Materialism and the Second Religiousness

In this post we will finally be talking about the full death and rebirth of religion during the Winter of a higher culture’s life-course.

Materialism is a notion that, as we are now familiar with, is personal to each of the higher cultures. Materialism as a stage is the solidification of those cultural forms, devoid of any metaphysical energy from the spring period, nor any scent of the blood of the countryside. Philosophically it is seen in China with Yang Zhu’s Confucianism (440 – 360 BC), the Lakayata and Samkhya schools of 6^th – 4^th Century BC India, Socrates, the sceptic descendant of the pre-Socratics and ancestor of the cynics in Greece, and materialism is nowhere more exemplified than in our own civilisation from the industrial revolution onwards, resulting in various unmetaphysical doctrines such as evolution, socialist ethics, Nietzsche’s superman, which are all taken as synonymous with reality today but are merely calcified shades of a previous spirituality already apparent as far back as the scholastics of the 1200s.

In 1277, Aristotle’s works were banned by the Bishop of Paris for positing the inherently limited nature of the universe, non-existent outside the largest of a series of concentric spheres surrounding the earth and forming the tangible cosmos, on the grounds that God could arbitrate the earth to be anywhere and the universe organised as he saw fit. Within such an assertion lies the whole history of the following eight hundred years, the will to power as ultimate arbitrarily applied force, the Copernican opposition to earth at the centre of creation, the universe as a commanded machine and the young Faustian opposition to the hardened rationalism of a long since dead culture. What was expressed in early times by vague metaphysical sentiment, simply assumes a new material form when reason cannot live in harmony with the unknown.

Materialism is closely linked to ethics, as philosophies like Stoicism, Buddhism and Socialism all become popular as a “causality of act” in the winter/civilisation period, which further calls upon examination of earlier forms of conduct to identify these movements, not as eureka-like breakthroughs in history, but as the next step of a directionally moving zeitgeist approaching fulfilment. The technical mindset of Western civilisation brings the idea of the function to full effect, without God as a motivator, social ideals turned to ideas of the spread of evolution and progress instead, the one developing the bodies of man, the latter developing their minds, but specifically to the amassing of the only tangible metric left: material and money.

One of the challenges Spengler specifies in the cities is the need for the release of intellectual tension then and again, this is done by entertainment and relaxation, for which all the cities in the world from the first to last possessed without limit. But Materialism itself, also being a product of the city intellect, reaches relaxation by toying around with spiritual ideas as play things. Religion, just like late-stage art, possessing no inner meaning or direction anymore, becomes fashionable. Atheists in action are Christians by word and the cross they hang round their necks, cults are invented out of thin air so people can feel like they are part of something greater, which the United States today is as familiar with as the Greco-Egyptians when they conjured up the Serapis cult, or the Romans with the Isis cult of the republic. Forms dissolve and pass in and out of popularity as brands of clothing, and pretentious money-makers delude the public into believing their words of tripe possess some meaning.

‘Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest.’ (Decline 2.9.6)

Materialism is far too high-tension to sustain in the long run, when sterility sets in, when Caesars are on the rise and politics becomes about great individuals again, when the offerings of high society prove they cannot replace the soul with intellect and art is now in the process of constant recycling as seen in Constantine’s triumphal arch, we get the second religiousness.

“It 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 time-periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-Hwang-ti’s (Qin Shi Hwang) time in China.” (Decline 2.9.6)

Spengler does not look upon this with relief, but it is regarded as a return of the springtime forms with ripened and learned experience on its side. Physics reaches its limits of explanation and fails to fully describe the world successfully; the form of the form is revealed to be nothing. The moment enlightenment shows it can bleed, the masses seize upon it and begin to qualify anew the world with some form of underlying metaphysical or spiritual basis again. Hostility to scientific proofs create a vacuum, not for learned scholastics, but for spontaneous and sentimental thought to flurry without a fear of shrewd rationalists in the cities.

Classical philosophy had run its course by 150 BC. The age of Socrates saw rationalism as the religion of the educated, with scholar philosophy above them and superstition below them among the masses. On this turning point, both intellectual and popular predispositions turned back towards religion. In Sulla’s time there was a religious stoicism among the upper class, and syncretism had started to weld and assimilate Phrygian, Syrian and Egyptian cults with forgotten classical mysteries.

Syncretism, that is, the merging of multiple faiths into one, is a commonality among all revived spiritualism; the second religiousness sees the merging of rationalist doctrines with the peasant tales and springtime motives. In the classical from 100 BC, in China from 67 BC, this syncretism begins. In the latter, China brings in Mahayana Buddhism, the foreignness of holy writings and buddha figures as charms and fetishes made the potency of their holy effects all the greater. This syncretism is most clearly seen in the form of the world-weary Buddha ascending to Godhood during the Indian Imperial period (150 BC). Intellectual theories on Nirvana gave way to simpler doctrines of heaven, hell and salvation, ideas likely borrowed from the Persian apocalypses. With the arrival of the scholar Nagajuna in 150 AD, the whole proto-Indian mythology made a return to circulation, resulting in a transfer of the Krishna and Rama legends to Vishnu, whose religion was fully formed around 300 BC. Elsewhere, the Middle Eastern second religiousness drove Islam into the background as old ideas of purgatory, hell, the last judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, fairies, saints and spooks all made a return.

Lastly, this brings us onto a more aristocratic form of second religiousness, that of the emperor-cults witnessed in Rome and China.

‘The elevation of men to divinity is the full-cycle return to the springtime in which gods were converted into heroes — exactly like these very emperors and the figures of Homer — and it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions of this second degree. Confucius himself was deified in a.d. 57, with an official cult, and Buddha had been so long before. A1 Ghazali (c. 1050), who helped to bring about the “Second Religiousness” of the Islamic world, is now, in the popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint and helper.’ (Decline 2.9.6)

A century before the first Chinese Augustus, Mencius wrote that “The people is the most important element in the country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the crops, and least in importance comes the ruler.” Which to the modern mind is a few words away from being indistinguishable from the mentality of our civilisation period thus far. In the second religiousness, the political gets swept up in the prevailing sentiment and comes to present itself in the ways of pre-cultural and springtime beliefs. Early Greek religion was characterised by the demigod as the bridge between man and divinity, so also the Caesars of this period come to characterise themselves as demigods in nature, with the Aeneid, in standard fashion for all things historical in the classical world, tracing Augustus’ lineage back to Aeneas, a demigod founder of Rome and son of Venus. These emperor-cults can be just as potent as normal religions as they come to demand organisation and cult-like behaviour to match the myths they come to represent. Could the future Caesar figures of the West assume such a divine, God-Emperor status? Perhaps we can imagine in a century or two the canonization of future presidents or rulers in the West to play into saintly myths of the early spring time. Only time will tell.

Beyond this, we lastly arrive at the fellah religions. On the Somme every second had causal significance, every decision in World War 2 is the lauded choice that allowed Britain to win. But in the future, for all cultural forms, decades and centuries barely matter as the civilisation decays and quietens down. Religious history ends more or less here for the higher cultures, as here the higher culture dies and all following paths become arbitrary flavours of the millennia.