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Chamberlain, Houston Stewart

(Chamberlain), (1855–1927), English writer, sociologist, philosopher, forerunner of Nazi ideology. Born September 9, 1855 in Southsea, Hampshire, England, the son of a British admiral. He studied natural sciences in Geneva, aesthetics and philosophy in Dresden. Became an ardent admirer of Richard Wagner. Having married the composer's daughter, Eva Wagner, Chamberlain settled in Bayreuth in 1908, becoming a much greater fanatic of everything German than the Germans themselves. During World War I, he published numerous anti-British articles in the German press, earning him the nickname “English Changeling” in his homeland. Chamberlain's ideological concepts were later continued in Hitler's theories as outlined in Mein Kampf. Chamberlain died on January 9, 1927.

Chamberlain's main work, which brought him scandalous fame, "The Foundations of the 19th Century" ("Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts") was published in Munich in 1899. Chamberlain's rationalist interpretation of European history was explained by the author's negative attitude towards Christianity in general, aristocratic contempt for the masses and overly romanticized the perception of the Germans as a nation destined to rule the world. Setting himself the task of revealing the foundations on which the 19th century rested, Chamberlain wrote that European culture was the result of the fusion of five components: the art, literature and philosophy of Ancient Greece; legal system and form of government of Ancient Rome; Christianity in its Protestant version; the resurgent creative Teutonic spirit; and the repulsive and destructive influence of Jews and Judaism in general.

In the 1st volume of his book, Chamberlain examines events before 1200, the legacy of the ancient world. With Hellenism came an unprecedented flowering of human intelligence, writes Chamberlain. - The Greeks created everywhere - in language, religion, politics, philosophy, science, history, geography. The pinnacle of this creative spirit was Homer. But the Hellenic legacy also had dark sides: cruel, short-sighted democracies, the absence of high politics, outdated morality and the decline of religion. The world is indebted to the Romans, who delivered it from Semitic-Arab enslavement and allowed “Indo-Teutonic Europe to become the beating heart and thinking brain of all mankind.” Greece, unlike Rome, according to Chamberlain, gravitated towards Asia. But many were confused and puzzled by the fact that despite a two-thousand-year legacy, Rome was unable to resist decay across its vast territory. “The experience of the energetic Indo-European race was revised and brilliantly used by mixed West Asian nations, which again led to the destruction of the unity of its characteristic features.”

Chamberlain then turned to the heirs of antiquity. He immediately had to face, he wrote, the study of racial problems. He spoke of the need to show courage and foresight in order to safely slip “between the Scylla of science of the almost inaccessible and the Charybdis of changeable and unfounded generalizations.” Rome shifted the center of gravity of civilization towards the West, unknowingly completing an act of global significance. But Rome left behind an incredible mixture of different types and races. Among this chaos of peoples (Voelkerchaos) were the Jews - the only race that managed to preserve the purity of their blood. History chose the Aryans as the force opposing the tiny but influential Jewish nation. “At the present time, these two forces, Jews and Aryans, no matter how the recent chaos has clouded their future, remain against each other, albeit no longer as enemies or friends, but still as eternal opponents.” “Nothing is more convincing,” Chamberlain wrote, “than the self-consciousness of a nation. A person belonging to a certain pure race will never lose this feeling. Race lifts a person above itself, endows him with extraordinary, almost supernatural energy, distinguishes him as an individual from a chaotic mixture peoples gathered from all over the world. The thick blood flowing invisibly in the veins will bring a rapid flourishing of life, will bring the future." The main secret of the story is that the purebred race becomes sacred. The rootless and non-national chaos of the last days of the Roman Empire became a disastrous, almost fatal circumstance, and it was the Aryans who had to correct this disastrous situation.

In Volume 2, Chamberlain analyzes the rebirth of the new German world and the struggle of the greatest forces for world domination. In this struggle, according to Chamberlain, three religious ideals are involved, striving to dominate: the East (Hellenes), the North (Aryans) and Rome. In the north of the former Roman Empire, the Aryans managed to create a new culture, which "is undoubtedly the greatest of all that has been achieved by mankind to date." Everything that is not Aryan is alien elements that need to be eliminated. The Jews became the heirs of Roman racial chaos; the Aryan race was responsible for the spiritual salvation of humanity. All achievements of science, industry, political economy and art were stimulated and advanced by the Aryans. Thus, the 19th century rested on a strong Aryan foundation.

Two main themes run through Chamberlain's entire book: the Aryans as the creators and bearers of civilization, and the Jews as a negative racial force, a destructive and degenerating factor in history. Idealizing purebred Aryans, Chamberlain viewed them as the only support for world development. The healthy and courageous children of nature, the Aryans, who conquered the dying Roman Empire, revived Western civilization and introduced into it a previously unknown idea of ​​freedom.

As a contrast to the creative genius of the Aryans, Chamberlain put forward the crude civilization of the Jews, who, in his opinion, were aliens who threatened to occupy a disproportionately significant place in German life in the 19th century. The Jews deserved to be sentenced, but not from the standpoint of base hatred or suspicion, but from the standpoint of the unattainable heights of Aryan superiority. Almost all outstanding and truly free people, Chamberlain wrote, from Tiberius to Bismarck, considered the presence of Jews in their midst as a social and political danger. Chamberlain calls the birth of Christ the most important date in human history. “Neither wars, nor changes of dynasties, nor natural disasters, nor discoveries have even a fraction of the significance that could be compared with the short earthly life of the Galilean.” But it should be obvious to everyone, he wrote, that Christ was not a Jew, there was not a drop of Jewish blood in him, and those who called him a Jew were simply ignorant or hypocritical people.

Chamberlain's Principles became extremely popular in Germany after Emperor William II called his work a monograph of the greatest importance. Critics enthusiastically praised the book for its brilliant, supreme eloquence, enormous erudition and extraordinary insight of the author. In England, this book was subjected to fierce attacks: it was either ridiculed or reviled with harsh abuse. Chamberlain was called "a street preacher, sometimes dressed in the toga of a Roman orator, sometimes in the cassock of a Christian priest." They said about his work that it was “the hangover belch of a drunken shoemaker.” Chamberlain's work was regarded as nothing less than "a deft synthesis of Schopenhauer and Gobineau, reflecting a cruder and more brazen assertion of the mystical kinship of the Aryans and Divine Providence."

American adherents of the Nordic school proclaimed Chamberlain the greatest architect of the Nordic theory, to which Theodore Roosevelt objected that Chamberlain's theory comes from stupid hatred and that his “brilliant blunders for a normal person look like absolute madness, a reflection of an abnormal psyche... He likes David, and on this basis he immediately makes him an Aryan. He likes Michelangelo, Dante or Leonardo da Vinci, and he immediately reports that they are Aryans. He does not like Napoleon and therefore claims that Napoleon is a true representative of raceless chaos."

Hitler's racial theories in Mein Kampf were largely based on the arbitrary provisions of Chamberlain's Principles. Although Hitler does not mention his name anywhere, and most likely did not read his monograph, since he was unlikely to be able to penetrate the intricacies of the author's metaphysics, it is likely that he absorbed Chamberlain's theory indirectly. One way or another, theses about the superiority of the Aryan race and the “Jewish danger”, expressed in a simpler and cruder form, became the leitmotif of Mein Kampf.

Chamberlain H.S. Foundations of the nineteenth century / Intro. Art. Yu.N. Corned beef; lane E.B. Kolesnikova. – In 2 vols. – St. Petersburg: Russkiy Mir, 2012. – T. 1. – 688 pp.; T. 2 – 479 p.

There are books with such a strong reputation that we judge them without reading them. There are words that we use without thinking about what they mean. If the first is combined with the second, then we are firmly protected from any possibility of understanding.

An example of this kind is Chamberlain's "Foundations..." - everyone knows that this is one of the key texts in the intellectual history of Nazism, everyone knows that this is one of the main books of racial theory, usually mentioned after Gobineau. Every educated person who has read a couple of books on the history of Nazism and some biography of Hitler, for example, Joachim Fest or Alan Bullock, knows about the Fuhrer’s admiration for Chamberlain - and ambivalent, firstly, as a key figure in the Bayreuth movement, and secondly, as the author of the notorious “Foundations...”

If we strain our memory a little, we will remember Hitler’s famous visit to Chamberlain, when the latter gave the Fuhrer his spiritual blessing – and then Chamberlain’s funeral in 1927, to which Hitler came, carried out according to the Nazi scenario: “a huge swastika was carried in front of the hearse. Black flags fluttered over the procession, and brave stormtroopers walked around the coffin. They also provided security for the procession” (vol. 1, pp. 175 – 176).

Everything in these common and ready-made images is correct - just as the common discussions about fascism and Nazism largely reproduce the uzuses that functioned back in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as in the case of common words about “fascism” and “Nazism”, the conversation loses all specificity - and thus the meaning referring to the designated subject of conversation. After all, when we now talk about “fascism,” then, as a rule, we are talking about anything other than the historical phenomenon itself denoted by this term, and our speech says a lot about our emotional assessments, about that place in the intellectual political disposition of our time , which we occupy or strive to occupy - but not about the past, with which our words should formally be related.

Hence the extraordinary value of turning to primary sources. If we are afraid of such texts (just remember the hysterical reactions to the translations of Jünger, Schmitt, Freier), then we are not protecting ourselves from the phenomenon that frightens us - on the contrary, remaining unknown, it remains unidentified in our intellectual space: Nazism for us , for example, appears in the guise of common images, not recognizable in any other arrangement - it turns out to be a style in our minds, not a phenomenon. By forbidding ourselves to speak and think - or by demanding that every thought be accompanied by an endless series of saving clauses and assurances of condemnation of "Nazism", "fascism", etc., we demonstrate taboo words and fixed practices of proper speech behavior, without realizing (or, rather, not allowing ourselves to realize - saving ourselves from the complexity of the problem) that the very phenomenon from which we strive to distance ourselves, prevent it, etc., may exist in a different guise.

To begin with, Chamberlain's text seems surprisingly familiar, non-individual, representing a typical example of high-brow essayism of the already approaching Edwardian era, the era of William II and the last building of the Hofburg, the construction of which would be completed just a few years before the end of Austria-Hungary. Stylistically, this is Maria Theresa coffee, a bittersweet, intoxicating, whole coffee structure that can only be enjoyed in the atmosphere of Viennese bliss - an era of decadence, when everyone understands that “this cannot continue like this,” but as long as this continues, this wonderful, and especially for those who proclaim the inevitability of disaster.

Correct understanding requires deciding on the genre of the work: “Foundations…” is a huge, more than a thousand-page essay, and the author’s position is that of an amateur, since it is impossible to cover such a range of issues and create a historical panorama of more than two millennia with any pretense of professionalism. The task for him is not to describe the details, but to outline the general contours, to create a general panorama, and from the perspective of the present:

“My goal is not to chronicle the past, but to illuminate the present” (vol. 2, p. 203).

This is not history - it is a search for the foundations of modernity, where the past is used to clarify the present, which in turn makes clear the past, which is reinterpreted through the prism of what is considered its results.

Chamberlain received an excellent natural science education, was the author of valuable work on plant physiology and had close contact with a number of outstanding biologists of his time - his ideas about physical anthropology are by no means strange reasonings of the fringe, but rather an attempt at free theorizing in the spirit of the era, with its popular ideas about plasticity human nature, about the acceleration of the cultural, social in the biological, and an understanding that is not devoid of a certain flexibility.

Unlike previous racist theories, Chamberlain does not think of race as something that exists primordial (“pure race”), which in subsequent history either decays or remains in its “purity” (more precisely, since nothing can persist forever, only decays at a slower rate), but as something that appears and disappears:

“From Gobineau’s limited, incorrect point of view, this does not matter, since we are only dying faster or slower. Even more mistaken are those who seem to contradict him, but at the same time make the same hypothetical assumption about the original pure race. But whoever has studied how the noble race actually arises knows that it can arise again at any moment, it depends on us. Here is our high duty to nature" [emp. us. – A.T.] (vol. 1, pp. 420 – 421).

“Race” in Chamberlain’s understanding does not even necessarily imply blood relationship - he is inclined to accept this hypothesis, however, accompanying it with the following reservations:

“I do not even postulate consanguinity, I do not forget about it, but I am too well aware of the extraordinary complexity of this problem, I see too clearly that the true progress of science here mainly consisted in revealing our ignorance and the inadmissibility of all previous hypotheses in order to want to now, where it is silent every real scientist, continue to build new castles in the air. We encountered a kindred spirit, a kindred spirit, a kindred physique, that's enough. We have something definite in our hands, and since this is not a definition, but something consisting of living people, I refer to these people, to the true Celts, Germans and Slavs, in order to understand what “Germanic” is” (i.e. 1, pp. 557 – 558).

Chamberlain's text is interesting because it allows us to clearly see how racial theory grows out of conservative and romantic ideas. Indeed, in essence, any attempt to give Chamberlain’s racism biological specificity fails - he is too good a biologist to attach special importance to one or another specific criteria of physical anthropology to try to establish a direct connection, for example, between the shape of the skull and race - where he reproduces such anthropological reasoning, he invariably accompanies them with reservations; for him the task is not to search for an imaginary pure race of the past, to isolate it from the modern “racial chaos”, but, on the contrary, to record a really existing, in his opinion, unity “ Germans” – given as an obvious historical fact, and only then rethink it biologically. The biological plays the role of a substantial bearer of tradition, historical unity - that which is capable of taking existence beyond the limits of individual goals and meanings:

“For the human race, one cannot ignore the fact that the moral and mental play a major role here. Therefore, for people, the lack of an organic racial connection means, first of all, the lack of a moral and mental connection. He who comes from nowhere goes to nowhere. A single life is too short to have a goal in front of your eyes and achieve it. The life of an entire people would be too short if racial unity did not create its own definite, limited character, if the excessive flowering of many-sided talents were not united by the unity of the race, which leads to gradual ripening, to gradual creation in a certain direction, as a result of which the most gifted individual lives for a supra-individual purpose.<..>...We learn to understand whatever we think about causa finalis existence, the human individual, not as a separate individual, not as a replaceable cog, but only as an honor of an organic whole, as a part of a special race, can fulfill its highest purpose” (vol. 1, pp. 423, 424).

Race becomes the body of history: “in the individual the soul may prevail over origin, here the idea prevails, but for the mass it does not,” and Chamberlain sympathetically quotes Paul de Lagarde: “what is German is not in origin, but in the state of the soul” (vol. 1, p. 559), but outside of race it will remain an individual action, a special case - while race gives this action density, it takes it beyond the limits of a single act or decision - through it it is recognized, becomes historical. Such is Augustine for Chamberlain (vol. 1, pp. 416 - 419) - his genius remains a fact of his private biography, what was perceived by his time is rather the opposite of the essence of his teaching, only where he deviates from himself does he gain influence on contemporaries. And, on the contrary, where there is a race, from individual, often nameless actions, a common meaning grows - greater than that which is realized by any of its figures, since individual efforts are not wasted, are not mutually extinguished, but are directed towards one common, supra-individual goal.

History, in Chamberlain's view, appears as the history of the formation and disintegration of races - their formation, the expression of a racial type - and subsequent mixing. And in this regard, his attitude towards Jews is indicative: for him they are not an object of hatred, but an enemy, and an enemy that commands respect (“it’s good to see an enemy in front of you who deserves respect, otherwise hatred or disdain can easily cloud one’s judgment,” t 1, p. 592) – in contrast to the other enemy, the “chaos of nations”, which does not have its own specific face and expression. The Jews become the very “ideal enemy” that, according to Chamberlain, the Germans should be like: they embody the ideal racial principle and the problem is that thereby they “naturally” turn out to be the enemies of the Germans:

“If the Jews were a disastrous neighborhood for us, then justice demands that we recognize that they acted according to the nature of their instincts and their gifts, while they show an admirable example of loyalty to themselves, to their nation, to the faith of their fathers. It was not they who were the seducers and traitors, but us. We ourselves were criminal accomplices of the Jews, it was and is still so today. We have betrayed what the most miserable inhabitant of the ghetto considers sacred - the purity of inherited blood, so it was before and so today more than ever” (vol. 1, pp. 444 – 445).

However, if the problem of the Germans is that they are not what the Jews are, then the main, substantial enemy for Chamberlain turns out to be the “chaos of nations”, the embodiment of which is Catholicism, the “Roman Church”. It carries within itself the legacy of the Roman Empire - that pure form that has lost all content, all creative definition: if the fight against the Jews for Chamberlain is a fight between equal opponents, then the fight against Catholicism is a fight with those who reject the racial principle itself. In general, all these arguments are very similar in type to the constructions of Lev Gumilyov - Chamberlain’s “Roman Church” is almost identical in description to Gumilyov’s “chimera”, races appearing and disappearing in the history - as a consequence of “passionary impulses”, etc.

However, it is worth emphasizing that a discussion of Chamberlain’s ideas inevitably distorts the perspective in which the work itself was created - if we understandably emphasize his “racial ideas”, due to the subsequent meaning and frequency of references to them, then for Chamberlain race is a way of “ultimate explanation "of the historical reality that awaits him. In the text of the “Foundations…”, relatively little space is devoted to discussions about races - it is much more important for the author himself to outline those basic meanings that lie in the foundations of the 19th century and should determine the future development, the self-awareness of the “Germans” (by which Chamberlain understands the Celts, Germans and Slavs).

Chamberlain was not a deep, but sensitive thinker - grasping new ideas of his time, combining and transferring intellectual developments from different subject areas to new areas. At the same time, he allows himself not to think out the theses he picks up, for example, setting out the idea of ​​​​the incommensurability of cultures, the impossibility of one culture to penetrate into the content of another, since each of them has a “strictly individual character” 1 - an idea that he will later pick up and develop Spengler; - Chamberlain does not draw any conclusions from this that would be reflected in other provisions of his work, it remains a private sketch, just as a sketch that will serve as a picture created by Spengler remains a brilliant essay on the history of mathematics (vol. 2, p. 212 – 214).

Chamberlain prefers to create sketches - trying to build not an integral structure, not another system, but rather, as an amateur, with whom (in the Italian sense) he relates himself, to present an outline of the understanding of modernity from history, where what is more important is not individual provisions, but the emerging sense of the whole, each the final formulation of which will be false, as an attempt to give final boundaries to what is in the process of becoming; in this situation, according to Chamberlain, it is more important to clarify the dynamics, to outline the “lines of force”, that which serves to understand the present - and for which turning to any material, from the doctrine of races and crossing to discussions about music, is only an example, more or less indicative .

Getting acquainted with the iconic text of its time, one of the key texts of formative Nazism, is important in two respects: firstly, “Foundations ...” is not a book of some eccentric and marginal; on the contrary, it is completely typical of its time, being a shining example of intellectual prose of the turn of the century centuries, quite original, but exactly as much as is required in order to attract the attention of the “educated public”. Discussions about races, about the biological foundations of history are not the thoughts of an individual, but a common idea of ​​the time (it is enough to recall Taine with his races as driving forces in the history of art or Darwin’s reasoning in The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, when he doubted whether there would be whether “negro” is biologically closer to the great apes or to the Anglo-Saxon).

Chamberlain's success stems from how effectively he combines popular scientific ideas with traditions of cultural and philosophical reasoning, combining ideas common in the culture of his time into a single picture - a significant part of the audience shared these ideas separately, hence the power of the impression made by their combination.

Secondly, and this is a much more important conclusion, Nazism, which is often interpreted ideologically as the result of the creativity of “half-knowledgeable people”, enlightenedly explained by a lack of intellectual culture, historically has a completely respectable pedigree - Chamberlain’s “Foundations ...” are woven into both the history of Nazism, as well as in the genealogy of, for example, the subsequent philosophy of culture or the sociology of knowledge (by the way, Scheler also liked to refer to the racial foundations of different types of thinking).

It is another matter that now respectable teachings do not like to remember such details of genealogy. But this once again confirms the correctness of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis about the incompetence of interpreting Nazism as a “failure”, a historical accident caused by unique circumstances - Nazism with its ideology turns out to be deeply rooted in the very center of the European cultural tradition. By stigmatizing certain names, creating a sanitized scheme of the intellectual history of the past, we reduce the same “Nazism” to an “incident,” an event in the past that was overcome by “correct understanding in the present.” By tabooing this kind of text, we protect ourselves from something that in reality does not pose a danger - from a literal repetition of the past. But the past does not repeat itself - by tabooing topics and words, we react to manifestations without getting to the essence, we give assessments that are ahead of understanding - and thus we risk encountering what we are running from, which has only changed its appearance.

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1. “One culture can destroy another, but not penetrate it. If we begin our historical works with Egypt or, according to the latest discoveries, with Babylon and trace the chronological development of mankind, we will erect a completely artificial edifice. Because Egyptian culture, for example, is a completely closed individual entity, about which we can judge no more than an ant state” (vol. 2, p. 152).

The name of Houston Stewart Chamberlain /1855-1927/ evokes - even in those who do not confuse him with Austin Chamberlain / "sat on the gun" / and Neville Chamberlain / "Munich Agreement" / - the required reaction: a "red danger signal" lights up in the brain. . Of course, formally the situation is a little more complicated: the name of H.S. Chamberlain is associated with certain concepts - “racial theory”, “Germanism”, “anti-Semitism”, “religious immanentism” - which were in use when presenting his ideas already at the beginning of the century and give our reaction seems to have a meaningful character. But in fact, these concepts also play the role of the same signals designed to awaken not our thought, but a “sense of danger.” This feeling should replace knowledge and understanding of the work of the thinker who wrote, in addition to “Foundations of the 19th Century” / a two-volume study of the genesis of European civilization. equally major works on Kant and Richard Wagner, a number of religious and philosophical books / “The Word of Christ”, “The Aryan Worldview”, etc./ and many works of a socio-political nature / among them his book “Democracy and Freedom” remains especially relevant/ ".

The purpose of my notes is not to convince the reader to “switch the traffic light” from red to green when encountering the name of H.S. Chamberlain. In general, culture as a debate about which light, red or green, should light up in the brain when pronouncing certain words and names - has, in my opinion, more clinical than spiritual interest. The real task of culture, seemingly recognized by everyone, but not always solved, is a breakthrough from words to meaning, and even more precisely, to the spirit that creates all ideas and meanings. Below I can only try to describe in the most general and meager terms the spiritual meanings that were revealed to me in the work of H.S. Chamberlain.

“Whoever takes seriously the commandment: know yourself,” Chamberlain wrote at the very beginning of his main book, “sooner or later comes to the knowledge that his being, at least nine-tenths, does not belong to himself.” Man is the “heir” /deg Erbe/ in the fullest sense, covering the entire composition of his being. Heritage /das Erbe/ is the key word in Chamberlain's concept: and one could simply say that "heritage" is a set of physical and spiritual constants passing from generation to generation, if this did not lose sight of something important, if not The main thing. Heritage, as the author of the Foundations constantly emphasizes, cannot - or can only to a very limited extent - be transmitted "automatically", without our will to continue. If the consciousness of the content and meaning of the heritage is lost, if the heritage ceases to be a life-shaping, creative force, it not only “lies unused,” but declines and ultimately dies. “History,” he says below, “is only the past that continues to live, shaping human consciousness.” Therefore, “historical memory” is, for Chamberlain, first of all, a creative act, an act of self-knowledge and self-determination at the same time: losing the ability to perform this act, we lose both our past and our future - “those who are from nowhere are nowhere.”

It is not surprising that Chamberlain resolutely rejected /as “fantastic”/ A. Gobineau’s teaching about race as something given from time immemorial, which only needs to be protected from confusion, as a kind of fatal heritage / although he very highly appreciated the very fact of the production question about the meaning of race by the French thinker/ And the point is not only that race is something essentially dynamic and plastic, that “a noble race does not fall from the sky, it only gradually becomes noble.” in our responsibility to understand the conditions that are imposed on human development by “simple and great laws that embrace and shape all living things,” Chamberlain saw in this substrate a means, not a goal, a condition, not the essence of human existence.” An individual can achieve the full and noble development of his inclinations only in the presence of certain conditions, which are summarized in the word “race,” he wrote, but these inclinations themselves have an essentially metaphysical, rather than physical, meaning. One would have to read the Foundations with an amazingly biased and selective reading in order not to notice this fundamental conviction of the author in the absolute value of the “metaphysical”, that which is hidden in the depths of the soul. However, the accusation of “immanentism” / that is, an emphasis on the internal, spiritual /, strangely adjacent to the accusation of “racism”, reflects precisely the misunderstanding of his main idea, hidden behind catchy labels. At the same time, they diligently do not notice that Chamberlain reproaches Judaism precisely for the fact that it forced morality and religion to serve the idea of ​​​​"racial purity"; But more on that later.

With all the significance that the data of anthropology, ethnography, etc. had for Chamberlain, the main significance for him was penetration into the “depth of the soul,” into its spiritual basis, as the fragment of his book below demonstrates.

In fact, one feature of the spiritual organization of the Slavic peoples was noticed by Chamberlain and compared with the same feature of the Celts and Germans - the desire to highlight, ethically think through and aesthetically design those moments of national history that are associated not with the triumph of the nation, but with its defeat. At the same time, as was noted, Chamberlain apparently did not know the monument that most convincingly supported his view - “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” Not the glorious victory won several decades earlier by Vladimir Monomakh over the same Polovtsians /on the Salnitsa River/ - a victory, rumors of which, according to the chronicler, reached “all the way to Rome” - but the pathetic defeat of the otherwise unremarkable appanage princes became a source of poetic inspiration and moral reflections of extraordinary depth and strength. “It is only through the tragic that we read in “Foundations” that history receives its purely human content”: but the essence of this “particularly human content” lies not in misfortune as such / and especially not in the masochistic savoring of one’s misfortune, not in the pose of “eternally offended "/", but in the self-purification and self-deepening that the human spirit can accomplish - through misfortune, whether we are talking about the contemporaries of the event or their descendants. And also - it is precisely to the spirit of the Aryan peoples that, according to Chamberley, the inner connection between dark victories and dark ones is revealed. defeats / “let us also think about the etymology of the ancient Slavic word “victory” /, the most important moral imperatives are revealed: mercy and forgiveness of even the worst enemies as fellow sufferers, the path to Christian ethics opens...

The second part of the fragment, dedicated to the serious and independent attitude of the Slavs to their religious heritage, I fear, will not be fully understood by the reader who is not familiar with the general historical concept of the Foundations. I will try to present it at least schematically.

The ancient world of the Mediterranean was, according to Chamberlain, those “old wineskins” that were no longer able to accept the “new wine of Christianity,” while he equally included in this world the imperial Rome of the era of decline, and Judaism, and “racial chaos "peoples who inhabited Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. The Germans became the “new furs” for the spirit of Christianity - “under this name,” Chamberlain explained on the very first pages of the book, “I unite the various members of one great North European race, whether we are talking about the Germans in the narrow, Tacitian sense of the word, or about the Celts, or about genuine /echte/ Slavs.”

The main content of history “after Christ” is the struggle of daring peoples against those influences that came from the “ancient world”, influences not so much direct /after the collapse of this world/, but rather exerted through ideas and institutions. The “imperial idea” of Rome *, the cosmopolitan, anational and amoral “syncretism” of the Greco-Syrian area, religious materialism and religious intolerance of Judaism—these were the heterogeneous “ideological” elements that sought to penetrate the emerging organism of the new Christian society. The main drama of this formation lay, in Chamberlain's opinion, in the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, called to be the bearer of the Christian ideal, adopted from the ancient world the most dangerous elements of its heritage: the idea of ​​​​world domination, hostility to national identity, Jewish intolerance to any form of dissent , and as a result took the path of coercion in matters of religion - “compelle intrare” / “force you to enter” the Kingdom of God/.

On the contrary, the Germanic peoples sought to affirm what is the true essence of Christianity: the principle of free faith, inseparable from the moral and mystical content of religion. An important point needs to be made clear here, since Chamberlain's remarks about the Bohumils could be interpreted as denying the mystical side of Christianity associated with the sacraments. But such an interpretation would be completely incorrect. Chamberlain denied the spirit of formal ritualism and petty ritualism (which, in his opinion, goes back again to Judaism, where ritual replaces a living sense of the transcendent), while the mystical in the real sense of the word (that is, going beyond the limits of experience) side of Christianity is the most important for him . It is the mystical and metaphysical in Christianity that is most consonant with the religious spirit of the Germanic peoples, expressed in their pre-Christian mythology. Myth is not “fiction,” the opposite of “fact,” but a symbolic expression of its inner metaphysical meaning: in turn, “mysticism is mythology thought out in the opposite direction, from the symbolic image to the inner experience of the inexpressible.” Therefore, Chamberlain resolutely rejects the “demythologization” of Christianity /proclaimed by liberal Protestant theology/ as a return to the historical-chronological religion of Judaism, with its extreme metaphysical poverty, with what Renan aptly defined as “the eternal tautology: God is God.”

The struggle for the metaphysical essence of religion is, at the same time, a struggle for freedom of faith, for the right of every individual to freely comprehend the religious ideal. In Christianity, freedom is associated with the very essence of religion, since “through Christianity, each individual person received a value that is incommensurable with anything and which was never suspected before.” The individualism of H.S. Chamberlain - and this is how he most often defined his worldview - was, however, too different from the walking individualism of the liberal-positivist sense: Chamberlain was one of the first to emphasize that before the need arose to free the individual from the oppression of the confessional narrowness and intolerance, this personality was created by Christianity,

And, finally, individualism, or more precisely, Chamberlain’s personalism was closely fused with his pochvenism. The meaning of this connection is not accessible to liberal positivist thinking: unfortunately, today this meaning remains hidden from most of our domestic “soilists”. The dual unity of nation and individual determines the entire logic of Chamberlain’s thought, a logic - let us repeat once again - incomprehensible to those who see in the very word “nation” / people, race, etc. / an attack on the individual, but also to those who do not understand, that it is “the development of an individual capable of freedom” that constitutes the highest goal of national development, as noted not by Chamberlain, but by the Russian thinker L.A. Tikhomirov in the book “Monarchical Statehood”. “The richer the spirit, the more versatile and stronger its connections with what constitutes its substrate, origin, breed” - this conviction of the author of “Foundations” was clearly expressed several decades earlier by such Russian personalist soil scientists as A. Grigoriev and Strakhov.

Avoiding any simplified subordination in the duality of “personality - nation,” Chamberlain points, however, to a decisive circumstance: God was incarnated not in a nation / and not in “humanity” /, but in an individual person, Jesus. “Here, in the person of Christ, is the real center of Chamberlain’s worldview. Not only the entire course of European history during the 19 centuries “after Christ,” but also events far removed from this history in time and space, be it the struggle of Rome and Carthage, the fate of Israel and Judea, the opposition between Brahmanism and Buddhism, etc., are assessed by him in the light of this personality, measured by the measure given by his image of Christ.

Of course, there is a lot of subjectiveness in the image of Christ created by Chamberlain; but Chamberlain’s critics / and even those authors who, like V.V. Rozanov, welcomed the “Foundations” / constantly passed by the main thing, since they could not understand, internally experience Chamberlain’s obsession with the person of Jesus Christ: they did not seriously believe that it was not related to Germans, Jews, the Roman Church, Protestantism, etc., but the attitude towards Christ forms the core of all his judgments and assessments. This is especially true of Chamberlain's so-called “anti-Semitism”.

Actually, Chamberlain’s attitude towards Jews can be accurately expressed in words that seem to have belonged to A.S. Khomyakov: “A Jew after Christ is living nonsense.” Chamberlain's attitude towards Jews was determined by the attitude of Jews towards Christ - not towards the Christian Church, not towards Christian teaching, not towards Christian culture, etc. namely, to the person of Jesus Christ. He considered the religious teachings of Judaism to be an expression of this decisive relationship. Having emerged as an attempt to solve the problem of national self-preservation by raising national exclusivity to the highest principle, this religion inevitably came into conflict with the One who turned out to be not the “savior of the nation,” but the Savior for every person who believes in Him. That is why Judaism became and remains to this day a religion of the rejection of Christ. Not finding in modern Jewry a real renunciation of the basic principles of Judaism (a renunciation that cannot be replaced by a simple confessional departure from the synagogue), Chamberlain saw in the Jews “eternal strangers” to the Christian world, those who are ready at any moment in history to show their solidarity with any forces, hostile to Christianity, to support any vacillation of the Christian world regarding its real center.

Unfortunately, a full-fledged understanding of the depth and richness of the ideas expressed in the “Foundations of the 19th Century” / which at one time caused a hurricane of sympathetic and hostile responses, including in Russia /, and to this day can only be obtained if you know German language. I have no doubt that Chamberlain’s book, even if read carefully, will raise many objections among the Russian reader; but I also have no doubt that a nationally-minded Russian person cannot help but feel the depth and relevance of many of the ideas and judgments expressed in the “Foundations.” “I would like to awaken a living feeling of the great Nordic brotherhood,” Chamberlain wrote, clearly anticipating the danger of fratricide into which the Germans and Slavs were plunged in the 20th century. Of course, not all of Chamberlain’s judgments about the Slavs, and especially about Russians and Russia, can be considered even approximately correct; sometimes they sound simply unfair. But we Russians are no strangers to doing without compliments; the point is not in them after all. Chamberlain called on all Christian peoples to restore within themselves the creative memory of their origins and foundations, to create their future not “out of nothing,” but from the depths of their national and religious spirit. And this call, no matter who it comes from, we need to hear and fulfill.

Experienced another rise at the end of the nineteenth century thanks to the son-in-law of the great composer Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The Englishman Chamberlain lived in Germany. Thanks to his contact with Wagner, he absorbed the radical views of the great composer, who read Gobineau and even earlier adopted the widespread in Germany anti-Semitic beliefs.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, photo 1895

1. Chamberlain did not regret the bygone aristocratic past. He was much more concerned about a pure racial future than about racial degeneration. He considered the national state to be an important means of preserving the purity of the race.

2. Chamberlain was an outspoken anti-Semite. History, in his view, was a struggle between God, represented by the German-Aryan races, and the Devil, represented by the Jewish race. Chamberlain, like a number of German writers of his generation, denied the Jewish origin of Jesus Christ.

3.Chamberlain saw a genetic solution to the racial problem. The existing ruling, superior races were the result of racial mixing. They had to be protected from further degeneration and pollution.

4. Race had a more ambivalent meaning for Chamberlain than for Gobineau. This concept was more metaphysical, spiritual than materialistic. Mental and moral characteristics were more important to Chamberlain than physical characteristics. All of these views were associated with his idea of ​​innate potential and, perhaps, with the idea of ​​the primacy of the will, proclaimed by Schopenhauer.

In The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Huston Chamberlain wrote:

Nothing is more convincing than the identity of a nation. A person belonging to a certain pure race will never lose this feeling. The guardian angel of his origin is all next to him. He supports him when he loses his support, warns him, like the Demon of Socrates, from the danger of going astray, forces him to submit and forces him to perform actions that, due to their seeming impossibility, he would never dare to take. Weak and fallible by virtue of his human nature, such a person is aware of himself, and others are aware of him, by the strength of his character and by the fact that his actions are marked by a certain simple and peculiar greatness, which finds explanation in his uniquely typical and superpersonal qualities . Race lifts a person above itself, endows him with extraordinary, almost supernatural energy, distinguishes him as an individual from the chaotic mixture of peoples collected from all over the world. And if this man of pure birth is more gifted than those around him, then the very fact of belonging to the race strengthens and exalts him in every respect, and he becomes a genius towering above the rest of humanity, not because he was thrown to the earth by a force of nature , like a flaming meteor, but because it shoots towards the heavens, like a strong and majestic tree, nourished by thousands and thousands of roots - not one individual, but the living sum of innumerable souls striving for one goal.

From 1899 to 1914, “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” went through eight editions and was translated into different languages. In total, this book sold more than 100,000 copies. Kaiser WilliamII distributed this book among the officers of his army, by his order it was in all German libraries.