VERSIONS OF DECADENCE

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If the Latin noun decadentia, from which related words in modern European languages derive ("decadence" in English, de · cadence in French, decadenzia in Italian, Dekadenz in German, etc.), was not used before the Middle Ages, the idea of decadence · itself is certainly much older, and probably as old as man himself. The myth of decadence was known, in one form or another, to nearly all ancient peoples. The destructiveness of time and the fatality of decline are among the outstanding motifs of all great mythical-religious traditions, from the Indian notion of the Age of Kali to the terrifying visions of corruption and sinfulness conveyed by the Jewish prophets; and from the Greeks' and Romans' disillusioned belief in the Iron Age to the Christians' sense of living in a malignant world that was approaching the dominion of absolute evil (the reign of Antichrist), as announced in the Apocalypse. "The men of early times," thought Plato, "were better than we and nearer to the Gods" (Philebus, 16c).' This is just one example of how the present—even in an age that was subsequently regarded as glorious and exemplary—deemed itself inferior to earlier and more blissful times. Ancient Greece was very much in "the grip of the past,"2 and in this respect it was not significantly different from any of the civilizations that flourished before the combined ideas of modernity and progress took hold of the Western mind. We all know how pervasive the myth of the Golden Age (as opposed to the Iron Age) was in Greece, then in Rome, but we are barely aware of the manifestations of the idea of decadence in classical metaphysics, outside of the obvious domain of poeticohistorical speculation. In this context, it would be tempting to consider Plato himself as perhaps the first great Western philosopher to build up a whole complex ontology on the idea of decadence. For the Platonic theory

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of Ideas clearly implies a metaphysical concept of decadence (Or degeneration) when it describes the relationship between those archetypal, perfect, unchanging, real models of all things and their mere "shadows" in the sensible world of perceived objects, where everything is subject to the corrupting influence of time and change. Closer to our concern with historical decadence, Plato's view of history and society summarizes the widespread Greek belief that time was nothing but a continuous decline. "With Plato," writes the French religious historian Henri-Charles Puech,

            the Greeks speculated on the models or ideal schemata of states or social
            forms, from which they derived a necessary, a temporal succession applicable
            to any event whatever. The resultant laws were "laws of decadence rather than
            of development" [Emile Brehierr: they rep resent change as a fall from an ideal
            primitive state conceived in terms of myth; political states do not improve, they
            become corrupted; and the history of governments is a history of decadence.
            Here we perceive the core of the Greeks' feelings about time: it was
            experienced as a 'degenerescence".....the notion of a continuous progress was
            unheard of.3

But to understand the formation of the modern idea of de cadence and its applications to certain outstanding aspects of cultural modernity (illustrated terminologically by the appearance, toward the mid-nineteenth century, of the adjective and the noun "de cadent," and, a few decades later, of the notion of "decadentism") we have to consider in the first place, as we did in our account of the development of modernity's concept, the yiew of time and history brought about by the Judeo-Christian tradition. The originality of the Jewish and then Christian philosophy of history comes from its eschatological character, from its belief—which makes the progression of time linear and irreversible—in an end to history, in a last day (eschatos in Greek means "last"), after which (in the Christian view) the elect will enjoy the eternal felicity for which Man was created, while the sinful will forever suffer the tortures of hell. The approach of the Day of Doom is announced by the unmistakable

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sign of profound decay—untold corruption—and, according to apocalyptic prophecy, by the satanic power of Antichrist.

Decadence thus becomes the anguishing prelude to the end of the world. The deeper the decadence, the closer the Last Judgment. From the early Middle Ages on, countless sects and movements within Christianity upheld the belief in the millennium, indulging in the most somber expectations of imminent cosmic collapse and doom, which were to precede the end of time. Chilianism, rejected as early as St. Augustine and subsequently condemned by a series of Councils, managed to survive and reemerge with renewed powers during the troubled period of the Reformation. The vitality of a modern, secularized millennialism is apparent in diverse revolutionary and utopian doctrines, among them Marxism, with its eschatological vision of communism as the end of human alienation (it is not fortuitous that the idea of decadence—of the advanced putrefaction of modern-day capitalism, and of its dying culture-is so important in Marxism).

Christian time, it has been said, organizes itself horizontally, while Greek time might be characterized as essentially vertical. This analogy, even though it should not be taken too literally, is actually very suggestive. The opposition between Greek and Christian time has been elaborated upon by, among others, Henri-Charles Puech, who has pointed out some of the implications of the horizontal! vertical metaphor as applied to the contrasting views of time and change:

            The vertical interpretation of the world's changing appearances through the
            fixed and atemporal. archetypal realities of the upper, intelligible world, gives
            way—in ancient Christianity—to a horizontal interpretation of the segments of
            time through one another: the past announces and prepares the future; or... the
            earlier events are the types' or 'prefigurations' of the subsequent events, and
            these in turn are the realization of the events which precede them and which
            are related to them as the shadow is related to full, authentic reality. Thus we
            might say that here the image anticipates the model, while in Creek thought the
            transcendent model is for all eternity

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            prior to the image. Creek exemplarianism is diametrically reversed.4

If the horizontal-temporal relationship between "prefiguration" or "shadow" and "full reality" applies exclusively to ancient Christianity, the broad horizontal view of time and the ensuing stress on histuricity (that is, on an irreversible succession of unique events, even if these can be seen as a fulfillment of prophecy) constitute a characteristic of Christianity as a whole.

What is new in the Christian view of decadence (by contrast with the more passive attitude of the ancients, whether they favored stoical resignation and indifference, or cultivated the hedonistic philosophy of "Carpe diem") is an acute and feverish sense of urgency. Decadence is felt, with an intensity unknown before, as a unique crisis; and, as time is running short, it becomes of ultimate importance to do, without waiting any longer, what one has to do for one's own and one's fellow man's Salvation. In the perspective of the rapidly approaching end of the world every single instant can be decisive. The consciousness of decadence brings about restlessness and a need for self-examination, for agonizing commitments and momentous renunciations. Christian apocalypticism, even when it does not manifest itself overtly, results in a dramatically increased time awareness. This may have been a significant psychological factor in the preparation of the Renaissance discovery of secular time and the high valuation of temporality.

At this point it may be worth observing that the Renaissance did not assert the value of time in anything like a serenely optimistic perspective of open-ended historical development. Many of the most outstanding representatives of the Renaissance were pessimists, and the consciousness of crisis was widespread. Summing up a whole line of research, an intellectual historian of the modern sense of decadence can write about the "myth" of Renaissance optimism:

            But the gradual replacement of Christian supernaturalism by a
            naturalist and secular outlook did not necessarily lead to a more
            cheerful view of history.. . . Thus one of the most naturalist minds of

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            the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, was obsessed with visions of a
            catastrophic end of the world, an event that he no longer envisaged as a divine
            judgment, but as a disaster in which all men, regardless of their merits, would
            suffer the same torments. . . . The wide response to Savonarola's virulent
            denunciations of Renaissance society also indicates that many Italians of the
            end of the fifteenth century looked upon their age as a period of crisis and
            corruption. In other words, the exuberant optimism of the Renaissance is little
            more than a myth.5

Leonardo's case is indeed revealing, and it is highly significant that his visions were centered around the characteristically Christian idea of an apocalyptic disaster, which, for being emptied of its religious significance, became only more ominously oppressive and anguishing.

The ideas of modernity and progress on the one hand, and the idea of decadence on the other, are mutually exclusive only at the crudest level of understanding. As soon as we take into consideration the way they were actually used in various phases of their history we become aware of the dialectical complexity of their relationships. Bernard de Chartres's famous simile is a good example. In the analogy of the dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of giants and are thus able to see farther, progress and decadence imply each other so intimately that, if we were to generalize, we would reach the paradoxical conclusion that progress is decadence and, conversely, decadence is progress. Bernard's metaphor has the merit of showing convincingly how such a blatant and logically unacceptable paradox can, as an image (or a projection of imagination), be received as a perfectly sound insight.

Like progress, decadence is a relative concept, and this relativity is rendered only more elusive by the fact that, as V. Jankelevitch points out in a remarkable philosophical essay on decadence, "there are no historical contents that can be characterized as decadent 'in themselves.' Decadence is not in statu but in motu. "6 Decadence is therefore not a structure but a dfrection or tendency.

We also note that the usual associations of decadence with such notions as decline, twilight, autumn, senescence, and exhaustion,

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and, in its more advanced stages, organic decay and putrescence— along with their automatic antonyms: rise, dawn, spring, youth, germination, etc.—make it inevitable to think of it in terms of natural cycles and biological metaphors. These organic affinities of the idea of decadence explain why progress is not its unqualified opposite. It is true that in earlier periods progress was conceived by analogy with growth and particularly with the intellectual development of the human individual (we recall Saint Augustine's comparison between the gradual development of mankind and that of a single man). But after centuries of close association with scientific research and technological advance, the concept of progress reached a level of abstraction at which older organic and specifically anthropomorphic connotations could no longer be retained. Progress came to be regarded as a concept having more to do with mechanics than with biology.

There is only a short distance from here to the view, not in frequent in our century, that progress is an enemy of life. The critique of the myth of progress was started within the romantic movement, but it gained momentum in the antiscientific and antirationalist reaction that marks the late nineteenth century and prolongs itself well into the twentieth. As a consequence—and by now this has become almost a truism—a high degree of technological development appears perfectly compatible with an acute sense of decadence. The fact of progress is not denied, but increasingly large numbers of people experience the results of progress with an anguished sense of loss and alienation. Once again, progress is de cadence and decadence is progress. The true opposite of de cadence-as far as the biological connotations of the word are concerned—is perhaps regeneration. But where are the barbarians who will regenerate our exhausted world?

Without entirely subsiding, the exhilarating belief in progress has been replaced during the last one hundred years or so by the infinitely more ambiguous (more ambiguous because more self- critical) myths of modernity, the avant-garde, and decadence. I am, of course, limiting my remarks to the way these myths function

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within the scope of the literary and artistic imagination of our age. So, I am particularly interested here in the passage from the old and general sense of decadence to the new and more specific notion of cultural decadence as it evolved in the nineteenth century, culminating with the appearance of the aesthetic-historical category of "decadentism." In other words, I am concerned with the process through which decadence becomes self-consciously modern. In this process, as we shall see, a complete reinterpretation and reevaluation of the concept of decadence is achieved.