Historical Cycles and Human Evolution

Phases of our historical cycle

If it is true that Man continues his terrestrial evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, it is also true that the historical cycle to which our civilization belongs is no more ancient than a few thousand years. In the same way, we do not think that this civilization is destined to last forever, but that it is plausibly destined to collapse in a few hundred years, leaving space for a new reorganization of Humanity, a new cycle of development in discontinuity with the previous one.

Now, it is evident that during the development and culmination of a cycle, one also finds the bases and seeds of successive cycles, as well as the shells and residues of previous cycles. Considering the limited temporal range that we intend to analyze, it will be useless for us to consider themes relating to development cycles that will come or the remains of previous cycles, which do not have the strength to alter the immediate development of the civilization in which we live.

The scientific-technological era in which we are immersed is, evidently, the fruit of a development and gestation operated in a few centuries in the Western mentality founded on Judeo-Christian spirituality contaminated by Greco-Roman mentality. For this reason, even atheists, agnostics or free thinkers cannot, in this historical moment, not call themselves Christians³⁰ and not consider as the center of our evolutionary cycle and its development the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ.

Phases of evolution of a people

Before the advent of Christ it is not convenient to analyze the evolution of Humanity as a whole. If on the initiative of Christ life is given to a Catholic or Universal Ekklesia and, therefore, to the institution of a single people with a Universal Mission;³¹ before the descent of Christ, individual evolution had to necessarily be considered in function of the people of belonging.

A people is a collectivity, formed by individuals with specialized functions which, coordinated by a directive power, give life to a true and proper organism, the social organism,³² with its own strength and also with its own soul. In the classical sense of the term, a people is characterized by a geographic, linguistic, cultural and religious unity placed under the patronage of a supra-individual entity or intelligence that inspires the sentiments and models the mentality of its members.³³ Thus different peoples have manifested different spiritual flows and influences, have made themselves vehicles of Revelation or have executed specific tasks in the economy of Salvation and human Evolution.

As superorganisms, peoples, like individuals, are subject to evolution: they are born, grow, develop and die. As in every evolutionary cycle, also in the evolution of a people we witness the progression of the four phases treated in the first part of this writing: a sowing phase, in which a seminal principle is inserted in a suitable ecological substrate; a gestation or development phase of such principle; one of culmination in which the people or constituted society reaches the most adequate conditions to realize their own evolutionary mission or finality. Everything that is subject to evolution has an evolutionary model, which constitutes its own evolutionary end, and which it must reach within a temporal cycle. Specifically, also a people, like any other organism in evolution, possesses an evolutionary model, an inspiring idea that guides it and which is a specialized expression of the unique model of Man which is Christ or rather the God-Man.