Jan Mosdorf’s “Yesterday and Tomorrow” is now available from Arktos. In this excerpt, Mosdorf reflects on living at the end of the modern European era running from the Renaissance to the First World War and looks to the spiritual heights of the Middle Ages to rediscover the transcendent foundations of European civilization.
The Twilight of an Epoch
One winter day in 1935, I found myself in an old manor. The snow was beating down, walking was hard, and I stopped hunting even before dusk fell. I made my way back to the manor to change out my shotgun for a book. In the library, the fireplace cast pink light on the walls, kindling flashes of light on the gilded spines of books. On the lower shelves there were the poor relatives of luxurious volumes: a gray borrow from a library, brochures and booklets, and supplements to old, prewar periodicals. I took out a handful of them and right away, in the first one, under the flickering light of a candle, I read the following passage at random:
The economic development of the new Japan inspires neither fear nor regret, but admiration and hope. How can we not admire such a sudden yet fertile transplantation of superior civilization onto soil where only outlived traditions vegetated. For the civilized world, the economic boom of Japan can only be a desired phenomenon. Only dull people imagine future nations as fierce competitors striving to bring each other to ruin.
I looked at the cover and the book’s release date. It was the year of my birth: 1904. Mr. Georges Weulersse was showing off his knowledge about “contemporary Japan” and the future world economy, and Polish publishers rushed to make this work accessible to their compatriots, whose ears were then perked up to the sounds coming from Liaoyang and Mukden.
No, I definitely had no desire to read that pamphlet. But my thoughts, stimulated by the voice of the past, flashed to the East of Eurasia, and after flipping through a few more worthless volumes, I found a gray cover with the imprint: Okakuro Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (Warsaw, 1905). I decided to familiarize myself with its contents. What does an awakened Japanese man have to say? He said a lot of interesting and wise things, but the following passage struck me the most:
The old, backward East still makes a distinction between ends and means. The West is striving for progress, but progress in what? Towards what? When we achieve material prosperity, what goal, Asia asks, will we achieve then? When will the passionate pursuit of the brotherhood of peoples end in universal cooperation, what will it serve then? And if only personal interests prevail, where will this famous progress be heard?... The individuals who contribute to the construction of their great machine called modern civilization become slaves to mechanical routine, and the monster they themselves created ruthlessly crushes them. Despite its much-vaunted freedom, true individuality is destroyed in the West by the struggle over existence, and happiness and contentment are devoted to the constant desire for something more. The West prides itself on being liberated from medieval superstitions, but what has it put in their stead? The idolatrous worship of capital! What suffering and dissatisfaction hides behind the great mask of the present! The voice of socialism is the language of the death agony of Western civilization — a tragedy of capital and labor.
Dry pine wood crackled in the fireplace and fantastic shadows danced across the walls. I have never felt so strongly as I did then that the generation of which I am a part was born at the turn of an epoch, and that the world war, visible traces of which I could see from a hundred paces outside the window in the silhouettes of the ruins of farm buildings, had closed a great chapter of history.
But what is this chapter? How far does it go back? Does it stretch back to the great French Revolution? Ten years ago, this is what people thought. But today it is obvious that this chapter is much more extensive, and that the present times are the end of the capitalist period in the history of Europe, a period whose origins date back to the time of the Renaissance.
Today, when the optimism and conceit of European writers from 1904 seem to us to be an echo of fantastically distant times, and Okakuro Kakuzo’s dangerous questions have lost their exoticism and resound all around us, evermore insistently, we have to think back, to explore the genesis of the present day, and to delve into reading the course of history in order to observe what led to the tragedy and what still allows us, in spite of everything, to look into the future without fear, to know what to eradicate by the roots, and what to rely on in our struggle.
However, this is no easy task. We do not know the elements of history. Marx’s powerful suggestion advises that we abandon the labor of seeking value so as to dispassionately view history as necessary phases in a predetermined process, no element of which is either bad or good, but simply given as an ingredient of reality, as a valid thesis and antithesis combining into synthesis only to provoke negation again and so on.
And yet, despite all its “misery,” perhaps the philosophy of good and evil, the philosophy of moral judgment, will give us a better tool than soulless dialectics. Or perhaps we might further detach our thinking from the turmoil of the contemporary chaos and gain a better perspective as soon as we look at such not through half a century counting the books of a descendant of rabbis from Lwów, but through those inspired by another Rabbi — from Nazareth — 2,000 years ago.
Yet, are we not standing on the grounds of Marxism as soon as we baptize this great, 400-years-long period of history with a name taken from only one field, “material production,” and as we define the epoch of Descartes and Kant, Newton and Darwin, Raphael and Rodin, Cervantes and Balzac, as the capitalist period? Every name is inaccurate, every term is one-sided, but regardless of whether we call this era the epoch of Naturalism or, as Berdyaev would have it, the epoch of Renaissance, or whatever else, we are always grasping at the very same element which today most firmly speaks to us from its economic side.
What is it, then, that makes up the course of history? It is the interaction of ideological and material factors, which are irreducible to one another. Neither is primal, neither is “superstructure,” at least as long as we speak of facts rather than the value of the facts. Their struggle over primacy takes place in a different field, not in so-called sociology. Material factors — nature, the degrees and types of its mastery, production, consumption — have a strong, often decisive influence on the course of history. But ideas, moral values, and religious commandments are no less powerful. Both of these factors are expressed in the human will in two forms. One of them is the activity of large groups of people, that is, everyday activity which is unaware of its historicity and is aimed at securing life; and there is the behavior of a large number of people, primarily economic, but also ideological and even religious, that creates a custom, a pattern, as well as habits, i.e., behavior that is in itself uninteresting and imperceptible throughout history as long as it is considered in individual people, but which merges in space and time into a huge stream that flows through history in one direction or another. Finally, a third element is added: the conscious human will that deliberately shapes history. Is that all there is? No. There is one more great world power left: chance.
The analogy of a stream does not need to be taken too literally. It is an old Tainian picture of progress flowing smoothly like a river, with the leading human individuals being merely the crest of the wave rising above the surface. This problem is described much more accurately by Stanisław Brzozowski: “The myth of constant, automatic progress obscures the truth that everything that has ever been and that is a cultural value was created through effort, and that in order for the world of culture to arise, it must first be a matter of strivings, a goal towards which the will of generations is heading and exerting itself.”
Historical changes are the result of constant fights and struggles, and ideas are often thrown to the wind, producing unexpected and different results which, depending on the souls they fall unto, determine what passions they stir. The soil is man, so individually rich that he is unreplicable. There are mysterious, hitherto unanalyzed elements in man: mental dispositions, temperament, ways of reacting to external and internal stimuli. Purely biological racial differences play a serious, underestimated role here, but the knowledge of this field is so little advanced that any judgments about it must be made with the utmost caution, lest, following the example of the Germans, we fall into conceited and shallow sectarianism. An equally strong role is played by the heritage of generations, ancient beliefs and customs, superstitions, as well as the purely external effects of climate, diet, etc. When all these factors are weighed, it is difficult to be surprised at the fact that man changes like a chameleon, that the deterministic science of “sociology,” with its claims to discover “rights” within society which are based on the principle of causation, has failed across the board. Correctness, insofar as it occurs in social and historical phenomena, is not a reflection of the law that “similar causes produce similar effects,” but rather an expression of the psychological truth that “similar impulses generally cause sufficiently similar reactions in people, although we can never be sure that they will not cause just the opposite.”
That this is the case is evidenced by thinkers who have not been understood by the epoch, who are judged only by posterity, and is evidenced by those handfuls of idealists who undertake to struggle against the general mass of their contemporaries. Without people courageous enough to challenge widely-held opinions, ideas would be something dead. The human genius is not only a mirror that focuses rays, but also a motor that produces rays. Therefore, much depends on the selection of people, the appearance of outstanding individuals and their spiritual structure. Their presence throughout history shows that the society that produces them still has a reserve of vital forces.
Researchers who would like to delve into this diversity of historical factors might make an interesting analysis, but they would not be creating a synthesis. Synthesis is always a simplification, and therefore an impoverishing of reality. There is always the risk of ignoring a number of characteristic phenomena, the inclusion of which would change the presented picture. But we have to take the risk, because realizing the past is important for assessing the present end of the epoch.
We live in Europe and, so it would seem to be likewise, in the world of Christian civilization. This civilization produced its most beautiful fruit to date in the 13th century AD, after which began its retraction, which in our days has led to Russia falling away from Christianity and, to a great extent, the same danger looming in Germany. Such accidents have happened throughout history; it suffices to mention all of North Africa with Egypt and Asia Minor. There is, however, a major difference: these countries fell away as a result of external conquest, whereas today we see anti-Christian forces emanating from within, from the very womb of Christian societies. These forces threaten to destroy Christian civilization. Christianity itself will not perish, for it is eternal and the final triumph belongs to it, but before that happens, Christian civilization may perish because it is, like any civilization, a human creation, not a divine one.
Christian civilization developed not in virgin soil, but in soil long cultivated by ancient peoples. She absorbed everything from the Hellenic and Roman legacy, which did not contradict the religious and moral principles of the revealed teaching. Saint Peter and his successors settled in the then capital of the world and remained faithful to it despite unfavorable political conditions that forced the Caesars, the first Christian Caesars, to move their seat to Hellenic lands. And when the West of Europe became a borderland flooded with waves of barbarian peoples, the capital of Peter became more and more of a beacon illuminating the darkness.
We, fed on the adoration for the Renaissance, like to extend the “darkness of the Middle Ages” across the entire epoch, up to the “modern era.” This is false. All the divisions of history have, of course, a conventional trait, but the convention in which we were brought up has a great evocative influence. In fact, it is difficult to say when ancient times ended. One can, together with Comte, consider the acts of Constantine the Great — the Edict of Milan and the election of Byzantium as the capital — as a turning point, but it bears remembering that in the minds of contemporaries this was not a greater coup than, for example, the reforms of Peter the Great in Russia. In no case can a border post of two epochs be set at the time of the dethronement of Romulus Augustulus in 476. These events and the entire period are of no greater importance than, for example, the history of China in the years 220–317, when the State of the Dragon was divided and later re-united, when the Mongolian and Turkic barbarians settled within the empire, and the better-located Nanjing became the capital, instead of Beijing, which was already in the borderlands. The year 476 in Europe only bore witness to the fact of the consolidation of the power of the Germanic tribes in Italy, and the imperial dignity regained its splendor by abolishing the caricature of the power of Ravenna and concentrating both diadems on the heads of the Eastern emperors.
The ancient empire continued in the Hellenized lands; even (until the Justinian repressions) the Olympic Games were still held and the Platonic Academy flourished. At a time when the West of Europe was plunging more and more into barbarism, Christianized ancient civilization in the East produced impressive works in the legislative, economic, and, finally, military fields. The Empire was a bastion of Christianity in constant cross-struggles with advancing pagans, both barbarian and civilized (Persia). The breakthrough in the East that constitutes the true border post between the universal empire of antiquity and the local Byzantine Empire was the ascendancy of the Syrian dynasty (formerly considered to be Isaurian) and the cultural upheaval known as iconoclasm. This was the influence of Islam, which was just finishing the cultural assimilation of ancient Persia. Through the first imperial dynasty of eastern Asian origin, the spirit of Islam left its mark on the society of its greatest enemies. This fact loosened ties between Byzantium and Western Europe, which for the first time felt like something more than a poor relative.
And when, 70 years later, a woman took the imperial throne for the first time in the history of the Roman Empire, the West already possessed so much power and culture, felt so strongly the principles of Roman legitimism, and the Roman bishop was in possession of so much spiritual power that he replaced the defunct Eastern Emperor in 800 AD with the Western Emperor, who, initially unequal to him in wealth and culture, was already his equal as a military power. Three hundred years later, primacy definitively belonged to the Western world. The Cluniac Reform actually closed the period of the middle, transitional centuries, and when the decline of the lands of Hellenic culture was sealed by the invasions of the Mongols and Turks, the Western lands appeared to be a great civilization, one which continues to this day in our souls, despite all the changes that modern times have brought.
Of course, one cannot close one’s eyes to the numerous negative traits common to both the early Middle Ages and that great epoch of the 12th-14th centuries. “We know very well,” says Berdyaev, “the negative and really dark sides of the Middle Ages: barbarism, callousness, cruelty, violence, slavery, ignorance in the field of the positive sciences of nature and history, religious terror, combined with an insane fear of the torments of hell. But we also know that medieval times were marked by extraordinary religiosity, characterized by a longing for heaven that made nations an instrument of holy madness; we know that the entirety of medieval culture was directed towards the transcendent, towards the ‘beyond,’ and that these ages were a period of great intensity of thought in scholasticism and mysticism, an intensity which was to give an answer to the ultimate problems of being, an intensity that has no equal in the modern era.”
The above text is an excerpt from Jan Mosdorf’s Yesterday and Tomorrow: The European Spirit and the Polish Nation — now available from Arktos:
