The Tragedy of Small Cultures - Emil Cioran
Translation from the Romanian "Schimbarea la faţă a României", 1936
Editor’s introduction:
In 1934-1936, Emil Cioran left Romania for a sojourn in France and Germany, supposedly in order to continue his philosophical education; in fact, Cioran used this trip away from home to broaden his own philosophical thinking, to listen to music in big European concert halls, and to write articles for Romanian journal named “Cuvântul” run by his mentor Nae Ionescu.
Also on this sojourn, Cioran decides to write a book where he aims to establish the first countour-lines of his philosophy of culture, but even more importantly, he aims to induce a Transfiguration of Romania (the name of the book), a desire to see his nation become a great culture and be redeemed out of the dirt of mediocrity.
The following text is a translation of the first chapter of this book. As always, I wish you a pleasant reading.
The Tragedy of Small Cultures
Those several millennia of history that we dispense of only in ignorance or in ecstasy – two unhistorical poles – oblige us to a macroscopic view and to an implacable selection of human unfolding. The one who doesn’t feel the need to be a judge of the past dissociates himself from an entire world which precedes him, even if his instinct integrates him into it through invisible ties; neither is one who doesn’t engage in prophecy as an actuality less lacking in a future existence. From Hegel we all learned a truth which now became a platitude, that the deeper sense of historical life is the realisation of consciousness, that progress in history is progress in consciousness. The interiorisation of the spirit in its path of emancipation from nature creates a distance from its own realisation, maintaining it on a peak to which man abandons himself as to an ultimate point of view. One’s consciousness is all the more comprehensive when its actuality contains the past in a more active measure, so much so, that historical perspectivism defines the dimensions of consciousness. A macroscopic vision of history makes one contemporary to all the essential moments of human becoming, just as it disposes of the humanly details, the accidents of evolution. Truthfully speaking, there exists not a microscopic vision, because second-hand phenomena don’t have any value in-themselves, being either preparations for, or consequences of central phenomena.
The numerical limitation of these phenomena has its reason in the particularities of the structure of history, which, not being a continuous whole, unfolds through the dynamism of great cultures. They are not necessarily discontinuous: their influences prove to what degree they are conditioned. In their phenomenon however, what is interesting is not heterogeneity, the elements taken from outside and made whole, but the inner seed, the predetermination towards a specific form. Just as, in biology, orthogenesis reveals life as being born and developing under the determinant of inner conditions and of an inner direction which triumphs over the mechanical resistance of the exterior medium, in the same way, there exists an orthogenesis of cultures in the historical world, which justifies the individuality of each one through originary-conditions and determinations, through a specific impulse. The march of great cultures in history resembles, therefore, a fatality; because nothing can stop their impetus towards affirmation and individualisation, towards imposing their style of life on others and converting everything towards their violent fascinations.
There being relatively few great cultures, the number of historical phenomena is fatally limited. So many peoples have failed to their destiny, powerless to accomplish themselves spiritually and politically, remaining condemned to the ethnic, to the margins of the ethnic, incapable to become nations and to create a culture! Just as there exists a heavenly grace, there must also exist an earthly grace. And who is touched by this grace? Any great culture. Because great cultures are kissed by people the way saints are by angels.
...Every time the map of the continents is opened in front of us, our eyes dart only towards countries touched by heavenly grace. Cultures which had their own destiny, but even more than that, cultures which were a destiny for others... for all small cultures, which cooled off their sterility in the shadow of the great ones.
History means – to cite but only a couple histories: Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan, cultures which have individuated on all planes – tying them together through a convergence and correspondence which is intimate, but discernible.
The limitation of their number does not have its explanation only in the insufficiency of an originary generator-seed, but also in the fact that their different worlds of values – which every culture realises in part – are limited. Each major culture is a solution to all problems. If there is a plurality of solutions, there isn’t however an infinity of them. Ancient Greece or France, for example (maybe the most accomplished cultures), have solutioned – in their own way – all the issues that man is presented with, they have equilibrated all incertitudes and have invented all truths. From the transhistorical perspective of a wiseman, the French of Greek solution could seem invalid; but let us think what a pleasing cradle they constituted for any Greek or Frenchman, who were born in its truths and conclusions. To be immanently assimilated into such a culture means to maintain, in one’s doubts, one’s visions and attitudes, the limits imposed by the frame of this culture. Its instability marks the beginning of a decline, a stylistic sunset, a disintegration of inner direction. It is a characteristic of small cultures – peripheric formations of becoming, instability not only in their objectivities, but also in their seed, in their primordial and irradiant center, in their deficient essence. What do these cultures mean in the world: Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, etc.? Small cultures only have a value insofar as they try to triumph over their own law, to unchain themselves from a condemnation which forces them into a straitjacket of anonymity. The laws of life are one for great cultures and another for small ones. The former ones consume their evolution florally, they grow naturally towards their own magnification; France has never know that it is great because it has always been so and has felt this continually. Inferiority complexes characterize minor forms of life whose becoming cannot be conceptualised without an example, without a prototype.
The deficiencies of small cultures are so great, that left to their own devices, they degenerate into caricatures. Biologically, they can represent a rare example; they nevertheless lack an instinct which would lead them to their essential destinationGreat cultures possess a hypertrophied historical instinct, meaning an unbridled urge to spill over their possibilities into the margins of their becoming, to exhaust their ultimate resources in the process of existence, to not miss a single element from their spirit’s potential.
Historical instinct however is essentially different from historical sense. From Nietzsche and from Spengler, I learned that the interest in history is characteristic for decadence, when the spirit instead of a tending towards a creative élan, of a deepening in intensity, tends towards an extensive coverage, to understanding-as-such, to a retrospective loss of itself in the world. Historical sense temporalises all forms and all values so that the categorical and the valid take root in the world as a concrete relativity.
Even then, they are a superstition of historical sense, whose inevitable hypertrophy gave birth to modern historicism.
The dawn of a culture and the auroral forms of the spirit are foreign to the temptations of this sense.
Any great culture is created in the overwhelming atmosphere of an eternity, absorbed by an individual through all his pores. The builders of cathedrals in the horizon of modernity, of pyramids in the Egyptian one or the heroes of the Homeric world lived without any distance to their creation, and every stone that was raised or every gesture of sacrifice were stratified into a definitive order of the world, into a divine or cosmic architectonics that was very little humanly. Historical relativism is a perversion of a temporal sensibility. After a culture has liquidated its belongings in creation, that’s when a distance begins to set in between itself in its (and other’s) perspective of the past. The creator-naivety has stopped, is followed by dualism inherent to historical understanding, which separates the spirit from the world to which it is applied to. The floral ascension of the spirit in the creative periods of a culture gives them a naivety which I have hardly found in the dull lucidity of small cultures.
A peoples that launches itself into history from their first act of life slips down its fate. Respiration in the mythological, the differentiation of religious life from the political one, the creation of an own spiritual and political style, the access to its power and consequence, imperialism etc., indicates a natural evolution, an irresponsibility in evolution.
The ethnic coagulation of the French peoples has made it cross the historical step. And like that for every peoples with a destiny, which have divided the world and have constituted its axis. Because from their first gesture of life, they have to bring something to the world which, unfolded in time, becomes everything to them.
There is no hindrance from outside to their entrance into history. Their dawn is a fatality, or it simply doesn’t exist. – Why did we, Romanians, ethnically speaking more homogenous than the Germans, had to wait a thousand years for our fate? An unfavourable geographical situation, the in-hospitability of our circumstances, the endless invasions of barbarians, our savage neighbours? But these should have been an even greater reason for affirmation, elements of our own magnification, if the urge to make history, the blind and primordial urge would have irresistibly thrown us into the whirlwind of universality. What have we arrived to today? To the will to make history. The one who understood this has figured out the tragedy of small cultures, with everything that is rational, abstract, conscious in our tragedy. It is true, those several millennia of history have made us ruthless to our own sub-history.
The unconfessed, but constant aspiration of a peoples, raised through their creations to the rank of great culture, has to be the coagulation of an entire world around themselves. This is the idea for which great cultures – knowingly or unknowingly – fight for. By content, the messianisms are different, opposing, warring; only the substratum is identical. The generative motives are the same, only the motivations are different.
Let’s think about a couple mission-ideas and their deeper sense, to the ideological and historical antinomy of messianism, but to the substantial identity of its roots. Two messianic peoples cannot live in peace. Not serving the same sense in the world – but fighting with the same intensity and dramatism for their idea (in substance, for their destiny) – the conflict is aggravated insofar as this “idea” is more mature in the substance of that peoples. From the Hebrew prophets up until Dostoevsky (the last great messianic visionary), we know that every race which opens a path in history for itself fights for an idea and a formula of salvation which belongs to itself, which it considers universal and definitive. Dostoevsky’s belief that the Russian people will save the world is the only valid expression of a messianic belief. In its brutal form, messianism has always been represented by the Germans, Russians, and Jews. Their purpose cannot lead them but on an isolated path or into dramatic antagonisms. The whole history of France was nothing but the concrete unfolding of a mission, which it didn’t confess loudly, because it was in its blood and was performed naturally. All the way back in the Middle Ages, the conception of Gesta Dei per Francos, and in modern times la civilisation française, La France éternelle, has fixed France into the consciousness of the French citizen as the only cultural reality of substance.
Throughout the centuries, the rivalry between France and Germany was almost always solutioned to the advantage of the former, because Germany, not being realised politically but only through a couple peaks of its history (The empire of Otto Bismarck), exercised a cultural domination, and that –indirectly, through the reaction of other nations, particularly France. Lutheranism, Romanticism, Hitlerism provoked crises in the world by reaction. The lack of a universalist vision has spiritually isolated the Germans, who, in order to save themselves from their organic particularism, have taken refuge in imperialism. The thirst for space, the desire for realisation in expansion, of accomplishment by conquering, doesn’t express but only in an exterior and concrete fashion the German messianic idea, whose metaphysical struggle is not lacking in outmost practical correspondences. An abstract messianism which satisfies itself only in formulas and doesn’t concern itself with something concrete, too concrete – doesn’t exist. Imperialism is the practical implication of messianism. There are however imperialist nations which have never been messianic because they never fought for a historical idea. For example: the English, whose imperialism is purely utilitarian, or, in the ancient world, the Romans, who fought only for an imperialistic idea, and not for a historical sense. One could say about Romans that they constituted a great nation; but we wouldn’t respect the nuances of the discussion if we called it a great culture. A nation which has given the world only a juridical consciousness, methods of colonisation, and historiography hasn’t overcome the elementary categories of the spirit.
French and German messianism justifies its durable antinomy not only in the irreducibility of messianic orientation as such, but also through a sum of spiritual and psychological elements which differentiates the specific physiognomy of these nations.
In French culture, which is a culture of style and in which grace tempers the élan of vitality, there has never existed – as a torturing and dramatic issue – an antinomy between life and spirit. (In France – Bergsonism is almost a heresy). The Frenchman lives more unitarily, neither too far from life, neither too close to it. For this reason, you will never find in the French the restlessness and fear of being disintegrated into the natural contents of humanity, of having risked everything and having lost a sense of measure. In France, people are masters over their own thoughts; in Germany, every thinker feels himself overcome by his own system. Once started on the path of elaboration he stops being able to dominate his thoughts, which evolve into forms more and more weird. The mixture of the sublime, the grotesque, and the monumental is something you will meet in almost all German systems of philosophy.
In France, everyone has talent; one rarely finds a genius. In Germany, nobody has talent; but one genius compensates for everyone’s lack of talent. Bring your thought to all Germanic geniuses: each one brings with himself a new world, a new form of existence. With Hegel, with Wagner, and with Nietzsche, new worlds were born. Each one of them would have had the right to say that the world starts with them. We are used to consider in humanity only a limited sum of values, a reduced number of possibilities, a determinant form of existence. In such a perspective, it is natural that these creators have overcome the humanly.
The existence and the work of all Germanic geniuses has something inexplicable, inaccessible, obviously inhuman. They weave themselves into catastrophic elements, with apocalyptic visions, with dizzying élans, sprung up from an unknown inner substance. Nietzsche said that Beethoven represents the invasion of barbarity into culture. This is just as true for Nietzsche himself. Germanic barbarity results from the incapacity of Germans to maintain an equilibrium between life and spirit. This disequilibrium is not expressed so much through an oscillation between these two realities, by a successive captivity in each of them, but through a simultaneous living in a contrast which determines a presence of an antinomial structure in the existence of man. Not being able to harmonise these two elements of existence, life erupts from within himself in a primary explosion, barbaric and elementary, and the spirit constructs, next to life or above it, systems and perspectives which vary from a hallucinating magnification to useless and sterile fantasies. Barbarity results from the incapacity of finding a form which would congeal originary antinomies on a derived plane. The whole magnitude of German culture derives from this incapacity, from this disproportion which encloses in itself an impressive tragic. The arch-banale distinction between Germanic dynamism and French statism shouldn’t be interpreted as a French degeneration and Germanic exuberance, but as a difference in tension. The French are alive without overcoming the forms which clothe life; the Germans cannot be alive but through a lack of forms, through the elemental and primordial. And the eruption of life in them always has some inhuman which defies conventions. The whole of Germanic messianism has this elemental character, explosive and prideful, in distinction with the French one, discrete and reserved, but not less imperial.
The discretion of French messianism, the permanent mask under which it hides, makes us understand why they were always looked at with more sympathy than the brutal sincerity of the Teutonic one.
The determination of the German man as an existence kneaded in antinomies, in contradictions and tensions, incapable of maintaining itself at just a normal level and to a formal stylisation of culture, explains why we can call it only a “cult” in the common sense – no. Germany has a certain existence in Europe. Thereby, for it, what we commonly understand by culture is most of the time nothing else but stylised mediocrity. Russia and Germany cannot be understood by other countries.
France has always loved the man of society, fine, polite, subtle, refined and intellectualised. The hero, as a being which smashes forms of life and throws himself irrationally into a demiurgic élan, who out of an excess of life feels a desire for death and who does not become a symbol but only through renunciation – has never been a French ideal or cult. What could have grown out of the barbarity, out of the infinite excess of the Germanic soul but a boundless cult of the hero as such? Germany has never been Christian in the proper sense of the word. The cult of the hero was for its intimate sentiment something more than the cult of sainthood. Every German is innerly closer to a heroic vision of German mythology than a conception of Christian life. The Christianisation of Germans meant, in fact, the Germanisation of Christianity. Isolation from Rome has always been a German ideal.
The Germans never overcame the ideal of the hero. The reaction of national-socialist theologians against dialectical theology (Karl Barth) is motivated by the fact that this current – through its anthropological pessimism – excludes any concrete and temporally efficacious determination. The distance between God and man has become so great in the conceptions of these theologians, that man could not be saved but only through a divine intervention, the actions of man as such being irrelevant and null.
That the ideal of the German is the hero, and not the saint, is proved in the effort of re-Germanisation of Christianity, the replacement of the idea of caritas by that of honour. The idea of honour, of pride based on nobleness, is an idea specifically un-Christian.
The more an orientation in diverse domains tends towards a specifically Germanic character, the more inaccessible these domains are to us, foreigners. Artists that are particularly Teutonic are the most foreign to us. Most Germans agree that Mathias Grunewald represents a specifically German vision of the world, more than Durer and much more than Holbein, in which the predomination of the linear impedes the realisation of a vision of infinite dramatism, which we always meet at Grunewald. Out of all the artists of Germany, that one is the hardest to for us to understand. For Latins – he is completely unintelligible. Italian art has accustomed us to the paradox of beautiful suffering. In all Italian art, pain is immaterialised through beauty, so that its aestheticization takes away that character of heavy materiality, of bestiality and the irreparable; in German art (as in Russian art too), however, these characteristics reveal themselves in their strange greatness. That’s why the Madonna in Northern art is of such a profound sadness, and in the Russian one she doesn’t lack tears, in comparison to the Madonna in Southern art, whose transcendence is a mixture of interiority and transfigured Eros. Certain protestant theologians wanted to extract out of this fact an argument of a Romanic essence for the authenticity of Nordic Christianity compared to Southern Christianity. What is true is that the North understood suffering more deeply, had a more persistent sentiment of death and a more interior experience of tragedy. But the North (especially Germany) never had the humbleness, charity, and restrained piety – intimate and discrete – which in the South defined the most authentically Christian movement, Franciscanism. Germans have never felt themselves too great in Christianity, although as it comes to religious profundity they are superior to Latins (with the exception of the Spanish).
Germany has never lived its mission universally. Dostoevsky called it a protester nation par excellence. The important events of Germany are a succession of anticipations… so much so that one asks himself how it would have defined itself if there were no Pope, Catholicism, Rationalism, and Classicism to react against. Germany, except for the fashion of Enlightenment which it falsified temporarily – has never naturally integrated into the West. The growth of Germanic self-consciousness isolated it even more in the world. Imperialism is the only way for Germany to realise itself in a universalist way. Otherwise, the world refuses it and it in turn refuses the world.
If Romania truly wants to make a path for itself in History, the country from which it can learn the most is Russia. The whole of the XIXth century the Russians tirelessly kneaded, to obsession, the issue of their own destiny. And together with their theoretical torture, Russia stepped effectively into history, in order for, by a revolution, to be in its center. Russian religious thought, Slavophilism and Occidentalism, Nihilism, Narodnicism, etc., were all spun around the mission of Russia. Khomyakov, Chaadayev, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Aksakov, Danilevsky or the nihilists Pisarev, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky all tried to resolve the same issue in different solutions. Solovyov’s mysticism itself seems to a theological transposition of a concrete Russia.
It is more than evident that Russia was fated for a monumental purpose. Then why was this evidence a torture for Russians? The whole of the Russian XIXth century shows a troubled and prophetic consciousness, a true messianic hysteria. Any peoples which enter history when others have already entered its maturity suffer from a disequilibrium provoked by inequalities of historical level. Russia was waking up to life after it has slept – just as Romania has – entire centuries. There was nothing left for it to do but burn through all the steps. It didn’t know the Renaissance, and the Russian middle-ages where dark, unspiritual. Their literature itself, until the start of the previous century, remarked itself only through a couple fabulists and moral-religious creations. The great plague of Russia – just as ours – is the Byzantine tradition, the breath of Byzantine spirituality, which when grafted into a different culture becomes ankylosis, abstract schematism, and on the political and cultural plane, organised reactionism. Everything that is reactionary thought in Russia in the past century continues – consciously or unconsciously – a Byzantine vein. Pobedonostsev – the prosecutor of the Holy Synod, prophet of the uncultured masses in a country of illiterates, I see deciphering the sense of history using a Byzantine icon, and not with the path of Sun as Westerners do – using a Byzantine icon, a symbol of death, of dryness and of shadows. There doesn’t exist a vision more devitalising than that which comes from Byzantine art, art of obscure circles, of monotony between Saints, of in-adherence to the Eros. And to think that Romania lived for centuries under the curse of the Byzantine spirit!
The ultimate roots of Russian messianism are to be found in apocalyptism. Everything that those peoples think and feel exceeds the categories of culture or fall under their level. Being incapable to understand juridical forms, state realities, and everything that constitutes an objective spirit (in Hegel’s or Dilthey’s sense), they move through a climate unbreathable for an European consciousness, because the symbolism of culture is an artificiality… natural, accepted, obvious. Even if Bolshevism gave Russia a theoretically-bounded horizon, the amplitude of its spiritual breath stayed the same. The dream of a universal domination which certain Slavophiles have conceived in a completely grotesque way, as the domination of the Tsar and the Pope, the resurrection of Constantinople as the new centre of the world – is continued in Bolshevism with another ideology, but not less fantastical in its way. The Russians would sooner disappear from Earth, annihilated physically, than abandon the idea of their fate. So rooted it is that it gains cosmic, inhuman proportions. With Russians – the absolute descended into politics, and even more than that, into history. All forms of social, political, or religious life which they fought for – they considered ultimate finalities. From here – the passion, the absurdness, the crime, the unique bestiality of their history. For Westerners, history is a finality in-itself, a totality of values and human dramas, which became a whole on the immanent plane of becoming. Eschatology has been foreign to them (at least to the moderns). Hegel – who is the one most inclined towards eschatology from the “official” philosophers of the modern world – doesn’t conceive of it in the Christian sense of a final solution on a transcendental plane, but on an immanent plane. The return to self and the interiorisation of the absolute spirit don’t resolve history in drama, the way the end is resolved in apocalyptic visions. In fact, dialectics, by making the process absolute and by historicising the cosmos, refuses – theoretically speaking – eschatology. Between style and eschatology, Hegel’s system maintains an equilibrium and shows consequently the proportionalisation of antinomies – the self-confessed intention of any dialectic.
Even more than Germans, the Russian lack style in their culture. Style is the expression of a tendency of life to temporarily create a form, to realise itself in a determined and limited structure, to direct an interior dynamism and to raise rationality from the inner substance of life to an intelligible plane. From the multiple directions which it presents, a style of life organises a new content, determines a specification and sets its prevailing conditions. Diverse aspects of a being are ordered as a direction or another predominates. A substantial centre spreads a relatively homogeneous content into all objectivities. Because this is the sense of style: to overcome heterogeneity through the imprinting of a specific character, to demarcate into the dynamics of being a barrier which will secure a pronounced individualisation. The hierarchy of existential contents derives from this individualisation, from this prevalence of a direction or another, from a specification operated in the multiplicity of being, from the setting of a form. Form itself presupposes a certain degree of harmony realised in existence even when it presents as having an exterior character, because in this domain there can be no talk of integral realisation. Style, form, and harmony presuppose themselves. The one who lives in a style determined by life experiences personally all the correlatives implied in the structure of style. In these conditions, it’s understandable why for man, even if a style doesn’t always represent an equilibrium, it is not less true as an expression of the possibility of an equilibrium, For him, life has a sense because everything that is produced is totalised into a specific region of values and into a determined form, thereby the existent reveals its finality in the phenomenon of globalisation and totalisation, eliminating any idea of irrationality from the immanent productivity of life. Russians don’t have style in their culture, because they do not live in the immediacy of life and even less in the immediacy of values; on the contrary, they do not organise – out of their heart – a rational cosmos, thereby their mission in the world appears as an act of overthrowing, of unenduring storm. Russia has insinuated itself so much in the world that from here on out, if not every road leads to Moscow, Moscow will step in front of us on every road. The Russian spirit is sticky. Didn’t Russian literature throw a whole continent into hysteria? Every culture will prove their degree of sanity by how much they will know to defend against Russia. The young ones will know to exploit and fecundate the Russian “sickness”; the old ones will become infected and in their decadence will compromise their last vital resources. I am not only speaking of Bolshevik Russia, but Russia in general, as a human phenomenon and as a historical destiny. There exists a true “Russian complex”, the liberation from which will be taken care of by the future, because until now it constituted a chapter of the autobiography of any individual of the past couple decades.
Messianism is born from the inner force of a peoples; but in its development, it strengthens the forces of these peoples, so much so that it exerts a vitalising action; a tonic born inside the organism, for its own purposes. How can the miracle of Judaic existence be explained, if not by the constant fuelling of a mission-flame? And in the flight of the Jews in history it seemed to have burned their soles more than their wings, because otherwise how would you explain their rush in time, the frenzy of their every moment of life, the ardour for earth, the desire not to miss any single treasure of the earth or any sublunar pleasure. If a single moment in the evolution of Jews was lacking in messianic fury – they would have disappeared on the spot. Their millenary presence had to make them an inevitable presence – but they didn’t meet anything more than a refusal. The world has never accepted them and never will. They are condemned to never realise themselves in the historical plane, even when history is their most passionate aspiration. If they will manage to accomplish themselves some time, then it cannot be but in a final moment of history. The apocalyptic solution is the only exit for them. A race essentially prophetic, in prophetism alone will be able to save itself. They will continuously project, in who knows what fate, their terrestrial paradise which they will reach on top their own ruins.
There hasn’t existed until now a peoples more avid for earth and life than them. And with all that being true, their monstrous strength consists in living their attachment to earth religiously. Their own fate preoccupied them so much that they made a religion out of it. Judaic messianism is perfectly covered by Judaic religion. No peoples have every pulled as much benefit from God as they have. Perhaps that’s why their fate is so hellish, it cannot be explained but as revenge from Heaven itself…
The difference between Russians and Jews consists of the fact that, while Jews live their destiny religiously, Russian live their ahistorical religion as destiny. Both these peoples have managed to complicate history through their essential a-history. The Judaic messianic idea is much less generous than the Russian one. Since, while Russians struggle in their vision of universal salvation, even if it has a significance purely theoretical, following practically the axis of their own destiny – the Jews do not follow anything, on any plane, but their salvation as a peoples, as a race, as an ethnos or God knows what they are.
Their attachment to the world in everything they have thought – but more significantly in what they have suffered, in the whole frightening curse of their existence – they still haven’t conceptualised and haven’t persistently and deeply felt the temptation to give up. In that way they were tied to their own fate, so deeply they have sunk in their mission that they have never drawn the inevitable conclusion from their suffering. That’s why Judaism doesn’t give the soul an elevated vibration; it brings too many people to the sky and too much sky to the world. The understanding of life as meaninglessness (Job, Solomon, Jeremiah) is pure lyrism, very profound in the souls of the ones who sang it, but it completely disappears in the collective consciousness of the Jews. Their predominant sentiment – which explains the equivocal or the complex of Judaic psychology – has always been a weird fear, which instead of dislocating them from the world, integrated them into it even more irremediably. It is incontestable that out of the sentiments which a human experiences – fear, as a durable spiritual reality, modifies psychology to more of an useable sense, of surprises and nuances, of a whole gamut of spiritual irreducibilities. It alone changes man and he is another only in it. In fear is expressed an insecurity in the world and attachment to the world. The paradox of the soul is still intelligible; because we are not afraid but of that which we value, of that which we cannot have integrally because it makes up another substance but that of ours. Fear makes us blind to our own axis; that’s why, in it, man searches for himself without finding himself. Maybe here is where the psychological reason resides for the fact that the Jews are lost …
The breath of a peoples is more ample the greater their mission is. That’s why, in all major cultures, the dimensions of a messianic vision sketches itself in grandiose proportions. On the other hand, peoples that are timid with themselves and with the world conceive of immediate aims, almost petty in how accessible they are. In the face of Russia, whose messianism has always been a universal soteriology, the national prophetism of minor cultures doesn’t overcome the significance of a historical moment. What possibilities of messianism could exist in Romania when we have never projected a monumental destiny? Is not the case of Eminescu frightening, who instead of attaching himself to a future of Romania has projected the greatness of our race in the sinister obscurity of our past? Romania hasn’t had messianic thinkers because all its visionaries didn’t overcome a local prophecy and the margins of a historical moment. Romanian national prophetism, which hasn’t overcome the limits and the problems of the ethnic, was a prophetism of events and not of intemporal dimensions. Eminescu was a national prophet à rebours. Balcescu who had experienced and known the atmosphere of Polish messianism – so promising another time and so practically compromised – wasn’t more than a prophet of the past. Compared to this romantic excess, a Iorga, a Parvan are only traditionalists; which means an equilibrium between the past and the future. A national prophetism, which is different from traditionalism, puts the centre of mass in the future, considered a treasure of national accomplishment. Traditionalism is a comfortable, unengaged form. It expresses a solidarity with the race, but not a will to give it a great sense in the world. Any traditionalism accepts the immanent limits of a nation. Then there is nothing left to do, the nation walks towards its destiny like a bull to water.
A peoples don’t have a destiny in the world but in the moment in which they cross the historical step. Until then, it is sub-history. It is risky – if not impossible – to specify the date and even the epoch in which a peoples cross over such a step. When values for which a race fights crystalize in a true historical world, then that race has integrated into the becoming of cultures. To specify the moment of this “crystallisation” is useless, because its affirmation in the world is not done on all planes at the same time, but mostly, through their succession. The way, in the case of Italy, that the Renaissance has entered into history through the spiritual plane.
That which is important in theory of culture consists in knowing if the affirmation of a culture is only an accidental episode or if, contrarily, it is an essential destination. In the face of Spain and the Netherlands – which became a great power for only a century and then were lost in a kind of cobweb of fate – you have to make space between the monumental destiny of major and minor cultures for small ones, for ones of intermediate categories. The causes of the failure of these intermediate cultures are multiple; the essential one is obviously the in-adherence of the planes, the incapacity of culture to realise itself in the course of its becoming on all its realms into a structural correspondence. Spain was undeniably spiritually successful (if it wouldn’t have produced anything but the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa), but politically, it didn’t reach the necessary level. It couldn’t affirm itself enduringly as a great power and was also not capable of creating consistent state-forms. What Spain means in the world is the triumph of the subjective spirit. (It never has been, properly-said, a nation). Not less characteristic of the destiny of failed intermediary cultures, of those cultures which realise themselves at the point at which a peoples becomes a nation, but still without yet being one – is the pre-Columbian Mayan culture. Two, three centuries before the arrival of the conquistadors who devasted the rest of the Mexican or Peruvian civilisation, Mayan culture is extinguished without a cause from the outside. This culture, which has known mathematics, the calendar, an architecture which can rival Egypt in monumentality, a hieratism which reminds one of Indian art – falls and disappears as a historical malformation. There exists no other explanation but that of a rapid decadence outside of a political insufficiency, of a defect in the capacity of organising an exterior destiny, which although compensated by through a spiritual hypertrophy, couldn’t reach the equilibrium of an enduring cultural mission.
That which is interesting in history is the ascension and fall of great cultures and the irreparable conflict between them. In the face of their tragedy, unfolded on the substance of all the shadows and lights of life, is consumed in a minor chiaroscuro – the tragedy of small cultures, their painful battle against anonymity waged in order to delight in the consolations of their becoming. Being sub-historical, meaning under the step and level of major cultures, they cannot raise their level unless they triumph over their own law. Discontinuity against their own fate is the condition of their affirmation. The only obsession that has to exist: a historical leap. Because their salvation is that history is not nature. All cultures are predetermined, in the sense that they have a germinal destiny; their fate is written in their seed. But also in their seed is contained the possibility of a leap – for some. Small cultures, touched by the earthly grace of which we spoke, have this access to a leap imprinted in their purpose. At a given moment of their evolution’s somnolence, a fecund breakage happens which raises them to the level – if not in creation, at least in tension – of a great culture. You cannot make that leap whenever you simply desire to. Will, however, can determine the magnitude of historical transfiguration. People cannot will but that which is already in their germ.
An organistic conception of natural evolution condemns us to the inertia, slowness, and somnolence which constituted a millennium of anonymity in our fate. Organicism represents a theoretical opposition to any leap, in order for its ultimate consequences to eliminate any gate of escape for small cultures. If the national and political thinking of Romania is so little revolutionary, this fact is owed to an excessive organistic contamination, just as well as to an influence directly or indirectly exercised by German Romantic historicism on Romanian nationalism.
A pure organic vision of our fate in the world would have a fecundity when the rhythm of life of modern cultures would be characterised by a calm and relative equilibrium, because then the possibility of a synchronisation would be less excluded. Fever is an extra element which gives a peoples an advantage, but it also exhausts them quicker. An accelerated rhythm explains the rapid exhaustion of modern culture and, in a certain measure, also of Greece and Rome. The precipitation of events presupposes a violent activity of a soul, a passion which obtains its substance out of a frenzy. When we look at the series of events in India, in the span of their millenary history, we observe a surprising interval between them, a distance in time that is truly astonishing. A century barely breathes in an event, and most of the time this event has a religious significance, meaning it is temporally neutral.
The calm breath of oriental culture has spared and stored their substance – and they haven’t lost their adherence to becoming even to this day. On the contrary, the breath of modern cultures is precipitated to the point of suffocation. Their viability is so reduced that they’ve lost their substance in a couple centuries.
If this rhythm wouldn’t have this acceleration – we would be permitted to consume our evolution normally: slowness and intermittent pulsation would with time brings us to our desired height. But things being as they are, only by jumping over the steps of history will we be able to enter the collective rhythm.
If small cultures would consume their evolution naturally – meaning that they would pass in miniature through all the phases passed by the great ones – they would never manage to become remarked by any history of the world. What use would their vitality and freshness be then when out of fear of decadence – they would never evade out of the sphere of biology? And without glory, history is nothing but biology.
They must go through all the stages, but not through an evolutive and slow transition, but in the fever of leaps. One cannot specify what these stages would be before knowing the historical level of the respective culture. A discontinuous passing through them is proof that there exists no other salvation for small cultures than an exit out of themselves, from the curse of their existence. But ultimately, who is actually pained by the painful issue of these cultures? A historian? By no means. Because how much pain could it provoke in him that certain countries are condemned, closed to the world, when his objectivity makes available to him the recomforting example of major phenomena? The historian caresses reality with an indifferent sympathy. But for the representatives of minor cultures, the issues takes the character of direct, subjective existence, completely overcoming the sphere of objectivity. If we didn’t have a deeper adherence to the phenomenon of Romania and we could be more perfectly objective with it, we wouldn’t really care if she would play a role in the world or not. Then her belonging to the fate of minor cultures would appear to us as natural and her anonymity wouldn’t pain us anymore. But our passion for Romania cannot accept its damnation to an everlasting mediocre destiny which it has shared until now. Criminal lucidity situates her in the microcosmical and the vanishing, in order for passion to fixate her in the centre of our hearts and as such in the rhythm of the world. Not for the number of values and their minor realisation is the issue of these cultures interesting, but for the man which is troubled within them, who does not accept them and wants to save himself by saving it. The issue of cultures doesn’t only interest philosophy of history, but also anthropology. And if by looking at the destiny of man in a historical manner, great cultures assure for him an evidence, it is not the same case for minor cultures, in which the destiny of man adds a dramatic extra to the pure human condition, resultant from its anomalies and insufficiencies. It is not at all comfortable to be born in a second-hand country. Lucidity becomes a tragedy and if you’re not strangled by a messianic fury, your soul is drowned in a sea of un-caresses.
There is in man a demiurgic thirst which he satisfies either through a spiritual excess and an internal vision, or through an active integration into historical becoming. The accelerated rhythm and ample breath of great cultures satisfy a demiurgic thirst. Great cultures are entire worlds; their existence justifies monadology. Only in so far as these monads don’t live in harmony because they each need to have a window in order for them to gaze at each other and hate. The demiurgic character of these cultures give a man living inside them an automatic satisfaction of his appetite for the absolute. The one who suffers from the superstition of history and has the chance to live inside a great culture can consider himself accomplished. The superstition of history signifies the cult of glory in time, the passion of aureole in becoming. A nation which doesn’t suffer from obsession for glory is lacking in a secret, but effective spring of life. The ascension of cultures gives the impression of creation ex nihilo, of direction on a purely interior plane. That’s why not all of them are fatalities in the same degree. The demiurgic germ is not equally fecund in all of them. In some, demiurgy takes a purely exterior character and then it is named gigantism. It is the case of England. You ask yourself: how could it happen that this country, having access to the world for such a long time, is not still a fatality? Undoubtedly, England has given the world unique, inexplicable geniuses and has produced, in the country of the most ordinary empiricism, the most delicate literature, although it is inexistant in music and null in metaphysics; it has never fought for an idea which overcomes it. More than that: England has never suffered for any faith. Everything was done from itself, through the automatism of interests. While France has defined itself in the world and has taken consciousness through a Revolution which cost it so much blood and so many useless wars, England has weaved itself a destiny by circumstance, has snaked its fate through contingencies and has never imposed itself directly, irrevocably, messianically. It has conquered the universe without wanting to assimilate it on the inside. The only new thing the British Empire has brought is new systems of coercion and exploitation, but it has never imprinted an ethos, nor an active idea, nor a useless and universal passion amongst men. That would be tragic, prophetic; an unleashing of the essential substance of a country. The demiurgy of cultures is haloed messianically; but the exterior gigantism of the English is lacking a halo. English destiny fixates the axis of the world in goods, not in a passion for domination in a complex of spiritual forms. The idea of a lordship purely exterior to the world, without an idea of reforming it, does not spring up either from universalism or national prophetism. In the frame of great cultures, phenomena of gigantism occupy a peripheral role. Extensive domination, material exclusivism eliminates the intensity of historical events and as such dilutes them. England is an example of how a great culture shouldn’t be. Interests which don’t serve a universal sense are stains of history.
A country which raised itself by exploiting conflicts between states and intervened in the moment of their enemy’s exhaustion doesn’t merit anything except an objective respect. The creators of this modern monster which is named the British Empire – aren’t conquistadors. Even their philosophical and politico-economical thought, interesting enough in its horror, is contaminated by the flattest empiricism, so much so that in order to not be instantly disgusted by the immediacy of England you have to retreat, in compensation, in the delicate, areal, and nuanced atmosphere of the pictures of a Gainsborough or Reynolds. In the modern period of history, England has maintained itself in the centre of all events; but in what capacity has it determined their ideal sense? There is something sterile in the substance of England, this country which is not glory, but an important chapter of events and people tied together by all appearances, but not through an essential destination. England lacks a collective genius, a mysterious dynamic of the totality of a race. It’s insular exclusivism has nothing from the ardour of a collective fanatical spirit. Logical nominalism has lead to, practically, an exaggerated individualism, which again doesn’t have the mystical colouring which it used to have in Germany some other time. In its aspects, England could’ve been great; it however lacks an ideal sense of grandeur. Shakespeare is equivalent to a world; however, he cannot make a world out of England (as a country, as a national destiny), even with its firm classification amidst great cultures. Parliamentarism is an English gift which has bewildered the world for countless decades. If in England universal history can be done through discussions and opinions, in countries with less cold blood parliamentarism has represented nothing else but stagnation. The only merit of parliamentarism is to give the illusion to certain presupposed representatives of the nation that they can consciously and artificially direct its fate. In substance, it has created nothing but a sum of megalomaniacs and no heroes. It is in fact the negation of heroism itself. Conceivable in the equilibrated epochs of a country, the parliamentary spirit becomes dissolving in the epochs launch and affirmation. Tension in history has always been the fruit of the spirit, and not of deeds. The political knows nothing but the force which serves itself – and when it is too great, it is also put in service of values.
I see the culminating point of a great culture to be situated in the ecstasy of its own force. After that, decadence can begin; it doesn’t offer any less retrospective consolation, exaltation in the regret of power.
What the Greeks, Romans, and French mean in history is owed necessarily to a specific world of values which they have realised. Today we know well enough in the name of what historical ideas each of them has fought, how much they realised of it and how limited it was in order to allow for so many parallel or complementary missions. It is still so little revelatory to know the ideal configuration of a mission when you want to know the secret, but active determinant which urges a culture towards its margins, towards the exhaustion of its sense in the world. I would sacrifice half a life, if I could live with the intensity that even the hindmost Greek, Roman, or Frenchman felt at the peak of their history. It must’ve been a magnificent pride, a pride which struck pallor into the gods. An arbitrary Frenchman who during the Revolution spilled his bestiality into a humanitarian fury represents, historically and politically, more than the whole amorphous collectivity of a small culture. Or I try to understand the psychology of the German soldier during the world war, to access the monumental pride in the hindmost soldier, conscious that he is fighting against the whole world, in order to understand that a universal culture gives a universal contour to individual consciousness.
The interior sensation of force can be intensified in individuals belonging to small cultures too, cultures that failed in their seed; but it presupposes an enduring individual exercise, and therefore doesn’t overcome the significance of a psychological fact.
In major cultures, you obtain the sensation of force automatically. Its intensification presupposes only a growth in the consciousness of the destiny of that culture. In major cultures, the individual saves himself. More than that; he is saved forever. Only minor cultures lose themselves. And how could they not lose themselves when the rhythm of their life lacks an offensive convergence and an aggressive élan? Their deficiencies don’t result only from the absence of an initial force, but from the absence of an excessive cult maintained for force.
The initial lacks of Romania (typical case of a culture with a minor fate) have never been corrected and compensated through a conscious love for force. The proof? What vision of our past has exaggerated our role in the world? It has been said many times: we defended Latinity (proceeded invariably by this citation: an oasis of Latinity in the Balkans); a dam against Slavicism, defenders of Christianity; keepers of Roman traditions, etc.
You understand: we defended and we kept. Can this be called a destiny? Great nations have cleaved history in their impetus to affirm themselves. A trail of fire remains after their flames, because a great culture resembles a cosmic offensive. But what remains after the defensive of a small culture? Powder – and not of guns, but dust carried by an autumnal wind. I search in vain for the spring of small cultures…
There exists however a moment in which they can save themselves from the void through the cult of force. When, by going through their process and entering a unique lucidity they take awareness of their own deficiencies, recognise their past as their death, and make a source of existence out of prophecy. The difference between a major and minor culture is not based on the number of their inhabitants nor on the frequency of extraordinary events, but on the spiritual and political destiny through which they specifically individuate in the world. A country which has been a national organism in becoming for a thousand years, but which didn’t manage to define its spiritual and political destiny in that time suffers from an organic deficiency, even if that millennium only served its biological constitution. From the point of view of history, biology is a substructure which doesn’t prove anything. Then what is the sense of force as finality of great cultures since it is rooted in biology?
We shouldn’t understand “force in history” as just vital imperialism, or this concept should be given a much more ample understanding. The biological sources of power express positively a phenomenon of negative significance: a deficient organism does not realise itself historically.
Force grows the historical level of a nation. The more a nation is under-accomplished the more it is deficient, even if biologically it is fresh. Energy is degraded the more the level of history lowers and the nation is precipitated towards a decline. Imperial Rome or the Athens of fifth century, Revolutionary France, Germany, Italy, and Russia have reached the peaks of their historical level in dictatorships, they have fully actualised at a moment in their becoming. The correlative force of a historical level is a certitude of biological nature, but also a spiritual one. If it was a simple vital imperialism, then it would not overcome the elementary and the a-historical. At the limits of the historical level, force is mirrored in itself so that the respective nation accomplishes the self-awareness of power in its self-awareness. The messianism of great cultures expresses a phenomenon of decanted force. Its spirituality differentiates the idea of historical imperialism from the telluric imperialism of barbarians. No barbarian invasion has been a generator of forms of state by-itself. Only aggression with style has given a contour to history.
Great nations live and destroy themselves just to get a taste of their own powers. If this is such, then force should not be considered a pretext or a means to an end. Nations consume their inner potentialities and exhaust themselves in becoming in order to realise self-awareness, and self-awareness is justified through force.
Vladimir Solovyov once said, in a famous passage: “Nations are not what they think about, but what God thinks about them in eternity”. Think how little a theological perspective selects from human history. In the face of God, nations cannot be saved but in the measure in which they realise him. As God doesn’t have a special understanding for the phenomenon of force, we remain, through what is essential in us, by ourselves.
The gushing destiny of great cultures overcomes all ethical values. If history would remain inside the frame of good and bad, it would unfold on a direction of mediocrity and instead of the tragic which defines them we would witness a spectacle of familiar conflicts.
Until now no one has spoken of moral and immoral nations; there exist only powerful nations and weak nations, aggressive or tolerant nations. The apogee of a nation presupposes infinite crimes; the details of their entrance into history is an apocalyptic image. If I was tempted by rationalism and ethics, I would have to see a fall in their every action. History doesn’t have an excuse in the face of eternity because it excuses time too much.
The spectacle of the ascension and the fall of great cultures cannot but make you a cynic. And cynicism is amplified by the regret that Romania, sat at the periphery of history, cannot take part to this spectacle directly – it constitutes only an echo of the ascension and fall of others.
If the theological vision of Solovyov has a spiritual objectivity, then great cultures would hardly be saved in eternity; but we, will we even be saved in time?...