Christianity subsume other traditions free#
This central Biblical idea included both the eternal spiritual destiny of every individual and the destiny of mankind to form a free communion. 3 For more than a thousand years Western culture had been based on the Christian idea that man is created in the image of God. The last three centuries seen from the spiritual point of view represent a history in which step by step the central and fundamental idea of the whole Western civilisation the idea of the dignity of man was undermined and weakened. If we ask as certainly many during these years have asked how all this this inhumanity this lawlessness this collectivist depersonalisation was possible the answer cannot I think be in doubt. Still looking back on these events this feeling of complete surprise and horror is not altogether justified in view of the fact that the spiritual evolution during the last centuries was a slow and invisible but none the less indubitable preparation for this outbreak. True this eruption of anti-spiritual and anti-cultural forces as they appeared first in the Bolshevist then in the Fascist and finally in the National-Socialist revolution came to the rest of the Western world as a complete surprise and left it in utter bewilderment. The mere fact that more than half a century ago a man thoroughly awake to the character of his time was able to foresee the catastrophe we have experienced indicates that the eruption of inhumanity lawlessness and depersonalisation which we have experienced during recent decades must have had its deep historical roots. What then was seen by such prophetic minds as a terrible future has become meanwhile an even more gloomy reality although thank God until now merely a partial reality. 2 This picture like that of Spengler is dominated by the figure of the political military dictator gaining and sustaining his position by means of mass-psychology and extirpating all spiritual culture by his brutal militarism and imperialism. But even Spengler was not the first to utter such dismal ideas about the future.įifty years before Spengler the great Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt who fifty years after his death is being more and more universally considered as the greatest continental interpreter of the history of civilisation had sketched a picture of the future of the Western world which is not less terrifying. A new epoch has begun in which the scholar the artist the seer and the saint are replaced by the soldier the engineer and the man of political power an epoch which is no more capable of producing real culture but merely an outward technical civilisation. His ominous prophecy of the end of Western cultural tradition based on his analysis of European history of the last centuries is to be interpreted as meaning that the time is past when spiritual forces and values determine the face and character of the Western world.
Before the world had heard the name Adolf Hitler a solitary thinker unknown till then Oswald Spengler by name had written a startling book with the almost apocalyptic title Der Untergang des Abendlandes 1. It is necessary to remember however that this danger must have been acute for some time in the past. For unfortunately the pressures to which the foundations of this culture were exposed have not decreased since then but rather increased.
Christianity subsume other traditions full#
Churchill's warning has retained its full actuality even now after the battle of Britain has ended in victory. We have become conscious of the fact that in the course of some fifteen centuries something like a Christian civilisation has been created and of the other fact that in our days this Christian civilisation is at stake and its survival is questioned. Churchill at a historic hour spoke words which have themselves made history about the survival of Christian civilisation the idea of Christian civilisation and its being endangered in the highest degree has become familiar among the Western nations.
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