in the Academy and the Peripatus, the Stoa and the Garden, the Cynic’s freedom of the highways and hedges and the Neoplatonist’s unearthly Land of Heart’s Desire.NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that a certain fixity and uniformity of ethos is its characteristic mark, there cannot but be an element of variety even within a dominant minority. Though it may perform prodigies of sterilization in converting to its own barren esprit de corps the recruits whom it is continually drafting into its repeatedly self-decimated ranks, it cannot prevent itself from putting forth the creative powers that are revealed in the creation not only of a universal state but also of a school of philosophy. Accordingly we find that it is apt to include a number of members who depart very strikingly from the characteristic types of the closed corporation to which they belong.
These characteristic types are the militarist and the more ignoble exploiter who follows in his train. It is hardly necessary to cite examples from Hellenic history. We see the militarist at his best in an Alexander and the exploiter at his worst in a Verres, whose misgovernment of Sicily is exposed in the voluminous orations, or pamphlets, of Cicero. But the Roman universal state owed its long duration to the fact that its militarists and exploiters were followed, after the Augustan settlement, by the innumerable and mostly anonymous soldiers and civil servants who partly atoned for the misdeeds of their predatory predecessors by making it possible for this moribund society to bask for many generations in the pale sunshine of an ‘Indian summer’.
Moreover the Roman public servant is neither the only nor the earliest epiphany of the Hellenic dominant minority in an altruistic role. In the age of the Severi, when the reign of the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was an accomplished fact of Roman history, and when a school of Stoic jurists was translating the Stoic ethos into terms of Roman law, it was obvious that the miracle of transforming the Roman wolf into a Platonic watch-dog had been the work of Greek philosophy. If the Roman administrator was an altruistic agent of the Hellenic dominant minority’s practical ability, the Greek philosopher was a still nobler exponent of its intellectual power; and the golden chain of creative Greek philosophers, which ends with Plotinus (circa
A.D.
203-62) in the generation that lived to see the Roman public service collapse, had begun with Socrates (circa
470-399 B.C.) in a generation that was already grown up when the Hellenic Civilization broke down.
To retrieve, or at any rate to mitigate, the tragic consequence of that breakdown was the Greek philosopher’s, as well as the Roman administrator’s, life-work; and the philosopher’s labours produced a more valuable and durable result than the administrator’s, just because they were less closely woven into the material texture of the disintegrating society’s life. While the Roman administrators built the Hellenic universal state the philosophers endowed posterity with a
in the Academy and the Peripatus, the Stoa and the Garden, the Cynic’s freedom of the highways and hedges and the Neoplatonist’s unearthly Land of Heart’s Desire.
If we extend our survey to the histories of the other broken-down civilizations we shall find the same noble streaks of altruism running side by side with the grim and sordid trails of the militarists and the exploiters. For example, the Confucian litterati who administered the Sinic universal state under the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 221) attained a standard of service and acquired an esprit de corps which place them on a moral level with the Roman civil servants who were their contemporaries on the other side of the world during the latter half of their period of activity. Even the chinovniks who administered the Orthodox Christian universal state in Russia for two centuries from the reign of Peter the Great onwards, and who became a byword, at home as well as in the West, for their incompetence and corruption, did not acquit themselves so discreditably as is often supposed in wrestling with their gigantic dual task of maintaining the Muscovite Empire as a going concern and at the same time transforming it into a newfangled polity on the Western pattern. In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the slave-household of the Ottoman Padishah, which has likewise become a byword for its oppression of the ra’iyeh, will also perhaps come to be remembered as an institution which performed at least one signal service for the Orthodox Society in imposing upon it that Pax Ottomanica which gave a self-tormented world a spell of quiet between two weary ages of anarchy. In the Far Eastern Society in Japan the feudal daimyos and their henchmen the Samurai, who preyed upon society, in preying upon one another, during the four centuries preceding the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate, survived to redeem their own past by lending themselves to Ieyasu’s constructive work of converting a feudal anarchy into a feudal order; and at the opening of the next chapter of Japanese history they rose to a height of self-abnegation which is almost sublime, when they voluntarily divested themselves of their privileges because they were convinced that this sacrifice was required of them in order to enable Japan to hold her own in the environment of a Westernized World from which she could no longer hold aloof.
This vein of nobility which reveals itself in the Japanese Samurai is the virtue attributed even by their enemies to two other ruling minorities, the Incas of the Andean universal state and the Persian grandees who governed a Syriac universal state as vice-gerents of an Achaemenid King of Kings. The Spanish Conquistadores vouch for the virtues of the Incas. In the Greek portrait of the Persians, Herodotus’s famous summary of the Persian boys’ education— ‘they train them from the age of five to the age of twenty to do three things, and three things only: to ride and to shoot and to speak the truth’—is not discredited by the companion picture that is presented to us of these same Persians in their manhood. There is the Herodotean tale of Xerxes’ suite in the storm at sea doing obeisance to their Imperial Master and then leaping overboard in order to lighten the vessel. But the most impressive Greek testimonial to Persian virtues is that of Alexander the Great, who showed by grave acts, and not just by easy words, how highly he thought of the Persians after he had made their acquaintance. He had no sooner come to know these Persians by the searching test of their reaction to an overwhelming disaster than he took a decision that was not only bound to offend his own Macedonians but was the surest way of outraging their feelings that he could have hit upon if it had been his deliberate aim. He decided to take the Persians into partnership in the government of the empire which the prowess of his Macedonians had just wrested from them; and he put this policy into execution with characteristic thoroughness. He took a Persian grandee’s daughter to wife; he bribed or browbeat his Macedonian officers into following his example; and he drafted Persian recruits into his Macedonian regiments. A people who could evoke this extraordinary tribute from the leader of their hereditary enemies—and this on the morrow of their utter defeat—must have been transparently endowed with the classic virtues of ‘a ruling race’.
We have now managed to marshal a considerable array of evidence for the capacity of dominant minorities to produce an admirable governing class, and the evidence is borne out by the number of the universal states that they have created. Out of twenty civilizations that have broken down, no less than fifteen have passed through this stage on their road to dissolution. We can identify a Hellenic universal state in the Roman Empire; an Andean in the Empire of the Incas; a Sinic in the Empire of the Ts’in and Han dynasties; a Minoan in ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’; a Sumeric in the Empire of Sumer and Akkad; a Babylonic in the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar; a Mayan in the ‘Old Empire’ of the Mayas; an Egyptiac in the ‘Middle Empire’ of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties; a Syriac in the Achaemenian Empire; an Indie in the Empire of the Mauryas; a Hindu in the Empire of the Great Moguls; a Russian Orthodox in the Muscovite Empire; a universal state of the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the Ottoman Empire; and in the Far Eastern World the Mongol Empire in China and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan,
Nor is this political capacity the only kind of creative power that is a common attribute of dominant minorities. We have already seen that the Hellenic dominant minority produced not only Roman administration but also Greek philosophy, and we can find at least three other cases in which a philosophy has been thought out by a dominant minority.
In the history of the Babylonic Society, for example, the terrible eighth century B.C., which saw the beginning of the hundred years’ war between Babylonia and Assyria, seems also to have seen a sudden great advance in astronomical knowledge. In this age Babylonic men of science discovered that the rhythm of cyclic recurrence, which had been patent from time immemorial in the alternations of day and night, in the waxing and waning of the Moon, and in the solar cycle of the year, was also discernible on a vaster scale in the motions of the planets. These stars, which were traditionally named ‘the wanderers’ in allusion to their apparently erratic courses, now proved to be bound by as strict a discipline as the Sun and the Moon and the ‘fixed’ stars of the firmament in the cosmic cycle of the magnus annus ; and this exciting Babylonic discovery had much the same effect as our recent Western scientific discoveries have had upon the discoverers’ conception of the Universe.
The never broken and never varying order that had thus been found to reign in all the known movements of the stellar cosmos was now assumed to govern the Universe as a whole: material and spiritual, inanimate and animate. If an eclipse of the Sun or a transit of Venus could be dated to some precise moment hundreds of years back in the past, or predicted with equal certainty as bound to occur at some precise moment in the equally remote future, then was it not reasonable to assume that human affairs were just as rigidly fixed and just as accurately calculable? And since the cosmic discipline implied that all these members of the Universe that moved in so perfect a unison were ‘in sympathy’— en rapport —with each other, was it unreasonable to assume that the newly revealed pattern of the movements of the stars was a key to the riddle of human fortunes, so that the observer who held this astronomical clue in his hands would be able to forecast his neighbour’s destinies if once he knew the date and moment of his birth? Reasonable or not, these assumptions were eagerly made; and thus a sensational scientific discovery gave birth to a fallacious philosophy of determinism which has captivated the imagination of one society after another and is not quite discredited yet after a run of nearly 2,700 years.
The seductiveness of astrology lies in its pretension to combine a theory which explains the whole machina mundi with a practice which will enable Tom, Dick and Harry to spot the Derby winner here and now. Thanks to this twofold attraction, the Babylonic philosophy was able to survive the extinction of the Babylonic Society in the last century before Christ; and the Chaldean mathematicus who imposed it upon a prostrate Hellenic Society was represented until yesterday by the Court Astrologer at Peking and the Munejjim Bashy at Istanbol.
We have dwelt on this Babylonic philosophy of determinism because it has a greater affinity than any of the Hellenic philosophies have with the still perhaps rather callow philosophical speculations of our own Western World in its present Cartesian Age.* On the other hand, there are counterparts of almost all the Hellenic schools of thought in the philosophies of the Indie and Sinic worlds. The dominant minority of the disintegrating Indie Civilization brought forth the Jainism of the followers of Mahavira, the Primitive Buddhism of the earlier followers of Siddhartha Gautama, the transfigured Buddhism of the Mahayana (which differs from its acknowledged original at least as profoundly as Neoplatonism differs from the philosophy of the Socratics of the fourth century B.C.) and the diverse Buddhistic philosophies that are part of the mental apparatus of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism. The dominant minority of a disintegrating Sinic Civilization brought forth the moralized ritualism and ritualized morality of Confucius and the paradoxical wisdom of the Tao which is ascribed to the legendary genius of Lao-tse.
A Hellenic Prototype
When we pass from dominant minorities to proletariats, a closer examination of the facts will confirm here too our first impression that within each of these fractions of a disintegrating society there is a diversity of type. We shall also find that, in the range of this spiritual diversity, the internal and the external proletariats are at opposite poles. While the external proletariats have a gamut which is narrower than that of the dominant minorities, the gamut of the internal proletariats is very much wider. Let us reconnoitre the wider field first.
If we wish to follow the genesis of the Hellenic internal proletariat from the beginning of the embryo stage, we cannot do better than quote a passage from Thucydides in which the historian of the breakdown of the Hellenic Society describes the consequent social schism in its earliest phase, as it showed itself first at Corcyra.
‘Such was the savagery of the class-war (stasis) at Corcyra as it developed, and it made the deeper impression through being the first of its kind—though eventually the upheaval spread through almost the whole of the Hellenic World. In every country there were struggles between the leaders of the proletariat and the reactionaries in their efforts to procure the intervention of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians respectively. In peace-time they would have had neither the opportunity nor the desire to call in the foreigner; but now there was the war; and it was easy for any revolutionary spirits in either camp to procure an alliance entailing the discomfiture of their opponents and a corresponding reinforcement of their own faction. This access of class-war brought one calamity after another upon the countries of Hellas— calamities that occur and will continue to occur so long as human nature remains what it is, though they may be aggravated or mitigated or modified by successive changes of circumstance. Under the favourable conditions of peace-time both countries and individuals display a sweeter reasonableness, because their hands are not forced by the logic of events; but war eats away the margins of ordinary life and, in most characters, adjusts the temperament to the new environment by its brutal training. So the countries of Hellas became infected with the class-war, and the sensation made by each successive outbreak had a cumulative effect upon the next.’ 1
The first social effect of this stat of affairs was to produce a large and ever larger floating population of ‘stateless’ exiles. During the growth period of Hellenic history such a plight had been uncommon and was regarded as a dreadful abnormality. The evil was not overcome by Alexander’s great-hearted effort to induce the reigning faction of the moment in each city-state to allow its ejected opponents to return to their homes in peace; and the fire made fresh fuel for itself; for the one thing that the exiles found for their hands to do was to enlist as mercenary soldiers; and this glut of military man-power put fresh drive into the wars by which new exiles—and thereby more mercenaries—were being created.
The effect of these direct moral ravages of the war spirit in Hellas in uprooting her children was powerfully reinforced by the operation of disruptive economic forces which the wars let loose. For example, the wars of Alexander and his successors in Southwestern Asia gave military employment to one swarm of homeless Greeks at the cost of uprooting another. For the mercenaries were paid by putting into circulation the bullion which had been accumulating for two centuries in the Achaemenian treasuries; and this sudden increase in the volume of currency worked havoc among the peasants and artisans. Prices soared, and the financial revolution reduced to pauperism an element in the body social which had hitherto enjoyed a relative security. The same effect of pauperization was produced again, a hundred years later, by the economic consequences of the Hannibalic War, when the peasantry were uprooted from the soil of Italy, first by the direct devastation wrought by Hannibal’s soldiery and then by the ever longer terms of Roman military service. Under this tribulation the pauperized descendants of an Italian peasantry that had been uprooted against its will had no recourse left except to make a profession out of the military career that had been imposed on their ancestors as a corvee.
In this cruel process of ‘deracination’ we cannot doubt that we are watching the genesis of the Hellenic internal proletariat—and this notwithstanding the fact that, at any rate in the earlier generations, the victims of the process were ci-devant aristocrats as often as not. For proletarianism is a state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance. When we first made use of the term ‘proletariat’ we defined it, for our purpose, as a social element or group which in some way is ‘in’ but not ‘of any given society at any given stage of that society’s history; and this definition covers the exiled Spartiate Clearchus and the other aristocratic captains of Cyrus the Youriger’s Greek mercenary force, whose antecedents Xenophon has sketched for us, as well as the meanest unemployed labourers who enlisted as mercenaries under the standard of a Ptolemy or a Marius. The true hall-mark of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth but a consciousness—and the resentment that this consciousness inspires—of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society.
Thus the Hellenic internal proletariat was recruited first of all from the free citizens, and even from the aristocrats, of the disintegrating Hellenic bodies politic; and these first recruits had been disinherited in the first instance by being robbed of a spiritual birthright; but of course their spiritual impoverishment was often accompanied, and was almost always followed, by pauperization on the material plane, and they were soon reinforced by recruits from other classes who were material as well as spiritual proletarians from the start. The numbers of the Hellenic internal proletariat were vastly swollen by the Macedonian wars of conquest which swept the whole of the Syriac, Egyptiac and Babylonic societies into the Hellenic dominant minority’s net, while the later conquests of the Romans swept in half the barbarians of Europe and North Africa.
These involuntary alien reinforcements of the Hellenic internal proletariat were perhaps at first more fortunate than their fellow proletarians of native Hellenic origin in one respect. Though they were morally disinherited and materially despoiled, they were not yet physically uprooted. But the slave-trade followed in the wake of the conqueror, and the last two centuries B.C. saw all the populations within range of the Mediterranean coast—both Western barbarians and cultivated Orientals—being laid under contribution in order to supply the demands of an insatiable Italian slave-labour market.
We now see that the internal proletariat of the disintegrating Hellenic Society was composed of three distinct elements: disinherited and uprooted members of the society’s own body social; partially disinherited members of alien civilizations and primitive societies that had been conquered and exploited without being torn up by the roots; and doubly disinherited conscripts from these subject populations who were not only uprooted but were also enslaved and deported in order to be worked to death on distant plantations. The sufferings of these three sets of victims were as various as their origins were diverse, but these differences were transcended by their overwhelming common experience of being robbed of their social inheritance and being turned into exploited outcastes.
When we come to examine how these victims of injustice reacted to their fate, we shall not be surprised to find that one of their reactions was an explosion of savagery which surpassed in violence the cold-blooded cruelty of their oppressors and exploiters. A uniform note of passion rings through a pandemonium of desperate proletarian outbreaks. We catch this note in a series of Egyptiac insurrections against the Ptolemaic regime of exploitation; in the series of Jewish insurrections against a Seleucid and a Roman policy of Hellenization, from the rising of Judas Macca-baeus in 166 B.C. down to the last forlorn hope under the leadership of Bar Kokaba in A.D. 132-5; in the reckless fury which moved the semi-Hellenized and highly sophisticated natives of Western Asia Minor to expose themselves twice over to Roman vengeance— under the Attalid Aristonicus in 132 B.C. and under Mithradates, King of Pontus, in 88 B.C. There is also the series of slave insurrections in Sicily and Southern Italy, culminating in the desperate exploit of the runaway Thracian gladiator Spartacus, who ranged up and down the length of the Italian Peninsula, defying the Roman wolf in his very lair, from 73 to 71 B.C.
Nor were these outbursts of exasperation confined to the alien elements in the proletariat. The savagery with which the Roman citizen-proletariat turned and rent the Roman plutocracy in the civil wars, and particularly in the paroxysm of 91-82 B.C., was quite equal to the savagery of a Judas Maccabaeus or a Spartacus; and the most Satanic of all the dark figures that stand out in sinister silhouette against the glare of a world in flames are the Roman revolutionary leaders who had been flung headlong, by some unusually violent turn of Fortune’s wheel, out of the Ordo Sena-torius itself: a Sertorius, a Sextus Pompeius, a Marius and a Catiline.
But suicidal violence was not the only response made by the Hellenic internal proletariat. There was another order of response altogether which found its highest expression in the Christian religion. The gentle, or non-violent, response is as genuine an expression of the will to secede as the violent response; for the gentle martyrs who are commemorated in the Second Book of Maccabees—the old scribe Eleazer and the Seven Brethren and their Mother—are the spiritual progenitors of the Pharisees, and the Pharisees are ‘they who separate themselves’—a self-conferred title which would translate itself into ‘secessionists’ in language of Roman derivation. In the history of the Oriental internal proletariat of the Hellenic World from the second century B.C. onwards we see violence and gentleness striving for the mastery of souls until violence annihilates itself and leaves gentleness alone in the field.
The issue was raised at the outset; for the gentle way which was taken by the protomartyrs of 167 B.C. was swiftly abandoned by the impetuous Judas; and the immediate material success of this proletarian ‘strong man armed’—tawdry and ephemeral though it was—so dazzled posterity that Jesus’s most intimate companions were scandalized at their Master’s predictions of his own fate, and were prostrated when these predictions came true. Yet a few months after the Crucifixion Gamaliel was already taking note of the executed leader’s miraculously rallied disciples as men who might prove to have God on their side; and a few years later Gamaliel’s own disciple Paul was preaching a crucified Christ.
This conversion of the first generation of Christians from the way of violence to the way of gentleness had to be purchased at the price of a shattering blow to their material hopes; and what was done for Jesus’s followers by the Crucifixion was done for Orthodox Jewry by the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. A new school of Judaism arose which renounced ‘the notion that the Kingdom of God was an external state of things which was just upon the point of being manifested’. 1 With the signal but solitary exception of the Book of Daniel, the apocalyptic writings in which the Jewish way of violence had found literary expression were now ejected from the canon of the Law and the Prophets; and the contrary principle of abstaining from all efforts to promote the fulfilment of God’s will in This World by the work of human hands has become so fast ingrained in the Jewish tradition that the strictly orthodox Agudath Israel at this day look askance at the Zionist movement and hold rigidly aloof from any participation in the work of building up a Jewish ‘national home’ in twentieth-century Palestine.
If this change of heart in Orthodox Jewry has enabled Jewry to survive as a fossil, the corresponding change of heart in the companions of Jesus has opened the way to greater triumphs for the Christian Church. To the challenge of persecution the Christian Church responded in the gentle way of Eleazer and the Seven Brethren, and its reward was the conversion of the Hellenic dominant minority and afterwards of the barbarian war-bands of the external proletariat.
The direct opponent of Christianity in the first centuries of its growth was the primitive tribal religion of the Hellenic Society in its latest guise: the idolatrous worship of the Hellenic universal state in the personality of a Divus Caesar. It was the Church’s gentle but intransigent refusal to allow its members to practise this idolatry, even in a merely formal and perfunctory way, that drew upon it a series of official persecutions and finally compelled the Roman Imperial Government to capitulate to a spiritual power which it had failed to coerce. But though this primitive state-religion of the Empire was maintained and imposed with the whole strength of the Government’s right arm, it had little hold over human hearts. The conventional respect for it which the Roman magistrate commanded the Christian to show by the performance of a ritual act was the beginning and end of this state-religion. There was nothing more in it than this for those non-Christians who performed as a matter of course what was demanded of them and who could not understand why the Christian insisted on sacrificing his life rather than comply with a trivial custom. The rivals of Christianity which were powerful in themselves—through a native power of attraction which needed no backing of political coercion—were neither this state-worship nor any other form of primitive religion but a number of ‘higher religions’ which sprang, like Christianity itself, from the Hellenic internal proletariat.
We can conjure up these rival ‘higher religions’ by reminding ourselves of the various sources from which the Oriental contingent of the Hellenic internal proletariat was derived. The Christian religion came from a people of Syriac antecedents. The Iranian half of the Syriac World contributed Mithraism. The worship of Isis came from the submerged northern half of the Egyptiac World. The worship of the Anatolian Great Mother Cybele may perhaps be regarded as a contribution from a Hittite Society which by this time had long been extinct on every plane of social activity except the religious—though, if we set ourselves to trace the Great Mother back to her ultimate origins, we shall find her originally at home in the Sumeric World under the name of Ishtar, before ever she established herself as Cybele at Pessinus in Anatolia or as the Dea Syra at Hierapolis or as the Mother Earth of remote Teutonic-speaking worshippers at her grove on a Holy Island in the North Sea or the Baltic.
A Minoan Lacuna and some Hittite Vestiges
When we seek for the histories of internal proletariats in other disintegrating societies we have to confess that in some cases evidence is scanty or altogether fails us. We know, for example, nothing about the internal proletariat of the Mayan Society. In the case of the Minoan Society our attention has already been caught by the tantalizing glimmer of a possibility that the vestiges of something which might be called a Minoan universal church may be preserved among the heterogeneous constituents of the historic Orphic Church which makes its appearance in Hellenic history from the sixth century before Christ onwards. We cannot, however, be certain that any of the practices and beliefs of Orphism derive from a Minoan religion. We know next to nothing, again, about the internal proletariat of the Hittite Civilization, which perished at an unusually tender age. We can only say that the wreckage of the Hittite Society seems gradually to have been assimilated in part by the Hellenic and in part by the Syriac Society, so that we should have to search the histories of these two alien societies for any vestiges of the Hittite body social.
The Hittite Society is one of the many disintegrating societies that have been devoured by a neighbour before the process of disintegration has been completed. In such cases it is natural that an internal proletariat should regard with indifference or even with satisfaction the fate that is befalling its dominant minority. A test case is the behaviour of the internal proletariat in the Andean universal state when the Spanish Conquistadores suddenly broke in. The orejones were perhaps the most benevolent dominant minority that any disintegrating society has ever produced, but their benevolence availed them nothing in their day of trial. Their carefully tended human flocks and herds accepted Spanish conquest with the same unresponsive docility as they had shown in accepting the Pax Incaica.
We can also point to cases where an internal proletariat has greeted the conqueror of its dominant minority with positive enthusiasm. There is the welcome expressed in the eloquent apostrophes of ‘Deutero-Isaiah’ to the Persian conqueror of the Neo-Babylonian Empire which had taken the Jews into captivity. Two hundred years later the Babylonians themselves welcomed the Hellenic Alexander as their deliverer from the Achaemenian yoke.
The Japanese Internal Proletariat
Some clear tokens of the secession of a Japanese internal proletariat can be discerned in the history of the Far Eastern Society in Japan, which had run through its time of troubles and entered into its universal state before the Western Society swallowed it up. If we are looking, for example, for the counterparts of those citizens of the Hellenic city-states who were uprooted by the series of wars and revolutions which began in 431 B.C. and who found a disastrous outlet as mercenary soldiers, we shall observe an exact parallel in the ronin, or masterless unemployed men-at-arms, who were thrown off during the Japanese time of troubles by the feudal anarchy. Again, the eta or pariahs who survive as outcastes in the Japanese Society of to-day may be accounted for as a still unassimilated remnant of the Ainu barbarians of the Main Island who were forcibly incorporated into the Japanese internal proletariat as the barbarians of Europe and North Africa were incorporated by Roman arms into the Hellenic internal proletariat. In the third place we can discern the Japanese equivalent of those ‘higher religions’ in which the Hellenic internal proletariat sought and found its most effective response to the tribulations that it had to endure.
These religions were the Jodo, the Jodo Shinshu, the Hokke and the Zen, all of them founded within the century following the year A.D. 1175. These religions resemble their Hellenic equivalents in being all of them of alien inspiration, for all four of them are variations on the theme of the Mahayana. Three out of the four resemble Christianity to this extent that they taught the spiritual equality of the sexes. In addressing themselves to an unsophisticated public the apostles of these religions discarded Classical Chinese and wrote, when they did write, in the Japanese vernacular with a comparatively simple script. Their chief weakness as founders of religions was that, in their desire to bring salvation to as large a public as possible, they pitched their demands altogether too low. Some prescribed mere recitals of ritual formulae and others made little or no moral demand on their disciples. But it is to be remembered that the cardinal Christian doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins has in various times and places been so misused and misunderstood by soi-disant Christian leaders as to expose them to either one or both of these charges. Luther, for example, attacked the sale of indulgences as practised by the Roman Church in his day as being the substitution of a commercial transaction, disguised under ritual forms, for Christian repentance, while at the same time, with his own interpretation of the Pauline Justification by Faith and his Pecca fortiter, he laid himself open to the charge of treating morality as a matter of indifference.
Internal Proletariats under Alien Universal States
A curious spectacle is offered by one group of disintegrating civilizations in which, after the indigenous dominant minority has been annihilated or overthrown, the course of outward events has still proceeded on normal lines. Three societies—the Hindu, the Far Eastern in China and the Orthodox Christian in the Near East—which have all duly passed through a universal state on the road from breakdown to dissolution, have each received this universal state as a gift, or imposition, from alien hands instead of constructing it for themselves. Iranic hands have supplied one universal state to the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the shape of the Ottoman Empire and another to the Hindu World in the Timurid (Mughal) Empire. British hands have since reconstructed this jerry-built Mughal Raj from the foundations. In China it has been the Mongols that have played the Ottoman or Mughal part, while the work of reconstruction on a firmer basis, which the British have undertaken in India, has been played in China by the Manchus.
When a disintegrating society is thus compelled to admit some alien architect to furnish it with its universal state, it is confessing that its own indigenous dominant minority has become totally incompetent and sterile; and the inevitable penalty for this premature senility is a humiliating disfranchisement. The alien who comes to do a dominant minority’s work very naturally arrogates to himself a dominant minority’s prerogative; and in an alien-built universal state the whole of the indigenous dominant minority is thus degraded to the ranks of the internal proletariat. The Mongol or Manchu Khaqan and the Ottoman Padishah and the Mughal or British Qaysar-i-Hind may still find it convenient to employ the services of the Chinese litteratus or the Greek Phanariot or the Hindu Brahman as the case may be; but that does not disguise from these agents the fact that they have lost their souls as well as their status. It is evident that in a situation like this, where the ci-devant dominant minority has become confounded in a common abasement with an internal proletariat upon which it has once looked down with disdain, we are unlikely to find the process of disintegration working itself out on normal lines.
In the internal proletariat of the Hindu Society in our own generation we can discern the twofold proletarian reaction of violence and gentleness in a contrast between the murders committed by a militant school of Bengali revolutionaries and the non-violence preached by the Gujerati Mahatma Gandhi; and we can infer a longer past history of proletarian fermentation from the presence of a number of religious movements in which the same two contrary tendencies are likewise represented. In Sikhism we see a warlike proletarian syncretism of Hinduism and Islam; in the Brahmo-Samaj a non-violent syncretism of Hinduism and Liberal Protestant Christianity.
In the internal proletariat of the Far Eastern Society in China under the Manchu regime we can see in the T’aip’ing movement, which dominated the social stage in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, a work of the internal proletariat which is analogous to the Brahmo-Samaj in its debt to Protestant Christianity but to Sikhism in its militancy.
In the internal proletariat of the main body of Orthodox Christendom the ‘Zealot’ revolution at Salonica in the fifth decade of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era gives us a glimpse of a violent proletarian reaction at the darkest hour of the Orthodox Christian time of troubles—in the last generation before the Orthodox Christian Society was dragooned into a universal state by the drastic discipline of an Ottoman conqueror. The corresponding gentle reaction did not advance very far, but if, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the process of Westernization had not followed so hard on the heels of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, we may conjecture that by the present day the BektashI movement might have won for itself throughout the Near East the position which it has actually succeeded in attaining in Albania.
The Babylonic and Syriac Internal Proletariats
If we now pass to the Babylonic World, we shall find that the ferment of religious experience and discovery in the souls of a sorely tried internal proletariat was as active in South-Western Asia under the Assyrian terror of the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ as it was on the Hellenized shores of the Mediterranean under the Roman terror some six centuries later.
Through the agency of Assyrian arms the disintegrating Babylonic Society expanded geographically in two directions, as the disintegrating Hellenic Society expanded through the conquests made by the Macedonians and the Romans. Eastwards, beyond the Zagros, in Iran, the Assyrians anticipated the Roman exploits in Europe beyond the Appennines by subjugating a host of primitive societies; westwards, beyond the Euphrates, they anticipated the Macedonians’ exploits on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles by subjugating two alien civilizations; and these, the Syriac and the Egyptiac, were actually identical with two of the four which were afterwards incorporated into the Hellenic internal proletariat after Alexander’s campaigns. Nor were these alien victims of Babylonic militarism conquered without being uprooted. The classic examples of the deportation of a conquered population are the transplantation of the Israelites—the ‘Lost Ten Tribes’—by the Assyrian war-lord Sargon and the transplantation of the Jews by the Neo-Babylonian war-lord Nebuchadnezzar to the heart of the Babylonic World in Babylonia itself.
The compulsory exchange of populations was the sovereign device of Babylonic imperialism for breaking the spirit of conquered peoples, and the atrocity was by no means exclusively inflicted on aliens and barbarians. In their own fratricidal warfare the dominant powers of the Babylonic World did not scruple to mete out the same treatment to one another, and the Samaritan community—of which a few hundred representatives can be seen still living under the shadow of Mount Gerizim—is a monument of the transplantation to Syria, by Assyrian hands, of deportees from several cities of Babylonia, including Babylon itself.
It will be seen that the furor Assyriacus did not spend itself before it had brought into existence a Babylonic internal proletariat which bore a singularly close resemblance to the Hellenic internal proletariat in its origin and composition and experience; and the two trees brought forth similar fruits. While the later incorporation of the Syriac Society into the Hellenic internal proletariat was to bear fruit in the birth of Christianity out of Judaism, the earlier incorporation of the same Syriac Society into the Babylonic internal proletariat bore fruit in the birth of Judaism itself out of the primitive religion of one of the parochial communities into which the Syriac Society had come to be articulated.
It will be seen that while Judaism and Christianity appear to be ‘philosophically contemporary and equivalent’ in so far as” they can be regarded simply as products of similar stages in the histories of two alien societies, there is another angle of vision from which they present themselves as successive stages in a single process of spiritual enlightenment. In this latter picture Christianity stands not side by side with Judaism but on its shoulders, while they both tower above the primitive religion of Israel. Nor is the enlightenment of the Prophets of Israel and Judah in and after the eighth century before Christ the only intervening stage of which we have a record or a hint in the chronological and spiritual interval between Christianity and the primitive worship of Yahweh. Before and below the Prophets the Biblical tradition presents the figure of Moses, and before his figure the figure of Abraham. Whatever view we may take of the historical authenticity of these dim figures, it is to be observed that tradition places both Abraham and Moses in the same historical setting as the Prophets and as Christ. For the appearance of Moses is synchronized with the decadence of the ‘New Empire’ in Egypt and the appearance of Abraham with the last days of the Sumeric universal state, after its short-lived reconstruction by Hammurabi. Thus all four stages, as represented by Abraham, Moses, the Prophets and Jesus, illustrate the relationship between disintegrations of civilizations and new initiatives ins religion.
The genesis of the higher religion of Judaism has left an incomparably full and clear record of itself in the books of the pre-exilic Prophets of Israel and Judah; and in these living records of a tremendous spiritual travail we see at issue the burning question that we have encountered elsewhere: the choice between the violent and the gentle way of facing the ordeal. Moreover gentleness gradually prevailed over violence in this case also; for the time of troubles, as it reached and passed its climax, delivered a series of hammer-blows which taught even the Die-hards of Judah the futility of replying to violence in kind. The new ‘higher religion’ which was born in eighth-century Syria, in Syriac communities pounded on their native threshing-floor by an Assyrian flail, was brought to maturity in sixth-century and fifth-century Babylonia among the uprooted and deported descendants of one of these battered peoples.
Like the Oriental slave deportees in Roman Italy, the Jewish exiles in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonia were proof against any facile adaptability to the ethos of their conquerors:
‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
‘If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my-mouth.’ 1
Yet the memory of their home which these exiles cherished in a strange land was not just a negative imprint: it was a positive act of inspired imaginative creation. In the unearthly light of this vision seen through a mist of tears the fallen fastness became transfigured into a holy city built upon a rock against which the gates of Hell should not prevail. And the captives who refused to indulge their captors’ whim by singing them one of the songs of Sion, and stubbornly hanged their harps upon the willows by Euphrates’ stream, were at that very moment composing an inaudible new melody on the invisible instrument of their hearts:
‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered thee, O Sion’; 2
and in that weeping the enlightenment of Jewry was accomplished.
It is evident that, in the successive religious reactions of the Syriac conscripts in the ranks of an alien internal proletariat, the parallel between Babylonic and Hellenic history is very close; but the response evoked by the Babylonic challenge came not only from those victims who were members of an alien civilization but from the barbarian victims as well. Whereas the European and North African barbarians who were conquered by Roman arms made no religious discoveries of their own but simply accepted the seed sown among them by their fellow proletarians of Oriental origin, the Iranian barbarians who were passed under the Assyrian harrow begot a native prophet in the person of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism. The date of Zarathustra is a matter of dispute and we cannot say for certain whether his religious discovery was an independent response to the Assyrian challenge or whether his voice was a mere echo of the cry of forgotten Israelite prophets who had been marooned in ‘the cities of the Medes’. It is evident, however, that, whatever the original relations between these two ‘higher religions’ may have been, Zoroastrianism and Judaism met on equal terms in their maturity.
At any rate, when the Babylonic time of troubles was brought to an end by the overthrow of Assyria, and the Babylonic World passed into a universal state in the shape of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, it looked as though Judaism and Zoroastrianism would compete for the privilege of establishing a universal church within this political framework, much as Christianity and Mithraism competed for the same privilege within the framework of the Roman Empire.
This, however, was not to be, for the very sufficient reason that the Neo-Babylonian universal state proved to be ephemeral compared with its Roman equivalent. Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian Augustus, was not followed, at intervals of centuries, by a Trajan, a Severus and a Constantine. His immediate successors, Nabonidus and Belshazzar, are comparable rather with a Julian and a Valens. Within less than a century the Neo-Babylonian Empire was ‘given to the Medes and Persians’ and this Achaemenian Empire was politically Iranian and culturally Syriac in character. Thus the roles of dominant minority and internal proletariat were reversed.
In these circumstances the triumph of Judaism and Zoroas-trianism might have been expected to be more sure and swift; but two hundred years later Fortune again intervened to give another unexpected turn to the course of events. She now delivered the Kingdom of the Medes and Persians into the hands of a Macedonian conqueror. A violent intrusion of the Hellenic Society upon the Syriac World broke the Syriac universal state in pieces long before its role was played out; and therewith the two higher religions which (as our somewhat scanty evidence suggests) had been spreading peacefully under the Achaemenian aegis were driven into the disastrous aberration of exchanging their proper religious function for a political role. Each on its own ground, they became champions of the Syriac Civilization in its struggle against an intrusive Hellenism. Judaism, in its advanced western position within sight of the Mediterranean, was inevitably cast for the forlorn hope, and it duly broke itself against the material power of Rome in the Romano-Jewish wars of A.D. 66-70, 115-17 and 132-5. Zoroastrianism, in its fastness east of Zagros, took up the struggle in the third century of the Christian Era under less desperately unequal conditions. In the Sasanian Monarchy it found a more potent weapon for an anti-Hellenic crusade than Judaism had been able to forge out of the petty principality of the Maccabees, and the Sasanidae gradually wore down the strength of the Roman Empire in a four hundred years’ struggle which culminated in the internecine Romano-Persian wars of A.D. 572-91 and 603-28. Even so the Sasanian Power proved unequal to completing the task of evicting Hellenism from Asia and Africa, while Zoroastrianism had in the end to pay as heavily as Jewry for having lent itself to a political enterprise. At the present day the Parsees, like the Jews, survive as a mere ‘diaspora’; and the petrified religions which still so potently hold the scattered members of the two communities together have lost their message to mankind, and have hardened into fossils of the extinct Syriac Society.
The impact of an alien cultural force did not merely divert these ‘higher religions’ into political paths; it also split them into fragments. After the transformation of Judaism and Zoroastrianism into instruments of political opposition, the Syriac religious genius took refuge among those elements in the Syriac population which were reacting to the Hellenic challenge in a gentle and not in a violent way; and, in giving birth to Christianity and Mithraism as its contributions to the spiritual travail of a Hellenic internal proletariat, Syriac religion found new expressions for the spirit and outlook which Judaism and Zoroastrianism had repudiated. Christianity in its turn, after having captivated, through the power of gentleness, the Hellenic conquerors of the Syriac World, broke up into three communions—a Catholic church which contracted an alliance with Hellenism and the two antithetical heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysitism which took over the militant political roles of Zoroastrianism and Judaism without achieving any more conclusive success in driving Hellenism off the Syriac field.
Two successive failures, however, did not reduce the militant Syriac opponents of Hellenism to apathy and despair. A third attempt followed and was crowned with success; and this final political triumph of the Syriac Society over Hellenism was achieved through the instrumentality of yet another religion of Syriac origin. At long last Islam overthrew the Roman Empire in South-Western Asia and North Africa and provided a universal church for a reconstructed Syriac universal state, the ‘Abbasid Caliphate.
The Indie and Sink Internal Proletariats
The Indie Society, like the Syriac, had the course of its disintegration violently interrupted by an Hellenic intrusion; and it is interesting to see how far, in this case, a similar challenge evoked a similar response.
At the time when the Indie and Hellenic societies made their first contact—as a result of Alexander’s raid into the Indus Valley—the Indie Society was on the point of entering its universal state, and its dominant minority had long since reacted to the ordeal of disintegration by creating the two philosophical schools of Jainism and Buddhism; but there is no evidence that its internal proletariat had produced any ‘higher religion’. The Buddhist philosopher-king Acoka, who occupied the throne of the Indie universal state from 273 to 232 B.C., sought without success to convert his Hellenic neighbours to his philosophy. It was only at a later date that Buddhism took by storm the outlying, yet extensive and important, province of the post-Alexandrine Hellenic World which was occupied by the Greek kingdom of Bactria.
But Buddhism did not make this triumphant spiritual counter-conquest until it had undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis through which the old philosophy of the earlier followers of Sid-dhartha Gautama 1 became transformed into the new religion of the Mahayana.
‘The Mahāyāna is a truly new religion, so radically different from Early Buddhism that it exhibits as many points of contact with later Brahmanical religions as with its own predecessor.... It never has been fully realized what a radical revolution had transformed the Buddhist Church when the new spirit—which, however, was for a long time lurking in it—arrived at full eclosion in the first centuries A.D. When we see an atheistic, soul-denying philosophic teaching of a path to personal final deliverance, consisting in an absolute extinction of life and a simple worship of the memory of its human founder—when we see it superseded by a magnificent High Church with a Supreme God, surrounded by a numerous pantheon and a host of saints: a religion highly devotional, highly ceremonious and clerical, with an ideal of universal salvation of all living creatures, a salvation by the divine grace of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, a salvation not in annihilation but in eternal life—we are fully justified in maintaining that the history of religions has scarcely witnessed such a break between new and old within the pale of what nevertheless continues to claim common descent from the same religious founder.’ 2
This transformed Buddhism that came to flower in the northeast of an expanded Hellenic World was in fact an Indie ‘higher religion’ comparable to others that in the same age were invading the heart of the Hellenic Society. What was the origin of this personal religion which was both the distinctive trait of the Mahāyāna and the secret of its success? This new leaven, which changed the spirit of Buddhism so profoundly, was as alien from the native vein of the Indie as it was from that of the Hellenic philosophy. Was it the fruit of the experience of the Indie internal proletariat, or was it a spark caught from the Syriac flame which had already kindled Zoroastrianism and Judaism? Evidence could be adduced in favour of either view, but we really are not in a position to choose between them. Suffice it to say that, with the arrival of this Buddhaic ‘higher religion’ on the scene, the religious history of the Indie Society begins to take the same course as that of the Syriac Society which we have already surveyed.
As a ‘higher religion’ which went forth from the bosom of the society in which it had arisen in order to evangelize a Hellenized world, the Mahayana is manifestly an Indie counterpart of Christianity and Mithraism; and with this key in our hands we can easily identify the Indie counterpart of those other rays into which the light of Syriac religion was diffracted by the interposition of the Hellenic prism. If we look for the Indie equivalent of those ‘fossils’ of the pre-Hellenic state of the Syriac Society that have survived in the Jews and the Parsees, we shall find what we are looking for in the latter-day Hinayanian Buddhism of Ceylon and Burma and Siam and Cambodia, which is a relic of the pre-Mahayanian Buddhist philosophy; and, just as the Syriac Society had to wait for the emergence of Islam in order to lay its hand upon a religion which was capable of serving as an effective instrument for casting Hellenism out, so we find that the complete and final expulsion of the intrusive Hellenic spirit from the Indie body social was accomplished, not through the Mahayana, but through the purely Indie, and utterly un-Hellenic, religious movement of post-Buddhaic Hinduism.
The history of the Mahaylna corresponds, so far as we have at present taken it, with that of Catholic Christianity in that both found their field of action in the Hellenic World instead of converting the non-Hellenic society from which each had sprung. But there is a further chapter in the history of the Mahayana to which the history of the Christian Church offers no parallel. For Christianity, having taken up its abode in the domain of the moribund Hellenic Society, remained there and ultimately survived to provide churches for the two new civilizations, our own and that of Orthodox Christendom, which have been affiliated to the Hellenic. The Mahayana, on the other hand, passed out through the ephemeral Hellenic Bactrian kingdom across the highlands of Central Asia into the moribund Sinic World, and, at a double remove from the land of its birth, became the universal church of the Sinic internal proletariat.
The Legacy of the Sumeric Internal Proletariat
Two societies, the Babylonic and the Hittite, have been affiliated to the Sumeric Society, but in this case we cannot discover any universal church produced within the bosom of the Sumeric internal proletariat and bequeathed to the affiliated civilizations. The Babylonic Society seems to have taken over the religion of the Sumeric dominant minority, and the Hittite religion seems to have been derived in part from the same source. But we know very little about the religious history of the Sumeric World. We can only say that, if the worship of Tammuz and Ishtar really is a monument of the experience of the Sumeric internal proletariat, this attempted act of creation was abortive in the Sumeric Society itself, and only came to fruition elsewhere.
These Sumeric deities, male and female, had, indeed, a long career and extensive travels ahead of them, and one interesting feature of this subsequent history of theirs is the variation in their relative importance. In the Hittite version of the worship of this pair of divinities the figure of the goddess has dwarfed and overshadowed that of the god who plays towards her the diverse and indeed contradictory roles of son and lover, protege and victim. By the side of Cybele-Ishtar, Attis-Tammuz dwindles to insignificance ; and, in her remote north-western island sanctuary, lapped round by Ocean Stream, Nerthus-Ishtar seems to stand in solitary grandeur without any male consort. But, in the course of the pair’s south-westward journey to Syria and Egypt, Tammuz increases in importance and Ishtar diminishes. The Atargatis whose worship spread from Bambyce to Ascalon would appear from her name to have been an Ishtar whose claim to veneration was based upon her function of serving as Attis’ mate. In Phoenicia an Adonis-Tammuz was ‘the Lord’ whose yearly death an Astarte-Ishtar mourned; and in the Egyptiac World an Osiris-Tammuz overshadowed his sister-wife Isis as decidedly as Isis, in her turn, overshadowed Osiris when she subsequently won an empire for herself in the hearts of the Hellenic internal proletariat. This version of the Sumeric faith in which the dying god and not the mourning goddess was the figure on which the worshipper’s devotion was concentrated seems even to have spread to the remote barbarians of Scandinavia, where a Balder-Tammuz was called ‘the Lord’, while his colourless consort Nanna still retained the personal name of the Sumeric mother-goddess.
To complete our survey of internal proletariats we have to examine the case that lies nearest home. Do the characteristic phenomena reappear in the history of the West? When we call for the evidence of the existence of a Western internal proletariat we may find ourselves overwhelmed by an embarras de richesses.
We have already noticed that one of the regular sources of recruitment for an internal proletariat has been drawn upon by our Western Society on a stupendous scale. The man-power of no less than ten disintegrating civilizations has been conscripted into the Western body social during the last four hundred years; and on the common level of membership in our Western internal proletariat, to which they have been thus reduced, a process of standardization has been at work which has already blurred—and in some cases quite effaced—the characteristic features by which these heterogeneous masses were once distinguished from one another. Nor has our society been content to prey upon its own ‘civilized’ kind. It has also rounded up almost all the surviving primitive societies; and while some of these, like the Tasmanians and most of the North American Indian tribes, have died of the shock, others, like the Negroes of Tropical Africa, have managed to survive and set the Niger flowing into the Hudson and the Congo into the Mississippi—just as other activities of the same Western monster have set the Yangtse flowing into the Straits of Malacca. 1 The Negro slaves shipped across to America and the Tamil or Chinese coolies shipped to the equatorial or antipodean coasts of the Indian Ocean are the counterparts of the slaves who, in the last two centuries before Christ, were consigned from all the coasts of the Mediterranean to the ranches and plantations of Roman Italy.
There is another contingent of conscripted aliens in our Western internal proletariat who have been uprooted and disoriented spiritually without having been physically evicted from their ancestral homes. In any community that is attempting to solve the problem of adapting its life to the rhythm of an alien civilization, there is need for a special social class to serve as the human counterpart of the ‘transformer’ which changes an electric current from one voltage to another; and the class which is called into existence—often quite abruptly and artificially—in response to this demand, has come to be known genetically, from the special Russian name for it, as the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia is a class of liaison officers who have learnt the tricks of the intrusive civilization’s trade so far as may be necessary to enable their own community, through their agency, just to hold its own in a social environment in which life is ceasing to be lived in accordance with the local tradition and is coming more and more to be lived in the style imposed by the intrusive civilization upon the aliens who fall under its dominion.
The first recruits to this intelligentsia are military and naval officers who learn as much of the domineering society’s art of war as may be necessary to save the Russia of Peter the Great from being conquered by a Western Sweden, or the Turkey and Japan of a later age from being conquered by a Russia who has by this time become sufficiently Westernized to be able to launch out on a career of aggression on her own account. Then comes the diplomatist who learns how to conduct with Western governments the negotiations that are forced upon his community by its failure to hold its own in war. We have seen the ‘Osmanlis enlisting their ra’lyeh for this diplomatic work, until a further turn of the screw compels the ‘Osmanlis to master for themselves this distasteful trade. Next come the merchants: the Hong merchants at Canton and the Levantine, Greek and Armenian merchants in the dominions of the Ottoman Padishah. And finally, as the leaven or virus of Westernism works deeper into the social life of the society which is in process of being permeated and assimilated, the intelligentsia develops its most characteristic types: the schoolmaster who has learnt the trick of teaching Western subjects; the civil servant who has picked up the practice of conducting the public administration according to Western forms; the lawyer who has acquired the knack of applying a version of the Code Napoleon in accordance with French judicial procedure.
Wherever we find an intelligentsia we may infer, not only that two civilizations have been in contact, but that one of the two is in process of being absorbed into the other’s internal proletariat. We can also observe another fact in the life of an intelligentsia which is written large upon its countenance for all to read: an intelligentsia is born to be unhappy.
This liaison-class suffers from the congenital unhappiness of the hybrid who is an outcaste from both the families that have combined to beget him. An intelligentsia is hated and despised by its own people because its very existence is a reproach to them. Through its presence in their midst it is a living reminder of the hateful but inescapable alien civilization which cannot be kept at bay and therefore has to be humoured. The Pharisee is reminded of this each time he meets the Publican, and the Zealot each time he meets the Herodian. And, while the intelligentsia thus has no love lost on it at home, it also has no honour paid to it in the country whose manners and tricks it has so laboriously and ingeniously mastered. 1 In the earlier days of the historic association between India and England the Hindu intelligentsia which the British Raj had fostered for its own administrative convenience was a common subject of English ridicule. The more facile the ‘babu’s’ command of English, the more sardonically the ‘sahib’ would laugh at the subtle incongruity of the errors that inevitably crept in; and such laughter was wounding even when good-natured. The intelligentsia thus complies in double measure with our definition of a proletariat by being ‘in’ but not ‘of two societies and not merely one; and, while it may console itself in the first chapter of its history by feeling that it is an indispensable organ of both these bodies social, it is robbed of even this consolation as time goes on. For the adjustment of supply to demand is almost beyond the wit of man where man-power itself is the commodity, and in due course an intelligentsia comes to suffer from overproduction and unemployment.
A Peter the Great wants so many Russian chinovniks or an East India Company so many clerks, or a Mehmed ‘Ali so many Egyptian mill-hands and shipwrights. Incontinently these potters in human clay set to work to produce them, but the process of manufacturing an intelligentsia is more difficult to stop than to start; for the contempt in which the liaison class is held by those who profit by its services is offset by its prestige in the eyes of those eligible for enrolment in it. The candidates increase out of all proportion to the opportunities for employing them, and the original nucleus of the employed intelligentsia becomes swamped by an intellectual proletariat which is idle and destitute as well as outcaste. The handful of chinovniks is reinforced by a legion of ‘Nihilists’, the handful of quill-driving babus by a legion of ‘failed B.A.s’; and the bitterness of the intelligentsia is incomparably greater in the latter state than in the former. Indeed, we might almost formulate a social ‘law’ to the effect that an intelligentsia’s congenital unhappiness increases in geometrical ratio with the arithmetical progress of time. The Russian intelligentsia, which dates from the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, has already discharged its accumulated spite in the shattering Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Bengali intelligentsia, which dates from the latter part of the eighteenth century, is displaying to-day a vein of revolutionary violence which is not yet to be seen in other parts of British India, where the local intelligentsia did not come into existence till fifty or a hundred years later.
Nor is the rank growth of this social weed confined to the soil in which it is a native plant. It has latterly made its appearance in the heart of the Western World as well as in its semi-Westernized fringes. A lower-middle class which has received a secondary and even a university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth-century Fascist Party in Italy and National-Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat’s exasperation at finding that its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient in themselves to save it from being crushed between the upper and nether millstones, of Organized Capital and Organized Labour.
As a matter of fact we do not have to wait till the present century to see our Western internal proletariat being recruited from the native tissues of the Western body social; for in the Western as well as in the Hellenic World it is not only subjugated alien populations that have been torn up by the roots. The sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Wars of Religion brought with them the penalization or eviction of Catholics in every country where power fell into the hands of the Protestant faction and the penalization and eviction of Protestants in every country where power fell into the hands of the Catholic faction, so that the descendants of French Huguenots are scattered from Prussia to South Africa and the descendants of Irish Catholics from Austria to Chile. Nor was the plague stayed by the peace of lassitude and cynicism in which the Wars of Religion came to a close. From the French Revolution onwards, political stasis began to be inspired by the odium hactenus theologicum, and fresh hosts of exiles were uprooted: the French aristocratic émigré’s of 1789, the European Liberal émigrés of 1848, the Russian ‘White’ émigrés of 1917, the Italian and German democratic émigrés of 1922 and 1933, the Austrian Catholic and Jewish émigrés of 1938 and the millions of victims of the war of 1939-45 and its aftermath.
We have seen, again, how in Sicily and Italy during the Hellenic time of troubles the free population was uprooted from the countryside and chevied into the towns by an economic revolution in the conduct of agriculture: the replacement of small-scale mixed farming for subsistence by the mass production of specialized agricultural commodities by means of plantation slavery. In our modern Western history we have an almost exact repetition of this social disaster in the rural economic revolution which substituted cotton plantations worked by Negro slaves for the mixed farming of White freemen in the ‘cotton belt’ of the American Union. The ‘White trash’ which was thus degraded to the ranks of the proletariat was of the quality of the dispossessed and pauperized ‘free trash’ of Roman Italy, and this rural economic revolution in North America, with its twin cancerous growths of Negro slavery and White pauperdom, was only an exceptionally rapid and ruthless application of a similar rural economic revolution which was spread over three centuries of English history. The English had not introduced slave-labour but they had imitated the Roman and anticipated the American planters and stockbreeders by uprooting a free peasantry for the economic profit of an oligarchy, by turning ploughland into pasture and common land into enclosures. This modern Western rural economic revolution has not, however, been the principal cause of the flow of population from the countryside to the towns of our world. The principal motive force behind it has been not the push of an agrarian revolution replacing peasant holdings by latifundia but the pull of an urban industrial revolution replacing handicraft by steam-driven machines.
When this Western industrial revolution broke out first on English ground about a hundred and fifty years ago, its profitableness seemed so immense that the change was welcomed and blessed by the enthusiasts for Progress. While deploring the long hours of labour to which the first generation of the factory workers, including women and children, were condemned, and the sordid conditions of their new life in both factory and home, the panegyrists of the Industrial Revolution were confident that these were transitory evils which could and would be removed. The ironical sequel has been that this rosy prophecy has very largely come true, but that the blessings of the earthly paradise so confidently predicted are being neutralized by a curse which was hidden from the eyes of optimists and pessimists alike a century ago. 1 On the one hand, child labour has been abolished, women’s labour has been tempered to women’s strength, hours of labour have been shortened, the conditions of life and work in home and factory have been improved out of all recognition. But a world gorged with the wealth ground out by the magic industrial machine is at the same time overshadowed by the spectre of unemployment. Every time the urban proletarian draws his ‘dole’ he is reminded that he is ‘in’ a society but not ‘of it.
Enough has been said to indicate some of the many sources from which an internal proletariat has been recruited in our modern Western Society. We have now to ask whether here, as elsewhere, we find the two veins of violence and gentleness reappearing in our Western internal proletariat’s reaction to its ordeal; and, if both tempers are displayed, which of the two is in the ascendant.
Manifestations of the militant temper in our Western underworld are at once apparent. It is unnecessary to catalogue the blood-stained revolutions of the last hundred and fifty years; but when we turn to look for evidence of a counteracting and constructive spirit of gentleness, the traces are, unhappily, far to seek.? It is true that many of the sufferers from the wrongs recorded in the earlier paragraphs of this chapter—exiled victims of religious or political persecution, deported African slaves, transported convicts, uprooted peasantry—have made good, in the second or third if not in the first generation, in the new conditions imposed upon them. This may illustrate the recuperative powers of our civilization, but it gives no reward to our search. These are solutions of the proletarian’s problem which escape the necessity of choice between the violent and the gentle response by escaping from the proletarian condition of life itself. In our search for modern Western exponents of the gentle response our only finds will be the English ‘Quakers’ and the German Anabaptist refugees in Moravia and the Dutch Mennonites; and even these rare specimens will slip through our fingers, for we shall find that they have ceased to be members of the proletariat.
In the first generation of the life of the English Society of Friends a vein of violence, which found vent in naked prophesy-ings and in noisy disturbances of the decorum of church services, drew down upon its members a savage chastisement both in England and in Massachusetts. This violence, however, was quickly and permanently superseded by a gentleness which became the Quakers’ characteristic rule of life; and the Society of Friends for a time looked as though it might play in the Western World the classic role of the Primitive Christian Church on whose spirit and practice, as set forth in The Acts of the Apostles, they devoutly modelled their lives. But, while the Friends have never fallen away from the rule of gentleness, they have long travelled right out of the proletarian path, and have been, in a sense, the victims of their own virtues. It might even be said that they achieved material prosperity in their own despite; for much of their success in business can be traced to formidable decisions which they have taken, not for profit, but at the bidding of conscience. The first step in their undesigned pilgrimage to the shrine of material prosperity was taken, all unwittingly, when they migrated from the country to the towns, not because they were tempted by the lure of urban profits, but because this seemed the most obvious way of reconciling a conscientious objection to the payment of tithes to the Episcopalian Church with an equally conscientious objection to resisting the tithe-collector by force. Thereafter, when Quaker brewers took to making cocoa because they disapproved of intoxicants and when Quaker retail shopkeepers took to marking their goods with fixed prices because they scrupled to vary their price in ‘the haggling of the market’, they were deliberately risking their fortunes for their faith. But in the event they merely illustrated the truth of the proverb that ‘honesty is the best policy’ and the beatitude that ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth’; and by the same token they removed their faith from the list of proletarian religions. Unlike their exemplars the Apostles, they were never ardent missionaries. They remained a select body, and their rule that a Quaker ceased to be a member of the Society if he married outside its ranks kept their numbers as low as their quality remained high.
The histories of the two groups of Anabaptists, though very different in many respects from that of the Quakers, are the same on the one point with which we are concerned. When, after violent beginnings, they adopted the rule of gentleness, they soon ceased to be proletarian.
Having drawn a blank so far in our search for a new religion reflecting the experience of our Western internal proletariat, we may remind ourselves that the Sinic internal proletariat found a religion in the MahaySna which was a transformation, out of all recognition, of the preceding Buddhist philosophy. In Marxian Communism we have a notorious example in our midst of a modern Western philosophy which has changed, in a lifetime, quite out of recognition into a proletarian religion, taking the path of violence and carving out its New Jerusalem with the sword on the plains of Russia.
If Karl Marx had been challenged by some Victorian censor morum to give his spiritual name and address, he would have described himself as a disciple of the philosopher Hegel, applying the Hegelian dialectic to the economic and political phenomena of his day. But the elements that have made Communism an explosive force are not of Hegel’s creation; they bear on their face their certificate of origin from the ancestral religious faith of the West—a Christianity which, three hundred years after the philosophic challenge from Descartes, was still being drunk in by every Western child with its mother’s milk and inhaled by every Western man and woman with the air they breathed. And such elements as cannot be traced to Christianity can be traced to Judaism, the ‘fossilized’ parent of Christianity which had been preserved by a Jewish Diaspora and volatilized through the opening of the ghettos and the emancipation of Western Jewry in the generation of Marx’s grandparents. Marx has taken the goddess ‘Historical Necessity’ in place of Yahweh for his deity, and the internal proletariat of the Western World in place of Jewry for his chosen people, and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived of as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat; but the salient features of the Jewish Apocalypse protrude through this threadbare disguise.
However, it looks as if the religious phase in the evolution of Communism may prove ephemeral. The conservative national Communism of Stalin seems to have decisively defeated the revolutionary oecumenical Communism of Trotsky in the Russian field. The Soviet Union is no longer an outlaw society, out of communion with all the rest of the world. She has reverted to being what the Russian Empire was under a Peter or a Nicholas: a Great Power choosing her allies and her enemies on national grounds and irrespective of ideological considerations. And if Russia has moved to ‘the right’ her neighbours have moved to ‘the left’. Not only the flash-in-the-pan of German National-Socialism and Italian Fascism but the apparently irresistible encroachment of planning on the once unregimented economies of the democratic countries suggests that the social structure of all countries in the near future is likely to be both national and socialist. Not only do the Capitalist and Communist regimes seem likely to continue side by side; it may well be that Capitalism and Communism—like intervention and non-intervention according to the sardonic dictum of Talleyrand—are becoming different names for very much the same thing. If this be so, we must decide that Communism has forfeited its prospects as a revolutionary proletarian religion: first, by being degraded from being a revolutionary panacea for all mankind into being a mere local variety of nationalism, and secondly by seeing the particular state that has enslaved it assimilate itself to the other states of the contemporary world by approximating to the latest standard type.
The upshot of our present inquiry seems to be that, while the evidence for the recruitment of an internal proletariat is at least as abundant in the recent history of our Western World as it is in the history of any other civilization, there is singularly little evidence in our Western history so far for the laying of any foundations of a proletarian universal church or even for the emergence of any strong-winged proletarian-born ‘higher religions’. How is this fact to be interpreted?
We have drawn many parallels between our own society and the Hellenic, but there is one fundamental difference. The Hellenic Society took over no universal church from its Minoan predecessor. The condition of parochial paganism in which it broke down in the fifth century B.C. was the condition in which it was born. But parochial paganism was certainly not the first state, even if it comes near to being the present state, of our own civilization, which was once entitled to describe itself as Western Christendom. Moreover, even if we have now at last succeeded in sloughing off our Christian heritage, the process of apostasy has been slow and laborious, and with the best will in the world we are unlikely to have carried it through with the thoroughness that we might wish; for, after all, it is not so easy to get rid of a tradition in which we and our forebears have been born and bred since the time, now more than twelve hundred years ago, when our Western Christendom was born—a feeble infant—from the Church’s womb. When Descartes and Voltaire and Marx and Machiavelli and Hobbes and Mussolini and Hitler have done their best to de-christianize our Western life, we may still suspect that their scouring and fumigating has been only partially effective. The Christian virus or elixir is in our Western blood—if, indeed, it is not just another name for that indispensable fluid—and it is difficult to suppose that the spiritual constitution of the Western Society can ever be refined to a paganism of Hellenic purity.
Besides, the Christian element in our system is not only ubiquitous: it is Protean; and one of its favourite tricks is to escape eradication by insinuating a strong tincture of its own essence into the very disinfectants that are so vigorously applied to sterilize it. We have already noticed the Christian ingredient in a Communism which purports to be an anti-Christian application of modern Western philosophy. The modern anti-Western prophets of gentleness, Tolstoy and Gandhi, have never pretended to conceal their Christian inspiration.
Among the many diverse contingents of disinherited men and women who have been subjected to the ordeal of being enrolled in the Western internal proletariat, the worst sufferers of all have been the primitive African Negroes transported as slaves to America. In them we have found the Western analogue of the slave-immigrants who were swept into Roman Italy from all the other Mediterranean coasts during the last two centuries before Christ, and we have observed that the Americo-African, like the Italo-Oriental, plantation slaves met their tremendous social challenge with a religious response. In comparing the two at an earlier stage in this Study we dwelt upon the resemblance, but there is a quite equally significant difference. The Egyptian, Syrian and Anatolian slave-immigrants found consolation in the religions that they had brought with them; the Africans turned for consolation to the hereditary religion of their masters.
How is this difference to be accounted for? In part, no doubt, by the difference in the social antecedents of the two sets of slaves. The plantation-slaves of Roman Italy were largely drawn from an ancient and deeply cultivated Oriental population whose children might be expected to cling to their cultural heritage, whereas the African Negro slaves’ ancestral religion was no more fit than any other element in their culture to hold its own against the overwhelmingly superior civilization of their White masters. This is a partial explanation of the difference in the sequel; but, to explain it completely, the cultural difference between the two sets of masters has to be taken into account.
The Oriental slaves in Roman Italy had actually nowhere else to look, outside their own native religious heritage, for religious consolation, since their Roman masters were living in a spiritual vacuum. In their case the pearl of great price was to be found in the heritage of the slaves and not in that of their masters, while in our Western case the spiritual treasure, as well as all the worldly wealth and power, has lain in the hands of the slave-driving dominant minority.
It is one thing, however, to possess a spiritual treasure and quite another thing to impart it; and, the more we think over it, the more astonishing we shall find it to be that these Christian slave-owners’ hands should have been able to transmit to their primitive pagan victims the spiritual bread which they had done their best to desecrate by the sacrilegious act of enslaving their fellow-men. How could the slave-driver evangelist ever touch the heart of the slave whom he had morally alienated by doing him so grievous a wrong? The Christian religion must indeed be animated by an invincible spiritual power if it can win converts under such conditions. And, since a religion has no dwelling-place on Earth except in human souls, it follows that there must still be Christian men and women abroad in our neo-pagan world. ‘Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city’; 1 and a glance at the American slave-mission field will show us some of these persisting Christians at work, for the American Negro convert to Christianity does not, of course, really owe his conversion to the ministrations of a plantation-gang overseer with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other. He owes it to the John G. Fees and the Peter Clavers.
In this miracle of the slaves’ conversion to the religion of their masters we can see the familiar schism between the internal proletariat and the dominant minority being healed in our Western body social by a Christianity which our dominant minority has been trying to repudiate; and the conversion of the American Negro is only one among many triumphs of a latter-day Christian missionary activity. In our war-ridden generation, in which the lately brilliant prospects of a neo-pagan dominant minority have been rapidly growing dim, the sap of life is visibly flowing once again through all the branches of our Western Christendom; and this spectacle suggests that perhaps, after all, the next chapter of our Western history may not follow the lines of the final chapter of Hellenic history. Instead of seeing some new church spring from the ploughed-up soil of an internal proletariat in order to serve as the executor and residuary legatee of a civilization that has broken down and gone into disintegration, we may yet live to see a civilization that has tried and failed to stand alone being saved, in spite of itself, from a fatal fall by being caught up in the arms of an ancestral church which it has vainly striven to push away and keep at arm’s length. In that event a tottering civilization which has shamefully succumbed to the intoxication of a showy victory over physical nature, and has applied the spoils to laying up treasure for itself without being rich towards God, may be reprieved from the sentence—which it has passed upon itself— of treading out the tragic path of Kopos —tJ/Jpis— arq; or, to translate this Hellenic language into a Christian imagery, an apostate Western Christendom may be given grace to be born again as a Respublica Christiana which was its own earlier and better ideal of what it should strive to be.
Is such spiritual rebirth possible? If we put Nicodemus’s question—’Can’ a man ‘enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’—we may take his instructor’s answer: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.’ 1
The external, like the internal, proletariat brings itself into existence by an act of secession from the dominant minority of a civilization that has broken down, and the schism in which the secession results is in this case palpable; for, whereas the internal proletariat continues to be geographically intermingled with the dominant minority from which it is divided by a moral gulf, the external proletariat is not only morally alienated but is also physically divided from the dominant minority by a frontier which can be traced on the map.
The crystallization of such a frontier is indeed the sure sign that such a secession has taken place; for, as long as a civilization is still in growth, it has no hard and fast boundaries except on fronts where it happens to have collided with another civilization of its own species. Such collisions between two or more civilizations give rise to phenomena which we shall have occasion to examine in a later part of this Study, 1 but at present we will leave this contingency out of account and confine our attention to the situation in which a civilization has for its neighbour not another civilization but societies of the primitive species. In these circumstances we shall find that, as long as a civilization is in growth, its frontiers are indeterminate. If we place ourselves at the focus of growth in a growing civilization and proceed to travel outwards until we find ourselves sooner or later in an environment which is unmistakably and completely primitive, we shall not be able, at any point on such a journey, to draw a line and say: ‘Here civilization ends and we enter the Primitive World.’
In fact, when a creative minority successfully performs its role in the life of a growing civilization, and the spark which it has kindled ‘gives light unto all that are in the house’, the light, as it radiates outward, is not arrested by the walls of the house, for in fact there are no walls and the light is not hid from the neighbours outside. The light shines as far as, in the nature of things, it can carry until it reaches vanishing-point. The gradations are infinitesimal, and it is impossible to demarcate the line at which the last glimmer of twilight flickers out and leaves the heart of darkness in undivided possession. In fact, the carrying-power of the radiation of growing civilizations is so great that, although civilizations are relatively a very recent achievement of mankind, they have long ago succeeded in permeating, at least in some degree, the whole array of surviving primitive societies. It would be impossible anywhere to discover a primitive society which had entirely escaped the influence of some civilization or other. In 1935, for example, a society previously quite unknown was discovered in the interior of Papua, 2 and this society possessed a technique of intensive agriculture which must, at some unknown date, have been acquired from some unidentified civilization.
This all-pervasiveness of the influence of civilizations in what remains of the Primitive World strikes us forcibly when we regard the phenomenon from the point of view of the primitive societies. If, on the other hand, we look upon it from the standpoint of a civilization, we shall be no less forcibly struck by the fact that the strength of the influence radiated wanes as the range increases. As soon as we have recovered from our astonishment at detecting the influence of Hellenic art in a coin that was struck in Britain in the last century before Christ or on a sarcophagus carved in Afghanistan in the first century of the Christian Era, we observe that the British coin looks like a caricature of its Macedonian original and that the Afghan sarcophagus is a shoddy product of ‘commercial art’. At this remove mimesis has passed into travesty.
Mimesis is evoked by charm; and we can now see that the charm which is exercised, during the growth of a civilization, by a succession of creative minorities preserves the house not only from being divided against itself but also from being attacked by its neighbours—in so far, at least, as these neighbours are primitive societies. Wherever a growing civilization is in contact with primitive societies, its creative minority attracts their mimesis as well as the mimesis of the uncreative majority in its midst. But, if this is the normal relation between a civilization and the primitive societies round about so long as the civilization is in growth, a profound change sets in if and when the civilization breaks down and goes into disintegration. The creative minorities which have won a voluntary allegiance by the charm which their creativity exerts are replaced by a dominant minority which, lacking charm, relies on force. The surrounding primitive peoples are no longer charmed but are repelled; these humble disciples of the growing civilization then renounce their discipleship and become what we have called an external proletariat. Though ‘in’ the now broken-down civilization they are no longer ‘of it. 1
The radiation of any civilization may be analysed into three elements—economic, political and cultural—and, so long as a society is in a state of growth, all three elements seem to be radiated with equal power or, to speak in human rather than physical terms, to exercise an equal charm. But, as soon as the civilization has ceased to grow, the charm of its culture evaporates. Its powers of economic and political radiation may, and indeed probably will, continue to grow faster than ever, for a successful cultivation of the pseudo-religions of Mammon and Mars and Moloch is eminently characteristic of broken-down civilizations. But, since the cultural element is the essence of a civilization and the economic and political elements are relatively trivial manifestations of the life that it has in it, it follows that the most spectacular triumphs of economic and political radiation are imperfect and precarious.
If we look at the change from the standpoint of the primitive peoples, we shall express the same truth by saying that their mimesis of the broken-down civilization’s arts of peace comes to an end, but that they continue to imitate its improvements—its technical gadgets—in the arts of industry, war and politics, not in order that they may become one with it—which was their aspiration so long as it charmed them—but in order that they may the more effectively defend themselves against the violence which is by now its most conspicuous characteristic.
In our foregoing survey of the experiences and reactions of internal proletariats we have seen how the path of violence has allured them, and also how, in so far as they have yielded to this temptation, they have only brought disaster on themselves. The Theudases and Judases inevitably perish with the sword; it is only when it follows a prophet of gentleness that the internal proletariat has a chance of taking its conquerors captive. The external proletariat, if it chooses (as it almost certainly will) to react with violence, is at no such disadvantage. Whereas the whole of the internal proletariat lies, ex hypothesi, within the dominant minority’s reach, some part at any rate of the external proletariat is likely to be beyond the effective range of the dominant minority’s military action. In the contest that now ensues the broken-down civilization radiates force instead of attracting mimesis. In these circumstances the nearer members of the external proletariat are likely to be conquered and added to the internal proletariat, but a point will be reached where the dominant minority’s qualitative superiority in military power is counterbalanced by the length of its communications.
When this stage is reached it brings with it the completion of a change in the nature of the contact between the civilization in question and its barbarian neighbours. So long as a civilization is in growth, its home territory, where it prevails in full force, is screened, as we have seen, from the impact of unreclaimed savagery by a broad threshold or buffer zone across which civilization shades into savagery in a long series of fine gradations. On the other hand, when a civilization has broken down and fallen into schism and when the consequent hostilities between the dominant minority and the external proletariat have ceased to be a running fight and have settled down into trench warfare, we find that the buffer zone has disappeared. The geographical transition from civilization to barbarism is now no longer gradual but is abrupt. To use the appropriate Latin words, which bring out both the kinship and the contrast between the two types of contact, a limen or threshold, which was a zone, has been replaced by a limes or military frontier, which is a line that has length without breadth. Across this line a baffled dominant minority and an unconquered external proletariat now face one another under arms; and this military front is a bar to the passage of all social radiation except that of military technique—an article of social exchange which makes for war and not for peace between those who give and take it.
The social phenomena which follow when this warfare becomes stationary along a limes will occupy our attention later. 1 Here it is sufficient to mention the cardinal fact that this temporary and precarious balance of forces inevitably tilts, with the passage of time, in favour of the barbarians.
A Hellenic Instance
The growth-phase of Hellenic history is rich in illustrations of the limen or buffer zone with which the home territory of a healthily growing civilization tends to surround itself. Towards continental Europe the quintessence of Hellas shaded off, north of Thermopylae, into semi-Hellenic Thessaly and, west of Delphi, into semi-Hellenic Aetolia, and these in their turn were screened by the demi-semi-Hellenism of Macedonia and Epirus from the undiluted barbarism of Thrace and Illyria. Towards Asia Minor, again, zones of diminishing Hellenism in the hinterlands of the Greek cities of the Asiatic coast are represented by Caria, Lydia and Phrygia. On this Asiatic border we can see Hellenism taking its barbarian conquerors captive for the first time in the full light of history. The spell was so strong that, in the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., the conflict between Philhellenes and Hellenophobes came to the forefront in Lydian politics; and, even when a Philhellenic aspirant to the Lydian throne, Pantaleon, was worsted by his half-brother Croesus, the protagonist of the anti-Hellenic party proved so impotent to swim against the pro-Hellenic tide that he became famous for being as generous a patron of Hellenic shrines as he was a credulous consultant of Hellenic oracles.
Even in the hinterlands overseas peaceful relations and gradual transitions seem to have been the rule. Hellenism spread rapidly in the hinterland of the Italian Magna Graecia, and the earliest mention of Rome in extant literature is a notice, in a surviving fragment of a lost work from the hand of Plato’s pupil, Heracleides Ponticus, in which this Latin commonwealth is described as ‘a Hellenic city’ 
.
Thus on all the fringes of the Hellenic World in its growth stage we seem to see the gracious figure of Orpheus casting his spell upon the barbarians round about and even inspiring them to rehearse his magic music, on their own ruder instruments, to the still more primitive peoples of a farther hinterland. This idyllic picture vanishes in a trice, however, upon the Hellenic Civilization’s breakdown. As the harmony breaks into a discord, the spell-bound listeners seem to awaken with a start; and, relapsing into their natural ferocity, they now hurl themselves against the sinister man-at-arms who has emerged from behind the gentle prophet’s cloak.
The militant reaction of the external proletariat to the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization was most violent and effective in Magna Graecia, where the Bruttians and Lucanians began to press upon the Greek cities and to occupy them one after another. Within a hundred years of the opening in 431 B.C. of a war which was ‘the beginning of great evils for Hellas’, the few remaining survivors among the formerly prosperous communities of Magna Graecia were summoning condottieri from the motherland to save them from being driven into the sea. And these erratic reinforcements were of such little avail for stemming the Oscan tide that the inflowing barbarians had already crossed the Straits of Messina before the whole movement was brought to an abrupt end by the intervention of the Oscans’ Hellenized Roman kinsmen. Roman statesmanship and arms saved not merely Magna Graecia but the whole Italian Peninsula for Hellenism by taking the Oscans in the rear and imposing a common Roman Peace on Italian barbarians and Italiot Greeks alike.
Thus the South Italian front between Hellenism and barbarism was wiped out, and thereafter successive feats of Roman arms extended the dominion of the Hellenic dominant minority almost as far afield in Continental Europe and North-West Africa as it had already been extended in Asia by Alexander of Macedon. But the effect of this military expansion was not to eliminate the anti-barbarian fronts but to add to their length and to their distance from the centre of power. For several centuries they were stabilized; but the disintegration of the society continued to run its course until at long last the barbarians broke through.
We must now proceed to ask whether we can discern, in the external proletariat’s reaction to the pressure of the Hellenic dominant minority, any symptoms of a gentle as well as a violent response; and whether we can credit the external proletariat with any creative activities.
At first sight it might seem that, in the Hellenic case at any rate, the answer to both questions must be in the negative. We can observe our anti-Hellenic barbarian in various postures and positions. As Ariovistus he is driven from the field by Caesar; as Arminius he holds his own against Augustus; as Odovacer he takes his revenge against Romulus Augustulus. But in all warfare there are the three alternatives of defeat, drawn battle and victory, and, in each alternative alike, violence monotonously rules and creativity is at a discount. We may be encouraged, however, to look farther by recalling that the internal proletariat also is apt to display an equal violence and an equal barrenness in its earlier reactions, while the gentleness which eventually expresses itself in such mighty works of creation as a ‘higher religion’ and a universal church usually requires both time and travail in order to gain the ascendancy.
In the matter of gentleness, for example, we can at any rate perceive a certain difference in degree in the violence of the different barbarian war-bands. The sack of Rome by the demi-semi-Hellenized Visigpth Alaric in A.D. 410 was a less merciless affair than the subsequent sack of the same city by the Vandals and Berbers in 455 or the sack which Rome might have suffered from Radagaisus in 406. The relative gentleness of Alaric is dwelt upon by St. Augustine:
‘The dreaded atrocity of the barbarians has shown itself so mild in the event that churches providing ample room for asylum were designated by the conqueror and orders were given that in these sanctuaries nobody should be smitten with the sword and nobody carried away captive. Indeed, many prisoners were brought to these churches by soft-hearted enemies to receive their liberty, while none were dragged out of them by merciless enemies in order to be enslaved.’ 1
And there is the curious evidence relating to Alaric’s brother-in-law and successor Atawulf that is reported by Augustine’s disciple Orosius on the authority of ‘a gentleman from Narbonne who had had a distinguished military career under the Emperor Theodosius’.
‘This gentleman told us that at Narbonne he had become extremely intimate with Atawulf, and that he had often been told by him—and this with all the earnestness of a witness giving evidence—the story of his own life, which was often on the lips of this barbarian of abounding spirit, vitality and genius. According to Atawulf’s own story, he had started life with an eager craving to wipe out all memory of the name of Rome, with the idea of turning the whole Roman domain into an empire that should be—and be known as—the Empire of the Goths. ... In time, however, experience had convinced him that on the one hand the Goths were utterly disqualified by their uncontrolled barbarity for a life under the rule of law, while on the other hand it would be a crime to banish the rule of law from the life of the state, since the state ceases to be itself when law ceases to reign in it. When Atawulf had divined this truth, he had made up his mind that he would at any rate make a bid for the glory, that was within his reach, of using the vitality of the Goths for the restoration of the Roman name to all—and perhaps more than all—its ancient greatness.’ 1
This passage is the locus classicus for evidence of a change from violence to gentleness in the ethos of the Hellenic external proletariat, and in the light of it we can identify certain accompanying symptoms of spiritual creativity, or at any rate originality, in partially reclaimed barbarian souls.
Atawulf himself, for example, like his brother-in-law Alaric, was a Christian. But his Christianity was not the Christianity of St. Augustine and the Catholic Church. On the European front the barbarian invaders of that generation, in so far as they were not still pagans, were Arians, and, although their original conversion to Arianism rather than Catholicism had been the result of chance, their subsequent fidelity to Arianism, after that heresy had lost its temporary vogue within the Christianized Hellenic World, was the result of deliberate preference. Their Arianism was henceforth a badge, deliberately worn and sometimes insolently displayed, of the conquerors’ social distinction from the conquered population. This Arianism of the majority of the Teutonic successor-states of the Roman Empire persisted throughout the greater part of the interregnum period, A.D. 375-675. Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 590-604), who, perhaps more than any other single man, may be regarded as the founder of the new civilization of Western Christendom which arose out of the void, played a part in bringing this Arian chapter of barbarian history to an end by converting to Catholicism the Lombard queen, Theodelinda. The Franks were never Arians but, at the conversion of Clovis and his baptism at Reims (A.D. 496), passed straight from paganism to Catholicism, a choice which powerfully assisted them to survive the interregnum and to build a state which became the political foundation-stone of the new civilization.
While an Arianism which its barbarian converts had taken as they found it thus eventually became the distinctive badge of these particular bands of barbarians, there were other barbarians on other frontiers of the Empire who showed in their religious life a certain originality, inspired by something more positive than pride of caste. On the frontiers of the British Isles the barbarians of ‘the Celtic Fringe’, who had been converted to a Catholic and not to an Arian Christianity, re-moulded this to fit their own barbarian heritage, and on the frontier facing the Arabian section of the Afrasian Steppe the trans-frontier barbarians showed originality in a still higher degree. In the creative soul of Muhammad the radiation of Judaism and Christianity was transmuted into a spiritual force which discharged itself in the new ‘higher religion’ of Islam.
If we carry our investigations a stage farther back, we shall find that these religious reactions that we have just recorded were not the first that had been evoked from these primitive peoples by the radiation of the Hellenic Civilization. All genuinely and completely primitive religion is, in one guise or another, a cult of fertility. A primitive community mainly worships its own pro-creative power as displayed in the begetting of children and in the production of food, and the worship of destructive powers is either absent or subordinate. But, since the religion of primitive man is always a faithful reflection of his social conditions, a revolution in his religion is bound to take place when his social life is violently deranged by being brought into contact with an alien body social that is both close and hostile; and this is what happens when a primitive community which has been gradually and peacefully absorbing the beneficent influences of a growing civilization tragically loses sight of the gracious figure of Orpheus with his enchanting lyre and finds itself brusquely confronted, instead, by the ugly and menacing countenance of the dominant minority of a civilization that has broken down.
In this event the primitive community is transformed into a fragment of an external proletariat, and in this situation there is a revolutionary inversion of the relative importance of the pro-creative and destructive activities in the barbarian community’s life. War now becomes the community’s all-absorbing occupation, and, when war thus becomes more lucrative, as well as more exciting, than the trivial round and common task of food-getting, how can Demeter or even Aphrodite hope to hold her own against Ares as the supreme expression of the divine? The god is refashioned as the leader of a divine war-band. We have come across divinities of this barbaric strain in the Olympian Pantheon which was worshipped by the Achaean external proletariat of the Minoan thalassocracy; and we have seen that these deified brigands of Olympus have their counterparts in the denizens of Asgard, who were worshipped by the Scandinavian external proletariat of the Carolingian Empire. Another pantheon of the same kind was worshipped by the Teutonic barbarians beyond the European frontiers of the Roman Empire before their conversion to Arianism or Catholicism; and the evocation of these predatory divinities in their militarized worshippers’ own image must be reckoned as a creative work that has to be placed to the credit of the Teutonic external proletariat of the Hellenic World.
Having gleaned these wisps of creative activity in the field of religion, can we add to our slender harvest by drawing upon analogy once again? The ‘higher religions’ which are the glorious discoveries of the internal proletariats are notoriously associated with a sheaf of creative activities in the field of art. Have the ‘lower religions’ of the external proletariat any corresponding works of art to show?
The answer is certainly in the affirmative; for, as soon as we try to visualize the Olympian gods, we see them as they are portrayed in the Homeric epic. This poetry is associated with that religion as inseparably as Gregorian plainsong and Gothic architecture are associated with medieval Western Catholic Christianity. And the Greek epic poetry of Ionia has its counterpart in the Teutonic epic poetry of England and in the Scandinavian saga of Iceland. The Scandinavian saga is bound up with Asgard, and the English epic—of which Beowulf is the principal surviving masterpiece—with Woden and his divine comitatus as the Homeric epic is bound up with Olympus. In fact, epic poetry is the most characteristic and distinguished product of the reactions of external proletariats, the only K-rrjfw. els ael which their ordeals have bequeathed to humanity. No poetry that is” the offspring of civilization ever will or ever can equal ‘the unwearying splendour and the ruthless poignancy’ 1 of Homer.
We have mentioned three examples of epic poetry, and it would be easy to add to this list and to show each example to be the reaction of an external proletariat to the civilization with which it has come into conflict. For example, the Chanson de Roland is the creation of the European wing of the external proletariat of the Syriac universal state. The French semi-barbarian Crusaders who broke through the Pyrenaean front of the Andalusian Umayyad Caliphate in the eleventh century of the Christian Era have inspired a work of art which is the parent of all the poetry that has ever been written since that day in any of the vernacular languages of the Western World. The Chanson de Roland outstrips Beowulf in historic importance as signally as it surpasses it in literary merit. 2
When we come to the history of the relations between our own Western World and the primitive societies which it has encountered, we can discern an early stage in which, like Hellenism in its growth-phase, Western Christendom won converts through the attraction of its charm. The most signal of these early converts were the members of the abortive Scandinavian Civilization, who eventually succumbed—in their native lairs in the far north and in their distant settlements in Iceland, as well as in their encampments on Christian ground in the Danelaw and in Normandy— to the spiritual prowess of the civilization they had been assailing by force of arms. The contemporary conversion of the Nomad Magyars and forest-dwelling Poles was equally spontaneous, yet this early age of Western expansion is also marked by violent aggressions far surpassing the occasional subjugations and evictions of primitive neighbours chargeable to the score of the early Hellenes. We have Charlemagne’s crusades against the Saxons and, two centuries later, the crusades of the Saxons against the Slavs between the Elbe and the Oder; and these atrocities were capped, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by the extermination of the Prussians beyond the Vistula at the hands of the Teutonic Knights.
On the north-western frontier of Christendom the same story repeats itself. The first chapter is the peaceful conversion of the English by a band of Roman missionaries, but this is followed by the coercion of the Far Western Christians by a series of turns of the screw which began with the decision of the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664 and culminated in the armed invasion of Ireland by Henry II of England, with Papal approval, in 1171. Nor is this the end of the story. Habits of ‘frightfulness’, acquired by the English in their prolonged aggression against the remnants of the Celtic Fringe in the Highlands of Scotland and the bogs of Ireland, were carried across the Atlantic and practised at the expense of the North American Indians.
In the expansion of our Western Civilization over the whole planet in recent centuries the impetus of the expanding body has been so strong, and the disparity of resources between it and its primitive antagonists so extreme, that the movement has swept on unchecked until it has reached, not an unstable limes but a terminus in the form of a natural frontier. In this world-wide Western offensive against the rear-guard of the primitive societies, extermination or eviction or subjugation has been the rule and conversion the exception. Indeed, we can count on the fingers of one hand the primitive societies that our modern Western Society has taken into partnership with itself. There are the Scottish Highlanders, one of those rare enclaves of untamed barbarians bequeathed to the modern Western World by a medieval Western Christendom; there are the Maoris of New Zealand; and there are the Araucanians in the barbarian hinterland of the Chilean province of the Andean universal state, with whom The Spaniards have had to deal since the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
The test case is the history of the incorporation of the Scottish Highlanders after the failure of these White barbarians’ last kick against the pricks in the Jacobite rising of 1745; for the social gulf between a Dr. Johnson or a Horace Walpole and the war-bands which carried Prince Charlie to Derby was probably not much less difficult to bridge than the gulf between the European settlers in New Zealand or Chile and the Maoris or Araucanians. At the present day the great-great-grandchildren of Prince Charlie’s shaggy warriors are undoubtedly of one standardized social substance with the descendants of those bewigged and powdered Lowlanders and Englishmen who were the victors in the last round of a struggle that reached its end barely two hundred years ago; so much so that the very nature of the struggle has been transformed out of all recognition by popular mythology. The Scots have nearly persuaded the English, if not themselves, that the Highland tartan—which the citizens of Edinburgh in A.D. 1700 regarded very much as the citizens of Boston at the same date regarded the feathered headgear of an Indian chief—is the national dress of Scotland; and Lowland confectioners now sell ‘Edinburgh Rock’ in tartan-covered cartons.
Such barbarian limites as are to be found in the Westernized World of our own day are legacies from non-Western civilizations not yet completely absorbed into the Western body social. Among these, the North-West Frontier of India is of outstanding interest and importance, at any rate to the citizens of the particular Western parochial state that has taken it upon itself to provide a universal state for the disintegrating Hindu Civilization.
During the Hindu time of troubles (circa A.D. 1175-1575) this frontier was broken through again and again by Turkish and Iranian leaders of predatory war-bands. It was sealed for a time by the establishment in the Hindu World of a universal state represented by the Mughal Raj. When the Pax Mogulica prematurely dissolved at the beginning of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, the barbarians who rushed in—to contend for the possession of the carcass with the Maratha protagonists of a militant Hindu reaction against an alien universal state—were the East Iranian Rohillas and Afghans; and when Akbar’s work was re-performed by other alien hands and the Hindu universal state was re-established in the shape of a British Raj, the defence of the North-West Frontier proved to be by far the heaviest of all the frontier commitments that the British empire-builders in India had to take over. Various frontier policies have been tried, and none of them has proved entirely satisfactory.
The first alternative which the British empire-builders essayed was to conquer and annex outright the whole of the East Iranian threshold of the Hindu World right up to the line along which the Mughal Raj, at its apogee, had marched “with its own Uzbeg successor-states in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and with the Safawi Empire in Western Iran. The adventurous reconnaissances which were carried out, from 1831 onwards, by Alexander Burnes, were followed by the still more hazardous step of dispatching a British-Indian military force to Afghanistan in 1838; but this ambitious attempt at a ‘totalitarian’ solution of the North-West Frontier problem had a disastrous ending. For, in the first flush of their triumphantly successful conquest of all India, south-east of the Indus basin, between 1799 and 1818, the British empire-builders had over-estimated their own strength and under-estimated the vigour and effectiveness of the resistance that their aggression would provoke among the untamed barbarians whom they were now proposing to subdue. In fact the operation ended, in 1841-2, in a disaster of greater magnitude than the Italian disaster in the Abyssinian highlands in 1896.
Since this resounding failure the British ambition to make a permanent conquest of the highlands has never been more than tentatively revived, and the variations of frontier policy since the conquest of the Panjab in 1849 have been tactical rather than strategic. Here, in fact, we have a limes of the same political order as the Rhine-Danube frontier of the Roman Empire during the opening centuries of the Christian Era. If and when the British-Indian dominant minority yield to the persuasions of the Hindu internal proletariat and quit the scene of their increasingly thankless labours, it will be interesting to see what this emancipated internal proletariat, when it is master in its own house, finds itself able to make of the North-West Frontier problem.
If we now ask ourselves whether the external proletariats generated by our Western Society at various stages of its history in different quarters of the world have been stimulated by their ordeals to any acts of creativity in the spheres of poetry and religion, we shall at once be reminded of the brilliant creative work of those barbarian rear-guards in the Celtic Fringe and in Scandinavia whose attempts to give birth to civilizations on their own account were rendered abortive by their defeat in their struggle with the nascent civilization of Western Christendom. These encounters have been discussed in this Study already in another connexion, and we may pass on at once to consider the external proletariats generated by an expanding Western World in the Modern Age. In reconnoitring this broad landscape, we will content ourselves with a single example of barbarian creativity in each of the two spheres in which we have learnt to look for it.
In the poetic field we may take note of the ‘heroic’ poetry which was cultivated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era by the Bosniak barbarians beyond the south-eastern frontier of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy. This example is interesting because at first sight it seems an exception to the rule that the external proletariat of a disintegrating civilization is not apt to be stimulated to the creation of ‘heroic’ poetry until the civilization in question has passed through its universal state and fallen into an interregnum which gives opportunity for a barbarian Völkerwanderung. But the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which, from the standpoint of London or Paris, was no more than one among several parochial Powers in a politically divided Western World, had all the appearance and properties of a Western universal state in the eyes of its own subjects and also in those of its non-Western neighbours and adversaries, against whom it served as a ‘carapace’ or shield for the whole body of a Western Christian Society whose sheltered members remained un-appreciative beneficiaries of the Monarchy’s oecumenical mission.
The Bosniaks were a rear-guard of the Continental European barbarians who had previously had to endure the unusual—and unusually painful—experience of being taken between the fires of two aggressive civilizations, those of Western and of Orthodox Christendom. The radiation of the Orthodox Christian Civilization, which had been the first to reach the Bosniaks, had been rejected by them in its orthodox form, and had only been able to insinuate itself in the schismatic guise of Bogomilism. This heresy had drawn upon them the hostile attentions of both Christian civilizations, and in these circumstances they had welcomed the arrival of the Muslim ‘Osmanlis, abandoned their Bogomilism and ‘turned Turk’ so far as religion was concerned. Thereafter, under Ottoman protection, these Jugoslav converts to Islam took to playing, on the Ottoman side of the Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier, the same part as was played on the Hapsburg side by Jugoslav Christian refugees from the territories which had fallen under Ottoman rule. The two opposing sets of Jugoslavs found an identical occupation in raiding, on the one side the Ottoman Empire and on the other side the Hapsburg Monarchy; and on the same fertile soil of border warfare two independent schools of ‘heroic’ poetry, both using the Serbo-Croat language, grew up and flourished side by side, apparently without exercising any influence on one another.
Our example of external-proletarian creativity in the religious field comes from a very different quarter, namely the nineteenth-century frontier of the United States over against the Red Indians.
It is remarkable that the North American Indians should have been capable of making any creative religious response at all to the challenge of European aggression, seeing that they were almost continuously ‘on the run’ from the moment of the arrival of the first English settlers down to the crushing of the last Indian attempt at armed”resistance in the Sioux War of 1890, two hundred and eighty years later, and it is still more remarkable that this Indian response should have been of a gentle character. We should rather have expected the Indian war-bands either to create a pagan religion in their own likeness—an Iroquois Olympus or Asgard—or else to adopt the most militant elements in the Calvinistic Protestantism of their assailants. However, a series of prophets, from the anonymous Delaware Prophet of A.D. 1762 to Wovoka who arose about A.D. 1885 in Nevada, preached a gospel of quite another kind. They preached peace and urged their disciples to renounce the use of all the technical material ‘improvements’ that they had acquired from their white enemies, 1 beginning with the use of fire-arms. They proclaimed that, if their teaching were followed, the Indians were destined to a life of bliss in an earthly paradise in which the living would be rejoined by the souls of their ancestors, and that this Red Indian Messianic Kingdom was not to be conquered with tomahawks, much less with bullets. What results would have followed the adoption of such teaching we cannot say; it proved too hard and too high for the barbarian warriors to whom it was addressed, but in these gleams of gentle light on a dark and grim horizon we catch an arresting glimpse of the anima naturaliter Christiana in the bosom of primitive man.
At the present moment it looks as though, for the few antique barbarian communities that remain on the map, the only chance of survival lies in adopting the tactics of the Abotrites and Lithuanians who, in the medieval chapter of the history of our Western expansion, had the foresight to anticipate a forcible by a voluntary conversion to the culture of an aggressive civilization which was too strong for them to resist. In our latter-day remnant of an antique barbarian world there are still standing out two closely beleaguered fastnesses of barbarism in each of which an enterprising barbarian war-lord has been making a determined effort to save a perhaps not yet quite hopeless situation by launching a vigorous cultural offensive-defensive.
In North-Eastern Iran it seems possible that the North-West Frontier problem of India may finally be solved, not by any drastic action against the untamed barbarians on the Indian side of the Indo-Afghan frontier, but rather by the voluntary Westernization of Afghanistan itself. For if this Afghan endeavour were to achieve success, one of its effects would be to place the war bands on the Indian side between two fires and thereby make their position ultimately untenable. The Westernizing movement in Afghanistan was launched by King Amanallah (A.D. 1919-29) with a radical excess of zeal which cost the royal revolutionary his throne; but Amanallah’s personal fiasco is less significant than the fact that this check has not proved fatal to the movement. By 1929 the process of Westernization had gone too far for the people of Afghanistan to put up with the unmitigated barbarian reaction of the brigand-rebel Bacha-i-Sakka; and under the regime of King Nadir and his successor the Westernizing process has been unobtrusively resumed.
But the outstanding Westernizer of a beleaguered barbarian fastness is ‘Abd-al-’AzIz Al Sa’Qd, the King of the Najd and the Hijaz: a soldier and statesman who, since 1901, has raised himself out of the political exile into which he was born until he has made himself master of all Arabia west of the Rub’-al-Khali and north of the Yamani kingdom of San’a. As a barbarian war-lord Ibn Sa’Qd may be compared in point of enlightenment with the Visigoth Atawulf. He has apprehended the potency of modern Western scientific technique and has shown a discerning eye for those applications of it—artesian wells and motor-cars and aeroplanes— that are particularly effective in the Central Arabian Steppe. But above all he has seen that the indispensable foundation for a Western way of life is law and order.
When the last obstinate enclave has been eliminated, in one way or another, from the cultural map of a Westernized World, shall we be able to congratulate ourselves on having seen the last of barbarism itself? A complete elimination of the barbarism of the external proletariat would warrant no more than a mild elation, since we have convinced ourselves (if there is any virtue in this Study) that the destruction which has overtaken a number of civilizations in the past has never been the work of any external agency, but has always been in the nature of an act of suicide.
‘We are betrayed by what is false within.’ 1 The familiar barbarians of the antique type may have been effectively wiped out of existence through the elimination of the last remaining no-man’s-land beyond anti-barbarian frontiers which have now been carried up to the limits set by physical nature on every front in the world. But this unprecedented triumph will have profited us nothing if the barbarians, in the hour of their extinction beyond the frontiers, have stolen a march on us by re-emerging in our midst. And is it not here that we find our barbarians embattled to-day? ‘Ancient civilizations were destroyed by imported barbarians; we breed our own.’ 2 Have we not seen, in our generation, a host of neo-barbarian war-bands recruited under our very eyes in one country after another—and these in the heart, and not on the outskirts, of what has hitherto been a Christendom? What else but barbarians in spirit were the fighting-men in these Fascii di Combattimento and these Sturmabteilungen ? Were they not taught that they were the stepchildren of the society out of whose bosom they came and that, as an aggrieved party with a score to pay off, they were morally entitled to conquer ‘a place in the sun’ for themselves by the ruthless use of force? And is not this precisely the doctrine that the war-lords of the external proletariat—the Genserics and the Attilas—have always proclaimed to their warriors as they have led them to plunder some world which, through its own fault, has lost the power to defend itself? Black shirts and not black skins were assuredly the badges of barbarism in the Italo-Abyssinian war of 1935-6, and the black-shirted barbarian is a more appalling portent than the black-skin whom he has made his prey. The black-shirt was a portent because he was deliberately sinning against inherited lights, and he was a menace because, for the commission of his sin, he had at his disposal an inherited technique which he was free to divert from God’s to the Devil’s service. But in arriving at this conclusion we have not yet dug down to the root of the matter, for we have not yet asked ourselves what the source might be from which this Italian neo-barbarism was derived.
Mussolini once declared that he thought ‘for Italy as the great Englishmen who have made the British Empire have thought for England, as the great French colonizers have thought for France’. 1 Before we dismiss with contempt this Italian caricature of the deeds of our own forebears, we should reflect that a caricature may be an illuminating portrait. In the repulsive countenance of the Italian neo-barbarian apostate from the path of civilization we may be compelled to confess a recognition of some of the features of much-admired English models—a Clive, a Drake and a Hawkins.
But must we not pursue our importunate question still farther? Ought we not to remind ourselves that, on the evidence presented in this chapter, the dominant minorities are found to be the original aggressors in the warfare between dominant minorities and external proletariats? We have to remember that the annals of this warfare between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ have been written almost exclusively by the scribes of the ‘civilized’ camp. The classic picture of the external proletarian carrying his barbarous fire and slaughter into the fair domain of some unoffending civilization is therefore likely to be no objective presentation of the truth but an expression of the ‘civilized’ party’s resentment at being made the target of a counter-attack which he has himself provoked. The complaint against the barbarian, as drafted by his mortal enemy, amounts perhaps to little more than:
Cet animal est tres mechant:
Quand on l’attaque, il se defend! 2
A Widening of Horizons
At the very beginning of this Study, after having argued, from the example of English history, that the history of a national state was not intelligible taken by itself and apart from the doings of the rest of its kind, we made the assumption that the groups of kindred communities which we called societies—and which we found to be societies of a particular species known as civilizations —would prove to be ‘intelligible fields of study’. In other words, we assumed that the course of the life of a civilization was self-determined, so that it could be studied and understood in and by itself, without requiring constant allowance for the play of alien social forces. This assumption has been borne out by our study of the geneses of civilizations and of their growths, and so far it has not been refuted by our study of their breakdowns and disintegrations. For, although a disintegrating society may split into fragments, each of these fragments turns out to be a chip of the old block. Even the external proletariat is recruited from elements within the disintegrating society’s field of radiation. At the same time, however, our survey of the several fractions of societies in disintegration—and this is true not only of external proletariats but of internal proletariats and dominant minorities as well—has frequently required us to take alien as well as indigenous agents into account.
It has, in fact, become clear that, while the definition of a society as ‘an intelligible field of study’ can be accepted almost without qualification so long as it is still in growth, this definition can only be maintained with reservations when we come to the disintegration stage. True though it be that the breakdowns of civilizations are due to an inward loss of self-determination and not to any external blows, it is not true that the process of disintegration through which a broken-down civilization has to pass on its way to dissolution is equally intelligible without reference to external agencies and activities. In the study of the life of a civilization in the disintegration stage the ‘intelligible field’ has proved to be distinctly wider than the ambit of the single society under observation. This means that, in the process of disintegrating, the substance of a body social tends not merely to split into the three components that we have just been studying but also to resume its liberty to enter into new combinations with elements derived from foreign bodies. Thus we are now finding that the ground on which we took our stand at the beginning of this Study, and which has stood firm so far, is slipping away from under our feet. At the beginning we chose civilizations for the objects of our Study just because they presented the appearance of being ‘intelligible fields’ which lent themselves singly to being studied in isolation. We now find ourselves already on the move from this standpoint towards a different one which we shall have to take up when we examine the contacts of civilizations with one another. 1
Meanwhile, it will be convenient at this point to distinguish and compare the respective effects of the alien and indigenous inspirations that can be discerned in the activities of the several fractions into which the body social of a society in disintegration is divided. We shall find that, in the works of a dominant minority and an external proletariat, an alien inspiration is apt to result in discord and destruction, whereas in the works of an internal proletariat it is apt to produce the exactly opposite effects of harmony and creation.
Dominant Minorities and External Proletariats
We have seen that universal states are usually provided by dominant minorities indigenous to the society for which they perform this high-handed service. These indigenous empire-builders may be frontiersmen from the outer edge of the world upon which they confer the blessing of peace through the imposition of political unity; but this origin does not in itself convict them of having any alien tinge in their culture. We have, however, also noted cases in which the moral debacle of the dominant minority has been so rapid that, by the time when the disintegrating society has been ripe for entering a universal state, there has no longer been any remnant of the dominant minority still possessed of the empire-building virtues. In such cases the task of providing a universal state is not usually allowed to remain unperformed. Some alien empire-builder steps into the breach and performs for the ailing society the task that ought to have been performed by native hands.
All universal states, alien and indigenous alike, are apt to be accepted with thankfulness and resignation, if not with enthusiasm; they are at any rate an improvement, in a material sense, upon the time of troubles that has preceded them. But as time passes ‘a new king’ arises ‘who knew not Joseph’; in plain language, the time of troubles and the memory of its horrors recedes into a forgotten past, and the present—in which the universal state extends over the entire social landscape—comes to be judged as a thing in itself irrespective of its historical context. At this stage the fortunes of indigenous and alien universal states diverge. The indigenous universal state, whatever its real merits, tends to become more and more acceptable to its subjects and is more and more regarded as the only possible social framework for their life. The alien universal state, on the other hand, becomes more and more unpopular. Its subjects are more and more offended by its alien qualities and shut their eyes more and more firmly to the useful service which it has performed and perhaps still is performing for them.
An obvious pair of universal states for the illustration of this contrast is the Roman Empire which provided an indigenous universal state for the Hellenic World and the British Raj which has provided the second of two alien universal states for the Hindu Civilization. Many quotations could be collected to illustrate the love and veneration with which the latter-day subjects of the Roman Empire regarded that institution, even after it had ceased to perform its task with tolerable efficiency and when it was in manifest dissolution. Perhaps the most striking of these tributes is a passage in the poem De Consulate Stilichonis written in Latin hexameters by Claudian of Alexandria in A.D. 400.
She—prouder boast than other conquerors knew—
Gently her captives to her bosom drew;
Mother not mistress, made the thrall her kin
And ‘neath her wing called all the nations in.
Who owns, and owes not to her parent sway,
His civick rights in utmost lands to-day? 1
It would be easy to prove that the British Raj has been in many respects a more benevolent and also perhaps a more beneficent institution than the Roman Empire, but it would be hard to find a Claudian in any of the Alexandrias of Hindustan.
If we look at the history of other alien universal states, we shall observe the same mounting tide of hostile feeling among their subjects as we find in British India. The alien Syriac universal state imposed by Cyrus on the Babylonic Society was so bitterly hated by the time it had completed the second century of its existence that in 331 B.C. the Babylonian priests were prepared to give an effusive welcome to the equally alien conqueror Alexander of Macedon, as in our day certain extreme nationalists in India might have been prepared to welcome a Clive from Japan. In Orthodox Christendom the alien Pax Ottomanica which had been welcomed in the first quarter of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era by the Greek adherents of the founder of the Ottoman commonwealth on the Asiatic shores of the Sea of Marmara had become an object of loathing to the Greek nationalists of A.D. 1821. The passage of five centuries had produced among Greeks a change of sentiment which was the exact inverse of the change in Gaul from the Romano-phobia of a Vercingetorix to the Romano-philia of a Sidonius Apollinaris.
Another prominent example of the hatred aroused by empire-builders of an alien culture is the animosity of the Chinese towards the Mongol conquerors who provided a distracted Far Eastern World with a sorely needed universal state, and this animosity might appear to present a curious contrast to the tolerance with which the same society accepted two-and-a-half centuries of Manchu domination at a later period. The explanation is to be found in the fact that the Manchus were backwoodsmen of the Far Eastern World who were not contaminated by any alien culture, whereas the Mongols’ barbarism was mitigated, however slightly, by a tincture of Syriac culture derived from Nestorian Christian pioneers and by an open-minded readiness to enlist the services of able and experienced men whatever their provenance. That this is the real explanation of the unpopularity of the Mongol regime in China is made plain by Marco Polo’s account of explosive contacts between the Chinese subjects and the Orthodox Christian soldiers and Muslim administrators of the Mongol Khāqān.
It was perhaps a tincture of Sumeric culture that made the Hyksos intolerable to their Egyptiac subjects, whereas the subsequent intrusion of the completely barbarian Libyans was accepted without resentment. In fact, we can venture to formulate something like a general social law to the effect that barbarian invaders who present themselves free from any alien cultural taint are apt to make their fortunes, while those who, before their Volkerwanderung, have acquired either an alien or a heretical tinge must go out of their way to purge themselves of it if they are to escape the otherwise inevitable doom of being either ejected or exterminated.
To take undiluted barbarians first: the Aryas and the Hittites and the Achaeans, each of whom invented a barbarian pantheon of their own during their sojourn on the threshold of a civilization, and who persisted in this barbarian worship after they had broken through and made their conquests, each also succeeded, notwithstanding this ‘invincible ignorance’, in founding new civilizations: the Indie, the Hittite and the Hellenic. Again, the Frankish and English and Scandinavian and Polish and Magyar converts from a native paganism to Western Catholic Christianity secured the opportunity to play full, and even leading, parts in the building up of Western Christendom. On the other hand the Hyksos worshippers of Set were evicted from the Egyptiac World and the Mongols were evicted from China.
An exception to our rule would seem to be presented by the Primitive Muslim Arabs. Here was a group of barbarians, belonging to the external proletariat of the Hellenic Society, who achieved a high degree of success in the Volkerwanderung which accompanied the dissolution of that society in spite of the fact that they clung to their own barbarian travesty of Syriac religion instead of adopting the Monophysite Christianity of their subjects in the provinces that they wrested from the Roman Empire. But the historic role of the primitive Muslim Arabs was altogether exceptional. Through their incidental conquest of the whole Sasanian Empire in the course of their victorious assault upon the Oriental provinces of the Roman Empire, the barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire which the Arabs founded on Syrian soil transformed itself into a restoration of the Syriac universal state which had been prematurely destroyed, a thousand years before, when the Achaemenidae had been overthrown by Alexander; and the vast new political mission with which the Muslim Arabs were thus, almost accidentally, endowed opened up a new horizon for Islam itself.
It would seem, therefore, that the history of Islam is a special case which does not invalidate the general results of our inquiry. In general we are justified in concluding that, for external proletariats and dominant minorities alike, an alien inspiration is a handicap because it is a fruitful source of friction and frustration for them in their dealings with the other two of the fractions into which a disintegrating society splits up.
Internal Proletariats
In contrast with these findings about dominant minorities and external proletariats we shall find that for internal proletariats an alien inspiration is not a curse but a blessing which confers on those who receive it an apparently superhuman power of taking their conquerors captive and of attaining the end to which they have been born. This thesis can best be tested by an examination of those ‘higher religions’ and universal churches which are the internal proletariat’s characteristic works. Our survey of these has shown that their potency depends on the presence, and varies in proportion to the strength, of an alien spark of vitality in their spirit.
For example the worship of Osiris, which was the ‘higher religion’ of the Egyptiac proletariat, can be traced back tentatively, as we have seen, to an alien origin in the Sumeric worship of Tammuz; and the manifold and competing ‘higher religions’ of the Hellenic internal proletariat can all be traced back to various alien origins with certainty. In the worship of Isis the alien spark is Egyptiac; in the worship of Cybele it is Hittite; in Christianity and Mithraism it is Syriac; in the Mahayana it is Indie. The first four of these ‘higher religions’ were created by Egyptiac, Hittite and Syriac populations which had been conscripted into the Hellenic internal proletariat through Alexander’s conquests, and the fifth was created by an Indie population likewise conscripted, in the second century B.C., through the Euthy-demic Bactrian Greek princes’ conquests in the Indie World. Profoundly though they differ from one another in their inward spiritual essence, all five of them have in common at least this superficial feature of being alien in their origin.
Our conclusion will not be shaken by a consideration of certain cases in which an attempt to conquer a society has been made by a higher religion without success. There is, for example, the abortive attempt of the Shl’ah sect of Islam to become the universal church of Orthodox Christendom under the Ottoman regime, and the abortive attempt of Catholic Christianity to become the universal church of the Far Eastern Society—in China during the last century of the Ming and the first century of the Manchu dynasties and in Japan at the moment of transition from the time of troubles to the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Shi’ah in the Ottoman Empire and Catholicism in Japan were both cheated of their prospective spiritual conquests by being exploited—or at any rate suspected of being exploited—for illegitimate political ends. The failure of Catholicism in China was due to the refusal of the Papacy to allow the Jesuit missionaries to carry on their work of translating an alien Catholic religious idiom into the traditional language of Far Eastern philosophy and ritual.
We may conclude that an alien spark is a help and not a hindrance to a ‘higher religion’ in winning converts; and the reason for this is not far to seek. An internal proletariat, alienated from the broken-down society from which it is in process of secession, is seeking a new revelation, and this is what the alien spark supplies; it is its newness which makes it attractive. But, before it can become attractive, the new truth has to be made intelligible; and, until this necessary work of exposition has been performed, the new truth will be inhibited from making its potential appeal. The victory of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire could not have been won if the Fathers of the Church, from St. Paul onwards, had not exerted themselves, during the first four or five centuries of the Christian era, to translate the Christian doctrine into terms of Hellenic philosophy; to build up the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy on the pattern of the Roman civil service; to mould the Christian ritual on the model of the Mysteries; and even to convert pagan into Christian festivals and replace pagan cults of heroes by Christian cults of saints. It was an undertaking of this kind which was nipped in the bud by the Vatican’s instructions to the Jesuit missionaries in China; and the conversion of the Hellenic World would have been as fatally arrested after the first excursions of Christian missionaries on to Gentile ground, if the Judaizing Christian opponents of St. Paul had been victorious in the conferences and conflicts described in The Acts of the Apostles and in the earlier Pauline epistles.
Our muster of ‘higher religions’ which appear to have had an indigenous inspiration will include Judaism and Zoroastrianism and Islam—three religions which have found their field in the Syriac World and have drawn their inspiration from the same quarter—and also Hinduism, which is clearly Indie both in its inspiration and in its field of operations. Hinduism and Islam must be regarded as exceptions to our ‘law’, but Judaism and Zoroastrianism will turn out on examination to be, after all, illustrations of it. For the Syriac populations among which Judaism and Zoroastrianism came to birth, between the eighth and the sixth century before Christ, were broken peoples which had been forcibly conscripted into the internal proletariat of the Babylonic Society by the Assyrian armies of the Babylonic dominant minority. It was this Babylonic aggression that evoked the Jewish and Zoroastrian religious responses from the Syriac souls that were subjected to the ordeal. On this showing we clearly ought to classify Judaism and Zoroastrianism as religions which were introduced by Syriac conscripts into the internal proletariat of the Babylonic Society. Judaism actually took shape ‘by the waters of Babylon’, as the Christian Church took shape in the Pauline congregations in the Hellenic World.
If the disintegration of the Babylonic Civilization had been as long drawn out as that of the Hellenic Civilization and had passed through all the same stages, then the birth and growth of Judaism and Zoroastrianism would present themselves, in historical perspective, as events in a Babylonic story—as the birth and growth of Christianity and Mithraism do, in fact, present themselves as events in Hellenic history. Our perspective has been thrown out by the fact that Babylonic history came to a premature close. The Chaldaean attempt at a Babylonic universal state collapsed; and the Syriac conscripts in its internal proletariat were able not only to throw off their chains but to turn the tables on their Babylonic conquerors by taking them captive in body as well as in spirit. The Iranians became converts to the Syriac and not to the Babylonic culture, and the Achaemenian Empire founded by Cyrus came to play the part of a Syriac universal state. It is in this perspective that Judaism and Zoroastrianism take on their present appearance of being Syriac religions with an indigenous inspiration. We can now see that they were, in their origin, religions of a Babylonic internal proletariat to which their Syriac inspiration was alien.
If a ‘higher religion’ has an alien inspiration—and we have found that this is a rule with only two notable exceptions—then obviously the nature of that religion cannot be understood without taking into account the contact of at least two civilizations: the civilization in whose internal proletariat the new religion arises and the civilization (or civilizations) from which its alien inspiration (or inspirations) is derived. This fact requires us to make a radical new departure; for it requires us to relinquish the basis on which this Study has so far been built up. So far we have been dealing in terms of civilizations; and we have assumed that any single civilization will afford a practicable ‘field of study’ in virtue of being a social whole, intelligible in isolation from whatever social phenomena might present themselves outside the spatial and temporal limits of this particular society. But now we find ourselves entangled in the same net as that in which, in our opening pages, we so confidently entangled those historians who believed that they could ‘make sense’ of an isolated national history. Henceforth we shall have to transcend the limits within which we have hitherto found ourselves able to work.