Monday, June 11, 2007

Fron non-I to I

Last week's essay by Paul Berman in the New Republic is worth reading. Spengler makes an interesting comment on the relationship between modern totalitarianism and paganism, understood as a creed in which the individual only exists for the sake of the state (or the tribe or the race):

Rosenzweig...described Islam as pagan, and Allah as an apotheosized despot. He began, that is, with a general characterization of pagan society, that is, society in the absence of God's self-revelation through love, and then considered Islam as a specific case of a paganism that parodies the outward form of revealed religion. God's self-revelation as an act of love first makes possible human individuality: the individual human is an individual precisely because he is loved.

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