Haydn call Beethoven an atheist:

Haydn (1732-1809) was a devout Catholic who turned to his rosary for comfort when composing; he normally began his music compositions with "in nomine Domini" ("in the name of the Lord") and ended with "Laus Deo" ("praise be to God").

Beethoven (1770-1827) was raised a Roman Catholic but his biographer Schindler considered him a deist.  At age 21, he studied composition with Haydn who claimed Beethoven was an atheist.  Beethoven kept quiet about his exact views on religion & did not attend any church; he distrusted priests.  Several of his works are about paganism.  He became increasingly devoted to Pantheism; his text in the choral movement of the 9th symphony reflects this.  Several other works reflect religious warmth & sincerity however.  He composed 2 Masses, especially moving was the Missa Solemnis (1823).  His String Quartet No. 15 (1825) contains a movement titled "Holy Song of Thanksgiving to God from a Convalescent" (written following recovery from serious illness).  

 

evening of the Culture:

reference to the organic Summer period of a Culture

 

the dawn of the Civilization:

reference to the dead, inorganic final phase, Autumn, of a Civilization

 

Aristotle (as atheist unawares):

The pre-Socratic thinkers moved away from the traditional pantheistic religions of Greece; Socrates (469-399 BC) tried to understand the world in general through careful systematic & rational thought, rather than relying on the gods for explanations.  He was charged with impiety inferring he did not believe in the Gods of the state.  Plato (427–347 BC) & Aristotle (384–322 BC) belong to succeeding generations & developed rational accounts of the world explicitly rejecting the superstitious pantheism of their contemporaries.  Aristotle posited that there must be a single, immortal, unchanging being responsible for the world, not a god the older generation would have recognized.

 

Stoicism (atheistic):

Stoic theology is a fatalistic & naturalistic pantheism: God is never fully transcendent but always immanent, identified with Nature.  God is the totality of the universe, identifiable with the logos (reason or leading principle); they downgraded the traditional gods, who even disappear during the periodic destruction of the cosmos (part of the never ending cycle of destruction & creation).  They did not practice a cult to this “Logos” God.  Middle & later Platonists spoke of a supreme God (not the gods) as responsible for the creation & who acted as providence for the universe; they did not however directly practice a religious cult to this God either.

 

Western Socialism (atheistic):* see EndNote<A>

The early socialist movement was compatible with Christianity, especially in Britain.  On the Continent in the 1840s however liberal academics became involved in the worker’s movement & injected a strong dose of atheism.  Marx had a major impact: socialism evolved from anticlerical Christian idealism to radically anti-religious materialism.  Marx called for nothing less than the abolition of religion (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right 1843); his followers saw the struggle against religion as an end in itself.  The SPD, the first socialist party in Europe, was born in Germany in 1863.  In the 1870s militant atheism led by Socialist writers like Albert Dulks pointed to religion as the main bastion of anti-socialism & declared the fight against religion even more vital than the political struggle!  This militancy was moderated in the 1880s; the Erfurt programme (1891) declared religion a private affair.  The SPD continued to advocate the ending of public funds for religious institutions & the establishment of secular education.  The rank & file and party leaders remained atheists.  In 1911 SPD candidates would claim the Church hindered progress, supported capitalism & class rule, & that the party need to destroy its influence

 

Buddhism of Indian (atheistic):

The existence or non-existence of God is not an important question in Buddhism.  Being is not the result of a creator God or the Vedic Brahman concept or any other transcendent creative principle.  The Buddha did not claim to be divine & did not embrace a personal god.  He suggested it was fear that produced the religious impulse in humanity.

                            Gripped by fear men go to the sacred mountains, sacred groves, sacred trees and shrines, but these are not a secure kind of refuge.

                                                                                                The Dhammapada

The way to cure this fear is not by believing in a God but by coming to a proper understanding & acceptance of the way things are.  In many cultures Buddhism co-exists with local gods, who may be seen as having adopted Buddhism, or are regarded as manifestations of various Buddha’s, they may be given responsibility for a particular temple. These "gods" are not eternal & unchanging, but go through death & rebirth, just as human beings do.

 

second religiousness:

a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state, occurring concurrently with Caesarism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization.  It is a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture & demonstrates the lack of youthful creativity the Early Culture once possessed.  In Apollonian history, between the battle of Canna (216 BC) and Actium (31 BC) Classical science faded, replaced by the world-outlook of the second religiousness as the denizens of the Roman Empire turned to the cults of Mithras, Isis, Sol Invictus.

 

well-ordered bodies:

the perception of Nature that an Apollonian experiences

 

world-cavern:

the perception of Nature that a MAgian experiences

 

efficient space:

the perception of Nature that a Faustian experiences

 

Nietzsche (" God is dead"): 

The expression is found in his collection The Gay Science (1882) and also Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85).  Nietzsche used the phrase to sum up the effects & consequences of the Enlightenment.  Up to this point European civilization had been essentially Christian since the later Roman Empire.  The Enlightenment brought about the triumph of scientific rationality over revelation; the rise of philosophical materialism & Naturalism which dispensed with the role of God in human affairs & the world.  This led to the rejection of a belief of cosmic order & a rejection of absolute values, the belief in an objective & universal moral law binding on all.  In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism.  It was against this nihilism that Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values.

 

Heraclitus or Meister Eckart (wise not intelligent):

Heraclitus (535-475 BC) Greek, pre-Socratic, Ionian philosopher, native of Ephesus, propounded a distinctive theory expressed in oracular language; he continued many of the physical & cosmological theories of his predecessors but shifted focus from the cosmic to the human realm; he was the first humanist; his best known doctrines were: that things are constantly changing, that opposites coincide & that fire is the basic material of the world.   He worked to break the mold of contemporary thought & criticized most of the Greek canons (Homer, Hesiod, Xenophanes) calling the epic poets fools & Pythagoras a fraud.  He was of the mid-Summer period of the Apollonian Culture, of ripening consciousness, earliest urban and critical stirrings; the beginning of a purely philosophical form of the world-feeling; the opposition of idealistic and realistic systems.

Meister Eckart (1260-1328) German theologian, philosopher & recognized mystic within contemporary popular spirituality, worked with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God; his central theme was the presence of God in the individual soul & the dignity of the soul of the just man.  He was a man full of spirit alive during the late Faustian Spring, the first mystical-metaphysical shaping of the new world-

 

Socrates and Rousseau (intelligent not wise):

 Socrates (470-399 BC) Athenian philosopher considered the first moral philosopher; immortalized in Plato's dialogues; he has become renowned for his contributions to ethics & epistemology as well as Socratic irony & the Socratic method, huge influence on philosophers in later antiquity & Western philosophical tradition.

Rousseau (1712-1778) Genevan philosopher, writer & composer; his political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment & the French Revolution & development of modern political, economic and educational thought.  His Discourse on Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762) are cornerstones in modern political and social thought while his novel New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of romanticism in fiction

Both men were alive in the Autumn, the first stage of Civilization, where we see the belief in the almightiness of reason, the cult of "nature" & "rational" religion

 

Medicean Florentines (irreligious not atheistic):

The Renaissance expanded free thought & sceptical inquiry; as the science of Copernicus & Galileo advanced, man's privileged place in the universe diminished.  The Aristotelian & Avveroist circles in Florence debated the eternality of the soul.  Some of the new philosophical enquiries questioned divine involvement in nature & the affairs of man.  We find criticisms of the Church from Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Bonaventure des Périers & Rabelais.  Guicciardini & Lorenzo Strozzi were free thinkers.  However there is no evidence of intellectuals denying the existence of a God or gods.  Machiavelli certainly comes closest.  He read Epicurus, Lucretius, Plato, Pythagorean cult writings, Cicero’s sceptical dialogs, & Seneca, all writers who offer alternate explanations to Christian theology.  He modelled a Utilitarianism ethics, which works without God.  He painted a world of politics in which God or an absolute code of Truth is absent.  Machiavelli shows repeatedly that he saw religion as man-made, and that the value of religion lies in its contribution to social order and the rules of morality must be dispensed with if security requires it.  But does this make him an atheist?

 

Megalopolis:

an urban region consisting of several large cities & suburbs that adjoin each other; it is the city which emerges in the Autumn, gigantic, sucking in the surrounding population.