Between decline and collapse
Thinkers who live in late ages tend to experience themselves as standing at the end of a story, not between stories. Cicero is exemplary here.
His laments about the corruption of Roman mores and the breakdown of republican institutions register a profound sense of decline, but decline within a world that remains, in principle, continuous and repairable. The Roman res publica is sick, not mortal. Even when he anticipates catastrophe, the horizon is civil war, tyranny, exile, not the disappearance of his civilization into something unrecognisable.
Augustine, writing two generations after the sack of Rome, radicalises the diagnosis without altering that basic frame.
In The City of God he insists that Rome fell not because of Christianity but because of its own long-standing moral bankruptcy, and he reads the disasters of his day as one episode in a single, providential history stretching from creation to judgment. The earthly city decays, but it decays inside a universal sacred narrative.
Loss is intelligible as punishment, purification, or testing; it is not the loss of history itself.
The Byzantines, for a millennium, speak in a similar register. They call themselves Rhomaioi, Romans, understanding their polity as the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire, grounded in Greek language and culture, Roman law, and Christian faith. Even as territorial, linguistic and institutional realities mutate, the self-description insists on organic evolution rather than replacement. There is no conceptual space, in that self-understanding, for Byzantium to be a second civilization after a first one’s collapse. There is only Rome, differently configured.
Renaissance humanists complicate but do not abandon this pattern. Their polemical contrast between a radiant antiquity and a “Gothic” Middle Age often suggests rupture, yet the scholarship on education and intellectual life stresses how deep the continuities actually were. Humanists re-centre Latin eloquence, ethics, and classical models, but do so from within a Latin Christian world that they still inhabit and assume. The “rebirth” of antiquity is imagined less as the emergence of a new civilization than as recovery and renovation within the same overarching one.
We could multiply examples: Chinese literati at the end of dynasties, Islamic scholars reflecting on the Mongol sack of Baghdad, early modern commentators on the so‑called “decline” of the Ottoman Empire.
Again and again, one finds a rich vocabulary of decadence, corruption, loss of virtue, betrayal of founding ideals – but all framed as internal deformation of a single civilizational arc, not as the twilight of one among many incommensurable worlds.
Why is the thought of collapse, in the strong sense, so hard to think?
One answer is metaphysical: for European thought, the fusion, in late antiquity and beyond, of a Judeo‑Christian linear, unbroken sacred history with imperial universalism. The biblical narrative offers a single story of humanity under one God; Roman and later imperial ideologies imagine a single oecumene ordered under a universal law. In the synthesis that follows – visible in Augustine’s two cities, in Byzantine self‑identification, in the theistic frame that still undergirds Renaissance humanism – history becomes one continuous drama of fall and restoration. Civilizations can sin, decline, be chastised, even be conquered, but they remain chapters in the same book.
To see oneself instead as living in a second or third civilization, built on the ruins of predecessors whose values are no longer binding, would require a different imaginary: one in which there is no guaranteed thru-line, no single providential spine.
That sense of radical plurality, of civilizations as mortal, discontinuous experiments, only really becomes thinkable once the universal monotheistic narrative and its imperial carriers begin to lose their taken‑for‑granted authority.
Until then, even the most clear‑sighted critics of decline, from Cicero to Augustine to the humanists, remain poised between decline and collapse, able to feel the rot but not to conceive that the world itself might end and another, truly other, begin.