Note 919 — Chapter XIII · THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

The “Jews” of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Pârvan, Die Nationalität der Kaufleute im röm. Kaiserreiche, 1909; also Mommsen, Röm. Gesch., V, p. 471); that is, they followed the very callings that in the Gothic period became the object of their merchant activity. Present-day “Europe” is in exactly the same position vis-à-vis the Russians whose profoundly mystical inner life feels “thinking in money” as a sin. (The Pilgrim in Gorki’s Night-asylum, and Tolstoi’s thought generally; pp. 194, 278.) Here to-day as in the Syria of Jesus’s time we have two economic worlds juxtaposed (pp. 192, et seq.): an upper, alien, and civilized world intruded from the West (the Bolshevism of the first years, totally Western and un-Russian, is the lees of this infiltration), and a townless barter-life that goes on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate needs. We have to think of the catchwords of the surface as a voice, in which the Russian, simple and busied wholly with his soul, hears resignedly the will of God. Marxism amongst Russians is based on an inward misunderstanding. They bore with the higher economic life of Petrinism, but they neither created it nor recognized it. The Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not comprehend it. Anyone who understands Dostoyevski will sense in these people a young humanity for which as yet no money exists, but only goods in relation to a life whose centre of gravity does not lie on the economical side. The horror of values supervening from nowhere which before the war drove many to suicide is a misconstrued literary disguise of the fact that, for a townless barter-thinking, money-getting by means of money is an impiety, and (from the view-point of the coming Russian religion) a sin. To-day, with the towns of Tsarism in ruin and the mankind in them living the village life under the crust (temporarily) of urban-thinking Bolshevism, he has freed himself from the Western economy. His apocalyptic hatred—the same that the simple Jew of Jesus’s day bore to the Roman—is directed against Petersburg, as a city and the seat of a political power of Western stamp, but also as the centre of a thinking in Western money that has poisoned and misdirected the whole life. The Russian of the deeps to-day is bringing into being a third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and built on the John Gospel—a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian than to the Faustian and, consequently, rests upon a new symbolism of baptism, and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades. This is the only thing that this new Russia really cares about. And it will no doubt let itself fall once again under the economy of the West, as the primitive Christian submitted to the Romans and the Gothic Christian to the Jews. But inwardly it has no part nor lot therein. (Cf. pp. 192, 226, 278, 293, 295.)