been fortunate enough to possess in old Egypt a Civilization that had for a thousand years thought of nothing but the organization of its economy. The Roman neither comprehended nor was capable of copying this style of life,[1] but the accident that Egypt provided the political possessor of this fellah-world with an inexhaustible source of gold rendered it unnecessary for him to make a settled habit of proscription at home; the last of these financial operations in massacre-form was that of 43, shortly before the incorporation of Egypt.[2] The amassed gold of Asia Minor that Brutus and Cassius were then bringing up, which meant an army and the dominion of the world, made it necessary to put to the ban some two thousand of the richest inhabitants of Italy, whose heads were brought to the Forum in sacks for the offered rewards. It was no longer possible to spare even relatives, children, and grey-heads, or people who had never concerned themselves with politics. It was enough that they possessed a stock of cash and that the yield would otherwise have been too small.
But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares — because men were again living the peasant life[3] — and this explains the
- ↑ Gercke-Norden, Einl. in der Altertumswissensch., III, p. 291.
- ↑ Kromayer, in Hartmann's Röm. Gesch., p. 150.
- ↑ The "Jews" of those times were the Romans (p. 318), and the Jews themselves were peasants and artizans and small traders (Parván, Die Nationalität der Kaufleute in röm. Kaiserreich, 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.)
