that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circumvent this certainty — which for it constitutes an imminent danger of self-destruction — and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[1] Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[2] The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[3] the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the theatre of a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking-consciousness itself, a contest of the two forces of the Ego — namely, will and reason,[4] and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding — are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has to wage this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the
- ↑ "He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian Classical, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner and tribune. This is the starting-point from which he must be understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own real mind, the synthesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could not possibly have been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to deal with different tasks" (E. Troeltsch, Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter, 1915, p. 7). His power, like Tertullian's, rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into Latin, but thought in this language, the sacred language of the Western Church; it was precisely this that excluded both from the field of Aramæan thought. Cf. p. 224 above.
- ↑ "Inspiratio bona voluntatis" (De corr. et grat., 3). His "good will" and "ill will" are, quite dualistically, a pair of opposite substances. For Pelagius, on the contrary, will is an activity without moral quality as such; only that which is willed has the property of being good or evil, and the Grace of God consists in the "possibilitas utriusque partis," the freedom to will this or that. Gregory I transmuted Augustinian doctrines into Faustian when he taught that God rejected individuals because he foreknew their evil will.
- ↑ All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in Spinoza, hard as he tried to replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimonides) by the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for him not an ego, but only a mode of the one divine attribute, the "cogitatio" — which is just the Pneuma. He protests against notions like "God's Will." His God is pure substance and in lieu of the dynamic causality of the Faustian universe he discovers simply the logic of the divine cogitatio. All this is already in Porphyry, in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and Goethe it is as alien as anything can possibly be. (Allgem. Gesch. d. Philos. in Kultur der Gegenwart, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.)
- ↑ Here, therefore, "good" is an evaluation and not a substance.
