The Decline of The West - Religion's Role

Religion's Role

Spengler is neither wholly pro-religion nor anti-religion, but he does differentiate between manifestations of religion that appear within a civilization's developmental cycle. He sees each culture as having an initial religious identity, which eventually results in a reformation-like period, followed by a period of rationalism, and finally entering a period of second religiousness that correlates with decline. Intellectual creativeness of a Culture's Late period begins after the reformation, usually ushering in new freedoms in science.

The scientific stage associated with post-reformation Puritanism contains the fundamentals of Rationalism. Eventually rationalism spreads throughout the Culture and becomes the dominant school of thought. To Spengler, Culture is synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a religious trend that arises in the countryside, is carried through to the cultural cities, and ends in materialism in the world-cities.

Spengler described the process by which Enlightenment rationalism undermines and destroys itself, passing from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism. The Cartesian self-centered rationalism leads to schools of thought that do not cognize outside of their own constructed worlds, ignoring actual every-day life experience. It applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. In reaction to the educated elites, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness, which manifests as deeply suspicious of academia and science.

The Second Religiousness appears as a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state. The Second Religiousness occurs concurrently with Caesarism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization. Both the Second Religiousness and Caesarism demonstrate the lack of youthful strength or creativity that the Early Culture once possessed. The Second Religiousness is simply a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture.