Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Civilization, like life, is a perpetual struggle with death.”¹ These are the words of Will Durant (1885-1981), an American historian known for his authoritative work on the history of civilizations, The Story of Civilization. Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), a British historian also known for his expertise on the history of civilizations, concurs with Durant when he says, “[C]ivilisation … is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.”²

Why is civilization a perpetual struggle with death? Why does civilization get destroyed? In short, why does civilization rise and fall, come and go? It is important to confront and examine this question if we are to figure out what we need to do to prevent the decline and fall, let alone the death, of a civilization, especially that civilization is the one that has brought us to where we are and defines the way we lead our existence today.

As historians Durant and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) see it, the death, or the decline and fall, of a civilization is due mostly to internal decay. As Durant puts it, “The death of a civilization seldom comes from without; internal decay must weaken the fibre of a society before external influences or attacks can change its essential structure, or bring it to an end.”³ Spengler sees civilization going through two stages—an earlier stage, which he calls ‘culture,’ characterized by vigorous creativity and a later stage of ‘civilization’ characterized by the weakening of moral fiber and the pursuit of selfish interests.⁴

The decline and fall of a civilization, in addition to internal decay, is also brought about by external threat. This is so because no civilization exists by itself but is subject to the constant process of interaction with other civilizations. As the British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) sees it, the life of a civilization is the story of challenge-and-response, that is, the constant process of challenges coming from other civilizations and its responses to them. A civilization rises and continues to prosper as long as these challenges are successfully met, but declines when it fails to come up with successful responses.

From a systems perspective, both internal decay and external threat that contribute to the decline and fall of a civilization can be explained as the case of “systemic dissonance.” A civilization, which can be defined as a social system composing of subsystems of culture, economy and polity, is an open system that exists in the space of interaction with other civilizations and the natural environment. The term “systemic dissonance” refers to a disturbance, or an imbalance, created in a civilization as a social system composing of these three subsystems. It can originate from any one of the subsystems, which would be an internal decay, or from other civilization(s) or the natural environment, which would be an external threat. The term “systemic dissonance” is employed here because, whether a disturbance comes from within or without, it causes conflict and friction among the three subsystems of culture, economy, and polity, resulting in the decline and fall, even the death, of a civilization.

What took place in the Indus valley around 1,500 BCE illustrates how an external threat coming from the natural environment causes the decline and fall of a civilization. For the period of about 2,500 through 1,500 BCE, a fairly sophisticated civilization with urban planning, sewer, and septic system flourished around Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. This civilization disappeared almost overnight around 1,500 BCE before the Aryans invaded the region. It is speculated that a catastrophic flood triggered by an earthquake was probably responsible for the disappearance of this civilization. It appears that a natural disaster caused systemic dissonance in this civilization by destroying the infrastructure, or the economic subsystem, judging from the skeletal remains that seem to indicate that people left the area in panic.

The Black Death in the Middle Ages that wiped out almost half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century can be cited as another example of a natural disaster that caused the decline and fall of a civilization through its impact on the economy. The plague began in 1347 with a merchant ship returning to the Sicilian port of Messina, bringing back the disease from the Black Sea. In 20 years half the population of Europe was wiped out. The countryside was damaged and the farmland went uncultivated. The resulting starvation further contributed to the people’s misery from the plague. In fact, it took nearly three centuries before the population of Europe regained the pre-plague level and what we now know as Western civilization started to rise as a dominant civilization in the world.

The rise of Western civilization as a dominant civilization in the world is a familiar story by now that owes to a number of dramatic events that have taken place in Europe since the sixteenth centuries, notable among which are the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. The Reformation, originally intended to offer an alternative to the Church doctrine regarding salvation, has turned out to be a transformative event in the character of Western civilization by causing changes in all three subsystems of civilization—the division among different denominations in the Christian world in the cultural realm, the rise of Calvinism as the driving force of capitalistic development in the economic realm, and the spread of democratic ideas and institutions in the political realm. On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution, which was made possible by advances in science and technology, has been responsible for the rise of global industrial civilization with an increase in the material standards of living in the realm of economy. As Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) pointed out, “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.”⁵

It is clear by now to historians and astute observers of world events that the kind of civilization that has evolved under the influence of dominant Western civilization for the last several centuries is facing a crisis, even showing signs of decline and fall, as exemplified by the deep gulf between rich and poor not just in the West and but in other regions of the world as well. Reflecting on the phenomenon of the decline and fall of civilizations is pertinent now as we are going through a critical phase in the evolution of a dominant civilization that has been shaped by the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. There is no question that the introduction of industrial capitalism has drawn all nations of the world into the sphere of industrial civilization for the past couple of centuries. At the same time, the spread of industrial civilization has created a systemic dissonance between economy and culture in the form of obsessive pursuit of material progress at the cost of degradation and destruction of the natural environment. Indeed, we are at a critical stage in the evolution of humans as a species, for systemic dissonance between human economic activities and the natural environment is not an external threat but a sign of internal decay of global human civilization.

1. Durant, Will, Our Oriental Heritage, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954, p.218.
2. Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation: A Personal View, New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p.3.
3. Durant, op. cit., p.914.
4. Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
5. Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

One of the by-products of the Protestant Reformation was the secularization of the arts, as exemplified by the transformation of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) from an artist into an entrepreneur. The individual transformation of Cranach the Elder is actually quite symbolic of the transformation of the Western mind that the Reformation unleashed. In fact, the Reformation marks the rise of the rational mind, of the left-hemisphere mode of inquiry into the world, in the evolution of Western civilization.

When Martin Luther (1483-1546) and other Protestant reformers rose to protest and rebel against the authority of the Church of Rome, they were rejecting the psychological role the church had played in the evolution of Western civilization. From the very beginning, the church had been conceived as a place where the sense of togetherness, the spirit of community, could be experienced. Thus, in the Acts of the Apostles we find the following lines: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2: 44, 45)

A more interesting interpretation of the role of the church appears in Paul’s reference to the church as the bride of Christ: “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself to it.” (Ephesians 5: 23, 24, 25)

The idea of the church as the bride, or the wife, of Christ is mainly significant in its relation to matriarchal psychology. If the Christ the Son of God inherits and, therefore, represents the patriarchal psychology of God the Father, then the church as the bride of the Son of God can be interpreted as representing the matriarchal psychology of the Mother of the Son of God. Although the mother figure was not an integral part of the central doctrine of Christianity in the beginning, the early church adopted Mary as the Mother of the Son of God as a symbol mainly in an effort to convert the people of the Mediterranean and the Near East who had been exposed to the figure of the Great Mother Goddess. In fact, it was the Eastern Church that adopted Virgin Mary as a symbol of the Holy Wisdom, or Sophia. If the Church of Rome decided to incorporate the Virgin Mary as a central symbol, it was an attempt on its part to be in conformity with these traditions.

What is significant in the context of the evolution of the Western mind is the revival of the Virgin worship in the Middle Ages. The Virgin worship surfaced most notably in the form of statues of the Virgin and the Child in the twelfth century, one of the earliest examples being found at the Abbey of St. Denis constructed in 1130. This form of artistic (or religious) expression blossomed in many parts of Europe, becoming an integral part of Gothic churches mostly constructed in the thirteenth century. The sudden revival of the Virgin worship in the history of Christianity around this period appears to be related to the Crusades. The Crusades, which were already in full swing in the eleventh century, brought destruction by perpetuating violence in the name of religious devotion. It would be quite natural, then, if the matriarchal aspect of human psychology was revived as a reaction, rekindling the need for motherly values of compassion and togetherness among the Christian nations. A contact with matriarchal religions of the East during the Crusades may also have contributed to the revival of the Great Mother worship in the Virgin Mary. In fact, St. Sophia in Istanbul, called the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom, was known for its majestic incarnation of the motherly wisdom. This obvious association of the Virgin Mary with matriarchal psychology immediately suggests the vital symbolic role of the Virgin Mary in Christian psychology. To the extent that matriarchal psychology is linked to the unconscious psyche, the Virgin Mary serves as a symbol for the world of unconsciousness for the Christians.

Did the Protestants lose their contact with matriarchal psychology with the rejection of the authority of the Church of Rome? To the extent that the Protestants kept their link to their church and to the extent that they understood the psychological role of their church in promoting the sense of togetherness, the spirit of community, they had access to the same institutional protection and guidance as the Catholics had from their church. However, as the individual interpretation of the Bible became recognized as a valid means of maintaining Christian faith, the Protestant movement naturally led to an increase in the number of Christians who would break away from their church. And those Christians who broke their spiritual ties with their church and decided to deal with the problem of their salvation on their individual interpretation of the Christian dogma had to develop the mind of their own—the Protestant mind, if you will—in order to deal with their psychological problems.

The Protestant mind is characterized by its reliance on the power of reason, which represents the rational mode of dealing with psychological problems and the left-hemisphere mode of comprehending realities in the world. The development of science, although it can be traced back to the humanistic spirit of the early Renaissance, is essentially a Protestant venture in its psychological implications. With its emphasis on the power of reason, the development of the Protestant mind led to the neglect, if not the total suppression, of other psychological functions of human psychology besides reason. In fact, Freudian psychology can be seen as an extension of the Protestant mind. Though not a Protestant, the way Freud treats “id” as a force to be suppressed and controlled by the development of “ego” is in conformity with the Protestant spirit that places emphasis on the rational mode of dealing with human psychology.

As long as the psychological implications of the church and the Virgin Mary and other symbols are properly understood, it does not matter whether the individual Christian is a Catholic or a Protestant. Unfortunately, however, those zealous Protestant reformers did not properly understand these psychological implications in their eagerness to break away from the corruption and moral decay of the Church of Rome. Much as the intention of these reformers to restore Christian faith may be admired, their efforts actually contributed to perpetuate and stimulate dissentions among Christian nations and eventually led to the emergence of the gulf in the Western mind between the Catholic and the Protestant mind. Needless to say, we are not suggesting that these reformers ought to be blamed for their lack of historical insight. Any product of human imagination is destined to lead its own life once it leaves its producer. The Reformation was no exception in this regard. And these reformers could not be held responsible for the fate of the Protestant movement once it was thrust into the stage of history that involved far more complex forces than they could possibly have anticipated.