Thomas Cole: The Course of Empire: Arcadian or Pastoral State
Let us begin with the German Spengler, who likens civilization to a living organism, which has its own stages of development, which have their own sequence, and to which he gives the names of the seasons.
The springtime of civilization, in his conception of high culture, is the period of rural intuition, it is the time of the birth of the great style and the expression of the world-view, and after it the earliest mystical-metaphysical rendering of the world-view and the zenith of scholasticism - that is the epoch of legends, epics and heroic deeds - the Theseus, the Gospels, the Grail legends, the time of Homer and the Vedic religion, and after that the epoch of Hesiod, Origen and Aquinas, the Avesta and the Talmud.
The summer of Civilization - that is the period of the maturation of consciousness, that is the Reformation and the questioning of the forms of the springtime - through Orphism, Augustine, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, Savonarola, Ján Hus and Copernicus, Luther and Calvin, and beyond that the beginning of the philosophical worldview - that is the era of the Presocratics, the Upanishads, Galileo, Bacon and Descartes. It is the period when civilization comes up with its own conception of number as a representation of its own worldview -through classical geometry, Near Eastern algebra, or our understanding of number as a function. Finally, the summer period is capped by the arrival of Puritanism and a rationalist conception of religion-through Pythagoras, Mohammed, iconoclasm, the Puritans, and French Jansenism.
The autumn of civilization, the time of the city's intelligentsia, and the height of intellectual creativity, is the time of the "Enlightenment," the belief in the omnipotence of reason, the cult of nature, and rational religion-this is the time of Buddha, Socrates, Alkindi, and Rousseau; after it the zenith of mathematical thought, and finally the great systems of conjecture-Plato, Aristotle, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Goethe and Kant, Yoga and Vedanta.
And finally comes the winter of civilization, the time of the dawn of the world city. There comes a materialistic worldview and a cult of prosperity - as in the Cynics and the late sophists, in some movements in Islam or in our own through Comte, Darwin or Marx, and after them a period of scepticism - Epicurus, Nietzsche, Wagner ; the consummation of mathematical thought (Gauss, Archimedes, Euclid, al-Khwarizmi), all before the degradation of abstract thought into lecture philosophy, and finally the consummation of all possible forms by the propagation of the final world-sense.
On the political plane, it divides the pre-cultural, cultural and civilizational epochs. In the pre-cultural period, there is a chaos of primitive forms of expression, of mystic symbolism and naive expression; it is the time of tribes and chiefdoms, a pre-political state. The period of culture follows, when a style of inner being is formed and politics is articulated into peoples according to a particular form of expression. Finally comes the period of civilization, when culture becomes formless, with rapidly-changing fashions, and the urban population dissolves into an inorganic, cosmopolitan, formless mass.
Civilization thus goes through a cycle during its lifetime: From the dawn of a great culture in times veiled by mythological and legendary mists , when man's connection to his native breast, to the land, to the earth, is fullest, through the materialization of the soul of this civilization in its creative Middle Ages, and the later gradual urbanization and urban intellectualism, until finally their light is snuffed out by the incessant growth of the cosmopolitan metropolis, which has already severed all ties with the ecological environment out of which it was born.
David Engels, who is a follower of Spengler, starts from the division of the life cycle of civilisation into the 'thesis', 'antithesis' and 'synthesis' phases - with the thesis period representing the initial rural, spiritual phase and the antithesis period the urban, rational phase of the history of civilisation.
The English historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee divides the life cycle of civilizations into several stages. The first is "genesis"-the birth of a civilization in response to some environmental challenge. This is followed by the growth stage, when a creative minority is able to respond successfully to the challenges of the times. The end of this phase occurs with the entry into the decay phase when the creative minority; ceases to be creative and loses the ability to respond successfully to the challenges of the times. Consequently, civilization collapses, dividing into a dominant minority, the internal and external proletariat. The emergence of the universal state is immediately preceded by a period of turmoil, before civilization disintegrates.
Toynbee's view of the chronological structure of civilizations does not point to a predetermined lifespan: he gives examples of abortive civilizations that passed through the birth phase but failed to make it to the growth phase; also the example of the Muslim "Iranian" civilization, which collapsed prematurely during the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry. His model of the development of civilizations theoretically allows civilization to grow ad infinitum, provided that the creative minority remains creative, or that someone within the civilization always manages to find a creative response to the challenge of the times.
His rhythm of civilization begins with the Völkerwanderung, the migration of peoples, obscured by the heroic phase of the mythological mist, embodied in the great epics of conquerors seizing a derelict universal empire. And it continues with the emergence of a world religion that remains as a memory of the extinct civilization of the previous generation; as a chrysalis from which a new civilization will be born. This idea was once mentioned in the words of the English giant Gilbert Keith Chesterton in his work Orthodoxy: in Chapter 9, "Christianity was far from belonging to the Dark Ages, but it was the only way during the whole of the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two luminous civilizations (...) Constantine nailed a cross to the mast of a ship. It is quite true that the ship then sank, but what is much stranger is that it reemerged: repainted and shining, still with the cross at the top of the mast. It is astonishing what Christianity has done: it has turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under a mass of waters; after we were buried beneath the wreckage of dynasties and clans, we rose up and remembered -you- Rome. If our faith were but the whim of a fading empire, twilight would follow whim after whim, but if civilization ever reemerged (many never did) it would be under some new barbarian flag. But the Catholic Church was the last life of the old society, and was at the same time the first life of the new."[1]
Civilization thus emerges along with religion, and by gradual responses to the challenges of the times it is able to advance further, opening new horizons for the human spirit until all its creative life-force, all its élan vital, is consumed by destructive cataclysmic wars, in which it is utterly exhausted, and as the one-eyed among the blind, only one power remains to bring to an exhausted world the longed-for peace and universal empire that are the last glimpses of Indian summer in the cooling October sun, the last gleam of civilization's glory before its inevitable disintegration.
Caroll Quigley's chronological structure divides the development of civilizations into seven phases: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decline, and invasion. When he dated these stages to Western civilization, for example, he showed that the succession of these stages is not entirely set in stone, and that the protagonists of a civilization can revert back to a period of growth even after a phase of conflict. For Quigley, the main obstacle to growth is the gradual ossification (institutionalisation) of the instruments of expansion of civilisation, where they cease to serve their original purpose and become a vehicle in their own right. If this ossification can be overcome, by reforming the institution or bypassing it by shifting its function elsewhere. If neither of these options succeeds, civilization starts to go downhill.
Jaroslav Krejčí comes up with a scheme that mirrors the concepts of his two predecessors, Toynbee and Quigley, dividing the history of each civilization into five phases, namely, heroic, founding, classical, retreat, and fatal, with the retreat phase of the older civilization corresponding to the heroic phase of the new civilization, and the fatal phase of the older civilization being the founding phase of the new civilization.
[1] CHESTERTON, Gilbert Keith: Orthodoxy, chapter 9.
It's interesting that the metaphor of seasons to track the change in civilization was used. Inherently, this implies a cyclical nature of civilization which, as was mentioned, could be aborted in the birth stage.
Moreover, seasons such as spring and winter come with certain connotations that could have influenced the placement of these ideas - enlightenment during winter appears incongruous.