Abstract
The sentiments that both Ostwald and d’Alveydre express in the epigraph reveal the passion for social reform that permeated cosmopolitan religious thought, but their predictive assessments also illustrate unambiguously the more extensive political and national ramifications that they envisioned. These iconoclasts sought to revise European society and its political institutions, or as Ostwald expressed, its “State Organization” (his emphasis), and re-devise their nations. Their manifestos demonstrate the intricate bond between cosmopolitan spiritual aims and their visions for social and political renewal—prerogatives that these spiritual pioneers articulated in each domestic domain across the transnational field of cosmopolitan religion, which were intricately yoked to national dictums. Moreover, both the development of new and revised schemes of state organization as Ostwald described, and d’Alveydre’s concept of “national synarchy” assumed, plotted to embolden the German and French nations, respectively. They believed that only through the affirmation of their cosmopolitan spiritual precepts could the revitalization of social, political, and economic paradigms occur, a process, however, whose successful execution depended on national authority and guidance. To make this case, they turned to cosmopolitan spiritual historiography, an analytical framework through which these spiritual trailblazers traced the history of civilizations in a way that mapped the affirmation of each of their nation’s distinctive historical unity and progress. They charted a merit-based national path that culminated in each nation’s superior status on the world stage. Elite spiritual pundits articulated historical progressions that traced the trajectory of their national prerogatives and destiny, which peaked, they claimed, at the apex of the world’s greater civilizations. Yet such domestic designs and jingoistic templates for social and political renewal awkwardly belied the cosmopolitan religious vision of inclusive universal spirituality that they all evangelized—a contradiction that nevertheless seemed to pose few rankles among the era’s cosmopolitan spiritual thinkers. With this in mind, the political and nationalist formulations of cosmopolitan religious movements will be the focus of Spiritual Empires’ final two chapters. A closer look at such dissonance that all of these fractions seemed to easily abide will bring to bear the conflict and discord that the amalgamation of politics and religion so often engenders.
Only a permeation of monist thought can enable our governments and state leaders to act to preserve the state. Only this thought develops in them the higher capability of State development, State Organization that is singly the fitting form of existence for contemporary cultural humanity.
Wilhelm Ostwald, Monistische Sonntagspredigten (Wilhelm Ostwald, Monistische Sonntagspredigten, vol, 3, 136) (emphasis in original)
European synarchy will have, as a result, everywhere, in each country, national synarchy.
Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission des Souverains (Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission des Souverains. Par l’un d’eux. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 1884)
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Notes
- 1.
On the European Enlightenment, a great place to start remains Peter Gay’s classic study, The Enlightenment . 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966; 1969). Also relevant to this discussion is Rogers Brubaker’s book, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 2.
A wealth of scholarly literature exists on Germany’s Second Reich. One might start with David Blackbourn, History of Germany , 1780–1918, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); and Das Kaiserreich Transnational. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914, Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).
- 3.
On German imperialism and colonialism, see Imperialismus und Kolonialmission: Kaiserliches Deutschland und Koloniales Imperium, ed. Klaus Bade (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982); Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (München: C. H. Beck, 2008), among many other works.
- 4.
John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11. A rich secondary literature has emerged on this topic. In addition to Williams important book, see Kai Buchholz, ed., Die Lebensreform : Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Häusser, 2001); and Thorsten Carstensen and Marcel Schmid, eds., Die Literatur der Lebensreform: Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016).
- 5.
Ibid., 223.
- 6.
Ibid., 234.
- 7.
Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5.
- 8.
Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier, kulturell, wirthschaftlich und politisch betrachtet (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen & Co., 1898), 2. For background, see Sheldon Pollock’s important essay, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); and the older but still useful Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance .
- 9.
Notably, the reference to Aryanism frequently became part and parcel to the radical nationalist reform movements during the era. As has been well-documented, such racially based worldviews became easily co-opted by some of Germany’s sociocultural innovators to construct radical theories of racial superiority linked with German heritage. One of those, for instance, was Willibald Hentschel (1858–1947), a former student of Ernst Haeckel. Hentschel harangued apocalyptically in his shorter utopic text, Mittgart : Ein Weg zur Erneuerung der germanischen Rasse (Leipzig: Hammer Verlag, 1906), as the title suggests, for the conservation and rejuvenation of Germany through the German race as “breeding-product” (Züchtungs-produkt), 14. The extent to which Darwinian thought and Romantic biology, as Richards in his Romantic Conception of Life termed it, could be co-opted as a vehicle to formulate Aryan visions is horrifically apparent in Hentschel’s thought. For further elaboration, see Hentschel’s Varuna: eine Welt- und Geschichts-betrachtung vom Standpunkt des Ariers (Leipzig: T. Fritsch, 1901). For additional insight on this topic, one might begin with the older, but still important, George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology . Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964). The important work of Richard Weikart, especially From Darwin to Hitler : Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2004), should also be included in any review. Most importantly in the German context, see the previously referenced work by Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters. On the emergence of the Aryan myth in Europe, see Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols : Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, trans. Sonia Wichmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); also important is Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India ; also, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth , especially 64–66. My appreciation should be expressed to the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to better contextualize these linkages during the era, though a detailed examination of these movements extends beyond the comparative focus of my work in Spiritual Empires.
- 10.
Joseph Ennemoser, Geschichte der Magie (1819; Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844), cited in Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 273.
- 11.
Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier, 11. On the importance of Greek tradition in Germany, see Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus : Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany : A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).
- 12.
Hübbe-Schleiden, Indien und die Indier, 11.
- 13.
Ibid., 2–3.
- 14.
Ibid., 7.
- 15.
This assertion is supported by Bruce Lincoln’s work. In Theorizing Myth , Lincoln elaborates: “I am inclined to argue that when a taxonomy is encoded in mythic form, the narrative packages a specific, contingent system of discrimination in a particularly attractive and memorable form. What is more, it naturalizes and legitimates it. Myth, then, is not just taxonomy, but ideology in narrative form,” 147.
- 16.
For a detailed description of how Goethe developed his morphology, particularly in its relevance to Darwinian evolutionary science, see the aforementioned Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, chapter 11, “Goethe’s Scientific Revolution.”
- 17.
Hübbe-Schleiden, Being as Lust, Suffering and Love, 90.
- 18.
Rudolf Steiner, “Vierter Vortrag,” in Die Apokalypse des Johannes, Ein Zyklus von zwölf Vorträgen, Nürnberg, 17.-30. Juni, 1908 (Rudolf Steiner Online Archive, 4. Auflage, 2010), 65. http://anthroposophie.byu.edu/vortraege/104.pdf. (Accessed on March 10, 2021).
- 19.
Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions (February, 2008): 21.
- 20.
The term “Jewel in the Crown” was coined by the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1874–1881).
- 21.
Ernst Haeckel, Indische Reisebriefe, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel), 414. Haeckel’s travelogue has been translated into English as A Visit to India. For more background, see my article “Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe,” in Seminar 44:2 (May 2008): 190–209.
- 22.
Ostwald, Grosse Männer, 330 (emphasis in original).
- 23.
Ibid., 330 (emphasis in original). The lecture was titled “Allgemeine Orientierung.” In this short exposé Ostwald assumes racial distinctions as the basis of these national comparisons without specifying any explicitly racial characteristics as Jinarajadasa did. Ostwald, it seems, just assumed these racial characteristics to be self-evident.
- 24.
Ibid., 330.
- 25.
Ibid., 337 (emphasis in original).
- 26.
For a thorough discussion of the importance of the sciences in Germany, see Thomas Nipperdey’s chapter, “Die Wissenschaften,” in Deutsche Geschichte , 602–691; also Fritz Ringer’s book, The Decline of the German Mandarins.
- 27.
Ibid., 135.
- 28.
Ostwald, monistische Sonntagspredigten, 3, 136. For more background, see my article, “An Elite Class of Thinkers: Monism Between Science and the Occult in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies, eds. Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (New York: Camden House, 2015), 42–64.
- 29.
Ibid., 135.
- 30.
Metaphysische Rundschau was founded in 1894 and was renamed the Neue Metaphysische Rundschau in 1897 but continued publication under Zillmann’s editorship.
- 31.
Neue Metaphysische Rundschau, XXI (1914): 164 (emphasis in original). Zillmann’s entire quote is printed in enlarged font, which frequently served as the equivalent to italics in that era’s publications.
- 32.
Papus, Anarchie, Indolence et Synarchie, 11.
- 33.
Ibid., 14.
- 34.
Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. La France vraie (Mission des Français) (Paris; Calmann-Lévy, 1887), 338.
- 35.
Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, 37.
- 36.
Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Mission des Souverains. Par l’un d’eux. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1884), 418–19.
- 37.
Laurant, L’Ésotérisme Chrétien en France, 134–35.
- 38.
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 244.
- 39.
For an insightful overview of the development of nationalism in France from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, see Jean-Jacques Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La France, La Nation, La Guerre: 1850–1920 (Paris: Armand-Colin, 2012).
- 40.
D’Alveydre, Mission des Souverains, 423.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
D’Alveydre, La France Vraie, 151.
- 43.
Ibid., 525–26.
- 44.
Ibid., 526.
- 45.
Édouard Schuré. Grands Initiés, 464.
- 46.
Ibid., 473–74.
- 47.
Many of these thinkers referred to Caesarism. Though they frequently did not provide a definition or explanation, it is safe to assume that they meant one of two things, or both: the submission of the Church to political power, and/or the dominance of power in a single and powerful leader.
- 48.
Ibid., 464.
- 49.
Ibid., 11. For background on the Aryan debate, see Thomas Trautmann, ed. The Aryan Debate: Debates in Indian History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); also see Trautmann’s Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
- 50.
Barlet, LÉvolution Sociale, 12.
- 51.
Ibid., 13 (emphasis in original).
- 52.
Barlet and other cosmopolitan thinkers understood the term “Verbe” in its more religious sense, as Logos, as we have frequently seen in other examples. For theses thinkers, the Logos manifested the speech of the divine.
- 53.
Barlet, LÉvolution Sociale, 13 (emphasis in original).
- 54.
Barlet, L’Évolution Sociale, 126–27.
- 55.
The letter was signed “Faucheux,” which was Barlet’s legal name. Cited in Laurant, L’Ésotérisme Chrétien en France, 137.
- 56.
Barlet, L’Évolution Sociale, 24.
- 57.
Ibid., 137.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
While the Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia are far beyond the scope of my work, for those with interest, one could consult the numerous works by Derek Croxton on the topic.
- 60.
Barlet, L’Évolution Sociale, 141.
- 61.
Ibid., 188. Barlet attributes a long list of devastating European conflicts to the behest of German history: the repression of Ireland and Scotland by the British; England’s maritime war against the Dutch; the installation of Scandinavian power in the North; war in Holland; the wars of succession in England and Spain; the war of Charles XII and Peter the Great. A disastrous list indeed with which Barlet burdened the German Reformation.
- 62.
For a nuanced explication of the emergence of French nationalism and in particular the consolidating factors related to revenge against Germany, among other important factors, see the two successive chapters, “Identité Nationale, Revanche et Nationalisme de 1871 à la fin du Siècle” and “Nouveau Nationalisme et Internationalisme,” in Becker and Audoin-Rouzeau, La France , la Nation, la Guerre, 125–236.
- 63.
This perspective was not new, but played an important role in the pre-1848 fusion of socialism and religion in France. See Strube’s “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism” for the development of “Romantic Socialism” among Saint-Simonians, 366; also how this influenced the thought of Eliphas Lévi, 371–73.
- 64.
L’Évolution Sociale, 12 (emphasis in original). In his posthumously published work in 1916, Cours de Linguistique Générale, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the langue that humans employ, such as to speak French, versus langage, which, he argued, depicts the way or means in which humans communicate their thoughts. Thus, in Barlet’s usage, national langage embodies an organic, or more specifically, an ethnic element.
- 65.
Barlet, L’Évolution Sociale, 187.
- 66.
Ibid., 188.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Ibid., 192.
- 69.
Ibid., 189–90.
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Myers, P. (2021). Cosmopolitan Spirituality: National Merit in Germany and France. In: Spiritual Empires in Europe and India. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81003-0_8
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