Oswald Spengler on the Second Religiosity
Discussion
John Michael Greer:
"Spengler noted that the waning of each civilization’s age of reason brought about a revival of its earlier religious forms—but with a difference. Religious traditions in the springtime of a culture are organic growths, drawing heavily on the folk traditions and popular culture of the time. The revival of traditional religion in the wake of an age of reason, by contrast, is an artificial growth, shaped by the concerns of the waning civilization’s intellectual classes.
The Second Religiosity, as Spengler called it, is formal, ordered, tolerant, autumnal. It can hardly be anything else, because it comes into being as a refuge from chaos. Each civilization begins in an age of faith, when vivid archetypal narratives backed by potent collective emotions define the basic structures of thought and action. As the civilization matures, its version of rationalism—whatever that happens to be—dissolves the old religious narratives, replacing them with a set of secular narratives that claim to offer some form of salvation in the here and now in place of the otherworldly goals of religion. Inevitably, though, heaven on earth fails to arrive on schedule and the secular narratives break apart, leaving most people without any culturally provided narratives to give meaning and direction to their lives. The flight to religion follows promptly.
Yet the people who flee back to religion no longer have the mentality that made the age of faith what it was. They can make themselves believe in religious narratives by an act of will, but they cannot embrace myths and legends with the wholehearted innocence of a culture’s springtime. In 1023 AD, the world was so full of marvels and mysteries that nobody in Europe had any problem believing that a suitably holy person could be born of a virgin, rise from the dead, and soar up through the air into heaven in the sight of a crowd of witnesses. A thousand years later, most people have to make a sustained effort to reach the state of willing suspension of disbelief in which those traditional claims can be accepted. The age of reason has left its mark, and the habit of testing claims against logic and experience is hard to break, even when logic and experience have already proven themselves to be frail reeds.
There’s another difference, and it’s a crucial one. An age of faith is born out of the wreckage of a fallen civilization. In the case we’re discussing, it wasn’t merely Classical rationalism that crashed to the ground—in the eyes of a great many people who witnessed Rome’s decline, an entire civilization was refuting itself, and they embraced Christianity precisely because it was the rejection of everything that was so obviously failing around them. Centuries earlier, when Classical civilization’s age of reason imploded, the people who flocked back to the temples of the old gods did so in an attempt to prop up everything that Christians later rejected. Thus it was above all the successful and privileged classes that drove the Classical world’s Second Religiosity, and it was the silent masses of the Roman world, the ones who got few of the benefits and carried most of the costs of Classical civilization, who turned away from the traditional faiths of their societies to the first whispered rumors about a man in the province of Judea who was born of a virgin and rose from the dead."