This debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the moral history of humanity."[1]
But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling of this sort of Time and the view of this sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern — a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally Jesus's normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something perfectly different,[2] while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego — that Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine Infinite — there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes "Islam." Every attempt to meet the operations of God with a personal purpose or even a personal opinion is "masiga," — that is, not an evil willing, but an evidence that the powers of darkness and evil have taken possession of a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian waking-consciousness is merely the theatre of a battle between these two powers and not, so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world-happening there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any universally effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently there is no necessary connexion between sin and punishment, no claim to reward, no old-Israelitish "righteousness." Things of this order the true piety of this Culture regards as far beneath it. The laws of nature are not something settled for ever that God can alter only by the method of miracle — they are (so to put it) the ordinary state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves anything of the logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls. In the entire world-cavern there is but one Cause, which lies immediately behind all visible workings, and this is the Godhead, which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate upon causes in connexion with God is sinful.
From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was Augustine's high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough
