THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

CHAPTER SIX

BUT Indo-European religiosity is not able to unfold truly in conformity with its nature in every form of mysticism; not for instance, in the mysticism of supersensual and sexual moods and abandonments: not in the mysticism of intoxicated excitement, in that enthusiasmos, in which man wishes to torture himself out of the bounds of his body in order to reach down into the essence of the deity; nor also in the manner of being enraptured or carried away, as in Islamic mysticism by the feeling of being torn away, overpowered by a transcendent God, by the mysticism which involves a dissolution of all barriers, an immersion and swimming in formless un-becoming. All such trends are opposed to the Indo-European view of the ordered shaping of the world and the Indo-European feeling of duty to battle against destructive powers, against Utgard. Therefore the mysticism of self-seclusion (myein), of retreat from the world, of inaction and the extinction of the will or even of the senses, of excessive contemplation, the so called quietistic mysticism — is not the mysticism of the Indo-Europeans. However much as calmness may be valued by the Indo-Europeans, deep as the insight he will acquire again and again in self-immersion or in the pure contemplation of things without activity of will, the Indo-European can never give himself up to them entirely, and self assertion, the confrontation of destiny, is essential to his nature. Indo-European mysticism is thus the inner contemplation of high-minded (hochgemüter) men: through sinking the morally purified individual soul (Indian: atman) into itself, the soul experiences itself in its ground as the universal soul (Indian: brahman).

For this reason Indo-European mysticism as inward contemplation will confine itself again and again to contemplation which is unbounded in space — not secluded within itself, but open, and far seeing, such as is represented most beautifully of all through the far-aiming gaze of the Apollo of Belvedere, by whose statue Winckelmann was so moved and which he described so stirringly! With such vision the Indo-European experiences the divine:

Von Gebirg zum Gebirg
schwebet der ewige Geist
ewigen Lebens ahndevoll.


From mountain to mountain,
Hovers the eternal spirit
of everlasting life ominously.
(Goethe: An Schwager Kronos)

At great moments, Indo-European nature thus participates in a vision, a theoria, a one and all (hen kai pan) in the All-One, which is already taught by the older Upanishads in India34 and then — each in his own way — by the great early Hellenic thinkers, such as Heraclitus, Xenophon and Parmenides.35 A universal teaching of Indo-European kind, the Vedanta philosophy,36 was announced in India at the beginning of the ninth century A.D. by the Brahman thinker, Sankara. Since it came to be known in Europe and North America it has influenced many thinking men. The same religiosity breaks through Christian dogma in the Nordic-German mysticism of reality, which H. Mandel has described.37

The wide vision of the Indo-European, which was represented most beautifully of all through far-aiming Apollo, can develop into a dedication to a universe without beginning and without end such as Heraclitus announced, or it can emerge as that feeling of identity with the universe which has been described as nature mysticism. Josef Strzygowski (Die Landschaft in der nordischen Kunst, p. 256) has described the plastic art of the Indo-European as the “feeling” of being one with the universe and its expanse. In such nature mysticism the Indo-European width of vision and inner contemplation are combined. Western (i.e. European) landscape painting, above all that of the Teutonic peoples, and landscape lyricism,38 above all in England and Germany, but also in Hölderlin’s Hyperion display the same feeling of identity with Nature.

From the Indo-Iranian belief in the Gods of antiquity (Polytheism), Spitama Zarathustra created in approximately the ninth century B.C. the first teaching of and belief in One God (Monotheism) in the history of religions. The Gods who had been common to the Indians and Iranians now passed into the background behind the one Ahura Mazda, after whom Mazdaism is named. These other Gods, preserved in India, in Iran became the sacred immortals (amesha spentas) the representatives of the moral virtues. They were later regarded as the messengers (Greek: angeloi) of Ahura Mazda, and the archangels created by Jewish and Christian legends were modelled on them. Spitama Zarathustra erected his monotheistic form of belief in a one-sided way, purely based upon morality, but in so doing he contradicted hereditary Indo-European religiosity. Hermann Lommel (Von arischer Religion, Geistige Arbeit, Year 1, No. 23, pp. 5-6) has proved, however, that, arising from Iranian popular belief, a natural religiosity again and again broke out in Mazdaism. A curious example of these outbreaks was the creation by the Persian kings, of landscape parks and gardens, whose fame spread far and wide. One of these gardens was called pairidesa and from it derived the Old Testament idea of Paradise and of the Garden of Eden (Josef Strzygowski: Spuren Indogermanischen Glaubens in der Bildenden Kunst, 1936, pp. 279 et seq.; G. Widengren: Hochgottglaube im Alten Iran, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift, 1938, pp. 6, 151 et seq. and 171 et seq., 235, 240 et seq., 372 et seq.; A. T. Olmstead: History of the Persian Empire, 1952, pp. 20, 62, 170, 315, 434; P. A. J. Arberry: The Legacy of Persia, 1953, pp. 5, 35, 260-261, 271). According to Xenophon (Oikonomikos, IV, 20-22), the younger Kurash (Cyrus), who later fell in the battle of Kunaxa (401 B.C.), showed the Spartan Lysandros (Lysander) with pride his Paradise (paradeisos), a park laid out according to his plans with rows of beautiful trees, part of which he had planted himself.

Nature religiosity has also been expressed in Iranian poetry and plastic art in the descriptions of the “Landscape filled with the glory of the deity” (khvarenah — Josef Strzygowski: Die Landschaft in der nordischen Kunst, pp. 143, 261 et seq.), akin to that of Indo-European aristocratic farmers, and the landscape parks of eighteenth century Europe.

It was Nature religiosity that filled the Persian king Khshayarsha (Greek: Xerxes), from the family of the Achaemenides, the king with the “flashing dark blue eyes” (Aeschylus: The Persians, 81). Herodotus (VII, 31) reports that, when on the march to Lydia and the Hellespont, the king caught sight of a beautiful plane tree, he had it hung with golden jewellery and guarded by a man from his bodyguard. This story called forth the famous Largo by Friedrich Handel, which was not, as generally assumed, a church composition, but a further example of Indo-European nature religiosity: the Persian king of Handel’s opera Serse (Xerxes) praises the beautiful plane tree in song in the Largo Ombra mai fu: o mio platano amato!

Bismarck and Moltke were talking one day in Berlin after the war was ended in 1871 and Bismarck asked the field marshal what, after such events and successes, they could still enjoy in life together. After a pause, Moltke said simply, “to see a tree growing”. The love and worship of trees as Erik Therman (Eddan och dess Ödestragik, 1938, pp. 124 et seq.; cf. also Giacomo Devoto: Origini Indoeuropee, 1961, pp. 251-252) has also shown was one of the characteristics of Teutonic religiosity.

Nature religiosity, the religiosity of aristocratic Indo-European farmers, also permeates the Georgica of Vergilius Maro (Vergil), the works of the painters Claude Lorrain and William Turner, Gottfried Keller’s poetry and his novel Der grüne Heinrich, and the novel Nachsommer by Adalbert Stifter. Inborn nature mysticism has again and again removed far away from the teachings of the Church many Christian theologians, as for example the Weimar court chaplain, Herder. The North American, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), resigned his office as pastor, when he could no longer reconcile the mystical concept of a world soul, which was revealed to him in the sublimity of landscape and in the demands of conscience, with the teachings of the Church. His apologia, entitled Nature, appeared in the year 1836.

A surrender to the Cosmos, which on account of its being without beginning and end, cannot be called creation, a devotion to liberation from time and space, thus a Nirvana during lifetime, was experienced by Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), an English mystic, whose life and work, The Story of My Heart, has remained almost unknown in his own country.

Nature mysticism — contrary to the intention of the author, who thought in materialistic terms under the influence of Epicurus — can be seen, in the rich and grandiose poem of the Roman, Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura. Even his introductory invocation to the Goddess Venus, in whom, however, Lucretius, as the heir to rational Hellenic thought, no longer believed, signifies more than mythological embellishment: it begets a spiritual fullness of poetry, a hen kai pan, a unio mystica, of the discerning poet and thinker with the universe as the object of his knowledge. The remoteness of a mystic also corresponds to the Roman poet’s moral and religious goal: “to be able to view everything with a calm spirit” (V, 1203) — pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

Otto Regenbogen (Lucretius: Seine Gestalt in seinem Gedicht, Neue Wege zur Antike, Heft I, 1932, pp. 47, 54, 61, 75 ff., 81 ff., 85 et seq.) has shown that the Epicurian thinker Lucretius and the poet Lucretius were not one and the same person; but De rerum natura provides sufficient proof of the fact that Lucretius had departed from the materialist Epicurus and his teaching on the motions of atoms — apart from the fact that the Roman’s poem was Stoic in spirit and more austere and manly, indeed more commanding, than the teaching of the Hellenic thinker. If Lucretius rejected all religio in general, then this is explained by the fact that the rural religiosity which originally formed the religio of the Latin-Sabine Romans, had already been penetrated, through the influence of the neighbouring Etruscans, with many gloomy superstitions and repellent customs. However, such a rejection of every religion speaks, as Regenbogen has said, more respect for the highest and ultimate things, than all the religious receptiveness of the philistine.

Was Lucretius a materialist as well as a nature mystic? Goethe, the poet of nature religiosity (and as such not a materialist), was going to write a study of Lucretius in which he intended to portray him as a “natural philosopher and poet” (Goethe: Von Knebel’s Translation of Lucretius, Cotta’s Jubilee edition, Vol. XXXVII, p. 218), and he took an active interest in the translation by his friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who had made a masterly rendering of De rerum natura into German. Karl Büchner (Römische Literaturgeschichte, 1962, pp. 236, 246, 249) has pointed out that Lucretius was the first Roman thinker to discover the spirit (mens), a spirit which liberates through knowledge: Lucretius discovered meaning “only in the superiority of the perceptive spirit”, and that liberation could be achieved solely by belief in the “power of the spirit and of reason”. Liberation to the timeless value of “a firm, lasting spirit” was the religious and moral goal of the poet. Genus infelix humanus (V, 1194) the unfortunate species of humanity, was looked on by the poet as men who were still bound by superstition, incapable of attaining the freedom of the spirit.

But if Lucretius the thinker thus portrayed for the Romans the capacity of perception, the spirit (mens), then Lucretius the poet, in contrast to Epicurus, who in his nature teachings had proceeded from Democritus, must have had a premonition or have understood that while feeling (sensitivity), consciousness and the perceptive activity of man were linked to the material activity of the brain and body and hence, in the last analysis, as Democritus and Epicurus had taught, to the movements of atoms, yet they were not in fact derived from such movements, and cannot be explained by them. Spirit becomes alive only in the tension between a discerning (perceptive) consciousness which faces, as Subject, an Object of perception. While Lucretius the Epicurean followed the materialistic atomic teaching of the Hellene, the poet Lucretius discovered a spirit which is free to experience natural religiosity. It is worth commenting here that Walter F. Otto (Das Wort der Antike, 1962, pp. 293 et seq.) also regarded both Epicurus and Lucretius as poets of a religious mind.

In Faust’s monologue in the scene “Wald und Höhle” (Faust, I, Verse 3217, et seq.) Goethe has linked both with each other: the study of the Object Nature, in the sense of Lucretius the thinker is linked in antithesis with a sensitive and discerning consciousness as Subject namely — the “secret, deep miracles in one’s own breast” (Verse 3232 et seq.) — giving rise to a power of reflection without which a true understanding of magnificent Nature cannot be grasped. With Goethe, it is not possible, as with Lucretius, to separate the poet from the thinker. But Goethe, like his friend Knebel, was enthused by the latter’s natural religiosity which he expressed in his Poetry and Truth (Second part, sixth book, Goethe’s Complete Works, Cotta’s Jubilee edition, Vol. XXIII, p. 10): “God can be worshipped in no more beautiful way than by the spontaneous welling-up from one’s breast of mutual converse with Nature”.

Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) has described this hen kai pan recently in more appropriate language in his poem Hertha. Thus a metaphysical need as Schopenhauer called it, has again and again called forth poems and semi-philosophical ideal poems (F. A. Lange) of the All-One. Western thinkers, for example Schelling, have however, attempted to convey the teaching of Universal Oneness more convincingly through the medium of an unfortunate philosophy of identity and more recently through an even less convincing form of Monism. In his Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801) Schelling wished to prove that the perceptive consciousness and its object, Nature, were one. Time conditioned poetical moods are possible from a oneness outwards, but not judgment of thoughts which are timelessly valid. Any thinker, who wishes to prove in a comprehensible manner that material and spirit or body and soul, or thinking and Being, or subject and object, are One and the same, or identical, overlooks the fact that such terms as material or power or spirit or Being already correspond to the judgments of a discerning subject, which faces an object — Rückert’s “object of knowledge”, even if this object is one’s own body or the personal spiritual stimulation of the thinker.

How can the One or the Universal or the All-One, which according to their nature are indissolubly one, be split into two, namely into a perceiving subject and an object of perception? How can they so be arranged that they become released from themselves in such a way that, thinking themselves in opposition to each other, they understand each other and name themselves accordingly? Nevertheless poets and enthusiastic poetic thinkers of the Indo-European peoples have again and again been compelled to express by unnatural imagery, what cannot be imparted in comprehensible language as a generally valid judgment. In this light we must examine the different kinds of Pantheism and Mysticism, as also Goethe’s “God-nature”, an Indo-European exposition of Spinoza’s Deus sive natura, which resulted from Spinoza incorporating Indo-European ideas from the Stoics and the Pantheist Giordano Bruno.

Any thinker who wishes to equate God, the world and human spiritual life as one, such as is attempted by some poets at inspired moments, will in the Indo-European domain be confronted by destiny — as has been shown above, an all too difficult object of perception to be redeemed in a becalming or inspiring Universal-Oneness.

How was it possible, that belief in a God and Gods among the Indo-European peoples became transmitted, first with the Indians, then with the other peoples, and finally also with the Islamised and Christianised peoples, into Pantheism and Mysticism?

Hildebrecht Hommel39 has shown that the figure of a heavenly father originally common to all Indo-Europeans — known by the Indians as Djaus pitar, by the Hellenes as Zeus Pater, and by the Romans as Jupiter (from Diupater) — was elevated above the other Gods at an early point in time and recognised as a god of the Universe by the Teutons, as the Icelander Snorri proves — the “All Father” (in Old Nordic: alfadir), which Indo-European mysticism later discovered in the soul of the religious man. In upper Bavaria and in Tyrol the description Heavenly Father has been preserved amongst the farmers and transferred to the Christian God — an orderer and protector of a universe without beginning and end, and hence, as the Hellenes said, a “Father of Gods and Men”, in the Christian God, the creator of a universe with a beginning in time. The transition from the father of the heavens, a term which possibly belongs to the Bronze Age, to an inner worldly and spiritual God, was gradually accomplished by the Indo-Europeans towards the end of their early period, which was full of Sagas of the Gods. In India this transition took place from the ninth century B.C. onwards in the Upanishads, in which the world was not seen as the creation of a God: the universe was a timeless essence, the brahman, which dwells in all things and all souls. Paul Deussen (Vedanta und Platonismus im Lichte der Kantischen Philosophie, Comenius-Schriften zur Geistesgeschichte, Zweites Heft, 1922, pp. 19-20) — has shown that, even in the most recent songs of the Rig Veda, the existence of the traditional Indo-Aryan world of the Gods is doubted, and that even here — as later in Hellas — philosophic thought forced its way through as a premonition or certainty of the unity of all existence. In the Rig Veda (I, 164) it is said: “What is the One, poets call manifold” (K. F. Geldner: Der Rig-Veda aus dem Sanskrit ins Deutsche Übersetzt, Erster Teil, 1951, p. 236). The simple men of remote agricultural communities did not participate readily in this transition from the manifold Gods of the universe to a sole God. The isolated Italic farmers still worshipped and celebrated their native Gods in festivals, the dii indigentes of the early Roman period, when in the capital, Rome, after the Olympic Gods of the Hellenes had been equated to the ancient Roman divinities (numina), an inner-worldly deity had already been anticipated and conceived by thinking men. The general Indo-European transition from the Gods of the Sagas to Pantheism and Mysticism, which took place amongst those who by choice or by force were converted to Christianity or Islam, despite the resistance of true believers, can be briefly portrayed as follows.

After their early period and in the middle age of their development — on the way “from myth to Logos” (W. Nestle) — the Bronze Age idea of the Gods and God gradually grew dim among logical and resolutely thinking men in the Indo-European peoples, whose hereditary dispositions directed them towards reason. This school of free thought recognised that it was childish to imagine that the Gods lived somewhere out in space, reaching down into the human world, and these ideas necessarily carried less and less conviction to thinking men, when they became convinced that the gods too were governed by destiny. Thus there gradually evolved the idea of an inner-worldly and inner-spiritual deity (Pantheism) and of a God working within us (Mysticism) — the dominans ille in nobis deus, as Marcus Tullius Cicero (Tusculanae disputationes, I, 74) called this divinity. Thus Pantheism was joined by rational mysticism, perception and inner experience, which postulates that the individual immersing himself in himself experiences self-comprehension in its ultimate form as the universal soul, and concludes that the atman, or individual soul, is, in the final analysis, a part of brahman, as the Indians described such mysticism.

The pantheistic width of vision and mystical inner contemplation of the Indo-Europeans were interchangeable — if not in comprehensible thought, at least in poetical moods. The power pervading the universe and the power felt by the soul as it sank into the universal soul could be felt to flow together in one. In the first years of his stay at Weimar, Goethe happily agreed with a sentence which he found in Cicero’s de Divinatione (I, 49): everything is filled by divine spirit and hence the souls of men are moved by communion with the divine souls (cumque omnia completa et referta sint aeterno sensu et mente divina, necesse est contagione divinorum animorum animos humanos commoveri). This again is the premonition of a deity which expresses the divine in the universe as the basis of the soul.

The fearless thinkers among the Teutons, above all among the North Teutons, to whom the world of the Gods of the Aesir and Vanir had become a childish idea, must have recognised long before the penetration of Christianity the existence of an inner-worldly and inner-spiritual deity, a brahman, or a theion, as the Hellenes called it, a daimonion, such as Socrates felt working within himself. It is a striking fact, to which too little attention has been paid hitherto, that the word “God” was neuter in gender in the Teutonic languages (Das Gott, or, in Old Nordic: gud) and that it was only after the false interpretation by Christian converters that the word acquired male gender. Thus thinking Indians no longer spoke of Gods even at an early period, but of a deity governing the world (dewata), which was also called the brahman. This is the deus in nobis of Hellenic and Roman poets and thinkers.

When Christian missionaries asked the north Teutons who or what they believed in, they received the reply which centuries previously the south Teutons — who had believed in Das Gott (neuter) — might also have given, that they believed in their power (matt) or strength (magin), a power working within them, a deity filling the religious man, an inner-worldly and inner-spiritual deity. Such an answer must have seemed to the missionaries, as it would to many present day commentators, a mere boast of power or an idolatrous presumption, while in fact it must be understood as a factual “The God” (Das Gott) corresponding to the dominans ille in nobis deus. But it is easy to understand that the missionaries, who in Christianity had accepted the extra-mundane, transcendent ideas of a “personal” God, from the Semitic peoples, were at a loss when confronted by faith in a destiny ruling within men.

The pagan north Germans, who still believed that the divine was present in all “men of high mind”, were called Godless (gudlauss or gudlausir menn) by their converted countrymen, who were spiritually more simple, and therefore could not understand inner spiritual power or strength.

The men with more insight among the Hellenes would have understood the neuter God — Das Gott — of the Teutons, for it corresponded to their own to theion. Thinking Hellenes had already long replaced the plurality of the Gods by the single deity and later by the single figure called The Mighty (to Kreitton). The orator Dion of Prusa, known as Chrysostom (40-120), and the philosopher Plotinus (204-270), would not have misunderstood the Icelanders: Might and Power as descriptions of the deity were familiar to them. Dion of Prusa (XXXI, 11) says of the deeply prudent men of his time: “They simply combine all Gods together in one might (ischys) and power (dynamis)” and Plotinus expresses this in the Enneads (I, 6, 8) in the same way as Goethe, who read this passage in the year 1805:

Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
wie könnt’ uns Göttliches entzücken?


If the Gods own power did not lie within us,
how could the divine enrapture us?
(Zahme Xenien, III, 725, 26)

The might or power of which the Indo-Europeans had a presentiment, this unity of the deity was split up by thinkers in the realm of human experience into the trinity of “The Good, the True and the Beautiful”, but in such a way that these ideas or words remained close neighbours in Hellas. Here and there with the later Hellenic-Roman thinkers the true could easily be understood as the good and the beautiful, aletheia could signify both intellectual truth as well as moral truth, and in the kalok’agathia the ideal of sifting and selection, of eugeneia or human disciplined, choice bodily beauty and moral fitness, and virtue (arete) became linked with one another. Since Plato’s Banquet, Indo-European thinkers have recognised truth, beauty and virtue as life values which pointed beyond the realm of experience to the divine, to the brahman, or the concept of Das Gott (neuter) — to a deity which through truth rendered the thinking man capable of knowledge.

The reappearance of Indo-European religious attitudes, also explains why Christian theologians as well as thinkers and poets of the Christianised West again and again revolted against the concepts of an other-worldly, personal God — of a God who had created the world from nothing and had populated it with creatures according to his design. The French mystic and scholar, Amalric of Bena, who died in Paris about 1206, was even cursed after his death by the Church because he rationally rejected the teachings of God as a creator, and because he had asserted that such a God must be responsible for the sorrow of all living creatures and for the vices of man, since he had created them all. Amalric, the Pantheistic mystic, knew as a result of his Indo-European disposition, that the justification (Theodicy) by the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-merciful God, of the evils of his creation, was impossible.

The outlook of Amalric of Bena, however, had already been expressed in north India after it had been penetrated by Indo-European migrants in the pre-Christian centuries and especially by Samkhya teaching, by Jains and Buddhists, who guarded themselves against non-Indo-European theistic religions infiltrating from Southern India: God the creator must be reproached with having either created or permitted the existence of liars, thieves and murderers.

The Indo-European concept of destiny relieved the Gods from responsibility for the evil of earthly life, and Epicurus, who himself no longer believed in Gods (cf. Eduard Schwartz: Charakterköpfe aus der Antike, 1943, p. 147; Epicurus: Philosophie der Freude, translated by Johannes Mewaldt, 1956), advised his contemporaries who did, to imagine them as creatures, who lived a blessed untroubled life amongst the stars without bothering about men, neither using nor harming them. Such an idea had already appeared in the Iliad (XXIV, 525) centuries before Epicurus. There Achilles attempts to console Priamos bowed down by sorrow, with the words:

Thus have the Gods determined it for the wretched men,
To live sorrowfully, but they themselves are struck by no sorrow.

Shakespeare (King Lear, IV, 1) puts the same embittered thoughts on Gloucester’s lips:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods —
They kill us for their sport.

This idea was adopted by Hölderlin in Hyperion’s Song of Destiny and by Tennyson in his poem The Lotus Eaters. Kant, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Part II, p. 85), defended the Hellenes and Romans in these words: “One cannot count it so highly to their blame, if they conceived their Gods . . . as limited, for when they studied the artifices and course of Nature, they encountered the good and evil, the purposeful and pointless in it . . . and only with the greatest difficulty could they have formed a different judgment of its cause”.

Theodicies were not necessary for the Indo-Europeans, because over the Gods stood merciless destiny. (Virgil: inexorabile fatum). Within Christianity however, Pantheism and Mysticism again and again sought to set themselves against the church’s teachings of an all-powerful, all-knowing, predestined and yet all-good creator. The church answered with condemnation and burning; examples are numerous: Origen, Scotus Eriugena, Hugo of St. Victor, Amalric of Bena, David of Dinant, Meister Eckhart, Nikolaus von Kues, Sebastian Frank, Miguel Serveto (Servetus), Vanini, Valentin Weigel, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius, Fénélon, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Shelley, Tegnér, Kuno Fischer and others.

Thus the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans, which appears whenever their nature can unfold itself freely, emerges only in that form which religious science has described as nature religions. Here however, it may be said, that Indo-European religiosity in the West has also been repeatedly misinterpreted and misunderstood, for the outlook is widespread that the more the faith, all the greater the religiosity, which is to be found where men feel drawn to “supernatural” values. In a far more inward sense than the description nature religion commonly implies, the belief and religiosity of the Indo-Europeans represent the natural, balanced conduct of the worshipping mind, and the heroic power of thought as it is found in the honest Nordic man. Powerful spontaneous thought and ordered worship of the deity here strengthen and deepen one another. The more richly a man cultivates these facilities the more perfect in his humanness, the more truly religious does he become at the same time.

No pressing forward to God is possible in this attitude of mind and spirit, no rigid belief, no pretence of a duty to believe, no anxiety to please the deity; freedom and dignity and the composure of the noble spirited, even under deep stress, are characteristic of the purest religiosity. Indeed, one can almost say that Indo-European religiosity and morality (in contrast to the commands and penalties of a God who promises reward and punishment) emanates from the dignity of man, the dignity of humanitas — from a dignitas which is characteristic of the great-minded and well-born. According to Cicero, a great and strong-minded person (fortis animus et magnus) wishes to carry himself with honour (honestumde officiis, I, 72-73, 94-95, 101, 106, 130; III, 23-24) because in such conduct reason controls desire. Thus the Roman concept of humanitas as interpreted above, presupposes “the centuries long breeding of an aristocratic type of man” (Franz Beckmann: Humanitas, Ursprung und Idee, 1952, p. 7). Hence Hellenic-Roman humanitas cannot become a morality for everyone; in Hellas it was the morality of the eleutheroi, in Rome that of the ingenui, or of the free-born, and it could not be transferred to the freedmen (liberti). In the Middle Ages the church used the word humanitas to describe human lowliness (humilitas) when faced by the extra-mundial, other worldly God. It was not until the advent of the scholars of the Renaissance in Florence, around 1400 A.D., that humanitas was again understood to mean human dignity, and conceived of as a duty which it was incumbent on man to observe.

When today praise is lavished on so-called works of art, it is almost tragic to recall that Friedrich Schiller demanded this very humanitas and dignitas above all from artists; just as Marcus Tullius Cicero did of the Italici:

The dignity of man is given into your hands.
Preserve it!
It falls with you, it will rise with you.

As far as the mature religiosity of the Indo-Europeans is concerned, their morality does not, like the morality of the Bible, spring from a commandment of God, from a “Thou shalt not!” (Leviticus, xix. 18; Matthew, v. 43; Luke, vi. 27). Indo-European morality springs from the positive dignity of the high-minded man, to whom humanity or human love, which may best be described as good-will, comes as second nature — maitri in Sanskrit, or metta in Pali, or eumeneia, philanthropia or sympatheia in Greek, or benevolentia or comitas in Latin. Biblical morality is of alien law (heteronom). Indo-European morality is of its own law (autonom). Compared with the biblical admonition to love thy neighbour (agape), which originally only applied to the fellow members of the tribe, the concept of good-will is perhaps more valid, since love cannot be commanded.

Burkhard Wilhelm Leist (Alt-arisches Jus gentium, 1889, p. 173; Alt-arisches Jus civile, 1892-96, pp. 228, 241, 381-82; 1892, Vol. I, p. 211) has proved that such humanity and good will already existed in the oldest legal records of the Indo-Europeans, that Indo-European human dignity had demanded that in man one should always see one’s fellow and meet him with aequitas, or good will (maitri, metta), one of the highest values of ancient India, and above all of Buddhist morality. According to the Odyssey (VI, 207; VII, 165; IX, 270) Zeus himself guides the worthy man who implores him for help and avenges strangers who are cast out and those in need of protection: Zeus xenios, who looks after strangers and all those in want, corresponds to the dii hospitales of the Romans. The Edda advises in the Teachings to Loddfafnir (21, 23):

Never show
Scorn and mockery
To the stranger and traveller!
Never scold the stranger,
Never drive him away from the gate!
Be helpful to the hungering!
(Edda, Vol. II, 1920, translated from the German of Felix Genzmer, pp. 137-138.)

However, to the Teutons, who according to Tacitus (Germania, XXI) were the most hospitable of all peoples, “moral demands were not divine commands”, for them a good deed had no reward, an evil deed expected no punishment by the deity (Hans Kuhn: Sitte und Sittlichkeit, in Germanische Altertumskunde, edited by Hermann Schneider, 1938, p. 177). Man’s attempt to wheedle himself into favour with the Gods by offering sacrifices is censured by the Edda (Havamal, 145):

Better not to have implored for anything,
than to have sacrificed too much;
the gift looks for reward.

The morality of human dignity is not inspired on account of the prospect of a reward in heaven, but for its own sake: nihil praeter id quod honestum sit propter se esse expetendum. This was how Cicero understood the Roman religiosity and morality (de officiis, I, 72-75, 94-95, 106, 130; III, 23-24, 33; Tusculanae disputationes, V, 1), which both originate from ancient Italic and hence Indo-European nature. Such aims as the Hellenic kalok’agathia (beauty and fitness), and that of the Roman humanitashumanitas being understood in the era of the Roman aristocratic republic as a duty or ideal of full manhood, of human wholeness, or of Noble nature40 — such goals of heroic perfection are therefore particularly expressive of Indo-European religiosity which offers the worship of a resolute, heroic heart.

It can be shown, and could be proved in detail, that in Europe and North America, the noblest men and women, even those who admitted to accepting a church belief handed down to them, behaved and spoke in the decisive hours of their lives according to the religious disposition, actions and morality of the Indo-European.

Indo-European spiritual history had commenced at the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium with outstanding works like the Vedas (cf. K. F. Geldner: Vedismus und Brahmanismus, Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, Vol. IX, 1928) and the Upanishads, which Schopenhauer (Parerga und Paralipomena, Chapter XVI) called not only the “consolation of his life”, but also the “consolation of his death”. The Indo-Europeans entered the stage of world history with Kurash (Cyrus) II, the Persian king of the Hakamanish family of the Achaemenides, who ruled from 559 to 529 B.C., and founded the great Persian kingdom which extended from India to Egypt (cf. Albert T. Olmstead: A History of the Persian Empire, 1948, pp. 34 et seq.). The Hellenic historian Xenophon wrote about Kurash the Great in his Kyrupaideia. The Persians under the Achaemenides, with the Hellenes, “brothers and sisters of the same blood” (Aeschylus: The Persians, Verse 185), are described by Bundahishn (XIV), a Persian saga book of the ninth century (G. Widengren: Iranische Geisteswelt, 1961, p. 75) as “fair and radiant eyed”. According to Herodotus (I, 136) they taught their sons “to ride, to shoot with the bow and to speak the truth”. The religion of Mazdaism regarded lies and deceit (German: Trug, Persian: drug) as a basic evil, truth as a basic virtue.

Since the advent of the twentieth century the Indo-Europeans have begun to withdraw from the spiritual history of the world. Particularly today, what is described as most “progressive” in music, the plastic arts and literature of the “Free West” is already no longer Indo-European in spirit.

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