Spengler - Mythically Shrouded Paganism

Here is some vintage Spengler of The Asia Times in his article, The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name:

The Rousseauvian paradise of paganism depicted in the anthropological writings of Margaret Mead or such films as Dances With Wolves do not square with the all-embracing, total control of the individual we encounter in paganism. In fact, Rosenzweig wrote, pagan society dissolves the individual into a mere instrument of race or state:

People, State, and whatever else the societies of antiquity may have been are lion's caves before which one sees the tracks of the Individual entering, but not leaving. In fact, the individual human stands before society as a whole: he knows that he is only a part. These wholes, with respect to which he is only a part, these species, of which he is only a representative example, have absolute power over his ethical life, although they as such are hardly absolute, but are in fact themselves only examples of the species "State" or "People". For the isolated individual, his society is the society ...

In the thoroughly organized State, the State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State ...

The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.

That is precisely what Rosenzweig meant when he 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.

Read all of The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name.