The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.
But those who read on further in the first volume of his Story of Civilization will find that Durant also made another observation regarding this theme of cyclical history: “A nation begins with poetry and ends with prose.” It is a bit harder to understand what he meant by this. Near the end of the book, however, he states that poetry expresses “in perfect and irreducible form the profound characteristic[s] of a race.” He refers to the modest, quiet, and short passages of Japanese poetry, especially in comparison to the epic, bombastic, and lengthy lines that emerged in 17th-century Western verse. Thus, from its poetry, one can deduce the nature of a particular culture at a particular time. From this, we can infer that the meaning of his earlier axiomatic statement does indeed go deeper than a mere literary analysis.
When discussing poetry and the cyclical theory of history, one naturally finds oneself turning to Giambattista Vico. When not preoccupied with trying to prove the existence of giants, the early 18th-century Italian professor of rhetoric advances an ingenious theory of history in his New Science. He divides the lifecycle of a civilization into three parts: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Each part has its own form of language. In the first age, men communicated in grunts; in the second age, with poetry; and in the third age, with prose. Each linguistic system was essential in shaping the way its practitioners understood their world. Simultaneously, with each successive age, the power of imagination declined and the power of reason increased.
Vico posits in one of his most important axioms that “the weaker its power of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows.” Thus, he equates poetry to feeling and imagination and prose to reason. In the age of the gods, reason was nonexistent, and people lived by wonder at what they believed to be the actions of the gods. They had a totally enchanted worldview in which everything their ignorance did not allow them to understand was attributed directly to the gods. Vico calls this the barbarism of sense. The first poets, emerging at the very end of the first age, thought and spoke in symbols, “imaginative general categories or archetypes,” images formed in the mind. The poetry of the age of heroes, of which the Homeric Iliad is the foremost example, is one of archetype and myth. The poets created sublime myths through which the public might understand reality.
Then, in the age of men, myth is vanquished by logic and reason. These reductionist forces are expressed through reflective prose. The age of men eventually decays into what Vico terms the barbarism of reflection. In early paganism, every man was a poet, and everyone wondered at creation, which through verse they grasped and tamed. But now, reason begins to outweigh imagination, consuming the latter. It deconstructs the myths by which people hitherto understood their world, and it questions everything in order to categorize and explain, leading to a renewed barbarism.
Spengler develops Vico’s insights when he writes that both poetry and prose are products of the experience of a particular Lebensgefühl or ‘world feeling.’ Poetry can be equated to the becoming, the still-forming, and the dynamic—Spengler’s culture phase. Prose can be equated to the established, the stagnant, and thus the declining—Spengler’s civilization phase. Poetry attempts to arouse the soul of a people; prose attempts to deconstruct that soul into rationalized abstractions, trying to understand but not seeing that by so deconstructing, it kills the living object of study. Poetry is about the essence; prose is about the parts. Poetry deals with archetypes; prose deals with characters. Poetry is a feeling, an emotional state, or a vague sense of some sweet smell in the air; prose tries to discern what the aroma is without enjoying it.
The poetry of the heroic age gradually morphs into the prose of the age of men. Over time, the raw and rowdy gods of Homer became abstractions of perfectly rational deities, represented through statues of gleaming marble painted in colors that made them into artificial spectacles. The Greeks began with The Iliad, an epic originally recited orally, and ended with the ruthless rationalism of Socrates and the skepticism of even less heroic men (for Socrates at least served in the Peloponnesian War), eventually decaying into the universalizing categorization-fever of the Hellenistic scholars. The barbarism of reflection that followed the death of Alexander can best be seen in the grid design of his most famous city, which looks curiously similar to Manhattan. Nor do the comparisons with America end there. For even in the poetry of Whitman, at what Emerson calls the “cock crowing and the morning star” of American culture, the virility and confidence of a young people can be detected. Although the enigma that is America escaped until about half a century ago, the downward spiral of its mother civilization, the barbarism of reflection, has since taken a firm hold there, even going into overdrive.
Vico placed the beginning of Western civilization’s age of men at the Renaissance. That period and the subsequent two centuries, like Hellenistic Greece, were swept up in a craze for encyclopedizing and categorizing the entire world. Both in theology and in natural science, everything had to be labeled and structured according to rational frameworks. Rather like Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Faustian man set out on a quest to survey all of creation. To tear it apart, catalog, and subjugate it because it couldn’t accept it any other way.
Once a civilization enters the age of men, it all but loses the creative spark of the heroic age. Its literature becomes imitative and stale. Durant tells us that the later Chinese philosophical writings were nothing more than ridiculing parodies of the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. The Romans, reaching their zenith in the classical age of men, hailing the barbarism of reflection that soon followed, brought law and administration, but little culture—prose, but no poetry. Even its greatest cultural gift, Virgil’s Aeneid, was a stale imitation of the Greek genre. It was an artificial epic, not the foundational poem of a people. His age was only yet capable of imitation, then mockery, and eventually exhaustion. As the great art historian Kenneth Clark noted, civilizations thrive on confidence and die of exhaustion.
In these exhausted civilizations, myth and story—poetry—are replaced by explanation and statistics—prose. They become mired in Apollonian excess, where everything must be rationally explained and picked apart. The American historian Henry Adams allegorized this system as ‘the dynamo.’ This was a purely rationalistic and materialistic Lebensgefühl, where everything was determined only by the grinding of gears and the endless rotation of the dynamo. Sociologist Max Weber would soon after describe modernity as disenchanted. Poetry leaves the world, and in its wake, only mechanical explanations remain.
Such an arrangement creates men who, as C.S. Lewis put it, are “without chests.” They have an oversized head but no heart. They suck all poetic meaning out of objects. For them, there is no room for heroes, let alone for gods. The Atlantic is not the great sea where Columbus and Drake sailed westwards to a land Europeans had always dreamt of as a paradise, but simply a body of water in a particular geographic location. There is no sublimity in a waterfall. The only magic in the world is that which you mistakenly attribute to it. The entire world has been disenchanted. Such an apprehension of being marks a textbook example of the barbarism of reflection.
The modern West is completely submerged in prose. There are no more archetypes, no more myths. Everything must be atomized into infinite minorities. The inherited stories of bygone eras, supposed to teach moral lessons, are deconstructed and stripped bare in preparation for ruthless examination. Even in the academic discipline of history, a prominent school of thought posits that history ought not to be used for any social, cultural, or political purpose. It is solely practiced for the accumulation and categorization of knowledge of past events. Historia magistra vitae—history as the teacher of life—as Cicero prescribed, is anathema. In fact, the entire notion seems offensive to about half of academic, bean-counting historians.
Yet, at the very end of a civilization’s life, during the darkest nights of winter, the exhausted people begin to yearn for spring. Their gods have been deconstructed, explained away, and cast aside as outdated. But that does not mean that a culture dies in unbelief. Strangely enough, in the age of prose’s dying days, people will turn away from their soulless world and seek solace in foreign, poetic religions. The late Egyptians ignored the sacrilege of their traditional gods and only became outraged at Achaemenid subjugation when Cambyses slew their sacred Apis bull, which had only recently superseded the other deities. The atheistic Greeks of the Hellenistic age fell in love with Babylonian astrology. The Romans became obsessed with the underground caverns in which hooded figures celebrated the mysteries of the Persian Mithras, or instead with the emotional ecstasy of early Christianity. Desperate to re-enchant their world, they allowed themselves one last crescendo before their light was snuffed out. One wonders what strange cults our ailing civilization will take to, or perhaps has already adopted.
Durant embedded within a fleeting statement about literary history, timeless truths about disenchantment and decay. We should take stock, for on a civilization’s deathbed, its people, in their final throes, cry out one last time for myth and enchantment. Thus, a people begins with poetry, ends with prose, but dies mesmerized again by poetry.
