The State Circus
Crowds and Power,
According to Vico, the divine age is strictly theocratic, the heroic age is the age of mythology, while the human age is rational. Vico, corresponding to these three ages, distinguishes three types of language and writing (sacred, symbolic, and profane) and also three phases of natural law, of the political community, and of jurisprudence, phases connected to each other by divine providence.
This regular course is progressive in that it leads from anarchy to order and from wild and heroic customs to rational and civilized customs. According to Vico, however, there is no infinite progress towards increasingly more civilized stages. "The real thelos of such progress are decadence and decline, whereby the entire course begins again from a new barbaric stage, or in a recurrence that is at the same time a rebirth. Such a recurrence has already occurred, according to Vico, once, precisely after the decline of Rome, with the return of the barbaric era in the Middle Ages.
The times, Berdyaev asserts, choosing his key term with special care, qualify as “apocalyptic.”
This unveiling corresponds not merely to “a revelation of the end of the world”; rather it corresponds to “a revelation of the inner events of history, of the internal judgment upon history itself.” Because “man’s existence in this world is historical,” the disintegration of history involves the disintegration both of man and culture. “The things man has planned do not come to pass, and the true significance of what takes place escapes man’s comprehension.” Berdyaev means modern man – the deluded being who, having killed off God, took on the godlike role, quite as Ludwig Feuerbach had urged him to do..
In Berdyaev’s interpretation, modernity thinks that it can reverse Adam’s fall and reestablish paradise, but it only blindly and dumbly reenacts that fall. It is a case of titanic hubris and of equally titanic nemesis. “The world war (WW1) and the revolutionary processes which have followed it have a metaphysical significance for the fate of man.”
The war put on display, bloodily and destructive, the demonic inhumanity that had long simmered under the veneer of civilization; it showed that the modern utopian conceit expressed a fundamental nihilism which, discovering that it could not create on a godlike level, turned its fury on creation, especially the human portion of that creation, and sought its annihilation. “The war revealed the personality of our civilization,” Berdyaev writes; “it cheapened life, it taught man to take no thought for human life and personality, to consider them as means and instruments in the hands of the fatality of history.”
That term personality operates centrally in Berdyaev’s Christian anthropology. When men think of history as a process that they can control, they make war on the person, as such – the person validated by the words and deeds of Christ, in whom alone the human creature can find its dignity.
Berdyaev observes how “it is noteworthy that at a time when every religious sanction of authority has vanished, we live in a very authoritarian epoch.” The point strikes Berdyaev as sufficiently important that he repeats it in variorum a few lines later: “The tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that great masses of humanity have awakened and come into power at the moment of a falling away from Christianity and the loss of all religious beliefs.https://www.knightstemplarorder.com/berdyaev_on_culture_and_christianity