Oswald Spengler Decline Of The West Quotes

[Mirtha Shikles]

Im in the west of Ireland today, gallivanting about with the writer Paul Kingsnorth. We went earlier today to visit the cave dwelling of St. Colman Mac Duagh, an early medieval Irish saint, then had oysters and Guinness at a seaside restaurant, prayed the rounds at a holy well of St. Brigid of Kildare, and then Paul dropped me at the airport hotel. Early flight home tomorrow. Here is a link to Paul's latest Substack newsletter -- it's subscriber-only (paid), but I tell you, if I could only keep one of my Substack subscriptions, it would be his. In the newsletter, Paul talks about the power of nostalgia, which he feels has too strong a hold on him. (Same for me.) In the newsletter, he quotes this poem by C.P. Cavafy, which one of my reader friends sent to me, and that I passed on to Paul. It's called "The God Abandons Antony," and it's about the death of Marc Antony in the Egyptian city Alexandria, in defeat:

Me, I have to watch my tendency towards nostalgia. The things we mourn can be the things that make us human: the source of poetry and song, of the crooked places and small things, of everything that we hold dear against the Machine. Sometimes it is a pleasure to dream of the hawthorn lanes and the stillness before the engines. But it is necessary to dance only lightly with any of it. We are all sojourners here. Nothing gold can stay, and dreams can easily blind us.

As I wrote somewhere before, many lifetimes ago: there is a fall coming. Now, I think, it is here - and it is civilisation itself, at its very foundations, that is on the rack. The modern experiment has failed. The tower is coming down. There are opportunities to be found in all of the cracks that are spreading upwards from its foundations. In the rotting of the old world is the seed of the new. But only if we let go - of both the past and the future.

I tell you, there's nothing that rebalances your chakras quite like sitting alone in a remote limestone cave that was once home to a hermit, 1,200 years ago, and praying the same prayer he prayed, and looking out of the entrance to see and hear the world pretty much like it was when he dwelled there. Yes, the Burren, where his cave is, was thickly forested in Colman's day and is mostly bare now, but the part where his cave is to be found, along with a small chapel and his well, still has moss-covered trees and ferns growing there.

It won't surprise you to hear that I agree with Paul that we are living through a fall. We commiserated on how frustrating it is to be called a defeatist because you don't see how humanity is going to turn all this around. My view -- this is in The Benedict Option -- is that we are not going to stop what's coming, but we can come through it with our faith intact if we take lessons from what the early Benedictine monks did, and create structures and ways of living that prove resilient under the tectonic stresses that will shake everything to its foundations.

Mind you, St. Colman was not a Benedictine. He was born about twenty years after Benedict died. Benedictine monasticism hadn't yet taken off. He was an Irish hermit who became a wonder-working abbot and bishop. I'm not saying that we should head for the mossy caves, though if that Grammy crap I've been reading about on Twitter is as bad as they say, retreating to a cave in a gentle Irish forest sounds better and better all the time. What I'm saying is that all the fighting we're doing isn't stopping the general movement of the culture. Believe me, I'm going to fight wokeness until I move to the cave, but I can't convince myself that even if we beat wokeness, we can or will resurrect our sick and exhausted civilization. I wish it weren't so, but there we are.

Kingsnorth has been writing for some time about the great dissolution of our civilization. Here's a link to a piece I did in 2021 about a superb essay he wrote on Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline Of The West. Here's a link to the original -- or if it's now paywalled, UnHerd republished it. In the piece, Paul writes that wokeness is a sign of a deeper sickness:

Why is this happening and what is going on? Looked at through a wide lens, it is a deeply weird (not to mention WEIRD) phenomena. What sort of country is ashamed of itself? What people wants to be governed by a ruling class that holds it in contempt? What historical precedent is there for a lasting culture whose story-makers are embarrassed by their own ancestors? How can any culture continue into the future if it is teaching its children a deeply disturbing form of racialised self-loathing?

As he goes on to write, this decline is highly unlikely to be arrested, so the sensible thing for people to do today is to send down deep roots so we can regrow when the crisis has passed -- certainly long after our lifetimes. If you want to understand why we are falling apart, here's good insight from the Kingsnorth essay:

I know, I know, there is more going on in Western culture than this sick dude's pop Satanism. I would just point out, though, that pop Satanism was all the rage in pre-Bolshevik Russia, among the elites, who weren't going to black masses (as far as I know), but who were embracing transgression for the sake of destroying everything around them. So are we. If you summon demons, they will come. We have been summoning them for some time.

When I say we have no culture, I mean it in the sense that Spengler meant it: there is no form anymore. Alasdair MacIntyre and Philip Rieff, in their separate ways, discerned that there is no solid basis for culture in the West today. Look, when you have a situation in which we are teaching our children that there is no such thing as male and female, you have a culture that has lost its mind. In Mexico, a Catholic former member of the legislature has been fined by the state for calling a male-to-female transgendered legislator a "man" -- this, after the male-masquerading-as-female showed up in the legislature dressed as a Catholic bishop, and saying he was going to push for new rules that would criminalize anti-LGBT discourse in and from churches. We could go on and on, but you get the point: this is not a culture that is going to survive, or that deserves to. I was telling Kingsnorth that one thing that living outside the United States, and outside of western Europe, has shown me is not that we are decadent -- I knew that already -- but how imperialistic we are with our decadence. I hope the rest of the world is looking at us and deciding that there has to be some other way. When I talk to confused and sad older people in the former Communist countries of eastern Europe, they really can't wrap their heads around how in their lifetimes, the United States went from a country that they believed in and admired, to one they now fear, on the cultural front. I completely understand where they are coming from.

I sat in St. Colman's narrow cave this morning and prayed for about twenty minutes. When I emerged, I made my way down the slick, damp hill, and found Paul lingering around the ruined stone chapel. As we left the forest to return to the vast limestone plain, we talked about the end of this civilization that we're all living through. Paul said that the only thing that makes sense in this time of convulsive and accelerating change is to turn towards God. Yes, it's an old remedy, but it's also one that works. That's what the early Benedictines did. I read this very counsel tonight in the wonderful book Winters In The World: A Journey Through The Anglo-Saxon Year, by Eleanor Parker. Here is her translation of a portion of an Old English poem called "The Wanderer". It is found only in the 10th century Exeter Book, but scholars believe it is older. Parker brings it up as an example of how deeply the idea of winter went in the Anglo-Saxon mind. She says that the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet speaks her to anyone, of any era, who is seeing desolation:

Every aspect of human society is laene, a word which implies "fleeting, transition", but literally means "on loan": friends, wealth, family have been lent to us for a while, but can be taken away at any time. The only place to seek stability, the poem concludes, is with God, eternal and unchanging. Its last lines offer the prospect of finding "comfort from the Father in heaven, where for us all permanence stands."

If you want to root yourself in the permanence of God in the face of the storm-battered crumbling world, what should you do? When I was in London late last week, I heard many lamentations from Anglicans about the foolishness and utter irrelevance of the Church of England -- their own church! Here's fresh news today:

It may suggest that priests can stop using the male pronouns 'He' and 'Him' when referring to God in some prayers, or even that they can drop the famous phrase 'our Father' from the start of the Lord's Prayer.

However, such a radical rewriting would have to be agreed by the whole of the church's governing body, the General Synod, and would be fiercely resisted by traditionalists for breaking away from the words of the Bible.

Based on current numbers, both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England are going to go extinct in the 2060s. Now in England, the new thing is "champing" -- renting out churches for campers to sleep in at night. Whatever. Better than putting a helter-skelter in a Norman cathedral and watching the vicar make a fool of herself, I guess.

Catholicism in Ireland today is a wreck, as even faithful, orthodox Catholics acknowledge. This writer points out that the decline started before the sex scandal exposure, and speculates that much of Ireland's fidelity in the past was mere social conformity. John Duggan, reviewing a book about Catholicism's collapse in Ireland, draws a similar conclusion, quoting approvingly something an old church lady told the author: that people were just waiting for a reason to leave. Duggan goes on:

"In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Eire, Humble acknowledging all out obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial... ."

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