If, as we have been led to think, self-determination is the criterion of growth, and if self-determination means self-articulation, we shall be analysing the process by which growing civilizations actually grow if we investigate the way in which they progressively articulate themselves. In a general way it is evident that a society in process of civilization articulates itself through the individuals who ‘belong’ to it, or to whom it ‘belongs’. We can express the relation between the society and the individual indifferently by either of these formulae, contradictory though they are; and this ambiguity seems to show that both formulae are inadequate and that, before setting out on our new inquiry, we shall have to consider what is the relation in which societies and individuals stand to each other.
This is, of course, one of the stock questions of sociology, and there are two stock answers to it. One is that the individual is a reality which is capable of existing and of being apprehended by itself and that a society is nothing but an aggregate of atomic individuals. The other is that the reality is the society; that a society is a perfect and intelligible whole, while the individual is simply a part of this whole which cannot exist or be conceived as existing in any other capacity or setting. We shall find that neither of these views will bear examination.
The classic picture of an imaginary atomic individual is the Homeric description of the Cyclops, quoted by Plato for the same purpose as ours in quoting it now:
Mootless are they and lawless. On the peaks Of mountains high they dwell, in hollow caves, Where each his own law deals to wife and child In sovereign disregard of all his peers. 1
It is significant that this atomic way of life is ascribed to no ordinary human beings, and in fact no human beings have ever lived Cyclops-fashion, for man is essentially a social animal inasmuch as social life is a condition which the evolution of man out of sub-man pre-supposes and without which that evolution could not conceivably have taken shape. What, then, of the alternative answer which treats man as simply a part of a social whole?
‘There are communities, such as those of bees and ants, where, though no continuity of substance exists between the members, yet all work for the whole and not for themselves and each is doomed to death if separated from the society of the rest.
‘There are colonies such as those of corals or of hydroid polyps where a number of animals, each of which by itself would unhesitatingly be called an individual, are found to be organically connected so that the living substance of one is continuous with that of all the rest. . . . Which is the individual now?
‘Histology then takes up the tale and shows that the majority of animals, including man, our primal type of individuality, are built up of a number of units, the so-called cells. Some of these have considerable independence; and it is soon forced upon us that they stand in much the same general relation to the whole mass as do the individuals of a colony of coral polyps, or better of siphonophora, to the whole colony. This conclusion becomes strengthened when we find that there exist a great number of free-living animals, the protozoa, including all the simplest forms known, which correspond in all essentials, save their separate and independent existence, with the units building up the body of man. . . .
‘In a sense . . . the whole organic world constitutes a single great individual, vague and badly co-ordinated, it is true, but none the less a continuing whole with interdependent parts: if some accident were to remove all the green plants, or all the bacteria, the rest of Life would be unable to exist.’ 1
Do these observations of organic nature hold good for mankind? Is the individual human being so far from possessing a Cyclopean independence that he is actually no more than a cell in the body social, or, on a wider view, a cellule in the vaster body of ‘a single great individual’ which is constituted by ‘the whole organic world’? The well-known original frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan pictures the human body social as an organism built up out of a host of Anaxagorean homoeomeriae which are individual human beings —as though the social contract could have the magical effect of degrading a Cyclops into a cell. Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century and Oswald Spengler in the twentieth have written of human societies as social organisms in sober earnest. To quote only from the latter:
‘A civilization (Kultur) is born at the moment when, out of the primitive psychic conditions of a perpetually infantile [raw] humanity, a mighty soul awakes and extricates itself: a form out of the formless, a bounded and transitory existence out of the boundless and persistent. This soul comes to flower on the soil of a country with precise boundaries, to which it remains attached like a plant. Conversely a civilization dies if once this soul has realized the complete sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, creeds, arts, states and sciences, and thereupon goes back into the primitive psyche from which it originally emerged.’ 1
An effective criticism of the thesis of this passage may be found in the work of an English writer which happened to appear in the same year as Spengler’s book.
‘Again and again social theorists, instead of finding and steadily employing a method and a terminology proper to their subject, have attempted to express the facts and values of society in terms of some other theory or science. On the analogy of the physical sciences they have striven to analyse and explain society as mechanism, on the analogy of biology they have insisted on regarding it as an organism, on the analogy of mental science or philosophy they have persisted in treating it as a person, sometimes on the religious analogy they have come near to confusing it with a God.’ 2
The biological and psychological analogies are perhaps least harmful and misleading when they are applied to primitive societies or to arrested civilizations, but they are manifestly unsuited to express the relation in which growing civilizations stand to their individual members. The inclination to introduce such analogies is merely an example of that myth-making or fictional infirmity of historical minds to which we have already referred: the tendency to personify and label groups or institutions—’Britain’, ‘France’, ‘the Church’, ‘the Press’, ‘the Turf and so on—and to treat these abstractions as persons. It is sufficiently evident that the representation of a society as a personality or organism offers us no adequate expression of the society’s relation to its individual members.
What then is the right way of describing the relation between human societies and individuals? The truth seems to be that a human society is, in itself, a system of relationships between human beings who are not only individuals but are also social animals in the sense that they could not exist at all without being in this relationship to one another. A society, we may say, is a product of the relations between individuals, and these relations of theirs arise from the coincidence of their individual fields of action. This coincidence combines the individual fields into a common ground, and this common ground is what we call a society.
If this definition is accepted, an important though obvious corollary emerges from it. Society is a ‘field of action’ but the source of all action is in the individuals composing it. This truth is forcibly stated by Bergson:
‘We do not believe in the “unconscious” [factor] in history: “the great subterranean currents of thought”, of which there has been so much talk, only flow in consequence of the fact that masses of men have been carried away by one or more of their own number. ... It is useless to maintain that [social progress] takes place of itself, bit by bit, in virtue of the spiritual condition of the society at a certain period of its history. It is really a leap forward which is only taken when the society has made up its mind to try an experiment; this means that the society must have allowed itself to be convinced, or at any rate allowed itself to be shaken; and the shake is always given by somebody.’ 1
These individuals who set going the process of growth in the societies to which they ‘belong’ are more than mere men. They can work what to men seem miracles because they themselves are superhuman in a literal and no mere metaphorical sense.
‘In giving to man the moral conformation which he required to be a social animal, nature has probably done all that she was able to do for the human species. But, just as men of genius have been found to push back the bounds of the human intelligence, ... so there have arisen privileged souls who have felt themselves related to all souls, and who, instead of remaining within the limits of their group and keeping to the [restricted] solidarity which has been established by nature, have addressed themselves to humanity in general in an Han of love. The apparition of each of these souls has been like the creation of a new species composed of one unique individual.’ 2
The new specific character of these rare and superhuman souls that break the vicious circle of primitive human social life and resume the work of creation may be described as personality. It is through the inward development of personality that individual human beings are able to perform those creative acts, in the outward field of action, that cause the growths of human societies. For Bergson it is the mystics who are the superhuman creators par excellence, and he finds the essence of the creative act in the supreme moment of the mystical experience. To pursue his analysis in his own words:
‘The soul of the great mystic does not come to a halt at the [mystical] ecstasy as though that were the goal of a journey. The ecstasy may indeed be called a state of repose, but it is the repose of a locomotive standing in a station under steam pressure, with its movement continuing as a stationary throbbing while it waits for the moment to make a new leap forward. . . . The great mystic has felt the truth flow into him from its source like a force in action. . . . His desire is with God’s help to complete the creation of the human species. . . . The mystic’s direction is the very direction of the elan of life. It is that elan itself, communicated in its entirety to privileged human beings whose desire it is thereafter to set the imprint of it upon the whole of mankind and— by a contradiction of which they are aware—to convert a species, which is essentially a created thing, into creative effort; to make a movement out of something which, by definition, is a halt.’ 1
This contradiction is the crux of the dynamic social relation which arises between human beings upon the emergence of mystically inspired personalities. The creative personality is impelled to transfigure his fellow men into fellow creators by re-creating them in his own image. The creative mutation which has taken place in the microcosm of the mystic requires an adaptative modification in the macrocosm before it can become either complete or secure; but ex hypothesi the macrocosm of the transfigured personality is also the macrocosm of his untransfigured fellow men, and his effort to transform the macrocosm in consonance with the change in himself will be resisted by their inertia, which will tend to keep the macrocosm in harmony with their unaltered selves by keeping it just as it is.
This social situation presents a dilemma. If the creative genius fails to bring about in his milieu the mutation which he has achieved in himself, his creativeness will be fatal to him. He will have put himself out of gear with his field of action; and in losing the power of action he will lose the will to live—even if his former fellows do not harry him to death, as abnormal members of the swarm or hive or herd or pack are harried to death by the rank and file in the static social life of gregarious animals or insects. On the other hand, if our genius does succeed in overcoming the inertia or active hostility of his former fellows and does triumphantly transform his social milieu into a new order in harmony with his transfigured self, he thereby makes life intolerable for men and women of common clay unless they can succeed in adapting their own selves, in turn, to the new social milieu that has been imposed on them by the triumphant genius’s masterfully creative will.
This is the meaning of a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospels:
‘Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth: I came not to send peace but a sword.
‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’ 2
How is it possible for social equilibrium to be restored when once the disturbing thrust of genius has made itself felt?
The simplest solution would be that uniform thrusts—uniform alike in vigour and in direction—should be made by each and every member of society independently. In such a case there would be growth without a trace of strain or tension. But, it need hardly be said, such hundred-per-cent responses to the call for creative genius do not in fact occur. History is, no doubt, full of examples of the fact that, when an idea—religious or scientific— is, as we say, ‘in the air’, it will take form in the minds of several inspired persons independently and almost simultaneously. But even in the most striking of such cases the plurality of independently and simultaneously inspired minds is to be counted in single figures as against the thousands or millions unresponsive to the call. The truth seems to be that the intrinsic uniqueness and individuality of any act of creation is never counteracted to more than a trifling extent by the tendency towards uniformity which arises from the fact that every individual is a potential creator and that all these individuals are living in the same atmosphere; so that the creator, when he arises, always finds himself overwhelmingly outnumbered by the inert uncreative mass, even when he has the good fortune to enjoy the companionship of a few kindred spirits. All acts of social creation are the work either of individual creators or, at most, of creative minorities; and at each successive advance the great majority of the members of the society are left behind. If we glance at the great religious organizations extant in the world to-day, Christian, Islamic and Hindu, we shall find that the great bulk of their nominal adherents, however exalted the creeds to which they profess lip-service, still live in a mental atmosphere which, so far as religion is concerned, is not far removed from a simple paganism. It is the same with the recent achievements of our material civilization. Our Western scientific knowledge and our technique for turning it to account is perilously esoteric. The great new social forces of Democracy and Industrialism have been evoked by a tiny creative minority, and the great mass of humanity still remains substantially on the same intellectual and moral level on which it lay before the titanic new social forces began to emerge. In fact the main reason why this would-be Western Salt of the Earth is in danger, to-day, of losing its savour is because the great mass of the Western body social has remained unsalted.
The very fact that the growths of civilizations are the work of creative individuals or creative minorities carries the implication that the uncreative majority will be left behind unless the pioneers can contrive some means of carrying this sluggish rear-guard along with them in their eager advance. And this consideration requires us to qualify the definition of the difference between civilizations and primitive societies on which we have hitherto worked. In an earlier part of this Study we found that primitive societies, as we know them; are in a static condition whereas the civilizations— other than the arrested civilizations—are in dynamic movement. We should now rather say that growing civilizations differ from static primitive societies in virtue of the dynamic movement, in their bodies social, of creative individual personalities; and we should add that these creative personalities, at their greatest numerical strength, never amount to more than a small minority. In every growing civilization the great majority of the participant individuals are in the same stagnant quiescent condition as the members of a static primitive society. More than that, the great majority of the participants in a growing civilization are, apart from a superimposed veneer of education, men of like passions with primitive mankind. Here we find the element of truth in the saying that human nature never changes. The superior personalities, geniuses, mystics or supermen—call them what you will— are no more than a leaven in the lump of ordinary humanity.
We have now to consider how those dynamic personalities who do succeed in breaking what Bagehot called ‘the cake of custom’ in their own for intirieur are actually able to consolidate their individual victory, and save it from being converted into a social defeat, by going on to break ‘the cake of custom’ in their social milieu. In order to solve this problem,
‘a double effort is demanded: an effort on the part of some people to make a new invention and an effort on the part of all the rest to adopt it and adapt themselves to it. A society can be called a civilization as Soon as these acts of initiative and this attitude of docility are both found in it together. As a matter of fact, the second condition is more difficult to secure than the first. The indispensable factor which has not been at the command of the uncivilized societies is in all probability not the superior personality (there seems no reason why nature should not have had a certain number of these felicitous vagaries at all times and places). The missing factor is more likely to have been the opportunity for individuals of this stamp to display their superiority and the disposition in other individuals to follow their lead.’ 1
The problem of securing that the uncreative majority shall in fact follow the creative minority’s lead appears to have two solutions, the one practical and the other ideal.
‘The one is by way of drill (dressage) ... the other is by mysticism The first method inculcates a morality consisting of impersonal habits; the second induces imitation of another personality, and even a spiritual union, a more or less complete identification with it.’ 1
The direct kindling of creative energy from soul to soul is no doubt the ideal way, but to rely upon it exclusively is a counsel of perfection. The problem of bringing the uncreative rank and file into line with the creative pioneers cannot be solved in practice, on the social scale, without bringing into play the faculty of sheer mimesis—one of the less exalted faculties of human nature, which has more in it of drill than of inspiration.
To bring mimesis into play is indispensable for the purpose in hand because mimesis, at any rate, is one of the ordinary faculties of primitive man. We have already noticed 2 that mimesis is a generic feature of social life, both in primitive societies and in civilizations, but that it operates in different ways in these two species of society. In static primitive societies mimesis is directed towards the older generation of the living members and towards the dead, in whom ‘the cake of custom’ is incarnated, whereas in societies in process of civilization the same faculty is directed towards the creative personalities who have broken new ground. The faculty is the same but it is turned in the opposite direction.
Can this revised version of a primitive social drill, this perfunctory and almost automatic ‘right or left incline’, really serve as an effective substitute for the ‘strenuous intellectual communion and intimate personal intercourse’ which Plato affirmed to be the only means of transmitting a philosophy from one individual to another? It can only be replied that the inertia of mankind in the mass has never in fact been overcome by the exclusive use of the Platonic method; and that, in order to draw the inert majority along in the active minority’s train, the ideal method of direct individual inspiration has always had to be reinforced by the practical method of wholesale social drill—a habitual exercise of primitive mankind, which can be made to serve the cause of social progress when new leaders take command and issue new marching orders.
Mimesis may lead to the acquisition of social ‘assets’—aptitudes or emotions or ideas—which the acquisitors had not originated and which they would never have possessed if they had not encountered and imitated those who possessed them. It is, infact, a short cut; and at a later point in this Study we shall find that this short cut, though it may be an inevitable path towards a necessary goal, is also a dubious expedient which no less inevitably exposes a growing civilization to the peril of breakdown. It would be premature, however, to discuss that peril here.
In the last section we have studied the course which is followed by creative personalities when they are taking the mystic path which is their highest spiritual level. We have seen that they pass first out of action into ecstasy and then out of ecstasy into action on a new and higher plane. In using such language we describe the creative movement in terms of the personality’s psychic experience. In terms of his external relations with the society to which he belongs we shall be describing the same duality of movement if we call it withdrawal and return. The withdrawal makes it possible for the personality to realize powers within himself which might have remained dormant if he had not been released for the time being from his social toils and trammels. Such a withdrawal may be a voluntary action on his part or it may be forced upon him by circumstances beyond his control; in either case the withdrawal is an opportunity, and perhaps a necessary condition, for the anchorite’s transfiguration; ‘anchorite’, in the original Greek, means literally ‘one who goes apart’; but a transfiguration in solitude can have no purpose, and perhaps even no meaning, except as a prelude to the return of the transfigured personality into the social milieu out of which he had originally come: a native environment from which the human social animal cannot permanently estrange himself without repudiating his humanity and becoming, in Aristotle’s phrase, ‘either a beast or a god’. The return is the essence of the whole movement as well as its final cause.
This is apparent in the Syriac myth of Moses’ solitary ascent of Mount Sinai. Moses ascends the mountain in order to commune with Yahweh at Yahweh’s call; and the call is to Moses alone, while the rest of the Children of Israel are charged to keep their distance. Yet Yahweh’s whole purpose in calling Moses up is to send him down again as the bearer of a new law which Moses is to communicate to the rest of the people because they are incapable of coming up and receiving the communication themselves.
‘And Moses went up unto God; and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying: “Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob and tell the Children of Israel.” . . . And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony . . . written with the finger of God.’ 1
The emphasis upon the return is equally strong in the account of the prophetic experience and the prophetic mission given by the Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era:
‘The human soul has an innate disposition to divest itself of its human nature in order to clothe itself in the nature of the angels and to become an angel in reality for a single instant of time—a moment which comes and goes as swiftly as the flicker of an eyelid. Thereupon the soul resumes its human nature, after having received, in the world of angels, a message which it has to carry to its own human kind.’ 1
In this philosophic interpretation of the Islamic doctrine of prophecy we seem to catch an echo of a famous passage of Hellenic philosophy: Plato’s simile of the Cave. In this passage Plato likens the ordinary run of mankind to prisoners in a cave, standing with their backs to the light and gazing at shadows cast upon a screen by the realities which are moving about behind them. The prisoners take it for granted that the shadows which they see on the back wall of the cave are the ultimate realities, since these are the only things that they have ever been able to see. Plato then imagines a single prisoner being suddenly released and compelled to turn round and face the light and walk out into the open. The first result of this re-orientation of vision is that the liberated prisoner is dazzled and confused. But not for long; for the faculty of vision is already in him and his eyes gradually inform him of the nature of the real world. He is then sent back to his cave again; and he is just as much dazzled and confused by the twilight now as’ he was by the sunlight before. As he formerly regretted his translation into the sunlight, so he now regrets his re-translation into the twilight, and with better reason; for in returning to his old companions in the cave who have never seen the sunlight he will be exposed to the risk of a hostile reception.
‘There will assuredly be laughter at his expense, and it will be said of him that the only result of his escapade up there is that he has come back with his eyesight ruined. Moral: it is a fool’s game even to make the attempt to go up aloft; “and as for the busybody who goes in for all this liberating and translating to higher spheres, if ever we have a chance to catch him and kill him, we will certainly take it”.’
Readers of Robert Browning’s poetry may be reminded at this point of his fantasy of Lazarus. He imagines that Lazarus, who was raised from the dead four days after his death, must have returned to ‘the cave’ a very different man from what he was before he left it, and he embodies a description of this same Lazarus of Bethany, in old age, forty years after his unique experience, in An Epistle of one Karshish, a travelling Arabian physician who writes periodical reports for the information of the head of his firm. According to Karshish the villagers of Bethany can make nothing of poor Lazarus; he has come to be regarded as a quite harmless variety of the village idiot. But Karshish has heard Lazarus’s story, and is not so sure.
Browning’s Lazarus failed to make his ‘return’ in any effective shape; he became neither a prophet nor a martyr, but suffered the returning Platonic philosopher’s less exacting alternative fate of being tolerated but ignored. Plato himself has painted the ordeal of the return in such unattractive colours that it is almost surprising to find him imposing it remorselessly on his elect philosophers. But if it is essential to the Platonic system that the elect should acquire philosophy, it is equally essential that they should not remain philosophers only. The purpose and meaning of their enlightenment is that they should become philosopher-kings. The path which Plato lays down for them is unmistakably identical with the path that has been trodden by the Christian mystics.
Yet, while the path is identical, the spirit in which it is traversed by the Hellenic and by the Christian soul is not the same. Plato takes it for granted that the personal interest, as well as the personal desire, of the liberated and enlightened philosopher must be in opposition to the interest of the mass of his fellow men who still ‘sit in darkness and in the shadow of death . . . fast bound in misery and iron’.’ Whatever may be the interests of the prisoners, the philosopher, on Plato’s showing, cannot minister to the needs of mankind without sacrificing his own happiness and his own perfection. For, when once he has attained enlightenment, the best thing for the philosopher himself is to remain in the light outside the cave and live there happy ever after. It was indeed a fundamental tenet of Hellenic philosophy that the best state of life is the state of contemplation—the Greek word for which has become our English word ‘theory’ which we habitually use as the opposite of ‘practice’. The life of contemplation is placed by Pythagoras above the life of action, and this doctrine runs through the whole Hellenic philosophical tradition down to the Neo-platonists living in the latest age of the Hellenic Society in its dissolution. Plato affects to believe that his philosophers will consent to take a hand in the work of the world from a sheer sense of duty, but in fact they did not; and their refusal may be part of the explanation of the problem why the breakdown which the Hellenic Civilization had suffered in the generation before Plato was never retrieved. The reason why ‘the great refusal’ was made by the Hellenic philosophers is also clear. Their moral limitation was the consequence of an error in belief. Believing that the ecstasy and not the return was the be-all and end-all of the spiritual Odyssey on which they had embarked, they saw nothing but a sacrifice on the altar of duty in the painful passage from ecstasy to return which was really the purpose and culmination of the movement in which they were engaged. Their mystical experience lacked the cardinal Christian virtue of love which inspires the Christian mystic to pass direct from the heights of communion to the slums, moral and material, of the unredeemed workaday world.
This movement of Withdrawal-and-Return is not a peculiarity of human life which is only to be observed in the relations of human beings with their fellows. It is something that is characteristic of life in general, and becomes manifest to man in the life of the plants as soon as he has made this plant life his concern by taking up agriculture—a phenomenon which has led the human imagination to express human hopes and fears in agricultural terms. The annual withdrawal and return of the corn has been translated into anthropomorphic terms in ritual and mythology, as witness the rape and restoration of a Kore or Persephone, or the death and resurrection of a Dionysus, Adonis, Osiris or whatever may be the local name for the universal corn-spirit or year-god, whose ritual and myth, with the same stock characters playing the same tragic drama under diverse names, is as widespread as the practice of agriculture itself.
Similarly, the human imagination has found an allegory of human life in the phenomena of withdrawal and return apparent in the life of plants, and in terms of this allegory it has wrestled with the problem of death, a problem which begins to torment human minds from the moment when, in growing civilizations, the higher personalities begin to disengage themselves from the mass of mankind.
‘Some men will say: “How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?”
‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;
‘And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain;
‘But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. . . .
‘So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption;
‘It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power;
‘It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . .
‘And so it is written: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” . . .
‘The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from Heaven.’ 1
In this passage of the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians four ideas are presented in a succession which is also a crescendo. The first idea is that we are witnessing a resurrection when we behold the return of the corn in the spring after its withdrawal in the autumn. The second idea is that the resurrection of the corn is an earnest of the resurrection of dead human beings: a reaffirmation of a doctrine taught long before in the Hellenic Mysteries. The third idea is that the resurrection of human beings is possible and conceivable in virtue of some kind of transfiguration which their natures undergo through the act of God during the time of waiting that has to intervene between their death and their return to life. The earnest of this transfiguration of dead human beings is the manifest transfiguration of seeds into flowers and fruits. This change in human nature is to be a change in the direction of greater endurance, beauty, power and spirituality. The fourth idea in the passage is the last and most sublime. In the concept of the First and Second Man the problem of death is forgotten and the concern for the resurrection of the individual human being is momentarily transcended. In the advent of ‘the Second Man who is the Lord from Heaven’ Paul hails the creation of a new species composed of one unique individual, the Adjutot Dei whose mission it is to raise the rest of mankind to a superhuman level by inspiring his fellow men with his own inspiration from God.
Thus the same motif of withdrawal and transfiguration leading up to a return in glory and power can be discerned in the spiritual experience of mysticism and in the physical life of the vegetable world and in human speculations on death and immortality and in the creation of a higher out of a lower species. This is evidently a theme of cosmic range; and it has furnished one of the primordial images of mythology, which is an intuitive form of apprehending and expressing universal truths.
One mythical variant of the motif is the story of the foundling. A babe born to a royal heritage is cast away in infancy—sometimes (as in the stories of Oedipus and Perseus) by his own father or grandfather, who is warned by a dream or an oracle that the child is destined to supplant him; sometimes (as in the story of Romulus) by a usurper, who has supplanted the babe’s father and fears lest the babe should grow up to avenge him; and sometimes (as in the stories of Jason, Orestes, Zeus, Horus, Moses and Cyrus) by friendly hands that are concerned to save the babe from the villain’s murderous designs. In the next stage of the story the infant castaway is miraculously saved alive, and in the third and last chapter the child of destiny, now grown to manhood and wrought to a heroic temper by the hardships through which he has passed, returns in power and glory to enter into his kingdom.
In the story of Jesus the Withdrawal-and-Return motif perpetually recurs. Jesus is the babe born to a royal heritage—a scion of David or a son of God Himself—who is cast away in infancy. He comes down from Heaven to be born on Earth; He is born in David’s own city of Bethlehem, yet finds no room in the inn and has to be laid in a manger, like Moses in his ark or Perseus in his chest. In the stable He is watched over by friendly animals, as Romulus is watched over by a wolf and Cyrus by a hound; He also receives the ministrations of shepherds, and is reared by a foster-father of humble birth, like Romulus and Cyrus and Oedipus. Thereafter He is saved from Herod’s murderous design by being taken away privily to Egypt, as Moses is saved from Pharaoh’s murderous design by being hidden in the bulrushes, and as Jason is placed beyond the reach of King Pelias by being hidden in the fastnesses of Mount Pelion. And then at the end of the story Jesus returns, as the other heroes return, to enter into His Kingdom. He enters into the Kingdom of Judah when, riding into Jerusalem, He is hailed by the multitudes as the Son of David. He enters into the Kingdom of Heaven in the Ascension.
In all this the story of Jesus conforms to the common pattern of the tale of the foundling babe, but in the Gospels the underlying motif of Withdrawal-and-Return presents itself in other shapes as well. It is present in each one of the successive spiritual experiences in which the divinity of Jesus is progressively revealed. When Jesus becomes conscious of His mission, upon His baptism by John, He withdraws into the wilderness for forty days and returns from His Temptation there in the power of the spirit. Thereafter, when Jesus realizes that His mission is to lead to His death, He withdraws again into the ‘high mountain apart’ which is the scene of His Transfiguration, and returns from this experience resigned and resolved to die. Thereafter, again, when He duly suffers the death of mortal man in the Crucifixion, He descends into the tomb in order to rise immortal in the Resurrection. And last of all, in the Ascension, He withdraws from Earth to Heaven in order to ‘come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: whose Kingdom shall have no end’.
These crucial recurrences of the Withdrawal-and-Return motif in the story of Jesus likewise have their parallels. The withdrawal into the wilderness reproduces Moses’ flight into Midian; the Transfiguration on a ‘high mountain apart’ reproduces Moses’ transfiguration on Mount Sinai; the death and resurrection of a divine being is anticipated in the Hellenic Mysteries; the tremendous figure which is to appear and dominate the scene, at the catastrophe which is to bring to an end the present mundane order, is anticipated in the Zoroastrian mythology in the figure of the Saviour and in the Jewish mythology in the figures of the Messiah and ‘the Son of Man’. There is, however, one feature of the Christian mythology which seems to have no precedent; and that is the interpretation of the future coming of the Saviour or Messiah as the future return to Earth of an historical figure who had already lived on Earth as a human being. In this flash of intuition the timeless past of the foundling myth and the timeless present of the agrarian ritual are translated into the historical striving of mankind to reach the goal of human endeavour. In the concept of the Second Coming the motif of Withdrawal-and-Return attains its deepest spiritual meaning.
The flash of intuition in which the Christian concept of the Second Coming was conceived must evidently have been the responseto a particular challenge of the time and place, and the critic who makes the mistake of supposing that things have nothing more in them than is to be found in their origins will depreciate this Christian doctrine on the ground that it originated in a disappointment: the disappointment of the primitive Christian community when they realized that their Master had actually come and gone without the looked-for result. He had been put to death, and, as far as could be seen, His death had left His followers without prospects. If they were to find heart to carry on their Master’s mission, they must draw the sting of failure from their Master’s career by projecting this career from the past into the future; they must preach that He was to come again in power and glory.
It is, indeed, true that this doctrine of a Second Coming has since been adopted by other communities that have been in the same disappointed or frustrated state of mind. In the myth of the Second Coming of Arthur, for example, the vanquished Britons consoled themselves for the failure of the historic Arthur to avert the ultimate victory of the English barbarian invaders. In the myth of the Second Coming of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (A.D. 1152-90) the Germans of the later Middle Ages consoled themselves for their failure to maintain their hegemony over Western Christendom.
‘To the south-west of the green plain that girdles in the rock of Salzburg, the gigantic mass of the Untersberg frowns over the road which winds up a long defile to the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden. There, far up among its limestone crags, in a spot scarcely accessible to human foot, the peasants of the valley point out to the traveller the black mouth of a cavern and tell him that, within, Barbarossa lies amid his knights in an enchanted sleep, waiting the hour when the ravens shall cease to hover round the peak and the pear-tree blossom in the valley, to descend with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the golden age of peace and strength and unity.’ 1
Similarly the Shi’ite community in the Muslim World, when they had lost their battle and become a persecuted sect, conceived the idea that the Twelfth Imam (twelfth lineal descendant of ‘All, the son-in-law of the Prophet) had not died but had disappeared into a cave from which he continued to provide spiritual and temporal guidance for his people, and that one day he would reappear as the promised Mahdi and bring the long reign of tyranny to an end.
But if we turn our attention again to the doctrine of the Second Coming in its classic Christian exposition, we shall see that it is really a mythological projection into the future, in physical imagery, of the spiritual return in which the Apostles’ vanquished Master reasserted His presence in the Apostles’ hearts, when the Apostles took heart of grace to execute, in spite of the Master’s physical departure, that audacious mission which the Master had once laid upon them. This creative revival of the Apostles’ courage and faith, after a moment of disillusionment and despair, is described in the Acts—again in mythological language—in the image of the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost.
After this attempt to grasp what Withdrawal-and-Return really means, we are in a better position to take an empirical survey of its working in human history through the interaction of creative personalities and creative minorities with their fellow human beings. There are famous historical examples of the movement in many different walks of life. We shall encounter it in the lives of mystics and saints and statesmen and soldiers and historians and philosophers and poets, as well as in the histories of nations and states and churches. Walter Bagehot expressed the truth we are seeking to establish when he wrote: ‘All the great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from all distraction.’ 1
We will now pass rapidly in review a diversity of examples, beginning with creative individuals.
Paul of Tarsus was born into Jewry in a generation when the impact of Hellenism upon the Syriac Society was presenting a challenge which could not be evaded. In the first phase of his career he persecuted the Jewish followers of Jesus who were guilty, in Jewish Zealot eyes, of making a breach in the Jewish community’s ranks. In the latter part of his career he turned his energies in an entirely different direction, preaching a new dispensation ‘where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free’, 2 and preaching this reconciliation in the name of the sect which he had formerly persecuted. This last chapter was the creative chapter of Paul’s career; the first chapter was a false start; and between the two chapters a great gulf was fixed. After his sudden enlightenment on the road to Damascus, Paul ‘conferred not with flesh and blood’ but went into the desert of Arabia. Not until three years later did he visit Jerusalem and meet the original Apostles with a view to resuming practical activity. 1
Saint Benedict
The life of Benedict of Nursia (circa A.D. 480-543) was contemporary with the death-throes of the Hellenic Society. Sent as a child from his Umbrian home to Rome in order to receive the traditional upper-class education in the humanities, he revolted from the life of the capital and withdrew into the wilderness at this early age. For three years he lived in utter solitude; but the turning-point of his career was his return to social life upon reaching manhood, when he consented to become the head of a monastic community: first in the valley of Subiaco and afterwards on Monte Cassino. In this last creative chapter of his career the saint improvised a new education to take the place of the obsolete system that he himself had rejected as a child, and the Benedictine community on Monte Cassino became the mother of monasteries which increased and multiplied until they had spread the Benedictine Rule to the uttermost parts of the West. Indeed this rule was one of the main foundations of the new social structure which was eventually raised in Western Christendom on the ruins of the ancient Hellenic order.
One of the most important features in Benedict’s rule was the prescription of manual labour; for this meant, first and foremost, agricultural labour in the fields. The Benedictine movement was, on the economic plane, an agricultural revival: the first successful revival of agriculture in Italy since the destruction of the Italian peasant economy in the Hannibalic War. The Benedictine Rule achieved what had never been achieved by the Gracchan agrarian laws or the Imperial alimenta, because it worked, not, as state adtion works, from above downwards, but from below upwards, by evoking the individual’s initiative through enlisting his religious enthusiasm. By virtue of this spiritual élan the Benedictine Order not only turned the tide of economic life in Italy; it also performed in medieval Transalpine Europe that strenuous pioneer work of clearing forests, draining marshes and creating fields and pastures which was performed in North America by the French and British backwoodsmen.
Saint Gregory the Great
Some thirty years after the death of Benedict, Gregory, holding the office of Praefectus Urbi in Rome, found himself faced with an impossible task. The city of Rome in A.D. 573 w; s in much the same predicament as the city of Vienna in A.D. 1920. A great city, which had become what it was in virtue of having been for centuries the capital of a great empire, now suddenly found itself cut off from its former provinces, deprived of its historic functions and thrown back on its own resources. In the year of Gregory’s prefecture, the Ager Romanus was restricted approximately to the area which it had occupied some nine centuries back, before the Romans had embarked on their struggle with the Samnites for the mastery of Italy, but the territory which had then to support a little market-town had now to support a vast parasitic capital. The impotence of the old order to deal with the new state of affairs must have been borne in upon the mind of a Roman magnate who held the Praefectura Urbis at this time, and this painful experience would fully account for Gregory’s complete withdrawal from the secular world two years later.
His withdrawal, like Paul’s, was of three years’ duration, and at the end of that period he was planning to undertake in person the mission that he afterwards undertook by proxy, for the conversion of the heathen English, when he was recalled to Rome by the Pope. Here, in various ecclesiastical offices and finally on the Papal throne itself (A.D. 590-604), he accomplished three great tasks. He reorganized the administration of the estates of the Roman Church in Italy and overseas; he negotiated a settlement between the Imperial authorities in Italy and the Lombard invaders; and he laid the foundations of a new empire for Rome in the place of her old empire which now lay in ruins—a new Roman Empire, established by missionary zeal and not by military force, which was eventually to conquer new worlds whose soil the legions had never trodden and whose very existence had never been suspected by the Scipios and Caesars.
The Buddha
Siddhārtha Gautama the Buddha was born into the Indie World in its time of troubles. He lived to see his native city state Kapilavastu sacked and his Sakyan kinsmen massacred. The small aristocratic republics of the early Indie World, of which the Sakyan community was one, appear to have been succumbing in Gautama’s generation to rising autocratic monarchies built on a Lrger scale. Gautama was born a Sakya aristocrat at a moment when the aristocratic order was being challenged by new social forces. Gautama’s personal retort to this challenge was to renounce a world which was becoming inhospitable to aristocrats of his ancestral kind. For seven years he sought enlightenment through ever-increasing asceticism. It was not until he had taken the first step towards returning to the world by breaking his fast that the light broke in upon him. And then, after he had attained the light for himself, he spent the rest of his life in imparting it to his fellow human beings. In order to impart it effectively, he allowed a company of disciples to gather round him and thus became the centre and head of a fraternity.
Muhammad
Muhammad was born into the Arabian external proletariat of the Roman Empire in an age when the relations between the Empire and Arabia were coming to a crisis. At the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era the saturation-point had been reached in the impregnation of Arabia with cultural influences from the Empire. Some reaction from Arabia, in the form of a counter-discharge of energy, was bound to ensue; it was the career of Muhammad (whose lifetime was circa A.D. 570-632) that decided the form that this reaction was to take; and a movement of Withdrawal-and-Return was the prelude to each of the two crucial new departures upon which Muhammad’s life-history hinges.
There were two features in the social life of the Roman Empire in Muhammad’s day that would make a particularly deep impression on the mind of an Arabian observer because, in Arabia, they were both conspicuous by their absence. The first of these features was monotheism in religion. The second was law and order in government. Muhammad’s life-work consisted in translating each of these elements in the social fabric of ‘Rum’ into an Arabian vernacular version and incorporating both his Arabianized monotheism and his Arabianized imperium into a single master-institution—the all-embracing institution of Islam—to which he succeeded in imparting such titanic driving-force that the new dispensation, which had been designed by its author to meet the needs of the barbarians of Arabia, burst the bounds of the peninsula and captivated the entire Syriac World from the shores of the Atlantic to the coasts of the Eurasian Steppe.
This life-work, upon which Muhammad appears to have embarked in about his fortieth year (circa A.D. 609), was achieved in two stages. In the first of these stages Muhammad was concerned exclusively with his religious mission; in the second stage the religious mission was overlaid, and almost overwhelmed, by the political enterprise. Muhammad’s original entry upon a purely religious mission was a sequel to his return to the parochial life of Arabia after a partial withdrawal of some fifteen years’ duration into the life of a caravan-trader between the Arabian oases and the Syrian desert-ports of the Roman Empire along the fringes of the North Arabian Steppe. The second, or politico-religious, stage in Muhammad’s career was inaugurated by the Prophet’s withdrawal or Hegira (Hijrah) from his native oasis of Mecca to the rival oasis of Yathrib, thenceforth known par excellence as Medina: ‘the City’ (of the Prophet). In the Hijrah, which has been recognized by Muslims as such a crucial event that it has been adopted as the inaugural date of the Islamic Era, Muhammad left Mecca as a hunted fugitive. After a seven years’ absence (A.D. 622-9) 2 returned to Mecca, not as an amnestied exile, but as lord and master of half Arabia.
Machiavelli
Machiavelli (A.D. 1469-1527) was a citizen of Florence who was twenty-five years old when Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and overran Italy with a French army in 1494. He thus belonged to a generation which was just old enough to have known Italy as she had been during her age of immunity from ‘barbarian invasions’; and he lived long enough to see the peninsula become the international arena for trials of strength between sundry Transalpine or Transmarine Powers which found the prize and the symbol of their alternating victories in snatching from one another’s grasp an oppressive hegemony over the once independent Italian city-states. This impact upon Italy of non-Italian Powers was the challenge which the generation of Machiavelli had to encounter and the experience through which they had to live; and the experience was the more difficult for the Italians of this generation to meet inasmuch as it was one which had not been tasted, either by them or by their forefathers, for the best part of two-and-a-half centuries.
Machiavelli was endowed by nature with consummate political ability; he had an insatiable zest for exercising his talents. Fortune had made him a citizen of Florence, one of the leading city-states of the peninsula, and merit won him, at the age of twenty-nine, the post of Secretary to the Government. Appointed to this important office in 1498, four years after the first French invasion, he acquired a first-hand knowledge of the new ‘barbarian’ Powers in the course of his official duties. After fourteen years of this experience he had become perhaps better qualified than any other living Italian for taking a hand in the urgent task of helping Italy to work out her political salvation, when a turn in the wheel of Florentine domestic politics suddenly expelled him from his field of practical activity. In 1512 he was deprived of his Secretaryship of State and in the following year he suffered imprisonment and torture; and, although he was lucky enough to emerge again alive, the price which he had to pay for his release from prison was a perpetual rustication on his farm in the Florentine countryside. The break in his career was complete; yet, in putting him to the proof of this tremendous personal challenge, Fortune did not find Machiavelli wanting in the power to make an effective response.
In a letter written very shortly after his rustication to a friend and former colleague he describes in detail and with an almost humorous detachment the manner of life which he has now mapped out for himself. Rising with the sun, he devotes himself during the hours of daylight to the humdrum social and sporting activities suitable to the manner of life now forced upon him. But that is not the end of his day.
‘When the evening comes I return to the house and go into my study; and at the door I take off my country clothes, all caked with mud and slime, and put on court dress; and when I am thus decently re-clad I enter into the ancient mansions of the men of ancient days. And there I am received by my hosts with all lovingkindness, and I feast myself on that food which alone is my true nourishment, and which I was born for.’
In these hours of scholarly research and meditation was conceived and written The Prince; and the concluding chapter of the famous treatise, which is an ‘Exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians’, reveals the intention that Machiavelli had in mind when he took up his pen to write. He was addressing himself once more to the one vital problem of contemporary Italian statesmanship in the hope that perhaps, even now, he might help to bring that problem to solution by transmuting into creative thought the energies which had been deprived of their practical outlet.
In fact, of course, the political hope that animates The Prince was utterly disappointed. The book failed to achieve its author’s immediate aim; but this is not to say that The Prince was a failure, for the pursuit of practical politics by literary means was not the essence of the business which Machiavelli was going about when, evening after evening in his remote farm-house, he entered into the mansions of the men of ancient days. Through his writings Machiavelli was able to return to the world on a more etherial plane, on which his effect on the world has been vastly greater than the highest possible achievement of a Florentine Secretary of State immersed in the details of practical politics. In those magic hours of catharsis when he rose above his vexation of spirit Machiavelli succeeded in transmuting his practical energies into a series of mighty intellectual works— The Prince, The Discourses on Livy, The Art of War and The History of Florence —which have been the seeds of our modern Western political philosophy.
Dante
Two hundred years earlier the history of the same city furnished a curiously parallel example. For Dante did not accomplish his life-work till he had been driven to withdraw from his native city. In Florence, Dante fell in love with Beatrice, only to see her die before him, still the wife of another man. In Florence he went into politics only to be sentenced to exile, an exile from which he never returned. Yet, in losing his birthright in Florence, Dante was to win the citizenship of the world; for in exile the genius which had been crossed in politics after being crossed in love found its life-work in creating the Divina Commedia.
Athens in the Second Chapter of the Growth of the Hellenic Society
A conspicuous example of Withdrawal-and-Return, which has come to our notice in other connexions, is the behaviour of the Athenians in the crisis into which the Hellenic Society was thrown by the presentation of the Malthusian challenge in the eighth century B.C.
We have noticed that the first reaction of Athens to this problem of over-population was ostensibly negative. She did not, like so many of her neighbours, react to it by establishing colonies overseas, and she did not, like the Spartans, react to it by seizing the territory of adjoining Greek city-states and converting their inhabitants into serfs. In this age, so long as her neighbours were content to leave her alone, Athens continued to play an apparently passive role. The first glimpse of her demonic latent energy was to be seen in her violent reaction against the attempt of the Spartan king Cleomenes I to bring her under the Lacedaemonian hegemony. By her vigorous reaction against Lacedaemon, following her abstention from the colonizing movement, Athens had more or less deliberately segregated herself from the rest of the Hellenic World for upwards of two centuries. Yet these two centuries had not been for Athens a period of inactivity. On the contrary, she had taken advantage of this long seclusion to concentrate her energies upon solving the general Hellenic problem by an original solution of her own—an Athenian solution which proved its superiority by continuing to work when the colonizing solution and the Spartan solution were bringing in diminishing returns. It was only in her own good time, when she had remodelled her traditional institutions to suit her new way of life, that Athens at last returned to the arena. But, when she returned, it was with an impetus unprecedented in Hellenic history.
Athens proclaimed her return by the sensational gesture of throwing down the gauntlet to the Persian Empire. It was Athens who responded—when Sparta hung back—to the appeal of the Asiatic Greek insurgents in 499 B.C., and from that day onwards Athens stood out as the protagonist in the Fifty Years’ War between Hellas and the Syriac universal state. For upwards of two centuries from the beginning of the fifth century B.C. onwards the role of Athens in Hellenic history was the absolute antithesis of the role that she had been playing for an equal period of time before. During this second period she was always in the thick of the melee of Hellenic inter-state politics, and it was not until she found herself hopelessly outclassed by the new Titans born of Alexander’s Oriental adventure that she reluctantly renounced the status and the burdens of a Hellenic Great Power. Nor was her withdrawal after her final overthrow by Macedon in 262 B.C. the end of her active participation in Hellenic history. For, long before she fell behind in the military and political race, she had made herself ‘the education of Hellas’ in every other field. She had given the Hellenic culture a permanent Attic impress which it still retains in the eyes of posterity.
Italy in the Second Chapter of the Growth of the Western Society
We have already noticed, in touching upon Machiavelli, that Italy secured for herself during a period of over two centuries—from the destruction of the Hohenstaufen in the middle of the thirteenth century to the French invasion at the end of the fifteenth century—a withdrawal from the tumultuous feudal semi-barbarism of Transalpine Europe. The greatest achievements of the Italian genius during those two-and-a-half centuries of immunity had not been extensive but intensive, not material but spiritual. In architecture, in sculpture, in painting, in literature and in almost every other province in the realm of aesthetic and general culture, the Italians had been performing works of creation which bear comparison with the achievements of the Greeks during an equal period in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Indeed the Italians sought inspiration from this Ancient Greek genius by evoking the ghost of the extinct Hellenic culture, looking back to the Greek achievement as something absolute, standard and classic, to be imitated but not surpassed; and we, following in their footsteps, established a system of ‘classical’ education which has only recently been giving way before the claims of latter-day technology. In fine, the Italians had used their hard-won immunity from alien domination to create, within their precariously sheltered peninsula, an Italian World in which the level of Western Civilization had been raised precociously to such a pitch that the difference in degree became tantamount to a difference in kind.?By the close of the fifteenth century they felt themselves to be so far superior to other Westerners that—half in conceit and half in earnest—they revived the term ‘barbarians’ to describe the peoples beyond the Alps and across the Tyrrhene Sea. And then these latter-day ‘barbarians’ began to act in character by showing themselves politically and militarily wiser than the Italian children of light.
As the new Italian culture radiated out of the peninsula in all directions it quickened the cultural growth of the peoples round about, and quickened it first in the grosser elements of culture— such as political organization and military technique—in which the effect of radiation is always most prompt to make itself felt; and when the ‘barbarians’ had mastered these Italian arts they were able to apply them on a vastly larger scale than the scale of the Italian city-states.
The explanation of the ‘barbarians’ ‘success in achieving a scale of organization which the Italians had found to be beyond their powers lies in the fact that the ‘barbarians’ were applying the lessons learnt from the Italians in far easier circumstances than those that were the Italians’ lot. Italian statesmanship was handicapped and ‘barbarian’ statesmanship facilitated by the operation of one of the regular laws of ‘the Balance of Power’.
The Balance of Power is a system of political dynamics that comes into play whenever a society articulates itself into a number of mutually independent local states; and the Italian Society that had differentiated itself from the rest of Western Christendom had at the same time articulated itself in this very way. The movement to extricate Italy from the Holy Roman Empire had been carried through by a host of city-states which were striving, each for itself, to assert a right of local self-determination; thus the creation of an Italian World apart and the articulation of this world into a multiplicity of states were coeval events. In such a world the Balance of Power operates in a general way to keep the average calibre of states low in terms of every criterion for the measurement of political power: in territory, population and wealth. For any state which threatens to increase its calibre above the prevailing average becomes subject, almost automatically, to pressure from all the other states within reach; and it is one of the laws of the Balance of Power that this pressure is greatest at the centre of the group of states concerned and weakest at the periphery.
At the centre any move that any one state makes with a view to its own aggrandizement is jealously watched and adroitly countered by all its neighbours, and the sovereignty over a few square miles becomes a subject for the stubbornest contention. On the periphery, by contrast, competition is relaxed and small efforts will secure great results. The United States can expand unobtrusively from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Russia can expand from the Baltic to the Pacific, while all the efforts of France or Germany will not suffice to obtain unchallenged possession of Alsace or of Posen.
What Russia and the United States are to the old and cramped nation-states of Western Europe to-day, those communities themselves four hundred years ago—a France politically Italianized by Louis XI, a Spain politically Italianized by Ferdinand of Aragon and an England politically Italianized by the early Tudors—were to such contemporary Italian city-states as Florence, Venice and Milan.
On a comparative view we can see that the Athenian withdrawal in the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries B.C. and the Italian withdrawal in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era display a strong resemblance to one another. In both cases the withdrawal, on the political plane, was complete and persistent. In both cases the self-segregating minority devoted its energies to the task of finding some solution for a problem that confronted the whole society. And in both cases the creative minority returned in the fullness of time, when its work of creation was accomplished, to the society which it had temporarily abandoned, and set its impress upon the whole body social. Moreover, the actual problems which Athens and Italy solved during their withdrawal were much the same. Like Attica in Hellas, Lombardy and Tuscany in Western Christendom served as a segregated social laboratory in which the experiment of transforming a locally self-sufficient agricultural society into an internationally interdependent industrial and commercial society was successfully carried out. And in the Italian as in the Athenian case there was a radical remodelling of traditional institutions in order to bring them into conformity with the new way of life. A commercialized and industrialized Athens changed over, on the political plane, from an aristocratic constitution based on birth to a bourgeois constitution based on property. A commercialized and industrialized Milan or Bologna or Florence or Siena changed over from the prevalent feudalism of Western Christendom to a new system of direct relations between the individual citizens and the locally sovereign governments whose sovereignty resided in the citizens themselves. These concrete economic and political inventions, as well as the impalpable and imponderable creations of the Italian genius, were communicated by Italy to Transalpine Europe from the close of the fifteenth century onwards.
At this stage, however, the respective courses of Western and Hellenic history diverge, on account of one essential point of dissimilarity between the position of the Italian city-states in Western Christendom and the position of Athens in Hellas. Athens was a city-state returning to a world of city-states; but the city-state pattern, on which the Italian world-within-a-world had likewise come to be organized in the course of the Middle Ages, was not the original basis of social articulation in Western Christendom. Its original basis was feudalism, and the greater part of Western Christendom was still organized on a feudal basis at the close of the fifteenth century, when the Italian city-states were re-absorbed into the main body of the Western Society.
This situation presented a problem which could, theoretically, be solved in either of two ways. In order to place itself in a position to adopt the new social inventions which Italy had to offer, Transalpine Europe might either break with its feudal past and particulate itself throughout on a city-state basis; or it might modify the Italian inventions in such a way as to make them workable on the feudal basis and the corresponding kingdom-state scale. In spite of the fact that city-state systems had achieved a considerable measure of success in Switzerland, Swabia, Franconia, the Netherlands and on the North German plain, where the key-points controlling inland and maritime waterways were the cities of the Hanseatic League, it was the non-city-state solution of the problem that was generally adopted beyond the Alps. And this brings us to another chapter of Western history and to another equally remarkable and fruitful withdrawal-and-return.
England in the Third Chapter of the Growth of the Western Society
The problem now confronting the Western Society was how to change over from an agricultural aristocratic to “an industrial democratic way of life without adopting the city-state system. This challenge was taken up in Switzerland, in Holland and in England, and it eventually received an English solution. All these three countries were furnished with some degree of assistance from the geographical environment in their withdrawals from the general life of Europe: Switzerland by her mountains, Holland by her dykes and England by the Channel. The Swiss had successfully surmounted the crisis of the late medieval city-state cosmos by establishing a form of federation, and had maintained their independence, first against the Hapsburg and then against the Burgundian Power. The Dutch had established their independence against Spain and had federated as seven United Provinces. The English had been cured of their ambition to conquer Continental dependencies by their ultimate failure in the Hundred Years’ War and, like the Dutch, they had repelled under Elizabeth the aggression of Catholic Spain. From that time onwards until the war of 1914-18 the avoidance of Continental entanglements was accepted, without further question, as one of the fundamental and perpetual aims of British foreign policy.
But these three local minorities were not all equally well placed for putting their common policy of withdrawal into effect. The Swiss mountains and the Dutch dykes were less effective barriers than the English Channel. The Dutch never entirely recovered from their wars with Louis XIV, and both Dutch and Swiss were for a time swallowed up in Napoleon’s empire. Moreover the Swiss and the Dutch were handicapped in another way as aspirants for finding the solution of the problem that we have already described. They were neither of them fully centralized nation-states but were only loosely federated combinations of cantons and cities. Thus it fell to England, and, after the union of 1707, to the Anglo-Scottish United Kingdom of Great Britain, to play in the third chapter of the history of Western Christendom the part that Italy had played in the second.
It is to be noticed that Italy herself had begun to feel her way towards transcending the limits of the city-state unit, for, by the end of her period of withdrawal, some seventy or eighty independent city-states had been reduced through acts of conquest to some eight or ten larger combinations. But the result was inadequate in two respects. For one thing, these new Italian political units, though large by comparison with what had gone before, were stilt too small to hold their own against the ‘barbarians’ when the period of the invasions began. For another, the form of government evolved in these new larger units was always a tyranny, and the political virtue of the city-state system was lost in the process. It was this latter-day Italian despotic system which, crossing the Alps, was readily adapted to the larger Transalpine political units —by Hapsburgs in Spain, by Valois and Bourbons in France, by Hapsburgs again in Austria, and eventually by Hohenzollerns in Prussia. But this apparent line of advance proved a blind alley; for without the achievement of some kind of political democracy it was difficult for the Transalpine countries to emulate the prior Italian economic accomplishment—achieved in Italy under the city-state dispensation—of advancing from agriculture to commerce and industry.
In England, unlike France and Spain, the growth of autocratic monarchy was a challenge which evoked an effective response, and the English response was to breathe new life and import new functions into the traditional constitution of the Transalpine body politic, which was an English as well as a French and a Spanish heritage from the common past of Western Christendom. One of the traditional Transalpine institutions was the periodical holding of a parliament or conference between the Crown and the Estates of the Realm for the double purpose of ventilating grievances and obtaining a vote of supply for the Crown from the Estates as a quid pro quo for an honourable undertaking that well-founded grievances should be redressed. In the gradual evolution of this institution the Transalpine kingdoms had discovered how to overcome their regional problem of material scale—the problem of unmanageable numbers and impracticable distances—by inventing or rediscovering the legal fiction of ‘representation’. The duty or right of every person concerned in the business done by parliament to take a personal part in the proceedings—a duty or right self-evident in a city-state—was attenuated in these unwieldy feudal kingdoms into a right to be represented by proxy and a duty on the proxy’s part to shoulder the burden of travelling to the place where the parliament was to be held.
This feudal institution of a periodical representative and consultative assembly was well fitted for its original purpose of serving as a liaison between the Crown and its subjects. On the other hand it was originally not at all well fitted for the task to which it was successfully adapted in seventeenth-century England —the task of taking over the functions of the Crown itself and gradually superseding it as the mainspring of political authority.
Why was it that the English took up, and met successfully, a challenge with which no other contemporary Transalpine kingdom proved able to cope? The answer to this question will be found in the fact that England, being smaller than the Continental feudal kingdoms and possessed of better-defined frontiers, achieved far earlier than her neighbours a really national as distinct from a feudal existence. It is no mere paradox to say that the strength of English monarchy in the second, or medieval, chapter of the history of Western Christendom made possible its supersession by parliamentary government in the third chapter. No other country in the second chapter experienced such authoritative and disciplinary control as that exercised by William the Conqueror, the first and second Henrys, and the first and third Edwards. Under these strong rulers England was welded into a national unity long before anything like it was achieved in France or Spain or Germany. Another factor making for the same result was the predominance of London. In no other Western Transalpine kingdom did one single city so entirely dwarf all others. At the end of the seventeenth century, when the population of England was still insignificant in comparison with that of France or Germany and less than that of Spain or Italy, London was already in all probability the largest city in Europe. In fact, one may assert that England succeeded in solving the problem of adapting the Italian city-state system to public life on a national scale because, more than any of the other Transalpine nations, she had already achieved—through her small size, her firm frontiers, her strong kings and the predominance of her one great city—something of the compactness and self-consciousness of a city-state writ large.
Yet, even when full allowance is made for these favourable conditions, the English achievement of pouring the new wine of Renaissance Italian administrative efficiency into the old bottles of medieval Transalpine parliamentarism, without allowing these old bottles to burst, is a constitutional triumph that can only be regarded as an astonishing tour de force. And this English constitutional tour de force of carrying parliament across the gulf that divides the criticism of government from its conduct was performed for the Western Society by the English creative minority during the first phase of its withdrawal from Continental entanglements, a period covering the Elizabethan Age and the greater part of the seventeenth century. When, in response to the challenge from Louis XIV, the English made a partial and temporary return to the Continental arena, under the brilliant leadership of Marlborough, the Continental peoples began to take notice of what the islanders had been doing. The age of Anglomanie, as the French sometimes called it, set in. Montesquieu praised—and misunderstood—the English achievement. Anglomanie, in the form of a cult of constitutional monarchy, was one of the powder trains that fired the French Revolution, and it is a matter of common knowledge that, as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, all the peoples of the Earth became possessed of an ambition to clothe their political nakedness with parliamentary fig-leaves. This widespread worship of English political institutions at the latter end of the third chapter of Western history clearly corresponds with the worship of Italian culture at the latter end of the second phase, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an Italy-worship of which the most obvious illustration for Englishmen is the fact that more than three-quarters of Shakespeare’s fictional plays, are based on Italian tales. Indeed Shakespeare, in Richard II, alludes to, and mocks at, the Italomanie which his own choice of stories illustrates. The worthy old Duke of York is made to say that the foolish young king is led astray by—
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.
1
The dramatist, in his usual anachronistic manner, is attributing to the age of Chaucer what was more characteristic of his own age—though, for that matter, Chaucer and his age saw the beginnings of it.
The English political invention of Parliamentary Government provided a propitious social setting for the subsequent English invention of Industrialism. ‘Democracy’ in the sense of a system of government in which the executive is responsible to a parliament which is representative of the people, and ‘Industrialism’ in the sense of a system of machine-production by ‘hands’ concentrated in factories, are the two master-institutions of our age. They have come to prevail because they offer the best solutions which our Western Society has been able to find for the problem of transposing the political and economic achievement of the Italian city-state culture from the city-state to the kingdom scale; and both these solutions have been worked out in England in the age of what one of her latter-day statesmen has called her ‘splendid isolation’.
What is to be Russia’s Role in our Western History?
In the contemporary history of the Great Society into which our Western Christendom has expanded, can we again discern symptoms of that tendency of one age to overbalance into the next, and of one section of a whole society to solve in isolation the problem of the future while the rest are still working out the implications of the past, which signifies that the process of growth is still continuing? Now that the problems set to us by Italian solutions of earlier problems have themselves received their English solutions, are these English solutions giving rise to new problems in their turn? We are already alive, in our generation, to two new challenges to which we have been exposed by the triumph of Democracy and Industrialism. In particular, the economic system of Industrialism, which means local specialization in skilled and costly production for a world-wide market, demands the establishment of some kind of world order as its framework. And, in general, both Industrialism and Democracy demand from human nature a greater individual self-control and mutual tolerance and public-spirited co-operation than the human social animal has been apt to practise, because these new institutions have put an unprecedentedly powerful drive into all human social actions. It is generally agreed, for example, that, in the social and technological circumstances in which we now find ourselves, the continued existence of our civilization depends on the elimination of war as a method of settling our differences. Here we are only concerned to observe whether these challenges have evoked any fresh examples of a withdrawal, to be followed by a return.
It is too early to make any certain pronouncements upon a chapter of history that is clearly at present in its opening stages, but we may venture to speculate whether we have not here an explanation of the present posture of Russian Orthodox Christendom. In the Russian Communist movement we have already detected, under a Western masquerade, a ‘Zealot’ attempt to break away from the Westernization which had been imposed upon Russia two centuries before, by Peter the Great; and at the same time we have seen this masquerade passing over, willy-nilly, into earnest. We have concluded that a Western revolutionary movement, which has been taken up by an unwillingly Westernized Russia as an anti-Western gesture, has turned out to be a more potent agency of Westernization in Russia than any conventional application of the Western social creed; and we have tried to express this latest outcome of the social intercourse between Russia and the West in the formula that a relation which was once an external contact between two separate societies has been transformed into an internal experience of the Great Society into which Russia has now been incorporated. Can we go farther and say that Russia, being now incorporated into the Great Society, has at the same time been making a withdrawal from its common life in order to play the part of a creative minority which will strive to work out some solution for the Great Society’s current problems? It is at least conceivable, and is believed by many admirers of the present Russian experiment, that Russia will make her return to the Great Society in this creative role.