The Second Soul: Faust and Helen
On the perpetual devotion of our Western Culture to the ghost of Classical antiquity, the love of Faust for Helen.
In the first act of Goethe’s Faust II, the Holy Roman Emperor, desirous to see the ideal forms of male and female beauty, requests that Faust produces these. Obliging the Emperor, he summons the spirits of Paris and Helen from Hades, with the men of the court then envious and criticizing the appearance of Paris and the women jealous and scorning Helen. Faust however immediately falls in love with Helen.
Faust:
Is this the fount of beauty? Have I still, eyes?
What pours here, through my mind, so richly?
My dreadful journey yields a blessed prize.
How void the world was, undeveloped for me!
What is it now since my priesthood?
Desirable, lasting, solid underfoot!
The power of my life’s breath should
Fail, if I’m ever again estranged from you! –
The perfect form that drew me before,
Delighting me, in the magic mirror,
Was only an airy phantom of such beauty! – You
Are the true embodiment of my passion:
Towards you is my powers’ whole direction
To you, love, feeling, faith, madness are owed—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II: 6487—6500
It is no wonder that it is Faust, one of the heroes most intimately connected with the character of Western Culture itself, after whom is named this very Culture in Oswald Spengler’s taxonomy of Cultures in his The Decline of the West, is desperately in love with Helen. She standing for the Hellenic Culture, summoned from Hades by Faust in the present, who stands for the Germanic-West-Christian Culture, is of course indicative of the long-standing love that the latter has held for former. Perhaps there is no other example in all of history of a Culture adoring a preceding one to such an extent as our West has. We are not the same Civilization nor a continuation of Rome or Greece, but forever have we praised and adored this hallowed ghost.
CHAPTERS:
The Beginning
The Painting, the Sculpture, and the Structure
The Renaissance
The Remainder
The Beginning
The gesticulation period of the Western Culture was defined by the fall of a giant, the end of a world in its own right. The fall of the Roman Empire, and by that token the end of the Classical Civilization, was an event necessitated and, ultimately, a positive development. As well as the event that enabled our Western Culture to arise in the “Interregnum” between the Germanic migrations into the lands of the Empire and the rise of Frankia.
Of this period, Toynbee writes:
This interregnum is filled with the activities of two institutions: the Christian church, established within and surviving the Roman Empire, and a number of ephemeral successor states arising on the former territory of the Empire out of the so-called Völkerwanderung of the Barbarians from beyond the no-man’s-land beyond the Imperial frontiers.
—Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement Vol.I-VI, Ch. II
The rotting and decrepit must give way to the youthful and the resplendent. What was a frontier for the Romans, the limit of their northern expansion, would become the heartland of the new Society to come.
Thus the line embedded in the Lotharingia entered into the geographical structure of the Roman Empire before Lothaire’s time as well as into that of the Western Society after it, but the structural function of this line for the Roman Empire and for the subsequent Western Society were not the same. In the Roman Empire it had been frontier; in our Western Society it was to be a base-line for lateral expansion on either side and in all directions. During the deep sleep interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species.
—Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement Vol.I-VI, Ch. I
From the very inception of our Western Culture, around the time of the Carolingians and Charlemagne, as well as his grandson successors, it had found its core in and around the area of Middle Frankia, what would come to comprise the whole of the Netherlands, eastern France, western Germany, and northern Italy.
The first great state of the West, the Empire of Charlemagne, exhibited this longing for the antiquity of only a few centuries prior already. He had come to style himself Western Roman Emperor—the Byzantines acknowledging him as such when he was at the doorstep of Venice, their vassal state—consolidating his realm and then in late Roman fashion dividing the Empire among his three progeny (albeit this was a Frankish custom, primogeniture hadn’t been established). The palace of Aachen in Charlemagne’s imperial city was designed with Roman architectural elements, the youthful Culture yet still too shy to ardently express its own world-feeling. The script of course was Latin, and to this day we employ it in almost every European language. The development of much of Western artistic sensibility consisted of attaining the confidence and certainty to assert our own world-feeling, for Faust to move away from the lingering ghost of Helen.
We would continue to identify ourselves in-line with the Classical world. However between the founding of the Holy Roman Empire under the auspicies of the Ottonian Dynasty, and the beginning of the Renaissance, we would progressively (although maybe not consciously) move away from the Classical, and attain the confidence to enact our own world-feeling in stone.
After the Renaissance however much of the West would return to its appeals to antiquity. Grand states of great economic and military prowess coming to style themselves Rome, while cultured and enlightened lesser polities would consider themselves Athens. See just how many states claim to be a “third Rome,” from the Ottomans who captured Constantinople, to Imperial Russia claiming the title by virtue of similarity of culture to Byzantium and a few royal bloodline ties to the royalty of the Eastern Roman Empire.
The Painting, the Sculpture, and the Structure
To quote Nietzsche once again (the very same quote as I have used in a previous article actually) on the subject of culture:
It is, above all, a unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.
—Untimely Meditations, I: 1; II: 4
The attached painting that begins this article itself serves as a mark of the love Faustian man has for the Classical world, and his veneration of it in a characteristically un-Classical manner. We employ depth, perspective, and emphasize the background, in stark contrast to the Hellene who knew not of perspective, employed depth not, and who emphasized foreground to the point of backgrounds being wholly irrelevant within any mosaic or plastic art.
Through all our Western art we seek out an actively metaphysical experience. The painting The Temple of Juno in Agrigento depicts the Classical as ruin, the somber sunset marks the antiquity and distance between us and the world of the temple’s youth, meanwhile for distance the Hellenes had nothing short of contempt, thus their ever-present focus on the near, epitomized in the art of sculpture, that which is definitively demarcated, epitomized in the most proximate of all things - the body.
The subject of Friedrich’s painting itself is not so much the ruins themselves (nor is the landscape itself the main subject for any of his paintings), rather, it is the staggering encounter with divinity, immanent in nature as in all things that ultimately characterizes all Faustian man’s fixation with both history and nature. It is Caspar Friedrich’s paintings that illustrate the Faustian soul to the very highest degree in any form of plastic art.
Caspar Friedrich also employs the Rückenfigur [figure as seen from behind] to excellent effect, allowing us to apprehend the immensity of the landscape by the small human figures in whom we ground ourselves, whilst we are swayed by the sublime in these paintings, the Greek would feel out of place, perturbed.
We intuitively see the infinite in both nature and history, and we grasp at it; mastering history (even pressuring cultures foreign to ours to preserve their history when we have done as much as possible for the cataloging of our own) and subjugating nature (by first capturing it in the painting and then by industry and technology) more than any other race before us has.
However in spite of that we still find ourselves imbued with a certain sense of melancholy whenever we contemplate the world of the Romans and Hellenes. Perhaps to some degree Western man is envious of the Hellene, ever-living in the eternal present and largely apathetic to both past and future. Gazing not into the sublime yet cold infinite but rather the warm and proximate near, his state is the extent of his eye’s stationary vision, beyond that is the foreign element which he is likewise indifferent towards.
All Classical sculpture is simply body immersed in the eternal present. What the sculptures of Polycletus and Phidias lack wholly (not through any fault of their own, rather, by necessity) is any form of soul.
There is nothing so impersonal as the Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable. Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality?
—Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol.1, Act and Portrait
They convey the beauty and vitality of the human, however they do not reflect any emotion or feeling from within the statue itself, body exists for body’s sake. Irises and pupils were indeed painted onto the eyes of the sculptures, but they were not chiseled into them. Contrast this with Western art, the sheer quantity of self-portraits of commissioned portraits of various Emperors, Kings, Aristocrats, or even wealthy merchants, almost all painted in the lifetime of the personage depicted.
Here is the Arnolfini Portrait, depicting not rulers or heroes or any scene of particular majesty, it is merely a depiction of matrimony. An intimate and personal vision into the life of the couple, the viewer is invited to peer into the life of the Arnolfinis, symbolized by the fact that the room is actually a guestroom, and in the reflection in the center of the portrait are present two guests, it is an intensely personal work of art.
The Classical world was wholly concerned with external beauty, beauty of the body, whilst the West-Germanic-Christian, although ever admiring of the effortless attainment of beauty on the part of the Classical, in a move of envy, the West simply asserted that their new society was of the spirit.
Feeling, the specific aching of the interior soul are absent in Hellenic art.
All Greek heroes have very simple motivations that need little elaboration. Even a child can understand the yearning of Achilles to die in glory or the labors of Heracles undertaken so that he might be redeemed, how many can earnestly understand Ahab’s motivations for chasing the elusive phantom, Moby Dick?
With all our art; the painting, the novel, the architecture; the spires and cathedral stained-glass, our military and industrial technology, our mathematic and remaining sciences, we seek out the infinite, and to unwrap all cosmic mystery, to unveil Isis, while to this exactly Greeks were most averse. Quoting from Spengler on the development of Calculus:
It was an instinct that guided Nicolaus Cusanus, the great Bishop of Brixen (about 1450), from the idea of the unendingness of God in nature to the elements of the Infinitesimal Calculus. Leibniz himself, who two centuries later definitely settled the methods and notation of the Calculus, was led by purely metaphysical speculations about the divine principle and its relation to infinite extent to conceive and develop the notion of an analysissitus - probably the most inspired of all interpretations of pure and emancipated space - the possibilities of which were to be developed later by Grassmann in his Ausdehnungslehre and above all by Riemann, their real creator, in his symbolism of two-sided planes representative of the nature of equations.
—Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol.1, Meaning of Numbers
Our mathematic, our art, our science, as well as reaching toward the infinite, it also starts from the very premise of the infinite, as the above citation illustrates, the preconceptions of Cusanus and Leibniz of the nature of our infinite are what lead them to their developments in mathematics.
The Renaissance
Everything he (Michelangelo) created he meant sculpturally—sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollonian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence — that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco — the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour — was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, that was in him, But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.
—Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol.1, Act and Portrait
The Renaissance was not, as commonly believed, a revival of the spirit of Classical antiquity, rather, it was merely an anti-Gothic movement, what Spengler describes as the awareness of a culture’s destiny which is fiercely fought against and resisted. Homologous to the Dionysian-Orphic artistic sensibility of ancient Greece contrasted to the Olympian orthodoxy. Nonetheless the great artists of the Renaissance end up winding back toward their Gothic-Christian spirits. The Classical soul is dead forever, and in imitation of it it’s always clear what work belongs to Phidias or Michelangelo. One could never in all Hellenic sculpture find anything resembling the Pietà or the Moses of Julius II’s tomb. True, the Renaissance artists had perhaps better patronage, superior work materials and resources at their disposal when compared with the Graeco-Roman sculptors and artists, but it is not a matter of one style of sculpture being superior to the other, rather, the Renaissance artist always attempts to permeate his work with abstract feeling, an inward meaning which radiates through the statue, the Classical sculptor does no such thing.
Interest in all things Classical grew, that much is obvious. However the Renaissance could never have been a genuine resurrection of the spirit of Classical antiquity or its art-forms (for art is but the self-disclosure of spirit), other than merely being an art that’s in the same domain, sculpture to sculpture, fresco to fresco. On the methods of Michelangelo’s sculpture Spengler wrote:
His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde.
—Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol.1, Act and Portrait
On another note, through our fixation on the Renaissance as a resurrection of the Classical spirit, we often overlook the influence that the northern artists (primarily Dutch and German) had on the Italians.
These movements which masquerade as either a foreign element (Thrace) or an antiquated element (Classical antiquity) are bound to dissolve back into the orthodoxy which they foresaw by intuition and fought against, the Dionysiacs into the Hellenic world, and the anti-Gothic Renaissance art would come to serve its primary soul, the more fundamental and honest one. This is why eventually the fresco painting of Michelangelo gives way to the perspective paintings of Titian. Florence to Venice.
The Renaissance, as outwardly perceived as a resurrection of the Classical spirit, has pierced the heart of the West deeply. The Classical architectural style is dead, the chief buildings of the Hellenes and Romans built in this way were temples and theaters to be seen in a single glance, but we have blended our interpretation of the Classical with the existing Gothic, giving way to the Baroque (the architecture of the Renaissance), and then to the over-elaborate Rococo. In the Hellenic Culture the very same evolution came about; the crude Doric gave way to the Ionian, and then to the over-elaborate Corinthian.
In this sense, we have never seen any instance of any Doric, Ionian, or even Corinthian architecture that wasn’t a reconstruction or a ruin. That isn’t to say we have no idea as to what they would have looked like, but we can never behold these as they were meant to be beheld. A reconstruction of something such as the Acropolis, even were it to be fully true to whatever records we have of its appearance, would only be an interpretation. Our “Classical” is not their “Classical,” ours is the Baroque and the Neoclassical, neither being true to the spirit of the Classical, rather, we build these as mediums which we can look at the Classical through, but through still our own Faustian, world-feeling.
The Remainder
Post-Renaissance, the West would now adore its second soul, which it knew only by its twilight period, of the end of Rome in which was the West-Christian-Germanic element nurtured. We never knew or saw the days of Pericles or Plato, those being remote to us by seven centuries in the very least, distant by double that, if we take our earnest birth to be around 1000 A.D., these things we never knew but through our history.
However, by virtue of our mastery of history, we have translated all their texts that we could find, undug all the archaeological sites we know of, and study them to just about the greatest extent we could. No man could call himself educated for the longest time if he did not wield fluency in Greek and Latin, had he not read the Homeric epics and Aeschylus’s and Sophocles’s tragedies.
Whereupon we entered the first stages of democratization, of the transition from the rule of the one to the rule of the few, through the establishments of charters or institutions such as the signing of the Magna Carta in England, Aragon’s General Privilege in Spain, the establishment of the Estates General in France, or the entire history of Venice up to the Napoleonic wars of struggle between the Doge and the other ruling parties. Thereupon those who enabled for these transitions toward oligarchic aristocracies fashioned themselves after the Greeks who had established their Republics, or the Romans who banished the Tarquins. Not to mention that practically all such documents or charters would have been written in Latin.
After the Renaissance revitalized outward Classical forms (though it did not, and could not, resurrect the Classical spirit in earnest) so many structures were now influenced by this style of Classical-form that the new Baroque style was inaugurated, and Gothic structures faced an existential threat, so much so that the erection of Gothic buildings after the Renaissance was coined “Gothic Survival.” This video covers a few significant Gothic structures that had been built after the Renaissance:
In England Gothic would continue to thrive however, perhaps Cromwell and the Puritans wishing to distance themselves from Catholic Rome and all things Graeco-Roman by that rationale. The adoration of the Classical in mainland Europe would persist however.
This isn’t even to mention that the most powerful state of the West, the Rome to our Greece, the United States, was founded with the explicit intention of it being a new Roman Republic. Today buildings in the Neoclassical style litter just about every state capitol as well as the national capitol itself. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and their architecture and ornamentation, Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court are all built in a Neoclassical style, and are thoroughly ornamented with symbols of Rome, such as the fasces in the House of Representatives or the rotunda of Congress depicting George Washington among the gods of Rome.
The impressions of all things Hellenic and Roman maintain their hold on the Faustian soul, the second soul of Helen, which wields the eternal present, the warm, the red and yellow colors, the proximate and the near, the demarcated and the limited, the shaped. As opposed to the truer and first soul, of the ever-expansive horizons of past and future, the cold, the blue and green colors, the distant and inaccessible, the boundless and infinite, the shapeless.
Sometimes I wonder, do people lament the eventual death of our Culture not so much for the sake of our first soul, which likely could be carried on as the second soul of a new peoples, but instead for our second soul, made by distance and age now utterly foreign, the Gothic to be carried on in some form or another, but upon the end of our West, which has been the Culture to hold this long-deceased apparition in our hearts, will then the Classical die its second death, of memory departed?
Peter Sloterdijk used the term "creative misunderstanding" to describe the renaissance, which I find to be a very nice take. The Occident didn't understand the relics and artifacts they saw, they couldn't hope to understand them. Yet their desire to recreate what they didn't understand birthed something new.