JOHN E. TASHJEAN
299
for Spengler's
Ursymbol
as the source and dynamic of civilization.
The concern with guilt necessarily involves the quest for redemption
and the life of the soul, as evidenced by the dogmatic and ecclesiasti–
cal history of the first Christian millennium.
End and Beginning
is not a finished and systematic treatise, but a
conflation of published and unpublished writings. "The succession of
ideas dazzles and sometimes baffles, but nearly every page is arrest–
ing," writes Professor Leslie Armour. However, perhaps the book
will be buried in silence. It led the reviews in the December 1982
American Historical Review;
but, by and large, American intellectuals
are not famous for devotion to Spenglerian themes and will hardly
believe their eyes when they see a revisionist Freudian breathing
dramatic life into Pelagius, the Irish voluntarist, and Paschasius
Radbertus, the theologian of transsubstantiation. And orthodox
Christians may be uneasy about support from a brilliant but un–
classifiable au thor.
Yet, it is clear, that whatever one makes of Borkenau's theses,
interpretations , and omissions, his subject will remain. The first
millennium
A. D.
is
fascinating:
nothing like this has happened since
Vico . Single-handedly Borkenau pushed a dark and trivialized past
close to the central concerns of an age threatened by the thermo–
nuclear collapse of civilization.
For this achievement he was qualified, not to say predestined,
by the omens of birth, time, and place. Educated in continental
catholicity, he was driven to discovery and reintegration. And what
he discovered, ultimately, was the superficiality of the left as well as
the right. Two quotes from
End and Beginning
are apropos.
"It
is char–
acteristic of every paranoiac age - including our own - to believe in
the effectiveness of techniques, the knack of reducing problems of
the soul to the mechanical arrangement of social factors." "To the
materialist interpretation of history, of which the bourgeois histor–
ians of the later nineteenth century much more than Marx were the
standard-bearers, we oppose another view, which puts man's spir–
itual conflicts back into the center of the picture."
Here is a world view of depth and seriousness, which one would
hardly expect from the person described by Gerald Brenan. The
strains of his personality and life qualified and inclined Borkenau to
see fundamental value conflict where others might see mere politics.
In comparison to the importance of values and value conflicts, it
does not matter very much whether his oddity was a psychological
