XIX. SCHISM IN THE SOUL

(1) ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF BEHAVIOUR, FEELING AND LIFE

THE schism in the body social, which we have been hitherto examining, is a collective experience and therefore superficial. Its significance lies in its being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual rift. A schism in the souls of human beings will be found to underlie any schism that reveals itself on the surface of the society which is the common ground of these human actors’ respective fields of activity; and the several forms which this inward schism may take must now engage our attention.

Schism in the souls of members of a disintegrating society displays itself in a variety of shapes because it arises in every one of the various ways of behaviour, feeling and life which we have found to be characteristic of the action of human beings who play their part in the geneses and growths of civilizations. In the disintegration phase each of these single lines of action is apt to split into a pair of mutually antithetical and antipathetic variations or substitutes, in which the response to a challenge is polarized into two alternatives—one passive and the other active, but neither of them creative. A choice between the active and the passive option is the only freedom that is left to a soul which has lost the opportunity (though not, of course, the capacity) for creative action through being cast for a part in the tragedy of social disintegration. As the process of disintegration works itself out, the alternative choices tend to become more rigid in their limitations, more extreme in their divergence and more momentous in their consequences. That is to say, the spiritual experience of schism in the soul is a dynamic movement, not a static situation.

To begin with, there are two ways of personal behaviour which are alternative substitutes for the exercise of the creative faculty. Both of them are attempts at self-expression. The passive attempt consists in an abandon (d*cpaT≪a) in which the soul ‘lets itself go’ in the belief that, by giving free rein to its own spontaneous appetites and aversions, it will be ‘living according to nature’ and will automatically receive back from that mysterious goddess the precious gift of creativity which it has been conscious of losing. The active alternative is an effort at self-control (eyKparew.) in which the soul ‘takes itself in hand’ and seeks to discipline its ‘natural passions’ in the opposite belief that nature is the bane of creativity and not its source and that to ‘gain the mastery over nature’ is the only way of recovering the lost creative faculty.

Then there are two ways of social behaviour which are alternative substitutes for that mimesis of creative personalities which we have found to be the necessary, though perilous, short cut on the road to social growth. Both these substitutes for mimesis are attempts to step out of the ranks of a phalanx whose ‘social drill’ has failed to work. The passive attempt to break this social deadlock takes the form of truancy. The soldier realizes with dismay that the regiment has now lost the discipline that has hitherto fortified his moral, and in this situation he allows himself to believe that he is absolved from his military duty. In this unedifying frame of mind the truant steps out of the ranks backwards, in the futile hope of saving his own skin by leaving his comrades in the lurch. There is, however, an alternative way of facing the same ordeal, which may be called martyrdom. In essence, the martyr is a soldier who steps out of the ranks on his own initiative in a forward direction in order to go beyond the demands of duty. While in normal circumstances duty demands that the soldier should risk his life to the minimum extent that may be necessary for the execution of his superior officer’s orders, the martyr courts death for the vindication of an ideal.

When we pass from the plane of behaviour to that of feeling, we may first take note of two ways of personal feeling which are the alternative reactions to a reversal of that movement of elan in which the nature of growth seems to reveal itself. Both these feelings reflect a painful consciousness of being ‘on the run’ from forces of evil which have taken the offensive and established their ascendancy. The passive expression of this consciousness of continual and progressive moral defeat is a sense of drift. The routed soul is prostrated by a perception of its failure to control its environment ; it comes to believe that the Universe, including the soul itself, is at the mercy of a power that is as irrational as it is invincible : the ungodly goddess with a double face who is propitiated under the name of Chance (TU) or is endured under the name of Necessity (deay/07)—a pair of deities which have been given a literary incarnation in the choruses of Thomas Hardy’s Dynasts. Alternatively, the moral defeat which desolates the routed soul may be felt as a failure to master and control the soul’s own self. In that case, instead of a sense of drift we have a sense of sin.

We have also to notice two ways of social feeling which are alternative substitutes for the sense of style—a sense that is the subjective counterpart of the objective process of the differentiation of civilizations through their growth. Both these feelings betray a loss of this same sensitiveness to form, though in their respective ways of responding to this challenge they are poles apart. The passive response is a sense of promiscuity in which the soul surrenders itself to the melting-pot. In the medium of language and literature and art this sense of promiscuity declares itself in the currency of a lingua franca (kowtj) and of a similarly standardized and composite style of literature, painting, sculpture and architecture; in the realm of philosophy and religion it produces syncretisms. The active response takes the loss of a style of living which has been local and ephemeral as an opportunity, and a call, to adopt another style which partakes of what is universal and eternal: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. This active response is an awakening to a sense of unity which broadens and deepens as the vision expands from the unity of mankind, through the unity of the cosmos, to embrace the unity of God.

If we pass on, in the third place, to the plane of life, we shall encounter here again two pairs of alternative reactions, but on this plane the picture departs from the previous pattern in three respects. For one thing, the alternatives which here replace the single movement that is characteristic of the stage of growth are variations on that movement rather than substitutes for it. Secondly, both pairs of alternatives are variations on the same single movement—a movement which we have described as transference of the field of action from the macrocosm to the microcosm. Thirdly, the two pairs are differentiated from one another by a difference sufficiently profound to account for the duplication. In one pair the temper of the reactions is violent; in the other pair, gentle. In the violent pair the passive reaction may be described as archaism and the active as futurism; in the gentle pair the passive may be described as detachment and the active as transfiguration.

Archaism and futurism are alternative attempts to substitute a mere transfer in the time-dimension for that transfer of the field of action from one spiritual plane to another which is the characteristic movement of growth. In both, the effort to live in the microcosm instead of the macrocosm is abandoned for the pursuit of a Utopia which would be reached—supposing it could actually be found ‘in real life’—without any challenge to face the arduous change of spiritual clime. This external Utopia is intended to do duty as an ‘Other World’; but it is an ‘Other World’ only in the shallow and unsatisfying sense of being a negation of the macrocosm in its present state of being, here and now. The soul proposes to perform what is required of it by making its move from the present disintegrating state of society to a goal which is simply the same society as it may once have been in the past or as it may sometime come to be in the future.

Archaism may, in fact, be denned as a reversion from the mimesis of contemporary creative personalities to a mimesis of the ancestors of the tribe: that is to say, as a lapse from the dynamic movement of civilization to the static condition in which primitive mankind is now to be seen. It may be defined, again, as one of those attempts at a forcible stoppage of change which result, in so far as they succeed, in the production of social ‘enormities’. Thirdly, it may be taken as an example of that attempt to ‘peg’ a broken-down and disintegrating society which in another context we found to be the common aim of the authors of Utopias. In corresponding terms we may define futurism as a repudiation of the mimesis of anybody, and also as one of those attempts at a forcible accomplishment of change which result, in so far as they succeed at all, in producing social revolutions that defeat their own purpose by tumbling over into reaction.

For those who put their trust in either of these would-be substitutes for the transfer of the field of action from the macrocosm to the microcosm, there lies in wait an ironical common fate. In seeking their alternative ‘easy’ options these defeatists are actually condemning themselves to the violent denouement which is bound to overtake them, because they are attempting something which is contrary to the order of nature. The quest of the inner life, hard though it may be, is no impossibility; but it is intrinsically impossible for the soul, in so far as it is living in the outward life, to extricate itself from its present place in the ‘ever rolling stream’ by taking a flying leap either backwards up-stream into the past or down-stream into the future. The archaistic and the futuristic Utopias alike are Utopias in the literal sense of the word: they are ‘Nowheres’. These two alluring alibis are unattainable ex hypo-thesi; and the sole and certain effect of striking out towards either of them is to produce a troubling of the waters with a violence that brings no healing.

In its tragic climax futurism expresses itself as Satanism.

‘The essence of the belief is that the World Order is evil and a lie; goodness and truth are persecuted rebels. . . . The belief has been held by many Christian saints and martyrs, and notably by the author of the Apocalypse. But we should notice that it is diametrically opposed to the teaching of almost all the great moral philosophers. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant and J. S. Mill and Comte and T. H. Green, all argue or assume that there exists in some sense a Cosmos or Divine Order; that what is good is in harmony with this order and what is bad is in discord against it. I notice that one of the Gnostic schools, in Hippolytus the Church Father, actually defines Satan as “the Spirit who works against the Cosmic Powers”: the rebel or protestant who counteracts the will of the whole and tries to thwart the community of which he is a member.’ ¹

This inevitable outcome of the spirit of revolution is an accepted commonplace among all men and women who are not themselves revolutionaries, and it is not difficult to lay our finger on historic illustrations of the working out of this spiritual law.

For example, in the Syriac Society, the Messianic form of futurism made its first appearance as a positive attempt to follow the way of gentleness. Instead of persisting in a disastrous attempt to maintain his political independence, here and now, against the assaults of Assyrian militarism, the Israelite bowed his neck to a present political yoke and reconciled himself to this painful act of resignation by transferring all his political treasure to the hope of a saviour-king who was to arise and restore the fallen national kingdom at some unknown future date. When we trace out the history of this Messianic Hope in the Jewish community, we find that it worked in favour of gentleness for more than four hundred years—from 586 B.C., when the Jews were carried away into a Babylonish Captivity by Nebuchadnezzar, until 168 B.C., when they were subjected to the Hellenizing persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. Yet the discord between a confidently expected mundane future and an excruciatingly painful mundane present resolved itself into violence in the end. The martyrdom of Eleazer and the Seven Brethren was followed within two years by the armed insurrection of Judas Maccabaeus, and the Maccabees inaugurated that long line of ever more fanatically militant Jewish Zealots—the innumerable Theudases and Judases of Galilee—whose violence reached its appalling climax in the Satanic Jewish revolts of A.D. 66-70 and 115-17 and 132-5.

The nemesis of futurism, illustrated by this classic Jewish case, is not unfamiliar; but it is perhaps more surprising to find archaism overtaken by the same nemesis at the end of its own apparently opposite path; for, so far from being a commonplace, it may seem something of a paradox to suggest that a pandemonium of violence is the inevitable outcome of this retrograde movement likewise. Nevertheless, the facts of history show that it is so.

In the history of the political disintegration of the Hellenic Society the first statesmen to take the archaistic road were King Agis IV at Sparta and the tribune Tiberius Gracchus at Rome. Both were men of unusual sensitiveness and gentleness, and both set themselves the task of righting a social wrong, and thereby averting a social catastrophe, through a return to what they believed to have been the ancestral constitutions of their states in the already half legendary ‘golden age’ before the breakdown. Their aim was the restoration of concord; yet, because their archaistic policy was an attempt to reverse the current of social life, it inevitably led them into a course of violence; and their gentleness of spirit, which moved them to sacrifice their lives rather than go to extremes in combating the counter-violence which their reluctant violence had provoked, did not avail to arrest the avalanche of violence which they had unintentionally set in motion. Their self-sacrifice merely inspired a successor to take up their work and seek to carry it through to success by a ruthless use of the violence in which the martyr had shown himself half-hearted. The gentle King Agis IV was followed by the violent King Cleomenes III and the gentle tribune Tiberius Gracchus by his violent brother Gaius. Nor was this, in either case, the end of the story. The two gentle archaists let loose a flood of violence which did not subside until it had swept away the whole fabric of the commonwealths which they had sought to save.

But if we now pursue our Hellenic and our Syriac illustrations into the next chapters of the histories to which they belong, we shall find that the pandemonium of violence, let loose by archaism in the one case and by futurism in the other, was eventually allayed by an astonishing resurrection of that very spirit of gentleness which the surging tide of violence had overborne and submerged. In the history of the Hellenic dominant minority the gangsters of the last two centuries B.C. were followed, as we have observed, by a breed of public servants with the conscience and the ability to organize and maintain a universal state; and at the same time the successors of the violent-handed archaizing reformers turned into a school of aristocratic philosophers—Arria, Caecina Paetus, Thrasea Paetus, Seneca, Helvidius Priscus—who took no satisfaction in the exercise of their hereditary dominance even in the public interest, and who carried this abnegation to a point of obediently committing suicide at the command of a tyrant emperor. Similarly, in the Syriac wing of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic World, the fiasco of the Maccabaean attempt to establish by force of arms a Messianic Kingdom of This World was followed by the triumph of a King of the Jews whose Kingdom was not of This World; while, in the next generation, on a narrower range of spiritual vision, the savagely heroic forlorn hope of the militant Jewish Zealots was retrieved, in the hour of annihilation, by the sublimely heroic non-resistance of the Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, who separated himself from the Jewish Zealots in order that he might quietly continue his teaching out of earshot of the battle. When the news of the inevitable catastrophe was brought to him, and the disciple who brought it exclaimed in anguish ‘Woe to us, because the place is destroyed where they make propitiation for the sins of Israel’, the master answered: ‘My son, let it not grieve thee; we have yet one propitiation equal to it, and what is that but the bestowal of kindnesses? —even as it is written “I desired kindness and not sacrifice”.’

How was it that in both these cases a tide of violence, which seemed to have swept away every barrier in its path, was brought thus to a standstill and reversed? In either case the miraculous reversal can be traced to a change in ways of life. In the souls of the Roman fraction of the Hellenic dominant minority the ideal of archaism had been supplanted by the ideal of detachment; in the souls of the Jewish fraction of the Hellenic internal proletariat the ideal of futurism had been replaced by the ideal of transfiguration.

Perhaps we can apprehend the qualities of these two gentle ways of life in the same view as their historical geneses if we approach each of them first through the personality and life-history of a notable convert: for example, Cato Minor, the Roman archaist who became a Stoic philosopher, and Simon Bar-Jonas, the Jewish futurist who became Peter the disciple of Jesus. In both of these great men there was a streak of spiritual blindness which obscured their greatness by misdirecting their energies so long as they were pursuing the respective Utopias to the service of which they had first thought to dedicate themselves. And in each of them the long-baffled and bewildered soul was enabled, through its conversion to a new way of life, to realize at last its highest potentialities.

As the Quixotic champion of a romantically conceived Roman which had never existed ‘in real life’ in any past age, Cato was almost a figure of fun. In the politics of a generation which he refused to take as he found it he was perpetually chasing the shadow and missing the substance; and, when at last he stumbled into playing a leading part in a civil war for the outbreak of which he bore a large share of unadmitted responsibility, his political make-believe was doomed to suffer a shattering disillusionment whatever the event might be, for the regime which would have resulted from a victory of his associates would have been at least as repugnant to Cato’s archaistic ideal as the eventually victorious Caesarean dictatorship. In this dilemma the Quixotic politician was redeemed from ineptitude by the Stoic philosopher. The man who had lived as an archaist in vain now met his death as a Stoic to such good purpose that, after all, he gave Caesar—and Caesar’s successors after him for more than a century—more trouble than all the rest of the Republican party put together. The story of Cato’s last hours made an impression upon his contemporaries which can be recaptured down to this day by any reader of Plutarch’s narrative. With the instinct of genius Caesar apprehended the gravity of the blow which had been dealt to his cause by the Stoic death of an antagonist whom he had never found it necessary to take very seriously as a live politician; and, in the midst of the titanic labour of reconstructing a world while he was stamping out the embers of a civil war, the militarily triumphant dictator found time to reply to Cato’s sword with Caesar’s pen—the only weapon, as this versatile genius well knew, which might avail to ward off an attack that had been transferred from the military to the philosophic plane by Cato’s disconcerting gesture of turning his sword against his own breast. Yet Caesar was unable to vanquish the adversary who had struck this parting stroke; for Cato’s death gave birth to a school of philosophic opponents of Caesarism who were inspired by their founder’s example to put the new tyranny out of countenance by removing themselves, with their own hand, from a situation which they would not accept and could not mend.

The change-over from archaism to detachment is also vividly illustrated in the story of Marcus Brutus, as told by Plutarch and retold by Shakespeare. Brutus was married to Cato’s daughter, and was also a party to that outstanding act of futile archaistic violence, the assassination of Julius Caesar. Yet we are given to understand that, even before the assassination, he was doubtful whether he was on the right track, and that after he had seen its results he was more doubtful still. After the battle of Philippi, in the last words which Shakespeare puts into his mouth, he accepts the Catonian solution which he had formerly condemned. As he commits suicide he says:

Caesar, now be still:
I killed not thee with half so good a will.

As for Peter, his futurism at first seemed as incorrigible as Cato’s archaism. The first of the disciples to hail Jesus as the Messiah, he was also the foremost in protesting against his acknowledged Master’s consequent revelation that his Messianic Kingdom was not to be a Jewish version of the Iranian world-empire of Cyrus; and so, having earned a special blessing as the reward for his impulsive faith, he immediately drew down upon himself a crushing rebuke for his obtuse and aggressive insistence that his Master’s vision of his own kingdom must conform to the disciple’s idee fixe:

‘Get thee behind me, Satan; thou art an offence unto me. For thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.’

Even when Peter’s error had been held up before his eyes by his Master’s terrible reproof, the lesson had so little effect that he failed again under the next test. When he was chosen out to be one of the three witnesses of the Transfiguration, he immediately took the vision of Moses and Elias standing at his Master’s side as a signal for the beginning of a Befreiungskrieg, and betrayed his prosaic misconception of what the vision meant by proposing to build on the spot the nucleus of a camp (‘three tabernacles’ or tents) of the kind that the Theudases and Judases of Galilee were wont to establish in the wilderness during the brief interval of grace before the Roman authorities received intelligence of their activities and sent out flying columns of troops to disperse them. At the sound of this jarring note the vision vanished in an echo of admonition to accept the Messiah’s own revelation of the Messiah’s path. Yet this second lesson was still not enough to open Peter’s eyes. Even at the climax of his Master’s career—when all that the Master himself had foretold was patently coming true—the incorrigible futurist drew his sword to fight in the garden of Gethsemane; and it may be that his ‘betrayal’ of his Master later in the same evening was the result of the confusion of mind of one who had lost his futuristic faith at last without as yet confidently grasping any alternative to it.

Even after this crowning experience of his life, when the Crucifixion and the Resurrection and the Ascension had taught him at last that Christ’s Kingdom was not of This World, Peter was still fain to believe that even in this transfigured kingdom the franchise must be restricted to the Jews, just as it would have been in the futurist’s Messianic Utopia—as though a society that embraced God in Heaven as its King could be bounded on God’s Earth by a frontier excluding from it all but one of the tribes of God’s human creatures and children. In one of the last scenes in which Peter is displayed to us in the Acts of the Apostles, we see him characteristically protesting against the clear command which accompanied the vision of the sheet let down from Heaven. Yet Peter does not give place to Paul as the protagonist in the story until the narrative has recorded his comprehension, at last, of a truth which Paul the Pharisee had apprehended in a trice through a single overwhelming spiritual experience. The long work of Peter’s enlightenment was completed when the vision on the roof was followed by the arrival of Cornelius’s messengers at the gate. And in his confession of faith at Cornelius’s house, and his defence of his action there before the Jewish-Christian community upon his return to Jerusalem, Peter preached the Kingdom of God in words that would have drawn no reproof from the Christ.

What are these two ways of life which produced these vast spiritual effects when they were respectively adopted in place of archaism by Cato and in place of futurism by Peter? Let us begin by taking note of the common differences between detachment and transfiguration on the one hand and archaism and futurism on the other, and then go on to the differences between detachment and transfiguration.

Transfiguration and detachment alike differ from both futurism and archaism in substituting a genuine change in spiritual clime, and not a mere transfer in the time-dimension, for the particular form of transference of the field of action from the macrocosm to the microcosm which we have found to be the criterion of the growth of a civilization. The kingdoms that are their respective goals are both of them ‘otherworldly’ in the sense that neither of them is an imaginary past or future state of mundane existence. This common ‘otherworldliness’, however, is their only point of resemblance; in every other respect they present a contrast to each other.

The way of life that we have called ‘detachment’ has been given a variety of names by various schools of adepts. From a disintegrating Hellenic World the Stoics withdrew into an ‘invulnerability’ and the Epicureans into an ‘imperturbability’ —as illustrated by the somewhat self-consciously Epicurean declaration of the poet Horace, when he tells us that ‘Fragments of a ruined world strike me unperturbed’ (impavidum). From a disintegrating Indie World the Buddhists withdrew into an ‘unruffledness’ (nirvāna). It is a way that leads out of This World; its goal is an asylum; and the fact that that asylum excludes This World is the feature that makes it attractive. The impulse that carries the philosophic traveller along is a push of aversion and not a pull of desire. He is shaking off from his feet the dust of the City of Destruction, but he has no vision of ‘yonder Shining Light’. ‘The worldling says: “O beloved City of Cecrops”; and shalt thou not say: “O beloved City of Zeus”?’ ¹ —but Marcus’s ‘City of Zeus’ is not the same as Augustine’s Civitas Dei which is ‘the city of the Living God’; and the journey is a withdrawal according to plan rather than a pilgrimage inspired by faith. For the philosopher a successful escape from This World is an end in itself, and it really does not matter what the philosopher does with himself when once he has crossed the threshold of his city of refuge. The Hellenic philosophers pictured the state of the liberated sage as one of blissful contemplation and the Buddha (if his doctrine is faithfully reflected in the scriptures of the H nayāna) frankly declares that, so long as all possibility of returning has been ruled out once for all, the nature of the alternative state in which the tathāgata has come to rest is a matter of no consequence.

This unknowable and neutral Nirvana or ‘City of Zeus’, which is the goal of detachment, is the very antithesis of the Kingdom of Heaven which is entered by way of the religious experience of transfiguration. While the philosophic ‘Other World’ is in essence a world that is exclusive of ours on Earth, the divine ‘Other World’ transcends the earthly life of man without ceasing to include it.

‘And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”

It will be seen that the Kingdom of God is as positive in its nature as the ‘City of Zeus’ is negative, and that, whereas the way of detachment is a sheer movement of withdrawal, the way of transfiguration is a movement of what we have already had occasion to call ‘withdrawal-and-return’.

We have now set out in brief six pairs of alternative ways of behaviour, feeling and life that present themselves to the souls of men whose lot is cast in disintegrating societies. Before we proceed to examine them, pair by pair, in greater detail, we may pause for a moment to take our bearings by observing the links between the history of the soul and the history of society.

Granting that every spiritual experience must be that of some individual human being, shall we find that certain experiences, among those which we have been reviewing, are peculiar to members of certain fractions of a disintegrating society ¹ We shall find that all four personal ways of behaviour and feeling—passive abandon and active self-control, passive sense of drift and active sense of sin—can be detected in members of the dominant minority and the proletariat alike. On the other hand, when we come to the social ways of behaviour and feeling, we shall have to distinguish, for our present purpose, between the passive and the active pair. The two passive social phenomena—the lapse into truancy and the surrender to a sense of promiscuity—are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of ‘proletarianization’. Conversely the two active social phenomena—the quest of martyrdom and the awakening to a sense of unity—are apt to appear first in the ranks of the dominant minority and to spread from there to the proletariat. Finally, when we consider our four alternative ways of life, we shall find, conversely, that the passive pair, archaism and detachment, are apt to be associated in the first instance with the dominant minority and the active pair, futurism and transfiguration, with the proletariat.

(2) ‘ABANDON’ AND SELF-CONTROL

The particular manifestations of abandon and self-control which are characteristic of societies in disintegration are perhaps rather difficult to identify, just because these two ways of personal behaviour are apt to be exhibited by human beings in every variety of social circumstance. Even in the life of primitive societies we can distinguish an orgiastic and an ascetic vein, and also the annual cyclic alternation of these moods, according to the season, in the tribe’s ceremonial corporate expression of its members’ emotions. But by abandon as an alternative to creativity in the lives of disintegrating civilizations we mean something more precise than this primitive flux of feeling. We mean a state of mind in which anti-nomianism is accepted—consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice—as a substitute for creation. Examples of abandon in this sense can be identified with least uncertainty if we try to take them in a single synoptic view side by side with examples of self-control, which is the alternative substitute for creativity.

In the Hellenic time of troubles, for instance, in the first generation after the breakdown, a pair of incarnations of abandon and self-control are presented in Plato’s portraits of Alcibiades and Socrates in The Symposium and of Thrasymachus and Socrates in The Republic —Alcibiades, the slave of passion, standing for abandon in practice, and Thrasymachus, the advocate of ‘Might is right’, standing for the same mood in theory.

In the next chapter of the Hellenic story we find the exponents of each of these attempts at self-expression in lieu of creation seeking an authoritative sanction for their respective ways of behaviour by claiming that these are ways ‘of living according to nature’. This merit was claimed for abandon by those vulgar hedonists who took in vain, and brought into disrepute, the name of Epicurus, and who for this offence were chidden by the austere Epicurean poet Lucretius. On the other side we see the sanction of ‘naturalness’ claimed for the ascetic life by the cynics, of whom Diogenes in his tub is the exemplar, and in less crude fashion by the Stoics.

If we pass from the Hellenic to the Syriac World in its time of troubles, we shall find the same unreconciled opposition between abandon and self-control appearing in the contrast between the sedately sceptical theory of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the piously ascetic practice of the monastic community of the Essenes.

There is another group of civilizations—the Indie, the Babylo-nic, the Hittite and the Mayan—which seem, as they disintegrate, to be reverting to the ethos of primitive man in their apparent insensibility to the yawning breadth of the gulf between the abandoned sexualism of their religion and the exaggerated asceticism of their philosophy. In the Indie case there is a contradiction which at first sight looks insoluble between lingam-worship and yoga; and we are similarly shocked by the corresponding contrasts between the temple prostitution and the astral philosophy of a disintegrating Babylonic Society, between the human sacrifices and the penitential self-mortifications of the Mayas and between the orgiastic and the ascetic aspects of the Hittite worship of Cybele and Attis. Perhaps it was the common vein of sadistic extravagance which entered into their practice of abandon and of self-control alike that maintained, in the souls of the members of these four disintegrating civilizations, an emotional harmony between practices which seem to defy reconciliation when they are observed with the coldly analytic eye of an alien spectator.

Are these two conflicting ways of behaviour now re-performing their parts upon the broader stage of our Western Society in the modern chapter of its history? There is no lack of evidence of abandon; in the domain of theory it has found its prophet in Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his alluring invitation to ‘return to nature’, while, for the practice of abandon to-day, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. On the other hand we may search in vain for a counter-resurgence of asceticism, and may perhaps tentatively draw from this fact the cynical conclusion that, if our Western Civilization has indeed broken down, its disintegration cannot yet be very far advanced.

(3) TRUANCY AND MARTYRDOM

Truancy and martyrdom, in the unspecialized sense of both terms, are simply products of the vice of cowardice and the virtue of courage and as such are common phenomena of human behaviour in all ages and all types of society. The truancy and martyrdom, however, which we are now considering are special forms inspired by a particular attitude to life. The truancy of mere cowardice and the martyrdom of pure courage are not our concern. The truant soul of which we are in search is a soul whose truancy is inspired by a genuine feeling that the cause which it serves is not really worth the service that this cause demands of it. Similarly the martyr soul of which we are in search is the soul which goes to martyrdom not merely or mainly to render practical service to the furtherance of that cause but rather to satisfy a craving of the soul itself for deliverance from

the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world. ¹

Such a martyr, noble as he may be, is psychologically more than half a suicide. He is, in modern jargon, an escapist, as. is also of course our truant an escapist of a more ignoble variety. The Roman archaist converts to the philosophy of detachment were martyrs in this sense. By their supreme act they felt that they did not so much deprive themselves of life as free themselves from it; and, if one were to seek an example of truancy from the same class in the same period of history, one could cite Mark Antony, a truant from Rome and Roman ideals of gravitas in the arms of a semi-orientalized Cleopatra.

Two centuries later, in the gathering gloom of the outgoing decades of the second century of the Christian Era, we behold in the person of Marcus Aurelius a prince whose title to the martyr’s crown is not invalidated, but is on the contrary confirmed, by Death’s refusal to cut this martyr’s ordeal short by any coup de grdce; while in Marcus’s son and successor Commodus we are presented with the spectacle of an imperial truant who makes scarcely an effort to shoulder the burden of his heritage before he turns tail and is off, in headlong moral flight, along the sordid cinder track of proletarianization. Born to be an emperor, he prefers to amuse himself as an amateur gladiator.

The Christian Church was the principal target for the parting strokes of a Hellenic dominant minority which turned savage in its death-agony; for this dying pagan ruling class refused to face the heart-rending truth that it was itself the author of its own downfall and destruction. Even in articulo mortis it tried to salvage a last shred of self-respect by persuading itself that it was perishing as the victim of a dastardly assault on the part of the proletariat; and, since the external proletariat was now marshalled in formidable war-bands which were able to defy or elude the Imperial Government’s attempts at retaliation for their galling raids, the brunt fell upon the Christian Church, which was the master institution of the internal proletariat. Under the test of this ordeal the sheep of the Christian fold were divided unequivocally from the goats by the challenge of being called upon to make the tremendous choice between renouncing their faith or sacrificing their lives. The renegades were legion—indeed their numbers were so great that the problem of how to deal with them became the burning question of ecclesiastical politics as soon as the persecutions came to an end—but the tiny band of martyrs was spiritually potent out of all proportion to its numerical strength. Thanks to the prowess of these heroes who at the critical moment stepped forward from the Christian ranks to bear their witness at the cost of life itself, the Church emerged victorious; and that small but noble army of men and women have received no more than their due meed of fame in being remembered in history as ‘the martyrs’ par excellence, in antithesis to ‘the traitors’ (traditores) who delivered up the holy scriptures or the sacred vessels of the Church at the demand of the pagan Imperial authorities.

It may be objected that here is mere cowardice on the one side and pure courage on the other, and that this illustration is of no use for our present purpose. So far as the truants are concerned we have no material for replying to this charge; their motives are buried in ignominious oblivion; but for the motives of the martyrs there is abundant evidence to prove that something more—or less, if the reader prefers—than sheer disinterested courage was the mainspring of their inspiration. Men and women enthusiastically sought martyrdom as a sacrament, a ‘second baptism’, a means of forgiveness of sins and a secure passage to Heaven. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the notable Christian martyrs of the second century, speaks of himself as ‘the wheat of God’ and longs for the day when he shall be ‘ground by the teeth of wild beasts into the pure bread of Christ’.

In our own modern Western World can we discern any traces of these two antithetical ways of social behaviour? Assuredly we can put our finger on a portentous modern Western act of truancy in ‘la trahison des clercs’ ; and the roots of this treason spring from a depth to which the gifted Frenchman who coined the phrase might perhaps hesitate to trace them ¹ —though he has virtually confessed how deep-rooted the mischief is by choosing the medieval ecclesiastical name to denote and indict our modern ‘intellectuals’. Their treason did not begin with the pair of treasonable acts which they have perpetrated within living memory—a cynical loss of faith in the recently established principles, and a nerveless surrender of the recently won gains, of Liberalism. The truancy which has given this latest exhibition of itself was set on foot, centuries earlier, when the ‘clerks’ repudiated their clerical origin by trying to shift the rising edifice of our Western Christian Civilization from a religious to a secular basis. This was the original act of vfipis which is being requited in our day by an a-nj that has been accumulating for centuries at compound interest.

If we cast our eyes some four hundred years back and then focus them on the patch of Western Christendom which is known as England, we shall there see in Thomas Wolsey—the precociously modern-minded clerk who pleaded guilty, in the hour of his political disgrace, of having served his God less well than he had served his king—a truant whose truancy was shown up in all its blackness, less than five years after its ignominious end, by the martyrdom of his contemporaries, Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More.

(4) THE SENSE OF DRIFT AND THE SENSE OF SIN

The sense of drift, which is the passive way of feeling the loss of the elan of growth, is one of the most painful of the tribulations that afflict the souls of men and women who are called upon to live their lives in an age of social disintegration; and this pain is perhaps a punishment for the sin of idolatry committed through worshipping the creature instead of the Creator; for in this sin we have already found one of the causes of those breakdowns from which the disintegrations of civilizations follow.

Chance and Necessity are the alternative shapes of the Power which appears to rule the world in the eyes of those afflicted with a sense of drift; and, though at first sight the two notions may appear to contradict one another, they prove, when probed, to be merely different facets of one identical illusion.

The notion of Chance is expressed in the literature of the Egyp-tiac time of troubles through the simile of the giddy spinning of a potter’s wheel, and in the literature of the Hellenic time of troubles through the simile of a ship that has been abandoned, without a steersman, to the mercy of the winds and waves. ¹ The anthropomorphism of the Greeks converted Chance into a Goddess, ‘Our Lady Automatism’. Timoleon, the liberator of Syracuse, built her a chapel in which he offered sacrifices, and Horace dedicated an Ode to her. ²

When we look into our own hearts we find this Hellenic goddess similarly enthroned, as is witnessed by the profession of faith to be found in the Preface of H. A. L. Fisher’s History of Europe:

‘One intellectual excitement has . . . been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in History a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave; only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.’

This modern Western belief in the omnipotence of Chance gave birth in the nineteenth century, when things still seemed to be going well with Western man, to the policy of laissez-faire: a philosophy of practical life which was founded on a faith in the miraculous enlightenment of self-interest. In the light of a transitorily gratifying experience our nineteenth-century grandfathers claimed to ‘know that all things work together for good for them that love’ the Goddess Chance. And even in the twentieth century, when the goddess had begun to show her teeth, she was still the oracle of British foreign policy. The view that was prevalent among the people, as well as in the Cabinet, of the United Kingdom during the fateful years which opened in the autumn of 1931 was accurately expressed in the following sentence from a leading article in a great English Liberal newspaper:

‘A few years of peace are always a few years gained, and a war that is due in a few years’ time may never come off at all.’ ¹

The doctrine of laissez-faire cannot be claimed as an original Western contribution to the stock of human wisdom, for it was current coin in the Sinic World some two thousand years ago. This Sinic worship of Chance, however, differs from ours in deriving from a less sordid origin. The eighteenth-century French bourgeois came to believe in laissez-faire laissez-passer because he had noticed and envied and analysed the prosperity of his English ‘opposite number’ and had come to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie might prosper in France as well as in England if only King Louis could be induced to follow the example of King George in allowing the bourgeois to manufacture what he chose, without restrictions, and to send his goods to any market, free of tolls. On the other hand the line of least resistance along which a weary Sinic World allowed itself to drift during the earlier decades of the second century before Christ was conceived of, not as a pack-horse’s beaten track from a humming mill to a busy market, but as a way which was the truth and the life: the tao which ‘meant “the way the Universe works”—and ultimately something very like God, in the more abstract and philosophical sense of that term’. ²

Great Tao is like a boat that drifts; It can go this way; it can go that. ¹

But the Goddess of laissez-faire has another face, under which she is worshipped, not as Chance but as Necessity. The two notions of Necessity and Chance are simply different ways of looking at the same thing. For example, the disorderly motion of the rudderless ship, which stands in Plato’s eyes for the chaos of a Universe abandoned by God, can be recognized, by a mind endowed with the necessary knowledge of dynamics and physics, as a perfect illustration of the orderly behaviour of waves and currents in the media of wind and water. When the human soul adrift apprehends that the force baffling it is not simply a negation of the soul’s own will but is a thing in itself, then the countenance of the invisible goddess changes from the subjective or negative aspect in which she is known as Chance to the objective or positive aspect in which she is known as Necessity—but this without any corresponding change in the essential nature of the goddess or in the predicament of her victims.

The dogma of the omnipotence of Necessity on the physical plane of existence seems to have been introduced into Hellenic thought by Democritus—a philosopher whose long life-span (circa 460-360 B.C.) gave him time to grow to manhood before becoming a spectator of the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization, and thereafter to watch the process of disintegration for three-score years and ten; but he seems to have ignored the problems involved in an extension of the empire of determinism from the physical to the moral sphere. Physical determinism was also the basis of the astral philosophy of the dominant minority of the Babylonic World, and the Chaldaeans did not shrink from extending the same principle to the lives and fortunes of human beings. It is quite possible that it was from Babylonic sources rather than from Democritus that Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, derived the thorough-going fatalism with which he infected his School, and which is everywhere apparent in the ‘Meditations’ of the most famous of Zeno’s disciples, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The modern Western World seems to have broken virgin soil in extending the empire of Necessity into the economic field— which is, indeed, a sphere of social life that has been overlooked or ignored by almost all the minds that have directed the thoughts of other societies. The classic exposition of economic determinism is, of course, the philosophy—or religion—of Karl Marx; but in the Western World of to-day the number of souls who testify by their acts to a conscious or unconscious conviction of economic determinism is vastly greater than the number of professing Marxians, and would be found to include a phalanx of arch-capitalists.

The sovereignty of Necessity in the psychical sphere has also been proclaimed by one faction, at least, in our fledgeling school of modern Western psychologists, who have been tempted to deny the existence of the soul—in the sense of a personality or self-determining whole—in the excitement of an apparent initial success in an endeavour to analyse the soul’s processes of psychic behaviour. And, young though the science of psycho-analysis is, the worship of Necessity in the medium of soul-stuff can claim as its convert, in the hour of his brief triumph, the most notorious politician of the age.

‘I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist, the way which Providence has sent me.’

These words are quoted from a speech delivered by Adolf Hitler at Munich on the 14th March, 1936; and they sent a cold shudder through the frames of millions of European men and women beyond the frontiers of the Third Reich (and perhaps inside them too) whose nerves had not yet had time to recover from the preceding shock of the German military re-occupation of the Rhineland seven days before.

There is another version of the creed of psychical determinism which breaks the bounds of the narrow time-span of a single human life on Earth and carries the chain of cause and effect both backwards and forwards in time—backwards to the first appearance of man on this terrestrial stage and forwards to his final exit from it. The doctrine appears in two variants which seem to have arisen quite independently of one another. One variant is the Christian conception of Original Sin; the other is the Indie conception of Karma which has entered into both the philosophy of Buddhism and the religion of Hinduism. These two renderings of one doctrine agree in the essential point of making the spiritual chain of cause and effect run on continuously from one earthly life to another. In both the Christian and the Indie view the character and conduct of a human being alive to-day are held to have been causally conditioned by actions performed in other lives—or in one other life—lived in the past. To this extent the Christian and the Indie conceptions coincide, but beyond this point they diverge from one another.

The Christian doctrine of Original Sin affirms that a particular personal sin of the progenitor of the human race has entailed upon all his offspring a heritage of spiritual infirmity which they would have been spared if Adam had not fallen from grace; and that every descendant of Adam is doomed to inherit this Adamic blemish— in spite of the psychic insulation and individuality of each single soul, which is an essential tenet of the Christian religion. According to this doctrine, the capacity for transmitting an acquired spiritual characteristic to his physical descendants was possessed by Adam but by him alone of the race of which he is the progenitor.

This last feature of the doctrine of Original Sin is not found in the conception of Karma. According to this Indie doctrine, the spiritual characteristics that any individual acquires through his own acts are all transmitted, from first to last, for good or for evil, without exception; and the bearer of this cumulative spiritual heritage is not a genealogical tree representing a procession of successive separate personalities but is a spiritual continuum which appears and reappears in the world of sense in a series of reincarnations. According to the Buddhist philosophy, the continuity of Karma is the cause of this ‘transmigration of souls’ or metempsychosis which is one of the axioms of Buddhist thought.

Finally we have to take notice of the theistic form of determinism—a form which is perhaps the most bizarre and perverse of all, since in this theistic determinism an idol is worshipped in the likeness of the True God. The addicts of this covert idolatry still theoretically ascribe to the object of their worship all the attributes of a divine personality, while at the same time they insist upon the single attribute of transcendence with an emphasis so disproportionate that their God becomes transformed into a being as unaccountable, implacable and impersonal as Saeva Necessitas herself. The ‘higher religions’ that have emanated from the internal proletariat of the Syriac Society are the spiritual fields in which this idolatrous perversion of a transcendental theism seems most apt to break out. The two classic examples of it are the Islamic notion of Qismet and the doctrine of predestination as formulated by Calvin, the founder and organizer of the militant Protestantism of Geneva.

The mention of Calvinism raises a problem which has proved a puzzle to many minds and for which we must try to find some solution. We have suggested that a deterministic creed is an expression of that sense of drift which is one of the psychological symptoms of social disintegration, but it is an undeniable fact that many people who have been avowed determinists have actually been distinguished, both individually and collectively, by an uncommon energy, activity and purposefulness, as well as by an uncommon assurance.

‘The central paradox of religious ethics—that only those are nerved with the courage to turn the world upside down who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a power of which they are the humble instruments—finds in [Calvinism] a special exemplification.’ ¹

Calvinism, however, is only one of several notorious examples of a fatalistic creed which is apparently in contradiction with the conduct of its votaries. The temper displayed by the Calvinists (Genevan, Huguenot, Dutch, Scottish, English and American) has likewise been displayed by other theistic predestinarians: for example, by the Jewish Zealots, the Primitive Muslim Arabs dnd by other Muslims of other ages and races—for instance, by the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire and the Mahdists of the Sudan. And in the nineteenth-century Western Liberal votaries of Progress and the twentieth-century Russian Communist Marxians we see two predestinarian sects of an atheistic turn of mind whose ethos is manifestly akin to that of their theistic fellow-worshippers of the idol of Necessity. The parallel between the Communists and the Calvinists has been drawn by the brilliant pen of the English historian whom we have quoted above:

‘It is not wholly fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth, or that the doctrine of Predestination satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the Universe are on the side of the Elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of Historical Materialism. He . . . taught them to feel that they were a Chosen People, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to realize it.’ ²

The historical link between sixteenth-century Calvinism and twentieth-century Communism is nineteenth-century Liberalism.

‘Determinism was much in vogue by this time: but why should determinism be a depressing creed? The law which we cannot escape is the blessed Law of Progress—”that kind of improvement that can be measured by statistics”. We had only to thank our stars for placing us in such an environment, and to carry out energetically the course of development which Nature has prescribed for us, and to resist which would be at once impious and futile. Thus the superstition of Progress was firmly established. To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The Superstition of Progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies—those of Hegel, of Comte and of Darwin. The strange thing is that none of these philosophies is really favourable to the belief which it was supposed to support.’ ¹

Are we then to infer that the acceptance of a deterministic philosophy is in itself a spur to confident and successful action? We are not; for the addicts of predestinarian creeds on whom their faith has had this fortifying and stimulating effect seem all of them to have made the bold assumption that their own will was coincident with the will of God or with the law of Nature or with the decrees of Necessity, and was therefore bound, a priori, to prevail. The Calvinist’s Jehovah is a God who vindicates His Elect; the Marxian’s Historical Necessity is an impersonal force that brings about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Such an assumption gives a confidence in victory which, as the history of war teaches, is one of the springs of moral and is therefore apt to justify itself by achieving the result which it has taken for granted in advance. Possunt quia posse videntur’ ² (they can because they believe they can) was the secret of the success of the ultimately victorious crew in the Virgilian boat-race. In short, Necessity can operate as a potent ally when she is assumed to be one; but the assumption is, of course, an act of vppis —and a supreme one— which invites its eventual confutation by the inexorable logic of events. Confidence in victory at last proved Goliath’s bane when the long series of his successful combats was broken and terminated by his encounter with David. The Marxians have now lived on their assumption for nearly a hundred years, and the Calvinists for some four centuries, without having yet had the bubble pricked; but the Muslims, who committed themselves to the same proud but unproven belief some thirteen centuries ago and, in the strength of it, performed no less mighty deeds in their earlier history, have had time enough to fall on evil days; and the feebleness of their reaction to their latter-day tribulations indicates that Determinism is just as apt to sap moral in adversity as it is to stimulate it so long as the challenges encountered are within the range of an effective response. The disillusioned predestinarian who has been taught by harsh experience that his God is not, after all, on his side is condemned to arrive at the devastating conclusion that he and his fellow-homunculi are

But helpless pieces in the game He plays

Upon this chequer-board of nights and days,

Hither and thither moves and checks and slays,

And one by one back in the closet lays. ³

While the sense of drift is a passive feeling, it has its active counterpart and antithesis in the sense of sin, which is an alternative reaction to an identical consciousness of moral defeat. In essence and in spirit the sense of sin and the sense of drift present the sharpest contrast to one another; for, while the sense of drift has the effect of an opiate in instilling into the soul an insidious acquiescence in an evil which is assumed to reside in external circumstances beyond the victim’s control, the sense of sin has the effect of a stimulus because it tells the sinner that the evil is not external after all but is within him and is therefore subject to his will—if only he wills to carry out God’s purpose and to render himself accessible to God’s grace. There is here the whole difference between the Slough of Despond in which Christian for a time wallowed and the original impetus which started him running towards ‘yonder wicket gate’.

There is none the less a kind of ‘no-man’s-land’ in which the two moods overlap, as is implicitly assumed in the Indie conception of Karma; for although, on the one hand, Karma, like ‘Original Sin’, is conceived of as a spiritual heritage with which the soul is saddled without the option of repudiating it, the accumulation of the burden of Karma, as it stands at any given moment, may be increased or diminished by the deliberate and voluntary action of the individual in whom the soul at any given moment is embodied. The same passage to a conquerable Sin from an unconquerable Fate can be made along the Christian way of life; for the Christian soul is offered the possibility of purifying itself from the taint of Original Sin, which is its heritage from Adam, by seeking and finding God’s grace, which is won solely as a Divine response to human effort.

An awakening to the sense of sin can be detected in the development of the Egyptiac conception of the life after death in the course of the Egyptiac time of troubles, but the classical case is the spiritual experience of the Prophets of Israel and Judah in the Syriac time of troubles. When these Prophets were discovering their truths and delivering their message, the society out of whose bosom they had arisen, and to whose members they were addressing themselves, was lying in helpless misery in the grip of the Assyrian tiger. For the souls whose body social was in this fearful plight it was a heroic spiritual feat to reject the obvious explanation of their misery as the work of an irresistible external material force and to divine that, in spite of superficial appearances, it was their own sin which was the cause of their tribulations and that it therefore lay in their own hands to win their true release.

This saving truth, which had been discovered by the Syriac Society in the ordeal of its own breakdown and disintegration, was inherited from the Prophets of Israel and propagated in Christian guise by the Syriac wing of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic World. Without this instruction from an alien source in a principle which had already been apprehended by Syriac souls with an altogether un-Hellenic outlook, the Hellenic Society might never have succeeded in learning a lesson so much at variance with its own ethos. At the same time the Hellenes might have found it still more difficult than they did find it to take this Syriac discovery to heart if they had not, of their own motion, been moving in the same direction themselves.

This native awakening to a sense of sin can be traced in the spiritual history of Hellenism many centuries before a Hellenic trickle mingled with a Syriac stream in the river of Christianity.

If we have been right in our interpretation of the origin, nature and intention of Orphism, there is evidence that, even before the Hellenic Civilization broke down, at least a few Hellenic souls had become so painfully conscious of a spiritual void in their native cultural heritage that they had resorted to the tour de force of artificially inventing the ‘higher religion’ with which the apparented Minoan Civilization had failed to endow them. It is at any rate certain that, in the very first generation after the breakdown of 431 B.C., the apparatus of Orphism was being used— and abused—for the purpose of providing satisfaction for souls that were already convicted of sin and were groping, however blindly, for release from it. For this we have the testimony of a passage of Plato which might almost have flowed from the pen of Luther.

‘There are the quacks and diviners who peddle their wares to the rich and make them believe that these cheapjacks possess powers, procured from the Gods by sacrifices and incantations, for healing with diversions and festivities any sin that has been committed either by oneself or by one’s forebears.... They follow these books [of Musaeus and Orpheus] in their hocus-pocus; and they persuade even governments, as well as private people, that a release and purification from sin can be obtained by means of sacrifices and agreeable child’s-play. They further maintain that these “rites” (as they call them in this connexion) are as efficacious for the dead as they are for the living. “Rites” liberate us from the torments of the world beyond the grave, while a dreadful fate awaits us if we neglect here and now to make sacrifices.’ ¹

This first glimpse of a native sense of sin in the souls of the Hellenic dominant minority looks as unpromising as it is repulsive. Yet four centuries later we find a native Hellenic sense of sin which has been purified out of all recognition in the fires of suffering; for there is an almost Christian note in the voice of the Hellenic dominant minority of the Augustan Age as it makes itself heard in the poetry of Virgil. The well-known passage at the end of the First Georgic is a prayer for delivery from a torturing sense of drift, and it takes the form of a confession of sin. Moreover, though the sin from which the poet implores Heaven for release is nominally an ‘original sin’ inherited from a legendary Trojan ancestor, the whole force of the passage impels the reader to realize that this is allegory and that the sin which the Romans were really expiating in Virgil’s own day was the sin which they themselves had been committing during the two-centuries-long rake’s progress upon which they had entered when they plunged into the Hannibalic War.

Within a century of the year when Virgil’s poem was written the spirit that breathes through these passages had become predominant in a stratum of the Hellenic Society which had hardly yet come within range of the radiation of Christianity. In retrospect it is clear that the generations of Seneca and Plutarch and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were unwittingly preparing their hearts for an approaching enlightenment from a proletarian source out of which these sophisticated Hellenic intellectuals would never have augured the coming of any good thing. Both the unwitting preparation of the heart and—in the particular case chosen—the sophisticated rejection of the offer of proletarian enlightenment are portrayed with remarkable insight and felicity in Robert Browning’s character-study Cleon. Cleon, an imaginary philosopher of the Hellenic dominant minority in the first century of the Christian Era, has been brought by his study of history to a state of mind which he describes as ‘profound discouragement’. None the less, when it is suggested to him that he should refer to ‘one Paulus’ the problems he had admitted that he could not solve himself, his amour-propre is merely irritated.

Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew

As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,

Hath knowledge of a secret hid from us. ¹

The Hellenic and Syriac societies are assuredly not the only civilizations in which there has been an awakening to the sense of sin through the shock of seeing an ancient social structure collapse in ruins. Without attempting to compile a list of such societies, we may ask, in conclusion, whether our own society should be added to it.

The sense of sin is, no doubt, a feeling with which our modern Western homunculus is quite familiar. A familiarity with it is indeed almost forced upon him; for the sense of sin is a cardinal feature of the ‘higher religion* which we have inherited. In this case, however, familiarity seems to have latterly been breeding— not so much contempt as positive aversion; and the contrast between this temper of the modern Western World and the contrary temper of the Hellenic World in the sixth century B.C. shows up a vein of perversity in human nature. The Hellenic Society, starting life with the jejune and unsatisfying religious heritage of a barbarian pantheon, seems to have become conscious of its spiritual poverty and exerted itself to fill the void by inventing, in Orphism, a ‘higher religion’ of the kind that some other civilizations have inherited from their predecessors; and the character of the Orphic ritual and doctrine makes it clear that the sense of sin was the pent-up religious feeling for which the Hellenes of the sixth century were eager, above all, to find a normal outlet. In contrast to the Hellenic Society our Western Society is one of those more generously endowed civilizations which have grown up under the aegis of a ‘higher religion’ and within the chrysalis of a universal church; and it is perhaps just because Western man has always been able to take his Christian birthright for granted that he has so often depreciated it and come near to repudiating it. Indeed the cult of Hellenism, which has been so potent, and in many ways so fruitful, an ingredient in our Western secular culture since the Italian Renaissance, has been partly fostered and kept alive by a conventional conception of Hellenism as a way of life which gloriously combines with all our modern Western virtues and attainments an innate and effortless freedom from that sense of sin which Western man is now industriously purging out of his Christian spiritual heritage. It is no accident that the more up-to-date varieties of Protestantism, while retaining the concept of Heaven, have quietly discarded the concept of Hell and have surrendered the concept of the Devil to our satirists and comedians.

To-day the cult of Hellenism is being pushed into a corner by the cult of physical science, but the prospects for a recovery of the sense of sin have not been improved thereby. Our social reformers and philanthropists are very ready to regard the sins of the poor as misfortunes due to external circumstances—’What can you expect from the man, seeing that he was born in a slum?’ And our psychoanalysts are equally ready to regard the sins of their patients as misfortunes due to internal circumstances, complexes and neuroses: in fact, to explain sin, and explain it away, as disease. In this line of thought they were anticipated by the philosophers of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, where, as the reader may remember, poor Mr. Nosnibor had to send for the family ‘straightener’ (sc. doctor) because he was suffering from an attack of embezzlement.

Will modern Western man repent of, and recoil from, his vfipis before it finds its nemesis in arrj? The answer cannot yet be forecast, but we may anxiously scan the landscape of our contemporary spiritual life for any symptoms that may give us ground for hope that we are regaining the use of a spiritual faculty which we have been doing our utmost to sterilize.

(5) THE SENSE OF PROMISCUITY

(a) VULGARITY AND BARBARISM IN MANNERS

A sense of promiscuity is a passive substitute for that sense of style which develops pari passu with the growth of a civilization. This state of mind takes practical effect in an act of self-surrender to the melting-pot; and in the process of social disintegration an identical mood manifests itself in every province of social life: in religion and literature and language and art, as well as in the wider and vaguer sphere of ‘manners and customs’. It will be convenient to begin operations in this latter field.

In our search for evidence on this point we shall perhaps be inclined to turn our eyes with the greatest expectancy towards the internal proletariat, for we have already observed that the common and characteristic affliction of internal proletariats is the torture of being torn up by the roots; and this terrible experience of social deracination might be expected, above all other experiences, to produce a sense of promiscuity in the souls of those compelled to undergo it. This a priori expectation is not, however, borne out by the facts; for, more often than not, the ordeal to which an internal proletariat is subjected seems to strike that optimum degree of severity at which it acts as a stimulus, and we see the uprooted, expatriated and enslaved people of whom an internal proletariat is composed not only keeping a firm hold on the remnants of their social heritage but actually imparting it to the dominant minority who, a priori, might have been expected to impose their own culture pattern upon the mob of waifs and strays whom they have caught in their net and forced under their yoke.

It is still more surprising to see—as, again, we do see—the dominant minority showing itself similarly receptive to the cultural influence of the external proletariat, considering that these truculent war-bands are insulated from the dominant minority by a military frontier and that their barbarian social heritage might have been expected to be lacking in both the charm and the prestige that manifestly still cling even to the tatters of those mellow civilizations to which the internal proletariat is heir in the persons of some, at least, of its involuntary recruits.

Nevertheless we do find, as a matter of fact, that, of the three fractions into which a disintegrating society is apt to split, it is the dominant minority that succumbs most readily to the sense of promiscuity, and the ultimate result of this proletarianization of the dominant minority is a disappearance of that schism in the body social which is the index and penalty of social breakdown. The dominant minority in the end atones for its sins by closing a breach that has been its own handiwork and merging itself in its own proletariats.

Before attempting to follow the course of this process of proletarianization along its two parallel lines—vulgarization by contact with the internal proletariat and barbarization by contact with the external proletariat—it may be convenient to glance at some of the evidence for the receptivity of empire-builders, since this predisposition may partly explain the sequel.

The universal states of which these empire-builders are the architects are, for the most part, the product of military conquest and we may therefore look for examples of receptivity in the sphere of military technique. The Romans, for example, according to Polybius, discarded their native cavalry equipment and adopted that of the Greeks whom they were in process of conquering. The Theban founders of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt borrowed the horse-and-chariot as a weapon of war from their defeated antagonists, the once Nomad Hyksos. The victorious ‘Osmanlis borrowed the Western invention of fire-arms, and, when the tide turned in this particular struggle, the Western World borrowed from the ‘Osmanlis their immensely potent weapon of a disciplined, drilled and uniformed professional infantry.

But such borrowings are not confined to the military art. Herodotus notes that the Persians, while proclaiming themselves superior to all their neighbours, borrowed their civilian dress from the Medes and a number of outlandish indulgences, including unnatural vice, from the Greeks; and ‘the Old Oligarch’, in the course of his pungent criticisms of fifth-century Athens, remarks that his fellow-countrymen had been exposed, through their command of the sea, to a more extensive debasement by foreign customs than was to be seen in the cities of less enterprising Greek communities. As for ourselves, our tobacco-smoking commemorates our extermination of the red-skinned aborigines of North America, our coffee-drinking and tea-drinking and polo-playing and pyjama-wearing and Turkish baths commemorate the enthronement of the Frankish man-of-business in the seat of the Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rum and of the Mughal Qaysar-i-Hind, and our jazzing commemorates the enslavement of the African Negro and his transportation across the Atlantic to labour on American soil in plantations which had taken the place of the hunting-grounds of the vanished Red Indians.

After this prefatory recital of some of the more notorious evidence for the receptivity of the dominant minority in a disintegrating society, we may now proceed to our survey, first of the vulgarization of the dominant minority through its pacific intercourse with an internal proletariat which lies physically at its mercy, and then of its barbarization through its warlike intercourse with an external proletariat which eludes its yoke.

While the intercourse of the dominant minority with the internal proletariat is pacific in the sense that the proletarians have already been conquered, it often happens that the first contact between the two parties as rulers and subjects takes the form of an introduction of proletarian recruits into the empire-builders’ permanent garrisons and standing armies. The history of the standing army of the Roman Empire, for example, is the story of a progressive dilution which began almost on the morrow of the Roman army’s transformation from an ad hoc and amateur conscript force to a permanent and professional volunteer force by the act of Augustus. In the course of a few centuries an army which originally had been drawn almost entirely from the dominant minority came to be drawn almost entirely from the internal proletariat and, in the final phase, very largely from the external proletariat as well. The history of the Roman army is reproduced, with differences of detail, in that of the army of the Far Eastern universal state as reconstructed by Manchu empire-builders in the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, and in the history of the Arab standing army of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid Caliphates.

If we try to estimate the importance of the part that has been played by comradeship-in-arms in the breaking-down of the barrier between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat, we shall find, as we might expect, that this factor has been of greatest account in those cases where the dominant minority has been represented by empire-builders who have been not merely frontiersmen but men from the wrong side of the frontier—empire-builders, that is, of barbarian origin. For the barbarian conqueror is likely to be even more receptive than the marchman to amenities of life which he finds in use among the peoples he has subjected. Such, at any rate, was the sequel to the comrade-ship-in-arms between the Manchus and their Manchurian Chinese subjects. The Manchus became thoroughly assimilated to the Chinese, and the same tendency to abandon de jure segregation in favour of de facto symbiosis can be traced in the history of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of South-Western Asia, who were unconsciously restoring a Syriac universal state which had first taken form in the prematurely overthrown empire of the Achaemenidae.

When we turn to the histories of dominant minorities which have arisen—as dominant minorities normally do arise—from within the disintegrating society’s pale, we shall not be able to leave the military factor out of account, but we shall find that here the comradeship-in-arms is apt to be replaced by a partnership in business. ‘The Old Oligarch’ observed that in thalassocratic Athens the slaves of alien origin had come to be undistin-guishable in the streets from the lower class of citizens. In the latter days of the Roman Republic the management of the Roman aristocrats’ households, with their huge personnel and elaborate organization, had already become the perquisite of the ablest of the freedmen of the nominal master; and, when Caesar’s household actually went into partnership with the Senate and the People in the management of the Roman universal state, Caesar’s freedmen became cabinet ministers. The imperial freedmen of the early Roman Empire enjoyed a plenitude of power comparable to that of those members of the Ottoman Sultan’s slave-household who attained to the equally powerful—and equally precarious— office of Grand Vizier.

In all cases of symbiosis between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat both parties are affected, and the effect on each of them is to set them in motion on a course which leads to an assimilation to the other class. On the superficial plane of ‘manners’ the internal proletariat moves towards enfranchisement and the dominant minority towards vulgarization. The two movements are complementary and both are taking place all the time; but, while it is the enfranchisement of the proletariat that is the more conspicuous in the earlier phases, in the later chapters it is the vulgarization of the dominant minority that forces itself on our attention. The classic example is the vulgarization, in ‘the Silver Age’, of the Roman governing class: a sordid tragedy which has been inimitably recorded—or caricatured—in a Latin literature which still preserved its genius in the satirical vein after it had lost its last breath of inspiration in every other genre. This Roman rake’s progress can be followed in a series of Hogar-thian pictures in each of which the central figure is not merely an aristocrat but an emperor: Caligula, Nero, Commodus and Caracalla.

Of the last named we read in Gibbon:

‘The demeanour of Caracalla was haughty and full of pride; but with the troops he forgot even the proper dignity of his rank, encouraged their insolent familiarity and, neglecting the essential duties of a general, affected to imitate the dress and manners of a common soldier.’

Caracalla’s way of going ‘proletarian’ was neither so sensational nor so pathological as that of Nero the music-hall artiste or that of Commodus the gladiator, but it is perhaps of greater significance as a sociological symptom. A Hellenic dominant minority which had reached the last stage in the repudiation of its social heritage was fitly represented by the figure of an emperor who took refuge in the proletarian freedom of the barrack-room from a freedom of the Academy and the Stoa which he found intolerable just because he knew it was his birthright. Indeed, by this date, on the eve of the next relapse of the Hellenic Society after the respite of the Augustan rally, the relative volumes and momenta and speeds of the two mutually contrary streams of influence that flowed respectively from the dominant minority and from the internal proletariat had changed, in the proletarian stream’s favour, to a degree at which the latter-day observer may find himself wondering whether, after all, he has not been watching the movement of a single current which now, at a certain moment, has simply reversed its direction.

If we now turn our eyes to the Far Eastern World we shall see the first chapter of our story of the proletarianization of the Roman governing class in the act of reproducing itself at the present day. It is illustrated in the following record from the pen of a living Western scholar who shows us the struggle for enfranchisement giving way to the drift towards proletarianization within the compass of the single generation that separates a Manchuized Chinese father from his proletarianized son:

‘It was . . . possible, in Manchuria, for a Chinese from China proper to become in his own lifetime an out-and-out “Manchu”. An instance of this phenomenon came within my own experience when I formed an acquaintance with a Chinese military officer and his old father. The father, born in Honan, had gone to Manchuria as a young man, had travelled over the most remote parts of the three provinces, and had finally settled down in Tsitsihar. One day I said to the young man: “Why is it that you, who were born in Tsitsihar, speak just like the generality of Manchurian Chinese, while your father, who was born in Honan, has not only the speech, but exactly the manner and even gestures, of the old-fashioned Manchus of Manchuria?” He laughed, and said: “When my father was a young man it was difficult for a min-jen [non-’banner’ Chinese, ‘a civilian, one of the people’] to get on in the world up in the northern regions. The Manchus dominated everything. . . . But when I was growing up it was no longer any use to be a ‘bannerman’, and therefore I became like all the other young men of my generation.” This is a story which illustrates the processes of the present as well as of the past; for the young Manchus of Manchuria are becoming rapidly indistinguishable from Manchuria-born Chinese.’ ¹

But in A.D. 1946 an Englishman had no need either to read Gibbon or to book a berth on the Trans-Siberian express in order to study the process of proletarianization; he could study it at home. In the cinema he would see people of all classes taking an equal pleasure in films designed to cater for the taste of the proletarian majority, while in the club he would find that the black ball did not exclude the Yellow Press. Indeed, if our latter-day Juvenal was a family man he could stay indoors and still find his copy. He had merely to open his ears (which was perhaps easier than to close them) to the jazz or ‘variety’ which his children were conjuring out of the wireless set. And then when, at the end of the holidays, he saw his boys off to their public school—an institution whose social exclusiveness was an abomination to democrats—let him not forget to ask them to point out to him ‘the bloods’ among their schoolfellows assembling on the platform. As, at this passing show, our quizzical paterfamilias discreetly took smart young Commodus’s measure, he would notice the rakish proletarian angle of the trilby hat and would observe that the apache scarf, with its convincing air of negligence, had really been carefully arranged to conceal the obligatory white collar. Here was proof positive that the proletarian style was a la mode. And, since a straw does really show which way the wind is blowing, the satirist’s trivialities may be grist for the more ponderous mill of the historian.

When we pass from the vulgarization of the dominant minority through their pacific intercourse with the internal proletariat to examine the parallel process of their barbarization through their warlike intercourse with the external proletariat beyond the pale, we find that the plot of both plays is the same in its general structure. In the second of the two the mise-en-scene is an artificial military frontier—the limes of a universal state—across which the dominant minority and the external proletariat are seen confronting each other, when the curtain rises, in a posture which, on both sides, is one of aloofness and hostility. As the play proceeds, the aloofness turns into an intimacy which does not, however, bring peace; and, as the warfare goes on, time tells progressively in the barbarian’s favour, until at last he succeeds in breaking through the limes and overrunning the domain which the dominant minority’s garrison has hitherto protected.

In the first act the barbarian enters the world of the dominant minority in the successive roles of hostage and mercenary, and in both capacities he figures as a more or less docile apprentice. In the second act he comes as a raider, unbidden and unwanted, who ultimately settles down as a colonist or a conqueror. Thus, between the first act and the second, the military ascendancy has passed into the barbarian’s hands, and this sensational transfer of the kingdom, the power and the glory from the dominant minority’s to the barbarian’s banners has a profound effect on the dominant minority’s outlook. It now seeks to retrieve its rapidly deteriorating military and political position by taking one leaf after another out of the barbarian’s book; and imitation is assuredly the sincerest form of flattery.

Having thus sketched out the plot of the play, we may now return to its opening and watch the barbarian make his first appearance on the stage as the dominant minority’s apprentice; see the dominant minority begin to ‘go native’; catch a glimpse of the two adversaries at the fleeting moment at which, in their rival masquerades in one another’s borrowed plumage, they assume the grotesque generic resemblance of the griffin to the chimaera; and finally watch the ci-devant dominant minority lose the last traces of its original form by sinking to meet the triumphant barbarian at a common level of unmitigated barbarism.

Our list of barbarian war-lords who have made their debut as hostages in the hands of a ‘civilized’ Power includes some famous names. Theodoric served his apprenticeship as a hostage at the Roman Court of Constantinople and Scanderbeg his at the Ottoman Court of Adrianople. Philip of Macedon learnt the arts of war and peace at the Thebes of Epaminondas, and the Moroccan chieftain ‘Abd al-Karlm, who annihilated a Spanish expeditionary force at Anwal in 1921 and, four years later, shook the French power in Morocco to its foundations, served an eleven months’ apprenticeship in a Spanish prison at Melilla.

The list of barbarians who have ‘come’ and ‘seen’ as mercenaries, before imposing themselves as conquerors, is a long one. The Teutonic and Arab barbarian conquerors of Roman provinces in the fifth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era were descendants of manv generations of Teutons and Arabs who had done their militaiy service in the Roman forces. The Turkish bodyguard of the ‘Abbasid Caliphs in the ninth century of the Christian Era prepared the way for the Turkish buccaneers who carved up the Caliphate into its eleventh-century successor-states. Other examples could be cited, and our list would be longer still if the historical records of the last agonies of civilizations were not so fragmentary as they are apt to be. But we may at least conjecture that the sea-roving barbarians who hovered round the fringes of the Minoan thalassocracy and sacked Cnossos circa 1400 B.C. had served their apprenticeship as the hirelings of Minos before they aspired to supplant him, and tradition tells that Vortigern, the British King of Kent, employed Saxon mercenaries before he was overthrown by those unverifiable marauders, Hengist and Horsa.

We can also espy several instances in which the barbarian mercenary has missed his ‘manifest destiny’. For example, the East Roman Empire might have fallen a prey to the Varangian Guard if it had not been ravished by the Normans and the Saljuqs, carved up by the French and the Venetians and finally swallowed whole by the ‘Osmanlis. And the Ottoman Empire, in its turn, would assuredly have been partitioned among the Bos-niak and Albanian mercenaries who were fast asserting their mastery over the provincial pashas and even over the Sublime Porte itself at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era if the Frankish man-of-business had not come treading on the heels of the Albanian man-at-arms to give the last chapter of Ottoman history an unexpected turn by flooding the Levant with Western political ideas as well as with Manchester goods. The Oscan mercenaries, again, who found a market for their services in the Greek city-states of Campania and Magna Graecia and Sicily made a practice of ejecting or exterminating their Greek employers whenever they saw an opportunity, and there is little doubt that they would have carried on this game until there was not a single Greek community left west of the Straits of Otranto if the Romans had not, at the critical moment, taken the Oscan homelands in the rear.

These examples may suggest to us a contemporary situation in which we cannot yet foresee whether mercenaries will turn marauders or whether, if they do, their enterprises will, like those of the Oscan and the Albanian, be nipped in the bud or, like those of the Teuton and the Turk, go on to fruition. A present-day Indian might well speculate on the future role, in India’s destinies, of those barbarians—entrenched in a warlike independence in their fastnesses beyond the limits of the Government of India’s administration—from among whom no less than one-seventh of the Indian regular army was recruited in 1930. Were the Gurkha mercenaries and the Pathan raiders of that day marked out to be remembered in history as the fathers and grandfathers of barbarian conquerors who were to carve out on the plains of Hindustan the successor-states of the British Rāj?

In this example we are unacquainted with the second act of the play. To watch the progress of the drama in this phase we must return to the story of the relations between the Hellenic universal state and the European barbarians beyond the northern limes of the Roman Empire. On this historic stage we can watch from beginning to end the parallel processes by which a dominant minority sinks into barbarism while the barbarians are making their fortune at its expense.

The play opens in a liberal atmosphere of enlightened self-interest.

‘The Empire was not an object of hatred to the barbarians. Indeed, they were often eager to be taken into its service, and many of their chiefs, like Alaric or Ataulphus [Atawulf], had no higher ambition than to be appointed to high military command. On the other hand there was a corresponding readiness on the Roman side to employ barbarian forces in war.’ ¹

It appears that, about the middle of the fourth century of the Christian Era, the Germans in the Roman service started the new practice of retaining their native names; and this change of etiquette, which seems to have been abrupt, points to a sudden access of self-confidence and self-assurance in the souls of the barbarian personnel which had previously been content to ‘go Roman’ without reservations. This new insistence on their cultural individuality did not evoke on the Romans’ part any counter-demonstration of anti-barbarian exclusiveness. So far from that, the barbarians in the Roman service began, at this very time, to be appointed to the consulship, which was the highest honour that the Emperor had to bestow.

While the barbarians were thus setting their feet on the topmost rungs of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were moving in the opposite direction. For example, the Emperor Gratian (A.D. 375-383) succumbed to a newfangled form of inverted snobbery, a mania, not for vulgarity, but for barbarism, which led him to assume barbarian styles of dress and devote himself to barbarian field-sports. A century later we find Romans actually enlisting in the war-bands of independent barbarian chieftains. For example, at Vouille in A.D. 507, when Visigoths and Franks were fighting for the possession of Gaul, one of the casualties on the Visigoths’ side was a grandson of Sidonius Apollinaris, who in his generation had still managed to live the life of a cultured classical man-of-letters. There is no evidence that at the opening of the sixth century of the Christian Era the descendants of the Roman provincials showed any less alacrity in following a Fiihrer on the war-path than was shown by the contemporary descendants of barbarians to whom for centuries past the war-game had been the breath of life. By this time the two parties had reached cultural parity in a common barbarism. We have already seen how, in the fourth century, the barbarian officers in Roman service began to retain their barbarian names. The following century saw, in Gaul, the earliest examples of an inverse move, on the part of true-born Romans, to assume German names, and before the end of the eighth century the practice had become universal. By Charlemagne’s time every inhabitant of Gaul, whatever his ancestry, was sporting a German name.

If we lay alongside this history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire the parallel story of the barbarization of the Sinic World, the outstanding dates of which fall, throughout, some two centuries earlier, we shall find a significant difference in regard to this last point. The founders of the barbarian successor-states of the Sinic universal state were meticulous in disguising their barbarian nakedness by the adoption of correctly formed Sinic names, and it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to see a connexion between this difference of practice on an apparently trivial point and the eventual resuscitation of the Sinic universal state in a much more effective form than the parallel evocation of a ‘ghost’ of the Roman Empire by Charlemagne.

Before closing our inquiry into the barbarization of dominant minorities, we may pause to ask ourselves whether any of the symptoms of this social phenomenon are discernible in our own modern Western World. On first thoughts we shall perhaps be inclined to think that our question has received a conclusive answer in the fact that our society has embraced the whole world in its tentacles and that there are no longer external proletariats of any considerable dimensions left to barbarize us. But we must recall the rather disconcerting fact that, in the heart of our Western Society’s ‘New World’ of North America, there is to-day a large and widespread population of English and Lowland Scottish origin, with a Protestant Western Christian social heritage, which has been unmistakably and profoundly barbarized by being marooned in the Appalachian backwoods after serving a preliminary term of exile on ‘the Celtic Fringe’ of Europe.

The barbarizing effect of the American frontier has been described by an American historian who is a master of the subject.

‘In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. . . . The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war-cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. . . . Little by little he transforms the wilderness; but the outcome is not the old Europe. . . . The fact is that here is a new product that is American.’ ¹

If this thesis is correct, then we are bound to declare that, in North America at any rate, a social pull of tremendous force has been exerted upon one section of our dominant minority by one section of its external proletariat. In the light of this American portent it would be rash to assume that the spiritual malady of barbarization is a portent which our modern Western dominant minority can afford altogether to ignore. It appears that even conquered and annihilated external proletariats can take their revenge.

(b) VULGARITY AND BARBARISM IN ART

If we pass from the general field of manners and customs to the special field of art, we shall find the sense of promiscuity betraying itself, here again, in the alternative forms of vulgarity and barbarism. In one or other of these forms the art of a disintegrating civilization is apt to pay for an abnormally wide and rapid diffusion by forfeiting that distinctiveness of style which is the sign-manual of fine quality.

Two classic examples of vulgarity are the fashions in which a disintegrating Minoan and a disintegrating Syriac Civilization successively radiated their aesthetic influence round the shores of the Mediterranean. The interregnum (circa 1425-1125 B.C.) which followed the overthrow of the Minoan thalassocracy is marked by the vulgar fashion labelled ‘Late Minoan III’ which outranges in its diffusion all the earlier and finer Minoan styles; and similarly the time of troubles (circa 925-525 B.C.) which followed the breakdown of the Syriac Civilization is marked in Phoenician art by an equally vulgar and equally widespread mechanical combination of motifs. In the history of Hellenic art a corresponding vulgarity found expression in the excessively rich decoration which came into vogue with the Corinthian order of architecture —an extravagance which is the very antithesis of the distinctive note of the Hellenic genius; and, when we look for outstanding examples of this fashion, which reached its climax under the Roman Empire, we shall find them, not at the heart of the Hellenic World, but in the remains of the temple of a non-Hellenic deity at Ba’lbak or in the sarcophagi that were manufactured by Hellenic monumental masons to harbour the mortal remains of Philhellene barbarian war-lords on the far-eastern rim of the Iranian Plateau.

If we turn from the archaeological to the literary record of the disintegration of the Hellenic Society, we find that the ‘highbrows’ of the first few generations after the breakdown of 431 B.C. bewailed the vulgarization of Hellenic music; and we have already noticed in another context the vulgarization of the Attic drama at the hands of Avov&ooo Texyircu (‘United Artists, Ltd.’). In the modern Western World we may observe that it was the floridly decadent and not the severely classical style of Hellenic art that inspired our Western Hellenizing fashions of baroque and rococo; and in the so-called ‘chocolate-box’ style of our Victorian commercial art we can discern an analogue of ‘Late Minoan III’ that bids fair to conquer the whole face of the planet in the service of a peculiarly Western technique of visually advertising the tradesman’s wares.

The fatuousness of the ‘chocolate-box’ style is so desolating that it has provoked our own generation into attempting desperate remedies. Our archaistic flight from vulgarity into pre-Raphaelite Byzantinism is discussed in a later chapter, but in this place we have to take note of the contemporary and alternative flight from vulgarity into barbarism. Self-respecting Western sculptors of to-day who have not found a congenial asylum in Byzantium have turned their eyes towards Benin; and it is not only in the glyptic branch of art that a Western World whose resources of creativeness have apparently run dry has been seeking fresh inspiration from the barbarians of West Africa. West African music and dancing, as well as West African sculpture, have been imported, via America, into the heart of Europe.

To the layman’s eye the flight to Benin and the flight to Byzantium seem equally unlikely to lead the latter-day Western artist to the recovery of his lost soul. And yet, even if he cannot save himself, he may conceivably be a means of salvation to others. Bergson observes that

‘A mediocre teacher, giving mechanical instruction in a science that has been created by men of genius, may awake in some one of his pupils the vocation which he has never felt in himself;

and if the ‘commercial art’ of a disintegrating Hellenic World performed the astonishing feat of evoking the supremely creative art of Mahayanian Buddhism through its encounter with the religious experience of another disintegrating world on Indie ground, we cannot pronounce a priori that the modern Western ‘chocolate-box’ style is incapable of working similar miracles as it is flaunted round the globe on the advertiser’s hoardings and sky-signs.

(c) LINGUE FRANCHE

In the field of language the sense of promiscuity reveals itself in the change from a local distinctiveness to a general confusion of tongues.

Though the institution of language exists for the purpose of serving as a means of communication between human beings, its social effect in the history of mankind hitherto has actually been, on the whole, to divide the human race and not to unite it; for languages have taken such a number of diverse forms that even those enjoying the widest currency have never yet been common to more than a fraction of mankind, and unintelligibility of speech is the hall-mark of the ‘foreigner’.

In disintegrating civilizations at an advanced stage of their decline we are apt to see languages—following the fortunes of the peoples that speak them as their mother-tongues—waging internecine wars with one another and conquering, when victorious, wide dominions at their discomfited rivals’ expense’; and, if there is any grain of historical fact in the legend of a confusion of tongues in the land of Shinar at the foot of an unfinished ziggurat in a recently built city of Babel, the story perhaps takes us to Babylon in an age in which the Sumeric universal state was breaking up; for in the catastrophic last chapter of Sumeric history the Sumerian language became a dead language after having played an historic role as the original linguistic vehicle of the Sumeric culture, while even the Akkadian language, which had recently attained an upstart parity with it, had now to contend with a host of external proletarian vernaculars brought into the derelict domain by barbarian war-bands. The legend of the confusion of tongues is true to life in fastening upon this state of mutual unintelligibility as being a sovereign impediment to concerted social action in face of a new and unprecedented social crisis; and this association of linguistic diversity with social paralysis can be illustrated by examples which stand out conspicuously in the full light of history.

In the Western World of our own generation this was one of the fatal weaknesses of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy which perished in the General War of 1914-18; and even in the inhumanly efficient slave-household of the Ottoman Padishah in its age of maturity, in A.D. 1651, we see the curse of Babel descending upon the Ich-oghlans within the precincts of the seraglio and reducing them to impotence at the critical moment of a palace revolution. In their excitement the boys forgot their artificially acquired ‘Osmanli idiom, and the astonished ears of the spectators were smitten with the sound of ‘a tumult . . . with different voices and languages—for some cried in Georgian, others Albanian, Bosnian, Mingrelian, Turkish and Italian’. ¹ The circumstances of this trivial incident in Ottoman history are, however, inverted in the momentous event of the Coming of the Holy Spirit as recorded in the second chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. In that scene the tongues which are spoken are foreign to the lips of the speakers: unlettered Galilaeans who have hitherto never spoken and seldom heard any other language than their native Aramaic. Their sudden outbreak into other tongues is represented as being a miraculous gift from God.

This enigmatic passage has been variously interpreted, but there will be no dispute about the point in it which here concerns us. It is clear that, in the view of the writer of the Acts, the gift of tongues was the first enhancement of their natural faculties which was needed by Apostles who had been charged with the tremendous task of converting all mankind to a newly revealed ‘higher religion’. Yet the society into which the Apostles were born was far less ill-supplied with lingue franche than our world is to-day. The Aramaic mother-tongue of the Galilaeans would carry any speaker of it northwards as far as the Amanus, eastwards as far as the Zagros, and westwards as far as the Nile, while the Greek in which The Acts themselves were written would carry the Christian missionary overseas as far as Rome and beyond.

If we now proceed to examine the causes and the consequences of the transformation of local mother-tongues into oecumenical lingue franche, we shall find that a language which wins this kind of victory over its rivals usually owes its success to the social advantage of having served, in an age of social disintegration, as the tool of some community that has been potent either in war or in commerce. We shall also find that languages, like human beings, are unable to win victories without paying a price; and the price a language pays for becoming a lingua franca is the sacrifice of its native subtleties; for it is only on the lips of those who have learnt it in infancy that any language is ever spoken with that perfection which is the dower of nature and the despair of art. This judgement can be verified by a survey of the evidence.

In the history of the disintegration of the Hellenic Society we see two languages one after the other—first Attic Greek and subsequently Latin—starting as the respective mother-tongues of two tiny districts—Attica and Latium—and then spreading outwards until, on the eve of the Christian Era, we find Attic Greek employed in a chancery on the bank of the Jhelum and Latin in camps on the banks of the Rhine. The expansion of the domain of Attic Greek began with the first establishment of an Athenian thalassocracy in the fifth century B.C., and was afterwards enormously extended as a result of Philip of Macedon’s adoption of the Attic dialect as the official language of his chancery. As for Latin, it followed the flag of the victorious Roman legions. If, however, after admiring the expansion of these languages, we study their contemporary development from the standpoint of the philologist and the literary connoisseur, we shall be equally impressed by their vulgarization. The exquisite parochial Attic of Sophocles and Plato degenerates into the vulgar Kourf of the Septuagint and Polybius and the New Testament, while the literary medium of Cicero and Virgil eventually becomes the ‘Dog Latin’ which did duty for all serious forms of international intercourse in the affiliated Western Christian Society until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Milton, for example, was the ‘Latin Secretary’ of Cromwell’s government. In the Hungarian Parliament, ‘Dog Latin’ continued to be the medium for the transaction of business until 1840, and its abandonment was one of the detonators of a fratricidal struggle of intermingled nationalities which burst out in 1848.

In the disintegration of the Babylonic and Syriac civilizations the ruins of the two simultaneously collapsing societies became intermingled, ever more indistinguishably, the thicker they came to be strewn over their common Trummerfeld. Across the broken surface of this promiscuous debris the Aramaic language spread itself with the luxuriance of a weed, though, unlike both Greek and Latin, Aramaic owed little or nothing to the patronage of successful conquerors. Yet the currency of the Aramaic language, remarkable in its day, seems short-lived and narrow-verged by comparison with that of the Aramaic Alphabet and script. One of the variants of this script reached India, where it was used by the Buddhist Emperor Acoka to convey his prakrit texts in two out of the fourteen inscriptions of his that are known to us. Another variant, the so-called Sogdian, gradually made its way north-eastwards from the Jaxartes to the Amur, and by A.D. 1599 it had provided an alphabet for the Manchus. A third variant of the Aramaic Alphabet became the vehicle of the Arabic language.

If we turn next to the abortive cosmos of city-states with its main focus in Northern Italy which arose in Western Christendom in the so-called ‘medieval’ age, we shall see the Tuscan dialect of Italian eclipsing its rivals as Attic eclipsed the rival dialects of Ancient Greek, and at the same time being propagated all round the shores of the Mediterranean by Venetian and Genoese traders and empire-builders; and this pan-Mediterranean currency of Tuscan Italian outlived the prosperity and even the independence of the Italian city-states. In the sixteenth century Italian was the service language of an Ottoman Navy that was driving the Italians out of Levantine waters; and in the nineteenth century, again, the same Italian was the service language of a Hapsburg Navy whose Imperial masters were successful, from 1814 to 1859, in thwarting Italian national aspirations. This Italian lingua franca of the Levant, with its Italian base almost buried under the load of its miscellaneous foreign accretions, is such an admirable example of the genus which it represents that its historic name has come to bear a generic meaning.

Latterly, however, this vulgarized Tuscan has been replaced, even in its congenial Levantine haunts, by a vulgarized French. The fortune of the French language has been made by the fact that, during the time of troubles of the broken-down cosmos of Italian and German and Flemish city-states—a phase in the history of this sub-society’s disintegration which set in towards the close of the fourteenth century and lasted until the close of the eighteenth—France carried off the victory in the contest among the Great Powers round the periphery of this still expanding society for the control of its decaying centre. From the age of Louis XIV onwards French culture exerted an attraction which kept pace with French arms; and, when Napoleon at length achieved his Bourbon forerunners’ ambition of piecing together a mosaic with a French design out of all the broken fragments of city-states which strewed the face of Europe at the French nation’s doors from the Adriatic to the North Sea and the Baltic, the Napoleonic Empire proved itself to be a cultural force as well as a military system.

It was, indeed, its cultural mission that was the Napoleonic Empire’s undoing; for the ideas of which it was the carrier (in the clinical sense) were the expression of a modern Western culture which was still in growth. Napoleon’s mission was to provide a ‘sub-universal’ state for the sub-society of the city-state cosmos at the heart of Western Christendom. But it is the function of a universal state to provide repose for a society long distracted by a time of troubles. A universal state inspired by dynamic and revolutionary ideas is a contradiction in terms, a lullaby performed on a trombone. The ‘ideas of the French Revolution’ were not calculated to act as a sedative which might reconcile the Italians and Flemings and Rhinelanders and Hanseatics to the yoke of the French empire-builders by whom diese ideas were being introduced. So far from that, the revolutionary impact of Napoleonic France gave these stagnating peoples a stimulating shock which roused them from their torpor and inspired them to rise up and overthrow the French Empire as a first step towards taking their places as new-born nations in a modern Western World. Thus the Napoleonic Empire carried within itself the Promethean seeds of its own inevitable failure in its Epimethean role of serving as the universal state of a decadent world which once, in its long-past noonday, had created the splendours of Florence and Venice and Bruges and Liibeck.

The actual task which the Napoleonic Empire did perform, involuntarily, was to tow the stranded galleons of a derelict medieval armada back into the racing current of Western life, and at the same time to stimulate their listless crews into making their vessels seaworthy; and this actual French performance would have been a short and thankless business in the nature of the case even if Napoleon had not provoked the unconquerable hostility of nation states—Britain, Russia and Spain—beyond the limits of the city-state cosmos which, on our showing, was his proper sphere of action. Yet in the Great Society of to-day there is one substantial legacy of the two-hundred-years-long role, with its brief Napoleonic culmination, which was sustained by France in the last phase of the city-state cosmos. The French language has succeeded in establishing itself as the lingua franca of that central portion of our Western World, and it has even extended its dominion to the far extremities of the former domains of the Spanish and Ottoman Empires. A knowledge of French will still carry the traveller through Belgium and Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America and Rumania and Greece and Syria and Turkey and Egypt. Throughout the British occupation of Egypt French never ceased to be the language of official communication between the representatives of the Egyptian Government and their British advisers, and when the British High Commissioner, Lord Allenby, on the 23rd November, 1924, read to the Egyptian Prime Minister, in English, two communications conveying an ultimatum provoked by the assassination of the Sirdar, the unusual choice of language was doubtless intended to be taken as a mark of displeasure. Even so, written copies of these British communications were deposited in French at the same time. Viewed from this standpoint, Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition in the wake of medieval Italian seafarers, which is usually regarded as an irrelevant and futile divagation in the career of a European conqueror, wears the appearance of a fruitful endeavour to sow seeds of French culture on a soil that was as receptive as it was far afield.

If the French lingua franca is a monument of the decline and fall of a medieval sub-society within the Western body social, we may see in the English lingua franca a product of that gigantic process of pammixia that has expanded and diluted our modern Western World into a ‘Great Society’ of world-wide range. This triumph of the English language was a corollary of the triumph of Great Britain herself in a military, political and commercial struggle for the mastery of a new world overseas, both east and west. English has become the native language of North America and the dominant lingua franca of the Indian sub-continent. It has also a wide currency in China and Japan. We have already found Italian in use as the service language in the navies of the enemies of the Italian states, and similarly we find, in the China of 1923, the Russian Communist agent, Borodin, using English as his medium of communication with the Chinese representative of the Kuomintang Party in political operations designed to drive the British out of the treaty ports. English is also used as a medium of communication between educated Chinese coming from provinces where different Chinese dialects are spoken, and the vulgarization, on alien lips, of the classic Tuscan and classic Attic tongues has its counterpart in the babu English of India and the pidgin-English of China.

In Africa we can trace the progress of an Arabic lingua franca as it has pushed its way westwards from the west coast of the Indian Ocean towards the Lakes, and southwards from the south coast of the Sahara into the Sudan, in the train of successive bands of Arab or semi-Arabicized stock-breeders and slave-raiders and traders. And the linguistic consequences of this movement can still be studied to-day in the life; for, while the physical impact of Arab intruders has been brought to a standstill by European intervention, the linguistic impact of the Arabic language upon the native vernaculars has actually received fresh impetus from an ‘opening-up* of Africa that has latterly been taken out of Arab hands. Under European flags which signify the imposition of a Western regime, the Arabic language enjoys better facilities for its advancement than ever before. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all conferred upon Arabic by the European colonial governments has been the official encouragement that they have given—for the sake of supplying an administrative need of their own—to the mixed languages that have arisen on the different cultural coasts on which the flowing tide of Arabic has been seeping in through native mangrove swamps. It is French imperialism on the Upper Niger and British imperialism on the Lower Niger and British and German imperialism in the East African hinterland of Zanzibar that have respectively made the fortunes of Fulani and Hausa and Swahili; and all these languages are linguistic alloys— with an African base and an Arabic infusion—that have been reduced to writing in the Arabic Alphabet.

(d) SYNCRETISM IN RELIGION

In the field of religion the syncretism or amalgamation of rites, cults and faiths is the outward manifestation of that inward sense of promiscuity which arises from the schism in the soul in an age of social disintegration. This phenomenon may be taken, with some assurance, as a symptom of social disintegration because the apparent examples of religious syncretism in the histories of civilizations in their growth-stage turn out to be illusory. For example, when we see the parochial mythologies of innumerable city-states being co-ordinated and harmonized into a single Pan-Hellenic system by the labours of Hesiod and other archaic poets, we are watching a mere juggling with names which is not accompanied by any corresponding fusion of different rites or blending of diverse religious emotions. Again, when we see Latin numina being identified with Olympian divinities—a Jupiter with a Zeus or a Juno with a Hera—what we are watching is, in effect, a replacement of primitive Latin animism by a Greek anthropomorphic pantheon.

There is a different class of identifications between names of gods in which these verbal equations do occur in an age of disintegration and also do bear witness to a sense of promiscuity, but which, nevertheless, will be found on examination to be no genuine religious phenomena but merely politics under a religious mask. Such are the identifications that are made between the names of different local gods in an age when a disintegrating society is being forcibly unified on the political plane by wars of conquest between the different parochial states into which the society had previously articulated itself during its growth-phase. For example, when, in the concluding chapters of Sumeric history, Enlil the Lord (Bel) of Nippur was merged into Marduk of Babylon, and when Marduk-Bel of Babylon in his turn went incognito for a time under the name of Kharbe, the pammixia thus commemorated was purely political. The first change records the rehabilitation of the Sumeric universal state through the prowess of a Babylonian dynasty, and the second the conquest of that universal state by Kassite war-lords.

Parochial gods who come to be identified with one another in a disintegrating society as a consequence of the unification of different parochial states or the transfer of political authority over such unified empires from one group of war-lords to another, are apt to have a certain antecedent affinity with one another in virtue of their being in most cases the ancestral gods of different sections of one and the same dominant minority. For this reason, the amalgamation of godheads demanded by raison a” Hat does not, as a rule, go seriously against the grain of religious habit and sentiment. To find examples of a religious syncretism that cuts deeper than raison d’etat and touches the quick of religious practice and belief, we must turn our attention from the religion which the dominant minority inherits from a happier past to the philosophy which it strikes out for itself in response to the challenges from a time of troubles, and we must watch rival schools of philosophy colliding and blending not only with one another but also with the new higher religions produced by the internal proletariats. Since these higher religions, too, collide with one another besides colliding with the philosophies, it will be convenient to glance first at the relations between the higher religions inter se and the philosophies inter se in their originally separate social spheres before we go on to consider the more dynamic spiritual results that follow when the philosophies on the one side come into relation with the higher religions on the other.

In the disintegration of the Hellenic Society the generation of Posidonius (circa 135-51 B.C.) seems to mark the beginning of an epoch in which the several schools of philosophy, which had hitherto delighted in lively and acrimonious controversy, now tended with one accord, with the solitary exception of the Epicureans, to notice and emphasize the points which united them rather than those which divided them, until a time came, in the first and second centuries of the Roman Empire, when every non-Epicurean philosopher in the Hellenic World, whatever he might call himself, subscribed to much the same eclectic set of tenets. A similar tendency towards promiscuity in philosophy displays itself in the history of the disintegration of the Sinic Society at the corresponding stage. In the second century B.C., which was the first century of the Empire of the Han, eclecticism was equally the note of the Taoism which was at first in favour at the Imperial Court and of the Confucianism which supplanted it.

This syncretism between rival philosophies has its parallel in the relations between rival higher religions. For example, in the Syriac World from the generation of Solomon onwards we find a strong tendency towards rapprochement between the Israelitish worship of Yahweh and the worships of the local Baalim of neighbouring Syriac communities; and the date is significant, because we have seen reason to believe that the death of Solomon heralded the breakdown of the Syriac Society. No doubt the remarkable and momentous feature of the religious history of Israel in that age is the exceptional success of the Prophets in combating the sense of promiscuity and diverting the stream of Israelitish religious development out of the facile channel of syncretism into a new and arduous course which was peculiar to Israel itself. Yet when we look at the credit instead of the debit side of the Syriac account of reciprocal religious influences, we shall recall that the Syriac time of troubles may have seen the worship of Yahweh make an impact on the religious consciousness of the peoples of Western Iran in whose midst a ‘diaspora’ of Israelitish deportees had been planted by the Assyrian militarists; and it is at any rate certain that there was a powerful counter-impact of the Iranian upon the Jewish religious consciousness in the time of the Achae-menian Empire and afterwards. By the second century L c. the mutual interpenetration of Judaism and Zoroastrianism had gone to such lengths that our modern Western scholars find the utmost difficulty in determining and disentangling the respective contributions that these two sources made to the stream which was fed by their united waters.

Similarly, in the development of the higher religions of the internal proletariat of the Indie World, we see a fusion, which goes much deeper than a mere equation of names, between the worship of Krishna and the worship of Vishnu.

Such breaches in the barriers between religion and religion or philosophy and philosophy in times of disintegration open the way for rapprochements between philosophies and religions; and in these philosophico-religious syncretisms we shall find that the attraction is mutual and that the move is made from both sides. Just as, astride the military frontiers of a universal state, we have watched the soldiers in the imperial garrisons and the warriors in the barbarian war-bands gradually approximating towards one another in their ways of life until at length the two social types cease to be distinguishable, so, in the interior of a universal state, we can watch a corresponding movement of convergence between the adherents of the philosophic schools and the devotees of the popular religions. And the parallel runs true; for, in this case as in that, we find that, though the representatives of the proletariat do come a certain distance to meet the representatives of the dominant minority, the latter go so much farther along their own path of proletarianization that the eventual fusion takes place almost entirely on proletarian ground. In studying the rapprochement from both sides it will therefore be convenient to survey the shorter spiritual journey of the proletarian party first before attempting to follow the longer spiritual journey of the dominant minority.

When higher religions of the internal proletariat find themselves face to face with the dominant minority, their advance along the path of adaptation may sometimes stop short at the preliminary step of commending themselves to the dominant minority’s notice by assuming the outward fashions of the dominant minority’s style of art. Thus, in the disintegration of the Hellenic World, the unsuccessful rivals of Christianity all sought to promote the success of their missionary enterprises on Hellenic ground by recasting the visual representations of their divinities in forms likely to prove agreeable to Hellenic eyes. But none of them made any appreciable move towards taking the further step of Helle-nizing itself inwardly as well as outwardly. It was Christianity alone that went the length of expressing its creed in the language of Hellenic philosophy.

In the history of Christianity the intellectual Hellenization of a religion whose creative essence was of Syriac origin was foreshadowed in the employment of the Attic, instead of the Aramaic, Kounj as the linguistic vehicle of the New Testament; for the very vocabulary of this sophisticated tongue carried with it a host of philosophic implications.

‘In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is regarded as the Son of God, and this belief is carried on and deepened in the body of the Fourth Gospel. But also in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel the idea is thrown out that the Saviour of the World is the Creative Logos of God. Implicitly, then, though the statement is not made explicitly, the Son of God and the Logos of God are one and the same: the Son as the Logos is identified with the creative wisdom and purpose of Deity, the Logos as the Son is hypostatized into a person beside the person of the Father. At one bound the philosophy of the Logos has become a religion.’ ¹

This device of preaching religion in the language of philosophy was one of the heirlooms which Christianity had inherited from Judaism. It was Philo the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria (circa 30 B.C.-A.D. 45) who sowed the seed from which Philo’s Christian fellow-citizens, Clement and Origen, were to reap so rich a harvest two centuries later; and it was perhaps from the same quarter that the author of the Fourth Gospel gained his vision of the Divine Logos with which he identifies his Incarnate God. No doubt this Alexandrian Jewish forerunner of the Alexandrian Christian Fathers was led into the path of Hellenic philosophy through the gate of the Greek language; for it was assuredly no accident that Philo lived and philosophized in a city in which the Attic had become the vernacular language of a local Jewish community that had so utterly lost command of Hebrew, and even of Aramaic, that it had been driven to desecrate its Holy Scriptures by translating them into a Gentile language. Yet in the history of Judaism itself this Jewish father of a Christian philosophy is an isolated figure; and his ingenious effort to derive the Platonic philosophy from the Mosaic Law remained, for Judaism, a tour de force without consequences.

When we pass from Christianity to Mithraism, its rival in a competition for the spiritual conquest of the Hellenic World, we observe that, on its voyage westward from its Iranian homeland, Mithra’s barque took on board a heavy cargo of the Babylonic astral philosophy. In a similar fashion the Indie higher religion of Hinduism despoiled a senile Buddhist philosophy in order to acquire for itself the weapons with which it drove its philosophical rival out of their common homeland in the Indie World. And it is the opinion of at least one eminent modern Egyptologist that the proletarian worship of Osiris only won its way into the citadel of the Egyptiac dominant minority’s hereditary pantheon by usurping from Re the ethical role—originally quite foreign to the Osirian faith—of a divinity that reveals and vindicates righteousness. But this ‘spoiling of the Egyptians’ cost the proletarian religion dear; for the Osirian religion had to pay for its borrowed plumes by putting itself into the hands of the party that was constrained to lend them. The master-stroke of the old Egyptiac priesthood was to place itself at the disposal—and in so doing also place itself at the head—of a rising religious movement which it found itself unable to suppress or hold at bay, and thereby to raise itself to a pinnacle of power which it had never attained before.

The capture of the Osirian religion by the priests of the old Egyptiac pantheon has its parallels in the capture of Hinduism by the Brahmans and the capture of Zoroastrianism by the Magi. But there is another and still more insidious way in which a proletarian religion is apt to fall into the hands of a dominant minority; for the priesthood which gains control of a proletarian church and then abuses this control in order to govern it in the dominant minority’s spirit and interest need not be an ancient priesthood belonging to the dominant minority by descent; it may actually be recruited from the leading lights of the proletarian church itself.

In an early chapter of the political history of the Roman Republic the stasis between Plebeians and Patricians was brought to an end by a ‘deal’ in which the Patricians took the leaders of the Plebeians into partnership on the tacit understanding that these leaders of the unprivileged class would betray their trust and leave their rank and file in the lurch. In a similar fashion on the religious plane, the rank and file of Jewry had been betrayed and deserted, before the time of Christ, by their own former leaders, the Scribes and Pharisees. These Jewish ‘separatists’ had lived to deserve their self-chosen name in a sense which was the opposite of their intention at the time when they assumed it. The original Pharisees were Jewish puritans who separated themselves from the Hellenizing Jews when these renegades were joining the camp of an alien dominant minority, whereas the distinguishing mark of the Pharisees in the time of Christ was their separation from the rank and file of the loyal and devout members of the Jewish community to whom they still hypocritically professed to be setting a good example. This is the historical background of the scathing denunciation of the Pharisees which echoes through the pages of the Gospels. The Pharisees had become the Jewish ecclesiastical counterparts of Jewry’s Roman political masters. In the tragedy of the Passion of Christ we see them actively ranging themselves at the side of the Roman authorities in order to compass the death of a prophet of their own race who had been putting them to shame.

If we pass now to our examination of the complementary movement in which the philosophies of the dominant minority make their approach towards the religions of the internal proletariat, we shall find that on this side the process begins earlier, besides going farther. It begins in the first generation after the breakdown; and it passes from curiosity through devoutness into superstition.

The earliness of the first infusion of a religious tinge is attested, in the classical Hellenic case, in the mise-en-scene of Plato’s Republic. The scene is laid in the Peiraeus—the oldest crucible of social pamtnixia in the Hellenic World—before the fatal end of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War; the master of the house in which the dialogue is supposed to take place is a resident alien; and the alleged narrator, Socrates, begins by telling us that he has walked down to the port from the city of Athens ‘in order to pay’ his ‘respects to the Thracian goddess Bendis, and out of curiosity to observe how they are going to keep the festival that is being celebrated in her honour at the Peiraeus for the first time on this occasion’. Thus religion is ‘in the air’ as a setting for this masterpiece of Hellenic philosophy—religion, too, of an alien and exotic character. Here, surely, is an introduction which prepares us for the sequel described by a modern Western scholar in the following words:

‘The extraordinary thing ... is that, despite the alien source of the new [i.e. the Christian] myth, the theology and philosophy of the Greek Fathers should have turned out in essential matters so thoroughly Platonic or, more accurately expressed, could have been adopted from Plato with so few modifications. Such a coalescence may lead us to conjecture that the mythology which Plato sought to substitute for the old tales of the Gods was not so much antagonistic to the faith of Christianity as imperfectly Christian. . . . From hints here and there it could even be surmised that Plato himself was dimly aware of a theophany to come, of which his allegories were a prophecy. Socrates in the Apology had warned the Athenians of other witnesses to the soul who should appear after him and avenge his death; and elsewhere he had admitted that, for all the reasoning and high imaginings of philosophy, the full truth could not be known until revealed to man by the grace of God.’ ¹

Our historical record of this metamorphosis of philosophy into religion is ample enough in the Hellenic case to enable us to follow the process through its successive stages.

The cool intellectual curiosity which is the Platonic Socrates’ attitude towards the Thracian religion of Bendis is also the mood of the historical Socrates’ contemporary, Herodotus, in his incidental disquisitions on the comparative study of religion. His interest in such matters is essentially scientific. However, theological problems came to be a matter of somewhat greater practical concern to the dominant minority after the overthrow of the Achae-menian Empire by Alexander the Great, when the Hellenic rulers of the successor-states had to make some ritual provision for the religious needs of their mixed populations. At the same time the founders and propagators of the Stoic and Epicurean schools of philosophy were providing a ration of spiritual comfort for individual souls which found themselves forlornly astray in a spiritual wilderness. If, however, we take as our gauge of the prevalent tendency of Hellenic philosophy in this age the tone and temper of the School of Plato, we shall find his disciples during the two centuries after Alexander pushing ever farther along the path of scepticism.

The decisive turn of the tide comes with the Syrian Greek Stoic philosopher Posidonius of Apamea [circa 135-51 B.C.), who opened wide the gates of the Stoa for the reception of popular religious beliefs. Less than two centuries later, the leadership in the Stoic school had passed to Seneca, the brother of Gallio and the contemporary of Saint Paul. There are passages in Seneca’s philosophical works that are so arrestingly reminiscent of passages in the Pauline epistles that some of the less critical-minded Christian theologians of a later age have allowed themselves to imagine that the Roman philosopher was in correspondence with the Christian missionary. Such conjectures are as superfluous as they are improbable; for, after all, there is nothing to surprise us in these harmonies of tone between two pieces of spiritual music created in the same age under the inspiration of the same social experience.

In our study of the relations between the military guardians of the frontier of a disintegrating civilization and the barbarian warlords beyond it, we have seen how, in the first chapter, the two parties approximate towards one another to a point of virtual indis-tinguishability; and how, in the second chapter, they meet and mingle on a dead level of barbarism. In the parallel story of the rapprochement between the philosophers of the dominant minority and the devotees of a proletarian religion, the approximation, on a lofty plane, between Seneca and Saint Paul marks the conclusion of the first chapter. In the second chapter, philosophy, succumbing to less edifying religious influences, descends from devoutness into superstition.

Such is the miserable end of the philosophies of the dominant minority, and this even when they have striven with all their might to win their way on to that kindlier proletarian spiritual soil that is the seed-bed of the higher religions. It profits these philosophies nothing that they, too, have at last broken into flower, when this tardy and reluctant flowering revenges itself upon them by degenerating into an unwholesome luxuriance. In the last act of the dissolution of a civilization the philosophies die while the higher religions live on and stake out their claims upon the future. Christianity survived, crowding out the Neoplatonic philosophy, which found no elixir of life in its discarding of rationality. In fact, when philosophies and religions meet, the religions must increase while the philosophies must decrease; and we cannot turn away from our study of the encounter between them without pausing to look into the question why it is that this defeat of the philosophies is a foregone conclusion.

What, then, are the weaknesses that doom philosophy to discomfiture when it enters the lists as the rival of religion? The fatal and fundamental weakness, from which all the rest derive, is a lack of spiritual vitality. This lack of élan lames philosophy in two ways. It diminishes its attractiveness for the masses and it discourages those who feel its attractions from throwing themselves into missionary work on its behalf. Indeed philosophy affects a preference for an intellectual élite, the ‘fit though few’, like the high-brow poet who regards the smallness of his circulation as evidence of the excellence of his verse. In the pre-Senecan generation Horace felt no incongruity in prefacing the philo-sophico-patriotic appeal of his ‘Roman Odes’ with:

Avaunt, ye herd profane!

Silence! let no unhallow’d tongue

Disturb the sacred rites of song,

Whilst I, the High Priest of the Nine,

For youths and maids alone entwine

A new and loftier strain. ¹

It is a far cry from this to the parable of Jesus:

‘Go ye out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.’

Thus philosophy could never emulate the strength of religion at its best; it could only imitate, and parody, the weaknesses of its inferior devotees. The breath of religion which had momentarily animated the clear-cut marble of the Hellenic intellect in the generation of Seneca and Epictetus rapidly staled, after the generation of Marcus Aurelius, into a stuffy religiosity, and the heirs of the philosophic tradition fell between two stools. They discarded the appeal to the intellect without finding a way to the heart. In ceasing to be sages they became, not saints but cranks. The Emperor Julian turned from Socrates to Diogenes for his model of philosophy—the legendary Diogenes from whom, rather than from Christ, the ‘Christian’ asceticism of St. Simeon Stylites and his fellow-ascetics is derived. Indeed, in this tragi-comic last act, the epigoni of Plato and Zeno confessed the inadequacy of their own great masters and ensamples by abandoning themselves to an imitation of the internal proletariat which was in very truth the sincerest flattery of the profanum vulgus that Horace had excluded from his audience. The last Neoplatonists, Iamblichus and Proclus, are not so much philosophers as priests of an imaginary and non-existent religion. Julian, with his zeal for priestcraft and ritual, was the would-be executor of their schemes, and the immediate collapse, on the news of his death, of his state-supported ecclesiastical establishment proves the truth of the judgement of the founder of a school of modern psychology:

‘Great innovations never come from above; they invariably come from below . . . [from] the much-derided silent folk of the land— those who are less infected with academic prejudices than great celebrities are wont to be.’ ¹

(e) CUIUS REGIO EIUS RELIGION

We noticed, at the end of the preceding chapter, that Julian, as emperor, failed to force upon his subjects the pseudo-religion to which, as a philosopher, he was addicted. This raises the general question whether in any more favourable circumstances dominant minorities are able to make up for their spiritual weakness by bringing their physical strength into play and forcing a philosophy or a religion on their subjects by means of a political pressure which might be none the less effective for being illegitimate; and, although this question is off the main line of the argument of this part of our Study, we propose to seek for the answer to it before proceeding farther. ²

If we examine the historical evidence on this head we shall find that in general such attempts prove failures, at any rate in the long run—a finding which flatly contradicts one of the sociological theories of the Enlightenment during the Hellenic time of troubles; for, according to this theory, the deliberate imposition of religious practices from above downwards, so far from being impossible or even unusual, has actually been the normal origin of religious institutions in societies in process of civilization. This theory has been applied to the religious life of Rome in the following celebrated passage of Polybius (circa 206-131 B.C.):

‘The point in which the Roman constitution excels others most conspicuously is to be found, in my opinion, in its handling of religion. In my opinion the Romans have managed to forge the main bond of their social order out of something which the rest of the world execrates: I mean, out of superstition. In dramatizing their superstition theatrically and introducing it into private as well as into public life, the Romans have gone to the most extreme lengths conceivable; and to many observers this will appear extraordinary. In my opinion, however, the Romans have done it with an eye to the masses. If it were possible to have an electorate that was composed exclusively of sages, this chicanery might perhaps be unnecessary; but, as a matter of fact, the masses are always unstable and always full of lawless passions, irrational temper and violent rage; so there is nothing for it but to control them by “the fear of theainknown” and play-acting of that sort. I fancy that this was the reason why our forefathers introduced among the masses those theological beliefs and those notions about Hell that have now become traditional; and I also fancy that, in doing this, our ancestors were not working at random but knew just what they were about. It might be more pertinent to charge our contemporaries with lack of sense and lapse from responsibility for trying to eradicate religion, as we actually see them doing.’ ¹

This theory of the origins of religion is about as remote from the truth as the social contract theory of the origin of states. If we now proceed to examine the evidence we shall find that, while political power is not completely impotent to produce effects upon spiritual life, its ability to act in this field is dependent on special combinations of circumstances, and that, even then, its range of action is narrowly circumscribed. Successes are exceptional and failures the rule.

To take the exceptions first, we may observe that political potentates do sometimes succeed in establishing a cult when this cult is the expression, not of any genuine religious feeling, but of some political sentiment masquerading in a religious disguise: for example, a pseudo-religious ritual expressing the thirst for political unity in a society that has drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of a time of troubles. In these circumstances a ruler who has already won a hold over his subjects’ hearts as their human saviour may succeed in establishing a cult in which his own office and person and dynasty are the objects of worship.

The classic example of this tour deforce is the deification of the Roman emperors. Yet Caesar-worship proved a fair-weather cult, the precise opposite of the ‘present help in time of trouble’ which is what a real religion proves to be. It did not survive the first collapse of the Roman Empire at the turn of the second and third centuries; and the warrior emperors of the rally which followed began to cast about for some supernatural sanction behind and beyond their own discredited Imperial Genius. Aurelian and Constantius Chlorus enlisted under the standard of an abstract and oecumenical Sol Invictus, and, a generation later, Constantine the Great (A.D. 306-37) transferred his allegiance to that God of the internal proletariat who had proved himself more potent than either Sol or Caesar.

If we turn from the Hellenic to the Sumeric World, we shall observe an analogue of Caesar-worship in the cult of his own human person which was instituted—not by the founder of the Sumeric universal state, Ur-Engur, but by his successor, Dungi (circa 2280-2223 B-c)’> but this also appears to have proved a fair-weather contrivance. At any rate, the Amorite Hammurabi, who occupies in Sumeric history a position analogous to that of Constantine in the history of the Roman Empire, ruled not as a god incarnate but as the servant of the transcendental deity Marduk-Bel.

An examination of such traces of ‘Caesar-worship’ as may be found in other universal states, Andean, Egyptiac and Sinic, confirms our impression of the congenital feebleness of cults propagated by political potentates from above downwards. Even when such cults are political in essence and religious only in form, and even when they correspond with a genuine popular sentiment, they show little capacity for surviving storms.

There is another class of cases in which a political potentate attempts to impose a cult which is no mere political institution in a religious guise but is of a genuinely religious character; and in this field, too, we can point to instances in which the experiment has secured some degree of success. It appears, however, to be a condition of success in such cases that the religion imposed in this fashion should be a ‘going concern’—at any rate in the souls of a minority of its political patron’s subjects—and, even when this condition is fulfilled and success attained, the price that has to be paid turns out to be a prohibitive one. For a religion which, by an exertion of political authority, is successfully imposed upon all the souls whose bodies are subject to the ruler who is imposing it, is apt to gain this fraction of the world at the price of forfeiting any prospects it may once have had of becoming, or remaining, a universal church.

For example, when the Maccabees changed, before the close of the second century B.C., from being militant champions of the Jewish religion against a forcible Hellenization into being the founders and rulers of one of the successor-states of the Seleucid Empire, these violent resisters of persecution became persecutors in their turn, and set themselves to impose Judaism on the non-Jewish peoples whom they had conquered. This policy succeeded in extending the domain of Judaism over Idumaea and over ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ and over a narrow Transjordanian Peraea. Even so, this triumph of force was narrowly circumscribed; for it failed to overcome either the particularism of the Samaritans or the civic pride of the two rows of Hellenized city-states which flanked the Maccabees’ dominions on both sides, one row along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine and the other along its desert border in the Decapolis. In fact, the gain through force of arms was inconsiderable, and, as it turned out, it was to cost the Jewish religion the whole of its spiritual future. For it is the supreme irony of Jewish history that the new ground captured for Judaism by Alexander Jannaeus (102-76 B.C.) brought to birth, within a hundred years, a Galilaean Jewish prophet whose message was the consummation of all previous Jewish religious experience, and that this inspired Jewish scion of forcibly converted Galilaean Gentiles was then rejected by the Judaean leaders of the Jewry of his own age. Thereby Judaism not only stultified its past but forfeited its future.

If we now turn to the religious map of modern Europe we are naturally prompted to inquire how far the present boundaries between the domains of Catholicism and Protestantism have been determined by the arms or diplomacy of the parochial successor-states of the medieval Respublica Christiana. No doubt the influence of external military and political factors on the outcome of the religious conflict of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ought not to be rated too high; for, to take two extreme cases, it is difficult to imagine that the action of any secular authority could have retained the Baltic countries within the fold of the Catholic Church or brought the Mediterranean countries over into the Protestant camp. At the same time there was an intermediate and debatable zone in which the play of military and political forces was certainly influential; and this zone embraces Germany, the Low Countries, France and England. It was in Germany, in particular, that the classical formula, cuius regio eius religio, was invented and applied; and we may take it that in Central Europe, at least, the secular princes did successfully use their power to force down the throats of their subjects whichever of the competing varieties of Western Christianity the local potentate happened to favour. We can also take the measure of the damage which our Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, has suffered in the sequel as a penalty for having thus allowed itself to become dependent on political patronage and consequently subservient to raison d’etat.

One of the first instalments of the price that had to be paid was the loss of the Catholic Church’s mission-field in Japan; for the seedlings of Catholic Christianity which had been planted there by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century were uprooted before the middle of the seventeenth century by the deliberate action of the rulers of the newly founded Japanese universal state because these statesmen had come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church was an instrument of the imperial ambitions of the Spanish Crown. This forfeiture of a promising mission-field must be estimated, however, as a trifling loss by comparison with the spiritual impoverishment which the policy of cuius regio eius religio was to inflict upon Western Christianity at home. The readiness of all the competing factions of Western Christianity in the age of the Wars of Religion to seek a short cut to victory by condoning, or even demanding, the imposition of their own doctrines upon the adherents of rival faiths by the application of political force was a spectacle which sapped the foundations of all belief in the souls for whose allegiance the warring churches were competing. Louis XIV’s methods of barbarism eradicated Protestantism from the spiritual soil of France only to clear the ground for an alternative crop of scepticism. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was followed within nine years by the birth of Voltaire. In England, too, we can see the same sceptical temper setting in as a reaction from the religious militancy of the Puritan Revolution. A new Enlightenment arose of a temper akin to that displayed in the quotation from Polybius at the opening of this chapter of our Study, a school of thought which treated religion itself as an object of ridicule; so that, by 1736, Bishop Butler could write in the Preface to his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature:

‘It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if in the present age this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.’

This attitude of mind, which sterilized fanaticism at the cost of extinguishing faith, has lasted from the seventeenth century into the twentieth, and has been carried to such lengths in all parts of our Westernized ‘Great Society’ that it is beginning at last to be recognized for what it is. It is being recognized, that is to say, as the supreme danger to the spiritual health and even to the material existence of the Western body social—a deadlier danger, by far, than any of our hotly canvassed and loudly advertised political and economic maladies. This spiritual evil is now too flagrant to be ignored; but it is easier to diagnose the disease than to prescribe the remedy, for faith is not like a standard article of commerce that can be procured on demand. It will be hard indeed to refill the spiritual vacuum which has been hollowed in our Western hearts by the progressive decay of religious belief that has been going on for some two-and-a-half centuries. We are still reacting against a subordination of religion to politics which was the crime of our sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ancestors.

If we take a synoptic view of the several surviving forms of Western Christianity in their present state and compare them in respect of their relative vitality, we shall find that this varies inversely with the degree to which each of these sects has succumbed to secular control. Unquestionably Catholicism is the form of Western Christianity that is showing the most vigorous signs of life to-day; and the Catholic Church—in spite of the lengths to which modern Catholic princes have gone, in certain countries and at certain times, towards asserting their own secular control over the life of the Church within their frontiers—has never lost the inestimable advantage of being united in a single communion under the presidency of a single supreme ecclesiastical authority. Next to the Catholic Church in order of vitality we shall probably place those ‘free churches’ of the Protestant persuasion which have extricated themselves from the control of secular governments. And we shall certainly place at the bottom of the list the Protestant ‘established’ churches which still remain tied to the body politic of this or that modern parochial state. Finally, if we were to venture to draw distinctions of relative vitality between the different shades of religious thought and practice within so widely ramifying and Protean an established church as the Church of England, we should unhesitatingly assign the palm of superior vitality to the Anglo-Catholic variety of Anglicanism which, ever since the Act of 1874, designed to put down ‘mass in masquerade’, has treated the secular law with contemptuous indifference.

The moral of this odious comparison seems plain. This diversity of the fortunes of the several fractions of the Western Christian Church in modern times would appear to complete our proof of the proposition that religion stands to lose, in the long run, far more than it can ever hope to gain by asking for, or submitting to, the patronage of the civil power. There is, however, one conspicuous exception to this apparent rule which will have to be accounted for before the rule can be allowed to pass muster; and this exception is the case of Islam. For Islam did succeed in becoming the universal church of a dissolving Syriac Society in spite of having been politically compromised at an earlier stage and in an apparently more decisive way than any of the religions that we have passed in review up to this point. Indeed, Islam was politically compromised within the lifetime of its founder by the action of no less a person than the founder himself.

The public career of the Prophet Muhammed falls into two sharply distinct and seemingly contradictory chapters. In the first he is occupied in preaching a religious revelation by methods of pacific evangelization; in the second chapter he is occupied in building up a political and military power and in using this power in the very way which, in other cases, has turned out disastrous for a religion that takes to it. In this Medinese chapter Muhammed used his new-found material power for the purpose of enforcing conformity with at any rate the outward observances of the religion which he had founded in the previous chapter of his career, before his momentous withdrawal from Mecca to Medina. On this showing, the Hijrah ought to mark the date of the ruin of Islam and not the date since consecrated as that of its foundation. How are we to explain the hard fact that a religion which was launched on the world as the militant faith of a barbarian war-band should have succeeded in becoming a universal church, in spite of having started under a spiritual handicap that might have been expected, on all analogies, to prove prohibitive?

When we set out the problem in these terms, we shall find several partial explanations which, taken together, may perhaps amount to a solution.

In the first place we can discount the tendency—which has been popular in Christendom—to over-estimate the extent of the use of force in the propagation of Islam. The show of adherence to the new religion exacted by the Prophet’s successors was limited to the performance of a small number of not very onerous external observances, and even this much was not attempted beyond the limits of the primitive pagan communities of the Arabian no-man’s-land in which Islam took its rise. In the conquered provinces of the Roman and Sasanian Empires the alternatives offered were not ‘Islam or death’ but ‘Islam or a super-tax’—a policy traditionally praised for its enlightenment when pursued long afterwards in England by a Laodicean Queen Elizabeth. Nor was this option made invidious for the non-Muslim subjects of the Arab Caliphate under the Umayyad regime, for the Umayyads (with the exception of a single representative of the line, who reigned for only three years) were Laodiceans to a man. In fact the Umayyads were personally crypto-pagans who were indifferent, or even positively hostile, to the propagation of the Islamic faith of which they enjoyed the titular leadership.

Under these singular conditions Islam had to make its way among the non-Arab subjects of the Caliphate on its own religious merits. Its spread was slow but sure; and, in the hearts of ex-Christians and ex-Zoroastrians who embraced the new religion in face of the indifference, if not in the teeth of the displeasure, of their nominally Muslim Umayyad masters, Islam became a very different faith from what it had formerly been on the sleeves of Arab warriors who had worn it as the denominational badge of a privileged political status. The new non-Arab converts adapted it to their own intellectual outlook, translating the crude and casual assertions of the Prophet into the subtle and consistent terms of Christian theology and Hellenic philosophy; and it was in this clothing that Islam was able to become the unifying religion of a Syriac World which had been reunited hitherto only on the superficial plane of politics by the sweep of the Arab military conquest.

Within a hundred years of Mu’awlyah’s rise to political power the non-Arab Muslim subjects of the Caliphate had become strong enough to put down the Laodicean Umayyads from their seat and to enthrone in their place a dynasty whose devoutness reflected the religious temper of their supporters. In A.D. 750, when the favour of the non-Arab Muslims gave the ‘Abbasids their victory over the Umayyads, it is possible that the numerical strength of the religious faction which thus turned the scales was still as small in proportion to the total population of the Arab Empire as were the numbers of the Christians in the Roman Empire at the time when Constantine overthrew Maxentius, a number estimated by Dr. N. H. Baynes at about ten per cent. ¹ The mass conversions of the subjects of the Caliphate to Islam probably did not begin before the ninth century of the Christian Era or reach their term until the dissolution of the ‘Abbasid Empire in the thirteenth century, and it can confidently be said of these belated harvests in the Islamic mission-field that they were the outcome of a spontaneous popular movement and not of political pressure; for the Islamic counterparts of a Theodosius and a Justinian, who misused their political power in the supposed interests of their religion, are few and far between in a list of the ‘Abbasid Caliphs which stretches through five centuries.

These facts may be considered to account satisfactorily for the exception which Islam prima facie presents to our rule that, while it is not impossible for a secular power to obtain some measure of success in forcibly imposing upon its subjects a religion which is already a ‘going concern’, the price to be paid for such political support far more than counterbalances, in the long run, any immediate advantage to the religion thus politically patronized.

The same penalty seems to be incurred even when the political patronage secures no immediate returns at all. Among the more notorious cases in which a religion has received the compromising support of the secular arm and suffered unmitigated loss we may reckon the failure of Justinian to impose his own Catholic Orthodoxy on his Monophysite subjects beyond the Taurus; the failure of Leo Syrus and Constantine V to impose their Iconoclasm on their Iconodule subjects in Greece and Italy; the failure of the British Crown to impose its Protestantism on its Catholic subjects in Ireland; and the failure of the Mughal Emperor Awrangzib to impose his own Islam on his Hindu subjects. And, if such is the case where the religion to be imposed is a ‘going concern’, it is still less likely that the political arm will succeed in imposing a philosophy of the dominant minority. We have already mentioned the failure of the Emperor Julian, which was in fact the starting-point of this inquiry. Equally complete was the failure of the Emperor Acoka to impose his Hinayanian Buddhism on his Indie subjects, though the Buddhist philosophy of his day was in its intellectual and moral prime, and is thus comparable with the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius rather than with the Neoplatonism of Julian.

There remain to be considered the cases in which a ruler or ruling class has sought to impose not a religion which is already a ‘going concern’ nor a philosophy of the dominant minority but a newfangled ‘fancy religion’ of his or its own devising. In view of the failures already recorded where the purpose was to impose a religion or a philosophy already possessing inherent vitality, we might feel ourselves justified in assuming, without hearing the evidence, that this latter undertaking would prove a failure whenever and wherever it was attempted; and such proves indeed to be the case. However, these ‘fancy religions’ are among the curiosities of history and for this reason, if for no other, may now be rapidly reviewed.

The most extreme case of the kind on record is perhaps that of the Isma’ill Shi’i dissident Caliph al-Hakim (A.D. 996-1020); for, whatever its borrowings from external sources, the distinctive dogma of the so-called Druse theology is the deification of al-Hakim himself as the last and most perfect of ten successive incarnations of God: a divine and immortal Messiah who is to return in triumph to a world from which he has mysteriously withdrawn after a brief first epiphany. The solitary success of the missionaries of this new faith was the conversion by the apostle Darazi, in A.D. 1016, of one tiny community in the Syrian district of Wadi’1-Taym, at the foot of Mount Hermon. Fifteen years later the mission of converting the world to the new faith was explicitly abandoned, and since that date the Druse community has neither admitted converts nor tolerated apostates but has remained a closed hereditary religious corporation whose members bear the name, not of the god incarnate whom they worship, but of the missionary who first introduced them to al-Hākim’s strange gospel. Ensconced in the highlands of Hermon and the Lebanon, the Druse church universal manquée has become a perfect example of a ‘fossil in a fastness’; and by the same token al-Hākim’s ‘fancy religion’ has proved a fiasco.

Al-Hākim’s religion at least survives as a ‘fossil’, but nothing at all resulted from the almost equally presumptuous attempt of the Syrian pervert Varius Avitus Bassianus to install as the high god of the official pantheon of the Roman Empire, not indeed his own person, but his own parochial divinity the Emesan Sun-God Elagabalus, whose hereditary high priest he was, and whose name he continued to bear by choice after a stroke of fortune had placed him, in A.D. 218, on the Roman Imperial throne. His assassination four years later brought his religious experiment to an abrupt and final close.

While it may not be surprising to see an Elagabalus and a Hakim meet with utter failure in their endeavours to make their political authority minister to their religious caprice, we shall perhaps more clearly appreciate the difficulty of propagating creeds and rites by political action from above downwards when we observe the equally striking ill-success of other rulers who have attempted to take advantage of their political power for the promotion of some religious cause in which they have been interested from more serious motives than the desire to gratify a personal whim. There are rulers who have tried and failed to propagate a ‘fancy religion’ for reasons of state which may have been irreligious but have certainly not been discreditable or unworthy of high statesmanship; and there have been others who have tried and failed to propagate a ‘fancy religion’ in which they themselves devoutly believed and which they felt themselves on that account entitled or even in duty bound to communicate by all means at their command to their fellow men, in order to lighten their darkness and to guide their feet into the way of peace.

The classic example of the calculated manufacture of a new religion for the service of a political end is the invention of the figure and cult of Serapis by Ptolemy Soter, the founder of the Hellenic successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire in Egypt. His object was to bridge by means of a common religion the gulf between his Egyptiac and his Hellenic subjects, and he enlisted a phalanx of experts to carry out his plans. The new synthetic religion secured a considerable following from among both the communities for which it was designed, but it failed entirely to bridge the gulf between them. Each went its own way in the worship of Serapis as in everything else. The spiritual gulf between the two communities within the Ptolemaic Empire was bridged at last by another religion which arose spontaneously out of the bosom of the proletariat in the ci-devant Ptolemaic province of Coele-Syria a whole generation after the extinction of the last shadow of the Ptolemaic Power.

More than a thousand years before the reign of Ptolemy Soter another ruler of Egypt, the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, had set himself to substitute for the orthodox Egyptiac pantheon the worship of an etherial and only true God who made his godhead manifest to human eyes in the Aton or solar disk, and, so far as can be seen, his attempt was not prompted by any Machiavellian considerations, such as animated Ptolemy Soter, nor by a semi-insane megalomania which we may take to have been the driving power behind the enterprises of al-Hakim and Elagabalus. He appears to have been inspired by an exalted religious faith which, like Acoka’s philosophic convictions, translated itself into evangelical works. The religious motive by which Ikhnaton was inspired was disinterested and single-minded. It may be said that he deserved to succeed, and yet his failure was complete; and this failure must be attributed to the fact that his programme was an attempt on the part of a political potentate to propagate a ‘fancy religion’ from above downwards. He incurred the bitter hostility of the dominant minority within his realm without succeeding in reaching and touching the hearts of the proletariat.

The failure of Orphism may be similarly explained if it is true, as there seems reason to believe, that the propagation of Orphism received its first impulse from the Athenian despots of the House of Peisistratus. Such modest success as Orphism did eventually achieve was posterior to the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization and to the invasion of Hellenic souls by that sense of promiscuity which kept pace with the material expansion of the Hellenic World at the expense of alien societies.

It is hard to know whether to class with the Machiavellianism of Ptolemy Soter or with the idealism of Ikhnaton the wellnigh undecipherable mixture of motives which led the Timurid Mughal Emperor Akbar (A.D. 1554-1605) into his attempt to establish within his Empire his ‘fancy religion’, the Din Ilahi; for this extraordinary man appears to have been simultaneously a great practical statesman and a transcendental mystic. In any case his religion never took root and was swept out of existence immediately after its author’s death. Indeed the last word on this vain dream of autocrats had already been uttered, presumably within Akbar’s knowledge, by one of the councillors of Akbar’s own predecessor and ensample, Sultan ‘Ala-ad-Din Khilji, at a privy council meeting at which ‘Ala-ad-Din had divulged his intention of committing the very act of folly which Akbar committed three hundred years later.

‘Religion and law and creeds’, declared the prince’s councillor on this occasion, ‘ought never to be made subjects of discussion by Your Majesty, for these are the concerns of prophets, not the business of kings. Religion and law spring from heavenly revelation; they are never established by the plans and designs of man. From the days of Adam till now they have been the mission of prophets and apostles, as rule and government have been the duty of kings. The prophetic office has never appertained to kings—and never will, so long as the World lasts—though some prophets have discharged the functions of royalty. My advice is that Your Majesty should never talk about these matters.’ ¹

We have not as yet drawn from the history of our modern Western Society any examples of the abortive attempts of political rulers to impose ‘fancy religions’ on their subjects, but the history of the French Revolution offers a group of illustrations. Successive waves of French Revolutionists in the hectic decade which closed the eighteenth century failed to make any headway with any of the religious fantasies by which they proposed to replace a supposedly outmoded Catholic Church—whether it were the democratized Christian hierarchy of the Civil Constitution of 1791 or the cult of Robespierre’s £tre Supreme in 1794 or the Theophilanthropy of the Director Larevelliere-Lepaux. We are told that on one occasion this Director read a long paper explaining his religious system to his ministerial colleagues. After most of them had offered their congratulations, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, remarked: ‘For my part I have only one observation to make. Jesus Christ, in order to found His religion, was crucified and rose again. You should have tried to do something of the kind.’ In this monumental gibe at the expense of the fatuous Theophilanthropist, Talleyrand merely repeated in gross terms the advice of the councillor of ‘Ala-ad-Din. If Larevelliere-Lepaux was to succeed in propagating a religion, he must leave the ranks of the Directors and take up a new career as a proletarian prophet.

It only remained for the First Consul Bonaparte to discover that France was, after all, Catholic and that therefore it would be both simpler and more politic to aim, not at imposing a new religion on France, but at enlisting her old religion on the side of her new ruler.

This last example may be left not only to complete our demonstration that cuius regio eius religio is on the whole a snare and a delusion, but also to point the way to a counter-proposition which contains a large element of truth, which we may express in the formula religio regionis religio regis. Rulers who have adopted the religion favoured by the most numerous, or at any rate the most vigorous, section of their subjects have generally prospered, whether actuated by religious sincerity or by political cynicism, like Henri Quatre with his ‘Paris is worth a mass’. The list of such conformist rulers would include the Roman Emperor Con-stantine who embraced Christianity and the Sinic Emperor Han Wuti who embraced Confucianism; it would include Clovis, Henri Quatre and Napoleon; but its most remarkable illustration would be found in a quaint provision of the British Constitution, in virtue of which the sovereign of the United Kingdom is an Episcopalian in England and a Presbyterian on the Scottish side of the Border. The ecclesiastical status of the Crown that has resulted from the politico-ecclesiastical settlement achieved between 1689 and 1707 has indeed been the palladium of the constitution of the United Kingdom ever since; for the formal equality at law between the respective ecclesiastical establishments of the two kingdoms has been symbolized, in a fashion that can be ‘under-standed of the people’ on both sides of the Border, in the visible fact that, on both sides alike, the King professes a religion which is the officially established religion of the land; and this palpably assured sense of ecclesiastical equality, so conspicuously absent during the century which intervened between the union of the crowns and the union of the parliaments (1603-1707), has provided the psychological foundation for a free and equal political union between two kingdoms which had previously been alienated from one another by a long tradition of hostility and which have never ceased to be differentiated by a wide disparity in population and wealth.

(6) THE SENSE OF UNITY

In our preliminary survey of the relations between the several alternative ways of behaviour, feeling and life in which human souls react to the ordeal of social disintegration, we observed that the sense of promiscuity, which we have just been studying in a variety of manifestations, is a psychological response to a blurring and blending of the sharp individual outlines that are assumed by a civilization while it is still in growth, and we also observed that the same experience may alternatively evoke another response— an awakening to a sense of unity—which is not only distinct from the sense of promiscuity but is its exact antithesis. The painfully perturbing dissolution of familiar forms, which suggests to weaker spirits that the ultimate reality is nothing but a chaos, may reveal to a steadier and more spiritual vision the truth that the flickering film of the phenomenal world is an illusion which cannot obscure the eternal unity that lies behind it.

This spiritual truth, like other truths of the kind, is apt to be apprehended first by analogy from some outward and visible sign; and the portent in the external world which gives the first intimation of a unity which is spiritual and ultimate is the unification of a society into a universal state. Indeed, neither the Roman Empire nor any other universal state could have established or maintained itself if it had not been led on to fortune upon a tide of desire for political unity which had mounted to its flood as a time of troubles approached its climax. In Hellenic history this longing—or, rather, the sense of relief at its belated satisfaction— breathes through the Latin poetry of the Augustan Age; and we children of the Western Society in its present phase are aware from our own experience how poignant this longing for a ‘world order’ may be in an age when the unity of mankind is being striven for unavailingly.

Alexander the Great’s vision of Homonoia or Concord never faded out of the Hellenic World so long as a vestige of Hellenism survived, and, three hundred years after Alexander’s death, we find Augustus putting Alexander’s head on his Roman signet-ring as an acknowledgement of the source from which he was seeking inspiration for his arduous task of establishing the Pax Romana. Plutarch reports as one of Alexander’s sayings: ‘God is the common father of all men, but he makes the best ones peculiarly his own.’ If this ‘logion’ is authentic, it tells us that Alexander realized that the brotherhood of Man presupposes the fatherhood of God— a truth which involves the converse proposition that, if the divine father of the human family is left out of the reckoning, there is no possibility of forging any alternative bond of purely human texture which will avail by itself to hold mankind together. The only society that is capable of embracing the whole of mankind is a superhuman Civitas Dei; and the conception of a society which embraces mankind and nothing but mankind is an academic chimaera. The Stoic Epictetus was as well aware of this supreme truth as the Christian Apostle Paul, but, whereas Epictetus stated the fact as a conclusion of philosophy, St. Paul preached it as the gospel of a new revelation made by God to man through the life and death of Christ.

In the Sinic time of troubles, also, the craving for unity was never confined to the terrestrial plane.

‘To the Chinese of this period the word One (unity, singleness, etc.) had an intensely emotional connotation, reflected equally in political theory and in Taoist metaphysics. And, indeed, the longing—or more accurately, the psychological need—for a fixed standard of belief was profounder, more urgent and more insistent than the longing for governmental unity. In the long run man cannot exist without an orthodoxy, without a fixed pattern of fundamental belief.’ ¹

If this comprehensive Sinic way of pursuing the quest for unity may be taken as the norm, and our modern Western cult of an arbitrarily insulated Humanity may be written off as something exceptional or even pathological then we should expect to see the practical unification of mankind and the ideal unification of the Universe accomplished pari passu by a spiritual effort which would not cease to be one and indivisible because it manifested itself simultaneously in diverse fields. As a matter of fact, we have already observed that the fusion of parochial communities into a universal state is apt to be accompanied by an incorporation of parochial divinities into a single pantheon in which one composite divinity— an Amon-Re of Thebes or a Marduk-Bel of Babylon—emerges as the spiritual equivalent of the earthly king of kings and lord of lords.

It will be seen, however, that the condition of human affairs which finds its superhuman reflection in a pantheon of this kind is the situation immediately after the genesis of a universal state and not the constitution into which a polity of this type eventually settles down; for the ultimate constitution of a universal state is not a hierarchy which preserves its constituent parts intact and merely converts their former equality as sovereign states into a hegemony of one of them over the rest. It solidifies in course of time into a unitary empire. In fact, in a fully seasoned universal state there are two salient features which dominate, between them, the entire social landscape: a supreme personal monarch and a supreme impersonal law. And in a world of men that is governed on this plan the Universe as a whole is likely to be pictured on a corresponding pattern. If the human ruler of the universal state is at once so powerful and so beneficent that his subjects are easily persuaded to worship him as a god incarnate, then a fortiori they will be prone to see in him the terrestrial likeness of a heavenly ruler likewise supreme and omnipotent—a god who is no mere God of Gods like Amon-Re or Marduk-Bel, but one who reigns alone as the One True God. Again, the law in which the human emperor’s will is translated into action is an irresistible and ubiquitous force which suggests, by analogy, the idea of an impersonal Law of Nature: a law which governs not only the material universe but also the impenetrably mysterious distribution of joy and sorrow, good and evil, and reward and punishment on those deeper levels of human life where Caesar’s writ ceases to run.

This pair of concepts—a ubiquitous and irresistible law and a unique and omnipotent deity—will be found at the heart of almost every representation of the Universe that has ever taken shape in human minds in the social environment of a universal state; but a survey of these cosmologies will show that they tend to approximate to one or other of two distinct types. There is one type in which Law is exalted at the expense of God and another in which God is exalted at the expense of Law; and we shall find that the emphasis on Law is characteristic of the philosophies of the dominant minority, while the religions of the internal proletariat incline to subordinate the majesty of the Law to the omnipotence of God. However, the distinction is only a matter of emphasis; in all these cosmologies both concepts are to be found, co-existing and interwoven, whatever their respective proportions may be.

Having placed this reservation upon the distinction that we are seeking to establish, we may now survey, in succession, those representations of the unity of the Universe in which Law has been exalted at the expense of God and then those other representations in which God overshadows the Law which He promulgates.

In the systems in which ‘Law is king of all’ ¹ we can watch the personality of God growing fainter as the law that governs the Universe comes into sharper focus. In our own Western World, for example, the Triune God of the Athanasian Creed has faded by stages, in an ever-increasing number of Western minds, as physical science has extended the frontiers of its intellectual empire over one field of existence after another—until at last, in our own day, when science is laying claim to the whole of the spiritual as well as the material universe, we see God the Mathematician fading right out into God the Vacuum. This modern Western process of evicting God to make room for Law was anticipated in the Babylonic World in the eighth century B.C., when the discovery of the periodicities in the motions of the stellar cosmos inveigled the Chaldaean mathematici, in their enthusiasm for the new science of astrology, into transferring their allegiance from Marduk-Bel to the Seven Planets. In the Indie World, again, when the Buddhist school of philosophy worked out to their extreme conclusions the logical consequences of the psychological law of Karma, the divinities of the Vedic pantheon were the most signal victims of this aggressive system of ‘totalitarian’ spiritual determinism. These barbaric gods of a barbarian war-band were now made to pay dearly, in their unromantic middle age, for the all too human wantonness of a turbulent youth. In a Buddhist universe in which all consciousness and desire and purpose was reduced to a succession of atomic psychological states which by definition were incapable of coalescing into anything in the nature of a continuous or stable personality, the Gods were automatically reduced to the spiritual stature of human beings on a common level of nonentity. Indeed, such difference as there was between the status of gods and of men in the Buddhist system of philosophy was all to the advantage of the latter; for a human being could at least become a Buddhist monk if he could stand the ascetic ordeal, and for this renunciation of the vulgar pleasures there was offered the compensation of a release from the Wheel of Existence and an entry into the oblivion of Nirvana.

In the Hellenic World the Gods of Olympus fared better than they deserved if their deserts are to be measured by the punishment meted out by Buddhist justice to their Vedic cousins; for when the Hellenic philosophers came to conceive of the Universe as a ‘Great Society’ of supra-terrestrial dimensions whose members’ relations with one another were regulated by Law and inspired by Homonoia or Concord, Zeus, who had started life as the disreputable war-lord of the Olympian war-band, was morally reclaimed and handsomely pensioned off by being elected to the presidency of the Cosmopolis with a status not unlike that of some latter-day constitutional monarch who ‘reigns but does not govern’ —aking who meekly countersigns the decrees of Fate and obligingly lends his name to the operations of Nature. ¹

Our survey has shown that the Law which eclipses the Godhead may take various forms. It is a mathematical law that has enslaved the Babylonic astrologer and the modern Western man of science; a psychological law that has captivated the Buddhist ascetic; and a social law that has won the allegiance of the Hellenic philosopher. In the Sinic World, where the concept of Law has not found favour, we find the Godhead being, none the less, eclipsed by an Order which presents itself to the Sinic mind as a kind of magical congruence or sympathy between the behaviour of man and that of his environment. While the action of the environment upon man is recognized and manipulated in the Sinic art of geomancy, the converse action of man upon the environment is controlled and directed by means of a ritual and etiquette as elaborate and momentous as the structure of the Universe which these rites mirror and sometimes modify. The human master of the ceremonies who makes the world go round is the monarch of the Sinic universal state; and, in virtue of the superhuman scope of his function, the Emperor is officially styled the Son of Heaven; yet this Heaven who, in the Sinic scheme, is the adoptive father of the magician-in-chief is as pale and impersonal as the frosty winter skies of Northern China. Indeed the complete erasure of any conception of Divine Personality from the Chinese mind presented the Jesuit missionaries with a difficult problem when they tried to translate the word Deus into Chinese.

We will now pass to the consideration of those other representations of the Universe in which the unity presents itself as the work of an omnipotent Godhead, while the Law is regarded as a manifestation of God’s will instead of being conceived of as the sovereign unifying force which regulates the actions of gods and men alike.

We have observed already that this concept of a unity of all things through God, as well as the alternative concept of a unity of all things through Law, is conceived by human minds through an analogy from the constitution which a universal state is apt to assume as it gradually crystallizes into its final shape. In this process the human ruler, who is originally a King of Kings, eliminates the client princes who were once his peers and becomes a ‘monarch’ in the strict sense of the term. If we now examine what happens simultaneously to the gods of the diverse peoples and lands which the universal state has absorbed, we shall find an analogous change. In place of a pantheon in which a high god exercises suzerainty over a community of gods, once his peers, who have not lost their divinity in losing their independence, we see emerging a single God whose uniqueness is His essence.

This religious revolution generally begins with a change in the relations between divinities and their worshippers. Within the framework of a universal state divinities tend to divest themselves of the bonds which have hitherto bound each of them to some particular local community. The divinity who started life as the patron of some particular tribe or city or mountain or river now enters a wider field of action by learning to appeal on the one hand to the souls of individuals and on the other hand to mankind as a whole. In this latter capacity the once local divinity, hitherto a celestial counterpart of the local chieftain, takes on characteristics borrowed from the rulers of the universal state in which the local community has been engulfed. We can observe, for example, the influence of the Achaemenian monarchy, overshadowing Judaea politically, upon the Jewish conception of the God of Israel. This new conception of Yahweh had worked itself out to completion by 166-164 B-c-, which appears to have been the approximate date of the writing of the apocalyptic part of the Book of Daniel.

‘I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head was like the pure wool; his throne was like the fiery flame and his wheel as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him; thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the judgement was set and the books were opened.’ ¹

Thus a number of previously parochial divinities assume the insignia of the newly established terrestrial monarch and then compete with one another for the sole and exclusive dominion which these insignia imply, until at length one of the competitors annihilates his rivals and establishes his title to be worshipped as the One True God. There is, however, one vital point on which the analogy between the ‘Battle of the Gods’ and the otherwise analogous competition between the ‘princes of This World’ does not hold good.

In the constitutional evolution of a universal state the universal monarch whom we find enthroned in solitary sovereignty at the end of the story is usually the direct successor, in an unbroken constitutional sequence, of the Padishah, or overlord of client princes, under whose auspices the story opens. When an Augustus, who has been content to make his authority felt in Cappadocia or Palestine by maintaining a general superintendence over local kings or tetrarchs (corresponding to the rulers of the ‘Indian States’ of the British Indian Empire), is succeeded in due course by a Hadrian who administers these former principalities as provinces under his own direct rule, there is no break in the continuity of the dominant power. But in the corresponding religious change continuity, so far from being the rule, is a theoretically possible exception which it might be difficult to illustrate by a single historical example. The writer of this Study cannot call to mind a single case in which the high god of a pantheon has ever served as the medium for an epiphany of God as the unique and omnipotent master and maker of all things. Neither the Theban Amon-Re nor the Babylonian Marduk-Bel nor the Olympian Zeus has ever revealed the countenance of the One True God beneath his own Protean mask. And even in the Syriac universal state, where the god who was worshipped by the imperial dynasty was not a divinity of this synthetic kind nor a product of raison d’etat, the deity through whose lineaments the existence and the nature of a. One True God became apparent to mankind was not the Zoroas-trian Ahuramazda, the god of the Achaemenidae; it was Yahweh, the god of the Achaemenidae’s insignificant Jewish subjects.

This contrast between the ultimate destinies of rival divinities and the momentary fortunes of their respective followers makes it evident that the religious life and experience of generations born and bred under the political aegis of a universal state is a field of historical study which offers striking examples of peripeteia or the ‘reversal of roles’—the theme of innumerable folk-tales of the type of Cinderella. At the same time, lowly and obscure origins are not the only features characteristic of the divinities that attain to universality.

When we look into the character of Yahweh as portrayed in the Old Testament, two other features immediately strike the eye. On the one hand Yahweh is in origin a local divinity—in the literal sense glebae adscriptus if we are to believe that he first came within the Israelites’ ken as the jinn inhabiting and animating a volcano in North-West Arabia, and in any case a divinity who struck root in the soil of a particular parish, and in the hearts of a particular parochial community, after he had been carried into the hill country of Ephraim and Judah as the patron of the barbarian war-bands who broke into the Palestinian domain of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C. On the other hand Yahweh is ‘a jealous god’, whose first commandment to his worshipper is ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me’. It is not, of course, surprising to find these two traits of provincialism and exclusiveness displayed by Yahweh simultaneously; a god who keeps to his own domain may be expected to warn other gods off it. What is surprising—and even repellent, at any rate at first sight—is to see Yahweh continuing to exhibit an unabated intolerance towards the rivals with whom he courts a conflict when, after the overthrow of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the establishment of the Syriac universal state, this ci-devant god of two highland principalities steps out into the wider world and aspires, like his neighbours, to win for himself the worship of all mankind. In this oecumenical phase of Syriac history the persistence of Yahweh in maintaining the intolerant attitude that was a legacy from his parochial past was an anachronism which was undoubtedly out of tune with the temper prevalent in that age among the host of ci-devant local deities of Yahweh’s kind. This unamiable anachronism was nevertheless one of the elements in his character that helped him to his astonishing triumph.

It may be instructive to look at these traits of provincialism and exclusiveness more closely, taking the provincialism first.

The choice of a provincial divinity to be the vehicle for the epiphany of a God who is omnipresent and unique might seem at first sight to be an inexplicable paradox; for while the Jewish, Christian and Islamic conception of God has indisputably been derived, as a matter of historical fact, from a tribal Yahweh, it is equally indisputable that the theological content, as opposed to the historical origin, of the idea of God common to these three religions is immeasurably different from the primitive conception of Yahweh and bears a much closer resemblance to a number of other conceptions to which, as a matter of historical fact, the Islamic-Christian-Jewish conception is indebted either much less deeply or not at all. In point of universality the Islamic-Christian-Jewish conception of God has less in common with the primitive representation of Yahweh than with the idea of the high god of a pantheon—an Amon-Re or a Marduk-Bel—who reigns in some sense over the whole Universe. Or again, if we take spirituality as our standard, the Islamic-Christian-Jewish conception has more in common with the abstractions of the philosophic schools: a Stoic Zeus or a Neoplatonic Helios. Why then is it that, in the mystery play which has for its plot the revelation of God to man, the supreme role has been allotted, not to an etherial Helios or an imperial Amon-Re but to a barbaric and provincial Yahweh whose qualifications for playing this tremendous part might seem, on our present showing, to be so conspicuously inferior to those of some of his unsuccessful competitors ¹

The answer is to be found in calling to mind one element in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic conception which we have not yet mentioned. We have dwelt on the qualities of omnipresence and uniqueness. Yet, for all their sublimity, these attributes of the Divine Nature are no more than conclusions of the human understanding; they are not experiences of the human heart. For mankind in the mass, God’s essence is that he is a living God with whom a living human being can enter into a relationship that is recognizably akin to the spiritual relationships into which he enters with other living human beings. This fact of being alive is the essence of God’s nature for human souls that are seeking to enter into communion with Him; and this quality of being a person, which is the essence of God as Jews and Christians and Muslims worship Him to-day, is likewise the essence of Yahweh as he makes his appearance in the Old Testament. ‘For who is there of all flesh that hath heard the voice of the living god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived?’’ is the boast of Yahweh’s Chosen People. When this living God of Israel encounters in turn the various abstractions of the philosophers, it becomes manifest that, in the words of the Odyssey, ‘he alone breathes and the rest are shadows’. For the primitive figure of Yahweh has grown into the Christian conception of God by annexing intellectual attributes from these abstractions without deigning to acknowledge the debt or scrupling to suppress their names.

If this persistent quality of being alive is the obverse of Yahweh’s primitive provincialism, we may find that the exclusiveness which is an enduring as well as a primitive trait in Yahweh’s character has also some value which is indispensable for the historic role which the God of Israel has played in the revelation of the Divine Nature to mankind.

This value becomes apparent as soon as we consider the significance of the contrast between the ultimate triumph of this ‘jealous god’ and the ultimate fiasco of the high gods of the pantheons of the two neighbouring societies which, between them, ground the political structure of the Syriac World to pieces. In respect of being rooted in the soil and of flowing with the visible and tangible sap of life, both Amon-Re and Marduk-Bel could measure themselves against Yahweh on equal terms, while they had the advantage over him of being associated, in the minds of their worshippers, with the colossal worldly success of their native Thebes and Babylon, whereas Yahweh’s people had been left, in their abasement and captivity, to solve as best they could the problem of vindicating the virtues of a tribal divinity who had apparently abandoned his tribesmen in their hour of need. If, in spite of this telling point in their favour, Amon-Re and Marduk-Bel were ultimately worsted in ‘the Battle of the Gods’, we can hardly avoid ascribing their failure to their innocence of Yahweh’s jealous vein. A freedom—for good or ill—from the spirit of exclusiveness is implicit in the hyphen which links the two parts of the names of these synthetic divinities. No wonder that Amon-Re and Marduk-Bel were as tolerant of polytheism beyond the bounds of their own loose-knit personalities as they were tolerant of the disunity in their own Protean selves. Both of them alike were born—or, more accurately, put together—to be content with their primal state of suzerainty over a host of other beings no less divine, if rather less potent, than themselves; and this congenital lack of ambition doomed them both to drop out of the competition for a monopoly of divinity when Yahweh’s devouring jealousy would as surely spur him on to run to the end this race that had been set before them all.

The same relentless intolerance of any rival was also manifestly one of the qualities which enabled the God of Israel, after he had become the God of the Christian Church, to outrun all his competitors once again in the later ‘Battle of the Gods’ fought out within the Roman Empire. His rivals—a Syriac Mithras, an Egyptiac Isis, a Hittite Cybele—were ready to enter into any compromise with each other and with any other cult that they severally encountered. This easy-going, compromising spirit was fatal to the rivals of the God of Tertullian, when they had to face an adversary who could be content with nothing less than ‘total’ victory, because anything less would be, for Him, a denial of His very essence.

The most impressive testimony to the value of the jealous vein in Yahweh’s ethos is perhaps afforded by a piece of negative evidence from the Indie World. Here, as elsewhere, the process of social disintegration was accompanied by the development of a sense of unity on the religious plane. In response to an ever more insistent craving in Indie souls to apprehend the unity of God, the myriad divinities of the Indie internal proletariat gradually coalesced and dissolved into one or other of the two mighty figures of Shiva and Vishnu. This penultimate stage on the road towards the apprehension of the unity of God was attained by Hinduism at least one thousand five hundred years ago; and yet, in all the time that has elapsed since then, Hinduism has never taken the final step that was taken by the Syriac religion when Yahweh— intolerant of even a single peer—disposed of Ahuramazda by swallowing him whole. In Hinduism the concept of an Almighty God, instead of being unified, has been polarized round the mutually complementary and antithetic figures of two equally matched candidates who have persistently refrained from settling accounts with one another.

In face of this strange situation we are bound to ask ourselves why Hinduism has accepted, as a solution for the problem of the unity of God, a compromise which is no solution at all, inasmuch as it is impossible to conceive of a godhead that is omnipresent and omnipotent—as Vishnu and Shiva each claim to be —unless it is at the same time unique. The answer is that Vishnu and Shiva are not ‘jealous’ of one another. They have been content to go shares, and it may be surmised that they have survived—unlike Mithras and Isis and Cybele, their equivalents in the Hellenic World—only because there has not been a Yahweh in the field against them. We reach the conclusion that a divinity credited by his worshippers with a spirit of uncompromising exclusiveness proves to be the only medium through which the profound and elusive truth of the unity of God has been firmly grasped hitherto by human souls.

(7) ARCHAISM

Having now taken stock of the alternative ways of behaviour and feeling that present themselves to souls born into a socially disintegrating world, we may pass on to the alternative ways of life that lie open to be followed in the same challenging circumstances, beginning with the alternative which in our preliminary survey we labelled ‘archaism’ and defined as an attempt to get back to one of those happier states which, in times of troubles, are regretted the more poignantly—and perhaps idealized the more unhistorically—the farther they are left behind.

O how I long to travel back,

And tread again that ancient track!

That I might once more reach that plain

Where first I left my glorious train;

From whence the enlighten’d spirit sees

That shady City of Palm-trees.

Some men a forward motion love,

But I by backward steps would move.

In these lines the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan is expressing the grown man’s nostalgia for childhood, otherwise expressed by those Mr. Bultitudes who, with whatever degree of sincerity, tell a younger generation that ‘your schooldays are the happiest time of your life’. The lines may equally serve to describe the emotions of the archaist who seeks to recapture an earlier phase in the life of his society.

In making a survey of examples of archaism we will divide the field as we divided it when discussing the sense of promiscuity, and take in turn the four fields of conduct, art, language and religion. The sense of promiscuity, however, is a spontaneous, unselfconscious feeling, whereas archaism is a deliberate self-conscious policy of attempting to swim against the stream of life, in fact a tour de force; and accordingly we shall find that in the field of conduct archaism expresses itself in formal institutions and formulated ideas rather than in unselfconscious manners, and in the linguistic field in points of style and theme.

If we now begin our survey with institutions and ideas, our best plan will be to start with examples of institutional archaism in matters of detail and then to follow the spread of the archaistic state of mind over a wider area until we arrive at an ideological archaism which is pervasive because it is an archaism-on-principle.

For example, in Plutarch’s day, which was the heyday of the Hellenic universal state, the ceremony of scourging Spartiate boys at the altar of Artemis Orthia—an ordeal which, in Sparta’s prime, had been taken over from a primitive fertility cult and incorporated into the Lycurgean agogi —was being practised once again with a pathological exaggeration which is one of the characteristic notes of archaism. Similarly in A.D. 248, when the Roman Empire was enjoying a temporary breathing-space in the midst of a bout of anarchy that was bringing it to its ruin, the Emperor Philip was inspired to celebrate once again the Ludi Saeculares instituted by Augustus, and two years later the ancient office of the censorship was re-established. In our own day the ‘Corporative State’ established by the Italian Fascists claimed to be a restoration of a political and economic regime in force in the medieval city-states of Italy. In the same country in the second century B.C. the Gracchi claimed to be exercising the office of the Tribunate of the Plebs in the fashion originally intended at the time of its establishment two hundred years earlier. A more successful example of constitutional archaism was the respectful treatment accorded by Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire, to his nominal partner but actual predecessor in the government of the Roman dominions, the Senate. It is comparable with the treatment, in Great Britain, of the Crown by a victorious Parliament. In both cases there was a real transfer of authority, in the Roman case from oligarchy to monarchy, in the British case from monarchy to oligarchy, and in both cases the change was masked by archaistic formalities.

If we turn to the disintegrating Sinic World we shall observe here the emergence of a constitutional archaism of a more comprehensive scope, extending from public into private life. The challenge of the Sinic time of troubles produced a spiritual ferment in Sinic minds which displayed itself both in the Confucian humanism of the fifth century B.C. and in the later and more radical schools of the ‘Politicians’, the ‘Sophists’ and the ‘Legists’; but this burst of spiritual activity was ephemeral. It was followed by a revulsion towards the past, which can be seen at its clearest in the fate which overtook the Confucian humanism. It degenerated from a study of human nature into a system of ritualized etiquette. In the administrative sphere it became a tradition that every administrative act required the sanction of historical precedent.

Another example of archaism-on-principle in a different sphere is the cult of a largely fictitious Teutonism which has been one of the provincial products of the general archaistic movement of Romanticism in the modern Western World. After having afforded a harmless gratification to some nineteenth-century English historians and instilled a perhaps more tiresome racial conceit into some American ethnologists, this cult of the imaginary virtues of the Primitive Teutons developed teeth and claws as the gospel of the National-Socialist movement in the German Reich. We are here confronted with an exhibition of archaism which would have been pathetic if it had not been so sinister. A great modern Western nation was brought, by the spiritual malady of the Modern Age, within an ace of irretrievable national collapse, and, in a desperate effort to escape from the trap into which the recent course of history had inveigled it, it doubled back upon the supposedly glorious barbarism of an imaginary historical past.

Another and earlier form of this reversion to barbarism in the West was Rousseau’s gospel of the ‘return to nature’ and the exaltation of ‘the noble savage’. The eighteenth-century Western archaists were innocent of the sanguinary designs which appear unashamedly in the pages of Mein Kampf, but their innocence did not render them innocuous in so far as Rousseau was a ‘cause’ of the French Revolution and the wars to which it gave rise.

The vogue of archaism in art is something so familiar to modern Western man that he is apt to take it for granted; for the most conspicuous of the arts is architecture, and our nineteenth-century architecture was desolated by an archaistic ‘Gothic revival’—a movement which, starting as the fad of landed proprietors who put up sham ‘ruins’ in their parks and built mammoth residences in styles supposed to reproduce the effect of medieval abbeys, soon spread to church building and church restoration, where it secured a potent ally in the likewise archaistic Oxford Movement and finally found riotous expression in hotels, factories, hospitals and schools. But architectural archaism is not an invention of modern Western man. If the Londoner travels to Constantinople and watches the pageant of the sun setting over the ridge of Stamboul, he will see, silhouetted against the skyline, dome after dome of the mosques which, under the Ottoman regime, have been constructed with a profoundly archaistic servility upon the pattern of the Big and the Little Haghia Sophia: the two Byzantine churches whose audacious defiance of the fundamental canons of the classical Hellenic order of architecture had once proclaimed in stone the emergence of an infant Orthodox Christian Civilization out of the wreckage of a dead Hellenic World. Finally, if we turn to the ‘Indian summer’ of the Hellenic Society, we find the cultivated Emperor Hadrian furnishing his suburban villa with expertly manufactured copies of the masterpieces of Hellenic sculpture of the archaic period—that is to say, the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; for the connoisseurs of Hadrian’s day were ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, too highly refined to appreciate the masterly maturity of the art of Pheidias and Praxiteles.

When the spirit of archaism is moved to express itself in the field of language and literature, the supreme tour deforce to which it can address itself is to bring a dead language back to life by putting it back into circulation as a living vernacular; and such an attempt is being made to-day in several parts of our Westernized World. The impulse towards this perverse undertaking has come from the nationalistic craze for distinctiveness and cultural self-sufficiency. The would-be self-sufficient nations that have found themselves destitute of natural linguistic resources have all taken the road of archaism as the readiest way of obtaining a supply of the linguistic commodity of which they are in search. At the present moment there are at least five nations engaged in producing a distinctive national language of their own by putting back into circulation some language which has long ceased to be current in any but an academic sphere. These are the Norwegians, the Irish, the Ottoman Turks, the Greeks and the Zionist Jews; and it will be noticed that none of them is a chip of the original block of Western Christendom. The Norwegians and the Irish are respectively remnants of an abortive Scandinavian and an abortive Far Western Christian Civilization. The Ottoman Turks and the Greeks are much more recently Westernized contingents of the Iranic and the Orthodox Christian societies, and the Zionist Jews are a fragment of a fossil of the Syriac Society which has been embedded in the body of Western Christendom since its pre-natal days.

The need which the Norwegians feel to-day for the production of a national language is the historical consequence of a political eclipse of the Kingdom of Norway from A.D. 1397, when it was united with Denmark, down to A.D. 1905, when, in parting company with Sweden, it at length recovered complete independence and once more acquired a king of its own who, abandoning his modern Western baptismal name of Charles, adopted the archaistic throne-name of Haakon, which had been borne by four Norwegian monarchs in the abortive Scandinavian Society between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries of the Christian Era. In the course of the five centuries of Norway’s eclipse the old Norse literature had given place to a version of modern Western literature which was written in Danish, though its pronunciation was modified to accord with that of the Norse vernacular. Thus, when the Norwegians set themselves, soon after the transfer of their country from Denmark to Sweden in 1814, to fit themselves out with a national culture of their own, they found themselves without any literary medium except one of foreign mintage, and without any mother-tongue except a patois which had long ceased to be a medium for literature. Confronted with this awkward gap in the linguistic department of their national outfit, they have been trying to produce a native language which will serve peasant and townsman alike by being both indigenous and cultivated.

The problem confronting the Irish nationalists is far more difficult. In Ireland the British Crown has played the political role of the Danish Crown in Norway with linguistic results that have been similar up to a point. The English language became the language of Irish literature, but, perhaps because the linguistic gulf between the English and Irish languages, unlike the comparatively fine shades of difference between Danish and Norse, is unbridgeable, the Irish language became virtually extinct. The Irish devotees of linguistic archaism are engaged, not in civilizing a living patois, but in re-creating an almost extinct language, and the results of their efforts are said to be incomprehensible to the scattered groups of peasantry in the west of Eire who still speak Gaelic as learnt at their mother’s knee.

The linguistic archaism in which the Ottoman Turks have been indulging under the late President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk’s regime is of a different character. The ancestors of the modern Turks, like the ancestors of the modern English, were barbarians who trespassed on, and squatted in, the derelict domain of a broken-down civilization, and descendants of both sets of barbarians have made the same use of the vehicle of language as a means of acquiring civilization. Just as the English have enriched their meagre Teutonic vocabulary by loading it with a wealth of borrowed French and Latin and Greek words and phrases, so the ‘Osmanlis have encrusted their plain Turkish with innumerable jewels of Persian and Arabic speech. The purpose of the Turkish nationalist archaizing linguistic movement is to get rid of these jewels, and, when it is realized that the Turkish borrowings from foreign sources have been quite as extensive as our own, it will be apparent that the task is no light one. However, the Turkish hero’s method of setting about his task was as drastic as that which he had previously employed in ridding his native country of the alien elements in the population. In that graver crisis Kemal had evicted from Turkey an old-established and apparently indispensable Greek and Armenian middle class on the calculation that, when once the social vacuum had been produced, sheer necessity would compel the Turks to fill it by taking on their own shoulders social tasks which they had hitherto lazily left to others. On the same principle the Ghazi afterwards evicted the Persian and Arabic words from the Ottoman Turkish vocabulary, and by this drastic measure demonstrated what an astonishing intellectual stimulus can be given to mentally sluggish peoples when they find their mouths and ears remorselessly deprived of the simplest verbal necessities of life. In these dire straits the Turks have latterly been ransacking Cuman glossaries, Orkhon inscriptions, Uighur sutras and Chinese dynastic histories in order to find—or fake—a genuine Turkish substitute for this or that sternly prohibited Persian or Arabic household word.

For an English spectator these frantic lexicographical labours are an awe-inspiring spectacle; for they give him an inkling of the tribulations that the future may hold in store for English-speakers too, if ever the day should come when ‘pure English’ is required of us by some masterful saviour of our society. Indeed, some slight preparation for this event has already been made by a perhaps far-sighted amateur. Some thirty years ago, one calling himself ‘C. L. D.’ published a Word-Book of the English Tongue for the guidance of those who long ‘to shake off the Norman yoke’ which lies so heavy on our speech. ‘What many speakers and writers, even to-day’, he writes, ‘call English is no English at all but sheer French.’ Following ‘C. L. D.’ we should call a perambulator a childwain and an omnibus a folkwain; and these might be improvements. But when he seeks to get rid of resident aliens whose domicile is of more ancient date he is less happy. When he proposes to replace ‘disapprove’ by ‘hiss’, ‘boo’ or ‘hoot’ he hardly hits the nail on the head and he hits it much too hard; and ‘redecraft’, ‘backjaw’ and ‘outganger’ are unconvincing substitutes for ‘logic,’ ‘retort’ and ‘emigrant’. ¹

The Greek case obviously resembles the Norwegian and the Irish, with the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the role played in these other cases by the Danish and British Crowns. When the Greeks became nationally self-conscious they found themselves, like the Norwegians, equipped linguistically with nothing better than a peasant patois, and they set out, like the Irish a hundred years later, to recondition their patois for the exacting tasks ahead of it by grouting it with injections of the antique form of the language. But, in making their experiment, the Greeks had to wrestle with a difficulty which was the antithesis of that confronting the Irish; for, whereas the material of Ancient Gaelic was embarrassingly scanty, the material of Classical Greek was embarrassingly abundant. In fact, the besetting snare in the path of the modern Greek linguistic archaists has been the temptation to draw upon the resources of Ancient Attic too prodigally, and thus provoke a modernist ‘low-brow’ reaction. Modern Greek is a battle-ground between ‘the language of the purists’ and ‘the popular language’

Our fifth example, the conversion of Hebrew into a vernacular language of every-day life on the lips of the Zionist Jews of the Diaspora settled in Palestine, is the most remarkable of all; for, whereas neither Norwegian nor Greek nor even Irish had ever ceased to be spoken as a patois, Hebrew had been a dead language in Palestine for twenty-three centuries, since its replacement there by Aramaic before the time of Nehemiah. For all this length of time, until within living memory, Hebrew survived only as the language of the liturgy of the Jewish Church and of the scholarship that concerned itself with the Jewish Law. And then, in the course of a single generation, this ‘dead language’ has been brought out of the synagogue and converted into a vehicle for conveying modern Western culture—first in a newspaper press in the so-called ‘Jewish Pale’ in Eastern Europe and now in the schools and homes of the Jewish community in Palestine, where the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Europe and English-speaking immigrants from America and Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Yaman and Persian-speaking immigrants from Bokhara are all growing up together to speak, as their common language, an ancient tongue that had ‘died’ five centuries before the generation of Jesus.

If we now turn to the Hellenic World, we shall find that here linguistic archaism was no mere adjunct of parochial nationalism but was something more pervasive.

If you examine a book-case filled with a complete collection of the books written in Ancient Greek before the seventh century of the Christian Era that have survived until the present day, you will notice two things: first that the overwhelmingly greater part of this collection is written in Attic Greek, and secondly that, if this Attic library is arranged chronologically, it falls apart into two distinct groups. In the first place there is an original Attic literature written at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. by Athenians who were writing their natural language. In the second place there is an archaistic Attic literature produced over a period of some six or seven centuries—from the last century B.C. to the sixth century of the Christian Era—by authors who neither lived at Athens nor spoke Attic as their native tongue. Indeed, the geographical range of these neo-Attic writers is as wide as the domain of the Hellenic universal state, for among them are Josephus of Jerusalem, Aelian of Praeneste, Marcus Aurelius of Rome, Lucian of Samosata and Procopius of Caesarea. Yet, in spite of this wide diversity of origin, the neo-Atticists display an extraordinary uniformity of vocabulary, syntax and style; for these are, one and all, frank, shameless and servile imitators of the Attic of ‘the best period’.

Their archaism has ensured their preservation; for when, on the eve of the final dissolution of the Hellenic Society, the question ‘to be or not to be’ was being decided for each and every Ancient Greek author by the prevailing literary taste of the day, the test question for copyists was not ‘Is it great literature?’ but ‘Is it pure Attic?’ In consequence we possess volumes of mediocre neo-Attic stuff which we would gladly exchange for a fraction of that amount of the lost non-Attic literature of the third and second centuries B.C.

The Atticism which triumphed in the archaistic age of Hellenic literature was not the only literary exercise of its kind. There is also the neo-Homeric poetry cultivated by a long line of antiquarians from Apollonius Rhodius in the second century B.C. to Nonnus Panopolitanus in the fifth or sixth century of the Christian Era. Our extant specimens of non-archaistic post Alexandrine Greek literature are substantially confined to two sets of works: the bucolic poetry of the third and second centuries B.C., preserved for the sake of its precious Doric, and the Christian and Jewish Scriptures.

The archaistic resuscitation of Attic Greek has an exact parallel in Indie history in the resuscitation of Sanskrit. The original Sanskrit had been the vernacular of the Eurasian Nomad horde of the Aryas, who had broken out of the Steppes and had flooded over Northern India, as well as over South-Western Asia and Northern Egypt, in the second millennium B.C.; and on Indian ground this language had been preserved in the Vedas, a corpus of religious literature which had become one of the cultural foundations of the Indie Civilization. By the time, however, when this Indie Civilization had broken down and entered upon the path of disintegration, Sanskrit had passed out of current usage and had become a ‘classical’ language, studied because of the enduring prestige of the literature enshrined in it. As a medium of communication in everyday life Sanskrit had by this time been replaced by a number of local vernaculars, all derived from Sanskrit but sufficiently differentiated to be regarded as separate languages. One of these prakrits—the Pali of Ceylon—was employed as the vehicle of the Hinayanian Buddhist Scriptures, and several others were employed by the Emperor Acoka (273-232 B.C.) as vehicles for his edicts. Nevertheless, soon after—or even before—Acoka’s death an artificial revival of Sanskrit began and extended its range until, in the sixth century of the Christian Era, the triumph of the neo-Sanskrit language over the prakrits was complete on the Indian mainland—leaving Pali to survive as a literary curiosity in the island fastness of Ceylon. Thus our extant corpus of Sanskrit, like our extant corpus of Attic Greek, falls into two distinct portions: an older portion which is original and a younger which is imitative and archaistic.

In the field of religion, as in the fields of language and art and institutions, it is possible for the modern Western observer to watch archaism at work within the limits of his own social environment. The British Anglo-Catholic movement, for example, is based on the conviction that the sixteenth-century ‘Reformation’, even in its modified Anglican version, went a great deal too far, and the purpose of the movement is to bring back into currency medieval ideas and ceremonies which were abandoned and abolished—on this view inconsiderately—four hundred years ago.

In Hellenic history we find an example in the religious policy of Augustus.

‘The revival of the State religion by Augustus is at once the most remarkable event in the history of the Roman religion, and one almost unique in religious history. . . . The belief in the efficacy of the old cults had passed away among the educated classes . . . the mongrel city populace had long been accustomed to scoff at the old deities, and . . . the outward practice of religion had been allowed to decay. To us, then, it may seem almost impossible that the practice, and to some extent also the belief, should be capable of resuscitation at the will of a single individual. . . . For it is impossible to deny that this resuscitation was real; that both pax deorum and ius divinum became once more terms of force and meaning. . . . The old religion continued to exist for at least three centuries in outward form, and to some extent in popular belief.’ ¹

If we turn from the Hellenic World to the Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern Society, we shall find, in the latter-day Japanese attempt to revive the native Japanese variety of primitive paganism called Shinto, another essay in religious archaism which has points in common with the policy of Augustus and also with the modern German attempt to revive a Teutonic paganism. The undertaking resembles the German rather than the Roman tour de force, for the Roman paganism which Augustus revived was still a going concern, though far gone in decay, whereas the Japanese, like the German, paganism had been for a thousand years supplanted, or absorbed, by a higher religion—in the Japanese case, the Mahayanian variety of Buddhism. The first phase of the movement was academic; for the resuscitation of Shinto was first put in train by a Buddhist monk named Keichu (A.D. 1640-1701) whose interest in the subject seems to have been primarily philological. Others, however, followed up his work, and Hirata Atsutane (A.D. 1776-1843) launched an attack on both the Mahayana and the Confucian philosophy as alien importations.

It will be seen that this Shinto revival, like the Augustan revival, was put in hand almost immediately after Japan had passed out of its time of troubles into its universal state, and that the neo-Shinto movement had just reached its militant stage by the time when the Japanese universal state was prematurely shattered by the impact of an aggressively expanding Western Civilization. When, upon the revolution of 1867-8, Japan entered upon her modern policy of holding her own in a semi-Westernized ‘Great Society’ by modernizing herself on Western nationalistic lines, the neo-Shinto movement appeared to provide just what was needed for asserting Japan’s national individuality in her new international circumstances. The first step taken by the new government in regard to religion was an attempt to establish Shinto as the religion of the state, and at one time it seemed as if Buddhism would be exterminated by persecution. But, not for the first or for the last time in history, a ‘higher religion’ surprised its enemies by its obstinate vitality. Buddhism and Shintoism had to agree to tolerate one another.

An air of failure or, where there is not positive failure, futility surrounds practically all the examples of archaism that we have been examining; and the reason is not far to seek. The archaist is condemned, by the very nature of his enterprise, to be for ever trying to reconcile past and present, and the incompatibility of their competing claims is the weakness of archaism as a way of life. The archaist is on the horns of a dilemma which is likely to impale him, whichever way he may turn. If he tries to restore the past without taking the present into consideration, then the impetus of life ever moving onward will shatter his brittle construction into fragments. If, on the other hand, he consents to subordinate his whim of resuscitating the past to the task of making the present workable, then his archaism will prove a sham. In either alternative the archaist will find, at the end of his labours, that he has unwittingly been playing the futurist’s game. In labouring to perpetuate an anachronism he will in fact have been opening the door to some ruthless innovation that has been lying in wait outside for this very opportunity of forcing an entry.

(8) FUTURISM

Futurism and archaism are both attempts to break away trom an irksome present by taking a flying leap out of it into another reach of the stream of time without abandoning the plane of mundane life on Earth. And these two alternative ways of attempting to escape from the present but not from the time-dimension also resemble one another in being tours de force which prove, on trial, to have been forlorn hopes. They differ from each other merely in the direction—up or down the time-stream—in which they make their two equally desperate sorties from a position of present discomfort. At the same time futurism goes more against the grain of human nature than archaism; for, while it is all too human to seek refuge from a disagreeable present by retreating into a familiar past, human nature is prone to cling to a disagreeable present rather than strike out into an unknown future. Hence in futurism the psychological tour de force is keyed to a distinctly higher pitch than in the archaistic alternative, and futuristic spasms are often the next reaction of souls at bay who have tried the way of archaism and have been disappointed. Disappointment is courted, a fortiori, by futurism too. The failure of futurism is, nevertheless, sometimes rewarded with a very different outcome; futurism sometimes transcends itself and rises into transfiguration.

If we may liken the catastrophe of archaism to the crash of a motor-car which skids right round on its tracks and then rushes to destruction in the opposite direction, the happier experience of futurism may be likened to that of a passenger on board a motor-driven vehicle who believes himself to be travelling in a terrestrial omnibus and observes, with deepening dismay, the ever-increasing roughness of the terrain over which he is being carried forward, until suddenly—when an accident seems immediately inevitable— the vehicle rises from the ground and soars over crags and chasms in its own element.

The futuristic, like the archaistic, way of breaking with the present can be studied in a number of different fields of social activity. In the field of manners the first gesture of the futurist is often an exchange of a traditional for an outlandish costume; and in the ubiquitously—though still no more than superficially— Westernized World of the present day we see a host of non-Western societies abandoning a hereditary and distinctive dress and conforming to a drably exotic Western fashion as an outward sign of their voluntary or involuntary enrolment in the Western internal proletariat.

The most famous, and perhaps the earliest, example of a forcible process of external Westernization is the shaving of beards and banning of kaftans in Muscovy by the order of Peter the Great. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century this Muscovite revolution in costume was emulated in Japan, and similar circumstances have evoked similar acts of tyranny in a number of non-Western countries since the General War of 1914-18. There is, for example, the Turkish law of 1925 which made it compulsory for all male Turkish citizens to wear hats with brims, and the corresponding decrees of Riza Shah Pehlevi of Iran and of King Amanallah of Afghanistan in 1928.

The Islamic World in the twentieth century of the Christian Era is not, however, the only arena in which a hat with a brim has been adopted as the battle-crest of a militant futurism. In the Syriac World of 170-160 B.C. the High Priest Joshua, the leader of a Hellenizing party among the Jews, was not content to advertise his programme by the verbal gesture of transposing his name into Jason. The positive act which provoked the reaction of the Maccabees was the adoption, by the younger priests, of a broad-brimmed felt hat which was the distinctive headgear of the pagan dominant minority in the Achaemenian Empire’s Hellenic successor-states. The ultimate outcome of this Jewish essay in futurism was not a triumph like Peter the Great’s but a fiasco like Amanal-lah’s; for the Seleucid Power’s frontal attack upon the Jewish religion evoked a Jewish reaction of a violence with which Antio-chus Ephiphanes and his successors were unable to cope. But the fact that this particular futurist enterprise was abortive does not make it the less instructive as an example. The ethos of futurism is essentially totalitarian, and this truth was recognized by both Jason and his adversaries. The Jew who wears the Greek petasus will soon frequent the Greek palaestra and will come to regard an observance of the rules of his religion as contemptibly old-fashioned and unenlightened.

In the political sphere, futurism may express itself either geographically in the deliberate obliteration of existing landmarks and boundaries or socially in the forcible dissolution of existing corporations, parties or sects or in the ‘liquidation’ of whole classes of society. The classical example of the systematic obliteration of landmarks and boundaries for the express purpose of producing a breach of political continuity is the redrawing of the map of Attica by the successful revolutionary, Cleisthenes, in about 507 B.C. Cleisthenes’ aim was to transform a loosely knit polity, in which claims of kinship had hitherto usually prevailed over claims of community, into a unitary state in which the obligations of citizenship would in future prevail over all lesser loyalties. His drastic policy proved remarkably successful, and this Hellenic precedent was followed in the Western World by the makers of the French Revolution—whether consciously as a result of their cult of Hellenism or because they lighted independently on the same means for compassing an identical end. Aiming at the political unification of France as Cleisthenes aimed at the political unification of Attica, they abolished the old feudal provinces and levelled the old internal customs barriers in order to turn France into a unitary fiscal area, subdivided for administrative convenience into eighty-three departments whose monotonous uniformity and strict subordination were intended to efface the memory of local diversities and loyalties. The obliteration of old boundaries outside France by the re-mapping of non-French territories temporarily incorporated in the Napoleonic Empire into departments on the French model no doubt paved the way for the creation of unitary states in Italy and Germany.

In our own day Stalin has given characteristic expression to the Bolshevik ethos in the geographical field by carrying to completion a far more radical re-articulation of the internal divisions of the Soviet Union, as becomes apparent when the new administrative map of this region of the world is superimposed upon the old administrative map of the Russian Empire. In pursuing an identical aim, however, Stalin has acted with a subtlety in which he is perhaps a pioneer. Whereas his predecessors have sought to attain their purpose by weakening the existing parochial loyalties, Stalin has pursued the contrary policy of satisfying, and even anticipating, the cravings of parochialism on the shrewd calculation that an appetite is more likely to be stifled by satiety than it is to be extinguished by starvation. In this connexion it is worth remembering that Stalin is himself a Georgian, and that in 1919 a deputation of Menshevik Georgians presented themselves at the Peace Conference in Paris demanding recognition as a distinct non-Russian nationality. They based their claims in part on the distinctiveness of the Georgian language and brought with them an interpreter whose function was supposed to be to translate their outlandish native tongue into French. It was observed, however, on one occasion, by an English journalist who happened (unknown to these Georgians) to be acquainted with the Russian language, that they and their interpreter were actually talking Russian among themselves. The inference was that a Georgian of the present day, whatever his political aspirations, would spontaneously and unconsciously do his political talking in Russian so long as the use of Russian was not being forcibly imposed upon him.

In the field of secular culture the classic expression of futurism is the symbolic act of the Burning of the Books. In the Sinic World the Emperor Ts’in She Hwang-ti, who was the revolutionary first founder of the Sinic universal state, is said to have confiscated and burnt the literary remains of the philosophers whohad flourished during the Sinic time of troubles for fear that the transmission of this ‘dangerous thought’ might thwart his own design of inaugurating a brand-new order of society. In the Syriac Society the Caliph ‘Umar, who reconstituted the Syriac universal state after it had been in abeyance for one thousand years of Hellenic intrusion, is reported to have written, in reply to an inquiry from a general who had just received the surrender of the city of Alexandria and had asked for instructions as to how he was to dispose of the famous library:

‘If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.’

According to the legend, the contents of a library which had been accumulating for more than nine hundred years were thereupon condemned to be consumed as fuel for the heating of the public baths.

In our own day Hitler has done what he can in the way of book-burning—though the advent of printing has made the achievement of ‘total’ results much more difficult for tyrants who have recourse to this measure in our world. Hitler’s contemporary Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk hit upon a more subtle device. The Turkish dictator’s aim was nothing less than to wrench his fellow-countrymen’s minds out of their inherited Iranic cultural setting and to force them into a Western cultural mould; and instead of burning the books he contented himself with changing the Alphabet. From 1929 onwards all books and newspapers were to be printed and all legally valid documents composed in the Latin Alphabet. The passage and enforcement of this law made it unnecessary for the Turkish Ghazi to imitate the Sinic Emperor or tne Arab Caliph. The classics of Persian, Arabic and Turkish literature had now been effectively placed beyond the reach of the rising generation. There was no longer any necessity to burn books when the Alphabet that was the key to them had been put out of currency. They could be safely left to rot on their shelves in the confidence that they would never be disturbed except by a negligible handful of antiquarians.

Thought and literature are not, of course, the only provinces of secular culture in which the heritage of the present from the past is exposed to futurist attack. There are other worlds for futurism to conquer in the visual and aural arts. It is in fact the workers in the field of visual art who have coined the name ‘Futurism’ to describe their revolutionary masterpieces. But there is one notorious form of futurism in the field of the visual arts which stands on common ground between the two spheres of secular culture and religion, namely Iconoclasm. The Iconoclast resembles the modern champion of cubist painting in his repudiation of a traditional style of art, but he is peculiar in confining his hostile attentions to art in association with religion and in being moved to his hostility by motives that are not aesthetic but theological.. The essence of Iconoclasm is an objection to a visual representation of the Godhead or of any creature, lower than God, whose image might become an object of idolatrous worship; but there have been differences in the degree of rigour with which this principle has been applied. The most celebrated school of Iconoclasm is the ‘totalitarian’ one that is represented by Judaism and, in imitation of Judaism, by Islam, and that is expressed in the second of the Mosaic Commandments:

‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.’ ¹

On the other hand, the Iconoclastic movements which have arisen within the Christian Church have accommodated themselves to a distinction which Christianity seems to have accepted from its earliest days. Though the eighth-century outbreak of Iconoclasm in Orthodox Christendom and the sixteenth-century outbreak in Western Christendom may have been inspired, at any rate in part, by the examples of Islam in the eighth century and Judaism in the sixteenth, they neither of them attempted to ban the visual arts altogether. They did not carry their offensive into the secular field, and even in the religious field the Orthodox Iconoclasts eventually acquiesced in a curious compromise. Three-dimensional representations of objects of religious adoration were to be banned on the tacit understanding that two-dimensional representations would be tolerated.

(9) THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF FUTURISM

While success may sometimes have been achieved by futuristic devices in the political field, futurism as a way of life leads those who seek to follow it into a barren quest of a goal which is intrinsically unattainable. Yet though the quest is barren and may be tragic, it need not be without value; for it may guide the baffled seeker’s feet into a way of peace. Futurism in its primitive nakedness is a counsel of despair which, even as such, is a pis aller ; for the first recourse of a soul which has despaired of the present without having lost its appetite for life on the mundane level is an attempt to take a flying leap up the time-stream into the past; and it is only when this archaistic line of escape has been tried in vain or rejected as intrinsically impossible that the soul will nerve itself to take the less natural line of futurism.

The nature of this pure—and by the same token purely mundane—futurism can be best illustrated by citing some of the classic examples.

In the Hellenic World, for instance, in the second century B.C., thousands of Syrians and other highly cultivated Orientals were deprived of their freedom, uprooted from their homes, separated from their families and shipped overseas to Sicily and Italy to serve as slaves on plantations and cattle-ranches in areas devastated by the Hannibalic War. For these expatriated slaves, whose need of a way of escape from the present was extreme,’ there was no possibility of an archaistic retreat into the past. Not only was it impossible for them physically to make their way back to their homelands, but all that had made those homelands congenial to them had irretrievably perished. They could not go back; they could only go forward; and so, when their oppression became intolerable, they were goaded into physical revolt. The desperate purpose of the great slave insurrections was to establish a kind of inverted Roman Commonwealth in which the present slaves would be masters and the present masters slaves.

In an earlier chapter of Syriac history the Jews had reacted in a similar way to the destruction of their sovereign independent kingdom of Judah. After they had been swallowed up in the neo-Babylonian and Achaemenian Empires and had been scattered abroad among the Gentiles, they could not hope with any conviction for an archaistic return to the pre-exilic dispensation in which Judah had lived a life of parochial independence. A hope that was to be convincing could not be conceived in terms of a state of affairs that had passed away beyond recall; and, since they could not live without a lively hope of extricating themselves from a present to which they could not be reconciled, the post-exilic Jews were driven into looking forward to the future establishment of a Davidic Kingdom in a shape which had no precedent in Judah’s political past, a kingdom of the only type now conceivable in a world of great empires. If the new David was to reunite all Jewry under his rule—and what but this could be his mission?—he must wrest the sceptre of empire from the hands of its present holder and must make Jerusalem to-morrow what Babylon or Susa was to-day, the centre of the World. Why should not a Zerubbabel have as good a chance of world dominion as a Darius, or a Judas Maccabaeus as an Antiochus, or a Bar-Kokaba as a Hadrian?

A similar dream once captivated the imaginations of ‘the Old Believers’ in Russia. In the eyes of these Raskolniki the Tsar Peter’s version of Orthodoxy was no Orthodoxy at all, and at the same time it was impossible to imagine the old ecclesiastical order triumphantly reasserting itself in the teeth of a secular order that was omnipotent as well as Satanic. The Raskolniki were therefore driven to hope for something without precedent, for the epiphany of a Tsar-Messiah who would be able as well as willing to restore the Orthodox Faith in its pristine purity.

The significant common feature of these examples of pure futurism is that the hopes in which the futurists have sought refuge have all been set upon a purely matter-of-fact fulfilment in the ordinary mundane way; and this feature is conspicuous in the futurism of the Jews, which has left ample documentary evidence of its history. After the destruction of their kingdom by Nebuchadnezzar the Jews again and again put their treasure in the hope of establishing a new Jewish state, whenever the play of oecumenical politics gave them the slightest encouragement. The brief bout of anarchy through which the Achaemenian Empire passed between the death of Cambyses and the rise of Darius saw Zerub-babel’s attempt (circa 522 B.C.) to re-establish a Davidic Kingdom. In a later chapter of history the longer interregnum between the decline of the Seleucid Power and the arrival of the Roman legions in the Levant was mistaken by the Jews for a triumph of the Maccabees; and a majority of the Palestinian Jews were so heedlessly carried away by this mirage of mundane success that they were willing—as ‘Deutero-Isaiah’ had been, four hundred years earlier—to throw overboard the now long consecrated tradition that the founder of the new state must be a descendant of David.

Whatever might have been possible against the senile Seleucids, how could the Jews hope to measure themselves against the mighty power of Rome in its heyday? The answer to this question was as clear as day to the Idumaean dictator Herod. He never forgot that he was ruler of Palestine by the grace of Rome, and so long as he reigned he contrived to save his subjects from the nemesis of their own folly. Yet, instead of being grateful to Herod for teaching them so salutary a political lesson, the Jews could not forgive him for being right; and as soon as his masterful hand was removed they took the bit between their teeth and bolted down their futuristic path to the inevitable catastrophe. Even then a single demonstration of Rome’s omnipotence did not suffice. The appalling experience of A.D. 66-70 did not deter the Jews from courting and winning disaster again in A.D. 115-17 and yet again in A.D. 132-5. Bar Kokaba in A.D. 132-5 was pursuing the same end by the same means as Zerubbabel in 522 B.C. It took the Jews more than six centuries to learn that futurism of this sort would not work.

If this were the whole Jewish story it would not be an interesting one; but it is, of course, only half the story, and the less important half. The whole story is that, while some Jewish souls ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’, like the Bourbons, other Jewish souls—or even some of the same Jewish souls in a different mood and through a different spiritual faculty—were gradually taught by bitter experience to put their treasure elsewhere. In the process of discovering the bankruptcy of futurism the Jews made the further tremendous discovery of the existence of the Kingdom of God; and century by century these two progressive revelations, the one negative and the other positive, were being unfolded simultaneously. The expected founder of the new Jewish mundane commonwealth was conceived of, appropriately enough, as a king of flesh and blood who would found a hereditary dynasty. Yet the title under which this empire-builder was predicted, and under which every successive pretender to the role, from Zerub-babel to Bar Kokaba, was acclaimed, was not melek (king) but Messiah—’the Anointed of the Lord’. Thus, even if only in the background, the god of the Jews was associated with the hope of the Jews from the beginning; and, as the mundane hope inexorably faded away, the divine figure loomed ever larger till it filled the whole horizon.

To call a god in aid is not, of course, in itself an unusual procedure. It is probably as old a practice as religion itself for a people embarking on some formidable enterprise to invoke the protection of their tutelary deity. The new departure lay not in the claim, expressed in the title ‘Messiah’, that the people’s human champion had the sanction of a god behind him; what was new, and also momentous, was the conception of the patron deity’s nature and function and power. For, while Yahweh did not cease to be thought of as the parochial god of Jewry in a certain sense, it was in another and wider aspect that he was pictured as the patron of the Lord’s Anointed. The Jewish futurists of the Post-Captivity Age were, after all, engaged on no ordinary political enterprise. They had set their hearts on a task which was, humanly speaking, impossible; for, when they had failed to preserve even their petty local independence, how could they hope to make themselves masters of the World? To succeed in this task they must have for their divine protector no mere parochial god but one commensurate with their futuristic ambitions.

Once this has been realized, a drama which, up to this point, has been ‘common form’ in the history of religions is transposed into a higher spiritual dimension. The human champion sinks to a subordinate role while the Divinity dominates the scene. A human Messiah is not enough. God Himself must condescend to play the part of Saviour. The champion of His people on the terrestrial plane must be Himself the Son of God.

By this time any modern Western psychoanalyst who is reading these lines will be raising his eyebrows. ‘What you have proclaimed as a sublime spiritual discovery turns out’, he will interject, ‘to be nothing but a surrender to that infantile desire to escape from reality which is one of the besetting temptations of the human psyche. You have described how some unhappy people who have foolishly set their hearts on an unattainable aim attempt to shift the intolerable burden of being saddled with an impossible task from their own shoulders to those of a series of intended substitutes. First they conscript a merely human champion; then, when he cannot avail, a human champion reinforced by an imaginary divine backing; and finally the fools, in desperation, signal S.O.S. to an imaginary divine being who is to do the job himself. For the psychological practitioner this rake’s progress in escapism is a familiar story and a melancholy one.’

In reply to this criticism we shall readily agree that it is childish to call upon a supernatural power to carry out a mundane task that we have chosen for ourselves and find ourselves unable to perform. The prayer ‘My will be done’ stands self-convicted of futility. In the Jewish case in point there were schools of Jewish futurists who did persuade themselves that Yahweh would take upon himself his worshippers’ self-chosen mundane task, and these Jewish futurists did, as we have already seen, come to a bad end. There was the melodramatic suicide of the Zealots who faced hopeless military odds in the delusion that the Lord of Hosts would be a host in Himself on the day of battle; and there were the Quietists who argued from the same erroneous premisses to exactly the opposite, but not less hopeless, conclusion that they should abstain from taking any action of their own in a mundane cause which they had decided to register as God’s affair. But there were other responses—the response of the school of Johanan ben Zakkai and the response of the Christian Church; and, while these two responses resemble Quietism in the negative feature of being non-violent, they differ from both Quietism and Zealotism in the more important positive point that they have ceased to set their heart on the old mundane purpose of futurism and have put their treasure in a purpose which is not Man’s but God’s, and which therefore can only be pursued in a spiritual field in which God is not an ally but the director of operations.

This point is of capital importance because it disposes, in these cases, of the criticism which our psycho-analyst can direct with such deadly effect against both the Zealots and the Quietists. To call in God cannot be denounced as infantile escapism if, at the same time, the human actor withdraws his libido from his previous mundane aim. And, conversely, if the act of invocation does produce so great and so good a spiritual effect as this in the human soul that performs it, that would appear, prima facie, to give ground for a belief that the Power which has been invoked is not a mere figment of the human imagination. We shall allow ourselves to hold that this spiritual reorientation was a discovery of the One True God, and that a human make-believe about the future of This World had given place to a divine revelation of an Other World. Through the disappointment of a mundane hope we have been admitted to an apocalypse of a reality which had been there all the time behind the scenes of a narrow man-made stage. The veil of the Temple has been rent in twain.

It remains for us to note some of the principal stages in the accomplishment of this immense feat of spiritual reorientation. Its essence is that a mundane scene which was once looked on as a stage for human actors, with or without superhuman backers, is now regarded as a field for the progressive realization of the Kingdom of God. At first, however, as might be expected, the new idea largely clothes itself in imagery derived from the old futurist conception. Against this background ‘Deutero-Isaiah’ draws the lineaments of a Kingdom of God which transcends, but also includes, the idea of a mundane kingdom, an Achaemenian Empire in which his saviour-hero Cyrus has taken Jerusalem instead of Susa as his capital and the Jews instead of the Persians as his ruling race, because Yahweh has revealed to him that it is he (and not Ahuramazda) who has enabled Cyrus to conquer the World. In this day-dream ‘Deutero-Isaiah’ is exposing himself, with a vengeance, to the strictures of our psychoanalyst. This prophet’s conception transcends the mundane futurist idea only on the point that both Man and Nature are depicted as experiencing a miraculous beatification. His Kingdom of God is really nothing but an Earthly Paradise, a Garden of Eden brought up to date.

The next stage comes when this Earthly Paradise is thought of as only a transitory state which may last perhaps for a thousand years ¹ but is destined to pass away, at the end of its allotted term, with the passing of This World itself. But if This World must pass in order to give place to an Other World beyond it, then it is in that Other World that the true Kingdom of God must lie; for the King who is to reign during the Millennium is not yet God himself but merely his deputy or Messiah. It is manifest, however, that the conception of a miraculous Millennium in This World, pending the replacement of This World by an Other, is an untenable attempt at a compromise between ideas that are not only distinct but in the last resort are mutually incompatible. The first of these ideas, Deutero-Isaiah’s idea, is the hope of a futurist mundane kingdom with miraculous ‘improvements’. The second idea is that of a Kingdom of God which is not in Time at all but is in a different spiritual dimension, and which, just by virtue of this difference of dimension, is able to penetrate our mundane life and to transfigure it. For making the arduous spiritual ascent to the vision of transfiguration from the mirage of futurism, the eschatological scheme of the Millennium may have proved an indispensable mental ladder, but when once the height has been scaled the ladder can be allowed to fall away.

‘The Pharisaic pietist had already learnt under the Hasmonaeans to turn away from This World to Heaven, to the future; and now, under Herod, all the current of national feeling which had been set running during the last generations in such strength beat against a blind wall, and itself found no outlet except through the channels opened by the Pharisee. It was among the people bent down beneath that iron necessity that the transcendental beliefs, the Messianic hopes, nurtured in the Pharisaic schools, spread and propagated themselves with a new vitality. The few books of Pharisaic piety that have come down to us— Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, the Assumption of Moses and others—show us indeed what ideas occupied the minds of writers, but they could not have shown us what we learn from our Gospels: how ideas of this order had permeated the people through and through; how the figure of the Coming King, “the Anointed One”, “the Son of David”, how definite conceptions of the Resurrection, of the Other World, were part of the ordinary mental furniture of that common people which hung upon the words of the Lord. . . . But... the Christ whom the Christian worshipped was not the embodiment of any single one of those forms which had risen upon prophetic thought; in Him all the hopes and ideals of the past met and blended.’ ¹