The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning and an End of “This Day,” which is irrevocably ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that _everything has “a” time_, from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things.[412] The Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man--the form, the “How?” of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is “When?” The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. Nowhere is the stage of transition more clearly visible than in Tacitus, whose entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation of his world-picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power of the old city-deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he regards this very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and finally, as a Stoic (by that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa had become _Magian_), he speaks of the power of the seven planets that rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes about that in the following centuries Time itself as vessel of fate--namely, the Vault of Time, limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an entity by the inner eye--is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God as Zrvan, and rules the world-conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the State religion of Persia in 438-457.

Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of “eras”--that is, of time-reckonings that begin at some event felt as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most important is the generic Aramæan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the “Seleucid era.” It was followed by many others, amongst them the Sabæan (about 115 B.C.), the starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian; the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by the Synedrion in 346;[413] the Persian, from the accession of the last Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro’s “_ab urbe condita_”; that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion’s breach with the Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500 and beginning with the birth of Jesus.

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as “the Golden Age.” This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind “thereabouts,” an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or “Time.” The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world _that is also the beginning and the end of man_--acts of God of mighty magic--and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a whole series of such æons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation of the end of the existing one.[414] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day--the view over a given time. “The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts--world-beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the ‘life’ of man. This debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the moral history of humanity.”[415]

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,[416] 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 that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circumvent this certainty--which for _it_ constitutes an imminent danger of self-destruction--and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[417] Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[418] The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[419] the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the _theatre_ of a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking-consciousness _itself_, a contest of the two forces of the Ego--namely, will and reason,[420] and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding--are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has _to wage_ this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonour and Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to world-history, a poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian pre-Culture and is in inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of that Culture itself--the Book of Job.[421] It is not Job, but his friends who look for a sin as the cause of his troubles. They--like the bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture, present-day readers and critics of the work, therefore, included--lack the metaphysical depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the world-cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfilment, to pure Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy that Magian feeling can set up by the side of our Faust.[422]