First World War

The First World War is identified as the approximate starting point of the Age of Wars, the period of upheaval whose ruins gave rise to Castalia and its educational system. In retrospect, it becomes both a landmark in the province’s origin story and a test of its historical self-understanding: the Castalians can condemn the age’s violence, yet their own account risks reducing a complex past to a convenient indictment of anti-intellectualism.

Place in Castalian History

The narrator situates the First World War at the beginning of the Age of Wars, an era whose end left the world shattered. Castalia’s founders began their work amid those ruins; the province did not originate from a position of serene distance from political history. The later Castalian hierarchy and its homeland were therefore products of a crisis, even though their descendants came to imagine themselves as detached observers of the historical world.

The official account of the age is described as one-sided. It explains the catastrophe chiefly by claiming that rulers treated intellectual life as an inferior weapon, useful only on occasion, and by connecting that attitude to the corruption of the Feuilleton age. The narrator accepts that anti-intellectualism and brutality were plainly visible, but cautions that this explanation is not enough to recover the era’s full circumstances.

Conflict and Moral Disorder

The account distinguishes the period’s intellectual achievements from its moral purpose. Its intelligence and methods could be imposing, but, by the standards of Castalia, intellect had become detached from the pursuit of truth. The deeper misfortune was the absence of a firm moral order capable of countering the restlessness and upheaval associated with rapid population growth. What remnants of such an order remained were suppressed by the era’s slogans.

The resulting conflicts divided people along many overlapping lines: young against old, fatherland against humanity, Red against White, believers against heretics, and advocates of the past against advocates of the future. Battlefronts cut across borders, nations, and families. Although later generations could no longer reconstruct the full force or meaning of the period’s labels and battle cries, the narrator insists that many fighters and leaders experienced their causes as significant and possessed some measure of good faith or idealism. Each side could believe it was fighting for God against the devil, even as fighting, killing, and destruction spread everywhere.

Castalia’s Historical Blind Spot

The retrospective account turns the history of the First World War back upon Castalia. Its members tend to view world history as an arena of appetite, power-seeking, violence, and destruction, much as early Christian hermits viewed the world as a theater of worldly passions. That perspective captures real horrors but encourages them to forget that they, too, are products of historical growth and are liable to perish if they lose the capacity to change.

The resulting failure is not simply an error of knowledge. Castalians share responsibility for world history and for their own position within it, yet their sense of that responsibility is gravely deficient. The First World War thus stands at once as part of the violence from which Castalia arose and as evidence that the province cannot understand its own beginnings by treating history as something external to itself.