The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  The warriors marched forward, the grim Jewish army, until they had come to the Christ.

  There he stood, the famous chieftain.

  Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action

  Held their position in front.

  They spoke to their chieftain, “My Lord chieftain”, they said, “if it should now

  Be your will that we be impaled here under spear points

  Wounded by their weapons then nothing would be so good to us as to die here

  Pale from mortal wounds for our chieftain”.

  Then he got really angry

  Simon Peter, the mighty, noble swordman flew into a rage.

  His mind was in such turmoil he could not speak a single word.

  His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there.

  So he strode over angrily, that very daring Thane, to stand in front of his commander

  Right in front of his Lord.

  No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest he drew his blade

  And struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands

  So that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword.

  His ear was chopped off.

  He was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with the mortal wound

  Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound.

  The men stood back; they were afraid of the slash of the sword.9

  The Ruthwell Cross - An 8th century Anglo-Saxon cross carved with runic inscriptions from one of the first English poems.

  This was the era of Charlemagne, when The West was born, under one Emperor and one Faith. The ethos was Chivalry, born from the synthesis of Gothic Christianity, and celebrated in epic literature. The Song of Roland, an 11th century saga of the battles of Charlemagne in the 8th century, is regarded as the foundation of the ethos, with the duties of a Knight enunciated:

  To fear God and maintain His Church

  To serve the liege lord in valour and faith

  To protect the weak and defenceless

  To give succour to widows and orphans

  To refrain from the wanton giving of offence

  To live by honour and for glory

  To despise pecuniary reward

  To fight for the welfare of all

  To obey those placed in authority

  To guard the honour of fellow knights

  To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit

  To keep faith

  At all times to speak the truth

  To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun

  To respect the honour of women

  Never to refuse a challenge from an equal

  Never to turn the back upon a foe.10

  This epoch from the 7th century was the birth and blossoming of the Western culture-organism; not Jewish, Arab, Roman, or Greek, but a unique life-form making its own impress on ethics, mathematics, physics, architecture, music, and warfare.

  Romanesque & Gothic Styles

  “Romanesque” was the first properly Western style of architecture. It was so named due to its use of Roman classical columns and arched vaults. Again, this emphasising of outside influences on Western culture obscures the unique and self-contained character of cultures. The implication is that today’s civilisation is the sum total of preceding cultures in a procession, each handing the torch of civilisation on to the next in line culminating in the Late West, which some such as Francis Fukuyama even call “the end of history” because they cannot envisage anything more prefect than Late Western liberal-democracy and capitalism.

  Lessay Abbey, Normandy, France.

  Western civilisation is regarded as the descendent in particular of the Graeco-Roman, with major input from the Arab, Indian and Chinese. Such similarities are superficial. The Western perspective is not Greek, Roman, Indian, Arab or Chinese, any more than the Russian is Western. The Western perspective of infinite space that Spengler called “Faustian” informed every aspect of its High Culture including those elements that were adapted from others, such as the column and the arched vault; becoming the purely Western-Faustian “Gothic” style.

  The “Romanesque”, despite the name being applied to it centuries later (19th century), seeks escape from the earth-bound solidity of the Classical Roman Temple, while the Western soul finally soars unbound several centuries later with the Gothic. The Romanesque sought communion with the body of Christ, and with the representation of the heavenly Jerusalem on earth. Jerusalem for Western Christendom became as much the axis mundi as for Judaism and Islam. It is a spiritual axis and again to compare the outlook of the Westerner with that of the Jew or Muslim is not only fallacious but harmful.

  The portal of the Romanesque church represented the metaphor of Christ that he is “the door”.11 The Romanesque portal guided the entry from the secular to the spiritual into the interior of the church. The portal lead the way of the faithful as symbolic of Christ leading the way. The development from Romanesque to Gothic was away from the Church as a material representation and towards transcendence from the earthly plain to spirit. The monk Bernard of Angers, writing of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy of Conques in 1013 described the allegorical character of the architecture, with the basilica comprised of three forms by the division on the roofs, “but on the inside these three forms are united across their width to shape the church into one body”, thus representing the trinity.12

  Romanesque: Cathedral of Pisa, Italy.

  Gothic: Milan Cathedral, Italy.

  From the 12th century, starting in France, the uniquely Western style started manifesting in its most recognisable form: Gothic. The Gothic Cathedral was the purest expression of the Western “Faustian” soul. The theologian Nicole Oresme (1320-1382) referred to this religious world-feeling towards infinity, writing that there is “Beyond the cosmos an infinite void that reflects the infinity and immensity of God”.13 While the “imaginative” faculty of the Western mind in its formative stage strived towards the infinity of God; in the Late civilisation epoch of rationalism, the Faustian imperative continues, no longer in the name of God, but of science, reaching out towards the infinity of space with rocketry. Both Gothic spire and spaceship symbolise the Faustian imperative; one of High Culture, the other of Late civilisation.

  The genius of Gothic man is shown in an architecture and engineering that is alone Western.

  “The whole scheme of the building is determined by, and its whole strength is made to reside in a finely organized and frankly confessed framework rather than in walls. This framework, made up of piers, arches and buttresses, is freed from every unnecessary incumbrance of wall and is rendered as light in all its parts as is compatible with strength — the stability of the building depending not upon inert massiveness, except in the outermost abutment of active parts whose opposing forces neutralize each other and produce a perfect equilibrium. It is thus a system of balanced thrusts in contradistinction to the ancient system of inert stability. Gothic architecture is such a system carried out in a finely artistic spirit”.14

  “Interiors induce a sense of infinity by making the beholder aware of the unending variety and limitlessness of God’s creation, the Andachtsbilder induced a sense of infinity by permitting the beholder to submerge his being in the boundlessness of the Creator Himself”.15

  The restlessness of spirit, which well describes the Faustian imperative, is recognised as Gothic across the arts and sciences:

  “This compulsion and lack of peace characterize the Gothic in all forms, preventing relaxation and the lapse into partial awareness. Gothic nervousness quickens the senses as more of the mind becomes awake to more of the world. Even in its embryonic state, Gothic art displayed the type of agitation that would continue to appear in Gothic architecture and literature”.16

  Comparative Culture Styles

  While the Gothic Cathedral expresses infinite space, the Arab dome
symbolises the vault of heaven. A Koranic verse states: “And we have made the sky a roof withheld (from them). Yet they turn away from its portents”.17

  Islamic architecture: Dome of the Rock Mosque, Jerusalem, Israel.

  “The dome is, of course, a cosmic symbol in every religious tradition; and symbolically, in Islam the dome represents the vault of heaven in the same way as the garden prefigures Paradise.”18

  This contrasts to the Gothic, Islamic architecture reflecting,

  “Enclosed space, defined by walls, arcades and vaults, [as] the most important element of Islamic architecture. The tendency to an infinite repetition of individual units (bays, arches, columns, passages, courtyards, door-ways, cupolas) and the continuous merging of spaces without any specific direction or any specific centre or focus. And if a definite spatial limit is reached, such as a terminal wall, the surface that should stop the progress of anyone moving through the building will be decorated with patterns that repeat themselves, leading on visually beyond the given limit of the wall, surface, vault or dome”.19

  Russia is not part of the Western civilisation despite the attempts of Peter the Great (Petrinism), Catherine the Great, Lev Trotsky, Boris Yeltsin and sundry others in both Russia and the West to make it so. Russia is its own distinct culture-organism. Remaining with architecture as an example of the expression of different race-souls, the dome is here as with the Arabic, the focus of symbolism, representing the celestial space. The product of the Eastern Church of Byzantium, the “dome of Byzantine churches represents the firmament covering the earth like a lid.”20

  The Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov explained this contrast of soul-feeling between the Gothic and the Byzantium:

  “…whether it is the dome of St. Sophia in Constantinople, which so admirably represents the heaven of Divine Wisdom reflected on earth, or whether it is the cupola of stone or wood of a Russian village church full of sweetness and warmth — the impression is the same. The Gothic temple rises in pride toward the transcendent, but in spite of the unnatural feeling striving toward the heights, there is always the feeling of an insurmountable distance, yet unattained. Under the Orthodox dome, on the other hand, one has the sense of a bowed humility which assembles and reunites; there is the feeling of life in the house of the Father, after the union between divine and human was created”. 21

  Russian Orthodox Church: Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Moscow.

  The Faustian urge is one of ever striving for the unattainable divine in the cosmos. For the Russian an inner unity with the divine: hence, the mystical character of the Russian soul that endures despite hardship; in contrast to the restless spirit of the Westerner. Instead of the heavenward Gothic spire there is the upward pointing flame atop the dome of the Russian church reaching towards God. The difference between the Gothic spire and the Orthodox flame is that,

  “It is through the flame that heaven descends to earth, enters the church, and becomes the ultimate completion of the church, the consummation, in which the hand of God covers everything earthly, in a benediction from the dark blue dome”.22

  In the West, Faustian humanity aspired to ascend to Godhead; in Orthodox humanity the Russian seeks the descent on Earth of the Holy Spirit.

  Chinese architecture reflects the insularity of the Chinese, is earthbound, symmetrical and defensive. The buildings were traditionally of a common height; social hierarchy was symbolised instead in the expanse. The upward curves of the roof are gently pointing heaven-ward. The focus of architecture was to connect geologically. Even reaching heavenward man must remain earthbound, mountain-like. Heaven and earth were within, Confucius stating: “Heaven and earth grow within me simultaneously and all things become one with me”.23

  One can discern the gulf between the souls of the Chinese and Gothic-Faustian, which are now obscured by China having adopted the economic paradigm of the Late West; obscured but not obliterated. The Chinese sought to merge with the landscape; the Faustian to dominate. “In traditional Chinese architecture, by contrast, the building merges with the site. There is a reciprocal penetration and permeation between the natural environment and the manmade environment”.24 Traditional Chinese construction does not seek to dominate the landscape but to meld with it, creating a spatial sequence that connects heaven and earth through the medium of man.25 Space is seen inwardly, as a void to be utilised,26 where the Faustian sees infinity. China, after repudiating its tradition, and adopting the Western economic model via Marxism, now seeks conversely to dominate the landscape to the extent of self-destruction. It is an attempt to adopt the Faustian imperative for economic gain that will cause ruin to China as it is to the Late West, because the spiritual impulse is lacking in both, and both have a world outreach beyond any previous empire.

  What we see in architecture as profound differences in race-soul between Western, Arabic, Russian and Chinese, manifested in every other area of culture: there was an Arabian, Chinese Gothic, Roman, Indian, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, art, music, engineering, all reflecting different race-souls. There was not one universal “truth”, but what was true for the life-cycle of each culture. In the present epoch of the Late West there is the push towards a universal aesthetics, or “globalisation”, where all traditions of distinctive race-souls are repressed or distorted to reflect the primacy of money. It was Communism that bought the Late Western economic model to China, as it had to Russia in 1917. The despoliation of the land, pollution of rivers and the air is not a legacy of China’s race-soul but the excrescence of a decaying Late West spreading its culture-pathogens world-wide in the name of “progress”.

  Western Science

  Likewise, Western science is not Greek, Arabic, Indian, Muslim, or Chinese; it is Western. While the modern Westerner might assume that there is only one objective, scientific method of looking at nature, each culture has its own perspective innate to itself. This does not mean that any one of them is “false”.

  Again, we are taught that Western science prior to the Renaissance, or revival of Graeco-Roman learning, was not much more than superstition, and it was only through the rediscovery of Classical learning that true science became known to Western civilisation, while in the meantime the Chinese, Arabs and Indians were showing their intellectual superiority. Hence modern mathematics is ascribed even by scholars to the Greeks, developing that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians from the time of Thales, 600 B.C., to the capture of Alexandria by the Muslims in 642 A.D.

  From the Arabs are ascribed algebra and numeration. Europe supposedly remained “dark” until the “Renaissance” a thousand years later. This fits nicely with the “world line of progress” theory, to be able to establish a continuous chain of learning from Greek to “modern”. Thereby, the organic life-cycle of cultures is obscured in favour of a “world culture” that has reached its apex with the present, according to historians such as Francis Fukuyama. The Greeks, Indians, Arabs, Westerners and Chinese saw the same things in nature from different perspectives, thereby determining the differences in thinking.

  The Classical conception of numbers was that of integers or whole numbers. The Classical cultures were based on perceptions of the solid body, as one sees in their architecture, and the sensuality of their sculpture. Likewise with the Classical conception of atoms as indivisible. The Greek and Roman principles that supposedly founded Western science were known as fragments or as poor translations during the Medieval epoch. Western theoretical mechanics was established in the 13th century by Jordanus Nemorarius with the publication of Elementa super demonstrationem ponderis, accurately discovering the law of the lever. He did not owe his theories to Archimedes or other Classical sources. Other geniuses of the Medieval era have been obscured or forgotten by the Renaissance, such as William Heytsbury, working on the law of acceleration of falling bodies; Richard Swineshead, working on continuous change of the variable; Jean Buridan, student of Occam, whose theories on motion repudiate the Aristotelian.

  The inability of Class
ical man, chained to sensory perception, to perceive the infinity of numbers, and the focus of Renaissance scholars on Archimedes, retarded the development of mathematics during the Renaissance epoch. The question of infinity, the basis of the Faustian outlook, had been addressed by Medieval scholars but was discarded by Renaissance mathematicians.

  While Classical and Arabian mathematics had become static, the Western, in keeping with the Faustian impulse, is without limit, reflected in such Faustian concepts as the mathematics of continuous change, and differential calculus. This supposed “dark age” of burning heretics, inquisitions, and book burnings was rather one in which bishops and friars experimented and calculated; when universities such as Oxford were built, teaching new concepts such as phenomenal causality, terrestrial and celestial mechanics, change as a mathematically expressible relation, mathematics freed from typically Classical limitations of sense perception.

  The physicist Pierre Duhem, having studied the Medieval epoch at a time when the it was discounted as an intellectual void, concluded that “the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud to proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements”, derive from “doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools”.27 His discovery of the then forgotten Jordanus Nemorarius prompted Duhem’s to write extensively on what became the establishment of the history of medieval science. He showed that Western science derives from the Medieval epoch, not from the Classical via the Renaissance:

  “When we see the science of Galileo triumph over the stubborn Peripatetic philosophy of somebody like Cremonini, we believe, since we are ill-informed about the history of human thought, that we are witness to the victory of modern, young science over medieval philosophy, so obstinate in its mechanical repetition. In truth, we are contemplating the well-paved triumph of the science born at Paris during the fourteenth century over the doctrines of Aristotle and Averroes, restored into repute by the Italian Renaissance.