/lit/ - Literature

>>21216068
There are four, as previously stated, foundations on which the european civilization stands, four principles that constitute their individuality or essence. They are the Greek Culture, the Roman Order, the Christian Morality, and English Politics. We do not have to see whether these principles are pleasing to us, each of us personally, or whether they are not pleasing to us. We need to they are and what they are. We need not make use of the foolish reasoning - which, because it is foolish, it can not be reasonable- that we are not christians, or that we aren't english; through the same reasoning we would reject what Ancient Greece and old Rome gave us, since none of us is today a greek from antiquity or a roman from the extinct Rome. It is the civilization built through a series of creations, each of which, for a reason of its own environment and favorable historical circumstances, particularly belongs to a particular nation. Intending to repudiate a civilization-forming principle because it is alien to our nature, either it means that we repudiate the same idea of civilization, which involves transformation and therefore changes in “nature”, or that we deem our nation capable of producing a whole civilization in itself, a concept that can only arise in the brain of a patriotic megalomaniac.

(2/?)

>>21216073
By greek culture is to be understood, essentialy, rationalism. What distinguished the ancient greeks from other peoples was the cult of Reason, of Critique (it has been justly said that the greeks created the Critical Spirit) or, as it has been said since Comte, of the Free Examination.
Without sacred books proper, without properly organized priesthood, the ancient greeks, despite one or another individual persecution of individual reasoning (as in the supreme example of that of Socrates) more for obscure political reasons than properly religious ones, suffered from few restrictions about the exercise of reason. Furthermore, the mythology they had, essentially atheological and syncretic, made religion a kind of poetry or legend, and each one shaped or reshaped, according to their will, the stories and characters of the Gods; the deities of the Greeks - like those of the Romans later, but more strictly, for the Roman mind was utilitarian and practical rather than poetic and speculative - were palpably the creation of men; nor is it any wonder that in such a system men were given the ascension to gods.«The race of Gods and Men is one alone,» said Pindar; and in that verse he summarized an aspect of Hellenic religion.

(3/?)

>>21216078
Prof. J. B. Bury entitles “Free Reason” the first chapter, which deals with Greece and Rome, of his History of Freedom of Thought. This Greek concept was only limited in a political circumstance: a great number of thinkers, and even more statesmen, of antiquity had religion, although it was false, because it was necessary for the rude plebs, capable of understanding certain reasonings, but not of giving rise to reasoning. The romans, as they had civics and politics, as practical as they were, and outside of practice stupid, a greater concern than the greeks, remarkably clung to this concern.
Greek culture, the main basis of our civilization, consists in the supremacy of Reason over other elements of the spirit. This means, firstly, that anything is acceptable in proportion as it presents itself to us as rational; that what emanates from authority or tradition has no such value, acquiring it only when reason supports it. This means, secondly, that our feelings, our fantasies, our desires and hopes are worthless and mean nothing if we don't put reason in them, that is, if we don't establish in them that balance that exists in reasoning. This means, thirdly, that our sensations or impressions of external things have no value if they do not conform to these things, if they do not give them a conformity with reality.

(4/?)

>>21216081
Rationality, harmony, objectivity: this is the triple manifestation through which Greek Culture, the essence of our civilization, is defined, as the essence of intelligence, or its superior part.
Whenever our civilization has contradicted the spirit of rationality, harmony and objectivity, our civilization has fallen. It has decayed wherever the Inquisition, or any other similar tyranny, has shackled individual thought. It was liberated where the Reformation was established—not that the spirit of the Reformers was per se more tolerant than that of the Catholics; but the necessity of free examination opened, in spite of itself, the doors to Reason. And where Reason enters, Greece enters; and where Greece enters, civilization enters.
It is evident that this rationalism cannot exist without a certain individualism, that is, without a certain freedom of the individual to think and express what he thinks. We must not, however, confuse this individualism with political individualism, which is what is now immediately understood by individualism. There can be individualism without actually being freedom. Frederick the Great of Prussia allowed the widest freedom of thought; but one in which he was absolute king cannot be described as a liberal regime.
Let us therefore fix this, and only this: Greek Culture, essence of our civilization, is characterized by Rationalism. Rationalism is defined by the spirit of rationality in ideas and in their exposition, of harmony in feelings and in their interrelationships, of objectivity in impressions and in the way of analyzing them.

(4/?)

>>21216084 (previous was 5/?)
(2) Having received this spirit from the Greeks, the Romans defined it better, limiting it; to define, moreover, is to limit, and it is the same to define in the sense of circumventing. Greek rationalism was based on, or produced, an individualism that invaded the political moral sphere.
The greek, however much he loved his city, often did not hesitate to betray it, out of political passion, born of excessive individualism. Alcibiades, an Athenian of the Athenians, did not hesitate to indicate to the Lacedaemonians the best strategic way to invade the territory of Athens. Now it was this individualistic outpouring of rationalism that the highly political, and little more than highly political, spirit of the Romans used to tame and limit. Let us understand each other well: the Romans did not set themselves the destiny of limiting Greek individualism. Men are rarely, peoples never, so conscious of their historical role. Nor did Rome's role consist in properly limiting Greek individualism, reducing it to simple rationalism. This limitation was a consequence of Rome's historical role; Rome created a civilizational element from which this limitation was derived. This element is the concept of the State, as an element, not national, but civilizational. Rome created the concept of the State as a historical mission, distinct from the State as a simple empire, or simple nation. Once this concept was created, or even, in the process of being created, it is understood that civic and political life assumes an accentuated value, and the individual's duties towards the State are of remarkable importance. The typical Greek concept (except in the uncharacteristic case of barren Sparta) that society exists for the individual, other than this one for her, suffers a limitation. In Greece, and especially in Athens, there are sketches of the concept that would be historically Roman; but it is that in Greece, and above all in Athens, everything exists either clearly or in embryo, because Greece, mother of all civilization, brought everything in her fertile womb.

(6/?)

>>21216088
(3) The at least relative subordination of the individual to the State left the individual free in the intellectual sphere, and Greek rationalism subsisted. But since, given the ancient mixture of the moral and the civic, the indistinction, common in Greece and typical in Rome, between the moral individual and the political individual, political subordination invaded an individual sphere not properly political, and that, when (*at the time of) that differentiation would have wanted to free itself. Now, just as Roman politics came to suffer the political consequences of Greek rationalism, so the Christian religion came to suffer the moral consequences of Roman statism. The famous passage of the Gospel, which distinguishes between what is of God and what is of Caesar, sums up, as a single step, the essence of the operation.
Christianity, historically considered, is a complex product. Its essence, or metaphysical part, is greek, it is platonic; and it can rightly be said that Plato was the true founder of Christianity. Having elevated Plato's philosophy to the mystical transcendences of the Alexandrian School, it infiltrated, through various interpretations of the Jewish Kabbalah, into a heretical sect of Jews - presumably the Essenes -, and from there, adding myths (mostly Assyro-Babylonian) and various fragments of historical things, Christianity came to be formed, which, after a struggle, the outcome of which was uncertain for a while, with a rival religion, Mithraism, finally won and overwhelmed the Empire: as for the person of the Founder of Christianity, his very existence is indeterminable; the complex inauthenticity of the Gospels, the interpolations of the Epistles of Paul, the falsifications of texts and of testimonies in the primitive literature of the sect, make any opinion that has the stamp of presuming with certainty impossible today. St. Paul, omitting from the letters attributing to him two or three admittedly interpolated texts, does not know a Christ with a biography, but a redemptive and divine abstraction. The maximum probability - but it is no more than probability - is that the system had taken as its nucleus the vague figure of Jeshu ben Pandira, who, according to the Talmud (in an unsuspected step, since it does not relate him to Christ) was hung from a tree and stoned in the Easter eve, in Lydia, in the reign of Alexandre Janneo—that is, about 100 years before our era.

(7/?)

>>21216092
All this, however, matters little. What matters, in our case, is that the religion that, wherever it came from, appeared in history under the name of Christianity, came to counteract the statist concept of the Roman Empire with a special and new individualism. Inheriting from it, in whose substance imperialism was created, the spirit of expansion and universality, and thus superimposing on its Jewish background a proselytism that the Hebrews did not know, it arose in the Empire in a kind of competition with it, as a dissolving and anarchizing force — the bolshevism of the time. All the social arguments that we use today against bolshevism could be used by the Romans against this strange and disintegrating force. In its ultimate results, however, Christianity was not disintegrating: it was only limiting the element that Rome had brought to civilization, as Rome had been the element that had brought Greece. There was a difference. Rome proceeded, as a civilization, directly from Greece; Christianity did not proceed directly from Rome, but from the results of Rome — that is, from the different forces encompassed by the Roman Empire, and, by its existence, placed in the possibility of contact and inter-influence.
The practical essence of Christianity lies in the concept that the human individual—an immortal soul created by God and redeemable by his Son from the sinful condition into which the fall had cast onto it—has in himself, as such, a superior value greater than all the other powers and pomps of the earth, because it is a value of another order. From this concept derives another statement - that the moral individual is distinct from, and superior to, the political individual. God is above the Emperor, and the salvation of the soul above the service of the Empire. And the ultimate consequences of the primary concept are these: the moral criterion is absolute, the political or civic criterion is relative. The State is above the citizen, but Man is above the State. No State, no Emperor, no human law can compel an individual to act against his conscience, that is, against the salvation of his soul. The inferior cannot compel the superior.
This is the essence of Christian morality, the third base of the civilization in which we live. Even where Christianity disappeared, the morality it created remains, because its creation was moral, not religious; as a religion, Christianity is syncretic.(...)

(8/8)

I'll leave you all with some questions:
-Why didn't Pessoa finish the text? Was it because he couldn't fit in the last pillar within the same logic or just his classical modus operandi of leaving things unfinished?
-What would have he written concerning this last pillar?
-Has a new pillar been erected since his death?

>>21216068
He saw some terrible things during WW1. The struggle between maintaining hope in the face of such an experience can drive you to despair. On top of that there was a global depression in the latter part of his life. It's possible he simply lost hope, as so many did during that era.

>>21216121
He saw things in WW1 as we see today the Ucranian war: only through proxy, he wasn't. Not to say he was not affected by it, he truly was but i fail to see how it correlates to the text at hand

>>21216121
>>21216144
Further elaborating, even though i agree he was deeply affect by the events of WW1, i do not believe it was the main factor of him losing hope in later years. He worked tirelessly on writing through out the 1920's and his hope rekindled with the possibility of being part of the ideological formation of the New State. Alas he was used and deposed and, in process, lost what was most dear to him: his freedom of expression. His last 5 years is him drinking and smoking himself to death, lamenting that he can't even write complex and long poems like he did in his youth, unable to publish in periodicals as freely as before.
At the same, it was during the dictatorship (which he helped establish through an intellectual defense of the military coup, remaining the single text that he regrets having written) that he published the only book authored in name which actually won a State contest for its nationalistic values, The Message. He failed to show up to award ceremony.

>asq te esqueces que és português e que já leste este texto várias vezes e lês isto tudo em inglês na mesma
Obrigado na mesma, danone, boa tradução.

Thank you for doing this anon, Pesso's work is too valuable to skim over and reply so quickly but I'll be giving this a good think.
Alas, this really makes me want to learn another language

>>21216068
>it shows how civilization is built upon previous structures and the denial of those past structures leads to the collapse of civilization.

A similar idea runs through Catafalque by Peter Kingsley, which is an examination of the West and Jung.

Top tier post anon. Have a bump.

>>21216068
I appreciate the effort but you really need to proofread this shit, anon

>>21216068
I know this is unfinished, but have Pessoa’s nonfiction writings ever been published in English? How many works like this did he write, and how much more stuff is there stuffed away in his huge trunk of letters that we still haven’t read?