Culture and Science – Atheism

To contrast his connections between Science, Religion and Culture, Spengler devotes a chapter to the subject of Atheism. If you are to ask an Atheist what they believe in, a snide response you may receive is that being an Atheist requires no such belief in anything and is simply a scepticism of the idea of God, where all else varies. This is but a half-truth. Indeed, without God, the atheist may toy with a myriad of aesthetics and convictions that are only adjacent to his position on religion. However, for all the galaxy brained takes they wield to challenge the idea of the one true God (most commonly the Christian God), they neglect to realize the relativity of their own position. Perhaps there are in fact many faiths and beliefs are culturally relative, but then what about atheism itself? Can Atheism possess convictions relative to their culture that limit their influence to a certain point in a society’s history?

Juxtaposed to the idea that Atheism is a negation, an antithesis, to the God idea, Spengler suggests that Atheism is in fact the final form of a religious order; instead of being a dichotomy of belief, Atheism is merely another historical stage in the development of a worldview. Specifically, it is the energy that arrives with a civilisation, it is religion passed into the inorganic, leaving behind a sentiment of romanticism for an organic, spiritual time now lost but immensely desired.

In as much as Atheists would love to claim that their scepticism is seen across time, the reality for most of history, that is up until the city intellect took hold, atheism was (in spirit) an impossibility. It is immensely tied to the coming of the new Science and the new Ethic. When we understand that movements such as this are not definitive moments in time, but as energy can bubble up from the collective conscience and manifest in a variety of symbolic fashions, we may identify Aristotle as an Athiest unabiding; for the invocations of a “god” in the teachings of the Buddha or the late Roman period, our understanding of what that entails shifts and becomes once again more romantic than actual: “God may not be a real entity but he is symbolic”.

As Atheism takes over in the Autumn of Civilisation, we find it will carry on the basic prime symbol like a relay baton into the next era. Apollonian man carries the body into his stoic worldview, Magian man carries the Cavern into his Alchemical worldview, and Faustian man caries the infinite into an era where life once lived is now life achieved by mechanism and a profane causality. Nietzsche formulated Atheism as “God is dead” whilst the same idea is conveyed in the Roman times as “the Gods that dwell in the holy places are dead”, suggesting the plurality of numina are gone.

The piety of a late civilisation is often in correlation to their perspective on tolerance, for toleration may be used to allow ideas that do not align directly with what is self-evident, but are nevertheless felt as spiritual. The Greeks and Romans were very tolerant during the late period, this was an extension of their belief in gods presiding over specific regions. If one were to travel to Babylon then it was Babylon’s gods whom they honoured as your native gods are in a far-off land now. For this reason, Christians and Jews appeared as Atheists because they lacked a certain tolerance for the plurality of gods, the pantheon, and so exposed themselves to Apollonian man as utterly godless. This is in contrast to the Faustian whose own form of godlessness was not determined by a lack of respect for the local gods, but a lack of doctrine. As the Faustian Will is all consuming across space, objections to the doctrine are a sign of Atheism. Revealed in more familiar language, the atheist of the 20th Century was the anti-fascist, the anti-communist, the internationalist, or the unpatriotic, and their Atheistic beliefs are self-realizable; lack of conviction was a sign of heresy (apply this to modern atheist movements as you so please).

In these Atheistic civilizations, a lack of adherence to the local customs could result in worse potentialities than if you were to visit their respective cultures. It was Athens that murdered Socrates for corrupting the youth and straying them from their gods. It was Rome who burned the books of Numa by Pythagoras. Of course they would justify this by accusing their opposition of Atheism, but symbolically they were the fundamental Atheist themselves: a corrupted equivalent of older spiritual ideas, enforcing their attitudes via their rules for tolerance.