Their is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with a clang of a broken bell in the soul.
—Emile Cioran, Tears and Saints
A preliminary translation of Emile Cioran’s early political tract The Transfiguration of Romania is in order. This is one of those works the author himself would later reject and like Paul de Mann wish he’d never written, a youthful digression into the world of fascism which lured and seduced many intellectuals at the time (i.e., think of Mircea Eliade). I’m using Microsoft’s terrible translation algorithm just to get it going as I actually spend time doing it the old fashioned way (i.e., word by word, phrase by phrase). Below is the first essay in the book that I’ve yet to rework, so forgive the atrocious errors in translation and phraseology:
The Tragedy of Petite Cultures
Our few millennia of history, of which we can only ignore by ignorance or in Ecstasy-two a-historical poles-, compel a macroscopic vision and an implacable selection of human developments. Who does not feel the need to judge the past is dissociating from a world that preceded him, although his instinct incorporates it through invisible links; and, likewise, who does not engage in prophecy as in a news is deprived of existence in the future. Hegel has taught us a truth that has become a common place, namely that the profound meaning of historical life is the realization, that historical progress is a progress in consciousness. By interiorizing as he frees himself from nature, the spirit distanced himself from his own achievements and maintained himself on a Crown to which man abandons himself as to an ultimate prospect. The more the consciousness actively includes the past, the more encompassing it is, since its dimensions are defined by historical perspectivism. The macroscopic vision of history makes us contemporary of all the essential moments of the future and, at the same time, saves us the details, the accidents of evolution. And, in any event, there can be no microscopic view of history, because second-order phenomena have no value in themselves, they are either the premise or the consequences of Central phenomena.
If the number of these phenomena is limited, it is necessary to look for the reason in the particular structure of history, which, not being a continuum, takes place thanks to the dynamism of the great cultures. These, which are not necessarily compartmented, influence and condition themselves to a certain extent. However, they are not characterized by the heterogeneous elements borrowed and assimilated, but by an intimate nucleus, by the predetermination of a specific form. Similarly to biology, where orthogenesis shows that the birth and affirmation of life are determined by internal conditions and orientations that are due to the mechanical resistance of the environment, there is also in the historical world a orthogenesis of cultures, which justifies the individuality of each of them by original conditions and determinants, by a specific impulse. The walk of the great cultures in history resembles this fact to a fatality; for nothing can hinder their tendency to assert themselves and to individualize themselves, to impose their lifestyle on others, to enslave everything to their violent fascination.
As there are relatively few large crops, the number of historical phenomena is necessarily limited. Many people have failed their destiny because they have not been able to fulfill themselves spiritually and politically, condemned to remain within their ethnic borders, incapable of becoming Nations, to create a culture! Just as there is a heavenly grace, there must be a earthly grace. And who does she touch? All the great cultures. For they are loved by men, as the saints are angels.
… Every time we open a world map, our eyes focus exclusively on the countries affected by the earthly grace, the cultures that have had their destiny, but which have been above all a destiny for others…, for all the small cultures, which have freshened their sterility in the shade of the great.
History means cultures (Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, not to mention more) that have individualized themselves on all fronts and have all linked them by convergence and internal relations but Understandable.
If they are not many, it is because the original generating nuclei are not, nor indeed the worlds of values that each realizes. Every great culture is a solution to all problems. But there are a plurality of solutions without an infinite number. Thus, ancient Greece or France (perhaps the most accomplished cultures) have solved-in their own way-all the problems facing man, have found their point of equilibrium in the face of all the uncertainties (unless we remain Greek or French within These) and invented their truths. In the transhistoric perspective of a Sage, the solution French or Greek may appear invalid; but think of the cozy cradle that it was for any Greek or French born in its truths and its conclusions. Being immanently integrated into a culture means for each one to assign to his doubts, to his conceptions and to his attitudes, the limits imposed by the framework of this culture. The loosening of this framework announces the beginning of a decline, a twilight of style, a disintegration of the inner direction.
The small cultures-peripheral formations of the future-are characterized by such a loosening, not only in their objectivations, but also in their nucleus, in their primordial and radiant Center, in their deficient essence. What do Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, etc. mean in the universe? Small cultures have value only insofar as they attempt to abolish their law, to escape a conviction that binds them in the straitjacket of anonymity. The laws of life are not the same in large and small cultures. The first have a floral development, they grow naturally in view of their greatness; France never knew that it was great because it was always and felt it constantly. Inferiority complexes are peculiar to the minor forms of historical life, the fate of which cannot be conceived without an example, without a prototype.
The small cultures are so deficient that, if they are abandoned to their natural inclinations, they degenerate into caricatures of history. If, from a biological point of view, they can be rare examples, they are devoid of the instinct that should lead them to their essential destination. While the great cultures are animated by an instinct of history, sometimes hypertrophied, i.e. an irrepressible impulse that causes them to repel by all means the frontiers of their becoming, to exhaust their last resources in the existential process, not to miss any element of their cultural potential.
The instinct of history is essentially distinguished from the meaning of history. Since Nietzsche and Spengler, we know that interest in history is peculiar to decadence, when the spirit substitutes for the creative momentum, deepening in intensity, and tends to an extensive apprehension, to understanding in itself, to the fall retrospective in the world. The sense of history makes temporal all forms and values, so that the categories and the valid are rooted in the world like any concrete relativity.
When and then are the haunting of the meaning of history, whose inevitable hypertrophy has engendered modern Historicism.
The dawn of cultures and the auroral forms of the spirit are alien to the temptations of this meaning.
Any great culture is created in the enveloping atmosphere of an eternity that the individual absorbs through all his pores. The builders of cathedrals at the dawn of modernity, the pyramid builders in Egypt or the heroes of the Homeric world lived without distancing themselves from their creation; each stone erect, every sacrificial gesture stratified in a definitive order of the world, in a divine or cosmic architecture, in any case very little Human. Historical relativism is a perversion of temporal sensitivity. When a culture has exhausted its wealth in creations, it begins to distance itself from itself, from a perspective on its past and that of others. The creative naivety has dried up, replaced by the dualism inherent in historical understanding, which separates the spirit of the world to which it applies. The floral decoration of the spirit in the creative cultural eras gives them a candor that we would seek in vain in the bland lucidity of the small cultures.
A people who launch themselves into history from their first act of life glide over their destiny. Breathing in mythology, separating religious life from political life, creating its own spiritual and political style, gaining power and its consequence, imperialism, etc., is a testament to a natural evolution, an irresponsibility in the evolution.
Having formed ethically, the French people have crossed the threshold of history. This is so of all people with a destiny, able to pierce the world to make it the axis. For such a people must, from its first vital gesture, bring to the world something which, in its temporal unfolding, will become everything for it.
No outside obstacle can prevent a people from entering history. Its emergence will be inevitable or will not. Why do we, Romanians, more homogeneous than the Germans ethnically, have we had to wait for our destiny for a thousand years? An unfavorable geographical position, adversity of history, barbarian invasions, wild neighbors? So many circumstances which should have been, on the contrary, additional reasons to assert ourselves, and to grow; but we should have had an inclination to make history, a blind and primordial inclination that would have irresistibly projected us into the universal vortex. Today, where are we? To the will to make history. Whoever understands this, will also have understood the drama of small cultures and all that our tragic has of rational, abstract, conscious. In truth, our few millennia of history have made us merciful towards our low-history.
The unconfessed but constant aspiration of the peoples that their work has raised to the rank of the great cultures must consist in structuring the whole world around them. This is the idea for which they are struggling, consciously or not. Because of their contents, messianisms stand out, oppose, fight-only their substrate is identical. The generating reasons are the same-only motivations differ.
Let’s think of some messianisms and the profound meaning of their ideas, their ideological and historical antinomy, but also the substantial identity of their roots. Two messianic peoples cannot live in peace. As they are not serving the same meaning on Earth, but as they fight with the same dramatic intensity for their idea (basically, for their destiny), the conflict worsens in proportion to the ripening of this “idea” in the substance of each people. From the Jewish prophets to Dostoyevsky (the last great messianic visionary), every people who is spawning a path through history struggles — as we know – for his idea and for a formula of salvation that he thinks is universal and definitive. Dostoyevsky believed that the Russian people would save the world-this is the only valid expression of a messianic faith. In its brutal form, messianism has always been illustrated by the Germans, the Russians and the Jews. Their destiny can only lead them to solitary paths or to dramatic antagonisms.
The whole history of France was only the concrete accomplishment of a mission which she did not testify loudly, because she had it in her blood and naturally realized it. The idea of the Gesta Dei per Francos in the middle ages, then those of the French civilization and France étemellé * have set France in the conscience of its citizens as the only substantial cultural reality. Over the centuries, the rivalries between France and Germany have almost always turned to the advantage of France because, Germany has not realised politically, except at a few highlights of its history (the Empire of Otto, Bismarck), It has had little cultural influence, if not indirectly, by the reaction of other Nations, particularly France. It is by reaction that Lutheranism, romanticism, Hitlerism have caused crises in the world. The absence of a universalistic vision has spiritually isolated the Germans, who, in order to escape their organic particularism, have fled into imperialism. The thirst for space and the desire to be fulfilled in the extension, to accomplish in the historical plan by conquests, express only in an outward and concrete way the German Messianic idea, whose metaphysical turbulence is not devoid of the most practical corollaries.
There is no abstract messianism, which is satisfied with formulas without aiming at something concrete, too concrete. The impracticality is the practical implication of messianism. Yet there are imperialist Nations that have never been messianic, because they have 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 spiritual sense. We can say of the Romans that they were a great nation; but we would not respect the nuances if we were talking about a great culture. A nation that has given the world only a legal conscience, methods of colonization and historiography, has not exceeded the elementary categories of the mind.
The perennial antinomy between the French and German messianisms comes not only from the irreducibility of any messianic orientation, but also from a series of psychological and spiritual data that specifically distinguish the physiognomy of Nations.
The French culture, which is a culture of style, where grace tempering the elk of vitality, has never posed the torturing and dramatic problem of the life-spirit antinomy. (In France, Bergsonism is a heresy.) The Frenchman has a unitary experience, not too far from life, but not too close either. That is why we will never find the anguish or the fear of being ripped off from the natural contents of mankind, of having risked everything, and lost the sense of the measure. In France, men are masters of their thoughts; in Germany, every thinker feels overwhelmed by his system. Once engaged in the path of his elaboration, he can no longer dominate his thoughts, which evolve towards the strangest forms. We find a mixture of sublime, grotesque and monumental in almost all German philosophical systems.
In France, everyone has talent, but we seldom meet a genius. In Germany, no one is talented, but a genius is compensating for the lack of talent of all. Think of all Germanic thinkers and genius: each brings a world, a new form of existence. With Hegel, with Wagner, with Nietzsche, new worlds were born. Each of them would have been entitled to assert that the world was beginning with him. We are accustomed to consider in human only a limited amount of values, only a small number of possibilities, only a definite form of existence. From this perspective, it is natural that such creators have, fatally, surpassed the human.
The life and work of all Germanic genius have something inexplicable, inaccessible, manifestly inhuman. It entangled with catastrophic elements, apocalyptic visions, stunning booms, from an incomprehensible for interior. Nietzsche said of Beethoven that he felt the eruption of barbarism in culture. This is no less true for Nietzsche himself. Germanic barbarism is the result of the Germans ‘ inability to maintain a balance between life and spirit. imbalance is expressed less by a oscillation between these two poles of which one is in turn prisoner, than by the fact of living in a contrast that generates simultaneous antinomic structures. As one cannot harmonize them, the vitality gusts from man like a primary explosion, barbaric, while the spirit built next to life or above systems and perspectives that range from hallucinating grandeur to useless fantasies and Sterile. Barbarism is due to the inability to find a form that can structure on a plane derived from the original Antinomies.
All the greatness of the German culture is the result of this incapacity, of this disproportion which contains an impressive tragic. From the arch=banal distinction between Germanic dynamism and French immobilism, one must not conclude to a French degeneration opposed to a German exuberance, but to a difference of tension. The French are alive without exceeding the forms of life; the Germans can only be alive in the absence of forms, in the elementary and the primordial. The explosion of life always has something inhumane in them, which defies the propriety. All German messianism has this primal, explosive and proud character, unlike French messianism, discreet and reserved, but no less imperialistic.
The discretion of French messianism, which hides permanently under a mask, explains why it has always inspired more sympathy than the Teutonic messianism with its brutal frankness.
While the definition of the German-a man Petri of Antinomies, contradictions and tensions, unable to confine himself to a normal level and to the formal stylization of culture-explains why it can be attributed to any qualifier, except that of “cultivated” in the common meaning of the word. Germany is a separate body in Europe. Thus, what we mean by culture is most often for her that stylized mediocrity. Russia and Germany cannot be understood by other countries.
France has always loved the man of society, fine, polite, subtle, refined, “intellectualized”. The hero, as a being who breaks the molds of life, who wishes death by excess vitality and which becomes a symbol only in death, the hero has never constituted an ideal or a French cult. While the barbarity and rampant excesses of the Germanic soul could only engender an unlimited cult of the hero as such! Never has Germany been Christian in the proper sense of the word. The cult of the hero represented, in his intimate feeling, more than the cult of Holiness. Each German feels closer to the heroic allegories of Germanic mythology than to the Christian conception of life. In fact, the Christianization of the Germans meant a Germanisation of Christianity. Isolation from Roumanity was always a Germanic ideal.
The Germans never exceeded the hero’s ideal. The reaction of the Socialist nationalists against dialectical theology (Karl Barth) is due to the fact that, because of its anthropological pessimism, this current excludes any concrete and effective temporal decision. The gap between God and man has widened so much, according to This theology, that man can no longer be saved only by divine intervention, his own action being insignificant, void.
The replacement of the idea of charity by that of honor, proper to the Germanisation of Christianity, proves that it is the hero, not the Saint, who illustrates the German ideal. For the idea of honor, pride based on nobility, is typically non-Christian.
The more accentuates the Germanic specificity in various fields, the more these become inaccessible to foreigners than we are. This is the case especially for the typically Germanic artists. Most Germans agree that Matthias Grünewald expresses a specific German view of the world, more than Dürer and that Holbein, in whom the predominance of the linear prevented the realization of the infinitely dramatic vision always present at Grünewald. But this one is, of all the artists of Germany, the hardest to understand. For the Latins, it is positively incomprehensible. Because Italian art has accustomed us to a paradox: that of beautiful suffering.
By sublimating suffering by beauty, he takes away what she has of heavy mate reality, bestiality, irreparable. On the contrary, in German art (and this also applies to Russian art), these characters are revealed in all their strange grandeur. This is why the Madonna is in the Germanic art of a profound sadness, and always in tears in Russian art, unlike the southern Madonna, whose transcendence is made of a mixture of interiority and transfigured Eros. Some Protestant theologians wanted to see a argument in favor of the authenticity of Northern Christianity, in relation to southern Christianity, of Roman essence. It is true that the North has always better understood the suffering, that it has had a more persistent feeling of death and a more intermixed experience of tragedy. But the North (in this case Germany) has never shown the restrained, intimate, discreet humility, charity and piety that have defined in the South the most authentically Christian movement, that of the Franciscans. In my view, the Germans never felt very well in Christianity, although their religiosity was deeper than that of the Latins (excepted Spaniards).
Germany has never lived its mission universally. Dostoyevsky considered it the Protestant nation par excellence. The important events of Germany are a succession of anti…
To the point that one wonders how it would have defined itself in the world if there had been no Papacy, Catholicism, rationalism, classicism, to oppose it. Apart from the fashion of the Enlightenment, which has momentarily distorted it, Germany has never naturally integrated into the West. And the rise of his conscience has isolated him even more in the world. Imperialism is the only modality of universalistic realization of Germany. For the rest, the world refuses her, and she, on the other hand, refuses the world.
If Romania really wants to find a way in history, the country in which it can learn the most is Russia. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russians had no other obsession but to look at their destiny. And, in the favor of this theoretical torment, Russia has actually engaged in history, to place itself in the Center through the revolution. Religious thinkers, Slavophiles and westernists, nihilists and Narodniks, etc., all revoled around the Mission of Russia. Komiakov, Chaadayev, Herzen, Dostoyevsky, Aksakov, Danilevsky or the nihilists Pisarev, dobrolyubov, chernyshevsky proposed a single problem of various solutions. Up to the Mystic of Soloviev which has the allure of a theological transposition of the concrete Russia.
This is more than obvious: Russia is called to a monumental destiny in the world. Why, despite this evidence, have the Russians been so tormented? For all the nineteenth century Russian testifies of a troubled and prophetic consciousness, of a true messianic hysteria. Any people who enter history while the others are already, and in full maturity, suffer from an imbalance caused by the inequalities of historical level. Russia woke up to life after sleeping-just like Romania-for centuries. She had no other choice but to burn the steps. She did not experience the Renaissance, and her middle ages were dark, devoid of spirituality. Until his literature which, before the beginning of the last century, had only given fabulists or productions of religious morality. The worst plague of Russia — like that of Romania, was the Byzantine tradition, the breath of Byzantine spirituality which, grafted on a different culture, became paralysis, abstract schematism and, politically and culturally, strangled Reactionary. All that was reactionary thought in Russia of the last century continued to exploit, consciously or not, the Byzantine vein.
Pobedonostsev, Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, the worst reactionary of the nineteenth century Russian, the Prophet of the in culture of the masses in a country of illiterate, I see him decipher the meaning of history on a Byzantine icon, and not on the March of the Sun as did Westerners, on a Byzantine icon, symbol of death, dryness and shadows. There is no more devitalizing vision than that which emerges from Byzantine art, an art of obscure skies, monotony among the Saints, non-adherence to Eros. So, when we remember that Romania lived for centuries under the curse of the Byzantine spirit!
The deep roots of Russian messianism plunge into an apocalyptic vision. Everything that people feel and think goes beyond the cultural categories or falls below their level. Incapable of understanding the legal forms, the State reality and all that constitutes the objective spirit {in the Hegelian or diltheyian sense), it moves in an unbreathable climate for a European consciousness, in which the symbolism of the culture is an artifice… natural, accepted, obvious. Even if Bolshevism gave Russia a narrow theoretical horizon, the amplitude of the breath of its soul remained the same. The dream of universal domination (which some Slavophiles judged quite grotesque) under the reign of the Tsar and the Pope, Constantinople resurrecting as the new center of the world, this dream is taken over by the Bolsheviks, with another ideology, but in a no less fantastic way. The Russians would disappear from the globe, annihilating physically, rather than giving up the idea of their mission. It is so rooted in the Russian soul that it seems to be cosmic, inhumane proportions.
The Russians have introduced the absolute into politics and, above all, in history. All the social, political or religious formulas for which they fought, they considered them as unique purposes. Hence the passion, the absurd, the crimes, the unparalleled bestiality of their apocalyptic history. For Westerners, history is an end in itself, a totality of human values and dramas, which are refined on the immanent level of becoming. Eschatology is foreign to them (at least with regard to the modern ones). Hegel, the modern “official” philosopher closest to eschatology, does not conceive of it in the sense of a definitive solution on a transcendent plane, he conceives it on an immanent plane. The return to oneself and the internalization of the absolute spirit end the story, but not in the drama, contrary to the unfolding of the end in the apocalyptic visions. From the rest, when it decrees absolute the process, and historical the cosmos, the dialectic rejects-theoretically speaking-the eschatology. The Hegel system, by balancing style and eschatology, demonstrates that it takes into account the relationship between the Antinomies, the avoated intention of any dialectic.
Even more so than the Germans, the Russians have missed the style in culture. It expresses the tendency of life to forge a temporal form, to be realized in a given and circumscribed structure, to orient an inner dynamism, to raise on a intelligible plan the irrationality of his intimate substance. Opting between multiple directions, each lifestyle organizes new content, determines a specification and establishes primacies. The various aspects of the being are arranged according to the predominance of this or that direction. A substantial Center diffuses in all objectivations a relatively homogeneous content. For this is the sense of style: to transcend the heterogeneous by printing a specific character, to draw in the dynamics of the being a barrier that will ensure a pronounced individualization. The hierarchy of the contents of existence derives from this individualization, from the primacy of a particular direction, from the specification made in the abundance of being, from the establishment of a form. But this implies a certain degree of harmony in existence, even if it is an external character, since in this matter we cannot speak of integral achievements. Style, shape and harmony are all involved. Anyone who exists in the structure of a determined lifestyle, personally experiences all the corollaries. It is easy to understand that if the style is not always a balance, the expression of a possibility of equilibrium for man remains. This one finds in this way a meaning to life, because all that happens is totaled in a specific area of values, and in a definite form, so that the existing reveals its purpose within the phenomenon encompassing and totaling, eliminating any idea of IRR in the immanent productivity of life. The Russians have no style in culture because they do not live in the immediacy of life, and all the less in the values; on the other hand, they do not forge–wholeheartedly–a rational Cosmos, so their mission to the world appears to us as a upheaval, like a ruthless storm.
Russia has been so insinuated in the world that, now, without all roads leading to Moscow, Moscow will stand before us on all paths. The Russian spirit is sticky. Has Russian literature not made a continent hysterical? People will prove their health according to how they will protect themselves from Russia. Young Nations will even exploit the fertile Russian “disease”; the old ones will be contaminated and jeopardize their last reserves of vitality in decadence. I am not just talking about Bolshevik Russia, I am talking about Russia in General, as a human phenomenon and as a historical destiny. There is a real “Russian complex”, the future of which will have to heal us because, for the time being, and for a few decades, it has been a chapter in everyone’s biography.
Messianism, stemming from the internal forces of a people, strengthens them during its development, thus exerting an invigorating action: a tonic secreted by the organism for its own needs. How can this miracle be explained by the Jewish existence, if not by the constantly maintained flames of a mission?
During the rise of the Jews in history, they seem to have burned their heels more than the wings, for one would not otherwise explain their haste, their frenzy, their ardor at every moment of life on Earth, their desire to lose none of the treasures of this world, to miss any of the sublunary pleasures. If, at one point in their evolution, they had been devoid of Messianic fury, they would have disappeared immediately. Their millennial presence should have made them an undeniable evidence, yet they only succeeded in wiping out refusals. The world has never accepted them and will not accept them. Us are doomed to never realize in the historical plan, although history is their most passionate aspiration. If they nevertheless manage to accomplish one day, then it will necessarily be at a final moment in history.
The apocalyptic solution is their only outcome. Essentially prophetic people, they can only find salvation in prophecy. They will not cease to project, until the last end of the spell, their earthly paradise, that they will reach on their own ruins…
Until today there were no people more hungry for Earth and life than this. And yet his monstrous strength is to have lived religiously his attachment to the Earth. His destiny has so preoccupied him that he has a religion. Judaean messianism and the Jewish religion are perfectly overlapping. No people have benefited more from God. This may be why his destiny is so infernal and can only be explained by a vengeance of heaven…
The difference between the Russians and the Jews lies in the fact that the Jews live their destiny religiously, while the Russians live their religion as a destiny. These are two peoples who have succeeded in complicating history by their a-historical essence. The Messianic idea is much less generous in the Jews than in the Russians. Because they struggle in the vision of universal salvation (even if the meaning is purely theoretical and if they follow practically only the axis of their destiny), while the Jews are aiming, on all planes, only at their salvation as a people, that race , that nation or God knows what.
The attachment of the Jews to the world explains why, in all that they thought, but especially in all that they have suffered, in the frightening curse of their existence, they have neither conceived nor experienced in a persistent and profound way the temptation to renounce. They were so bound to their destiny, so monopolized by their mission, that they never drew the necessary conclusion from suffering. This is why Judaism does not confer on the soul a high vibration; It puts too much the world in heaven and sky in the world.
To understand life as a vanity (job, Solomon, Jeremiah) is pure lyricism, very deep in the souls of those who were the singers, but which disappeared from the collective consciousness of the Jews. Their prevailing sentiment-which explains the ambiguity or the complex of Jewish psychology-has always been a bizarre fear which, instead of dislocated them in the world, has irreparably integrated them there. It is undeniable that among the feelings experienced by man, fear, as a lasting psychic reality, modifies the most psychology in the sense of elusive, surprises and nuances, of a whole range of psychic irreducibilities. Only fear transforms man, it is different only in fear. It expresses the insecurity in the world and the attachment to the world. Yet this psychic paradox is intelligible, since we fear only what we are jails, which we do not cannot possess in its entirety, because it consists of a substance other than ours. Fear makes us blind to our own axis, we seek in it without finding us. This is perhaps the psychological reason for the fact that the Jews are lost…
The historical breath of a people is all the more ample as its mission is great. That is why, in all the great cultures, the Messianic vision takes on grandiose proportions. On the contrary, the shy peoples with themselves and with the world conceive of immediate missions, almost petty so they are accessible. Compared to the messianism of Russia, which has always been a universal Sillery, the national prophetism of small cultures barely has the meaning of a historic moment. Is messianism possible in Romania, when we have never sketched a monumental destiny? Is it not frightening, the case of Eminescu who, instead of attaching itself to the future of Romania, projected the greatness of the nation in the sinister darkness of our past? Romania did not have a messianic thinkers; None of his visionaries exceeded the local prophecy or the narrow framework of a historical moment.
The Romanian national prophecy, which was confined to ethnic issues, has been event-driven, it has not reached timeless dimensions. Eminescu was a national Prophet * Balcescu himself, who had yet known the atmosphere of Polish messianism-so promising once and so compromised thereafter-was nothing more than a prophet of the past. After them and their romantic excesses, a Iorga1 or a Pârvan2 are only traditionalists, i.e. the followers of a balance between the past and the future. National prophecy, unlike traditionalism, focuses on the future, considered a receptacle of national achievements. Traditionalism is a convenient formula that does not commit to anything. It expresses solidarity with the nation, but not the will to give it a great sense in the world. All traditionalism accepts the immanent limits of the nation. Then there is nothing more to do and it goes to the future as the jug goes to the water. Renaissance has made history come into the spiritual plane.
What is important in the theory of cultures is whether the assertion of one of them is only a non-revealing episode or is, on the contrary, an essential destination. The example of Spain and Holland, which became great powers for only a century, before sinking into a true shipwreck of history, must inspire us to define an intermediate category of cultures, between the great to the monumental destiny and small to minor destiny. The failure of these intermediate cultures has multiple causes, the main of which is of course the inadequacy of plans, the inability for either to achieve itself during its becoming in a structural correspondence of all plans. Spain has constituted an undeniable spiritual success (just think of the Mystic of Saint John of the cross and St. Teresa), but it has not maintained at the same level from the political point of view.
It was not able to assert itself in the long term as a great power, nor was it capable of creating solid state forms. It represents the triumph of the subjective spirit. (She was never a nation itself.) No less characteristic of the fate of the unfulfilled intermediate cultures, of these cultures which are realized at about the moment when a people becomes a nation, but without being: the pre-Columbian culture of the Maya. Two or three centuries before the arrival of the conquistadors, which devastated the Mexican cultures or the Peruvian civilization, the Maya died without any external causes. Culture that knew the Mathé Matic and the calendar, whose architecture could competing with the monuments of Egypt and whose hié-ratism is not without evoking the art of India, it collapsed and disappeared, however, as if it had only been a malformation of history. There is only one explanation for this rapid decadence: the political deficiency, the inability to organise its external destiny, which, in spite of a spiritual hypertrophy, prevented the Mayan culture from reaching the equilibrium point of a lasting mission.
What matters in history is the ascent and ruin of the great cultures, as well as the irreducible conflicts that oppose them. While their tragedy is played in the theatre of shadows and lights of life, it is in a minor light-obscure that consumes that of small cultures, which deliver a painful battle to defeat their anonymity and finally surrender to the enjoyments of the story. Being subhistorical, that is to say below the threshold of the great cultures, they can raise their level only by breaking their own continuity. The discontinuity in relation to their destiny is the condition of their assertion. They must have a unique obsession with jumping into history. Their chance of salvation is that history is not nature.
All cultures are predetermined, in other words they have a germinal destiny: it is inscribed in their nucleus, which contains, for one, the possibility of jumping. At some point in their sleepy evolution, a fruitful rupture occurs, which elevates them to the level of the great cultures, even if it is not in their creations, in tension. It is impossible to choose the time of its jump. But the will can give the magnitude to a historical Transfiguration. Men can only want what they are already in germ.
The organicist conception of natural evolution condemns the inertia, slowness and drowsiness that have been our lot for a thousand years of anonymity. Organicism is a theoretical opposition to any jump, and its ultimate consequences close the slightest escape to the small cultures. If Romania’s national and political thinking is so unrevolutionary, it is because of excessive organicist contamination, as well as the direct or indirect influence exerted by the German romantic Historicism on Romanian nationalism.
A purely organic conception of our fate in the world would be fruitful if the rhythm of life of modern cultures was characterized by a relative calm and balance because, then, the possibility of a synchronization would not be totally excluded. Fever is one more element, which benefits a people, but at the same time it exhausts it faster. The acceleration of the rhythm explains the rapid exhaustion of modern cultures and, to some extent, of Greece and Rome. The precipitation of events presupposes the violent activity of a soul, the passion that draws its substance from its own frenzy. When we think of the phenomena that have taken over in India in a millennia-old history, we see between them surprising intervals, at least a disconcerting amount of time. A whole century breathes only barely in an event which, however, has, most often, a religious significance, therefore temporally neutral.
The calm breath of Oriental cultures has preserved their substance, so that they still have not lost their adhesion to the future. Conversely, the breath of modern cultures is gasping, on the verge of suffocation. Their viability is so short that they have lost their substance in a few centuries. Without this acceleration of rhythm, we could continue normally our evolution: our slowness and our intermittent pulse would gradually bring us to the desired height. But it is not so, and it is only by burning the historical stages that we will be able to participate in the collective rhythm. If the small cultures evolved in a natural way, that is to say, through the minor mode all the phases travelled by the large, they would never succeed to be noticed by any history of the world. What would be the vitality and freshness of them if, for fear of falling, they did not escape from the biological sphere? But without glory, history is only biology.
[The concept of historical jumping has affinities with the idea of qualitative leap present in the problem of stadiums at Kierkegaard. The passage from the aesthetic stage to the ethical stage and from it to the religious stage is not effected by a transition, but by a qualitative leap. After the aesthetic, immediate and direct experience, jumps in ethics and in religious interiority do not go without causing substantial continuity solutions.] Small cultures must traverse the stages, not in a slow evolutionary transition, but in jumping fever. As long as we do not know the historical level of the culture concerned, we cannot specify What will be these stages, traversed in a discontinuous way, which proves that the small cultures have no other plank of salvation than to come out of themselves, of the curse of their existence. But ultimately, for whom is the problem of these cultures painful? For a historian? Certainly not. How could he feel sorry for some condemned, closed countries in the world, when he has in all objectivity the comforting example of the great phenomena?
The historian envisages reality with more indifference than feeling. On the other hand, for the representatives of small cultures, the problem is of a direct existential nature which has absolutely nothing to do with the sphere of objectivity. If we were not to go deeply into the Romanian phenomenon, if we could be perfectly objectify about it, little would it matter whether or not it plays a role in the world. We would find it natural that she knows the fate of the small cultures, and her anonymity would be absolutely unsorry. But a Romanian enthusiast cannot accept that she is doomed to life in the mediocre destiny that has been hers so far. Spirits of a criminal lucidity see in her a microcosm called to disappear, on the contrary of the passionate, who situate her in the heart of their hearts and thus in the rhythm of the world.
It is not for a certain number of values nor for their minor realization that the problem of small cultures is interesting, it is for the man who is tormented, who does not accept their fate and wants to make their salvation by doing his. The problem of cultures certainly concerns the philosophy of history, but also anthropology. If we consider human destiny from a historical perspective, we will see that the great cultures ensure its obvious, but that it is not the same for the small, where destiny adds to the purely human condition a dramatic element stemming from their anomalies and their shortcomings. The pride of a man born in a small culture is always wounded. Being born in a second-class country is nothing to rejoice in. Lucidity becomes tragedy. And if one is not animated by a messianic fury, the soul drowns in an ocean of distress.
There is a demiurgic thirst in man, which he seals either in excess of the soul, in an inner vision, or by actively integrating into the historical future. Thanks to their rapid rhythm and ample breathing, the great cultures respond to this thirst, because they are totalities of cosmic character whose greatness surpasses the human. They are worlds; their existence justifies Monadology. But these Monads do not live in harmony, they need a window to see each other, and hate each other. Their demiurgia automatically satisfies man’s desire for absolute. Indeed, if, obsessed with history, he has the chance to live in a great culture, he can be satisfied. Being obsessed with history means nurturing the cult of temporal glory, the passion of the Halo in the future. A nation that is not haunted by the obsession with glory is deprived of a vital, secret but no less effective spring.
The ascent of cultures gives the impression of a creation from nothing, of a direction taken by following a purely inner plan. Fertility of the demiurgic germ is uneven. That is why they are not all fatalities to the same extent. In one, the demiurgy takes on a purely external character, and it is then called Gigantism. For example, England. One wonders: how is it that this country, which has the world for so long, is not a great fatality? He has undoubtedly given the world unique, inexplicable geniis, and, although it is non-existent in music and no one in metaphysics, he has also created, despite the most vulgar of empiricists, the most delicate of literatures. However, he did not fight for an idea that would have transcated him. Worse: he suffered for no idea. Everything was done by itself, by an automatic interest. While France defined itself in the world and became aware of itself in the revolution, which cost him so much blood, and in so many useless wars, the destiny of England was forged by the circumstances, he meted among the contingencies , without leading to a direct, irrevocable, messianic assertion. England conquered the world without trying to incorporate it. It dominated it without changing its face, or indeed its own. The British Empire has brought as novelty a system of coercion and exploitation, but no ethos, no active idea, no useless and universal passion. Devoid of universal idea, utilitarianism is the negation of messianism. The latter is tragic, prophetic, a unleashing of the very essence of a country.
The demiurgy of the cultures gives them a messianic Nimbus, while the external Gigantism of the English is devoid of it. British destiny sets the axis of the world in goods and not in a domineering passion expressed by a whole complex of spiritual forms. Wanting to dominate the world without transforming it is not an idea from universalism, nor of national prophecy. The phenomena of Gigantism occupy a secondary place in the great cultures. Extensive domination and materialistic exclusivism take away from the historical event its intensity and, as a result, dilute it. England illustrates what a great culture should not be. Companies that do not serve a universal meaning are spots in history. The material Gigantism is a shadow that can refresh us.
A country that built itself by exploiting conflicts between States and intervening at the time when adversaries had worn out, deserves no more than an objective esteem. They were not conquistadors, the founders of this modern Monster called the British Empire. The English philosophical and politico-economic thought, quite interesting in its horror, is itself contaminated by the flatter empiricism, to the point that, in order to compensate for the disgust due to the immediacy of England, one must take refuge in the atmosphere delicate, airy and mutant of a Gainsborough or a Reynolds. In modern times, England has placed itself at the Centre of all events, but without determining their ideal meaning. There is something sterile in the substance of this country, which is not a glory of history, but a considerable chapter made of events and men bound by appearances and not by an essential destiny. England is devoid of collective genius, of a dynamic mysticism of the totality of a nation. Its insular exclusivism is not the ardour of a fanatical collective spirit. Logical nominalism has led, in practice, to individualism private exaggeration of the mystical coloring which was once known to him in Germany. In many respects, England may have been great but, nevertheless, the ideal sense of greatness lacks it. Shakespeare is worth a whole world; but he cannot make it one of England-as a country, as a national destiny-although one ranks among the great cultures. Parliamentarianism is an English gift that has disturbed the world for tens and decades. If it allows in England to make universal history through debates, exchanges of opinions, in countries with less composure it is only a factor of stagnation. His only merit is to have given to presumed representatives of the nation the illusion that they could lead consciously and artificially his destiny. At the bottom, he created a quantity of megalomaniacs, but no heroes. It is even the negation of heroism. Conceivable at the balanced times of a country, it is solvent to those of the beginning, of the affirmation.
The tension in history has always been the fruit of the dictatorial spirit. Freedom is the climate of thought and not acts. Politics knows only the force that is used itself and which, when it is great, sometimes puts itself at the service of values. The excess of force serves the spirit in order not to dissolve in its own tension. The classical eras have pre-served the balance between “political-force” on the one hand and “freedom-spirit” on the other hand. While the historical fate has a specific rhythm and a whole system of alternatives that preserve always the coefficient of probability generated by the irrational substructure of history, the other periods, dramatically unilateral, fail to maintain the balance between the antinomic values which, when they are not, of this fact, engaged in a permanent conflict, are substituted for each other in a pendulum movement.
I see the highest point of a great culture in the ecstasy of its strength. After that, decadence can begin; We will certainly regret the fallen power, but we find a retrospective consolation to the exalt. What the Greeks, the Romans or the French mean in history is undoubtedly due to the world of specific values that they have created. We know well enough today for what historical ideas they fought, to what extent they realized them and what were their bounds, since they co-existed with many other missions, parallel or complementary. And yet, knowing the ideal configuration of a mission brings little when one wants to discover the decisive, secret but active, which launches a culture towards its confines, towards the exhaustion of its meaning in the world.
I would give half my life to share with the same intensity, only for a moment, the feelings experienced by the last Greek, the last Roman or the last Frenchman on the peaks of his history. This had to be a magnificent pride, a pride to make the gods pale. The last Frenchman who, during the revolution, transformed his bestiality into humanitarian fury, represents historically and politically much more than the an amorphous community of a small culture. Or, I seek to pierce the psychology of the German soldier during the great war, to identify the monumental pride of the last soldier, conscious of fighting the whole world. For these examples emphasize that a universal culture confers universal contours on the individual consciousness. The inner sensation of strength can also intensify in individuals belonging to small cultures, to cultures missed in the egg, but then this implies a lasting personal exercise and does not exceed the meaning of a psychological fact. This is only an intensification that implies a conscious growth of the destiny of the culture in question. In large cultures, the individual is saved. Better, it still is. While he’s lost in the little ones. How could it not be, moreover, since their rhythm of life is devoid of offensive convergence and aggressive momentum? Their shortcomings are certainly caused by an initial lack of force, but just as much by the absence of an excessive and permanent cult of force.
The initial deficiencies of Romania (typical case of a culture with a minor destiny) have never been corrected or compensated by a conscious love of power. The evidence? Has there been a single vision in our past that has exaggerated our role in the world? It has often been repeated: advocates of Latinity (and one adds: an oasis of Latinity); a dike against the Slavs; protectors of the Christian Conservatives of Roman traditions, etc. You understood: we protected and we kept. Is this a historical destiny? The great Nations or, in order to spiritualize them, the great cultures, have decided the history thanks to their willingness to assert themselves. A trail of fire remains in the world after the burning of a great culture, as it resembles a cosmic offensive. What remains on the other hand after the defensive of a small culture? Powder, but not cannon. Dust, washed away by a fall wind. I seek in vain the spring of small cultures…
It is however a time when they can escape from nothingness through the cult of force. It is so, instructing their own trial with a rare lucidity, they take note of their shortcomings, confess that their past was a path without exit and make prophecy the source of their existence. The difference between a large culture and a small one does not lie in the number of their population or in the frequency of extraordinary events, it is based on the spiritual and political destiny that uniquely individualizes them in the world. A country that has been a national body to become for a thousand years without succeeding in defining its spiritual and political destiny, suffers from an organic defect, even if all this time has served it to be biologically constituted. From the point of view of history, biology is a substructure that proves nothing in itself. So, given that the force is rooted in the biological, what sense does it have as the purpose of the great cultures? In the field of history, vital imperialism must not be inevitably understood by force, unless it is given a broader meaning. The biological sources of force positively express a negative sense phenomenon: a deficient organism is not realized on the historical level.
The strength of a nation grows at the same time as its historical level rises. The less a nation is accomplished and the more it is in deficit, even if it has some organic freshness. The force degrades as the historical level lowers and the nation rushes towards its decline. Imperial Rome or Athens in the Y century, France of the revolution, Germany, Italy and Russia under dictatorships have reached the heights of their historical development, have completely refreshed at some point of their becoming. The correlated strength of the historical level is a certainty, both spiritual and biological in nature. If it were a simple vital imperialism, it would remain elementary and a-historical.
At the limits of the historical level, the force is reflected in itself, so that the self-consciousness of the nation realizes the self-consciousness of the force. The messianism of the great cultures expresses a phenomenon of decanted force. The spiritualization of force distinguishes the historical imperialist idea of the barbaric imperialism of the barbarians. No barbaric invasion has created any form of State in itself. Only the aggression with a style has taken on a historical twist. The great nations live and destroy themselves only to savor their power. Therefore, the force must not be regarded as a pretext, nor as a means. Nations consume their inner possibilities and are exhausted in the future in order to achieve self-consciousness, which is justified by force. Vladimir Soloviev said in a famous passage that Nations are not what they believe, but what God thinks of them in eternity.
I imagine the little that the theological perspective retains from human history. In the face of God, the Nations can only be saved to the extent that they are fulfilled, but God does not manifest a particular understanding for the phenomenon of force, that is, what is essential in us, we find ourselves delivered to ourselves. Either strength is ethics or it goes beyond that. In fact, they do not need to be supported or conditioned. The impetuous destiny of the great cultures surpasses all the values of ethics. If history had remained within good and evil, it would have directed itself towards mediocrity and, instead of the tragic that defines it, would have offered us the spectacle of some familiar conflicts. No one has spoken so far of moral or immoral Nations; There are only strong or weak ones, only aggressive or tolerant.
The apogee of a nation implies endless crimes; and the images of the historical culmination are apocalyptic. If rationalism and ethics tempted me, I would see in every act a fall. History has no excuse for eternity because it excuses too much time, basically it is perhaps its only excuse. [What is Soloviev doing in the face of history? He deserted and passed to the Mystic.] The spectacle of the ascent and collapse of the great cultures can only make it cynical. And cynicism is amplified by the regret that Romania, located on the margins of history, cannot participate actively in this spectacle, that it is only an echo. If Soloviev’s theological vision is spiritually objective, the great cultures will be hard saved in eternity; but will we at least be saved in time?
Sartre is justified in claiming that Baudelaire wanted something which seems ruinous to us. At least he wanted it as one wants the impossible – that is to say, both genuinely as such, and deceptively, in the form of a chimera. Hence his tortured existence as a dandy, longing for work but bitterly engulfed in a useless idleness. But since, as Sartre admits, he was armed with ‘incomparable tension’, he drew all he could from an untenable position. A perfect expression of ecstasy and horror gave his poetry a fullness sustained to the very limits of a free sensibility, an exhaustive form of rarefaction and sterility which makes Sartre uneasy. The atmosphere of vice, rejection and hatred corresponds to the tension of the will which denied the constraint of Good in the same way as the athlete denies the weight of the dumbell. It is true that every effort is fruitless. The poems in which this expression is petrified and which reduce existence to being, have made of infinite vice, hatred and liberty those tranquil, docile and immutable forms with which we are acquainted. It is also true that poetry which survives is always the opposite of poetry for, having the perishable as its subject, it transforms it into something eternal. But it matters little if poetry, whose essential nature is to unite the object of the poem with the subject, unites it with the poet, disappointed, unsatisfied and humiliated by failure. The object, the world, irreducible and unsubordinated, incarnated in the hybrid creation of poetry and betrayed by the poem, is not betrayed by the poet’s unlivable life. Only the poet’s interminable agony can really reveal the authenticity of poetry, and Sartre, whatever he may say, helps us to see that Baudelaire’s end, preceding the glory which alone could have changed him to stone, corresponded to his will: Baudelaire wanted the impossible until the end.
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 