If we look at Christendom as a civilization, we may say
that it first budded in AD 1 when Jesus Christ was born, started to ripen in
380 when it became the sole official religion of the Roman Empire, began to decay
in 1216 with the death of Pope Innocent 3rd, then disintegrated into Europe in
1648.
We may apply this same analogy to Exuberant Olympianity
(1648-2008) as a civilization. Let us say that it budded in 1648, ripened between
1815 (end of Napoleon) and 1914, decayed until 2008, then began its own terminal
disintegration.
William Shakespeare opens his play, Richard the Third (ca 1593), with the
words, “Now is the winter of our discontent…” American author John Steinbeck elaborated on this theme in his novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). Charles Dickens, writing about
the years preceding the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), even mixed his seasons,
declaring, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
These references to winter, and an awareness of our own
disintegrating civilization, shouldn’t blind us, however, to the fact that our
modern Exuberant Olympianity did once experience a joyous springtime. This was especially
true during that period in the 1700s known as the Enlightenment (1715-1789).
Praising his epoch in The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (chapter 38, 1781), English historian
Edward Gibbon wrote,
The abuses of tyranny are
restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired
order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at
least, moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the
most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times. In peace, the
progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many
active rivals; in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and
indecisive contests (151).
His celebratory words expressed a sense of deep
satisfaction and a vision of even greater glory.
In his book, An
Historian’s Approach to Religion (1956), English historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that Westerners, during the spring and summer of Exuberant
Olympianity, enjoyed the experience of “supreme self-assurance”
(150). This was because “Late Modern Western Man” (150), as Toynbee put it,
assumed that his civilization would remain
the last word in Civilization
in two senses. He assumed that this was the mature and perfect form of Civilized
Society: Civilization with a capital ‘C’ (for he now dismissed the other living
civilizations as being ‘semi-civilized’, and the original unsecularized version
of his own Western Civilization as being ‘medieval’). He also assumed that this
latterday secularized Western Civilization was definitive in the sense of
being, not merely perfect, but permanent” (151).
Perfect and permanent: how wonderful to live in a
civilization that seemed so.
Copyright © 2018
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
