Laudator Temporis Acti

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. II (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1928), pp. 200-201 (footnote omitted):

The Classical religion lived in its vast number of separate cults, which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living. The divinity is always bound to and bounded by one locality, in conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which the significances lie in the form of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered geographically in innumerable points, so spiritually its religion was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely independent of the rest. Only their number, and not their scope, was capable of increase. Within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practise these cults without belonging to them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation — that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion — the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, "when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." It is self-evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false. The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church — in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in the creed.