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Adelphiasophism
Cyclical History: Oswald Spengler and
Arnold Toynbee
Abstract

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Oswald Spengler was a German historian of the last century who preceded Arnold Toynbee with the idea of analysing
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major civilizations to extract a general theory of history. The story of the eight High Cultures is that of societies that
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ultimately fail. Cultures eventually die, but produce fossils, canons of art and science and political forms. The period of
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fossilization, after the end of the culture proper, is what Spengler calls Civilization, which he said began for the West at
the end of the 18th century. The work of modernity is the completion of the final forms. Spengler expected society to
collapse or stagnate by 2200 AD, and maybe the recent robbery of the worlds finances by the bankers is another sign of
it. Spengler was the first philosopher of world history to write about the other great civilizations not as a mere prologue to
Western history.
1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly
attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 21, 2000
Last Modified: Sunday, June 8, 2014
The Cyclical View of History
Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West
Religion
Arnold Toynbee
A Western Apocalypse?
Science Fiction?

The Cyclical View of History

On the web, John J Reilly, a Catholic deeply absorbed by eschatolgy, reviews several modernist
history books under the title Spenglers Future. Oswald Spengler was a German historian of the
last century who preceded Toynbee with the idea of analysing major civilizations to extract a
general theory of history. The clues were to be found not just in parallel events but in parallels in
culture, and culture includes lifestyle and religion.
Since the momentum of these huge historic cycles is so great, the implication is that nothing can
be done to stop them. Once you recognize you are in a particular phase of a cycle, there is no point
in behaving as if you were somewhere else. You are out of synchronization, or out of form and can
only fail in what you are attempting to do. Plainly this has a bearing on those who believe in things
that are new or have been profoundly disrespected for a long time. Adelphiasophism as a religion
or world view might be like that. Is it?
In Spenglers view, history has manifested itself in just eight High Cultures. He found similar
patterns in seven other cultures, besides the Greco-Roman WorldEgypt, ancient China, India
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and other societies. From a unique initial religious base, each produced its own philosophy, arts,
political style, natural sciences and even mathematics. Each had also experienced modern eras
of two or three centuries, and had its own peculiar age of faith, and its cultural climax in a
Baroque. None expressed universal truths. Meaning was only the cultures own, and the
skepticism of each late culture realized it.
The story of the High Cultures is that of societies that ultimately fail. Cultures eventually die, but
produce fossils, canons of art and science and political forms. The period of fossilization, after the
end of the culture proper, is what Spengler calls Civilization, which he said began for the West at
the end of the 18th century. The work of modernity is the completion of the final forms. Spengler
was the first philosopher of world history to write about the other great civilizations not as a mere
prologue to Western history.
Spenglers idealization of the history of High Cultures had obvious implications for the future of
the West. If the analogies held, then, within a few hundred years the West should collapse into a
universal empire, with a culture that would ultimately become as stiff and curatorial as Egypts
during the New Kingdom. Meanwhile, money and democracy would increasingly hollow out the
traditional forms of society, until both collapsed in the face of power politics. Wars would reach a
climax of technical sophistication and speed, even as nations disintegrated internally.

Oswald Spengler
Spenglers doctorate was in Classical Greek philosophy, with a doctoral dissertation on the
philosopher Heraclitus. His own philosophy, strongly influenced by Nietzsche, resembled the ideas
of Martin Heidegger who also became a supporter of the Nazis.
A few years before the First World War, Spengler inherited a small sum from his mother which
allowed him to stop school teaching and to pursue a historical study he had in mind, an
examination of the parallels between the Western Europe of the early twentieth century and the
Classical Mediterranean world at the time of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage,
roughly, from the mid-third century BC to the mid-second century BC. Similarities had been
noted, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, between the modern era of the West and
the Classical agefrom the death of Alexander the Great (330 BC) to the assassination of Julius
Caesar (44 BC).
Spengler tried to work out the analogy systematically, noting that besides the great power
rivalries, parallels also happened in the exhaustion of artistic styles, the domination of both
periods by a few great cities, and that science and mathematics approached final formulations in
similar ways in antiquity and modernity. The outbreak of the First World War confirmed him in
his opinion that Western civilization had entered a period of great wars of annihilation.
After the Agadir Crisis of 1911, Spengler realized that a general European war was inevitable, and
that the West was entering a period of two centuries of wars for world power, like that between
the Battles of Cannae (216 BC) and Actium (31 BC). Spengler saw Germany as the equal of Rome,
but now it is more plainly the USA that is. It will establish hegemony over Europe, and create a
world empire.
Spengler had the first volume of his masterpiece, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, ready for
publication just as Germany surrendered to the allies in 1918, and it became extraordinarily
sought after throughout the German-speaking world. Called The Decline of the West in English,
in various translations, it became controversial throughout the whole world. It is not true, as is
often implied when The Decline of the West is mentioned, that Spengler thought the West was
collapsing or would soon be overcome by outsiders, but he saw that we were nearing the climax of
our western civilization and would decline or stagnate. Spengler seems not to have been quite
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accurate in his timescale but he predicted with reasonable accuracy the events of the twentieth
century and expected society to collapse or stagnate by 2200 AD.
With the loss of the world war, Spengler became involved in plots among right-wing aristocratic
circles to overthrow the Weimar government and establish an authoritarian regime. What
Germany needed to do, according to Spengler, was to rescue socialism from class warfare and
Marxism. The socialism of the future, would not be an economic theory, but a system of morality
for the conduct of public affairs. It would be ethical socialism.

The Decline of the West

Interested in the origin of civilized life, Spengler decided humanity is only about 100,000 years
old. In the past humanity has had four ages, three before the historical High Cultures began. Most
of human history was in the paleolithic, the remainder in the neolithic, precivilizationafter the
last ice age ended about 10,000 BCand lastly the time of the High Cultures, which began in the
Near East about 3,000 BC.
Spengler thought Nietzsches phrase transvaluation of all values captured the fundamental
character of the final dying phase of every Culture, what he called Civilization. The beginning of
a Civilization re-uses the forms of the culture that went before, understands them otherwise,
practises them in a different way. It ceases to create, but only reinterprets, whence the
negativeness common to all such periods. The genuine act of creation has already occurred, and it
merely inherits it.
The temporal quantum in the life of Spenglers High Cultures is the generation, a measure that
changes little over time, so Spengler believed that cultures go through life cycles of about the
same duration, and that each goes through similar phases.
A precultural period, when people are essentially barbarians, as in the Dark Ages of Europe;
Spring, an age of construction and faith like the High Middle Ages;
Summer, like the Renaissance and early Baroque, when the culture develops its distinctive arts
and sciences;
Autumn, when the fundamental insights of the culture reach full maturity if not necessarily
final form, as in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe;
Winter, when the creations of the past in art and science and spiritual life are perfected and
elaborated, but not fundamentally extended. Technology flourishes rather than new science.
For Spengler the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not new, but continued
the characteristically Western style of science established by people like Newton and Leibnitz.
This final age is the time of increase in quantity, not quality.
Spengler called spring, summer and autumn Culture, and winter Civilization. That mankind is
an active, fighting, progressing whole is a Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season.
Cultures with Civilizations, the late phase of a High Culture, have existed for only a small fraction
of the time that man has existed zoologically. Spengler does not explain how High Cultures arose
or what they have to do with each other. Each High Culture is equivalent to all the rest.
Spenglers method was to find examples of the art or political life of the spring, for instance, from
a variety of peoples and cultures. Which are we talking about? The ones from which data lines
have been entered are ancient Egypt (from the Hyskos to the twenty second Dynasty), China
(from the Hegemony of Chin to the end of the later Han Dynasty), the Classical world (from
Alexander to the end of the Roman Empire) and Islam. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom period
in Egypt and the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages in Europe are both characteristic products of
the spring.
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In the late-Classical age, Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism experienced the long death-struggle of the
Apollonian idealthe victory of natural order. In the interval from Socrateswho was the
spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and cityintellectualism became visibleto Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every ideal of the old Classical
age underwent transvaluation.
In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the time of King Asoka
(250 BC) as the parts of the Vedanta written before and after Buddha show. These illustrations
are all of equal significance in their own stories. They do not lead up to the modern West, but in
the end Spengler thought it possible that all the High Cultures might be part of a larger story.
There are streams of being which are in form in the same sense in which the term is used in
sports. When an athlete or team is in form, the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and
naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to
Bach.
Spengler held that by the beginning of the Christian Era, the Middle East was the home of an
awakening new culture which he called Magian, after the Magi of ancient Persia. Spenglers idea
was that the culture was composed of religious communities the way that the later West would be
composed of nation states. Thus, the Jews, the Christians of Syria and Anatolia, and the
Zoroastrians of Persia were all Magian communities. The birth of this new culture was masked,
however, by the accident that the Romans had political control over much of its territory.
Spengler calls this kind of distortion pseudomorphosis.
The new culture had to express itself in alien forms. It pretended to be Greek and Roman and as
such put Magian ideas into the West. The Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire
of the East, was a Magian polity. It was no different in spirit from its long-time foe, Sassanid
Persia, or from the Islamic Reformation which ultimately destroyed it. This culture reached its
final form in the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed as recently as the end of the First World War.
Spengler included the Ottoman Empire as one of four sample civilizations. Like Han China, the
Roman Empire, and the Empire phase of Egyptian history, it lasted roughly 500 years and went
through many of the same crises which these other empires also experienced. It was effectively a
universal state when it conquered the Middle East. The question is whether it can really be said to
represent the final form of a single, mature culture, or whether Islam will carry it further.
Spenglers presentation of economic history as a branch of culture, subject to styles and periods,
is a novel view of the subject. The peculiar ways of looking at the world that each culture develops
is true for itself, but fundamentally incomprehensible for the people of the other cultures.
Spengler spent his public career emphasizing the cultural unity of the West and the inevitability of
the end of national sovereignty, but seemed not to like international institutions.
While the High Cultures may borrow techniques from each other, they borrow nothing essential,
and even what they borrow they put to uses peculiarly their own. Spenglers best argument for
this is mathematics, where he shows how the West put Classical geometry and Arabian algebra to
uses that were different in kind from those of the societies that invented them. Historical
meaning, in fact, occurs only within each High Culture. There is no truth for mankind as a whole.
When a person occupies the same place in the life cycle of one civilization as someone else does in
another civilizations cycle, these people are said to be contemporary. For instance, Spengler
says that Alexander the Great in Classical times and Napoleon in the modern West are
contemporary. Even now the ethical socialism of the Western (Faustian) psyche, its
fundamental ethic, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that idealism is
walled up in the stone of the great cities.
Rousseau is the ancestor of this Socialism. He stands, like Socrates and Buddha, as the
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representative spokesman of a great civilization.

Rousseaus rejection of culture forms and conventions, his famous Return to the state of Nature,
his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium of
spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city
intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the late culture, and whoe pure reason longed to be
free from them and their authoritative form and their severity, from the symbolism with which it
was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated
by dialectic. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha.
So long as the man of a culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to follow straight
onwards naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive
morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms, but which he himself does not
controvert, because he has it. As soon as life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial
soil of great citiesintellectual worlds to themselvesand needs a theory to present life to
himself, morality turns into a problem.
Civilized ethics that are no longer the reflexion of life but the reflexion of knowlege upon life. One
need has made itself feltthe need of a practical morality for the observance of a life that can no
longer govern itself. Philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal
ethics occupied a modest place, but now it was moral philosophy. Epistemology has to give way to
hard practical needs or merge with them. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of
this type. Adelphiasophism the modern version.
Fundamanetally style is not just whimsy. The artist or designer does not just make the style out
of the air, personality, or brainthe style defines the artist. The style is a prime phenomenon of
the Culture, within it the style of life itself, be it the style of art or religion or thought. It is the
reflexion of Nature in the experience of people in that culture, their image in their world. In the
historical picture of a Culture there is but one style, the style of the Culture. Mere style-phases
Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empireare treated as if they were styles on the same
level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, or the Chinese style. Gothic and
Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same form, the style of the West as ripening
and ripened. Hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late
Gothic is with early Baroque, or late Romanesque with the late Baroque.
Each culture has made its own set of images of physical processes, which are true only for itself
and only alive when it is itself alive. The Nature of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem
in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near, and
Euclidian geometry. The Magian Culture can by symbolized by the arabesque and the cavernvaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of
mysterious substances like the philosophical mercury, neither a material nor a property but by
magic can transmute one metal into another. The outcome of the Western idea of Nature was a
dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the
conceptions of matter and form, to the Magian the idea of substances with visible or secret
attributes, and to the Western the idea of force and mass.
Just at the time of the emancipation of Western mathematics by Newton and Leibniz, Western
chemistry was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry
and mathematics alike became pure analysis when Robert Boyle (1626-91) devised the analytical
method and with it the Western conception of the element. That was the end of genuine
chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the
mechanical outlook which the Baroque Age had established through Galileo and Newton.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamicswords that as used in modern science, merely
traditional distinctions without deeper meaningare really the respective physical systems of the
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Apollonian, Magian and Western psyche, each of which grew up in its own culture and was limited
in validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of
Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue.
The symptom of decline in creative power often is a taste for the gigantic, but size is not, as in the
Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward greatness, but is meant to hide its
absence. This swaggering in specious dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizationswe find it
in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the Colossus of Rhodes, the
architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, and the American
skyscraper.
For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space
out of strokes and patches of colour, just what Wagner musically achieved in three barswhole
world could crowd into these three bars. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as
against contemplationpainting and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the
barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of
brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step.
An artificial art has no further organic future. The mark of the end is technical and prosaic artin
piles of bricks, unmade beds and lights merely switching on and off. Art is pursuit of illusions of
novelty called progress, of personal peculiarity, of the new style, of unsuspected possibilities, of
theoretical babble, of pretentious fashion, of prosaic pretenders in the poets place, of industrial
art, the unabashed farce which the art-trade has organized as latter day art-historyweightlifters with cardboard dumb-bells! The bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the
arts of the West. Our art dies of senility, having fulfilled its mission within the course of its
Culture.
Today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest.

The Alexandria of 200, as here in our world-cities, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists,
whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully
bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms
which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and
vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositionsall pattern-work. No one can date anything
within centuries, let alone decades, by its ornamentation. So it has been in the last act of all
Cultures.

Religion
Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is
carried through in the cities of art and intellect and closes with a finale of materialism in the
world-cities. But even these last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese,
Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of
myth shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed
mechanistically. The belief is belief in force and matter.
Unique and self-contained is Western materialism. In it the technical outlook upon the world
reached fulfilment. The whole world is a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable
down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can
dominate itthis is what distinguishes our particular return to Nature from all others.
Confucius also believed that Knowledge is Virtue, and Buddha, and Socrates, but Knowledge is
Power is a phrase that possess meaning only within the Judaeo-Christian Western Civilization.
The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre
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of the system. All these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism and what not are elevated
into the fitness morality which is the beacon of businessmen and politiciansPhilistines alikeand
turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification
by faith.
Christianity did not transform Western man, but Western man transformed Christianity, making
it a new religion and giving it a new moral direction. The it became I, the passion-charged
foundation of the sacrament of personal contrition, the passionate striving to set up a proper
morality as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanitywill-to-power in ethics, to
reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted. Nothing is more
characteristic of our own culture than Christianitya morality of imperative command.
The degree of piety of which an age is capable is revealed in its attitude towards toleration. One
tolerates something either because it seems to have some relation to the divine, or because of
indifference. Toleration in the classical world is the opposite of atheism. Plurality of numina and
cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion. To the Western psyche, dogma not visible
ritual is the core of religion. Opposition to doctrine is regarded as godless. A Western religion, by
nature of our cultures space-dominant dynamic, cannot allow any freedom of conscience. Even
free-thinking itself is no exception to the rule. All opinion leans to an inquisition of some sort.
Megalopolitans are irreligious. It is part of their being, a mark of their historical position. Atheism,
rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and
exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. What Spengler shrewdly
realized was that it is entirely compatible with a living desire for real religiousness, when that on
offer is no longer, or never was, valid. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with
the dawn of Civilization.
The natural beat in the being of the world-state city dwellers is ever decreasing, while the
tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous. This makes them
incapable of living any way but artificially. This is the conclusion of the citys history. Growing
from primitive barter-centre to culture-city and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the energy
and imagination of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of
that growth to the spirit of civilizationand so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.
Second Religiousness appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as
such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which
change ceases. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young
religiousness only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalisms fading out
in helplessness, then the forms of the springtime become visible and finally the whole world of the
primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the
foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at
this phase.
In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaningthe bringing back of the religion to the
purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. It was
Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Western worlds, to
the budding off of new religions at this point.
Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because,
for him, it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The mystic experience of
Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a S Bernard in the
presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but of a man who looks through narrow windows
on the streets and house walls and gables.
Luther liberated the Western personality. The person of the priest, which had formerly stood
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between it and divinity, however it was conceived, was removed. The common people welcomed,
enthusiastically the tearing up of visible duties, but did not realize that stricter intellectual duties
replaced them. The urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people were
concerned, has given little.
The holy causality of the contrition-sacrament, Luther replaced by the mystic experience of
inward absolution by faith alone. Both he and Bernard of Clairvaux understood absolution as a
divine miracle: man does not change himself, God changes him.
Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee.

For Bernard, belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for
Luther belief sank to doubt. From 1215, the Western priest was elevated above the rest of
mankind by the sacrament of ordination. By his hand even the poorest wretch could grasp God.
Protestantism destroyed this illusion of a link with the divine. While the strong do not need to hold
the hand of divinity, many do, and even Catholic priests could see the importance for the simple of
the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near and ever helpful, which could suffice for
the simple, with a priestly guide. Luther wanted the simple to be heroes. Christian life is a
desperate battle everyone must fight against the devil, and everyone who fought it fought it alone.

Arnold Toynbee
Spenglers chief competitor as a comparative historian was Arnold Toynbee whose work, A
Study of History, began to appear in 1934 and was finished in twelve volumes in 1961. Toynbee
was also convinced that the modern West was repeatin the behavior of the ancient Greek and
Roman civilization. Toynbee believed that the First World War in the West was contemporary
with the Peloponesian War between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece, which occurred more
than 200 years before the Punic Wars seen by Spengler as between contending states.
Toynbee did not believe in Spenglers rigid cycles. Toynbees Study was intended as a
correction of the Germans ideas. Spengler never attempted but the Study tried to cover the
whole world. Toynbee would note the parallels and common patterns in the lives of different
civilizations when they could be documented, but he refused to believe that history had ever been
predestined. Events could always be traced to some individual or collective act of will.
Toynbee recognized that the different civilization cycles were related to each other and fell into
certain classes. Both historians recognize Greco-Roman or Classical civilization as distinct from the
more properly so-called Western civilization which arose in Western and Central Europe during
the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Spengler said that the two societies had nothing
in common but a partial coincidence of territory and some inessential technology. Toynbee
insisted that Western Culture was obviously a successor to the Classical world. He also pointed out
that, while the Classical world was the creature of a certain limited geographical region, the West
was at least in principle a universal civilization, a characteristic it shared with China, which also
had a classical forerunner followed by a Dark Age, and with Islam. In comparison to both these
latter generations of civilization, the earliest civilizations, which in Eurasia arose in river valleys,
were really local developments. Egypt was never more than a small country. Still, even these
early societies seemed to manifest many of the crises and phases which their later regional and
universal descendants also experienced.
Finally, it must be noted that one of Toynbees chief preoccupations was what he called universal
states. This is the final political form into which civilizations tend to fall. While Spengler was also
keenly conscious of this final stage of his Winter phase of the historical cycle, he did not discuss the
universal states in great detail, though, in his earlier work, the US is a contender for the possible
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founder of the imperium mundi. Perhaps the United States did create the Western imperium
mundi in 1945, 150 years ahead of schedule. The situation of Rome after the end of the Second
Punic War was not so different from that of the United States after the Second World War.
The Empire is a theocracy. Macrohistorians like Arnold Toynbee have welcomed the prospect of
religious revival. Toynbee decided that history was really about the development of universal
religions, and only incidentally about civilizations. His Study of History became utterly
evangelical in its later volumes. Some suggestion of where it may lead is offered by Spenglers
famous prophecy of the the Second Religiousness:
Neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary
and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itselfit is only as if a mist cleared off the land
and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material
of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousnessonly otherwise
experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalisms fading out in helplessness, then the forms of
the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded
before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful in the guise of the popular
syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

Springtime is the first of the four metaphoric seasons that cultures evolved through. It
emphasized architectural novelty and ornamentation, with architecture initially dominant. Winter
brings us to civilization and the decline and fall of the Empire. When Civilization sets in, true
ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished: taste or fashion replaces
architectural style, methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, with capricious choice.

A Western Apocalypse?
And ourselves? Spengler saw the High Cultures as a series of ever-greater failures, later High
Cultures are more powerful and profound than the earlier ones, with the West reaching a
maximum. For Western existence the distinction between Culture and Civilization lies at about
the year 1800on the one side of that, frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself formed by
growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and
Napoleon, and on the other, the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms
fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and
amongst bodies and facts. That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a
linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialistin the sense of the word valid
for, and only valid for, Civilizationwhether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or
Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
Thus the present, roughly the early Winter of Western civilization, is not unique. Other
civilizations have also experienced comparable periods of secularism and aggressively individual
art and revolutionary politics, though each in its own form. The final phase of the West opens a
fifth and final age of the whole human story. The coming end of the West will be the greatest
catastrophe so far. By its end, the physical environment of the earth could be seriously disrupted.
Human populations could fall back to the sparse numbers of precivilization. The species could
even become extinct.
The end of the West as a High Culture is not purely pessimistic. As the era of its Civilization
advances, the West can be expected to produce a final version of science, of mathematics, of
politics, of ethics, even a measure of universal peace in the world empire. Spengler said he was
talking about the fulfillment of the West. The goal would not be achieved by nations and
individuals cooperating to establish theoretically correct solutions, but through the unprincipled
pursuit of national and individual self-interest.
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The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political
constitution of late Civilization. The destiny question is not that of states ideal task or structure,
but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means,
but only by a belief, of friend and foe, in their effectiveness. In every healthy state the letter of
the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living
constitution. The decisive problems lie, not in the working out of constitutions, but in effecting a
sound working government. It is always a definite minority, a single social stratum, which
provides the political lead, constitutionally or otherwise. At the point when a Culture is beginning
to turn itself into a Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisivelyand for the first
timeas an independent force.
The state, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So,
in the same phase, the great forms of the baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become
Classicist or Romanticist that is, sickly or formless. The idea of the whole nation being in form
for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This
holds good in morals, in arts and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois
revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hallmark the incomprehension of the old
symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the wish of enthusiastic thinkers and worldimprovers to see their conceptions actualized.
For the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The mistrust felt for high
form by the inwardly formless non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to
rescue its freedomfrom all formby means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and
is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up. With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts. It is the
transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least
two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures.
The transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism is a general phase of evolution, which occupies at
least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the
period of the Contending States. When, in 104 BC the urban masses of Rome for the first time
lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper
importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of assumption of the mythic
Emperor title by the ruler of Chin in 288 BC.
The place of the permanent armies as we know them will be taken by voluntary forces of eager
professional soldiers, and revert from millions to hundreds of thousands. These armies are not
substitutes for warthey are for war, and they want war. Within two generations, they will
prevail. These wars are for the heritage of the whole world, and continents will be staked. India,
China, South Africa, Russia, Islam will be called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed.
Popular education prepares the world for the coming Caesars. The nineteenth century began the
winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism,
and money. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom,
is nearing its end. The masses will accept the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey
them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism.
Caesarism is that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it
may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that
Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised
their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions,
however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real
importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar.
Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the
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situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had
reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of democracy might be turned into
actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these
rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A
hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies.

Democracy is simply forgotten. Low voter turnouts and the emergence of post-democratic
supranational entities like the European Union mean the end of democracy as anything but a
venerable anachronism.
The Empire, in the form of a universal state, can and does facilitate economic activity through the
rule of law, and through maintaining public order. It also taxes and regulates universally, in the
interests of income redistribution and toprevent disruption through economic change. So, the
expansive, technologically innovative economy that appeared in China during the politically
chaotic Sung and Yuan periods was brought to heel when order was restored in the Ming period.
By the eighteenth century, Chinas manufacturing sector was still huge and sophisticated, but
wholly subordinate to the imperial autocracy and gentry.
The arts under the Empire are well funded, technically proficient, and highly eclectic, but they are
not new. The art of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt can usually be dated to within a generation,
just as the periods of Western art can be easily distinguished from the Middle Ages on down.
When you get to the New Kingdomthe age of the Empirerepetition predominates, except for
freakish episodes like the Amarna period. The work that survives from the end of Egyptian
civilization is almost impossible to distinguish from that of the Old Kingdom 1500 years before.
Not all macrohistorians say that the Empire is inherently mortal. Spengler thought that the
Empire did not have to end. Fossils can last indefinitely. Classical civilization was destroyed by
historical accident. Toynbee thought that either the winner of another world war would create a
Western Universal State, or that an ecumenical society would arise peacefullywith western
characteristics and a world government, it would not be a Universal State in the traditional sense.
For Toynbee, the Universal States internal proletariat deserts it in favor of a higher religion,
while at the same time the outer barbarians become stronger and stronger.

Science Fiction?
William Atheling Jr, who dies in 1975, wrote science fiction under the pseudonym, James Blish.
Using the theory propounded by Oswald Spengler, Blish considered that science fiction was the
lieterature of the winter phase of western civilization, and so would never produce any towering
masterpieces. He explained his reasoning in the April 1979 edition of Futures magazine, a copy
of an item published posthumously in Foundation magazine the previous year.
Science fiction, on the face of it could never have existed without science, but some students of it
as a literary genre see similar fantastic fiction of previous ages as equivalent. Blish sees a
justification for this in Spenglers cyclic theory of history. Science fiction can be contemporary in
Spenglerian terms with early forms of fiction. As we have seen, contemporary to Spengler
meant in equivalent phases of the evolution of a culture. People who play a similar part in
different cultures are contemporary even if they lived centuries or millennia apart. Blish saw
Richard Nixon as contemporary with Caligula! Napolean and Hitler might be thought to have
common features but they are not contemporary, whereas Caesar and Trajan could be thought of
as contemporary with them. For Spengler, this age was the age of Caesarism in the western
culture.
Cycles of history limit peoples choices, if they want to succeed. the western culture has already
produced its great bards, poets, musicians, architects and painters in their appropriate times, so
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those with the ambition to be a Milton or Beethoven are too late to do it. Until we get to the
Fimbulwinter of the western culture, there is still scope for some lesser degrees of success, but
Milton and Beethoven have been, and the cycle has moved on, so that they cannot be bettered in
this culture we live in.
Once the autumn begins, civilization commences and real creativity begins to grind to a halt.
Napoleon began it, in the west. Great cities attract people from the countryside where they gather
in increasingly grest slums and tenements. Law is codified and history written. Arts adopt
standard models so that individuality wanes. Civilizations can last for many centuries as did
imperial Rome. Technology flourishes as it did in the Roman empire. Great works can still be
dones especially at the outset but they begin to dry up as the period lengthens and winter sets in.
This is the phase of contending states as the Chinese termed it, and the collapse of Caesarism.
Politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low
intelligence and complete moral plasticity.
James Blish

Familiar? Democracy becomes its own destroyer, when money destroys intellect. And:
Science disintegrates into a welter of competing grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each
other almost weekly and veer more and more towards the occult.
James Blish

A second religiousness arises among the masses that no one actually believes in, and this is upheld
by syncretism in which snippets of other religions are taken out of context and welded into the
latest one. Popular feeling turns towards occult matters, allowing science and religion to merge.
The poor classes grow to unprecedented levels, and have to be humoured grossly to prevent
discontent. In the arts, the lately respected traditions become old hat, and even schools fall into
disrespect. Instead confused individual experimentation and fads replace them. The aim is meant
to be originality, but the time for genuine invention has passed by, and tongu-in-cheek novelty
and bad taste substitute for it. Culture is dead. Winter has set in.
So, Blish is able to explain science fiction as a literary syncretism in which decaying scientific
forms meld with fantasy and the occult to feed a growing second religiosity. Science fiction draws
in besides the technology and terminology of science, pseudo-sciences like ESP, parallel universes
and psycho kinesis. Spiritualism and reincarnation are brought in. The spirits find tehnology
useful for communicating with the livingtape recorders have ghostly voices, computer screens
glow with ghostly writing, and TVs project ghostly figures. Cynicism leads science fiction into
Dianetics and Scientology.
Though the restraints of fate are severe, the chances of exercising free will remain. They are
merely bounded. Spengler says:
For us whom Fate has placed in this culture and at this moment of its development, the moment
when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches, our
direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is
not worth living. We have not the freedom to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to
do nothing. A task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against
him.

We can be led willingly or be dragged along against our will. Those who do not sense and
understand the forces of the time in which they are born, who trust to the surfacepublic opinion,
popular phrases and the ideals of the day, are not of the stature for its events. A yearning wakes
for whatever worthy tradition still lingers alive. The in-form powers, which the rationalism of the
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Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken. The tradition and nobleness of the money-disdaining high
ethic that has saved itself up for the future can revive at the center. The genuine statesman is
distinguished from the mere politicianthe seeker after wealth and rankby the fact that he
dares to demand sacrifices and obtains them. His feeling he is necessary to the time and the
nation is shared by thousands, transforming them to the core and rendering them capable of
unlikely deeds.
When science and religion overlap, we can follow with complete cynicism as Scientologists or with
pride and justification as Adelphiasophists. Adelphiasophism lets Nature lead, and, if Spengler has
his law of history correct, then we shall obey it quite naturally.
With the formed state having finished its course, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep.
Humanity is a plant again, attached to the soil, quiet and enduring. The timeless village and the
eternal peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth. People live from
hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and continue to live into a new springtime.
Should we return unprepared as in the past ot should we be preparedas Adelphiasophists?

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