The Myth of The Twentieth Century - Rosenberg's Influences

Rosenberg's Influences

Rosenberg was inspired, on the "esoteric" plane, more distantly by the anti-Judaistic formulations of ancient Gnostic dualism, especially the aggressive anti-Judaic thrust of the Marcionite and Manichaean creeds, in medieval times resurgent in the metaphysical, cosmological schemata of Catharism, the radical dualism of the Cathar religion portraying the Jewish deity as a malignant, delusive, enslaving and materialistic lesser deity purely emblematic of the fallen condition and evil, inferior to the absolute aseity of the hyper-cosmic, hyperuranion good Good of Cathar belief. On the more "historic" plane, Rosenberg's heady, unwieldy racial philosophy attempted to synthesize, in extreme awkwardness, the medieval German Catholic philosopher Meister Eckhart, the heirs of Eckhartian mysticism, the cultural and racist theories of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the anti-modernist, "revolutionary-conservative" ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner's Holy Grail romanticism inspired by the neo-Buddhist thesis of Arthur Schopenhauer, Haeckelian mystical vitalism, and Nordicist Aryanism in general as reference-point. Rosenberg believed that God created humankind as separate, differentiated races in a cascading hierarchy of nobility of virtue, not as separative individuals or as entities with "blank slate" natures. Rosenberg harshly rejected the idea of a "globular" mankind of homogeneity of nature as counter-factual, and asserted each biological race possesses a discrete, unique soul, claiming the Caucasoid Aryan race, with Germanic Nordics supposedly composing its vanguard elite, as qualitatively superior, in a vaguely "ontological" way, in comparison to all other ethnic and racial groupings: the Germanic Nordic Aryan as Platonic "ideal-form" of the meaning of humankind. The Myth of the Twentieth Century was conceived as a sequel to Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.