A STUDY OF
HISTORY
BY
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
HON. D.LITT. OXON. AND BIRMINGHAM
HON. LL.D. PRINCETON, F.B.A.
Director of Studies in the Royal Institute
of International Affairs
Research Professor of International History
in the University of London '
(both on the Sir Daniel Stfvenson Foundation]
'Except the Lord build the house,
their labour is but lost that build it.
'Except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.*
Ps, cxxvii. 1-2
VOLUME VI
Issued under the auspices / the Royal
of International Affairs
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
A STUDY OF
HISTORY
BY
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
HON. D.LITT. OXON. AND BIRMINGHAM
HON. LL.D. PRINCETON, F.B.A.
Director of Studies in the Royal Institute
of International Affairs
Research Professor of International History
in the University of London '
(both on the Sir Daniel Stfvenson Foundation]
'Except the Lord build the house,
their labour is but lost that build it.
'Except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.*
Ps, cxxvii. 1-2
VOLUME VI
Issued under the auspices / the Royal
of International Affairs
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
f, I ' " "!* ' '
r.ll
O
CHICKED
\ Oxford University Press, Amen House, London #.('.,;
lUASGOW NEW YOKK TORONTO MrMlOTHM ^HUMUns
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CArf TOWS uiAnAv
V
I'lMST EDITION
SKVKN'IH IMr
PRJNTED IN CHEAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
V. THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILI-
ZATIONS (ami.)
C THE PROCESS OF THE niSINTK^HATK >NS nj-
CIVILIZATIONS (cont.) . *
I, THE CRITERION OF PWINTXttKATION (<"fmf.) , J
(</) Schism in the Soul (<-f;rtf.) , , , , . i
7, The Sense of Unity . *
8, Archaism . 4tf
(a) Arthairm *Vi /fwf*wfw tfmf /i/nu , 4^
($) Archaism in An < <tf
(y) Archaism in fMnguagt am/ titeratur* ( <&
(&) Arcltaum in
(<) The
9, FuturiJim
#>w IV^irw*
The Bicch in
The Brnch in
The Breach in Scvular <'t*hurr rnJ m Hrltrf"n * ti
(r) TA/ $ty*Tttinscn*dfi%et ef ptAfvnim , * j*
10. Dcttchment . * j*
xx. Tn*%utm > 149
(#) Palingcnci . ***#
XI. AN ANALYSIS Ol* fIHfNTJItt1tAr|f)N . . - - *?f
() The Keltttion iK-twcrn !}tmiritftmit C"tvjh**tu*n atd ln*1i%H!uiU 4?^
The Creative Ci<*niu n t *Svitiur , 17$
The Saviour with th Hwir4 . , i?i
The Saviour with the 'Tim^-Mnrliuir* . jti
The Philwjiophfr rfwikcd by * Kifitf * , j 41
The <#<xJ !ndrnt in A Mm - 4*^
(6) The !ntrction IH?
The Rhythm of Divinc^mtitm
lite Rhythm in Ifelbinc Hiuiry
The Hhythin in Sink Hi*t^ry .
The Rhythm in Suinrrk Uivfury f
The Rhythm in the Ilitiary of ih^ Mum iU^Jv of HH>v
tcntlom , , ,
Th*ft Ehythifi in Hindu
The !lhyt^*m in Hyrinc
Ilhytam m the Htitary of
the Ifimtiry of <lw^ Mum i^iy **l ih* t^tr IW
,
The Hhyhm in Hubyhmk Htiory ,
l*he Rhy hm in the Hunury of tlrthmla* C*ui*i*#u3j*r m
Ventigei In MintMun iftjimry , in
Symptom i in Wtfrn Hkenry , . , , IM
vi CONTENTS
III. STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION . - ' 3-**
Table I; Universal States . . . , ;U7
Table II: Philosophies ...... 3%%
Table HI: Higher Religions . . -3*9
Table IV: Barbarian War-Bands , . . - 33
V. C I (d) 7 Annex: The Hellenic Conception of the 'Cosmopolite' . 332
9 (]8) Annex: New Eras . . -339
ii ,47W* /: Aristophanes* Fantasy of Tloudcuckoolimd' . 346
Annex II: Saint Augustine's Conception of the Kchuions
between the Mundane and the Supra- Mun-
dane Commonwealth . . 3^5
n (a) Annex I: The Hellenic Portrait of the Saviour with the
Sword . . - - -370
Annex II: Christus Patiens . - - * 37&
The Problem . . . . 37*>
Correspondences between the Story of Jesus and
the Stories of certain Hellenic Saviours with
the 'Time-Machine* .... 377
A Synopsis of Results . . . 406
Table I: Concordance of the Literary Authorities 407
Table II: Analysis of Correspondences between
the Gospels and the Stories of 1'ttgftn
Heroes .... 40$
Table III: Analysis of Correspondents between
the Stories of the Spartan Archabts
and those of the Other Heroes . 409
Table IV: Common Characters . ,410
Table V: Common Scenes . . ,411
Table VI: Analysis of Visual Correspomknce*
between the Gospels and tbe Stories
of Pagan Heroes . * ,411
Table VII: Common Properties , . 413
Table VUI: Common Worda . . 4*4
Table IX: Analysis of Verbal Correpon<knc#
between the Gospel* and the Stark*
of Pagan Heroes , . 4*7
Alternative Possible Explanation* * * 4*8
Dichtung und Wahrheit . * 438
The Legend of Haraklfis . . - 4^5
Table X: Concordance of Corrpondcncc* be*
tween the Legend of H^mkll* *n<i
the Stories of Jeans and the Ptgin
Historical Hcroc* * . - 47^
The Ritual Murder of an Incarnate C od * 47&
(a) 'The Ride of the Eeardlet* On< * ,481
(/3) 'The Reign of the Mock King* . - 481
The Life and Death of Socrtte* * 486
An Egyptian Bridge between Laconii* and Galilee 4^6
A Verbal Means of Conveyance , < $00
A Visual Means of Conveyance , 508
The Economy of Truth , . "534
INDEX TO VOLUMES IV-V1 , . . . ,341
V
THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF
CIVILIZATIONS (font.)
C. THE PROCESS OF mSlNTKOR VHON u^if
(I) THE CRITERION OF ntSlNTKUKATtnN* ., ^?
(d) SCHISM IN TH1{ St>n, (<-wi/ )
7, The *SV#w f/ ? VYv
IN our preliminary reconnaissance <f thr rrlmnm prtttcr
several alternative ways* of btrhaviwa' frrlinu .ttu! hu in tt
human souls react to the ordca! of nueul dKintri*fui*n, ur hr. r
observed 1 that the sense of promiscuity. ufuch ur !unr in *r J-rr <<
studying in various manifestatuws n it, is ,4 pu h-!,*f^i 3^
sponse to a blurring and hlcmimi: of fhr sharp utJnultu! "ur\ f *
that are assumed hy a civilmmmt while if i> Mill in K**' V U h 4i^i j
therefore still differentiating itself fr*nn nthcr n*jnornr *f -./-> ,j
its kind; 2 aad in this connexion we Juvr Mtt^rt\*tl Hut ti,* *-.*?:, r
experience may alternatively evoke another rr^ tu-> ,^i .r^ .M ^
ing to a sense of unity -which in nut only d{sfuu k t !i m fhr sr?, r ?
promiscuity hut in its exact amithrsis, Thr p.unful prttmln.*:
dissolution of familiar Ibnns, which .HU^CMH iu \%r,ikr? uptm il*i
the ultimate reality is noihini* huf a clnins, uuiv rrvr.il t-* ,t \*^4 fjr;
and more penetrating spiritual vimon fhr truth ilut fhr flukrttf,^
film of a phenomena! wtjrltl in which fhr fnrtm **t *u!4f4 flu?^*^
take shape only tt> disappear atjain i** ;tn Uu',j'*n ^huh ^t^H*t
for ever obscure the trvcrlasiinu taiity ih, lir^ lrtm! J
This spiritual truth* like uthrr truths *iJ thr luul n 4pt ^ t**"
apprehended first hy analogy frnrn ^Mlti^ Mutu4iJ \njMr MVMI, ,r*J
the portent in the external \utjrM uhifh ^rtvrs thr fir.f u.f.tMU^ti
of a unity that in spiritual atnl ulfintatr i^ fhr imiiu^fi -n t 4
human society into a universal Mate thf'tu*h 4 jn^ui^ ^!h ttuul
process of internecine war! arr hrtwrrn jMrothul t4tci whuh h
* In V. Cui f</} j, \v,l, v, i ^St, ^ - 4 r
i * For thr dtffrrnttuiiMH jjui 4 -i i 4t t,4 <1 4 MKTnr* <- !** s-t^*'* 1 "f *
civj j jzimn rr III. <*, \oi m* j ^ i;' ^ A, -*r
^ In the Hrlinm YU f iKi;<jf /|,V\",r-^u^ ih,, fr,r,.- * t *>>. ^ *** * r ^ rf ^.i
ntl ffivrn <xprniu4(t S /ru t fhr - ,s ,v* , j n*r -t, * ' . , t * . * * . n u i
* i
, t , .
below *** m nir ** w * r
as THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
ended at last in the exclusive and unchallenged dominion of one
sole surviving belligerent.
The dawn of a sense of unity on this pedestrian political plane of
life is commemorated in the titles in which some of the universal states
that have come into existence up to date have proclaimed their rulers*
own conception of their nature and function* 1 For example, the
prince of the Eleventh Egyptiac Dynasty who was the founder of
the Egyptiac universal state styled himself 'the Uniter of the Two
Lands', 2 and his Sumeric counterpart Ur-Engur gave his similar
political handiwork the title of 'the Kingdom of Sumcr and Akkatf.
Ur-Engur's successor, Dungi, abandoned this mere enumeration
of his empire's two principal component parts for tine abstract and
comprehensive title of 'the Kingdom of the Four Quarters V and
precisely the same formula was invented independently by the Incas
in another hemisphere and at a Time-remove of more than three
thousand years to designate the universal state into which they
had united the political surface of the Andean World/ Again,
1 Pretensions to oecumenical power can be expressed in the action of rite <*r cert*
rival claimants to supreme power, delivered after this fashion ;
* "A horse of a particular colour was consecrated hy the prrfurmaiuT t>f certain
ceremonies, and was then turned loose to wander for a year. The Kin^t tir hi* ft* i>rc i rnm
tive, followed the horse with an army, and, when the animal enterrdi a foreign rmintry,
great festival was held, at which the, horse was sacrificed" * (Smith, V, A,: The K<n/v
History of India , 3rd ed, (Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), p. 200, Burning Drnvntm, J,:
Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and jR%rVi, 6>i^rpA>% //iif#r ( v, um/ f, iterator*
(London 1879, Trilbner), s,v, Asvamedha),
The first recorded performance of this imperial rite seems to he it* ftfrhratiun fay
Pushyamttra, the usurper who overthrew the Mtury* Dynastyfind *cttm{ttrd m vm
to enter into the imperial heritage of Chandraftupt* and AvotattVft* *K*; JM\ (rc
Smith, op, cit., pp. 200-2). Thereafter, upon the rdnttgntion of the ImJi<? universal
state by the Gupta Dynasty after a lonpj interlude of HHcn0N0mid imrtttion, the
traditional horse-sacrifice was celebrated in succession by &tmu<$r*gupu, nrat A.t>. 35*
(Smith, op. cit., p. 288), and by his grandson KumSragupt** lmptrab<xt> Ar** 413 55)
(Smith, op. cit., p. 290). The last recorded performance of the haritc**<rrifice *i iu
celebration by a scion of the Gupta Dynasty after the death of the Thin**ri cmtwror
Harsha in A.D. 647 (Smith, op. cit., p, 313),
a Meyer, E.: Oeschichte des Altertums, vol. i part a, 3rd ctl (Htuttgurl and Berlin
1913, Gotta), i>. 257. According to Breasted, J, H,: Tke Dtvtlepmtttt qf Migim a**tf
Thought in AnaentEgypt (London 1012, Hodder4cStoughton) pp, 3x4-15. 'it w umv#r
salism expressed in terms of imperial power [by the emperors of **thc New Kmpir* " in n4
after the reign of Thothmes HI} which firat caught the imagination f thtr thinking mn
of the Empire, and disclosed to them the universal sweep of the Sun-tit^T* d^mmrcm #*
a physical fact , whereas 'commercial connexions, maintained from n immemiirtaHy rt?-
mote past, had not sufficed to bring the great world within the purview of Ky ptwn thmk
ing . As evidence of the awakening of E&yptic minds, in the time of 'the Nuw Emmr**
to a aenat* OT twrtrln imifv Mi-*>at*/i /*v y.i# ***n. * %\ M*M.*AJ& ^ L..^^. m ^, *t^^ L..,_. / **...'.
, , ., . ., . . , , ,
Annex, vol. v, p. 651, above.
4 s*e . V. C . (i) ft) 6 (5), Annex, p. 652, above, am! Cunow. H,; QmMxhu w*d
Kultur des Inkareiches (Amsterdam 1937, Elscvier), pp. 75-61 Msrkbtm* Sir C: T&*
SCHISM IN THK SOU, ?
the sovereign of the Achaemenian Umpire* \\lwh sent 4 .1* a mn
versal state for the Syriac World, asserted thr nrcuuiriur.il MTUV
of his rule by styling himself *Kin,u uf the L.tmls* us 'kr L* nt
Kings' 1 a title \vhich was laconically translated info itrrk in
the one word Bacuhtw vvithuut even an inirmiuv'fniv tlrinufr
article. 2 The same claim to exercise an mvmnrnK.tl au:h<*n?\
over a united world is embodied, with cnmpUtr rxplu jtitr -, in
the phrase Tien Ilia "All that is under HcM\ru* uhuh \*,n thr
official title of the Sinic universal sute nt" thr H,m; and thr
transmission, not only of this verbal formula, but aKu nf thr <uf,
look which it conveys, from the Sinic Sncietv t<t thr m.uu bul\
of the affiliated Far Eastern Society is attested ,uutu? .1 w.m nf
other evidence by the terms of alrttrr fruin thr M.imhu l^nprrnr
Ch*ien Lung (impffrahat A.IJ, 1735 <>'*) f Kim: ffrMrvr III <t
Great Britain which has been quoted already iti this Sttut>, 1 Thr
Roman Empire which served t!w Hdlrnic WmW ^ ,t tuuvrf^l
state came to be equated in the Latin tatitfiutfr uith the f fains
Terrarum* and in Greek with the OtVtii^i*Vi| in thr urn^r f fhr
whole of the inhabited world; and the eonseutUHtitHH. in Hrllrfv
souls, of the unity of Mankind, for which thr Ktmun l.ifjjnrr
provided an outward visible symbol, nuiy \w ilhiMratni by ijnf m^
from the works of two ,writers *if the jtrc*mi rrsitnry i*l thr
Christian Era one a philosopher am! the other a hifttnti wh
were both of them living under the ae^in of ;m o*cutnrnii'4t KmtiAn
Peace.
In a passage in which his main concern AH to pant out thr hmiu*
tions of Caesar's power, Kpictctun br^iiw by rrnurkiti^:
'You see that Caesar appear* to provide ti* with *t j,jfr4t jnr4i r, !*
there are no longer any wam or haulmor any wfituu ^ruiim *f lt%$*
age or piracy, so that one can travel at any rjw*m uinl 1 4n ^\l It tn
Levant to the Ponent. * $
i*/xo Srtih K14rn, f, ?< !t>
politic*! plane new* it tt> hnvtf *X|ur)iKf4 it***it, i*> mfUivii^ii'-ii^ *-^ jfrvr f#J**<*i#i i<U#%*
conception of the worU i * wmty f?*vtiUtr4 mf** lf^ t|-ufrr* f.. f *wi ^*^"***
bpinden* H, |.: Antitnt (fathwtwtf i 3/-s'<i *jhl f Vi##; |**#fH4 i \* 1 ..*% .
Amenoin Mufteum of Nmur*) Huitf\} ( p, AU*I
1 Meyer, K.I 6Vjr<-fe>^ */*!, 'Wr^*Mw,v*l tiiis^ rf (m i^, { , i ,^^ f t ,. ; ^ f ,
3 IhiiverNuecoipnt^ttfiufthr ufi|iirtirMf ihr *ui^*itii^4i^. .*Vh* ,\K*^if
tfiforti to extend hiMttt'umrmrMt mnh.r*T> 'n^fHfiVimn^'f'**** ***" *'** 4 * lMt '^
* In L C |iii) |^), vf, , p,
, whil
n, th*i MrtowH,
w*i VI ||
4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
And this unification of the whole of Mankind under a Roman
peace, which Epictetus mentions in order to belittle the achievement,
is belauded by Appian in the enthusiastic introduction to his
Studies in Roman History:
'A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to
those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have
revolted have been reduced to obedience ; but, since the Romans already
pcssess the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the Globe,
they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than at
extending their empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and un-
remunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen
representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic
missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing
to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his
Government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the
Romans themselves appoint, since they feel no necessity to incorporate
them into their empire. There are also certain subject nations to Whom
they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to
repudiate them in spite of their being a financial burden. They have
garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies,
and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as though
it were a modest farm/ 1
In this picture of a Hadrian or an Antoninus Pius dealing with
the barbarians of his own entourage with that judicious mixture of
benevolence and disdain which Ch'ien Lung employed in dealing
with the ambassadors of the South Sea Barbarian King George III,
we see Rome holding at bay a generation of men who are impor-
tuning her to place her empire at their disposal as an instrument
for giving satisfaction to a sense of unity which is demanding
fulfilment in an outward political form. The Roman Emperor of
Appian' s day does not have to *go out into the highways and hedges
and compel them to come in, that' his 'house may be filled:* 2 so far
from his being called upon to be a conqueror, his task is to act as the
warden of a kingdom that 'suffereth violence, and the violent take
it by force' 3 in so far as the Emperor, in his wisdom, allows them
to have their way.
In truth, neither the Roman Empire nor any other universal
state could have either established itself in the first instance or
maintained itself thereafter 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. 4 In Hellenic
quoted in the present chapter, p. 16, footnote 2, and at greater length in V. C (i) (<) xo,
1 &PP ian: Roma ^ Prooemium, 7. ^ Luke xiv. 23, 3 Matt, x*. 12
/ML* y , ea - rmng t0 g l ve P 01 ^ expression to an awakened coruKaousnew of the unity
of Mankind is not confined to the Dominant Minority and the Internal Proletariat who
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 5
history this longing or, rather, the sense of relief at its belated
satisfaction breathes through the Latin poetry of the Augustan
find their satisfaction for it in becoming respectively the citizens and the subjects of a
universal state: as Appian testifies, it also arises out of an analogous experience, and
finds satisfaction in an analogous way, among the External Proletariat in the no-man's-
land beyond the stationary artificial limes of a universal state which has not arrived at a
'natural frontier' (see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 208-10, above).
In this case, as in the other, the consciousness of unity is awakened by a violent process
of external unification on the political plane of life. We have seen that, in the course of
the 'Time of Troubles' of a disintegrating civilization, the parochial states into which
the society has articulated itself in its growth-stage destroy one another through an
internecine warfare which ends in the establishment of one universal state by a sole
surviving victor. In a similar way the incessant border-warfare, along the limes of an
established universal state, between the garrisons on the one side and the outer bar-
barians on the other, results in the break-up of the primitive barbarian tribes and in their
replacement by war-bands. These war-bands conform on a miniature scale and with a
barbarous crudity to the pattern of the adjoining universal state to whose challenge
they are a response (see V. C (ii) (a) t pp. 230-3, below : one striking example of this, which
has been noticed in V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 270-1, above, is the establishment of the
steppe empire of the Hiongnu in answer to that of the Sinic universal state of the Prior
Han) ; ana one of the ways in which this conformity shows itself is the role which is
played by such war-bands, as well as by universal states, in evoking a consciousness of
unity out of an experience of pammixia. A war-band, like a universal state, is apt to
express this consciousness in its style and title. For example, we may see an analogue
of the Achaemenian 'Kingdom of the Lands' in the 'Pamphyli', who were one o the
bands that descended upon the derelict domain of the Minoan World in the last wave
of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung, and an analogue of the Sinic 'All that is under
Heaven' in the 'Alemanni' who broke through the Roman limes and ensconced them-
selves in a salient between the upper courses of the Rhine and the Danube during the
bout of anarchy through which the Roman Empire passed in the third century of the
Christian Era (see V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex I, vol. v, p. 59^, above). Such names tell their
own story; and the social change to which they testify is a replacement of the primitive
bonds of kinship by a pan-barbarian comradeship -based on the personal loyalty of a
comitatus to a war-lord which is incompatible with the primitive sense of tribal par-
ticularism as well as with the complementary sense of solidarity within each tribe. (For
this change see Chadwick, H. M.: The Origins of the English Nation (Cambridge 1907,
University Press), pp. 162-4 an d I 75J eundem: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912,
University Press), pp. 391 and 443 ; and the present Study, V. C (ii) (a), in the present
volume, pp. 228-36, and especially pp. 231-2, below.) A classic case is that of the
war-bands (druzhinaiy of the Scandinavian barbarian 'successor-states' of the Khazar
steppe empire in the Khazars' former sphere of influence in the Russian forests. Both
the princes and their war-bands were -entirely without 'stability' (in the monastic sense
of an enduring attachment to a single community in a single place). The principalities
ranked in a definite order of precedence ; a prince had to follow a cursus honorum which
kept him perpetually on the move from one principality to another of higher rank; and
the war-bands trekked at their masters' heels. In the twelfth century, 'as before, the
druxhina was a mixed company. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Varangians, as
we know, had been the predominant element in them. In the twelfth century alien
elements also "join up* . Besides native Slavs and Russified descendants of the
Varangians we also find recruits of alien race from East and West, members of neigh-
bouring communities, Turks, Berendeyans, Polovci, Khazars, even Jews, Ugrians,
Liakhi, Lithuanians, and the Chuds' (Kliutachewskij, W. [Kluchevski, V.}: Geschicht*
Russlands, vol. i (Berlin 1925, Obelisk Verlag), pp. 197-8).
This passage from an old-fashioned tribalism to a new-fangled social sense which is
individualistic in one aspect but universalistic in another is reflected in the Teutonic
barbarians' 'heroic' poetry, in which 'nationalism in the narrower sense i.e., in the
interests of the poet's own nation or tribe seems to be altogether wanting* (Chadwick,
The Heroic Age, p. 34; cf. p. 335; Meyer, E.; Geschichte des Altertums t vol. ii, part (i)>
znd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1928, Cotta), p. 295). The same Universalism is like-
wise pharacteristic of the 'heroic' poetry of the Russians (Chadwick, H. M. and N, K;
The Growth of 'Literature ', vol. ii (Cambridge 1936, University Press), pp. 02 and 94) and
the Achaeans ; and it also displays itself in this case in combination with Anthropo-
morphism in the religion of the Teutons, the Achaeans, and the Aryas, who, all alike,
worshipped a pantheon conceived in the image of a barbarian war-band with a war-lord
at its head (see the present Study, L C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 95-100 ; II. D (vii), vol. ii, p, 3 16 j
II. D (vii), Annex V, vol. ii, pp. 434-7; and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 230-3, above).
'The itme gods were^. to a large extent at least, recognized everywhere. Whether by
6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Age; and we children of the Western Society in the present
generation are aware from our own experience how poignant this
longing may be in an age when the unity of Mankind is being
striven for unavailingly. In our day the universal state for which
we yearn the oecumenical commonwealth that will establish its
peace from end to end of a Westernized and, by the same token,
tormented world has not yet made its epiphany even on the
horizon; yet, in anticipation of its coming, its style and title
The Great Society' has been coined by a twentieth-century
English sociologist 1 as a Western equivalent for the Hellenic
Oucoufw-Vq and for the Sinic 'All that is under Heaven*,
It is this great longing for Peace on Earth after the tribulation
of a Time of Troubles' that has moved the subjects of the founders
or preservers of the universal states to venerate them as Saviours of
Society 2 or actually to worship them as gods incarnated And even
the historian's colder judgement will single out* as the greatest
of all men of action, those oecumenical rulers a Cyrus, an
Alexander, an Augustus who have been touched with pity for the
sufferings of their fellow men and, having caught the vision of the
unity of Mankind, have devoted their personal genius and thtir
political power to the noble enterprise of translating this clearly
bought ideal into a humane reality.
Alexander's vision of Homonoia or Concord 4 never faded out of
the Hellenic World so long as a vestige of Hellenism remained in
existence; and the compelling spiritual power of his humanitarian
gospel is impressive in view of the recalcitrance of his Macedonian
companions towards his efforts to induce them to fraternize with
their defeated Iranian antagonists, and the equally stubborn recal-
citrance 6f the rest of the Greeks towards his ordinance that the
ruling faction in every city-state should reopen the gates to their
exiled opponents of the contrary party. All but a few of the
borrowing or by identification of cult* they had ceased to be mtrtly tribal dcitict, , , .
Tribal ideas gave way to Universalism both in th cult of higher powers and in th oon*
ception of immortality* (Chadwick: The Hermc Ag#, pp. 4x4 and 443). A para-chill
tribalism was likewise transcended in the abortive movement* of re*iat*ncc to ***
irresistible tide of European colonization that wens st in motion among the North
American Indians at different times between A.0. 1762 and A,D. 1886 by a wrrie* of
barbarian prophets (see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 33$3 t bov c ); and the aubontmation
of an unusuauy obstinate tribal particularism to a ntw *cn*e of Panarab brotherhood
was the essence of the immense political achievement of th barbarian J*roph#t Muham-
mad in the Arabian hinterland of the Roman Empire.
Wallas, Graham: TA* Great Sotitty (London 1914* MacmilJa**)*
a See V. C (ii) (a) f po. 181-2x3, below.
s See V. C (i) (d) 6 (5), Annex, vol. v t pp, 648-57, above,
4 The credit for having been the first to catch thii vision in this H*l!*nk World I*
disputed between Alexander of Macedon and Zeno of Citium by their ra|>ectiv*
modern Western championa ; W. W. Tarn (Alexander *fa Ore&t &md tfttf C/irfjy m M##*
kind (London 1933, Milford)) and J. Bide* {<* CM du MoWt #* l<* CVurf ^w &&tf cte
Ut St<flcitns (Paris 1932, Les Belles Lettrs)j, Se now alto Tarn; *Alexandr, Cynic*
and Stoics* in American Journal of Philology, vol. Ix x Whole Number
January 1939, Johns Hopkins University rras).
SCHISM IN THE SOi'L 7
Macedonian officers whom their royal leader had cajoled or
dragooned into embarking with him on the pacific adventure ot
taking in marriage an Iranian bride might brutally rrfnidutr fhrjr
unwanted Oriental wives as soon as Alexander had hern foul in hi a
premature grave, 1 Yet, some three hundred years after Alexander'*
death, we find Caesar Augustus putting Alexander's head on hi*
Roman signet-ring as an acknowledgement of the source f rom which
he was seeking inspiration for his arduous work of hrmtfintf $ urdy
peace and unity to a Hellenic World which Alexander 1 * muvowrn
had thrown back into disunion and dmwd;* anil *nmr two
hundred, years after Augustus's time, again, this Alexandrine
tradition 'of humanitarianism still had power to move an warn-"
grained and brutal a soul as CantcallaV tt> complete the prut 4 ***
which Julius Caesar had lavishly begun and Augtmttn otuttiiu!y
continued of conferring the Roman citizenship upon the auhjrct
majority in the population of the Kuman Empire,* Nor did
Alexander's example merely influence the actitm <* ihrmr Ulcr
oecumenical rulers who 6at in Alcxandcr'a actt and caught from
that eminence Alexander's birdVeye view of ill hit feltuw men;
the leaven also worked its way down through the variegated mmu
of a Hellenic Society which had now annexed the children of few*
submerged alien worlds to the Hellenic internal pruirtariAt, If
was Alexander's spirit that moved one Roman centurion t Caper-
naum to make his humble appeal w Jeaua to heal hi* wrrvani by
simply speaking the word without coming under hi* rmif. 1 and
that emboldened another Roman centurion it C'araarra to mvuc
Peter to his house. 6 It was Alexander's! spirit, ltkrwi*r k thai m*
spired the Greeks who had came up to jeniiulcm m order to
worship at the feast to ask the disciple* of Jew* whether ihrtr
Master would grant them an audience ; 7 and we may Mieve that flic
same Alexandrine vision of the unity of Mankind wa* the human
inspiration in the mind of Jesus himself* when he broke ut
Sdeucua act tn honturtbJc but no* * *k ly f4l*w*4
to
3 T*m op, eif* p. , ,
Alexander succctiort toward* A!cji*mkr*i tll #** V t' ti*i 4*1,
^ 3 For Caracil!*** ml* in f
^
tion of tht Dommam Mmtrty M; V, t* f i| trf) fe <<|,
4 According 10 ur Ittersry iiuihtirtciM, t w*!k'
"
t, j* 415,
Mommsen disputed , thit r i? K** vtm**&
wta perhaps urmioj to thotv mhnb*urii* tf ih* Kmi^r* wh** w*i* ii#*4? m j
of some local civic franehi**. Smrt Mtmmacn' 4*^ Oiutn^*M 4 *** #*< ** *
ffto ^niowKitfifA iitlr hj* cm t Iiuhc in jPtowm r#V**# 4^, K*i !* *%^
it so ambiguous, and she l^unwr irr au44'(i(ti& | '
nd equally piauaibte vonjerturI rMttiuiwrK, 1H* * wtt ** ^M *^
dupoMd of Mommtftiit query, (}k* J*n**, A, II M "Ai^*H*rf It*wii
Cwutttutw AntommpiM m Tkt}ttw**lvj &#**>* fltofai, * M j ^, h*r , <
* Matt, viii , s-ii m take vii, i*to. * Aa* % * iaj^
fli ol Our bwrnii df Jvwry
8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
a paean of exultation upon learning of the Greeks' request, 1 and
again when, in his encounters with the dissident woman of Samaria 2
and with the Hellenized woman of Phoenicia, 3 he broke away from
an inhuman Jewish tradition of non-intercourse with unbelievers. 4
If we are convinced that Alexander's gospel of the unity of
Mankind did indeed possess this power of creating concord between
souls so far removed in time and creed and class from the Mace-
donian warrior- visionary, then we shall find ourselves impelled to
search for the source from which this extraordinary power was
derived ; and, if we address our inquiry in the first instance to a
humanist of the modern Western school, 5 he will probably reply
that the Brotherhood of Man is one of those fundamental truths
which, once seen, are recognized, in the same flash, as being self-
evident; and he will be likely to add that the duty and desire to
serve Humanity require no sanctions outside themselves in any
human heart that has become sensitively aware of its kinship with
all its fellows. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. 6 The
validity of the principle of Altruism is taken for granted by modern
Western humanists of every sect. The Communist, for instance,
believes, as devoutly as the Positivist, 7 that Man's ultimate duty
is owed to his fellow men in a Universe in which Humanity. is
monarch of all it surveys, because Man has no God above him; 8
and yet we have seen reasons for believing that the dynamic
elements in Communism the springs of the action that has made
Communism a force in contemporary human affairs-^are derived,
albeit unconsciously, from a trinity of theistic religions, if we are
right in tracing back some of these elements to Christianity and
others to Christianity's two forerunners, Judaism and Zoroastrian-
ism. 9 If we now return to our inquiry into the basis of the Human-
was indeed partly inspired by the spirit of Alexander, this is not to say that Jesus himself
was ever conscious of acting under Alexander's influence, but simply that Alexander's
spirit was *in the air' of Palestine in Jesus's day.
i John xii. 23-4. The historical significance of this passage is the same whether it be
accepted as a statement of historical fact or interpreted as a piece of retrospective fiction.
* John iv. 1-42. 3 Mark vii. 24-30.
* ludaicum ediscunt et servant ac metuunt ius,
tradidit arcano quodcumque volumine Moyses,
non monstrare vias eadem nisi sacra colenti,
quaesitum ad fontem solos deducere verpos.
Juvenal: Satires^ No. xiv, 11. 101-4.
s_For the modern Western idolization of Humanity at large with a capital *H' ;-as
distinct from the idolization of some racial or tribal fraction of Mankind see IV. C (iii)
(c) 2 (a), vol. iv, pp. 300-3, above.
6 Terence: Heautontimorumenos, Act I, Scene i, 1. 25. Compare the lines of Menander
that are quoted on p. 1 1, footnote i, below.
7 For the Positivist doctrine on this point see Caird, E. : The Social Philosophy and
Religion of Comte (Glasgow 1885, Maclehose), p. 53.
8 For this forlorn and forbidding aspect of Humanism see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (a), vol. iv,
pp. 302-3, above.
9 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v> pp. 178-9, above. Compare Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter,
V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1934 (London 1935, Milford), pp. 355-7.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 9
ism of Alexander, shall we find the theistic vein that is latent in
Marx's Humanism anticipated in Alexander's vision ?
There was, we must allow, in Alexander's life one arresting
experience on the ordinary human plane which might have been
sufficient, in and by itself, to open Alexander's eyes to the intel-
lectual falsity and the moral indefensibility of the current Hellenic
dichotomy of Mankind into 'Hellenes' and 'Barbarians' ; and that
was his sensational discovery of the unexpected virtues of his
defeated Iranian adversaries. In the hostile caricature which had
been the convention in Hellas during the interval of 146 years by
which Alexander's passage of the Hellespont was separated from
Xerxes' unluckier crossing of the same straits in the opposite
direction, the Persian grandees had been held up to odium as
monsters of luxury, tyranny, cruelty, and cowardice; and now,
when Xerxes' abortive aggression had been avenged at last up to
the hilt by Alexander's victorious riposte, the Macedonian cham-
pion of Hellas learnt, through the intimate and illuminating inter-
course of warfare, that these arch-barbarians were in reality men
capable of showing a bravery in battle and a dignity in defeat
which even a Spartan might envy. 1 The deepness of the impres-
sion which this unlooked-for discovery made upon Alexander's
mind is notorious; but, if we go on to ask whether, in Alexander's
opinion, this experience of his own, or others like it, would suffice
in themselves to awaken in human souls a consciousness of the
unity of Mankind and a will to act upon this great discovery, our
evidence (scanty though it is) will inform us explicitly that the
answer is in this case in the negative. It is recorded that at Opis,
in Babylonia, Alexander once offered up a prayer that his Mace-
donians and his Persians might be united in Homonoia; 2 and
Plutarch reportss 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's anthro-
pology differed from that of MarX in the fundamental point of
resting on an avowed theological foundation instead of professedly
hanging in the air. It tells us that Alexander discovered the truth
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 ever 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.
* See V. C (i) (c) i, vol. v, pp. 51-2, above.
2 or the significance of mis prayer see Tarn, op. cit., p. 19.
3 Plutarch: Life of Alexander, chap. 27 (cited in Tarn, op. cit., pp. 25 and 41).
io THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The only society that is capable of embracing the whole of Man-
kind is a superhuman Civitas Dei; and the conception of a society
that embraces all Mankind and yet nothing but Mankind is an
academic chimaera.
If Alexander was indeed the Prometheus who enriched the
Hellenic World with a knowledge of this heavenly truth, 1 the care
with which the precious revelation was handed down to later
generations is impressively attested in the teachings of a Stoic
philosopher who was born not much less than four hundred years
after Alexander's death.
'Slave, wilt thou not bear with thine own brother, who has Zeus to his
forefather and has been begotten like a son from the same sperms, and
in the same emission from Heaven, as thyself? If the station in which
thou hast been posted here below happens to be one that is somewhat
superior to thy brother's, wilt thou have the face to take advantage of
that in order to make thyself a tyrant? Wilt thou not remember what
thou art thyself and who are these thy subjects remember, that is to
say, that they are thy kinsmen and thy brothers, both in the order of
Nature and in their being of Zeus's lineage?' 'Yes, but I have rights
of property over them, while they have none over me.' 'Do you per-
ceive the objects upon which your eyes are set? They are set upon
the Earth and upon the Pit and upon the wretched laws 'of a society
of corpses, instead of being set upon the laws of the Gods. . . ,' 2
'What kind of love was it that Diogenes felt for his fellow men? It
was the kind that befitted a sage who was the servant of, Zeus a love
that was devoted to the creature's welfare yet was at the same time sub-
missive to the Creator's will. In virtue of this, Diogenes alone among
men had every land on Earth for his native country, without there being
one single spot where he did not find himself at home. When he was
taken captive, he felt no homesickness for Athens or for his Athenian
friends and acquaintances. He became intimate with the pirates them-
selves, and did his best to reform them. And when he had been sold
into slavery he led just the same life in Corinth afterwards as he had led
in Athens before. Nor would he have behaved any differently if he had
been packed off to Ultima Perrhaebia.' 3
Epictetus's Diogenes has won his freedom of 'the Great Society'
of the Hellenic OiKovfjievrj by taking the road from Man through
God to Man which Paul lays down for his Colossians. In the
philosopher's colder and more sophisticated way, Diogenes too,
as Epictetus portrays him, has
'put off the old man with his deeds and . . . put on the new man which
is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him
where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision,
1 For the modern Western controversy over this question see p. 6, footnote 4, above.
* Epictetus: Dissertationes y Book I. chap. 13, 3-5.
* Ibid., Book III, chap. 24, 64-6.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL n
Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all, and in all/ 1 [be-
cause Christ is God Incarnate, and] 'God that made the World and all
things therein . . ,. hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell
on all the face of the Earth, . . . that they should seek the Lord, if haply
they might feel after him and find him though he be not far from
every one of us ; for in him we live and move and have our being, as
certain also of your own poets have said: "For we are also his off-
spring".' 2
Thus we see a prophet of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic
Society proclaiming in unison with a statesman and a philosopher
of the dominant minority the truth that the unity of Mankind is
a goal which men can attain by way of the common fatherhood of
God and (Paul would add) through the new revelation of the
common brotherhood of Christ, but not through any exclusively
human endeavours in which God's leading part is left out of the
reckoning. If it is true on the one hand that 'where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of
them', 3 it is equally true as is signified in the legend of the
Tower of Babel 4 that, 'except the Lord build the house, their
labour is but lost that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the
watchman watcheth but ih vain'. 5 The common experience of
the Hellenic Time of Troubles' taught this truth to Alexander
the Greek and to Paul the Jew, to Epictetus the Hierapolitan bonds-
man 6 and to Diogenes the freeman of the city of the OlKovpevr];
but the Hellenic Society has not been singular either in passing
through great tribulation or in learning this lesson by suffering
this affliction. In the Egyptiac World, more than a thousand years
before Alexander made his pilgrimage to the oasis-oracle of Amon,
the unity of Mankind was numbered among the mighty works of
the divinity, manifested in the Sun-Disk, who was worshipped by
Ikhnaton.
'The lands of Syria and Nubia and the land of Egypt thou puttest
every man in his place and thou suppliest their needs. . . . Thou art lord
1 Col. iii. 9-ii. In these words of Saint Paul there is perhaps an echo of some lines
of Menander (fragment 533 in Koch's edition):
off av t? yeyovws $ rj) tfrfoci irpos TQ.ya.6o.,
KOV AlBLatjt $, fjtfrcp
.
Oys TtV; oAeflpor o S' 'Avdxapets ov Zfevftjs;
2 Acts xvii. 24-8. The quotation rov yap teal yevos cV/xev is from the exordium of
Aratus's Phasnomena^ 1. 5, which had been echoed in the Stoic philosopher-poet
Cleanthes* Hymn to Zeus, 1. 4: e*c oov yap y&o$ eta* ... or CK aov yap ycvoiJtfoP ....
3 Matt, xviii. 20. .This Christian 'loon* is a **
.. ....
Matt, xviii. 20. .This Christian 'logion* is presumably derived from a Jewish *logion*
preserved in more than one passage of the Talmudic literature which runs: 'Where
two or three are gathered together to study the Torah, the Shekinah is in the midst of
them/
* Gen. xi. 1-9. s ps. cxxvii. 1-2.
6 Epictetus appears to have been born at Hierapolis (the Carian or the Syrian?) and
only to have settled at Nicopolis after having been expelled from Italy (see H. Schenkl's
edition of the Dissertationes (Leipzig 1894, Teubner), p. iv).
12 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
of them all, who wearieth himself on their behalf; the lord of every land,
who arisethfor them. . . . All far-off peoples thou makest that whereon
they live. 11
And in the Western World of the present generation a truth which
has been strenuously combated by a school of Western humanists
for the past five hundred years has at last been boldly and abruptly
reaffirmed by a philosopher who is a Frenchman in culture and
a Jew by origin.
In a book entitled Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion*
the veteran metaphysician Monsieur Henri Bergson has expounded
his ethics and his politics at an age of life at which the philosopher's
intellect has received the tempering of the man's experience; and
Bergson's central theme in this work of his old age is the thesis that
there is no terrestrial road along which Man can make the transit
from a primitive Ishmaelitish tribalism to an oecumenical concord
of all Mankind. Between the tribe and Mankind there is a great
gulf fixed, and on the terrestrial plane this chasm is utterly impass-
able, since the social bond which holds the tribe together is a
solidarity for parochial self-defence against a world of human
enemies beyond the tribal pale; and a complete removal of this
external human pressure would threaten the tribe with dissolution
by depriving it of the hostile environment on which it depends for
its cohesion. The denizens of the deep sea, whose frames have
been built for bearing the enormous pressure of the mass of water
that weighs upon them at these formidable depths, are said to
burst asunder, long before they reach the surface, if the deep-sea
fisherman catches them in his toils and strives to drag them up to
the air and light; and in much the same way a tribe of men
though it may be capable of expanding from the dimensions of a
kaffir kraal to a British Empire embracing one-fifth of the living
generation of Mankind and extending over a quarter of the land-
surface of the Globe is perhaps doomed a priori to fall to pieces,
long before it comes within sight of attaining an oecumenical
universality, at the point, wherever this may lie, where the cen-
tripetal outer forces that have been holding it together lose their
preponderance over the centrifugal forces from within that are for
ever pushing it to dissolve apart. If ever this critical point is
reached, the human statesman who has dreamed the dream of
elevating his tribe into an oecumenical society must find himself
1 Ikknaton's hymn to the Aton, as translated in Erman, A.: The Literature of the
Ancient Egyptians, English translation (London 1927, Methuen), p. 290. In V. C (i)
(d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 695, with footnote 2, above, it is suggested that Ikhnaton's
proclamation of the unity of Mankind in virtue of their common enjoyment of the
ubiquitous beneficence of the Aton was a disinterested expression of a genuine intuition
and was not the political manoeuvre of a prince whose real concern was to unify a multi-
national empire. 2 Paris 1932, Alcan.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 13
awakened to a harsh reality in which he is offered the cruel choice
between falling back into tribalism and stumbling on into anarchy.
On this showing, the attempt to make the transit to an oecumenical
society from a parochial tribe is doomed a priori to failure so long
as it is made on the terrestrial level; and the last word of Bergson's
philosophy is a declaration that this transit which Man must
somehow make if he is not to perish from off the face of the Earth
can only be made across a bridge that vaults over an impassable
terrestrial gulf by rising to the height of Heaven* The whole of
Mankind can never dwell together in a brotherly unity 1 until men
have learnt to exchange their intrinsically conflicting as well as
parochial tribal loyalties for one common allegiance to a heavenly
king. 2
This is the final intuition of a modern Western philosopher who
stands, in his ripe old age, at the apex of a pyramid of thought that
is the cumulative product of the philosophical labours of five
industrious centuries of Western mental 'output' ; yet the truth
which it has cost our philosophers all this time and toil to win by
their own lights has been picked up casually by our anthropolo-
gists 'out of the mouth of babes and sucklings'. 3 The all but
annihilated rear-guard of a Primitive Man whom a sophisticated
Homo Ocddentalis alternately pities and abhors for his ignorance
of his social solidarity with the main body of Mankind outside the*
tribal zariba, has never ceased to take for granted the solidarity
between the tribe on its narrowly circumscribed terrestrial allot-
ment and the tribal gods in a circumambient Universe; 4 and, how-
ever parochial the 'savage's* horizon may be on the plane of sheerly
human life on the surface of this planet, his soul still lives and
moves in a spiritual environment with a superhuman dimension
which the modern Western humanist has deliberately excluded
from his reckoning. The humanist purposely concentrates all his
attention and effort upon a purely human cross-section of life
which he abstracts from the totality of his spiritual environment
by a mental operation that is performed for the practical purpose
of bringing human affairs under human control. Yet Reality can-
not in truth be eluded by begging the question that is involved in
the postulate that 'Man is the measure of all things' ;s and therefore
the unity of Mankind can never be established in fact except within
a framework of the unity of the superhuman Whole of which
1 Ps, cxxxiii. i.
2 This Bergsonian thesis is examined further in Part VII, below.
3 Ps. viii. 2.
* This element in the Weltanschauung of Primitive Man has been touched upon by
anticipation in IV. C (in) (c) 2 (j3), vol. iv, p. 351, above.
s This saying, which is attributed to Protagoras, is alluded to by Plato in his
Theaetetus, 183 B.
I 4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Humanity is a part. An oecumenical society must preserve or
recapture those spiritual dimensions which the tribal societies
possess as their birthright if the house with the broader terrestrial
site is to stand as stalwartly as its terrestrially diminutive neighbour.
However large its area on Earth, Man's universe cannot give Man's
spirit room to breathe unless it also extends from Earth to Heaven;
and our modern Western school of humanists have perhaps been
peculiar, as well as perverse, in planning to reach Heaven 1 by
raising a titanic Tower of Babel on terrestrial foundations in three
dimensions as though it were sheer physical distance, and not
any difference in mode of spiritual being, that divided and dis-
tinguished Heaven from Earth, When we compare this grossly
mundane plan of operations which has governed the outlook and
behaviour of the. Western Society in its Modern Age with the
reactions of other civilizations to a comparable social experience,
we shall become aware of a contrast. In the Sinic World, for
example, the craving for unity that was evoked by a 'Time of
Troubles' was never confined to the terrestrial plane.
*To the Chinese of this period the word One (unity, singleness, &c.)
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.' 2
If this comprehensive Sinic way of pursuing the quest for unity
may be taken as the norm, 3 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 paripassu 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
1 Gen. ri. 4.
a Waley, A. : The Way and its Power (London 1934, Allen & Unwin), Introduction,
pp. 60-70.
3 There is, however, at least one modem Western scholar wlio claims for the camp
of Humanism not only Confucius but all the Sinic philosophers with the possible
exception of Mo-tse.
'Confucius cut, semble-t-il, I'id^e . . . de faire reposer toute la discipline des naceurs
aur un sentiment afnn de 1'hurnanlsme. ... La conception confucienne du jen cm de
1'homme accompli, et qui me'rite seul le nom d'homme, s'inspire d'un sentiment de
rhumanisme qui pent d^plaire, mais qu'on n'a pas le droit de celer. . . . Seul, aemble-t-il,
lui paraissait bienfaisant et valable un art de la vie jaillissant des contacts arnica VLSI entre
hommes police's. . . . Sauf M6 tseu <s'il faut admettre que ce^ pfre*dicateur croyart i sa
rhetorique), il n'eat point, dans I'antiquite 1 , de sage chinois qui ait ye'ritablemexit songe*
a fonder, sur des sanctions divines, la regie des moeurs. . . . La sagesst chinoiae est une
sagesse indtyendante et tout humaine. EUe ne doit rien a Tid^e de Dieu' (Granet, M.:
La Penste Ckifoise (Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre), pp. 473, -486, 489, and 588).
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 15
observed already 1 that when, after the breakdown of a civilization,
a number of parochial communities are fused together into a
universal state, the process of political unification is apt to be
accompanied, on the religious plane of ritual and theology, by an
incorporation of the diverse parochial divinities into a single
pantheon which reflects, and is reflected in, the concomitant
change in the order of human life on Earth. 2 As the internecine
warfare between conflicting parochial states results in the supre-
macy of a single victor and in the subjugation of all the rest, so the
parochial god of the victorious human community an Amon^-Re
of Thebes or a Marduk-Bel of Babylon becomes the high god
of a pantheon into which the gods of the defeated human com-
munities are marshalled in order that henceforth they may fetch
and carry or stand and wait at the pleasure of their new master.
It will be seen, however, that the condition of human affairs
which finds its superhuman reflexion 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 that type eventually
settles down in the course of the age that follows its establishment;
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 independent states into a hege-
mony of one of them over the rest. A political structure which,
on the morrow of its establishment, may have been accurately
described as 'the Kingdom of the Lands' solidifies in the course
of time into a unitary empire articulated into standardized pro-
vinces; and a corresponding process of concentration concurrently
transforms the Padishah or King of Kings in fact, if not in name
into a solitary autocrat who delegates his plenary authority to
creatures of his own instead of simply keeping his foot upon the
necks of kinglets whose forefathers had been his own forefathers'
peers. In fact, in a fully seasoned universal state which, in matur-
ing, has developed true to type, there are two salient features
which dominate, between them, the entire social landscape. On the
one hand there is a monarch whose task and title-deeds alike con-
sist in keeping the peace among his subjects by the exercise of his
sovereign will; and on the other hand there is the law which is the
instrument for translating the monarch's will into action. And in
a world of men that is governed on this plan the Universe as a
1 In V. C (i) (d\ 6 (8), vol. v, pp. 529-32, above.
2 This morphological correspondence between the universal state and the pantheon
that are constructed by. the Dominant Minority at the close of the 'Time of Troubles' has
its analogue, in the history of the External Proletariat, in the, similar correspondence
between the barbarian war-band and the barbarian pantheon of Olympus or Aagard
face I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 96-7; II. D (vii), Annex V, vol. ii, pp. 436-7; and V. C (i)
(c) 3, vol. v, pp. 230-3, above).
16 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
whole is likely to be conceived on a corresponding pattern. If the
human ruler of a universal state is at once so powerful and so
beneficent that the subjects whom he has delivered from the night-
mare of a Time of Troubles' are easily persuaded to worship him
in person as a god incarnate, 1 then, a fortiori, they will be prone
to see in him a terrestrial likeness of a heavenly ruler who is like-
wise unique and omnipotent a god who is no mere God of Gods
like Marduk-Bel or Amon-Re, but who reigns alone as the One
True God with mere angels for his ministers and with no other
god in existence to share, even in a subordinate role, a divinity
which would not be truly divine if it were not strictly indivisible.
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 regular alternations of night and day
and winter and summer but also the more wayward movements
of the winds and tides and the impenetrably mysterious distribu-
tion 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. 2
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 unity of the Universe that has ever
taken shape in human minds in the social environment of a univer-
sal state; 3 but a survey of cosmologies of this kind will show us
that they tend to approximate to one or other of two distinct types.
i For this phenomenon of Caesar-worship in universal states see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8),
Annex, vol. y, pp. 648-57, above.
* The limitations upon Caesar's power are pointed out by Epictetus in the sequel to
the passage that has been quoted in this chapter on p. 3, above:
'Can Caesar also bring us peace from fever and from shipwreck, or from conflagration or
earthquake or thunderbolt ? Yes, and from love ? Impossible. And from grief ? Impossible.
And from envy? A sheer impossibility in every one of these predicaments. But, unlike
Caesar, the doctrine (Aoyos) of the philosophers does promise to bring us peace from
these troubles too' (Epictetus: Dissertationes, Book III, chap. 13, 10).
This Stoic distinction between the two different kinds of peace has (as has been pointed
out by Professor N. H. Baynes in The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. xxv, part (i), 1935,
p. 85) a Christian counterpart in:
'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you. Not as the World giveth give I
unto you' (John xiv. 27).
For the context of the passage of Epictetus see V. C (i) (d) 10, p. 142, below.
3 The Sinic representation of the unity of the Universe which crystallized under the
Ts'in and Han regimes must be declared, however, to be an exception to our rule if
we are to follow the- guidance of Monsieur Marcel Granet in his La Penste Chinpise
(Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre). The formula in which this modern Western scholar
sums up (in op. cit,, p. $86) his own reading of Tesprit des mceurs chinoises* is 'Ni Dieu,
laLoi.
durete, _ = f ; r ^
vertu de la discipline Ik ont eu le gout des^jugements imp'artiaux, des Evaluations
objectives, des arguments concrets. Ces esprits positifs et de"ja e"pris de rigueur scienti-
fique n'ont obtenu qu'un succes fugitif . Les Sophistes n'ont pas r6ussi & f aire accepter
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 17
There is one type in which the Law is exalted at the expense of
God and another in which God is exalted Lt the expense of the
Law. And we shall also find that the emphasis on the 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.
This differentiation of outlook is not difficult to understand if
we can imagine ourselves, by turns, in the position of each of the
parties. The Achaemenian Emperor and the Persian grandees
who were his ministers in the government of the Syriac universal
state were acutely conscious of the potency of a Law which was
not merely the engine of the Imperial administration but was also
a force in itself 'the Law of the Medes and Persians which
altereth not' 1 and which insists inexorably 'that no decree nor
statute which the King establisheth may be changed', 2 though the
King himself may labour till the going down of the Sun 3 to revoke the
royal decision that has passed once made out of the playground
of personal caprice into the realm of the immutable. On the other
hand the impotent and insignificant Jewish subjects of the Great
King, who knew nothing of the arcana imperil* were vividly aware,
and whole-heartedly-grateful, when the Great King deigned to
take notice of their plight and to speak the saving word, A Cyrus
who delivered them from a Babylonish captivity 5 and an Arta-
xerxes who intervened at the critical moment to avert the imminent
miscarriage of the work of reconstruction that an Ezra or a Nehe-
miah was carrying out under the Great King's patronage 6 these
were personalities whose power and will for good made an endur-
ing impression upon the 'folk-memory' of the broken peoples over
whom they had cast their beneficent aegis.
Such considerations may explain why it is that the mind of the
par les Chinois I'ictee qu'il existSt des termes contradictoires. De m6me, les Le*gistes
n'ont pas re*ussi a accre'diter la notion de regie constante et la conception de la Loi
souveraine (pp. 470-1). . . .
Tuisque tout depend de congruences, tout est affaire de convenances. La Loi, Tabstrait,
1 mconditionnel sont exclus 1'Univers est un tant de la Socie'te' que de la Nature. . . .
On tient a conserver a toutes les notions, mSnae & celle de Nombre, mme a celle de
Destin, quelque chose de concret et d'inde"termin6 qui reserve une possibility dej'eu.
Dans l'ide"e de rtgle, on ne veut guere voir que I'ide'e de module. La notion chinoise de
1 Ordre exclut, sous tous ses aspects, Tid6e de Loi* (p. 590).
This Sinic refractoriness to the concept of Law has its complement in an impervious-
ness to the concept of God.
'Les Chinois n'ont aucune tendance au spiritualisme. A peine trouve-t-on la trace,
dans les croyances populates, d'un animisme inconsjstant L'incre'dulite', chez tous
les sages, est totale, bien plus souriante qu'agressive. . . . Les dieux . . . n'ont aucune
transcendance. Trop engage's dans le concret, trop singuliers, Us manquent ausri de per-
sonnahte. Et chez aucun sage, en effet, aucune tendance au personnalisme ne se re-
marque, pas plus qu'au spiritualisme' (p. 587).
1 Dan. vi. 8 and 12; compare Esther i. 19. * Dan. vi, 15.
3 Dan. vi. U. . * Tacitus: Annals, Book II, chap. 36.
s Isa, xliv. 28 and xlv. 1-4; Ezra i.
6 Ezra iv; Neh. ii.
20 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
on the wheel was a human gnat or a divine bluebottle ? And
could it matter whether the small deer scampering through
aisles of the towering temple were mannikin mice or godling rats ?
Yet in their practical treatment of this wretched rabble of the self-
enslaved bondsmen of Desire this motley crowd in which meri
and gods were tumbling over each other pell-mell under the sage's
coldly contemptuous eye the Buddhist philosophers did still take
the trouble to differentiate between the two species in one way that
was wholly to the disadvantage of Man's superhuman companion
in insignificance. The mouse-like human being was eligible, e&
officio humanitatis, for admission to the only career that was worth
following in a world of suffering and illusion; and from this strait
way of release the rat-like god was excluded a priori, ex officio
divinitatis. Any human being might become a Buddhist monk or
nun, if only he or she could stand the ascetic ordeal; and, for this
renunciation of the pleasures of Vhomme moyen sensuel, the com-
pensation that was offered was enormous. Even the subdued
philosophy of Primitive Buddhism held out to the steadfast arhat
the prospect of ultimately attaining for himself (or, strictly speak-
ing, for his own tangled spillikin-pile of psychological states) a
release from the Wheel of Existence and an entry into the oblivion
of Nirvana] and the flamboyant religion of the Mahayana*
which was the Buddhist philosophy's changeling child, outbid its
foster mother by bringing within the reach of any one of its
human children the nobler and more inspiring aim of becoming a
Bodhisattva or candidate for the sublime role of BuddhahoocL
Thus Buddhism, in both its philosophical and its religious
presentation, did offer Man, at a price, a way out of the impasse
in which he found himself entrapped on the Buddhist map of
the Universe. On the Gods, however, the Hmayana and the Maha-
yana unanimously closed the doors of mercy; for 'the Gods are
laymen'. 1
In the Hellenic World the gods of Olympus fared better than
they deserved if their deserts are to be measured by the punish-
ment that was meted out by a Buddhist justice to their Vedic
cousins; for, when the Hellenic school of philosophers came to
conceive of the Universe as a 'Great Society' of supra-terrestrial
dimensions whose members' relations with one another were
TM. 1 ^ 5 ^' f^ : he , Hi3tor y f Buddhist Thought (London 1933, Kegan Paul), p. 217-
This laicity of the Gods was taken so much in earnest that in a Mahayanian sutra a
5*V5r yEnian , B ddhiat doctrine is expounded in exoteric t?rm" that
e - d ?- f ^iK *! 1 * 1S *?*?"$: addr **ed to the Gods, as a hint that it is
ma ' (lbld r 10 u- Clt -)- The Buddha's own view seems to have been
ll r u- Clt -- e uas own view seems to have been
m . erely . angel , s who "W be wi ^S to help good Buddhists, but are in no
SCHISM IN THE SOUL ai
regulated by Law and inspired by Homonoia or Ctmcord** they
wrote into the constitution of this Cosmnfwlis the principle of
equality before the Law which was the constitutional palladium of
the best conducted terrestrial Hellenic city-states. In this, ! fclicnic
philosophers* Universe the Gods were at any rate no \\urseuif tfun
their human fellow citizens, even if they no longer cnjoycil thane
traditional privileges which they had never earned and hail often
abused. And Zeus, who had started life ;w the disreputable war-
lord of the Olympian war-band, was now morally reclaimed and
handsomely pensioned off by being elected to tin* Honorary Presi-
dency of the Cosrnopolis with a status not unlike that of aome
latter-day Western constitutional monarch who Vdgm but dr*e*
not govern* a king who meekly countersigns the decree* of Fate 1
and obligingly lends his name to the openmona of Nature, 1
Our survey has now perhaps made it apparent th;*t the JJMV
which eclipses the Godhead may present itnctf in a variety of
modes. It is a mathematical law that has enslaved the Hahylonic
astrologer and the modern Western man of science; & jwyehtt*
logical law that has captivated the Buddhist ascetic; ami a t*ocu! lw
that has won the allegiance of the Hellenic phiiowphrr. If we
pass next to the SinSc World, where the concept of Law haa not
found favour, we shall find the Godhead being cclipncti here agftin
by an Order 4 which in the Sinic Wtltawth&wng prcnenu iuclf aa
1 For this Hellenic conception of the Univerte mi a iocifiy #rr further V C ft J l*/1 7*
Annex, below,
2 &su is explicitly coupled with Fttte in the fammi* y*riM?a t*f f!w SMH
Cltanthea which have been <joteti in !* HI. A* v*J, iti |>, 4? 4 ^j**uifr i +
V. C (t) (J) 4, vol. v, p, 43X, above,
3 The brutal truth wat th*t the only way of making X-u* rr%prvf aNtr *r <u
him; and this ultima rjtio xvas tvcntuslly applied, in lr<|H > i'it<*t$ t lny fiw* tf*
sophcr-physkianfli, who found their putiem'* iau'ivittu* $tfn|rntiTirfi <" (
cope with by any ie*s Uranttc nirttn*, v<*n for auch skilful prvT4fttinrrf ** rbn wi*ff* V
this Stoic solution of the problem f 5Ctu wa* * thrcr t<*umrl til 4r^|44u , 4iui }fvUti
ouls divl not resign theincivc t it until thi* Urlkmc i'uiluai%m **#* f^i tf*^ti* m i
decline, During the century imnirtljatrly prftY*Jiiij{ ihr bfrkUuwrn **f 4U *,t , MHr
the noblest toult in Hellas wrrr bcin inspired hy i {ift(ui >rarntntf *hith ^* t<i >*
divorced from hope, the Athenian pwct Actt'hytut Iftc4 l *u*4\rr$ ^wut >ni ih# Oi
1 rue Gad of a "higher religion',
II tin* name He lav**
Thi* He ihfl br t*ilr4 **l nr,
Starchinu <ra*th an4 *P# irul air
Kciugr ntmhrrr *** J tmd
Save Hmt mly, if my mm4
Will i'f *H tvfurr t dir
The IturUrn t4 Ihi* vamiy,
hylut: *<lgt*mmt&* t it, *6e- 7, C*ii
Zrui, however, ihowed no iwlmsfmn at nil iu
, , < ^u** *M *n
uWime p poet attempt ti mint the nW^umr vapum vhr Ulvminim it.*>f ut h
ot providing bread, iftumd t*f a nt*r for Hwr* Hrllwu ^,v*U ^A t v vn
tatlure than ma i)ireputab!r hlluw wunrrywun UimitMt ftfo'0
a higher rctigiun ^ Mnin jir,ri (F C V, C (n M t
aoovv),
* Sea the quomian* from tirintrt on p, 16,
32 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
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 an etiquette which are as elaborate and as momen-
tous as the structure of the Universe which they mirror and at the
same time modify.
'L/homme et la Nature ne forment pas deux rignts sipar^s, mais une
socit unique, Tel est le principe des diverses techniques qui reglemen-
tent les attitudes humaines, C'est gr&ce i une participation active des
humains et par Peffet d'une sorte de discipline cimlisatrice que se realise
TOrdre universe!. A la place d'une Science ayant pour objet la connais-
sance du Monde, les Chinois ont con^u une $tiqutte dc la vie qu'ils
supposent assez efficace pour instaurer un Ordre total/*
Th Sinic way of conceiving Time and Space has furnished
Sinic intelligences with
'les cadres d'une sorte d'art total: appuye sur un savoir qui nous semble
tout scolastique, cet art tend & nialiser, par le simple emploi cTemblirnes
efficaces, un am^nagement du Monde qui & 'inspire dc I'antinagement de
la Socit& < , . Pr^cisons en disant que les sectes ou <Seoks se sont toutes
proposd de r^aliser un am&nagement de la vie et des activit^s humainea
prises dans leur totalM entendez: dans la totalit< de leurs prolonge-
ments, non seulement sociaux, mais cosmiques, Chaque maitre pro-
fesse une sagesse qui d^passe Tordre moral et rn$me Tordre politique,* 2
And, on the same principle,
*le Total, K, TEntier, c'est le pouvoir universel d^animation qui ap-
partient au Chef, Homme Unique. Toute la conception chinoise des
Nombres (comme * . la conception du Yin et du Yang 3 et conimt . * la
conception de Tao 4 ) sort de representations sociales, dont elle n*a
aucunement cherch^ 4 s'abstraire. , , * L*ordre dc TUnivcrs n*est point
distingu^ de 1'ordre de la Civilisation/ 5
The human master of the ceremonies who makes the World go
round is the monarch of the Sinic universal state; 6 and, in virtue
of the superhuman scope of his function, the Emperor was offi-
* Granet, op. cit., p. 24, * Ibid,, pp. 113 ud 17,
3 See the present Study, Part I. B, vol. i, pp. 201*3, bov*?, AJ,T,
4 See the present Study, III. C <i) (r), vol. Hi, p. 187, id V, C (i) {4} 4, vol v t
pp. 416-17, above, A.Jf.T, 5 Grtnet* op. cit, pp. a^S md 38.
6 This Sinic conception of a magical order of the Univen wfth the mutkitn hirnlf
for its hub is manifestly much less far removed from the WeU&ntchauun$ of Primitive
Man than are the Hellenic and Indie and Babylonic and We*tern coneeotioni of Cosmic
Law, analogous to Human Law, which we have examined abov; ana accordingly we
ahau not be surprised to find Sinic notions foreshadowed in our rteordb of Ie*
sophisticated human readings of the relation between Man and hii environment. For
example, the following two passages in the Homeric Epic, which catch Western
reader's attention because they are so startlinRly out of gear with the order of th
Universe aa it presents itself to Western intelligence*, would b* to immediately atKl
SCHISM IN THE SOUL *,1
daily styled the Son of Heaven; yet this Heaven who, in the Sinic
Society, was the adoptive father of the rnapician-in-chirf, wan m
pale as the sky on a frosty winter day in Northern C'hina.
'Creation savante de la mythologie politiqm\ Ic SmnTuin d'Kn-haut
n'a qu'une existence littcraire. Ce patron dynasmjw*, chantr jur kn
po&tes de la cour royale, n'a jamais dfi jouir d'un grami crrdit auprrs
des "petites gens", ainsi que semhle Ic prouver 1 Vchcc dr la pnf 4*4ruk
thdocratique de Mo tseu [Mo-tse). Confucicns mi Tacristc* m Iw
accordant aucune consideration. Pour cux, ks aculs tre$ ftacttf** re aunt
les Saints ou les Sages/ 1
Indeed, this celestial stalking-horse of the human manipulator
of the Sinic Universe had so faint a personality that, in the* affiliated
Far Eastern Society at the turn of the seventeenth and cightrcnth
centuries of the Christian Era, the Jesuit miaaionarici* in China
raised a storm when in their eagerness to translate the doctrine*
of Christianity into terms that would he familiar and agreeable ^
their prospective converts 2 they employed the Chinese word Jw
Heaven, T'ien, to render their Latin word /tats. In A.I*. J(xj3 the
Papal Vicar-General of the Chinese province of Fukirn, ttfohop
Maigrot, issued an edict prescribing that Dem must henceforth he
rendered in Chinese no longer by the single word T'ien (Heaven)
completely intelligible to a F*r Eastern reader thit hr might foe tmptr*l i* m<futt m
the fancy that the Hellenic poet w her faking If f out ihf Sinn' * U**t*.
7ToAAoi<rt A'ai t
r* yat
triSt a/xtaiort Si Aaoi urr* owtoO*
Kiwk XJX, II.
<ws S* iwo
& S"
* iwf
Honk XVI, H, SlU-iiV
Cf, Hesiod: W^rks and $ay$t IL 213 47, and Eunjndc*; *tffliw it, 410
* Granet, op, cit, p. 58^. It will IM* srrn f hm the SiniV phtJtWH^Hrf wrr* 4 **f u<>* wi
with their Inaic confrfrtt in **si^nmj? * hi^hrr iwik 11* tor htrranhy l $';ir** t
dificipHnc<dl human being thjin to a vylatiir divinity, CFtr thr Iiwil4ni* MI^*
towards the gods of the Vedic Pantheon *rt j>j, u> jw, atxtvr.l
a For the ptrtHej between the bottiye nufm^t *tf tho Jrfvtiu no fatUi4ii
version of the Far Eastern World to <thrt*ttnity, hv trfftkfHMWtf tiir fhruitA
into terms of the Sinic phitoaophy tm4 ttw Uiir**fa! rtkiairntruf P! i r l)fianifir
'
terma of the Hellenic philosophy by thr Altan4nan I'siHr^tif ih* i'HuuK *** V, C
V. C {*)
(c) 4, vol. v, pp. 365-7* and V. C {*) (*l) 6 (^ v*J, v, p.
24 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
but by the phrase Tien Chu (the Lord of Heaven}; 1 in 1704 Bishop
Maigrofs edict was confirmed by a decree of Pope Clement XI ;*
and the prospects of Catholicism in China were compromised
as it proved, beyond rehabilitation when, in December 1706,
Bishop Maigrot was summoned into the Emperor K*ang Hsi's
presence and was dismissed into banishment for his outrageous
presumption in venturing to dispute with the Son of Heaven
himself on the meaning of the Chinese word Tien* although he
was convicted by the Emperor, in a personal colloquy, of being
quite unversed in the Sinic philosophy and even ignorant of the
Chinese language* 3
This unhappy controversy might never have arisen if, in the
Sinic World some two thousand years before the day of the Man-
chu Emperor K'ang Hsi and the French Bishop Maigrot, an enrich-
ment of the Sinic conception of the magical order of the Universe
had not brought with it a proportionate impoverishment of the
Sinic conception of the Godhead, For the T'ien whose personality
was so faint that a Papal Vicar-General was unwilling to recognize
in him a counterpart of the Christian Deus (notwithstanding the
willingness of the Son of Heaven to wield his immense authority
under an alleged mandate from this nebulous power) was an
abstraction from an earlier Shangti (^Supreme Ancestor*) 4 whose
claim to have been a personal god would appear to be less open
to doubt.s
If we now turn our attention again for a moment to the Hellenic
World, and re-examine the Ncoplatonic Weltanschauung, we may
be struck by its similarity to the Sinic Weltanschauung which we
have just been considering; and we shall notice that, although this
Neoplatonic conception of the Universe, unlike its Sinic counter-
part, was abortive, it did nevertheless have the effect, even in
* Jenkins, R. C,: The Jesuits in China (London *8*;4 Nutt), p. 25,
a Ibid,, p, 33.
3 Ibid., pp. ss8 91, and xio-jji,
* 'Supreme Ancestor* is the rendering of the term Shan%ti that is given in Fitz-
gerald, C. P,: China, a Short GtUtw&l fXittory (I^ndon 193$. Crm f'rci*)* p. 36*
The fuller title ffaot'en Shangti is analysed in Masp&o, I!,; La Chim Axtfyu* <P*rii
1927, Boccard), p. i6a footnote i, as follows;
'La traduction de cette expression doit 4tre ctmsjdeVle comme uei spproatimttivc,
car son sens exact n'est en ralit pas connu, Lt ttfmtftctttion dc pre*^ue tau let wrmct
eat douteusc: celle de hao paralt bien avoir ^t^ ptraue de* !e tmps des Htn* , . , Chang
[Anglicl ^Skang 1 ] peat sicnifter n haut, au proprc, mi supr^mt, u tigur^. Mime let
mots t'ien ct ti sont loin d tr simples: ^tant <lonn^ Tantiquit^ d* rxprstitn Ic sn de
t'fat est douteux; on a remarqu^ depuis Songrempi la forme
ment au caracrtre qui sert i eerire ce mot cc qut terrible mdmuer tmc cone*ption
anthropomorphique^du cicl; et le wot correspondant dt langwei thi l'f design* let
dicux celestes, tandis qu le ciel physique, le firmament. ttt d^?gn^ par ] mot /<*
Quant au mot <i, il paralt etre au propre une designation des ditux diet let, et s*s tens
uauels (titre rituel d'un empereur d^funt, et, en general, mpcrur) n*n ont <jue des
derivations.'
* In this matter of degree of personality the Sink Shangti perhaps stands to the Sinic
T'fi as the Indie Vartttta stands to the HeUenic t/xaww*,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 15
embryo, of taking the colour out of the Solar divinity with the
worship of whom Neoplatonism was associated, During the time
when in and after the bout of anarchy into which the f IcUemc
Society fell in the third century of the Christian Kra thin last
creative work of Hellenic minds was assuming the systematic
shape which it wears in the fourth-century* tract De />/& t r t MutufaS
the highly individual personalities and sharply distinctive usual
forms of an Apollo and a Mithras were fading into tht abstraction
of a Sol Invictus, 2 and Aurelian's abstract Hoi was pulini; in hn
turn into Julian's wintry Helios a shadow-kin^ of the Ttnvrrsr
who, in Julian's constitution of the Cosmic Commonwealth, \\A*
relegated to the honorary presidency that had been assigned to
Zeus by Zeno 3 and Cleanthes.
The substitution of Julian's Helios and Aurelian'n Hul Invictu*
for a Mithras and an Apollo in the penultimate chapter tit ! fr Unite
history has an exact parallel in Ikhnaton's attempt tu substitute
the new-fangled worship of an intentionally abstract Sun- Disk fur
the historic worship of a Protean Amon-Re ;* and we may speculate
whether, if the Egyptiac emperorprophct*s work had n*t died
with him, it might not have resulted in a radical revision of thr
whole of the Egyptiac Weltanschauung on lines which would h*i\r
exalted the conception of Law at the expense of the cmicr ntitm uf
the Godhead.*
^ Andean history affords another instance in which the abrupt ami
violent intervention of an external force in thin case, the Sp*mih
conquest may have anticipated the working out of the ithinutt
consequences of the deliberate substitution of a relatively faint ami
tenuous representation of the One True (Jod for a relatively drar
and concrete one. We have already observed* that the organi/at im
of an Egyptiac Pantheon, under the presidency of Anton- Kc*, on
the initiative of the Pharaoh Thofhmen III, hiw'an an;tbKue in the
Inca Pa<Jhacutec*s organisation of an Andean i^uitiron undrr the
presidency of the Sun-God of Coriehanea; but there in a further
^A" n Uu ?!?; Mi ? g ^'"^M cn m,w I* MuvlinJ m ihr *i<tniuh}r r,lnion ^
i^^ss^s^
^^Z'Z ii^ii' ,^: v - { " ^ ;f< - '"' v ' ** * '
;^
f - "< ^- h y^
v *
voi. pp6-6. " > <) ' i wi - ' MI *""* *'- **,
aferS 3 ""--^^^^^^^^^
a6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
analogy between the histories of the Andean and Egyptiac societies
on the religious plane to which we have not yet paid attention. If
the Andean World had its Thothmes III in the person of the Inca
Pachacutec, it also haa its Ikhnaton in the person of Pachacutec's
immediate predecessor the Inca Viracocha;* for this emperor took
up, and commended to his subjects, the worship of a creator-god 2
who was the namesake of his Imperial devotee. J The Andean
religious innovator, however, was wiser in his generation than his
Egyptiac counterpart,
In his zeal for his own conception of the One True God 4 Ikhn-
* Viracocha imperabat circa A.D, 1347-1400; Pachncutec imptrahut rirca A,I>, 1400-48*
* For this Andean creator-god ace Means, P. A.: Attcitnt (firiti station* </ the /J**J<a
(New York 1931, Scribner) pp. 422-40; Cunow, H.: (Jttfhtfhtf und Kttltw d?s Inka-
r&ches (Amsterdam 1937, Ewevier), pp. 175-85. Thin divinity was known on the
Plateau by the name of Viracochft (Means, op, cit,, p. i to) ami o the Ctiaat by the name
of Pachacamec (Means, op. cit., pj>, x84-s) and (according to Cunow, p. dt p. 179}
the two namea mean respectively 'Earth Creator' and *Wtjr!d Animator*; but thcie two
general namea probably replaced a host of previous local namcii, since they are both of
them taken from the Quichua language (Means, op. cit. pp. 421-3), which was the
" - ... . . Mean*
ri^inaliy iky-god; and that hit
worship can be traced at least as far back a a period m the i{rmvthitt*ig? of Andean
history, circa A,p, 6oo-9o<> l which is known among the archaeotajws m Titthuftnico H.
This was a period in which, us in the time of the Ineaic Empire, there \vti tn active
cultural intercourse between the Plateau artd the Coast,
* In this matter of name* the Inca Viracocha'a adoption of the nsttw of the ky-cod
of Tiahuanuco is analogous to the gesture which the Phtraoh Amenhttttp IV mad* wnen
he took to calling himself Ikhnaton ^Aton i 9atjfjcd') in prffercnce to hit proper nm*
Amenhotep (*Amon is at rest') with, however, the significant ditlercnce that the Inca
miaaionary of ai new religion did not go out of hit way to insult the religion of hi* fathert.
An exact parallel to the Inca Viracocha's identification of himself vvith a gent to whom he
was peculiarly devoted is to be found in the assumption of the rmm* K!aibalu by the
Roman Emperor Marcua Aurclius Antonimm alms Variu* Avitut IJiui*ianu (see V. C
(i) () a, vol. v, p. 82, footnote 4* and V, C (i) (d) 6 (5), Annex* vol. v pp. 685-8,
above)*
* It may be noted in paa*in that the Aton, like Viracocht (Cunow, op, cit, t jpp, ^79
and 183-4), wa adorea by hi* votaries a the creator and sumtmer of fhc Universe ;
and the Kkeneaa between the Pharaoh's and the Inca'i respective conception! of God at
any rate in thi$ aspect of the divine activitymay be illustrated by * companion between
the following extracts from two hymns: the hymn to the Aton wnich has been recovered
by our modern Western *rchaeolog**t from the dcbrit of Ikhnaion't Coumer-Thebef
at Tell-ekAmarm f and of which the text may be read in Brmitn, A. t Tb$ Ltttratvrt $
the Ancient Egyptians, English trtnslation (I-ondon 19*7, Methuen), pp. aH8-9! ; and
hymn to Viracocha which is transited by Meant, op. cit, p 438* from tourcct detcribdd
c*np, 477, footnote 37,
The B|?yptiac hymn runt:
'Beautiful ia thine appearing in the horizon of Hetvn> thou Hvinfi Sun p the tot wfco
lived. , . .
'Thou who createst (male children?) in women, nd rnnkeat iced in men! Thou who
maintained the ton in the womb of ma mother, and aootheat him 10 thtt he wp<&th
not thou nurse in the womb. Who giveth breath in order to kep *itv U thit he
hath made,*
The Andean hymn rum:
'O conquering Viracoch*!
Ever-pretent Viracocha!
Thou who art without equal upon the Earth!
Thou who art from the beginning* of the World until iti
Thou gaveat life ind valour to men, taying;
*'Let thia be & man,"
And to woman, saying:
"Let thia be a woman.**
Thou madest them and gavett them being.
SCHISM IN THE 'SOUL *7
aton tilted against an established religion which by his day was
virtually impregnable against attack owing to the consolidation of
all its forces, human and divine, into a single hierarchy and a single
pantheon by the act of Ikhnaton's own predecessor and ancestor
Thothmes III a hundred years before. 1 The I nca Yir;icoch;i would
not have had to reckon with so formidable a resistance it he had
attempted, in Ikhnaton's fashion, to take the fortress of the esub-
lished religion by assault; for in the Andean World the equivalent
of the work of Thothmes III was not carried out until after Vira-
cocha had been succeeded by Pachacutcc on the throne 4?f the
Incaic Empire. Nevertheless the I nca Viracocha, in bin activities
on behalf of the god whose name he bore, wan careful not to
embroil himself with the Sun-God of Coriehanca who wiit the
ancestral patron of the Incaic Dynasty, Ami accordingly, when
the Inca Pachacutec set himself to translate his predecessor'.'* idea*
into practice, he was able to promote the respective worship* of
the Creator-God and the Sun-God gimultancousiy ami *tdc by
side in contrast to what happened in the Kgyptiae World* where
Ithnaton's tactics not only drove Aton and Arnon into conflict
with one another, but turned their quarrel into s* fighi to the tJcstth,
By contrast, the Inca Pachacutec adroitly preserved the peace
between the Creator-God Viracocha and the Corichancan Hun-
God by insisting upon the diversity of their natures, upherc*, and
roles. At his Pan-Andean synod of priests he waited till he had
obtained the assembly's consent to the organization &f a pantheon
of the historic local divinities, with the Corichancan Kun-Ciod at
their head, before he made, on his personal initiative, the more
surprising, and perhaps also more contentious ftuggeMJun thai,
side by side with this consolidation of all the other exiHtin^ wor-
ships of the Andean World* a separate cult of Yirucnviu the
Creator should be instituted for the benefit of the Kpiriuul ftitr**
Possibly the consent of the synod to this second of the Inca** two
proposals, as well as to the first of them, was the more readily
accorded because Pachacutec simultaneously proposed n <JtJ!er*?fi
tiation in the respective material provision* that were to be made
for the service of the Corichancan President of the Pantheon and
for that of his creator-colleague, While the Corichancan Sun-God
was endowed with estates and revenues in <?vcry province and
parish of a *the Land of the Four Quarters 1 , as wa* meet and right
for a divinity who was the heavenly patron and counterpart of
the Sapa Inca himself, the etherial Viracocha needed no
* Thothrnct III impcrabat $dw area i4ot45O ,r;
1370-1352 B.C.
o *??' ? p * cit " p l*' W~8; Mtrkhim, Sir C,; Tl
omitn lilacr), pp^ 97-8,
28 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
endowments or memorials in a world that must everywhere and
always bear witness to its Creator's power and glory by the sheer
fact of its own existence. In the whole Incaic Empire no more
than two temples dedicated to Viracocha are vouched for by the
surviving records of Andean history. 1
Supposing that the wayward goddess Fortune had permitted
the Incaic Empire to live out the full term of life of a universal
state, instead of bringing Pizarro from the farther side of the
Atlantic to make havoc of Pachacutec's work within less than a
hundred years, we may speculate whether the paternal, authori-
tarian, collectivist regime which Pachacutec had brought to per-
fection would have come, in course of time, to be reflected in some
representation of the Universe as a commonwealth governed,
more Hellemco, by a social law, but with a constitution of the
Spartan rather than of the Athenian pattern. If we may allow our
imagination to picture the development of an Andean Weltan-
schauung on such lines as these, then perhaps on the analogy of
what happened to Zeus we may also imagine the ci-devant sky-
god Viracocha being relegated to an Honorary Presidency of the
Cosmic Phalanstery. 2
We have now to consider those other representations of the
constitution of the Universe in which its unity presents itself as
the work of an omnipresent and omnipotent Godhead, while the
Law which can be discerned in the Universe's structure and move-
ment and life is regarded as being a manifestation of God's will,
instead of being thought of as a sovereign unifying force which
regulates the actions of gods and men alike if it leaves any place
at all in the picture for anything that could be counted as divine.
We have observed already3 that this concept of a unity of all
1 Means, op. cit., pp. 428-9.
fcav^tef/;!'^ cours !' the alternative possibility that Viracocha unlike Zeus might
caUed^non hv hif^T ^P"?^ 1 crisi s under stress of which he was suddenly
p^Wly ca^t W^^T 1 ^ pl&7 5 grcater r le than that for which he had bee *
yj.^ viuusiy cast, we nave already ouotpn nn riarA *T fx+-..+ ^i_ f \* p
Aesehvln* In -k^v, +u~ u ti 4""Lcu, on page 21, lootnote 3, the famous lines of
whi h hi w CI i *e neiienic poet expresses his yearning for an epiphany of Zeus in
'Viracocha, Lord of the Universe!
Whether male or female.
Where art Thou ?
Would that Thou wert not hidden from this son of Thine!
Creator of the World, '
Creator of Man,
Great among my ancestors,
Before Thee
My eyes fail me,
Though I long to see thee.'
3 On pp. 15-18, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 29
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 human universal state
inclines to assume as, after its foundation, it gradually crystallizes
into its final shape. In this process of crystallization we have seen
that the human ruler of the universal state, who at the outset is
literally a King of Kings, eliminates the client princes who were
once his peers and thereby transforms his own constitutional
status from a suzerainty to a monarchy in the literal sense of that
word. If we now examine what happens simultaneously to the
gods of the diverse peoples and lands which the universal state
has absorbed into its own body politic, we shall find that there is
an analogous change in the reciprocal relations of these objects of
human worship. In the place of a pantheon in which a high god
exercises a suzerainty over a community of other gods who were
once his peers, and who have not lost their divinity in losing their
independence, we see emerging a single God whose uniqueness is
His essence.
This religious revolution is apt to begin with a general change
in the relations between divinities and worshippers. Within the
framework of a universal state there is a tendency for all divinities
to divest themselves of the bonds that have hitherto bound each
of them up with some particular parochial human community.
A divinity who has started life as the patron de jure and servitor
de facto of some single tribe or town or valley or mountain now
enters on a wider field of action by learning to appeal on the one
hand to the Soul of the individual human being and on the other
hand to the whole of Mankind; and, as eachgeniw loci simultane-
ously steps out into this wider world which has at last been opened
up for him by human empire-builders, there tends to arise, under
the aegis of a political peace, a religious competition between rivaj
worships which ends, like the foregoing physical warfare between
parochial states, in the victory of some single competitor over all
the rest. The course of this religious revolution, as it worked itself
out in the arena of the Achaemenian Empire, has been described
by Eduard Meyer in a passage which demands quotation in our
present context, not only on account of the brilliance of its obser-
vation and analysis, but also because the particular chapter of
religious history that is here recorded is typical of what is apt to
happen on the religious plane of life within the political frame-
work of any universal state.
'The most persistent effects of the Achaemenian Empire effects
which are still exerting a direct influence upon our own present age
are to be founc} in the domain of Religion. The Achaemenian regime
30 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
saw the beginning of a transformation of religions that cut very deep.
This development was assisted by the fact that the Achaemenian
emperors treated the religions of their subjects with a large-hearted
considerateness 1 and sought to erect them into props for their own
policy; but a still more potent factor was the mere existence of an
empire which embraced the whole World as the Achaemenian Empire did.
'In ancient times Religion had been the most vital expression of the
political community. It was the Gods that enabled the State to keep
alive, to maintain itself in conflict with other Powers, and to increase in
power and prosperity. But all that had changed since the national
states, one after another, had been deprived, at the very least, of their
political independence and had mostly been annihilated, so that the
inhabitants of all the civilized countries of South- Western Asia had had
to accustom themselves to seeing their fate decided by foreigners.
Occasionally this experience led to a repudiation of the native divinity
who had shown himself so weak and powerless that his worship had
patently ceased to be worth while. But, so far as can be seen, this con-
sequence was drawn only by isolated individuals. Among people in the
mass the belief in the reality of the native divinities was too deeply
rooted for there to be any possibility of the people tearing themselves
away from their traditional objects of worship. And there was a way
out of the dilemma which was always open: either the god was angry,
or else he had helped the adversary's cause to triumph because it was
the cause that deserved to win. Cyrus is in Babylon the legitimate king
who has been elected by Marduk, while Nabonidus is the apostate who
has been rejected. In the eyes of the Prophets of Israel the victory of
the Assyrians and Chaldaeans over the Prophets* countrymen is the work
of the victims' own national god. He wills to chastise his people, and
even to annihilate them, because they fail to understand his true nature;
and he demonstrates his power all the more dazzlingly by bestowing the
gift of world domination upon a nation which knows nothing of him
and which fondly imagines that he is one of the powers whom it has
vanquished. Others try to console themselves with the idea by which the
Delphic Oracle attempted to justify its behaviour towards Croesus: above
the god there stands a still mightier power to which the god has to sub-
mit either an inexorable Fate of an impersonal kind (the Necessity of
the Orphics), or else the verdict of some supreme Ruler of the Universe. 2
*In any case the inevitable result is a revolution in the old concept of
God. Already, through a theological extension of a naive faith, the
national gods had everywhere become cosmic powers as well powers
whose creative, life-giving, preservative activity embraces Heaven and
Earth. Now, with the annihilation of the National State and the cessa-
tion of public life, the political side of the divinity falls away and the
universal concept alone survives. Manners and customs converge ; the
. l. For the religious policy of the Achaemenidae see also the present Study, V. C (i) (d)
6 (o), Annex, vol. v, pp. 704-5, above. AJ.T.
a In this last sentence Meyer is, of course, referring to the alternative road which we
have already reconnoitred in this chapter and which leads, not towards an Almighty
God, but towards a Sovereign Law.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 31
nations mingle with one another partly in the peaceful way of com-
mercial intercourse, partly through the coercive action of the rulers ; in
many cases even the native language disappears before the face of the
great languages that are the vehicles of Civilization. 1 In these circum-
stances the national community falls back more and more upon Religion :
that is, upon the worship of the gods who are indigenous in its home-
land, and upon the scrupulous observance of their ritual. This very
process, however, endows the local religion with a capacity to extend
its range beyond the old national frontiers. The worshippers of a given
divinity are now no longer the members of the national community who
have been born into that divinity's service and are beholden to him for
their very existence : his worshippers are now those who acknowledge
him and remain faithful to him, whether they be members of the national
community or not ; and this turns religion into something that is at once
individual and universal. The god is no longer expected to bring public
prosperity to the body politic : what every one expects of him is personal
prosperity and individual advantage for the worshipper himself. And
accordingly the foreigner can pray to this god just as well as some one
who has inherited his relation to the god from his ancestors. So the
divinity becomes an independent self-subsistent power which operates
from its seat of worship and offers grace and blessing to all the World*
This is how these divinities are regarded by the Achaemenian Imperial
Government. The Government grants privileges and endowments to
all the larger shrines ; and at all of them sacrifices and prayers are offered
for the well-being of the Emperor. The immediate ground for this
policy is a desire to make capital for the Government out of the high
prestige which the shrine possesses in the eyes of the subject popula-
tion; but the Government is also moved by a genuine belief that the$e
divinities are mighty powers and that it cannot be anything but an
advantage to stand well with them.
Thus Universalism and Individualism become the characteristic
features of all religions and all worships. Every worship claims to be
the highest, and if possible the only legitimate, one; every divinity
claims to be a great cosmic power; and they all of them address them-
selves no longer or no longer exclusively to a national community,
but primarily to each individual human being promising him all kinds
of profit, both on Earth and.in the Other World, and this with greater
certitude than any other god can offer. This religious revolution was
not accomplished at one stroke, but it begins in the Achaemenian Age.*
This age witnesses the prelude to the great competition between reli-
gions which fills the later centuries of Antiquity,
1 For the spread of such lingue franche see the present Study. V. C (i) (<f) 6 (y),
vol. v. pp. 483-527, above. A.J.T. *
a The progress of the same religious revolution during the Roman Imperial Ag* i*
noticed by Spengler, O.: Der Untergang des AbcndlaruUx, vol. i (Munich 1920, Sdk)
pp. 576-7. A corresponding religious revolution from a public communal to a privttc
personal relation between the Soul and God took place in the Indie World at the birth
of the MahSySna and of Hinduism (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 135 and 138, above), *n4
m the Egyptiac World during the two centuries beginning with the generation of
Iknnaton (Breasted, T. H.: The Development of Religion and Thought in A*i**t &&**
(London 1912, Hodder & Stoughton), pp. 34^-9 and 355-6). AJ.T.
32 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
'It has also now become possible to pay respect to a divinity at a
distance from his local habitation and in detachment from his native
soil and from his own people ; for the bond which unites god and wor-
shipper is no longer national or political but is personal and therefore
indissoluble. Slaves and merchants and artisans who are permanently
expatriated carry their divinity with them, found new shrines for him,
and win adherents for him in foreign parts, while conversely the stranger
who arrives at a seat of worship pays the divinity the tribute of his
devotion and can be permanently won for this divinity's service.
'Hence all worships begin to make an active propaganda. They either
bestir themselves to widen the circle of the devotees of the shrine and
to heighten its prestige and influence far and wide beyond mere
parochial limits, or they seek to raise the ideas and the ritual of their
religion to a status of commanding importance. For instance, the
Babylonian and Egyptian priests broadcast their wisdom everywhere;
the priests of the Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, and those of kindred
Anatolian and Syrian worships, enlist from all quarters a circle of
fanatical adherents who are prepared to castrate themselves in the
service of the divinity and to range over the face of the Earth as mendi-
cant monks. These cults do not, any of them, make outright war upon
those of the other gods: they merely relegate them to a position of
inferiority, or demand at any rate a recognized position for themselves
side by side with them. There are, however, certain religions that do
not recognize the legitimacy of alien cults at all (the attitude of Zoro-
astrianism), or that even go so far as to condemn them as the most
grievous sin against their own god (the attitude of Judaism). Their
exclusiveness makes these religions all the more active in trying to win
foreign adherents who, by their acceptance of the revelation, will save
themselves from perdition and at the same time will bear witness among
the nations to the power of the Only True God and will thereby raise
the status of the god's worshippers in the eyes of the World. The
teaching of Zarathustra, which was the religion of the ruling nation,
addressed itself, from the very beginning, to the whole Human Race and
therefore never had an exclusive national character. The religion of
Yahweh did not completely lose, but did recast, its original nationalism
under the impact of the blows of Fate which descended on the Jewish
people; and, after achieving this transformation, it began to enlist
proselytes all the more actively for coming late into the mission -field.
'Inwardly, too, the religions begin to become assimilated to one
another. All the worships of the Oriental World now pass through the
same process as the parochial worships of the cantons of Egypt. The
only surviving differences between them are simply differences of name
and of the minutiae of liturgical practice. In substance all these wor-
ships are now indistinguishable 1 all gods having become sun-gods and
all goddesses heaven-goddesses and this convergence has the para-
1 'En ge'n&al la religion e"tait partout la mme; les dieux seuls e"taient diff6ren,ts; et,
si leurs cultes s^tendaient quclquefois, c'e"tait en se mfilant et non en se chassant
re"ciproquement des contract oil ils e'taient re$us.* CEuvres de Ttirgot (Paris 1844,
Guillaumin, z vols.), vol. ii, p. 621 ('Geographic Politiquc'). A.J.T.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 33
doxical effect of stimulating their militant competition with each other.
Spiritually, politically, and socially the plane on which the several reli-
gions live becomes more and more uniform, and this leads to the
formation of uniform religious general ideas which present themselves
in the individual worships and individual religions with merely super-
ficial differentiations. No one can any longer find satisfaction in the old
notion that the divinity to whom he pays devotion is a local power whose
operation is confined to a particular territory. Every one .thinks of his
god as the epiphany of a universal cosmic power, which both rules the
Earth and guides the destiny of Man as a sun-god or a heaven-god if
the divinity is male, and as a goddess of fertility or a nature-goddess if
she is female. Hence in Syria and Phoenicia "the Lord of Heaven"
(Be'elsamtn) acquires ever greater prestige. He is "the good god who
rewards his devotees" in the language of later inscriptions, and he is
also the Thunderer on High. Sometimes the divinity is invoked without
being named. For example, the inscriptions on Palmyrene altars of the
Hellenistic Age invoke "Him whose name is praised unto Eternity, the
Gracious, the Compassionate". Side by side with this Unnamed God,
Bel, "the Guider of Fate", pushes his way in from Babylonia. One feels
how close the individual gods have come to one another how, in some
sense, each of them is simply an epiphany of the others. Even the Jews,
in addressing themselves to foreigners, designate their god, not as
Yahweh, but as "the Heaven-God of Jerusalem"; and by this designa-
tion they present him to their Persian masters as the peer of Ahura-
mazda.' 1
One reason why these formerly parochial and variegated divini-
ties were thus being drawn into an ever closer conformity with one
another was because they were now subject, all alike, to the
influence of a single ensample; and this loadstone was the human
monarch of a universal state which had provided the political
container for this religious ferment.
'Apres la conqute de Babylone par Cyrus, le culte rnazdeen s'installa
dans cette antique m6tropole et un grand nombre de mages s'y ^tabli-
rent. Entre eux et les Chaldens, un voisinage plusieurs fois seculaire
amena^des rapports de confraternite, et ainsi le mazd&sme import^ en
Chaldee subit Tascendant de la religion autochtone. Toute la tMologie
des mages se p&i&ra d'astrologie. Dans cette astrologie chaldeo-
persique, le gouvernement du ciel, pour demeurer le patron et le modeie
des puissances terrestres, dut se prSter a une transformation. A la
hierarchic de justiciers etablie te-haut par les anciens Chald^ens, se
substitua 1'idee d'une royaute" sideVale analogue i FEmpire des Ache-
menides. Puis, cette notion nouvelle d'un palais aoite se r^pandit par-
tout ou s'imposait la suprematie des Perses et elle s'y perp<tua dans le
/ ^!3K. E rV $ eschicht * desAltertums vol. iii (Stuttgart 1901, Gotta), pp. 167-71,
o'ttaT^ ^ ^sprung und Anf&ngede* Christening vol. ii (Stuttgart and lerlin I^u
f S ' VOL *' pmrt (2) ' 4 ^ cd - <Smttgart ^
34 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
culte. "L'inscription de Nemroud-Dagh 1 park des trfrn^ 53 celestes de
Zeus Oromasdes, et un bas-relief nous le montre assis s** <iun trone > ie
sceptre a la main/' Hostans se le figure de meme, les a& e ^ ou mes ~
sagers divins faisant cercle autour de lui. Dans des textes rtojcn&reux, on
retrouve un souvenir, lointain parfois, de la croyance qui fit; <2 o:m P arer e
Maitre du Monde avec le Grand Roi, et ses assesseurs avc?o des satrapes.
C'est de la que devait venir, avec 1'idee d'un Royaume _ c f^
familiere a nos esprits, la conception stoicienne d'une Ci"t~ <lu JVioxi e
gouvernee par les plan&tes et les Voiles fixes, auxquelle?s l^ s nommes
sont assujettis.' 2
The closing sentence of this last quotation brings us back to the
now familiar forking-point of the road which we are atrt^** 1 ?* 111 ? to
survey; but this time we have not to follow out the biraxncn leading
towards a Cosmic Law, which we have explored already* kut e
other branch which leads towards a Unique and Omrtip *^ 11 * . *
and in this direction the first landmark that we shall notice is the
influence of the Achaemenian Monarchy upon the Je'wisl* concep-
tion of the God of Israel. 3
'In the Jewish religion, the [heavenly] court, by whiofa. "Yahweh h
waited upon, is elaborated on a Babylonian pattern, even -though certain
old native conceptions may account for the origin of the idea.* * 4
And, hi Jewish minds, this new conception of Yahwefa haici worked
itself out to completion by about 166-1643.0., which a/pp^^rs, from
internal evidence, to have been the approximate date of" tJbte writing
of the prophetical 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 lxoa.d like th
pure wool ; his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wh.eol ts burning
fire.
'A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him ; thousand
thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times em thousand
stood before him; the judgment was set and the books were opened. * s
i See V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), vol. v, p. 547, footnote a, above. AJ.T.
* Bidez, J.: La Citi du Monde et la Cite du Soleil (Paris 193^ Les JBdlea Lettr#*) 4
pp. 7-8.
3 The Jews appear to have taken this turning deliberately, for they i*tjct:c<l and cod-
temned the science of Astrology because they perceived the fundamental ixaoornpatibility
ot its belief m an inexorable mathematical law with a belief in God as sum omnipot
personality (Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anfdnge des Christentums, vol. ii (erlm 19
xrttah p. 54).
* Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. iii (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta>, T>* *7a. In
, . , . ar 1, oa, * .
Urstorung und Anfdnge des Christentums, vol. ii (Berlin 1921, Cotta), pp. ^S O, the Mum
scholar points out that Yahweh is already conceived in the likeness of an Aehaemenifttt
I ~ - """ *"*- *s> uu^xtuj WAivd r cu. 141 UIG UJLCilCaa UJ. a*XJl .CTwCXlRCmCIlUin
emperor in Zech. iii, which was written circa 519 B.C., as well as in the Book of Job 9 which
was written about a century later.
5 Dan. vii. 9-10. This precise and vivid picture of Yahweh in tHe lilccncas of im
Achaememan Great King appears to have been borrowed by Judaism romm ^2Sorotrimn-
ism. According to von Gall, A.: BcwAc/a TOU Scot (Heidelberg 1926, -Wixxt^r), p.
the Ancient of Days ... has nothing whatever in common with the god. Y*>iweh
the Jews would never have visualized in this shape ; the Ancient of Days I AJburai
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 35
The Achaemenian Great King is not, however* the only mon-
arch of a universal state in whose likeness his subjects have shaped
their conceptions of an Almighty God, In the Egyptiac World,
for example,
'the conception of the Sun-God as a former king of Egypt, as the father
of the reigning Pharaoh, and as the protector and leader of the nation,
still a kind of ideal king, resulted in the most important consequences
for Religion. The qualities of the earthly kingship of the Pharaoh were
easily transferred to Re, . . , The whole earthly conception and environ-
ment of the Egyptian Pharaoh were soon, as it were, the * 4 stage proper-
ties" with which Re was "made up n before the eyes of the Nile-dweller*
When, later on, therefore, the conception of the human fcinphip was
developed and enriched under the transforming social forces of the
Feudal Age, 1 these vital changes were soon reflected from the character
of the Pharaoh to that of the Sun-God/ 3
who was portrayed by the Persians aa h i* described in Dan, v, 9*. f, Myr ,t
Ursprunft und AnfSrtge ties Ckrutetttumt, vol* is % pp. 1^5^. The profoundness! w the
effect which this Iranian irnc exerted upon the Syrian imagination, when cmcc 4t hid
been transmitted from the Iranian to the Syrian f>r<*vin f the Syriac World, *i reye|ied
by a comparison of several scattered piece* of evidence, *rh rnott celebrated iffitintcmy
is the reproduction of the fltRMge quoted above from Daniel (vii, 9-10) m RnwUtion
(i, 13-16), where we sec a Chrintian writer who wiahe* to piresent * vmunl ima^e of hit
Christ in His glory drawing upon the Iranian imsjKtry of t jwith work which by thin
time was not much le*s than three centurtra aid, It ti per hap* not ktt i*gmrk*m that <mtt
of the features in thi* literary image i* reported tp haw been tiflnuitttci *in rrtt Jif4i* t by
means of a trick, by t leit two Syrian men f ACt*n wi*o wi ** far ttrptntMl from on*
another in time a* the respective awthort of the Bsmk of !)*nie! wnd UM Rvttton of
Saint John the Divine, Both these trkk&teri were vioknt-hftntled futttritc I*4en of th
Hellenic internaJ prolettn*t; n<l, while the reapective arniui in which th^y ftnighf were
far apart"~Eunu arena being in SitJy and Bar Kdk*bS* in Ptltfittn^^HEhttr rrspwrtivt
birthplace* were both on Syrian ml imce KtirkUi ii known to hnvis cwnc from Ap*mtii
and Bar K&kahl wt preiumthly l**ititimiinh#m* If both f thtm pruetiied ch4 tam
trick at dates divided by m> wide; n inicrvst ICvmun in the avtnth <tredc f ihr itrcond
century 8.c* and Bar Kflktbl m thj fourth docacl* of the s^coml e^ntury of the Chriitttn
Era this must mean thit in Syria, t any citm dunng the thriw c*nturi fditwmtlit
publication of the Htx>k of Daniel, prokiartan agitator who prcsch^ tfwurrvctKm; *nd
who promised to lead hi$ irjiurgtnt followni o victory on th* #trwtfth of t Jivirt com-
mission which he claimed to hoJd, would be txpect4 to givt matenit pvjdcnc^ of thii
divine patronage by himself performinf on rhe prodi|iwi that i* itfrit*yf**l in th
Iranian imagery to th Ancient of Dtyt. Accordtni to Dun, vii to* ** Stry ttrwun
issued and came forth from before him*, while, Acctjrams tt> RevcUtian i, 16, im fUrrve
came 'out of his mouth* in th shape oif ** iharp inc*aitd iword*. Now, sewr4Jiii l
Diodorm, Booki XKX1V-3OLXV, chap, a, f{ 5^* Ewnu 'us4
from his mouth, with a certain dinplay of dmne poeii<m {^v^MM
MI apparatua; and thi w the *cmn m which Kc u<4 to declaim ru prx>phde#.
used to take a nutahell or something of th mn t bort two hotat in i CNR oppj*t akbi
stutf it with fire and enough fuel to keep xbc fire tliht and thill put it into h*a mmitli
and flare out sometime* aparki mml tonMtimtti f1m by fokwiaf into it, let *t*
before he rote in revolt, Eunua utud to declare *h*t tb Syrto OoddbMi fe**t j
pp. 408-14, abov.*A J
Bjcaatad, J, H. i 7**
1912, Hoddftr & Stm^ht^ pj>. 1^17, di3 alndy to
36 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
In the Sinic World, likewise, we find the same mental imagery
already taking shape during the 'Time of Troubles' which, pre-
ceded the foundation of a Sinic universal state by Ts'in She
Hwang-ti. At any rate, the philosopher Mo-tse, who lived from
the fifth into the fourth century B.C.,
'pour refrener les vices des tyrans . . . evoque, a la suite des poetes <i^ ^ a
cour royale, 1'idee du Ciel Justicier, du Souverain d'En-haut, patron
dynastique. Aussi parle-t-il de la Volont6 du Ciel (T'ien tche) Weo les
memes tennes, a peu pres, qu'il emploie pour exiger une entiere son-
mission aux decisions du souverain.* 1
This pair of illustrations from the histories of other civilizations
may serve to show that the course of religious evolution in. "the
Syriac World, within the political framework of the Achaemenian
Empire and its Seleucid 'successor-state', 2 was not anything ex-
ceptional, but was a normal development which exemplifies a
general rule. In the political and social circumstances to wlxich
the foundation of a universal state gives rise, a number of pre-
viously parochial divinities simultaneously 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
all the other claimants and thus establishes his title to be worship-
ped as the One True God. This outcome of the Battle of the G-ods
is analogous to that of the terrestrial struggle for existence bet\veen
human princes during the disintegration of a civilization; fox*, in
the course of the two successive rounds in which this political
conflict works itself out, one of the competitors first either annihi-
lates or subjugates all his peers in the internecine warfare of a
'Time of Troubles', and afterwards peacefully yet relentlessly
eliminates those of them who have temporarily survived the estab-
lishment of a universal state by reconciling themselves to becoming
client princes of a victorious King of Kings with the result ttxat
the victor-suzerain turns into a monarch who, in his final plenitude
of power, is the sole embodiment of royalty and vehicle of sove-
reignty and source of authority in his world. There is, however,
one vital point on which the analogy that we have been drawing
does not hold.
In the constitutional evolution of a universal state the universal
monarch whom we find enthroned in solitary sovereignty at the
end <rf the story is usually a direct successor in an unbroken
constitutional sequence of the Padishah, or overlord of client
1 Granet, M.: La Pense Chinoise (Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre), p. 495.
2 For the transmission to the Seleucid Monarchy of the Achaernenian Em.j>I:re*8
function as a political/oyer for acts of religious creation see Part I. A, vol. i, pp. 5-6, at>ove.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 37
princes, under whose auspices the story opens. 1 When an Augus-
tus who had been content to make his authority felt in Cappadocia
or Palestine or Nabataea by maintaining a general superintendence
over local kings or tetrarchs was succeeded in due course by a
Hadrian who administered these former principalities as provinces
under his own direct rule, there was no break in the continuity of
the dominant power; for Hadrian, no less than Augustus, was
master of the Hellenic OlKov^vrj in virtue of being the head of the
Roman State, and he was still exercising this Roman authority in
the form of the Principate a subtle institution which was the
principal heirloom in Augustus's political legacy. In fact, the
universal state with which the Hellenic World had originally been
endowed by Roman empire-builders had not ceased to be a Roman
Empire in consequence of the subsequent process by which the
former client-states had been administratively gleichgeschaltet
through being assimilated to the provinces that had been under
the direct government of the Princeps and the Senate from the
beginning. On the other hand, in the corresponding and contem-
porary religious change, continuity, so far from being the rule, is
a theoretically possible exception which it might be difficult to
illustrate by historical examples.
The writer of this Study cannot, indeed, 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 Corichancan Sun-God
nor the Theban Amon-Re nor the Babylonian Marduk-Bel nor the
Vedic Dyauspitar nor the Olympian Zeus has ever revealed the
countenance of the One True God beneath his own Protean mask.
1 There is, however, at least one conspicuous exception to this rule in the constitu-
tional history of the Sinic universal state. In the first place the founder, Ts'in She
Hwang-ti, attempted to carry through by force, within the span of a single reign, a
process of Gleichschaltung which, in the constitutional history of the Roman Empire,
was spread over a period of not much less than two centuries. In the second place this
ruthless radicalism evoked an equally violent reaction which did not indeed destroy the
universal state that had just been founded by this empire-builder of the House of Ts'in,
but did depose Ts'in She Hwang-ti's dynasty in favour of a novus homo whose ancestors
had had no part or lot in the Ts in Dynasty's empire-building work. In the third place
the parvenu founder of the Prior Han Dynasty tried to repair Ts'in She Hwang-ti's
error, and to avoid the Ts'in Dynasty's fate, by abandoning the radical policy of
Gleichschaltung and centralization for a conservative policy of re-establishing the ci-
devant parochial states of the Sinic World as client kingdoms under the parvenue
dynasty's suzerainty. In the fourth place the Han Dynasty soon discovered, by trial
and error, that this attempt at political devolution was after all an anachronism; and
they then reverted to Ts'in She Hwang-ti's policy of centralization but this time with
greater tact and at a gentler pace. We can transpose the constitutional history of the
Sinic universal state into Hellenic terms by imagining what might have happened if the
Battle of Actium had been won, not by Octavian, but by Antony and Cleopatra. In that
imaginary event the Hellenic universal state which had been established by Roman
arms in the course of the preceding two hundred years might have been ruled for the
next four centuries by a Government seated at Alexandria and administering Roman
Italy as a client republic or even as a subject province. (The psychological reaction
of the Alexandrians to the chagrin of having just missed their 'manifest destiny* is
examined in V. C (ii) (a), pp. 217-19 below.)
38 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
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 and was also not a product of raison d'dtat,* the
deity through whose lineaments the existence and the nature of a
One True God became apparent to Marikind was not Ahuramazda
the god of the Achaemenidae: it was Yahweh the god of the
Achaemenian emperors* insignificant Jewish subjects. This vic-
tory of Yahweh over Ahuramazda, and over all the other divinities
of the Achaemenian Empire and its 'successor-states' who had
been competing with the once parochial god of Israel and Judah
for the superlative honour of becoming an eoiphany of God
Almighty, is the triumph that is celebrated in the Eighty-second
Psalm:
*God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among
the gods. . .
* "I have said : Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High ;
* "But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes/'
'Arise, O God; judge the Earth; for thou shalt inherit all nations/ 2
The note of this paean is not pitched too high ; for, while Asshur's
following had dwindled, by the time when the Jewish poem was
written, to as small a company 3 as Ahuramazda's worshippers
muster to-day, 4 these stricken gods' rival Yahweh whose Chosen
People was first trampled under foot by the Assyrians and then
raised from the dust by the Achaemenidae has grown into the
God of Christendom and Islam as .well as the G-od of Jewry. This
contrast between the ultimate destinies of the 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 to the observer some striking and
momentous examples of the phenomenon of Peripeteia or 'the
reversal of roles' ; 5 and in fact it is not an exception, but the rule,
for the particular representation of the Godhead which is singled
out for becoming a vehicle of the revelation of the unity of God, in
this unitary political phase of the disintegration of a civilization, to
be an obscure divinity of humble antecedents. At the same time
i For the origin and nature of the Zoroastrian religion see I. C (i) (), vol. i, p. 81, and
V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. i3i, above; for the religious policy of the Achaemen'dae see V, C
(i) (<Q 6 (5), Annex, vol. v, pp. 704-5, above.
a Ps. Ixxxii. i and 6-8.
a For the remnant of the Assyrian people which continued, for some centuries after
the destruction. of Nineveh in 612 B.C., to worship their eponymous divinity _among the
ruins of the city of Asshur in which he and his worshippers had begun their common
career, see IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (a), pp. 470-1, above.
<* For the downfall of Zoroastrianism, and for its political cause, see V. C (i) (<i) 6 (8)>
Annex, vol. v, pp, 659-61, above.
5 For Peripeteia see IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol. iv, pp. 345-61, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 39
this original lowliness and obscurity are not the only features that
are characteristic of the divinities that are cast for this overwhelm-
ing role.
When we look into the nature and 6thos of Yahweh as these are
portrayed for us in the scriptures that we have inherited from his
pre-Christian worshippers, 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/inn inhabiting and animating
a volcano in North- Western 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 divine patron of the
barbarian war-bands who broke into the Palestinian domain of
'the New Empire' of Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C. 1 On the
other hand Yahweh is 'a jealous god', 2 whose first commandment
to his worshipper is :Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' 3
It is not, of course, surprising to find these two traits of provin-
cialism and exclusiveness displayed by Yahweh simultaneously;
for a god who keeps strictly to his own local domain may be ex-
pected to be equally strict in warning off any neighbouring gods
who show a disposition to trespass. What is, however, 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
parochial kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the establishment of
a Syriac universal state in the shape of the Achaemenian Empire,
history the persistence of Yahweh in maintaining the intolerant
attitude and outlook that were legacies from his parochial past
was an anachronism which was undoubtedly out of tune with the
i See L C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 102, and V. C (i) 00 3, Annex III, vol. v, p. 611, above.
* Exod. xx. 5 and xxxiv. 14; Deut. v. 9 and vi. 15 ; Joshua xxiv, 19.
- - 5 ~ v. 7 an > dvi.i4.AccorcUngtoWoolleyS / rL:.4
.
^^
fcw , - / characteristic of the nameless
. with whom Yahweh came to be identified by
lescenaants in ine ivxa^ ~ge. In WooUeys view Abraham's God was the
ramiiy ^rod that had been worshipped in every household in Ur, and it was of the
ess^e S^isFamily God that 'he could admit no alien J^gKS^lS Se dS
side interests'. In persisting in the worship of this J^^^ t ^ ^rt^^!
fa^l^w^fe^^^
to pitch their moving tents.
40 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
temper that was prevalent in that age among the host of ci-devant
local divinities of Yahweh's kind, who for the most part were
conducting their tournament in a spirit of 'live-and-let-live' and
'give-and-take'. 1 This unamiable anachronism was, nevertheless,
as we shall see, one of the elements in Yahweh's character that
helped him to win his astonishing victory.
It may be instructive to look into these two traits of provincial-
ism and exclusiveness more closely, taking the provincialism first
and the exclusiveness second.
The choice of a provincial divinity to be the vehicle for an
epiphany of a God who is omnipresent and omnipotent and unique
might seem at first sight to be an inexplicable paradox; for, while
the Jewish and Christian and Islamic conception of a God with
these attributes 2 has indisputably been derived, as a matter of his-
torical fact, from the figure of a Yahweh who makes his first
appearance on the terrestrial scene as the Thunderer of Sinai or
as the Ba'al of Shiloh, it is equally indisputable that the theolo-
gical content, as opposed to the historical origin, of the idea of
God which is common to these three monotheistic religions sprung
from a single Syriac root is immeasurably different from the primi-
tive representation of Yahweh, and bears a far closer resemblance
to a number of other conceptions to which, as a matter of historical
fact, the Islamic-Christian-Jewish conception is either indebted
less deeply or even in some of the cases in question not indebted
at all, so far as we can tell. In point of universality the Islamic-
Christian-Jewish conception of God has less in common with the
primitive representation of Yahweh than it has with the picture
of the high god of a pantheon an Amon-Re or a Corichancan
Sun-God or a Marduk-Bel whose authority at any rate extends
in some sense over the whole of the Universe, even though the
divinity by whom this supreme power is exercised be neither
omnipotent nor unique. Or, if we take as our standard of com-
parison the degree of the spirituality that the different conceptions
of God display, here the latter-day Jewish and Christian and
Islamic conception of God has more in common with the abstrac-
tions of the philosophic schools : with an Andean Viracocha, an
1 The abnormality of the exclusiveness that was displayed, in different degrees of
militancy, by both Judaism and Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenian Age, is noticed by
Eduard Meyer in the passage quoted on p. 32, above.
a It was because Christianity had inherited from Judaism the conception of a God
"who was unique that the Hellenes looked upon the Christians as being no better than
atheists (see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (J3), vol. iv, p. 348, and the passage quoted from the
writings of the Emperor Julian in V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex II, vol. v, p. 584, above). 'To
the mind of a Roman there was something atheistic in Yahweh's claim to be the only
god in existence. For the Roman, One God was no god* (Spengler, O. : Der Untergang
des AbendLandes^ vol. ii (Munich 1920, Beck), p. 567), See further V. C (ii) (a), Annex
II, in the present volume, p. 536, below.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 41
Egyptiac Aton, a Neoplatonic Helios, a Confucian T'ien, a Stoic
Zeus, and even, perhaps, with a latter-day Western 'God the
Mathematician*. For the primitive figure of Yahweh, as we see it
(through a glass darkly) in the panorama of the Pentateuch, appears
equally gross whether we compare it with these philosophic ab-
stractions or with our own idea of the God whose countenance has
been astonishingly revealed to us through Yahweh's features. Why
is it, then, that, in a mystery play which has for its plot the revela-
tion of God to Man, the supreme role of serving as the vehicle for
the divine epiphany has been allotted, not to an etherial Aton or
even to 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 so many of his unsuccessful competitors ?
The answer to this hard question may perhaps be found in call^
ing to mind one element in the latter-day Jewish and Christian and
Islamic conception of God which we have not yet mentioned. We
have dwelt so far upon certain qualities which are as prominent
in this etherial representation of God as they are conspicuous by
their apparent absence from the character of the primitive Yahweh
the three sublime qualities of uniqueness and omnipotence and
omnipresence. Yet, for all their sublimity, these three attributes
of the Divine Nature are in themselves no more than conclusions
of the human understanding; they are not experiences of the
human heart; and, while it is no doubt possible for a human soul
which has made its first discovery of God on the intellectual plane
to enter into communion with Him thereafter on that higher level
of spiritual intercourse on which human beings are able to love,
as well as know, their human fellow creatures, the attainment of
communion with God along a path on which the heart has to wait
upon the head is evidently 'hard and rare\ Few human souls Jiave
succeeded, like Ikhnaton or Akbar, in winning the Visio Beatifica
for themselves by this intellectual approach; 1 fewer still have
succeeded, like Zarathustra, in communicating to others a vision
that has been gained in this primarily intellectual way; and this
will not surprise us when we consider what element in God's
nature it i? that we have so far left out of account; for it is an
element that is no mere attribute but is rather the very essence
of the Divine Nature as it presents itself to us an essence apart
from which the Godhead could hardly be imagined as existing or
as being capable of having any attributes ascribed to it.
For Man, God's essence is that He is a living god with whom
1 For the failure of Ikhnaton and Akbar to become founders of new religions see
V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 695-6 and 699-704, above.
42 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
a living human being can enter into a spiritual relation that; is
recognizably akin to his spiritual relations with the living ttim^an
beings among whom Man lives his earthly life as a social creature.
This fact of being alive is the essence of God's nature for faxusnan
souls that are seeking to enter into communion with Him, gund at
the same time it is the hardest element in God's nature for h-^ 1 * 12111
beings to grasp, since this living god has to be apprehended, by
our human faculties without the aid of those physical evidences of
life a visibility and a tangibility that are offered by all other
living beings that come within Man's ken. And, if it is thuts the
most difficult part of the knowledge of God to know Him Ixi this
essential way, this difficulty is evidently at its maximum, for a
spiritual explorer who attempts an intellectual approach to his
divine goal, since an intellectual apprehension of God's attributes
is a way of knowing God which is more remote than any other
from the direct communion of Life with Life. The seeker after
God who takes this intellectual path is like some climber who gains
his first footing on the mountain-side at the point which is not
only farthest from the summit but which is also separated from
it by the deepest chasms and the sheerest precipices. It is mani-
festly less difficult however difficult it still may be for a human
soul which is already in enjoyment of a direct communion with
God to enlarge its comprehension of the Divine Nature by graft-
ing a branch of intellectual knowledge on to the living stem of
its intuitive religious experience. In short, the natural order of
aspiration in any human endeavour to find the way to God Is the
order which is followed in Francis Thompson's poem:
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
We can now perhaps see why our latter-day Islamic-Christian-
Jewish conception of God has grown, as it has, out of the primitive
figure of Yahweh and not out of the sophisticated constructions
of the philosophers; for this quality of being alive, which is the
essence of God as Jews and Christians and Muslims believe in. Him
to-day, is likewise the essence of Yahweh as he makes his appear-
ance in the Old Testament. 1 . /For who is there of all flesh that
1 J? ^5 *<k of the Israelites this property of 'life* or 'existence* in the god -whose
worship they had inherited from their forefathers eventually came to loom so large that,
at least in official parlance, the genuine traditional name of the god was distorted into
conformity with a false etymology which sought to derive the name itself from the out-
out-
ears to
r^r
Testa-
ment, but also in certain non-Israelite names, some of which are of earlier date <e-- in
compound names current in Shinar in the time of Hammurabi, at Hamath in tlie time of
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 43
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 after his epiphany to them on Sinai. And it is this
same assurance that the god whom they worship is a living god
that nerves the Israelites to invade and occupy the Palestinian pro-
vinces of 'the New Empire' of Egypt, 2 and afterwards to match
themselves against the rival Philistine claimants to Pharaoh's dere-
lict Palestinian heritage. 3 When this living God of Israel encoun-
ters in turn an abstract Zoroastrian Ahuramazda 4 and an abstract
Sargon, and at Damascus in the time of Esarhaddon). Moreover, Yahu is the form of
his name under which the god was worshipped in the fifth century B.C. at Elephantine
by the Jewish, or Judaeo-Samaritan, garrison of that frontier-fortress of the Achaemenian
Empire. This original Yahu has been twisted into Yahweh to give the word the appear-
ance of being the third person singular of the imperfect tense of the verbal root HYH,
signifying 'existence* though the correct form of this is not yahweh but yihyeh. In
Exodus iii. 13-15 this name is represented as being revealed by its divine owner to
Israel through the mouth of Moses ; and in this place the distortion is carried a stage
farther than usual; for while in verse 15 the Lord instructs Moses to declare to Israel
that * Yahweh the god of your fathers . . . hath sent me unto you' and 'this is my name for
evcr^in the preceding verse the Lord reveals his name to Moses, not in the third person
"~ t in a co
so far rei
_ w __3t happe_ ,
(For this etymological evidence of the Israelites' sense of the vitality of their god see
van Hoonacker, A. : Une Communautl Judfo-Aramtenne d ldphantine> en gypte, aux
vi* et V siedes av.J.-C. (London 191 <, Milford), pp. 67-73. See also Pauly-Wissowaf
Real-Encydopa'die der Classischen Alterturwwissenschaft, neue Bearbeitung, Halbband
xvii, cols. 698-721, s.v. lao.)
1 Deut. v. 26. * Joshua iii. ro. 3 x Sam. xvii. 26 and 36.
+ Ahura Mazdah means 'God the Wise* ; and in the Zoroastrian conception of him
he is as abstract as the Stoic Zeus, even if there be truth in the conjecture that the
Iranian, like the Hellenic, abstraction has been drawn out of an historical divinity who,
in the Iranian case, would be Varuna, the Aryan counterpart of the Greek Cranus (for
this conjecture see Christensen, A.: VIran sous les Sassamdes (Copenhagen 1936, Levin
& Munksgaard), p. 28). Ahuramazda was conceived of by the Prophet Zarathustra as a
One True God who ^yas served by attendant spirits of less than divine rank though,
in the Gathas, these spirits, too, are called ahuras, like God Himself. The abstractnesa
(see Meyer, E.: Ursprung und An/tinge des Christentwm, vol. ii (Stuttgart and Berlin
i 92 i, Cotta), p. 59) of the beings who constitute the Zoroastrian Host of Heaven is as
evident in Zarathustra's names for these amesha spentat as it is in his name for the God
whom they serve. They are called (see Christensen, op. cit., pp. 20-30) Vohu Manah
('Good State of Mind'), Asha Vahishta ('The Best Truth 1 ), Khshathra Vairya ('The
Desirable Kingdom [of God] 1 ), Armaiti ('Submission* compare Muhammad's term
'Islam'), Haurvatat ('Integrity' or 'Health'), Ameretat ('Immortality'), Sraosha
('Obedience'). It is astonishing that this hierarchy of undisguised abstractions should
have been substituted by a prophet of the External Proletariat for an anthropomorphi-
cally conceived barbarian pantheon the Iranian counterpart of the Vedic Pantheon of
the Aryas whose members were the hereditary objects of worship of Zarathustra' a
world; yet, in order to clear the Universe for exclusive occupation by the creatures or
discoveries of his own penetrating thought, Zarathustra had the audacity to degrade
the traditional Iranian gods (the daSvas) to the rank of demons in the service of another
abstraction: Angra Mainyaush (Ahriman), 'the enemy spirit' or adversary of Ahura-
mazda. It is still more astonishing to find that this artificial, abstract, and universal
religion gradually supplanted the traditional Iranian paganism though this at the price
of incorporating into itself a considerable amount of incongruous pagan ritual and myth.
The secret of this success in which Zoroastrianism is perhaps unique among religions
and philosophies of this abstract kind can hardly be ascribed to the royal patronage
which Zarathustra won for his new faith in his own lifetime, and which was retained by
Zoroastrianism until the end of the Achaemenian regime; for the Achaemenian Em-
perors took care not to force upon their subjects the religion which they had embraced
for themselves (see V. C (i) (a) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v. pp. 704-5, above); and the in-
tolerant enforcement of a Zoroastrian orthodoxy by the Sasanidae in a later age, so far
from proving beneficial to Zoroastrianism, had a disastrous effect upon its destinies
44 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Stoic Zeus and an abstract Constantinian Sol Invictus 1 ati<3 an
abstract Neoplatonic Helios, it becomes manifest that Yahweht
olos TreTTwrat,, rol S aKtal atcrcrovcriv. 2
For the primitive figure of Yahweh has grown into the Christian
conception of God by annexing the intellectual attributes of t Jiese
abstractions without deigning to acknowledge the debt or scrupling
to obliterate their names. 3 The completeness of Yahweh's victory
in this series of encounters is pointed by its contrast with what
happened when another barbaric and parochial yet aggressively
living god the divine patron of the Arabian city-state of Mecca,
who was known within the Ka'bah as Allah, *the god* sans phrase
came to be identified by the Prophet Muhammad with the
omnipresent and omnipotent and unique God of Jewry and
Christendom. 4 The Ba'al of Mecca who was thus suddenly mag-
nified by the fiat of a man of genius did not contribute a smgl&
new attribute to the intellectual conception of the One True C3od
whose alter ego Allah was now proclaimed to be; but he has given
proof of his vitality by imposing his own provincial name upon
the God of the Universe on the lips of all the myriads of human
beings in every part of the World who have come to know God
through embracing Islam,
(see V. C (i) (d} 6 (S), Annex, vol. v, pp. 659-61, above). A more powerful advent* t*
aid was the eventual enlistment of the Magi (V. C (i) (of) 6 (8), vol. v, p. 542, abov&J *
the service of an upstart faith which they had at first done their utmost to stamp out
the remarkable success of Zarathustra s religion to the force of the Prophet's
and to the truth and profundity of his ideas. The eight concepts of the Devil, the
Judgement, Salvation, the Saviour, Transfiguration (Fraahdkarati), the Millennium* the
Kingdom of God (Khshathra Vairya), and Immortality, which, between them, e* *ver
so large a part of the fields of Christian and Islamic theology, are all derived
Zoroastrianism through a Jewish channel (for the Zoroaatrian origin of the Jewish e
tology see von Gall, A.: BaaiAei'a TOV 8<ov (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), pp. ix
156-7; for the Zoroastrian origin of the Jewish belief in Immortality see ibid., p. 1 60 1*
* For an interpretation of Constantine's vision of the Unconquerable Christ revealing
his cross athwart the disk of the Unconquerable Sun see the passage emoted ire*tn
N. H. Baynes in V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 693, above.
* Odyssey \ Book X, 1. 495, quoted in Polybius, Book XXXVI, cap. 8.
3 In the Christian diffraction of the Unity of God into a Trinity of Persons we <*n
observe the extent of the Christian Theology's intellectual debt to the abstract reliftiom
and philosophies with which Judaism and Christianity had collided between the sixth
century B.C. and the fourth century of the Christian Era. While in the Second Per***ra
of the Trinity the quality of being a Jiving god has been brought home to human hear f
with quite a new emotional vividness and spiritual force, by a God who haa renounced
the unmitigated transcendence of Yahweh in order to become incarnate, the Kir*t
person of the Trinity is represented in the iconography of the Christian Church, * I in
is in the Book of Daniel (see p. 34, footnote ^ above), in the likeness of the Zor**-
astnan representation of Ahuramazda, and the Third Person of the Trinity is virtually
identical m name, as well as in function, with the first of the Zoroastrian ayn#*fa&
spentas, Vohu Manah. In this theological plagiarism Christianity has done Zoroastri***-
ism not a wrong but a service, for 'it is not until it has been taken up into Christianity
that the Weltanschauung of the Iranian prophet begins to have its greatest effect m tit*
tteld of world history (Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christentums, vol. ii (Stutt-
gart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 441).
* See V. C (i) (d) 6 (5), Annex, vol. v, p. 688, footnote z, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 45
If this persistent quality of being alive is the obverse of Yahweh's
primitive provincialism, 1 we may find that the exclusiyeness which
is an enduring as well as an original 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 begins to become apparent as soon as we consider
the significance of the contrast between the ultimate triumph of
the 'jealous god' of two puny and ephemeral Syriac principalities
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, as a pair of con-
verging icebergs might crush a frail kayak* In respect of being
rooted in the soil and of flowing with the sap of visible and tangible
life, both Amon-Re and Marduk-Bel could measure themselves
against Yahweh on equal terms, while they had the advantage over
him in being associated, in the minds of their hereditary worship*
pers, with the colossal worldly success of their native Thebes and
Babyion -a &UCCCHH which was ascribed to the zeal and prowess
of these great tutelary divinities on their peoples* behalf, whereas
Yahweh's people had been left, in their abasement and captivity,
to solve as beat they could the problem of vindicating the bene-
volence and omnipotence of a tribal divinity who had apparently
abandoned his tribesmen in their hour of need, without lifting a
finger to defend them against a ruthless alien aggressor. 2 If, in
spite of these telling points in their favour, Marduk-Bel and Amon-
Re were outstripped, as they were* by Yahweh in the competition
between divinities under the Achaemenian regime, we can hardly
avoid ascribing their failure to their innocence of Yahweh's jealous
vein; for the absence of this trait was as conspicuous in the charac-
ters of both the Egyptian and the BabylonJc high god as its
presence was in the character of their obscure yet victorious Pales*
tinian rival A freedom for good or for ill from the spirit of
exclusiveness is implicit in the hyphen which links the two parts
of these synthetic divinities* respective names; for* if jealousy had
been the ruling passion of either of the original constituents in
either case, then neither of these composite high gods could ever
even have come into existence* 3 No wonder that Marduk-Bel and
Amon-Re were as tolerant of polytheism beyond the bounds of
* Compare ih* rffe f *h **m# qul**y in enabling natural language* of an originally
no more than local currency f* <tefif artificial language* like Bapermnto m the competi-
tion for becoming tixtu fwwlw (# V, C (i) (d) 6 (y) vol. v. pp, 4W~3 *bve),
* For the solution of ihi# problem which Yahweh*i Jewiah worshipper* worked out,
the puwiige qumttd frw* Kduftrd Meyer on p, 30, above,
* For the m*flifef n*r* tif Aman-fte uml Mr4dfc&el at tymptom of th* **n of
promiscuity in *Jta fettf of Religion V, C (i) (<0 6 (3), vol. v, pp. 519-3 * *bov,
46 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
their own loose-knit personalities as they were tolerant of the
disunity in their Protean selves. Both of them alike were born or,
more accurately speaking, were manufactured to be content with
their primal status of suzerainty over a host of other beings who
were no less divine, and not even much less potent, than they were ;
and, by the same token, this congenital lack of ambition doomed
them both to drop out of the competition for a monopoly of divi-
nity when Yahweh's devouring jealousness would as surely spur him
on to run to the end this race that had been set before them all. 1
The same relentless intolerance of any rival was also manifestly
one of the qualities that enabled the God of Israel, after he had
become the God of the Christian Church, to outrun all his com-
petitors once again in another Battle of the Gods which was fought
out this time in the arena of the Roman Empire, These rival
candidates for the spiritual allegiance of the Hellenic internal
proletariat were of diverse natures and origins a Syriac Mithras,
an Egyptiac Isis, a Hittite Cybele but they were in unani-
mous accord with each other, and in unanimous disagreement
with their eventual conqueror, in being ready to enter into a
compromise. They would have been willing either to parti-
tion the vast population of the Hellenic universal state into as
many separate flocks as there were competing divinities, or to find
a niche for each and all of the divine competitors in each and every
human soul, or even to allow the ingenuity of their hierophants
to incorporate these hitherto rival gods into a joint-stock company
for a common exploitation of the vast new virgin territory which
lay open to the Oriental divinities in a Hellenic World whose
native gods were now too decrepit to be capable any longer of
fighting even on their own ground in defence of their traditional
1 Heb. xii. i. The enterprise of our modern Western archaeologist* has disin-
terred at Elephantine, in Upper Egypt, the records of one exception to the rule
of Yahweh's jealousness which proves the rule to have had the value that we have
just attributed to it. In the Aramaic papyri relating to the affairs of the Jewish, or
Judaeo-Samaritan, garrison of Elephantine" under the Achaemenian regime we find
that in this community of Yahu-worshippers the god did not enjoy a monopoly of wor-
ship but had at least four associates 'Anath-Yahu, * Anath-Bethel, Aim-Bethel, Haram-
Bethel of whom the first two, at any rate, were goddesses (see Meyer, E.: Der Papyrw-
fund von Elephantine, 2nd ed. (Leipzig 1912, Hinrichs), pp, 54-63). These associates
of Yahu at Elephantine" appear to have been, not survivals from a pre-monotheistk
phase of Yahu- worship, but accretions contributed by a Samaritan element in the com-
munity at Elephantinfi (for this explanation see van Hoonacker, op cit., pp. 73-85,
especially p. 82; for the political origin and religious history of the Samaritans see
V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 125, footnote i, above). The most interesting feature in the
testimony of the Elephantinfi papyri from our present point of view i* the fact that,
fragmentary though they are, they inform us, not only that Yaml of Elcphantin* was a
less jealous god than Yahweh of Jerusalem, but also that the worship of YaMat Elephan-
tinfi failed to survive. One of the documents is a letter, written in 408-7 B.C.. which
recounts the destruction of the temple of Yahu by the local priests of the Egyptiac god
Khnum with the connivance of the Persian military commandant at Elephantine 1 , And
the worship of the easy-going Yahu of Elephantine 1 , in contrast to the worship of the
jealous Yahweh of Jerusalem, seems to have perished in the ruin of the shrine in which
it had been carried on in this particular place.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 47
rights. 1 This easy-going, compromising spirit was fatal to the
rivals of the God of Tertullian when they had to face an adversary
who could not be content with a less than 'totalitarian* victory
because any abatement of his own exclusive claim to divinity
would be, for him, a denial of his own essence.
The most impressive testimony to the value of the jealous vein
in Yahweh's thos is perhaps afforded by a piece of negative
evidence that comes from an Indie World in which the God of
Israel did not begin to make his existence felt until after the
religion of the Indie internal proletariat had set hard in an indi-
genous form 2 that it still retains to-day- 3 In the Indie World, as
elsewhere, the process of social disintegration was accompanied by
the development of a sense of unity, and this made itself felt very
forciblyon the religious plane as was to be expected in a society
in whose habitus the religious vein was dominant, 4 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 or dissolved into one or other of the two
mighty figures of Shiva and Vishnu- 5
'Vishnu is really all the other gods. Just as he is identical with Brah-
man and Qiva, so he condescends to manifest himself in beings which
do not claim to be self-existent or without beginning. It involves some
partial limitation of his own nature, some Docetic assumption of a
temporary form. aiva piety reached the same end in a different way-
"Victorious is the Eternal SthSnu (the ^Steadfast' or 'Stable'), whose
one body is formed by the coalescence of all the gods"; so ran the
dedication of King Katusthavarman (regnabat A*D, 500-50) on a great
tank in Mysore adjoining a temple of Qiva** 6
* For this decrepitude of the native Hellenic divinities by the time of the foundation
of the Roman Empire see I. C (i) <#) vot i, p. 57 J II. D (vi), yol, u, pp. X5~x6; and
IV. C (in) (e) a (J9) vol. iv p. 349* shove.
a For the elements and e*tho of Hinduism se* V. C (*) (c) a vol. v, pp. *37~8, above.
3 In essentials Hinduism appears to have attained its prent form by the tune of
the Gupta Dynasty (imperafoant circa A.IX 350-480, or, on a atncter reckoning, area
A.D. 390-470 : ace I. C (i) (&), voL i, p, 85 , footnote x above). On the other hand, Islam -
which is the vehicle in which the 'jeiioua god* of Israel has road* his epiphany on
Indian soil did not begin to impinge upon the Hindu World, even in the outlying and
isolated province of Sind, until after the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian
Era, and did not sweep over Hindustan until the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries (see IV, C (ii) (&) a, vol. iv pp, 00-100, above), ,."*.,
* For this dominance of the religious vein in the tobitw of both th* 'apparented
Indie and the 'affiliated* Hindu Society see the quotation* from Sir Charle* Eliot in
III. C (iii), vol. iii, pp. 384-5 and 388, above, . , , .
s The stage in the process of transcending a primitiv* polytheism which is repre-
sented, in the history of Indie religion, by the absorption of all other divinities into either
Vishnu or Shiva was never completed in the Babylonic and Egyptiac worlda. There
does, however* seem to have been an inchoate and abortive tendency, in the tame of the
New Empire* of Egypt, for Amon-Re to attract into hi* own personality some, at leaat*
of the other divinities of the Thothmean Pantheon to judge by certain PM**e from
the Egyptiac religious literature of that age that have been quoted in V. C (i) (4) 6 (3),
vol. v, p, 531 above.
6 Carpenter, J, Estlin: Tkeitm in Mtfaveit Iwti* (London ioai f Wifliam* fc Nor-
gate), p. 290,
48 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
With a former multiplicity of local divinities thus absorbed Into
the personality of one or other of two alternative Lords of tne
Universe, Hinduism has reached the stage that was reached by tJie
religion of the Syriac internal proletariat 1 in the Achaemeino-
Seleucid Age, when the mighty figures of Ahuramazda and Yahweh
confronted one another as the two survivors on a stricken field, ot
battle between a host of divinities who had been contending for
the prize of becoming the vehicle for a revelation of the unity
of the Divine Nature. This penultimate stage on the road towards
the apprehension of the unity of God was attained by Hinduism
at least fifteen hundred, and perhaps two thousand, 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 by the same token anti-
thetic figures of two equally-matched candidates who have per-
sistently 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, so far from offering a genuine
solution, involves an unresolved contradiction inasmuch as it is
really impossible to conceive of a godhead that is omnipresent and
omnipotent as Vishnu and Shiva each claim to be without
being at the same time unique. As soon as we put this question,
the answer stares us in the face. The reason why Hinduism has
come to this tragic halt within sight of a goal towards which it has
travelled over so long a road is because neither Shiva nor Vishnu
is a 'jealous god* in Yahweh J s vehement vein. So far from that,
the ethos of both these Hindu divinities bears a manifest resem-
blance to that of the Hittite and Egyptiac and Syriac divinities -
a Cybele and an Isis and a Mithras whom the God of Israel
overthrew after he had become the God of Christianity. In the
same easy-going spirit Vishnu and Shiva have always preferred a
compromise to a fight to the death; and it might have been ex-
pected a priori that, in a world where they did not find themselves
confronted by any implacable rival, they would have been able to
strike their compromise with an impunity that was impossible for
Mithras and Cybele and Isis in an arena in which the Christians*
'jealous god' was also one of the combatants. Yet, as it has turned
out, the fdrtunes of Shiva and Vishnu have been hardly happier than
vol v T the 8 Sy b!? C counterparts of ^ worships of Shiva and Vishnu see V. C (i) (r)
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 49
those of their counterparts in the Roman Empire. They have been
spared annihilation only to meet the more ironic fate of being
reciprocally frustrated and stultified by one another. And this
failure to apprehend the unity of God in a world in which the God
of Israel has not been on the scene seems to indicate that the
jealousness of Yahweh, which at first sight is so repellent, has a
value that transcends its sheer survival-value in a struggle for
existence between competing divinities. Its transcendent value
lies in the disconcerting fact that a divinity who is credited by his
worshippers with this spirit of uncompromising self-assertion
proves to be the only medium through which the profound and
therefore elusive truth of the unity of God has been firmly grasped
hitherto by human souls.
8. Archaism
(a) Archaism in Institutions and Ideas.
Having now taken stock of the alternative ways of behaviour and
feeling that present themselves to souls who are born into a socially
disintegrating world, we may pass on to a consideration of the
alternative ways of life that lie open to be followed in the same
challenging circumstances ; and here we may begin with that way
which, in our preliminary reconnaissance of this stage in our
Study, we have labelled 'Archaism' 1 and have defined 2 as an
attempt to remount the stream of life breasting the current and
taking salmon-leaps up cataracts and waterfalls in the hope of
regaining one of those quiet upper reaches that in 'Times of
Troubles' are regretted the more poignantly the farther they have
been left behind. 3
In making an empirical survey of examples of this phenomenon
of Archaism, we shall perhaps obtain a clearer view if we once
again divide the landscape up into those four fields Conduct,
Art, Language, and Religion which we have already plotted out
in the course of a preceding inquiry into the sense of promiscuity. 4
* In V. C (1) (d*) i, vol. v, p. 383, above.
2 In V. C (i) (d} i, vol. v, pp. 383-4, above.
3 In recalling our definition of the term Archaism, it may be timely to remind our-
selves of the limitations which we are placing upon it in this Study. For our purposes
Archaism means an attempt to recapture some elements from the past of the society of
which the archaist himself is a member. We are not taking Archaism to mean any and
every attempt at a reversion to something in the Past; for we are not including in our
use of the term those renaissances of elements in an 'apparented' civilization which an
'affiliated' civilization sometimes achieves. On the conception of History which we are
trying to work out in this Study, such renaissances are contacts between different
civilizations in the Time-dimension, whereas Archaism is a movement which does not
range outside the bounds of the single civilization to which the archaist himself belongs.
From our standpoint this difference between Archaism within the Time-horizon of a
single civilization and the contact in Time between two different civilizations is more
important than the feature common to Archaism and Contact in Time of being an
attempt at a reversion to the Past. 4 See V. C (i) (d) 6, vol. v, above.
S o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
We shall find, however, that in these two different surveys our
four fields are not completely coextensive in their several areas, and
that this divergence arises from an inward diversity between the
two states of mind which are the respective objects of study in
the two cases. The sense of promiscuity is a spontaneous, un~self-
conscious feeling which sometimes asserts itself, as we have seen,
in defiance of tradition and of law and of public opinion and even
of the taste and conscience of the person or persons whom the
sense of promiscuity is overpowering and carrying away. By con-
trast, Archaism is a deliberate, self-conscious policy of attempting
to swim against the stream of life at the bidding of a conscience
and a taste and a public opinion and a law and a tradition v^faich
spur the swimmer into attempting his arduous tour deforce ; and
accordingly we shall find that in the field of conduct Archaism
expresses itself in formal institutions and formulated ideas rather
than in un-self-conscious manners, and in the linguistic field in
points of style and theme, which are matters of convention and,
as such, are amenable to the control of the will, as well as in points
of vocabulary, accidence, and syntax, in which the wayward spirit
of the vulgar tongue is apt to outwit the 'high-brow* purist's most
straitly pedantic intentions.
If we now begin our survey by entering upon the field of insti-
tutions and ideas, our best plan of operations will be to start by
taking a glance at institutional Archaism in detail and then, to
follow the spread of the archaistic state of mind over a wider and
wider area till we arrive, in the end, at an 'ideological' Archaism
which is all-pervasive because it is an Archaism-on-principle.
We have already come across one example of an arciiaistic
resuscitation of a particular rite in our survey of civilizations that
have come to a standstill on the threshold of life, 1 We have seen 2
how 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-ritual and had been
incorporated into the Lycurgean agog was being practised at
Sparta once again, though now with a pathological exaggeration
which is one of the characteristic notes of Archaism in all its mani-
festations. In the Indie World, too, we have noted 3 that the horse-
sacrifice, which was a traditional Indie method of asserting a title
to an oecumenical authority, was resuscitated first by Pushyainitra,
the usurper who overthrew the Mauryas in the second century
B.C., and afterwards more than five hundred years later by tiie
in vctf' > f' u a ** Part IIL A * L *> p * "> above -
In V. C (i) (d) *i> p. 2, footnote i, tbove.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 51
Guptas. It is easy to guess that Pushyamitra and Samudragupta
in turn were moved to make this archaistic demonstration of their
legitimacy by an inward doubt about the validity of their respective
claims to a sovereignty on the oecumenical scale; and it was
assuredly an inward loss of certainty about the boasted eternity of
Rome that moved the Emperor Philip to celebrate, with the
utmost solemnity and magnificence, the traditional Ludi Saecu-
lares when, in A.D. 248, the Roman Empire was enjoying a momen-
tary breathing-space in the midst of a bout of anarchy that was
threatening to put an end to its very existence. 1
If we pass from recurrent rites to permanent institutions, we
shall observe that, in this age in which the Roman Commonwealth
appeared to be on the point of dissolution, the revival of the Ludi
Saeculares in A.D. 248 was followed in or about A.D. 25o 2 by the
re-establishment of the venerable office of the censorship. And if
we cast our eyes back to the Time of Troubles* from which the
bout of anarchy in the third century of the Christian Era was
divided by a span of effective Roman Peace, we shall see the
Gracchi attempting to deal with the economic and social crisis
which was the aftermath of the Hannibalic War by legislating for
the restoration of a system of peasant-proprietorship which they
believed to have been prevalent in the Ager Romanus at a date
more than two hundred years before their own day. 3 If we turn
from the Hellenic to the Western World, we shall find an analogue
of the re-establishment of the Roman censorship in the third
century of the Christian Era in the re-enhancement, in the twen-
tieth century, of the prestige and popularity of the British Crown
to a height at which they had never stood at any time since the
death of Queen Elizabeth in A.D. 1 603.4
1 The Ludi Saeculares had been first revived or had been originally invented by
Augustus in 17 B.C., and had since then been celebrated by Claudius in A.D. 47, by
Domitian in A.D. 88, by Antoninus Pius in A.D. 147 (according to Bury, J. B.: A History
of the Roman Empire from its Foundation to the Death of Marcus Aurelius (London 1913,
Murray), p. 524), and by Septimius Severus in A.D,, 204. The celebration by Philip in
A.D. 248 was officially in honour of the completion of the first millennium of Rome's
existence, counting from the legendary, date of the foundation of the city. For the
symbolic meaning and psychological effect of the ritual act condere saeculum see Wend-
land, P.: Die Hellenistisch-RSmische Kultur, 2nd and 3rd ed. (Tubingen 1912, Mohr),
P- 1 4i-
a The date is given as the 27th October, 251, in the so-called Historia Augusta,
'Valeriani Duo', chap. 5, 4; but this can haroUy be right, since by that date the Emperor
Decius, who was the author of this archaistic measure, was in all probability already
dead, and the true date must have been prior to the Emperor's departure from Rome for
the campaign against the Goths in which he was to meet his death. (See Schiller, H. :
Geschichte der Romischen Kaiserzeit, vol. i, part (2) (Gotha 1883, Perthes), p. 807,
footnote 3.*)
3 See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (]3), vol. iv, p. 508; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 70-1 and 78; and
V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 388-9, above; and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, pp.
219-20, below.
* The prestige and popularity which the British Crown was enjoying in the year 1937
would have astonished even the most sharp-sighted observer of the politics of the
United Kingdom in 1837, on the eve of the accession of Queen Victoria supposing that
52 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
If we pass from particular institutions to constitutions extending
over the whole domain of political life, we shall observe that the
revalorization of the medieval institution of the Crown in Great
Britain has been contemporaneous with the organization in Italy
of a 'corporative state', and that this is supposed to be a restoration
of a political and economic regime which was in force in 'the Middle
Ages* in Northern Italy and in the rest of the medieval Western
city-state cosmos, and which was based, in its original form,
upon the medieval trade-guilds. This modern Western Fascist
'corporative state' is a veritable Trdrpios TroXtrtia ('ancestral consti-
tution') of the kind which was so prominent a portent in a disin-
tegrating Hellenic World both during the Hellenic 'Time of
Troubles' and after the establishment of a Hellenic universal state
in the shape of the Roman Empire.
The slogan 'patrios politeia* implies the claim that a newly
inaugurated constitution is in reality an old-established one which
is nqw being brought back into force after an unmerited and
unfortunate interval of disuse and oblivion. In the history of the
decline and fall of the Hellenic Civilization we find this claim being
made, within twenty years of the breakdown of 431 B.C., by the
Athenian reactionaries who succeeded, through a coup d'etat, in
imposing upon the Athenian Demos the short-lived oligarchic
constitution of the year 411. This 'Regime of the Four Hundred'
was hailed by its supporters as a return to the Constitution of
Cleisthenes and perhaps even to the Constitution of Solon. In a
similar tone Agis and Cleomenes the two Spartan martyr-kings
who successively staked and lost their lives on a policy of political
and social Archaism in the third century B.C. proclaimed that
they were restoring the Constitution of Lycurgus and that they
ought therefore to be applauded as reformers instead of being
execrated as revolutionaries. 1 At Rome in the second century B.C.
our imaginary observer could have returned to life after the lapse of a hundred years.
It is true that in 1937 the Crown performed a practical service for which there had been
no demand a hundred years back as a personal link between the several fully self-
governing states members of the British Commonwealth of Nations (for this latter-day
role of the British Crown see Part II. B, vol. i, pp. 190-1, and IV. C (iii) (6) 5, vol. iv,
p. 187, above). Yet a contemporary English observer would not be disposed to believe
that the twentieth-century revalorization of the Crown had been wholly, or even mainly,
due to any such utilitarian constitutional considerations. The deeper reason why the
British Crown was now once more attracting to itself the affections and the hopes of its
subjects in the United Kingdom was because the English in this generation had a feeling
which was not the less strong for being unacknowledged that England had now
passed her political zenith. It was this feeling that was sapping the prestige and popu-
larity of Parliament the master institution of England in her maturity and was
restoring the prestige and popularity of the Crown, which had been the master institu-
tion of an age of political adolescence to which the twentieth-century Englishman was
now wistfully looking back.
* See Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 76-7; V. C (i) (c) a, vol. v, p. 78; and V. C (i)
W i, vol. v, pp. 388-9, above; and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, pp. 219-20,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL S3
the Gracchi professed and this, no doubt, with the same good
faith as their Heracleid forerunners at Sparta to be exercising the
office of the Tribunate of the Plebs in the fashion that had been
intended at the time when, at the turn of the fourth and third
centuries, the dissident Plebeian imperium in tmperio had been
re-absorbed into the legitimate Roman body politic in virtue of a
sagacious political compromise. 1
In the same Roman Commonwealth a hundred years later the
dictatorship which by that time had come to be the only possible
instrument for appeasing a stasis which the Gracchi had provoked
was commended to the ci-devant governing class by an Augustan
Archaism which was as rusd as the Gracchan Archaism had been
naif. The assassination of Octavian's adoptive father Divus Julius
had shown that the sheer necessity and urgency of establishing a
dictatorial regime were not enough to guarantee immunity from
criminal violence to a statesman who was attempting to perform
this invidious public service. So far from that, the mere admission
of the need for a dictatorship was a crushing indictment of the
class in whose hands the government of the Roman Common-
wealth had been concentrated for the past two centuries. If the
Ordo Senatorius were to be forced to confess that a dictator could
no longer be dispensed with, then it would be confessing in the
same breath its own complete political and moral failure; and the
fate of Caesar the dictator-god had shown that it was impossible
to extort this confession from the Roman aristocracy without
driving them, in the act, into a homicidal frenzy of exasperation.
The adoptive Caesar Octavianus might lack the genius of the
genuine Caesar the God, but he did possess, in the highest degree,
the capacity for learning by experience; and, when the crime of
44 B.C. confronted Octavian with the problem of how to wield
Caesar's powers without courting Caesar's fate, he contrived a
solution which earned him the titles of Augustus and Pater Patriae
and enabled him to become the true founder of the long-yearned-
for Hellenic universal state. 2
Augustus's solution of the political crux of the age was to 'save
the face' of the Ordo Senatorius by tacitly inviting its members to
collaborate with him in an open constitutional conspiracy. The
unavowed bargain which he induced them to accept was a 'division
of powers 1 in which Augustus received the substance while the
c
u'i P
below.
2 For Augustus's role and achievement see V. C (i) (d) 6 (o), Annex, vol. v, pp. 648-9,
above, and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, pp, 187 and 190, below.
54 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Senate retained the form; and the offer which would have been
rejected as an insult by the ci-devant Roman governing class^in its
heyday was accepted by their epigoni with alacrity and gratitude.
In consequence, Augustus died in his bed at a ripe old age more
than forty years after he had settled down into his dictatorship
under the disarming title of Princeps Senatus; and throughout
those four decades every urgent autocratic act that he had per-
formed had been juridically warranted by the constitutionally
well-established powers of the traditional republican magistracies
which the Senate had officially conferred upon him. De facto the
nature and scope and effect of these powers were magnified out of
all recognition by being combined in the person of a single incum-
bent upon whom they had been conferred in some cases in per-
petuity and in the rest with a frequency of iteration which had no
historical precedent. Yet this patent fact that the ancient repub-
lican magistracies amounted cumulatively to a dictatorship was
never allowed either by Augustus of the one part or by the
Senate of the other to disturb the constitutional fiction that
the Princeps Senatus was wielding no power which was alien to the
ancient republican constitution of the Roman Commonwealth;
and this archaistic constitutional make-believe actually provided
so solid a foundation for a new political structure that the Augustan
Principate endured for the best part of three hundred years. 1
It is also significant that the meticulous respect that was shown
by Augustus, throughout the period of his constitutional rule, for
the theory of the sovereignty of the Senate, was equalled and even
surpassed towards the close of this three-hundred-years' period
after having been cast aside, with various degrees of brutality, by
the first emperor's earlier successors from Tiberius onwards. In
the breathing-spaces in that half-century of political convulsions,
between A.D. 235 and A.D. 284, which was the prelude to a liquida-
tion of the Augustan Principate to make way for an absolute
monarchy on the Sasanian pattern, the Senate found itself once
again being treated with an honour which it had seldom known
since the death of Augustus himself. The struggle against the
proletarian dictatorship of Maximinus Thrax was conducted by
the Gordians and, after their deaths, by Maximus and Balbinus
as the Senate's nominees and mandatories. And even after
GalUenus had deprived the Ordo Senatorius of their last shreds
HeUenic
is
tkft Cttunt^rrv-r^^ T ~ V L ""*";" w^"C AUgUSIUS, Wltn HIS artlUl ArCnaiSITL, IS
25SS^iv?tf.^f% ^ n ^f ^^ ho be <^e the founder of the Prior Han
a universal
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 55
of effective power, 1 and after Aurelian had given the Hellenic
World a foretaste of the despotism that was to be imposed upon
it, once for all, by Diocletian within less than ten years of Aurelian's
death, we find the Army engaging with the Senate in an unpre-
cedented contest in courtesy in which each party insisted, more
Japonico, that the other should accept the honour of electing
Aurelian's successor, until at last the Senators admitted defeat by
consenting to nominate one of their own number. In A.D. 275 it
was strange indeed to see a proletarian soldiery submitting to the
command of a cultivated civilian who was already seventy-five
years old; but it was even stranger when the anxieties and
'fatigues of his incongruous task brought the aged Emperor Tacitus
to his grave within six months of his investiture with the purple
to see his virile successor Probus, who was a peasant-soldier of
the same rough Illyrian stock as Aurelian and Diocletian, declining
to assume the Imperial title, though he was already the candi-
date of the Army and the master of the Empire de facto, until
he had asked for and obtained the Senate's ratification of the
Army's choice. Thus, in the constitutional history of the Roman
Commonwealth, the Senate was never treated with a greater
show of deference than at a moment when it was on the point of
losing the last shadow of a sovereignty which by that time
had been in abeyance de facto for the best part of four cen-
turies. 2 So strong was the archaistic impulse in a society which
was obsessed with the problem of self-preservation under a threat
of imminent death.
If we turn from a disintegrating Hellenic to a disintegrating
Sinic World, we shall be able here to observe the emergence of
a constitutional Archaism of a more comprehensive scope, extending
from public into private life and from institutions to ideas.
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. 3 and in the later
1 According to Parker, H. M. D. : A fftsti
(London " ' ' - - -
Senators i _____ _
the Senatorial governors of provinces of their authority over the troops stationed in their
districts. (This conjecture is based on Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus, 33, 34, as read in
the hght of the evidence of inscriptions.)
* The Senate's loss of control over the reins of government de facto is to be dated
neither from the victory of Augustus over Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. nor from the
formation of the Second Triumvirate in 43 B.C. nor from the formation of the First
Triumvirate in 60 B.C. , but rather from the civil war of 90-81 B.C. The Sullan restoration
was already an archaistic tour deforce; and it was the tragedy of the Roman constitu-
tionalists of the generation of Cicero and Cato Minor that they had been born into an
age in which the dictatorship was overdue and in which the surviving simulacrum of
Senatorial government was a delusive anachronism.
3 For the humanistic ethos of Confucius himself see the passages quoted from Granet
in V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 14, footnote 3, above.
56 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
and more radical schools of the 'Politicians* and 'Sophists* and
'Legists' j 1 but this burst of spiritual activity was ephemeral.
*Ce sont les efforts tentes par les gouvernements de potentats (dont
certains jouaient les despotes eclaires) pour difier Tfitat sur un ordre
social renove qui sont h. 1'origine des concurrences corporatives et des
pol&niques sectaires par lesquelles se signalent les v e , iv e et iii e siecles.
Beaucoup (Tidees fecondes furent alors brillamment defendues. Axicune
n'a reussi a modifier profond6ment la mentalite des Chinois. . . . Comme
les solutions proposes Pattestent, toute Tactivite de pens^e que ces
probl^mes ont provoquee a ete d6termine par une crise sociale oil le
syst6me feodal et la conception traditionnelle de Tfitiquette auraient pu
sornbrer. L'ordre feodal, cependant, est, pour le fond, demeure vivace.
L 'agitation philosophique qui donne tant d'interet a la periode des
Royaumes Combattants a abouti au triomphe de la scolastique. Un
confonnisme archaisant a renforce* le prestige de I'^tiquette et de tout
le vieux systeme de classifications, de comportements, de convenances.' 2
This revulsion towards the Past can be seen at its clearest in the
fate which overtook the Confucian humanism.
'En meme temps que s'attenuait Inspiration humaniste, s'accroissait
Tattachement a un decorum archaisant. Plutot qu'a observer les corn-
portements de 1'homme en cherchant a affiner le sens de la dignit
humaine, les heritiers infideles du Maitre s'employerent a subordonner
1'ensemb^du savoir k Tetude des traditions rituelles.' 3
From this attitude of mind it is a short step to the Archaism-
on-principle of Tong Chong-chu (vivebat circa 175-105 B.C.), an
Imperial civil servant of the Prior Han regime who succeeded in
making a reductio ad absurdum of the bureaucratic outlook by
working out a system for subjecting every administrative act to the
test of an historical precedent.
'C'est en se servant des precedents, c'est-a-dire grice a une inter-
pr&ation des faits de Thistoire, qu'on justifiera, mais aussi qu'on pourra
condamner, les decisions du prince et de ses conseillers. Ceux-ci et
leurs decrets se trouveront juges par le Ciel et le peuple, des qu'un
savant, ayant produit un fait historique, Taura interpret^ en montrant
quel filt, jadis, dans une situation d&clarie analogue a telle situation
actuelle, le jugement du peuple et du Ciel.' 4
Another example of Archaism-on-principle in a different sphere
is the cult of a largely fictitious Primitive Teutonism which has
1 For a conspectus of the sects and schools of thought which were brought into
existence by the ordeal of the Sink 'Time of Troubles' see Granet, M.: La Penste
Chtnoise (Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre), Book IV, chaps. 1-3, and Waley, A. : The
Way and its Power (London 1934, Allen & Unwin), Introduction.
2 Granet, op. cit., pp. 423-4 and 417-18.
3 Ibid., p. 553. A still later stage in the metamorphosis of Confucianism, when it
degenerated into sheer sorcery, has been touched upon in V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), vol. v,
pp. 549 and 555-6, above.
^ Granet, op. cit., p. 577.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 57
been one of the provincial products of a general archaistic move-
ment of Romanticism in the modern Western World.
This curious superstition has arisen within the last hundred
years in certain provinces of Western Christendom in which the
current vernacular happens to be some twig of the Teutonic
branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The postulates
are that the Teutonic language has been spoken, ab initio, by a
blonde and blue-eyed race; that this race is autochthonous in
Northern Europe; and that the region, the race, and the language
are all of them uniquely noble. 1 After having afforded a harmless
antiquarian gratification to some nineteenth-century English his-
torians and instilled a perhaps more tiresome racial self-conceit
into some twentieth-century American ethnologists; this cult of
an imaginary Primitive Teutonism has latterly revealed its true
nature by becoming in the watchword 'Blood and Soil' the
palladium of the post-war National-Socialist Movement in the
German Reich. We are here confronted with an exhibition of
Archaism which would be pathetic if it were not so sinister. 2 A
great modern Western nation which has been brought, by the
spiritual malady of this Modern Age, 3 within an ace of an irre-
trievable national collapse, has apparently lost faith in the panoply
of a modern Western culture which has not availed to save it from
this dreadful experience; and, in a desperate effort to find a way
out of the trap into which the recent course of history has inveigled
it, this distraught and disillusioned Germany has turned away from
a future prospect of interminable humiliation and horror, and has
doubled back upon its own historical past. This is, no doubt, a
trail which has only to be retraced in the reverse direction in order
to lose itself sooner or later in the darkness of the primeval forest
out of which our common Teutonic ancestors first emerged into
notoriety some two thousand years ago; but it remains to be
proved that the Urwald is an earthly paradise!
In this latter-day German archaistic resort to a fancied saving
grace of the pristine tribal lair and the primitive tribal stock there
is a touch of the Sinic style of Archaism with its flair for the
primitive solidarity between the human tribe and the tribe's non-
human environment; but in this modern Western variation on a
1 The racial facet of this delusion has been examined already in this Study in II. C (ii)
(a) i, vol. i, pp. 207-49, above.
1 At the moment of revising this passage for publication in November 1938 the
German National-Socialist cult of 'Blood and Soil 1 had already earned this epithet. For,
although it had not so far precipitated a European War, it had already let loose, inside
the Reich, an outburst of savage Anti-Semitism.
3 Germany's troubles in the present generation can be ascribed, without dispute, to
the contemporary Zeitgeist of the Western Society of which Germany herself is a
fraction, though it might be more difficult to arrive at an agreement on the minor
question of assessing the relative responsibilities of the Germans and then- neighbours.
58 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Sinic theme the subtle Sinic touch is incongruously combined with
the simple animal instinct which prompts a baby kangaroo in the
zoological gardens of a great metropolis to take refuge in its
mother's pouch after it has been put out of countenance by the
collective stare of an inquisitive crowd of human spectators.
Yet another form of Archaism-on-principle is the hankering
after 'a return to Nature' or to 'the simple life' ;* and in our modern
Western Society, since the days of Jean- Jacques Rousseau and
Marie Antoinette, this itch has been apt to seek relief in a variety-
show of cranks and affectations in unfavourable contrast to the
corresponding reaction of the Taoist sages of a disintegrating Sinic
World, who turned their minds towards the soberer simplicity of
the archaic village communities out of which the now decadent
Sinic Society had originally sprung. 2
'L'ideal politique des maitres taoistes parait avoir &e un regime de
minuscules communautes paysannes. Dans une bourgade isolee, un
saint (v6n^re comme un dieu du sol) peut, de la fa^on la plus modeste,
exercer ses pouvoirs indefinis. Tchouang tseu declare que tout va bien
dans TEmpire lorsqu'on laisse libre cours aux traditions locales qu'il
nomme ies maximes villageoises.' 3
This archaistic ideal is commended in the nineteenth chapter of
the Tao Te King:*
Banish wisdom, discard knowledge,
And the people will be benefited a hundredfold.
Banish human kindness, discard morality,
And the people will be dutiful and compassionate.
Banish skill, discard profit,
And thieves and robbers will disappear.
If when these things are done they find life too plain and unadorned,
Then let them have accessories ;
Give them Simplicity to look at, the Uncarved Block to hold,
Give them selflessness and fewness of desires.
In the eightieth chapter of the same work the same ideal picture
is drawn again, but this time with a vividness which conveys, in
1 This hankering, which in one aspect is an expression of archaistic-niindedness, has
another aspect in which it is a gesture of abandon (see V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 377, and
V. C (i) (a) 2, vol. v, p. 403, above).
2 See Hackmann, H.: Chinesische PhUosophie (Munich 1927, Reinhardt), pp. 109-10,
for the view that this hankering after a return to 'the simple life' is a symptom of social
senescence.
3 Granet, op. cit., p. 547. While the Taoists were the chief advocates of an archaistic
return to the simple life during the final paroxysm of the Sinic Time of Troubles' in the
' fourth and third centuries B.C., this idea was not the monopoly of any one of the
numerous Sinic schools of philosophy that were evoked by the challenge of being born
into that terrible age. There was, for instance, an archaistic vein in the philosophy of
Mencius (vivebat, 372-289 B.C.) (Hackmann, H.: Chinesische Philosophic (Munich 1927,
Reinhardt), pp. 187-9 and 192-4).
* The following English translations are taken from Waley, A.: The Way and its
Power (London 1934, Allen & Unwin).
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 59
a few strokes of the Sinic brush, the essence of an Archaism that
is elaborated by Plato in page after page of The Republic and The
Laws.
'Given a small country with few inhabitants, he could bring it about
that though there should be among the people contrivances requiring
ten times, a hundred times less labour, they would not use them. 1 He
could bring it about that the people would be ready to lay down their
lives and lay them down again in defence of their homes, rather than
emigrate. There might still be boats and carriages, but no one would go
in them ; there might still be weapons of war, but no one would drill
with them. He could bring it about that "the people should have no
use for any form of writing save knotted ropes, should be contented with
their food, pleased with their clothing, satisfied with their homes, should
take pleasure in their rustic tasks. The next place might be so near at
hand that qne could hear the cocks crowing in it, the dogs barking; but
the people would grow old and die without ever having been there. J> ' 2
To an English reader of the Tao Te King the -note of this
passage is already familiar in Gray's Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard] and in the England of the present writer's day this
archaic life was still being lived in an unbroken continuity with
the Past by some, at least, of the inhabitants of the tract of
Yorkshire country-side in which he wrote these lines. If there is
any grain of truth in Tong Chong-chu's belief that the lessons of
History may elucidate the signs of the times, 3 it may be surmised
that, to-day, there are children already born in London or in
Leeds who will live to be overwhelmed by a passionate archaistic
impulse to throw away their motor-cars and wireless sets and
Lewis guns and bombing-planes in order to free their hands for
handling 'the poor crooked scythe and spade' that are fabled once
upon a time to have bestowed a homely happiness upon the
modern English urban proletariat's far-off rustic ancestors when,
in an unwittingly Taoist vein, 'they kept the noiseless tenor of
their way along the cool sequester'd vale of life'.
(f$) Archaism in Art.
The vogue of Archaism in Art is something so familiar to
modern Western Man that he is apt to take it for granted without
ever becoming conscious of it. For the most conspicuous of the
* Compare the legend of the latter-day Chinese pilot that has been recounted in
III. C (i) (c), vol. iii, pp. 188-9, above. A.J.T.
* The passage within double quotation marks is, in Waley's view, a quotation from
an earlier Taoist work (see Waley, op. cit., p. 242, footnote i). In more concrete and
prosaic terms this Taoist Sinic idea is also expressed by the Positivist Western philo-
sopher Comte in his suggestion that the great national states of the modern Western
World should be broken up into Kleinstaaten on the scale of the Grand Duchy of
Tuscany (see Caird, E.: The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte (Glasgow 1885,
MacLehose), pp. 239-40). 3 See p. 56, above.
60 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
arts is Architecture; in almost every great city of the Western World
in A.D. 1938 at least nine-tenths of the buildings then standing were
less than a hundred years old; 1 and our modern Western architec-
ture had already been falling under the dominion of Archaism at
the time by then a hundred years back when this orgy of build-
ing had begun. 2 Thus the worker who travels twice a day between
his suburban dormitory and his urban factory or office has regis-
tered automatically, on his visual memory, the print of innumer-
able Neo-Gothic railway-stations and churches, while, if he is a
worker in New York, his eye will have become equally well
accustomed to the millions of square feet of Neo-Colonial^ brick-
work that cast a cloak of archaistic decency over the steel-and-
concrete skeletons of the sky-scrapers. If our breadwinner is not
in too much of a hurry to glance at the marble bas-relief that
crowns the entrance to that Colonial-brick-skinned mammoth
office-building, he may find to-day that the lines of the carving
have been cunningly reduced to the clumsy stiffness of the pre-
Romanesque Dark Ages; 4 and, if he actually has the leisure to step
into the Neo-Gothic ironwork of this municipal art gallery, he may
stumble here into a roomful of Tre-Raphaelite' pictures.
This triumph of Archaism over the visual arts is, indeed, one
of the dominant features in our modern Western urban landscapes ;
but it is not, of course, a phenomenon that is peculiar to our
1 The European traveller becomes aware of this as soon as he visits the United -States
or any other overseas country that is Western in its culture. At first he is surprised to
find that cities which are not more than one hundred or two hundred years old can look
when viewed from bus-roof or train-window so little different from the cities of his
own European home, which can count their age in thousands of years instead of hun-
dreds. It is only on second thoughts that it occurs to him that, in all but one or two of
the European cities that are to-day in the full swim of modem Western life, nine-tenths
of the buildings are no older than ten-tenths of those in Buffalo or Pittsburgh. This
is true not only of Manchester and Berlin, but even of London and Cologne and Paris
and Milan.
2 In this connexion it may be well to draw attention once again to the distinction,
pointed out on p. 49, footnote 3, above, between Archaism within the limits of the
experience of a single society and that contact in the Time-dimension between two
different civilizations which displays itself in what is commonly called a renaissance.
In the modern Western World, for example, the Neo-Gothic Archaism of the archi-
tecture of the past hundred years has been a reaction against the fashion, which had been
prevalent for some three or four centuries before that, of discarding almost every
vestige of a native Western style in order to ape the alien architecture of the Hellenes.
3 The Americans use the term 'Colonial* for the eighteenth-century style of archi-
tecture which the English call 'Georgian*.
* The primitivism of one school of modern Western sculpture has suggested the
following reflexions to a contemporary Western biologist:
*To my mind, the closest analogy to the evolution of a given group is the history of
the art and literature of a civilization. The clumsy primitive forms are replaced by a
great variety of types. Different schools arise and decline more or less rapidly. Finally
a penod of decline sets in, characterized by Archaism like that of the last ammonites.
And it is difficult not to compare some of the fantastic animals of the declining periods
of a race with the work of Miss Sitwell, or the clumsy but impressive with that of
Epstein. The history of an animal group shows no more evidence of planning than does
that of a national literature. But both show orderly sequences which are already pretty
capable of explanation.' Haldane, J. B. S.: Possible Worlds (London 1928, Chatto &
Wmdus), p. 43.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 61
Western Society. If a Londoner travels to Constantinople instead
of travelling to New York, and watches the pageant of the sun
setting over the ridge of Stamboul, he will see, silhouetted against
the sky-line, dome after dome of the mosques which under an
Ottoman regime that has provided the main body of Orthodox
Christendom with its universal state 1 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 upon a time proclaimed
in stone the emergence of an infant Orthodox Christian Civiliza-
tion out of the wreckage of a Hellenic World which had already
ceased to live. 2
If we turn to the decline and fall of this Hellenic Society to
which our own, as well as the Orthodox Christian, is affiliated, and
watch what the cultivated Emperor Hadrian was doing with his
wealth and leisure in the pale clear sunshine of a Hellenic 'Indian
Summer', 3 we shall see him spending a considerable part of both
in 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.). The taste of
a generation of connoisseurs who were too highly refined to
appreciate the obvious and were too exquisitely sensitive not to
shiver at the mildest touch of a frost in which they could recognize
the herald of an approaching winter, found the masterliness of the
Hellenic sculptor's art in its fifth-century maturity too self-con-
fident and at the same time perhaps too painfully close to the
verge of the debacle to be valued quite at its proper worth. On
the other hand the archaic style appealed to the sophisticated
intellects of Hadrian's generation as something precious and re-
cherchd, while it captivated their unconscious selves by instilling
a suggestion of the dewy freshness of dawn into the still and stale
air of a monotonous evening. In combination, these two distinct
motives for preferring the archaic to the classical style made an
irresistible appeal to the Hellenic virtuosi of Hadrian's day. And
similar considerations will explain why it was that, in the latter
stages of the long-drawn-out dotage of the Egyptiac Society, the
artistic style of 'the Old Kingdom' the style which had distin-
guished the growth-stage of Egyptiac history in a remote antiquity
1 See Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 26-7; IV. C (ii) (fc) i, vol. iv, p. 70; V. C (i) (c) i,
vol. v, p. 54; and V. C (i) (c) 4, vol. v, p. 348, above.
2 In IV. C (ii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 54-5, above, it has been argued that the Byzantine
breach with a Hellenic past in the domain of Architecture was deliberate.
3 For, the view that an ostensible 'Golden Age* of the Hellenic World, during the
reigns of the Roman Emperors Nerva to Marcus inclusive, was really no more than an
'Indian Summer', see IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, pp. 58-61, above.
62 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
before the beginning of the Time of Troubles' was taken as a
pattern by the Saite Pharaohs of the Twenty- Sixth Dynasty after
an interval of some two thousand years.
(y) Archaism in Language and Literature. 1
When the spirit of Archaism is moved to express itself in the
field of Language and Literature, the supreme tour de force to
which it can address itself here is to bring a 'dead language' 2 to
1 In this field, Archaism in the sense of a deliberate return to some form of language
or style of literature or range of thought and feeling that has fallen into disuse has to
be distinguished from a mere conservatism which clings, perhaps more often than not
out of sheer inertia and with no deliberate policy at all, to a form of language that has
ceased to be intelligible or to a style of literature that has ceased to be serviceable or to
a range of thought and feeling that has ceased to come natural. The commonest ex-
amples of such linguistic and literary conservatism are to be found in one or other of
the two moulds of legal formulae and religious liturgies: for instance, in the Norrnan-
French tags in our twentieth-century English judicial and parliamentary procedure, and
in the Latin Liturgy of the Catholic Church. Other examples of the preservation, in
a living liturgy, of a language that is dead in every other usage are the su^-vival of the
Attic KOLVTJ, Old Slavonic, and Classical Georgian in different versions of the Liturgy of
the Orthodox Christian Church; the survival of Classical Syriac, Classical Armenian,
Classical Coptic, and Ge'ez in different versions of the Liturgy of the Monophysite
Christian Church; the survival of Classical Syriac in the Liturgy of the Nestorian Chris-
tian Church; and the survival of Classical Hebrew in the religious life of Jewry.
The Egyptiac Society is perhaps unique in having performed twice over the tour de
force of preserving a form of language until it has become unintelligible and this not
merely in a liturgy but in a profane literature. 'As far back as we can trace it, the Egyp-
tian language displays signs of being carefully fostered' ; the works of literature that
were written in this Classical Egyptian during the Egyptiac *Time of Troubles' and the
earlier days of the Egyptiac universal state (circa 2424-1770 B.C.) 'were read in the
schools five hundred years later; and from their language and style no one dared venture
to deviate'. The spoken language, however, went its own way, until 'finally . . . ,the
difference . . . became so great that the classical language could scarcely be understood
by ordinary people. In the great revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty which
we associate with the name of Amenophis IV [Ikhnaton] these shackles also were
broken. Men began to write poetry in the actual language of the day; and in it is com-
posed the beautiful Hymn to the Sun, the manifesto of the Reformed Religion. But,
whereas the other innovations of the heretical regime disappeared after its collapse, this
particular one survived doubtless because the conditions hitherto existing had become
impossible. 1 Once more, however, a cultural conservatism was to prevail in Egyptiac
intelligences over a human thirst for life. The 'New Egyptian Literature, -which, as we
might suppose, had set out to be really popular, did not long pursue this course, . . .
For something like five centuries this later literature appears to have been cultivated,
and then its language also became a dead one, which the boys at school had to learnl*
(Erman, A.: The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, English translation (London 1927,
Methuen), pp. xxiv-xxvi; see also the present Study, IV. C (ii) (a), vol. iv, p. 55,
footnote 3, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 496, above).
This incorrigible conservatism which' clings blindly *to whatever it may happen to
have in hand is evidently not the same thing as an Archaism which deliberately drops
what it has been holding in order to set the hand free for grasping at some lost treasure
* The term 'dead language* is ordinarily used to describe a language which has fallen
into disuse merely as a spoken vernacular, while remaining in use as a vehicle for Ritual
? r : baw . or Science or even for Belles Lettres; but, strictly speaking, a language which
is in this position (e.g. Latin in the position which it now occupies in the modern
Western World) is only half dead. The truly dead languages are those of which some
inscribed or written monument has been recovered by the ingenuity of our 'modem
Western archaeologists after the rediscovered language has been not merely in disuse
but in oblivion for hundreds or thousands of years a sequence of death, burial, and
disinterrnent which has been the history of Etruscan, Lycian, Ancient Egyptian both
Uld and New and 'Demotic', Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Urartian, the Old
Persian of the Achaemenian inscriptions, Tokharian, and so on. The criterion of
deadness in this stricter sense is that the disinterred texts have to be deciphered either
trom internal evidence or by the lucky discovery of some bilingual or multilingual
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 63
life again by putting it back into circulation as a living vernacular;
and such an attempt is being made to-day, under our eyes, in
several places in our Westernized World.
In this instance the impulse has come from the modern Western
movement of Nationalism, which we have defined in this Study
as a transference of interest from the whole to the part and as a
withdrawal of loyalty from the Creator in order to bestow it upon
the creature. 1 A community that has succumbed to this grave
spiritual malady is apt to resent its cultural debt to the society of
which it is itself a fragment, and in this frame of mind it will put
itself to great trouble and inconvenience for the sake of transposing
its culture into a shape that can be certified as being parochially
'national' throughout. One of the staples of such a 'national cul-
ture' is a 'national language* ; and, while most of the nationalized
communities of the modern 'Great Society* have found their
'national language* ready to hand, there are some which have been
reduced to the laborious and ludicrous expedient of fabricating
the 'mother-tongue' that they are determined to possess, in the
temper of a nouveau riche who furnishes himself with portraits of
appropriate ancestors. In our latter-day Westernized World the
would-be self-sufficient nations that have found themselves desti-
tute 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 in our world that are engaged in
producing a distinctive national language of their own by the
process of putting back into circulation as a living vernacular some
language which has long since ceased to be current in any but an
academic sphere. The five nations whom the writer of this Study
has in mind are the Norwegians, the Irish, the Ottoman Turks,
thfe Greeks, and the Zionist Jews; and it will be seen from this
roll-call 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 which came into collision with the Roman
Christendom in the first chapter of our Western history and were
successively defeated and devoured by this more puissant neigh-
bour. 2 The Ottoman Turks and the Greeks are recently Western-
inscription in which one of the other languages employed is some language that has
never ceased to be studied (as, for example, a key to Ancient Egyptian was found in the
Rosetta Stone, on which one version of the text is engraved in the Attic Koivrf). Some
of these genuinely dead languages (e.g. Etruscan and Lycian) still remain undeciphered
because no illuminating bilingual inscription has been found. There is probably no
example of any attempt to resuscitate a language that is 'dead' in this stricter sense.
1 See Part I. A, vol. i, p, o; IV. C (iii) (b) 4 and 5, vol. iv, pp. 156-90; IV. C (iii) (c)
2 (a), vol. iv, p. 261; and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j3), vol. iv, p. 303, above.
* See II. D (vii), vol. ii, pp. 322-60, above.
64 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
ized contingents of the Iranic Society in the one case and of the
main body of the Orthodox Christian Society in the other. The
Zionist Jews are a fragment of a fossil of alien origin 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 modern Norwegian national language is the historical conse-
quence of a political eclipse under which the Kingdom of Norway
lay from A.D. 1397, which was the date of the Union of Calmar, 1
until A.D. 1905, when Norway at length recovered her complete
political independence. During the greater part of this period of
more than 500 years from 1397, that is to say, until x8*4
Norway was politically united with Denmark under conditions
which made her culturally as well as politically subordinate to her
sister kingdom; and in these circumstances the indigenous Scan-
dinavian literature in the Norse language a literature which was
now no more than a decadent relic of an abortive Scandinavian
Civilization gave place in Norway to a version of the modern
Western literature which was written in Danish by Norwegian
hands, 2 though on Norwegian lips its pronunciation was modified
into harmony with the contemporary Norwegian vernacular. Thus,
when the Norwegians set themselves tentatively post 1814, and
resolutely post 1905, to fit themselves out with a national culture
^vhich was to be complete according to the specifications of a con-
ventional French or English pattern, they found themselves with-
out any literary medium, except one of foreign mintage, for con-
veying modern Western ideas, and without any mother-tongue
except a peasant patois which had ceased to be a vehicle for the
long since extinct Scandinavian literature without ever having
been refashioned into a vehicle for a Norwegian version of the
modern literature of the Western World. Confronted with this
awkward gap in the linguistic department of their national outfit*
the Norwegian nationalists have been trying to produce a Norwe-
gian language that will serve peasant and townsman alike by ful-
filling simultaneously both the two requirements of being national
and being cultivated; and the method that they have followed has
1 See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 175, above.
2 In Norway the indigenous Scandinavian literature in the Norse language died out
in the fourteenth century; and by the sixteenth century Old Norse had ceased to be
generally intelligible to the literate public in Norway as is testified by Laurent*
Hanss0n and other sixteenth-century Norwegian men-of-letters who on this account
were already beginning to make translations out of foreign languages not into- Nforae
but into Danish for the benefit of Norwegian readers. On the other hand, in Iceland,
where the indigenous Scandinavian literature in Norse had attained its greatest brilliance
(see II. D (Hi), vol. ii, pp. 94-6, and II. D (vii), vol. ii, pp. 356-9, above), there has been
no comparable break in the tradition, either linguistic or literary. Any one who i*
literate in the living form of Icelandic Norse can still read the Classical Icelandic Norse
literature without difficulty down to the present day.
IX THf SOf'L fi<
been to provide a Mil^fiwtc fir 4n r4llv Nnmcjjww/r*! !>4nifth
/{j jc /fo/'wiM/Hn- t-nlmatjrn* fhr mttfrttijwiufv \irwrtfi4n vrrna*
CUUf ittf** * Nr\\ \Misr N% \ ffl'T Jit ihr hnjr ll|4f 4 /Mf'Mf
\\hioh h,is >h*HUi ji* iurtf!r m thr j4*i lv prmitimtf thr Ijturtmfu*
iv$tufv< s f*r the * realign *? 4 i I.ISM* 4! Si*4tu!in.uuti Iurr4fwr
muv pr*nr ^tr**fn? rn<m*h f" *b% t<* Maml fhr Mf4in nf t*csrs^
wnr 4^ 4 \Thulr fur the i**ir$ilrrun*
\Wiirni MA s
uh^i 1 * 1 trmh t<ntrm|"Nrafir 4Hi! *'iun-
ter(itrt*i ate wrkuij? ^untUr fMiluitun fr A lingnifttif j*rihlrm nf
m
n ^tti** 1 *! r\rn tlriJiil, In trrbmi thr )iritih i*nw
has ptiyc^i thr p^hu^il tnjr of fhr tUnmh i'nn^n in \or\%4V,* am
thb uith much fhr Mmr hn^nntu- an*! ruhtir^I omMHjiirncnt
thr h*h4l!v 4'>miiunf t'on-rr h* v*ttir to H
fhr it<tttim4fnj |*rti|r h tih<4incfi U
i ii9fv<^f, *Mitt*i f"*9r * ****** K ^**f^s im
ltft of *
lltlr fit rHit'illlT Hrvi
In th
hsmj ih*
su;>p}r |>
trt oU
66 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
access to the literary sources of the modern Western culture; hut
in the Irish case the resulting difficulties have been aggravated by
two unfortunate facts: in the first place the intrusive Teutonic
English is fur more alien from the native Celtic Irish than Danish
is from the sister Norwegian twig of the same Scandinavian branch
of a single Teutonic stem; 1 and in the second place the English
language has latterly supplanted the Irish language in Ireland not
merely as the medium of culture and government but also as the
vernacular tongue of the common people except for a small
minority of the peasantry in a few remote and backward districts
along the western coast.*- Accordingly, in Ireland it is an even
greater tour de force than it is in Norway to attempt to conjure
a cultivated national language out of a peasant patois; and in these
more desperate circumstances the Irish have resorted to an expedi-
ent of which the Norwegians have fought shy. The Irish have
tried to lend a rubble foundation the strength to bear the weight
of the massive superstructure which they are proposing to build
upon it by grouting it with the vocabulary of an ancient and long
since extinct literature 3 in the hope that, through being recon-
ditioned in this exotic way, it may become capable of serving as
a vehicle for the modern Western culture. A foreign observer of
this Irish experiment may well feel that Archaism could no farther
go at any rate in the linguistic field. Yet, if the observer happen*
to be an Englishman, it would ill become him to smile at the
extravagance of the nationalism of his Irish neighbours* He would
do better to reflect that, if as seems only too probable the
archaistic tour de force of attempting to rehabilitate the Irish
x This difference, however, has counted for less thtn might have been expected ; fur
in the sight of the Norwegian Maahtwvers who have warped their vision, by wearing
the spectacles of Nationalism- 1 the Danish language is not a nister Scindinaviar* ^#fl w
guatfeto be called in aid, but a hostile foreign language to be expelled from iht national
territory. The negative process of eliminating everything Danish from the htofiiry
language of Norway has been the moat assiduous and the moat successful of ihe teiivjiwf
of the maabtrtxw movement ; and for the sake of getting rid of t Duntnh worst thr*
Norwegian linguistic nationalist* d not hesitate to alloy their New Nont with an
outlandish vocabulary which i* neither Scandinavian nor even Teutonic but !Vm*h,
Latin, or Greek in origin.
3 This replacement of Irish by English as the vernacular language of the great majority
of the Irish people is a recent event. As lately a & hundred yetra i#0 Irish w* nmf
prevalent among the peasantry in all parts of the bland outside the Dublin Pale and th
Ulster Plantations, This spread of English at the expense of Irish it to be explmiJFitfd
partly by the ahcer impsssability of the gulf between the two language* (which mad* if
impossible to blend them and therefore necessary to make a choice between them) and
partly by the advantage which English acquired through becoming an oecumenical
lingua franca. Thanks to its attainment of this status, English wa* employed a matter
of course in the nineteenth century aa the vehicle for the spread of education in Ireland t
and it was also propagated unintentionally hy every Irish emigrant to the United Ssatea
of America who eventually came home to settle down or even merely to pay a f**ing
visit to his family.
^ This indigenous Irish literature did not survive the tribulations of the seventeenth
century of the Christian Era and its fl&rwt the age in which its surviving master-
pieces were composed-*- was a thousand years before that.
SCHISM IN THE SOU. 67
language proves to be a disastrously heavy incubus upon the
cultural life of a small and till recently backward people, then this
will be one more item on the list of unhappy legacies that Ireland
has inherited from her ill-starred political association with the
English observer's own country.
The linguistic Archaism in which the Ottoman Turks have been
indulging under the late President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk's
regime is perhaps more wanton than the Norwegian, but certainly
less tragic than the Irish, excursion along the same regressive path*
Modern Ottoman Turkish as it was until the other day, when
the archaizers took it in hand was a language which, in point of
vocabulary, was in much the same condition as modern English,
and this for much the same reasons. The ancestors of the modern
Turks, like those of their English contemporaries, were outer
barbarians who had trespassed on* and squatted in, the derelict
domain of a broken-down civilization; and the descendants of both
sets of barbarians have made the same use of the vehicle of language
as a means for acquiring a tincture of civilisation. Just as the
English have enriched their meagre primitive Teutonic vocabulary
by loading it with a wealth of borrowed French and Latin and
Greek words and phrases, 1 so the 'O&manlis have encrusted their
plain Turkish with innumerable jewels of Persian and Arabic
speech. 2 The result, in both cases, has been to endow a poverty-
stricken barbarian language with a richness in means of expression
which might be envied by the great culture-languages themselves;
and the English-speaking peoples, for their part, are still modestly
content to enjoy this borrowed abundance without dreaming of
repudiating it as a national disgrace* The nationalism of the
English-speaking peoples is, howev<*r> a native growth and there-
fore a mild one; for Nationalism is a cultural virus which appears
to work with a potency that is proportionate to its novelty. At any
rate, this spiritual infection from the West has been taken so
seriously by the Ottoman Turks that they have come to the con-
clusion that they would be unworthy of their Eurasian Nornad
ancestors if they forbore to purify their ancestral language from
the foreign accretions which it has acquired in the course of an
unfortunate but ephemera! episode in its long and glorious history.
When it is remembered that the Persian and Arabic element in
Modern Turkish is at least as large and as important proportion-
ately as the French and Latin and Greek element in Modem
1 In taking on board thi* exotic cargo the medieval English were not guilty of the
ame wanton extravagance * the modern Norwegian* {<* p. 66, footnote i, above).
They were fitting an empty hold and not jettisoning one cargo in orarr to make room
for another,
Sec V, C (i) (<f) 6 ty) vol. v, p* 5x6,
68 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
English, it will be seen that, in this enterprise of cleansing his
native tongue, the Ghazi set himself a task with which none but
a hero could grapple; and the Turkish hero's method of setting
about it was the method which he had previously employed in
ridding his native country of the alien elements in its population.
In that graver crisis Mustafa 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 upon their own shoulders social tasks which hitherto
they had 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, he demon-
strated what an astonishing intellectual stimulus can be given to
mentally sluggish peoples (such as his Turks and our English are)
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; and for an
English spectator these frantic lexicographical labours at Angora
and Stamboul are an awe-inspiring spectacle; for they give him an
inkling of tribulations that the future may hold in store for English-
speakers too, if ever the day should come when 'pure English* in
the literal sense is required of us by some masterful'* Saviour of
Society* as a sacrifice on the altars of our English 'blood and soil'.
If we turn from modern Turkey to modern Greece we shall
find here a linguistic Archaism which has the same political back-
ground as the Irish and Norwegian examples which we have
already examined with the Turks in Greece taking the place of
the English in Ireland and of the Danes in Norway as the political
villains of the piece. Rather more than a hundred years ago the
Greek insurgents against the Ottoman Padishah succeeded, thanks
to the intervention of a Western France and England and a Wes-
ternized Russia, in carving out of a moribund Ottoman Empire
the nucleus of a sovereign independent Greek national state, and
they then at once set out to lead a new life as a fledgling Greek
nation on Western lines. For this cultural adventure, however,
they found themselves equipped linguistically with nothing better
than a peasant patois 1 which was incapable, as it stood, of serving
1 At the time of the foundation of the present Greek national state (A.D. 182932)
the Modern Greek patois was by no means so near the point of extinction as the Modern
Irah patois was at the time of the foundation of the Irish Free State (A.D, 1921). On the
other hand it was not (as the Modern Norwegian patois was in A.D. 1905) the common
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 69
as a vehicle for expressing the ideas of the contemporary West, in
whose intellectual life these politically emancipated Greeks were
now eager to participate. In their impatience at this obstacle in
their Westward path the Greeks anticipated the Irish in resorting
to the expedient of reconditioning their patois for its strange and
exacting new task by grouting it with injections of an antique form
of the language a form which in the Greek case had long since
fallen out of use in every sphere except the Liturgy of the Greek-
speaking patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. But, in making
this same experiment of producing a new language by calling an
old one back to life, the Greeks have had to wrestle with a problem
which is the antithesis of the difficulty which has confronted the
Irish. Whereas the Irish have been handicapped, like the Turks,
by the scantiness of the nutriment that they have been able to
extract for a living patois out of a dead culture-language, the
modern Greeks have been overwhelmed by an embarras de richesses.
For the liturgical Greek which has served their turn is not, like
Old Irish (and Old Norse), the fragile blossom of a culture that
died in its infancy. The liturgical Greek is the Attic K.oivr\\ and, in
audaciously drawing upon this reservoir of Ancient Greek, with its
vast floating wealth of Pagan as well as Christian literature, the
patriots who have been trying to force the growth of a Modern
Greek culture-language have been in danger, not of seeing their
irrigation-channel run dry, but of bringing down a spate which
might obliterate the living patois instead of invigorating it. In
fact, the besetting temptation in the path of this Modern Greek
linguistic Archaism has been to draw upon the resources of
Ancient Greek too lavishly; for, in themselves, these resources are
almost inexhaustible; and the short cut to the supply of any
Modern Greek linguistic need is always to open yet another Attic
sluice-gate. These archaistic excesses have provoked a modernist
reaction; and the artificial language of the purists' (y Kadapevovaa)
has been answered in a caricature of the 'popular language* (97
$r)fjLort.Krf) which is no less artificial in its own contrary way, since
it pounces upon every vulgarism that it spies in the gutter, while it
avoids every classicism with as prim a pedantry as the champions
of the opposing purism display in ejecting even the healthiest
Turcicisms and Italianisms from their stilted vocabulary. This
battle in a Westernized Greece between the advocates of alternative
language of the whole population of the new kingdom. Even within its original narrowly
drawn frontiers which excluded large Greek-speaking and still larger Greek-feeling
populations the Kingdom of Greece included considerable tracts in which the vernacu-
lar of the peasantry was not Greek at all. In Attica, for instance, the capital of the new
kingdom, which had been placed at Athens, was surrounded by an Albanian-speaking
peasantry.
70 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
artificial languages has been as bitter in its way as the feud between
Constantinians and Venizelists.*
Our fifth instance of linguistic Archaism in the 'Great Society'
of the present day is the reconversion of Hebrew into a vernacular
language of everyday life on the lips and in the ears of the Zionist
Jews from the Diaspora who have settled in Palestine; 2 and this
is the most remarkable case of all the five; for, whereas none of
the other four languages in question, not even the Irish, has ever
quite ceased to be spoken or heard, more than twenty-three
centuries have passed since the original Hebrew vernacular was
supplanted by Aramaic in Palestine itself, 3 while even in North-
West Africa, where the Hebrew language was introduced by the
Israelites' neighbours the Phoenicians and not by the Israelites
themselves, it does not seem to have lingered on much later than
the lifetime of Saint Augustine (decessit A.D. 430).* For more than
two thousand years past the language that a Jewish child has
learnt at its mother's knee has been the mother-tongue of one or
other of the Gentile peoples among whom Jewry has been dis-
persed abroad: Aramaic or Greek or Latin; Arabic or Castilian;
German 5 or Russian or English. 6 For all this length of time, until
within living memory, Hebrew has survived only as the language
of the liturgy of the Jewish Church and of the scholarship that is
concerned with the study of the Jewish Law. And then, in the
course of a single generation, this 'dead language* has been brought
out of the synagogue and has been converted into a vehicle for
conveying the modern Western culture at first in a newspaper
* Greece is perhaps the only country in Christendom either Orthodox or "Western
--in _ which popular disturbances over the question of translating the Bible out of a
classical language into the vulgar tongue have been excited, not against a veto upon the
project of translation, but against a threat to carry the project into effect!
2 Zionism has been touched upon already in this Study in II. D (vD vol ii rra 2*2-4.
above. " ' ' **' *
3 Hebrew was ceasing to be spoken by the Jewish community in Palestine as -early as
the third quarter of the fifth century B.C. on the testimony of Nehemiah ClSTeh. xiii,
24, already quoted in V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 499, footnote 5, above). At the present
2?7*, e Aramaic which supplanted Hebrew (see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 8o-r, and V. C (i)
{d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 491, above) and which was afterwards supplanted in its turn by
Arabic has likewise become extinct in Palestine and all but extinct throughout Syria.
The Aramaic language's last surviving Syrian citadel is the Jabal Qalamun, an isolated
range of hills which nses beyond the north-eastern fringe of the Ghutah of Damascus
and juts out farther in the same direction into the Hamad. In this fastness an Aramaic
dialect is still spoken in the villages of Ma'lulah, Bakh'ah and Jubb 'Adln 'The dialect
differs very considerably from the vernacular Syriac of the Nestorian Christians in Per-
sia and Kurdistan, so that the communities are not mutually intelligible. The dialect
of these villages is said to be largely mixed with Arabic, and is never written. Classical
bynac is here and elsewhere used in the liturgies of some of the churches* (British
Admiralty Naval Staff Intelligence Division: A Handbook of Syria, including Palestine
(London 1920, H.M. Stationery Office), p. 196).
4 2,l e . C (*). vo1 - *" P- *3 8 footnote 3, above.
6 Tn? at /i s ' ^i 6 J ewish dialec t of German known as Yiddish (Judisch).
1 he Orenule language spoken by a particular Jewish community at a particular date
nas not, oi course, always been the lapguage of the country in which that community
efffe 1 doimcile ? - at the mc ei *: . F P r example, at the present moment the Jews in the
ex-Ottoman countries speak Castilian and the Jews in Poland German
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 71
press in the so-called 'Jewish. Pale* in Eastern Europe, and now
latterly in the schools and the 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-speak-
ing immigrants from Bukhara are all growing up together to speak,
as their common language, a tongue which, in Palestine, has not
been heard on children's lips since the days of Nehemiah.
These five cases of linguistic Archaism in our contemporary
Westernized World are all in some degree abnormal in the sense
of being, all of them, cases in which a community that is not one
of the original members of the Western Society has resorted to
Archaism in the linguistic field as one of its ways and means of
qualifying itself for naturalization by fitting itself out with all the
equipment that any nation is expected to possess if it is to be
admitted to the Western comity. Yet the very fact that Archaism
should have come in so handy for this purpose seems to indicate
that there must be a strong archaistic vein in our latter-day Western
nationalism, at any rate in its linguistic facet.
This alliance between linguistic Archaism and linguistic Nation-
alism in the modern, or 'post-modern', Western World has a parallel
in the Hellenic World in the days of the Hellenic universal state.
In Roman Imperial times the antiquarian interest in local dialects is
reflected in the revival of their use in parts of Greece where for some
two centuries previously the Attic KOIVT) had been in general use, at least
in inscriptions. So, for example, in the case of Lesbian, Laconian, and
to some extent in Elean, where examples of rhotacism reappear in the
first and second centuries A.D. It is impossible to determine in every case
whether this was a wholly artificial revival of a dialect which had long
ceased to be spoken, or was an artificial elevation to written use of a
dialect which had survived throughout the interval as a patois. The
latter is true of Laconian; but for most dialects we have no adequate
evidence as to the length of their survival in spoken form.' 1
In the Hellenic World, however, this symptom of social decline
in the shape of linguistic Archaism was no mere adjunct of a paro-
chial nationalism, but was something more pervasive than that,
i Buck, C. D.: Introduction to the Study of the Greek Dialects (Boston 1910, Ginn),
p. 161. In the anthology of inscriptions in non-Attic Greek dialects that forms part ot
this book the author has included one archaistic inscription in Lesbian Aeokc which
can be dated from internal evidence to some year between 2 B.C. and A.D. 19 LINO. 24j,
and four archaistic inscriptions in Laconian Doric [Nos. 70-3] which all date from the
second century of the Christian Era a century in which the > Hellenic craze : for Archa-
ism was at its height in every field. The reason why it can be asserted with assurance
that the Laconian dialect continued to be spoken as a peasant patou, during the interval
between its natural demise and its artificial revival as a culture-language worthy of being
inscribed on stone, is that this dialect continues to be s P? ke ^ downto^e presentdaj
along the remote and isolated eastern seaboard of Laconia. This Tsakonian patou is
the only surviving form of spoken Greek that is not denved from the Attic KOivYf.
72 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
and very much more important. For in the course of the disin-
tegration of the Hellenic Society this movement asserted itself
not only in official or semi-official records but also in the field
of literature.
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, 1 that have survived until the present day, you
will soon notice two things : first that the overwhelmingly greater
part of this surviving corpus of Ancient Greek literature is written
in the Attic dialect, and second that, if this Attic part of the
corpus is arranged chronologically, it falls apart into two distinct
groups. In the first place there is an original Attic literature which
was written at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. by
Athenians 2 who were writing, un-self-consciously and unaffectedly,
in the language which they themselves were at the same time
speaking and hearing in the course of their daily life in their native
country. In the second place there is an archaistic Attic literature
which was produced over a period of some six or seven centuries
from the last century B.C. to the sixth century of the Christian
Era and was the work of authors who for the most part did not
live at Athens and did not speak Attic as their native tongue
indeed, a number of them were not born speakers of any dialect
of Greek at all.
The geographical range over which these Neo-Attic writers are
distributed is almost as wide as the Oi/coujtieVq itself. If we take
half a dozen of the non- Christian names, without calling upon
the Christian Fathers, we can muster Josephus of Jerusalem and
Aelian of Praeneste and Marcus Aurelius of Rome and Lucian of
Samosata and Julian of Constantinople (or, ought we to say, 'of
Paris'?) and Procopius of Caesarea. Yet, in spite of this wide
diversity of origin, the Neo-Atticists display an extraordinary uni-
formity in one point which, for them, was the essence of their
work. In their Attic vocabulary and Attic syntax and Attic style
they are, one and all, frank and servile and shameless imitators.
They have even bequeathed to us some of the grammars and the
glossaries indispensable tools of their literary craft which they
Greek literature (which corresponds to the medieval Latin literature of Western Chris-
tendom) has also survived: On the criterion laid down at the beginning of this chapter
(see p. 49, footnote 3, above) this medieval Greek literature is the offspring, not of
Archaism, but of rw+fl*+ ; TV,v ***
.
2 Athenians in the geographical sense of natives of Attica, but not necessarily in the
political sense of citizens of the Athenian state. For example, the advocate Lysias,
whose Attic is unsurpassed in its purity; was politically a resident alien whose devotion
to Athens did indeed win for him the Athenian franchise, but did not avail to enable
nim to retain it.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 73
laboriously compiled for themselves by making a minute and exact
study of the linguistic idiosyncrasies of their ancient Athenian en-
samples. They were determined to make their pens proof against
solecisms, and they achieved their ambition. Indeed, their success
in the game of archaistic writing is vouched for by the very fact that
the works of these Neo-Atticists have been preserved in quantities
that are at first sight astonishingly voluminous by comparison
either with the actual volume of the surviving Athenian Classics
or with the probable volume of the Ancient Greek literature as a
whole.
The explanation is that, at the critical time, on the eve of the
final dissolution of the Hellenic Society, when the question 'to be
or not to be j was being decided for each and every Ancient Greek
author by the prevailing literary taste of the day, the test question
for copyists was 'Is it pure Attic?' rather than 'Is it great litera-
ture?'; and the certified specimens of pure Attic were apt to be
picked out for recopying on their formal Attic merits, without any
invidious discrimination between a Plato of Athens and a Lucian
of Samosata. The consequence is that we find ourselves in posses-
sion of a number of works in Neo-Attic which have comparatively
little intrinsic merit ; and, if some miracle were to give us the chance
of making over again, for ourselves, the choice that has actually
been made for us by the Atticomaniac copyists of the Imperial and
the Post-Imperial Age, we would gladly exchange this mediocre
Neo-Attic stuff for one-tenth of that quantity of the mighty works
of Greek literature which are now lost to us. Among these lost
works are almost all the masterpieces of the third and second
centuries B.C. ; and these were allowed to drop out of circulation
for ever simply because the great Greek writers of that age, like
their greater predecessors in the fifth and fourth centuries, wrote
un-self-consciously and unaffectedly in the current Greek of their
own time and place, and therefore wrote for the most part in a
vulgar Attic /coivq 1 which the Neo-Attic archaizers of the succeed-
ing age with their laboriously cultivated hyper-sensitiveness to
fine shades of language and style found almost too excruciating
to read and a fortiori uninviting to copy out. Why spend labour
on preserving these horrors when the only sure result would be to
imperil the Attic purism of future generations ?
It is this perversely archaistic outlook that has deprived us of
all but a fragment of the work of Polybius of Megalopolis (vivebat
circa 206-128 B.C.), 2 an author whose surviving literary remains
1 For this Attic K0tvi7 see V. C (i) (<f) 6 (y), vol. v, pp. 494-5, abo T e ,* ](7 . A/ , , ont *
2 For the life of Polybius as an illustration of the movement of Withdrawal-and-
Return see III. C (ii) (&), vol. iii, pp. 310-18, above.
74 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
proclaim him to have been one of the four greatest historians
ever wrote in Ancient Greek from beginning to end of the life-span
of the Hellenic Society, 1 and who perhaps just because he had
so much to tell was content to write in the pedestrian style of
his generation. This loss of the work of Polybius is merely one
conspicuous illustration of the severity of the losses that have
been inflicted upon us by the Neo-Attic Archaism of the Imperial
Age of Hellenic literary history. The Greek literature that was
written neither in original nor in archaistic Attic has been reduced
to shreds and tatters ; and the papyri which our modern Western
archaeologists have recovered from deposits made in Egypt in the
Ptolemaic and the Roman Age have restored to us less of the
vulgar Attic Greek literature of the Hellenic Time of Troubles'
than might have been expected. The truth is that the Epimethean
fixation upon an Attic literary past took possession of Greek minds
at the very time when Greek texts began to be deposited in Egypt
in consequence of the conquest of the Achaemenian Empire by
Alexander. And thus even to-day, when we have had the benefit
of half a century of papyrological enterprise and ingenuity, our
extant specimens of non-archaistic post- Alexandrine Greek litera-
ture are still substantially confined to two sets of works: on the
one hand the bucolic poetry of the third and second century
B.C., which was preserved as a literary curiosity for the sake of
its precious Doric; and on the other hand the Greek text of the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures the Septuagint crowned by the
New Testament which was safeguarded by a religious conviction
that these linguistically bizarre specimens of the Attic KOWTJ with
an Aramaic flavouring were direct utterances of the Living God. 2
The Atticism which triumphed in the Archaistic Age of Hellenic
history was not the only literary exercise in which the archaists
indulged. Our surviving body of Neo-Attic Greek literature has
its pendants in the Neo-Ionic pieces of Lucian 3 and in the Neo-
Homeric epic poetry which was cultivated by a long line of anti-
quarian scholars* ranging from Apollonius Rhodius, whose lifetime
1 Two of the four are, of course, indisputably Thucydides and Herodotus; and most
Hellenists would probably allow Polybius the third place. As for the fourth place, in
the humble opinion of the writer of this Study it should be assigned, not to Xenophon,
but to Procopius.
2 It was this belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible that compelled even the most
Attically educated of the Christian Fathers to assess the value of this stylistically bar-
barous farrago on its intrinsic spiritual merits. If they had not been under the discipline
of this religious categorical imperative, we may suspect that the vocabulary and style of
the Greek Bible would have been intolerable for the Origens and Basils and Gregories
and John Chrysostoms.
3 e.g. his JJepi -rfjs '^or/joAoyijMjs and his IZepl rijs Supi^s @eou.
. 4 , My kained friend' a form of reference which is in use between fellow barristers
in the Law Courts in London at the present day is the stock epithet for a poet in the
language of those Latin poets of the last century B.C. who had learnt their trade from
the Greek poets of the Alexandrian schooll This usage of the word doctus tells a tale,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 75
extended from the third into the second century B.C., through
Quintus Smyrnaeus in the fourth century of the Christian Era to
Nonnus Panopolitanus, who may have lived to see the fifth century
pass over into the sixth. 1
The archaistic resuscitation of the Attic dialect of Greek to
serve as a vehicle for a voluminous Neo-Attic literature has an
exact parallel in Indie history in the resuscitation of Sanskrit in
comparable volume for a similar purpose. 2
The original Sanskrit had been the vernacular of the Eurasian
Nomad horde of the Aryas, who had broken out of the Steppe and
had flooded over Northern India, as well as over South- Western
Asia and Northern Egypt, in the second millennium B.C. ; 3 and on
Indian ground this language which had come in on the lips of
barbarian invaders had been preserved in the Vedas, a corpus of
religious literature which had become one of the cultural founda-
tions of an Indie Civilization that had arisen on the site of the Aryas'
Indian camping-grounds after the dust of the Aryan invasion had
subsided. By the time, however, when this Indie Civilization had
broken down and entered upon the path of disintegration, 4 Sans-
krit had passed out of current usage and had become a classical
language which continued to be studied because of the enduring
prestige of the literature that was enshrined in it. As a medium
of communication in everyday life, Sanskrit had by this time been
replaced by a number of younger local vernaculars which were
all alike derived from Sanskrit but which had come, in process of
time, to be so far differentiated both from their parent and from
one another that from a practical, if not from a philological,
point of view they had become separate languages. 5 One of these
1 This linguistic Archaism which is so prominent a feature of the Greek literature of
the decline and fall was no doubt stimulated by a literary convention which had estab-
lished itself in Hellas long before the breakdown of 431 B.C. This convention consisted
in allocating a particular dialect to a particular genre of literature, whatever might be the
native dialect of the author by whom this genre was being practised. For example, the
Attic tragedians of the fifth century B.C. wrote their choruses in an artificial kind of
Doric which had come to be recognized as the pr o>per medium for lyrics ; and as early
as the eighth or seventh century B.C., or whatever the date may hve been at which
Hesiod was writing, the Homeric dialect an archaic Ionic with a tincture of Aeolic isi
ithad become so completely de rigueur for any Greek poet who was writing in hexa-
meters that it was employed by the Ascran author of The Works and Days as a matter
of course, though this Homeric Greek was almost as remote from Hesiod's native
Boeotian Aeolic as it was from the native Attic /coivij of Apollonius and Quintus and
Nonnus.
2 This resuscitation of Sanskrit is also discussed in this Study in V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex
II, vol. v, p. 606, footnote 3, above.
seel,
and V. C"
3 For the long and widely divergent ramifications of the Volkerwanderung of the Aryas
e I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 104-7, and p. in, footnQto*jjJSL,p (vii), vol. U, pp. 388-91 ;
id V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 263-4, above. V^ttTT^^,
In other contexts (e.g. in I. C (i) (&), vo/i,j( $fM& v&8L C (n) (&) i, vol. iv,
.. ^^ _ i v . x \/\/ r *v_ 'i*.^ .sTCk T i* f*~ :i:__4~: A _
pp. 66-7, above) we have seen reason to ia>?trj&rtateb^^^r% Indie Civilization
before the birth of Siddhartha Gautama the I&flaha, and pelw&mven before the end
of the eighth century B.C. / O/ HYDERABAD \5i\l t r -
5 Franke, R. O. : Pall und Sanskrit in ihiem mstonschen und gffi&hischen Verhaltnt*
76 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
prakrits the Pali of Ceylon was employed as the vehicle of the
Hinayanian Buddhist Scriptures, and several others were employed
by the Emperor A9oka (imperdbat 273-232 B.C.) as vehicles for the
edicts which he caused to be inscribed at various places in his ex-
tensive dominions. 1
Asoka's object in varying the prakrit which he employed accord-
ing to the locality in which he was employing it was to make sure
that his edicts should be intelligible to the local population in each
of the districts where they were inscribed. Intelligibility was for
him a major consideration, to which he sacrificed the trivial con-
venience of establishing a single standard official language for the
whole of his empire. And the ruler of a universal state who thus
forbore to insist upon the use of any one current local vernacular
at the expense of the rest would presumably have scouted, a for-
tiori, the suggestion that he should address his subjects in a lan-
guage which like Sanskrit in A9oka's day had long since passed
out of spontaneous use. Nevertheless, just such an artificial revival
of Sanskrit was started, at a point within the frontiers of Agoka's
empire, 2 at latest immediately after, and possibly even before, the
Emperor A9oka's death; 3 and this archaizing linguistic movement
steadily extended its range 4 until, by the sixth century of the
Christian Era, the triumph of the Neo-Sanskrit language over the
prakrits was complete on the Indian mainland 5 leaving Pall to
survive as a literary curiosity in the solitary island fastness of
Ceylon.
Thus our extant corpus of Sanskrit literature, like our extant
corpus of Attic Greek literature, falls into two distinct portions:
auf Grand der Inschriften und Munzen (Strassburg 1902, Trttbner), pp. 65-6, 90, and
139-4- The geographical lines of division between these local prakrits were not clear-
cut; the respective ranges of the various dialectical peculiarities overlapped (op cit.,
p. 126).
1 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 498, above.
2 The geographical centre of dispersion of this archaistic movement for the re-
vival of Sanskrit is shown by the epigraphical evidence to have been the Ganges-Jumna
Duab between the foot of the Himalayas and the city of Mathura (Franke, op. cit.,
p. 83).
s Franke (in orx cit, p. 87) dates the beginning of the Neo-Sanskrit movement before
the end of the third century B.C.
* The spread of the use of Neo-Sanskrit from its starting-point in the Ganges-Jumna
Duab into other parts of India was gradual, and some of the stages can be dated. In
inscriptions Neo-Sanskrit did not begin to replace Pali in any part of the Indie World
until the last century B.C. (Franke, op. cit., pp. 50-1); and, even in Northern India, it
was not until the second century of the Christian Era that Neo-Sanskrit inscriptions
became so numerous relatively to inscriptions in Pali (ibid., p. 52). In the Deccan Pali
was stul holding the field in the second century of the Christian Era and only began to
give way to Neo-Sanskrit in the third century; and in this region some Pali inscriptions
have been discovered which date from as late as the fourth century (ibid., p. 51). There
are also extant a number of documents in a mixed language part Pali and part Neo-
Sansknt-^nd these can be arranged in a series showing the gradual transition from
a Pah with an infusion of Sanskrit in it to a Sanskrit with a trace of Pali in it (ibid.,
PP- 53-4). In the first century of the Christian Era Pali was still predominant in the
grammatical terminations, but in the second century the Sanskritisms became much
more sharply pronounced (ibid., p. 59). s Ibid p. 53.
SCHISM IN THE SO.UL 77
an older portion which is original and a younger portion which is
imitatively archaistic. 1
Up to this point we have confined our attention to matters of
language and style, without pausing to consider that this linguistic
Archaism is unlikely to have been cultivated as an end in itself. 2
It is, however, manifestly improbable a priori that even a pedant
would condemn himself to the hard labour of resuscitating a
language which had passed out of circulation unless he were moved
by some strong desire to make use of the 'dead language', when
he had duly succeeded in reviving it, in order to convey to his
fellow men some literary message a complex of emotions' or a
system of ideas which was of capital importance in the archaist's
own estimation. We must therefore go on to inquire into the
literary purposes for which the Neo-Sanskrit and the Neo-Attic
linguistic vehicles were actually employed. Were they used for
mere literary exercises in genres which were just as much vieujeu
as their linguistic medium ? Or was there a contrast between the
Archaism of the medium and the spirit of the ideas and emotions
which the medium was made to convey ?
If we put this question first apropos of the Neo-Sanskrit litera-
ture we shall find that the archaic vehicle has in fact been used
principally for the conveyance of something which is not merely
new but is also charged with a creative vitality; for the main use
to which the Neo-Sanskrit language has been put has been to serve
as a vehicle for the Scriptures of the Mahayana and Hinduism;
l In the Attic Greek literature the original and the archaistic portions are not only
distinct, but are separated from one another chronologically, as we have seen, by an
interval of not much less than a quarter of a millennium between the latest Athenian
works in original Attic and the earliest non- Athenian works in 'Neo-Attic. In making
a corresponding survey of the Sanskrit literature it is impossible to draw so sharp a line.
The Sanskrit Epic, for example, which, in the form in which it has come down to us,
is undoubtedly a work of the Neo-Sanskrit Age, may also (as is pointed out in V. C (i)
(c) 3, Annex II, in vol. v, above) contain an original Sanskrit element which it is im-
possible now to disengage from its Neo-Sanskrit recensions and accretions. Thus, in
the Epic, we have one outstanding work of Sanskrit literature which cannot be classified
as belonging wholly either to the Neo-Sanskrit or to the original Sanskrit stratum.
3 Before leaving the subject of purely linguistic Archaism we may take notice, in the
Synac World, of the epic poet Firdawsi's policy of restricting to a minimum the quota
of the Arabic vocabulary in the New Persian language in which he was writing. (For
+MO -inAioinn * A !..?_ *_ XT r T /~\ f*\ tt.\ i _ o_ -i __J Tr /-
write in Pehlevi, and he was probably unaware of the existence of the two dialects of
Old Iranian uncontaminated by any Semitic taint that are familiar to us as the
respective vehicles of the Achaemenian inscriptions and of the oldest stratum of the
Avesta.
9 The archaistic purge by which Firdawsi relieved the New Persian language of an
intrusive Arabic vocabulary has a parallel in which New Persian has been the victim
instead of being the beneficiary. The Hindi form of Hindustani 'was derived from Urdu
by ejecting all words of Arabic and Persian birth, and substituting in their place words
borrowed or derived from the indigenous Sanskrit* (The Imperial Gazetteer of India,
new edition (Oxford 1907, Clarendon Press), p. 366, quoted already in V. C (i) (d) 6 (y),
i V - P * 5I ^' footnote 2 > above). It is one of the curiosities of history that these Hindu
arcnaists should have been missionaries of an alien religion and culture.
78 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
and these were a pair of new-born 'higher religions' Hinduism
being a direct product of the religious experience of the internal
proletariat of the Indie Society, while the Mahayana was a meta-
morphosis of the Buddhist philosophy of the Indie dominant
minority. 1 Was the Neo-Attic language turned to any correspond-
ing account ? The answer is in the affirmative ; for the corpus of
Neo-Attic literature includes both the works of the Neoplatonic
philosophers and those of the Christian Fathers. Yet, if we leave
our answer at that, it will be misleadingly incomplete; for neither
the Neoplatonic- Philosophy nor the Christian Theology was the
'subject-matter ' for the sake of which the Attic language was so
laboriously reconstructed. That tremendous labour of love and
learning was lavished upon a dead Attic dialect without any
intention of using it to convey a living message. The purpose of
the Atticists was indeed the exact contrary of that. The vision that
inspired them was the prospect of re-creating a linguistic medium
through which they would be able to walk for all the world like
Alice through her looking-glass out of the living social environ-
ment of their own time and place into a dead social environment
which could only be recaptured, if it could ever be recaptured at
all, by the magic of a literary make-believe.
'Eloquence was now not valued because it affected the practical
decisions of the Present, but because it transported men into the Past.
Probably more than any other generations of men, before or since, -the
Greeks of the first Christian centuries found their pleasure in living by
imagination in a Past five hundred years gone by. The events of those
hundred and eighty years long ago, from the Battle of Marathon to -the
death of Demosthenes, stood out in peculiar illumination; all tHat
followed was grey. It was as if those hundred and eighty years were the
only ones that counted in human history: things had then really hap-
pened, events in which it was worth being interested. When you went
from the commonplace streets of your town into the hall where a great
orator was to speak and submitted yourself to that flow of words, the
rhetoric acted, as some drugs do, to carry you into a wonder-world. If
the cities of the Greek World had ceased for centuries to have the deter-
mination of great events in their hands, the Greeks could still, as in. an
opium dream, find themselves among the multitude in the Pnyx and.
listen to Demosthenes thundering against Philip. How much the
interval of time between the fourth century B.C. and the present was
considered, as far as was possible, non-existent, one may see by the
rhetorical sermons of Maximus of Tyre, a contemporary of Marcias
Aurelius. They are full of illustrative references and anecdotes, but no
allusion, I think, to anything later than the fourth century B.C., except
a few references to Epicurus in the third century, and a solitary reference
to Carneades in the second. We forget, while the spell of Maximus
* See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 133-8, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 79
holds us, that such a thing as Rome, such a person as Caesar, has ever
existed. A still odder indication of this habit of thought may be found
in a reference to Stoics in theProtrepticus of lamblichus, a Greek writer
of an even later century than Maximus of Tyre an indication all the
more striking because it is incidental and not supposed, apparently, to
cause any surprise. lamblichus, round about the year A.D. 300, refers
to the founders of the Stoic school as ol veourepot. 1 His standpoint is
that of Pythagoras or Plato, and thus philosophers of the third century
B.C. appear as "the moderns" or "the more recent" philosophers
separated from lamblichus by an interval of time as great as separates
us from Dante or Chaucer! Centuries later than the third century B.C.
do not count.' 2
This pathetic endeavour to circumvent the remorseless flow of
Time by dodging back into a dead and buried Past through a
literary door made of mirror-glass began on the morrow of the
breakdown of the Hellenic Society and was never abandoned so
long as anything that could call itself Hellenism remained in
existence. On the morrow of the breakdown we find Plato repre-
senting his fictitious dialogues as taking place, not at the time when
the author himself was thinking the thoughts which the dialogues
expound, or when he was putting these thoughts into words or
setting the words down on paper: every dialogue is deliberately
ascribed to some date that is prior to the death of Socrates; and
for Plato the judicial murder of Socrates in 399 B.C., rather than
the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C., was
the symbolic catastrophe which proclaimed the breakdown of the
Hellenic Civilization. The dramatis personae are carefully chosen
to fit these imaginary dates, and their ages and outlooks are por-
trayed in conformity with this archaistic regression. 3 Since Plato
(vivebat circa 430-347 B.C.) himself was born immediately .after the
outbreak of the fatal war, and was still a young man at the time of
the inexpiable judicial murder, the Time-span involved in this
Platonic Archaism is not more than half a lifetime. This, however,
was only the first move in a game that was to be played, as the
centuries passed, with an ever-growing extravagance until, in the
Hellenic World of the second century of the Christian Era, we are
treated to the spectacle of a new Socrates being commemorated by
1 Page 118 of the Teubner text.
2 Bevan, E. R. : 'Rhetoric in the Ancient World* in Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray
(London 1936, Allen & Unwin), pp. 208-10.
^ 'His dialogues are not only a memorial to Socrates, but also to the happier days ol
his own family. Plato must have felt the events of the end of the fifth century keenly,
but he is so careful to avoid anachronisms in these dialogues that no one could ever
guess from them that they were written after Kritias and Charmides had met with a
dishonoured end' (Burnet, J.: Greek Philosophy: Part I, Thales to Plato (London 1914,
Macmillan), pp. 208-9, Cf. pp. 211-13). For the detachment which was a different
and a deeper response of Plato's soul to the challenge of social disintegration see V. C (i)
(d) i, vol. v, pp. 394-6, above, and V. C (i) (d) 10, in the present .volume, pp. 132-48,
below.
8o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
a new Xenophon. Arrian's digest of Epictetus's dissertations is a
conscious repetition of Xenophon' s act in writing the Memorabilia- \
and the Nicornedian public servant of a Roman Imperial Govern-
ment can never forget that his literary mission is to follow in the
footsteps of an Athenian man-at-arms and man-of-letters who was
Arrian's senior by about five hundred years, and whose life had
been lived, and Weltanschauung been formed, in utterly different
social circumstances.
Strange though this Neo-Atticism may appear, the most extra-
ordinary feat of linguistic and literary Archaism in the Hellenic
World in the Imperial Age has still to be recorded. In this age,
once again, a captive Greece succeeded in captivating her Roman
conqueror; 1 and this time she led him a dance; for she now pre-
vailed upon him to fall into step with her retreat, after having once
upon a time carried him along with her in the last halting stage of
her broken advance; and for the Roman this reverse movement in
the train of his Greek Muse meant harking back, not to the glories
of an original Attic literature of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.,
but to the crudities and curiosities of his own ancestors' first
attempt to reclothe Greek literature in a Latin dress.
This disease of literary Archaism which the Romans caught
from the Greeks in the Imperial Age did not begin to show itself
in Latin literature until about a hundred years after Greek litera-
ture had succumbed to it; but, when once the infection had taken,
its ravages were rapid; and before the end of the second century
of the Christian Era the Latin version of Hellenism was quite as
Jar gone as its Greek ensample in a decline that could only end in
utter sterility.
The sickening of the Latin genius with this fatal malady can be
observed in Tacitus's Dialogus de Oratoribus y which is represented:
as having taken place in the sixth year of the reign of the Emperor
Vespasian (A.D. 74~s). 2 One of the topics of the dialogue 3 is a
disputation over the relative merits of 'the ancients' and c the
moderns' ; and, although the cause of 'the moderns' is championed
in spirited language by an advocate who holds up to scorn the
perversity of those archaists 'who read Lucilius in preference to
Horace and Lucretius in preference to Virgil', 4 the argument is
eventually broken off because the cause of 'the ancients' is assumed
to be invincible. 5 The Latin literary Archaism of Tacitus's genera-
1 Horace: Epistolae, Book II, Ep. i, 1. 156. 2 Tacitus: Dialogus , chap. 17, 3.
3 Chaps. 14-26. + Tacitus: Dialogus r chap. 23, 2.
s Tacitus: Dialogus, chap. 27, init. The rest of the work is devoted to considering
not whether, but why, the eloquence of 'the ancients' (i.e. of Latin orators of tKe last
generation before the establishment of the Pax Augusta) was superior to that of c the
moderns' (i.e. the characters in the dialogue and their younger contemporaries of Taci-
tus's own generation). In this inquiry Tacitus starts from a change for the worse in
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 81
tion 1 kept, however, within the bounds of moderation, since the
oldest 'ancients' with whom the speakers in the Dialogus are
seriously concerned are those of the generation of Cicero. There-
after the deterioration was rapid, for Tacitus himself may have
lived to see the principate of Hadrian, and the Latin poet whom
Hadrian preferred to Virgil was not the austere Lucretius but the
uncouth Ennius. The still more exotic taste of Marcus Aurelius's
African tutor Pronto found the greatest merit in the most archaic
Latin literature that had survived; and Fronto's Archaism was
pushed to a further degree of extravagance by his disciple Aulus
Gellius. 2
The bilingual folly of this Greek and Latin literary Archaism of
the second century of the Christian Era might have been pilloried
as the extreme case of its kind, if it were not a matter of attested
historical fact that, in this wild-goose chase, Hellenism has been
outrun by Sinism.
*Les Chinois, quand ils parlent et quand ils ecrivent, s'expriment
uniformement en employant des formules consacrees. ... La litterature
chinoise est une literature de centons. Quand ils veulent prouver ou
expliquer, quand ils songent a raconter ou a d^crire, les auteurs les plus
originaux se servent d'historiettes stereotypes et depressions con-
venues, puisees a un fonds commun. Ce fonds n'est pas tres abondant
et, d'ailleurs, on ne cherche gu&re a le renouveler. Une bonne partie
des themes qui ont joui d'une faveur permanente se retrouvent dans
les productions les plus anciennes et les plus spontan6es de la po&ie
chinoise Le role des centons n'est pas moins grand dans la prose que
dans la podsie, dansle style savant que dans la langue vulgaire. . . . Un
lecteur attentif des Annales chinoises hesite constamment: veut-on lui
presenter des faits particuliers, singularises, ou lui apprendre ce qu'il
convient de faire ou de ne pas faire? La redaction en termes rituels
domestic life: modern parents do not give the same personal attention as their predeces-
sors gave to the upbringing of their children, but leave it all to servants, ^e goes on to
discuss the changes in the system of apprenticeship for public speaking ; and here he has
some severe strictures to make upon the modern schools of rhetoric. But ms most
trenchant point is that fine oratory is the fruit of turbulent times, and that the inevitable
price of good government is an atmosphere of dullness which gives human wits no
stimulus. 'Magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materia alitur et motibus excitatur et urendo
clarescit' (chap. 36, i). Already, half-way through the principate of Augustus, longa
temporum quies et continuum populi otium et assidua senatus tranqudlitas et n^ome
principis disciplina ipsam quoque eloquentiam sicut omma aha pacayerat^ (chap. 3*, |J-
Wemoeodcmtempaieadsequipotestmag^
These concluding chapters of the Dialogus are a bruliant essay on the theme that Caesar s
peace (unlike the Peace of God) is a Yin-state which is r not at all conducive to creativity.
In a work of a later generation on the same subject (Longmus[?]: De ^?^Jj
chap. 44), Tacitus's political explanation of the decay of eloquence is re-examined but
is rejected in favour of the alternative thesis that the root of the evil is not the public
vice of despotism but the private vices of avarice and self-indulgence.
x The fictitious date of the Dialogus is placed by Tacitus, more Platomeo, about half
a generation earlier than the author's own floruit. ,.,.. *T j^*, ~
a For this Latin literary and linguistic Archaism of the Af#**e Indian
in the second century of the Christian Era see Parker, H. JVL D. : A History oj
World from A.D. 138 to 337 (London IQ35, Methuen), pp.47-8.
82 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
s'explique-tNelle simplement par un parti pris de stylistes ou bien 1'his-
toire n'a-t-elle a center qu'une succession d'incidents rituels? II n'y a
pas a decider: en fait, le gout des formules toutes faites n'est que 1'un
des aspects d'une adhesion generate a une morale conformiste. - - -
Comme les annalistes, les philosophes chinois sont des conteurs d'his-
toriettes. Dans les ouvrages de tous genres, on trouve, utilisees a satiete,
les memes anecdotes si bien qu'un lecteur occidental lisant pour la
premiere fois une ceuvre chinoise eprouve presque immanquablement
une impression de deja lu. 11
When even the earliest of our surviving specimens of Sinic
literature the poetry collected in the She King which apparently
dates from the Sinic Civilization's growth-stage already displays
this archaistic mental orientation towards the Past, we shall not be
surprised to find literary Archaism carrying all befqre it in the
succeeding age of disintegration, and capturing, quickly and com-
pletely, the Confucian school of philosophy.
'La passion d'enseigner en commentant signale le flechissement du
gout pour les formes pragmatiques d'enseignement auxquelles Con-
fucius dut apparemment son prestige. Le Maitre avait essaye* de faire
reconnaitre la valeur d'une psychologic positive en habituant ses dis-
ciples a ren6chir en commun a propos d'incidents journaliers. Ses suc-
cesseurs enseignerent en commentant les vers du Che King aussi bien que
les formules du Tch'ouen ts'ieou, les aphorismes chers aux devins tout
comme les adages des maitres des c6r6monies. Des la fin du v e si&cle,
on pouvait les accuser de ne s'attacher qu*a un savoir livresque et de
n'accorder de valeur qu'aux semblants rituels.' 2
If this were a verdict on the Hellenic thought of the Neo-Attic
Age, there might be nothing more to be said; but in studying the
actions of Sinic souls we must never forget to reckon with the
dexterity of a Sinic genius which delights in the use of unpro-
mising means for the attainment of unexpected ends.
'Si les auteurs s'appliquent a parler par proverbes, ce n'est point
qu'ils pensent de fa$on commune ; c'est que la bonne fa9on, et la plus,
fine, de faire valoir leur pensee, est de la glisser dans une fornrule'
eprouve*e dont elle empruntera le credit. Les centons possedent line
sorte de force, neutre et concrete, qui peut, de facon latente, se particu-
lariser a Tinfini, tout en conservant, dans les applications les plus singu-
lieres, un 6gai pouvoir d'inviter a agir Les poemes du Che King qui
sont Merits dans la langue la plus proverbiale sont assur^ment ceux
(ropinion publique en fait foi) ou se sont signifiees les pensees les plus
subtiles. La meme rfegle vaut pour les ceuvres de tous les temps, de
tous les genres. Les poesies les plus riches en expressions consacr<fes
sont les plus admirees. Dans aucune, les formules convenues ne se
pressent autant que dans ces sortes de meditations mystiques oti le
l Granet, M.: La Penste Chinoise (Paris 1934, Renaissance du Livre), pp. 57. 58, 68,
69, and 70. 2 Ibid., p. 553.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 83
lyrisme chinois donne sa note la plus haute. La densite en centons ne
mesure pas seulement le savoir traditionnel du poete: la densite la plus
forte est la marque de la pensee la plus profonde. 11
This Sinic art of turning the trick of literary Archaism from a
barren conceit into a potent charm, whose compelling power can
strike down to the subconscious fundament of the Soul and then
stir it to the depths, will be no secret to any Jewish or Christian
or Islamic writer who has had the good fortune to have been
equipped for his work by being educated in accordance with the
tradition of his forefathers ; for the language of the Bible or the
Qur'an will have been imprinted on his memory in his childhood
as indelibly as the language of the Sinic Classics on the memory
of the Far Eastern litteratus; and a mind thus inalienably enriched
with the treasures of its native spiritual heritage will be master of
that alchemy which knows how to evoke Something new out of an
allusion to something old or, in other words, how to transmute .an
act of mimesis into an act of creation.
(8) Archaism in Religion.
In the field of Religion, as in the fields of Language and Art and
Institutions, it is possible for a Western student of history at the
present day to study the phenomenon of Archaism at first hand
within the limits of his own social environment.
Within the past hundred years France, England, and Germany
in turn have each been the scene of an archaistic religious move-
ment. In France and in England this religious Archaism has been
the expression of a homesickness for the ceremonial and the
atmosphere of a medieval Western Christianity; and it is a remark-
able spectacle to see this homesickness overcoming two modern
Western institutions that have travelled so far from their medieval
Christian origins as the Positivist school of philosophy and the
Anglican Church: an artificial philosophy that has been manu-
factured in a Humanistic workshop, 2 and a parochial Protestant
1 Ibid., pp. 65 and 68; cf. pp. 73-4.
a The Humanism which has been one of the governing principles of our Western
culture in its so-called 'Modem Age' has been touched upon already in IV. C (111) (c) 2 (a),
vol. iv, pp. 300-3, and in V. C (i) (d) 7, in the present volume, p. 8, above. Comte s purpose
in appropriating the trappings of a medieval Western Christianity for the use of his own
'Religion of Humanity* was not, of course, to revive the worship of the god who had
previously been honoured with these rites. On the contrary, Comte was determined to
replace the Christians' personal God by a collective Humanity, and to present thas vrai
Grand Etre* to his own Positivist disciples as the proper recipient for the traditional
divine honours. Comte's 'Religion of Humanity' has been touched upon already in
IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (a), vol. iv, pp. 300-1, above, in this aspect, as an example of the
idolization of an ephemeral sefi. And this element of anti-Christian idolatry in the
~ iligion of Humanity* is, of course, much more important than the element of pseudo-
tiristian Archaism with which we are concerned in the present context.
This pseudo-Christian Archaism, which Comte (vivebat A.D. 1798-1857) gradually
orked out on lines of his own (see Caird, E.: The Social Philosophy and Religion of
worked
84 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Church that is borne upon the political establishment of one of the
national states of the modern Western World. Yet this regression
of a French Positivism and a British Anglo-Catholicism towards
the religion of medieval Western Christendom is not so startling
a phenomenon as the corresponding movement of Hauerism in
post-war Germany, where the spiritual strain to which the German
people has been continuously subject since July 1914 has eventu-
Cornte (Glasgow 1885, MacLehose), pp. 238-47, and Berdyaev, N.: The Meaning of
History (London 1936, Bles), pp. 163-4), was perhaps originally suggested to his mind
by the ideas of two thinkers of an older generation, Joseph de Maistre (vivebat A.D.
1754-1821) and C. H. de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (vivebat A.r>. 1760 1825).
De Maistre was a thorough-going archaistwho advocated a revival of the Hildebrandine
Respublica Christiana under the exclusive and absolute sovereignty of the Pope as the
only effective antidote to the Revolution; and his ideas were already familiar by the
time when Comte was growing up (de Maistre's masterpiece, Du Pape, was finished in
1817 and published in 1819 (Lyon, Rusand, 2 vols.)). Saint-Simon's aim was different;
for to his mind the institutions of medieval Western Christendom were outworn, and
he wished to replace them by modern equivalents which would perform corresponding
functions. Science was to be substituted for the Church, and Industry for Feudalism.
These Saint- Simonian ideas were set forth in an unfinished work, Nouveau Christianisme
(Paris: Bossange, Sautelet), which was published in 1825; and in 1826 Comte wrote his
Considerations on the Spiritual Power (English translation in Early Essays on Philosophy
translated from the French of Auguste Comte by Henry Dix Dutton (London, n.d,,
Routledge)), in which he propounded his own scheme for enlisting an ecclesiastical
Archaism in the service of an anthropolatrous Paganism. 'The social condition of the
most civilized nations imperiously demands the formation of a new spiritual order as
the first and chief mode of ending the Revolutionary Period which began in the six-
teenth century and thirty years ago entered on its last stage* (p. 297). *It would be easy
to form empirically a clear idea of the functions of the modern spiritual power by a
careful study of those which devolved upon the Catholic clergy at the period of their
greatest vigour and complete independence, that is to say, from about the middle of the
eleventh to nearly the end of the thirteenth century. . . . For every social relation that
fell within the province of the Catholic clergy, an analogous attribute will be found in
the new political system as a function of the modern spiritual power* (p. 298). We rnust
emancipate ourselves 'from the pernicious prejudices generally inspired by the Critical
Philosophy towards the spiritual system of the MidpUe Age* (p. 299). On the other
hand, due allowance must be made for 'the extreme difference' between the medieval
and the modem state of Western Civilization (p. 299); and on this head Comte criticizes
de Maistre and the other contemporary philosophers of *the retrograde school'. *In
them we may rerriark the radical inconsequence which consists in directly transferring
to modern societies considerations exclusively drawn from the observation of medieval
societies so essentially different. Associated, moreover, as they invariably are, with
projects for restoring a system whose destruction, already almost completed, is hence-
forward irrevocable, they ter^d in the present state of men's minds rather to fortify than
to uproot the general prejudice against every spiritual power* (p. 351, footnote 2). The
details of Comte's own system were afterwards worked out in a Positivist Calendar
(1849), in which "Benefactors of Humanity', more Alexandri Severi (see V. C (i) (d) 6 (S)
vol. v, p. 549, above), were substituted for Saints, and thereafter (in 1852) in The
Catechismof Positivism or Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion in Thirteen Syste-
matic Conversations between a Woman and a Priest of Humanity (English translation, second
edition: London 1883, Trubner, with a reprint, at the end, of the Positivist Calendar).
In the latter work Comte's thesis that Catholicism, on new intellectual foundations, will
finally preside over the spiritual life of a reorganized Modern Society (Positive Philosophy ,
vol. v, p. 344) is illustrated by the presentation of Humanity as an 'incomparable goddess*
(Catechism, English translation, p. 58) in the lineaments of the Theot6kos.
* Never will Art be able worthily to embody Humanity otherwise than in the form of
Woman. . . . The Symbol of our goddess will always be a woman of thirty with her son
in her arms' (Catechism, pp. 84 and 99).
In taking the traditional image of the Theot6kos and renaming it 'Humanity', Comte
was following a precedent which had been set by the Christian Church itself when, in
its formative age in the early centuries of the Christian Era, it had made its own image
of Mary in the traditional likeness of Isis or Ishtar or Cybele.
It is only in England, and not in his native France, tKat Comte's dream of establishing
a Positivist Church with a corporate life and an order of public worship has come true,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 85
ally betrayed its severity in the desperateness of the reaction in
which a certain number of tormented German souls are now
seeking to find relief.
Professor Hauer is adjuring his countrymen not merely to
repudiate a modern phase of the Western Civilization which
to-day, in retrospect, may well be looked askance at by any of its
children, but actually to break away from the Western Christianity
which is the common primal root and stem of every modern branch
of the Western Society. The watchword of Professor Hauer is
'Back to the paganism in which our Teutonic forebears found
happiness before they were captivated by an alien Judaistic super-
stition and an alien Romance culture'. The Hauerites 1 bugbear is
Charlemagne, who in their eyes has been the arch-betrayer of the
German Race. They cannot forgive this all-powerful German
master of an infant Western Europe for having employed his
power in suppressing the paganism of the Saxon barbarians in the
outer darkness beyond the north-east frontier of the Austrasian
dominions ; for, in incorporating Saxony into Western Christen-
dom, Charlemagne, in the Hauerites' view/ was capturing for
Christ and for Rome the last continental stronghold of a pure and
undefiled German culture. 1 And they picture the German pagan-
ism which Charlemagne stamped out and which they themselves
are now proposing to revive in a shape which bears no recog-
nizable likeness to the historical worship of the deified war-lord
Woden and his deified war-band. 2 The religion with which the
Primitive Germans are credited by the Hauerites is a worship of
the One True God through the symbol of physical light; and, in
their sophisticated enthusiasm for this imaginary religious intuition
of their primitive ancestors, they would almost have us believe
that the valley of the Spree, and not the valley of the Nile, was
the scene of Ikhnaton's enlightenment.
In 1938 it was impossible for an English observer to tell how
seriously this Neo-Pagan movement in Germany had to be taken
as an indication of the religious destiny of the Western World as
a whole; but he could hardly be mistaken in citing this portent of
Hauerism as evidence that Western souls were no longer proof
1 Less hysterical modern students of Charlemagne's work will be inclined to censure
the Austrasian militarist, not for setting out to reclaim his Saxon neighbours trom their
pestilent barbarism by converting them from their barren paganism, but for attempting
to achieve an admirable social purpose by means of the pernicious instrument of military
force. In the present Study Charlemagne's behaviour towards the Saxons has been
criticized on this mound already in II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 167; II- D (vu), vol. n, pp, 345-6;
IV. C (iii) (c) 2 0?) r vol. iv, pp. 322-3; IV. C (Hi) () 3 (), vol. iv, pp. 488-90, and IV.
C (in) (V) 3 (), vol. iv, p. 523, above.
2 For this by i *
proletariat of the ).
above. 1 Jtie Jnistorical ICA.IJJIV**'-'* v**^ v** ^. m r w*--~ - _ - - t t , .
derung is reflected, not in Professor Hauer's theology, but m Herr Hitler s politics.
86 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
against being captivated by a religious Archaism even when this
offered itself in an extravagant fancy-drc^.
The three living examples of Archaism in the religious field
which have met our eyes in the contemporary Western World 1 are
none of them impressive; tor, v.hile the German movement is
patently rabid, the French ant! KnjiHsh movements are no less
patently sentimental. If we now transfer our attention from our
own world to the Hellenic, and concentrate* it upon that moment
In the Hellenic Society's disintegration when Augustus wan bring-
ing a Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' to an end by c&tsih!i$hing a
Hellenic universal state* we shall encounter here an experiment in
religious Archaism which may command our admiration.
'The revival of the State religion by Augimttm in at once the most
remarkable event in the histury of the Raman religion, and one almost
unique in religious history, . , . The belief In the efficacy of the old culls
had passed away among the educated ctaftftcit; . , . the mongrel city
populace had long been accustomed TO scoff at the uid deities; and . . ,
the outward practice of religion had been allowed to decay. To us, then,
it may seem almost impossible that the practice, und tci some extent also
the belief, should he capable of resuscitation at the will of a single indi-
vidual, even if that individual represented the bait interests and the
collective wisdom of the State- tor it is irnpoisihlt to deny that this
resuscitation was real; that both /wx dwntm and m dmnum became
once more terms of force and meaning, Beset as it win by at least three
formidable enemies, which tended to deuoy it even while they fed on
it, like parasites in the animal or vegetable world feeding on their hosts -
the rationalizing philosophy of syncretism/ the worship of the Caesar^ 3
and the new Oriental cults 4 -the old religion continued to exim for at least
three centuries in outward form, tnd to otne extent in popular belief/*
This long-enduring success of Augustus's enterprise of reviving
the native religion of the Roman people Is remarkable indeed; for
> I Jfiv ** 8k *u wh ? ^^""Niwn k** ***n *wtit#4 faun i tin in which Anufa.
*** **** *" ^*; th rawer i* that A!U^.ttihnUcum % whtlt !iru
gf Archiwm m th* wmt n whi^h ^ Mm is \md m thu
of Ait'tutim within *h c*impw
*
t e Cwim
'fh .hi CX ^ UII|V | ^^i, 3^rtw*ntiB wti mlbfiK 7 io tiSfeiith n direct
wate th^ L? twc /^ ic . <*>^*JB *hwh waa th* noum of tht
waters of the *trcam of Chn*tinjry, On ihit thawing.
,, n
ra mtaltanial wid wnitlMe mwtimn li^wn t the
Renaimnce, which waa an attempt to tattbltah n dtrm cwuS Twi^HtKSSi (I
'
*' v ' p- tol "^ Vt C
* wTrdl* ? S V w "'' ' W' . ow.-
Wardc-Fwler, W.: n St/^wui ^xjwriwKt tf rt, J^^JR,^ {London
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 87
at first sight the Roman statesman's experiment might appear to
a modern Western observer to have been not less cold-blooded
than the French philosopher Comte's and not less crack-brained
than the German professor Hauer's. We may pay tribute to
Augustus's insight in recognizing that the spiritual void in the
souls of his countrymen and contemporaries must be filled with
something or other by any would-be Saviour of Society who was
seriously setting himself to heal the wounds of the Hellenic World
with the balm of a Roman Peace; for the Romans could not confer
an outward peace upon their neighbours until they had established
an inward peace within themselves. We may acknowledge Augus-
tus's perspicacity in perceiving that the sophisticated philosophies
of the dominant minority were 'caviare to the vulgar', 1 and that the
Caesar-worship in which he was capitalizing the popular gratitude
towards himself was at best a fair-weather cult which could not be
expected to outlast the temporary reprieve that Augustus's exer-
tions had won for the Hellenic Society and for the Roman Com-
monwealth.' We may also sympathize with Augustus's desire to
stem the tide of pammixia and proletarianization by damming back
the inflow of 'the new Oriental cults*. But when we have conceded
all this, we may still find it difficult to understand why Augustus
should have attempted the tour de force of bringing the native
Roman religion back to life. Why did he not put the whole of his
Roman treasure in the Greek gods of Athens and Delphi ^ and
Eleusia in an age which found Rome already completely acclima-
tized to the Hellenic culture and at least half-conscious that it was
now her mission to salvage a Hellenic Society which she had done
$o much to wreck in the preceding chapter of Roman and Hellenic
history? These Greek divinities might lack the vitality of their
aggressive Oriental rivals, but no competitor could eclipse their
matchless dignity and grace. Why, then, was Augustus not con-
tent with the notable addition that he had made to the array ot
Roman shrines in which these Greek divinities were installed?'
Was not his Roman religious task fulfilled when he had received
into his own house on the Palatine with all due honour the Ureek
Apollo who, at the crisis of Augustus's career, had sent him vic-
torious in the decisive naval engagement below the cliffs ot Actium r*
88 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Why must he go on to experiment in the extravaganza of
attempting also to revive the native Roman religion in its primitive
unhellenized nakedness ? The ethics of this brutally business-like
Roman religion of 'Do ut des' ijiust be laughed away as childish
if they were not to be condemned as immoral; and, as for the
quaint rites in which this Roman commerce between men and
gods had been transacted since the dawn of history, they could
hardly be taken seriously nowadays by any one but an antiquary. 1
Would not tfie resuscitation of this ridiculous native hocus-pocus
compromise, instead of crowning, the rest of Augustus's endea-
vours to win back for Religion at Rome the repute and authority
which it had lost? What, then, could have moved so astute a
statesman as Augustus to pin his faith to this relic of a primitive
past as his sovereign means for evoking that spiritual rally in
Roman souls on which the statesman-saviour no doubt rightly set
such store?
The vindication of Augustus's apparently unpromising essay in
religious Archaism is to be found in the sequel; for, if we date the
Augustan reinstatement of the primitive Roman religion from his
celebration of the Ludi Saeculares in 17 B.C., 2 we shall find that
Augustus's work of archaistic reconstruction lasted not merely for
three centuries, but for four; 3 that, even at the end of that long
1 The existing fragments of the Antiquitates Rerum Dtvinarum of Marcus Terentius
Varro (vivebat 116-28 B.C.) show that the prince of Roman antiquaries made his study
of the official religion of the community into which he had been born in a spirit of
thorough-going scientific detachment.
z This is a more significant date than 12 B.C., which was the year in which Augustus
became Pontifex Maximus; for the celebration of the Ludi Saeculares was an act of
religious policy for which Augustus was free to choose his own time, whereas the date
of his assumption of the office of Pontifex Maximus was determined for him by the
length of the life of the previous incumbent. If Augustus had abused his dictatorial
powers in order to anticipate Lepidus's death by evicting him from an office of which
the traditional tenure was for life, the would-be restorer of the prestige of the native
Roman religion would simply have been defeating his own purpose.
3 Three centuries is the duration claimed for Augustus's work by Warde-Fowler in
the passage quoted above; and it is true (see Geffken, J.: Der Ausgang des Griechisch-
Romischen Heidentums (Heidelberg 1920, Winter), pp. 20-5) that in Rome itself, as well
as all over the Roman Empire, circa A.D. 240-60, there seems to have been a sudden
cessation of pagan cults, on the negative evidence of a widespread breaking off of the
serial records of acts of worship in inscriptions. At Rome the records of the proceedings
of the Aryal Brethren and those of the celebration of the rite of the Taurobolium both
alike break off in A.D. 241. On the Nubian border of Egypt, at Ethiopian Talmis, and
in the *ayyum, there are corresponding breaks in the local records after the years A.D.
244, 248, and 250 respectively. At Olympia the last victor inscription is of the year
A.D. 261, and the last cult inscription of the year A.D. 265. In Macedonia, where the
inscriptions testify to an increase of ritual and liturgical activity in the second quarter
of the third century of the Christian Era, the records break off, nevertheless, in A.D.
S?' S '^ *i y Attica "ad & Syria that the series of inscriptions runs on through the
third century without a break. At the turn of the third century and the fourth century,
however, there was a deliberate and systematic revival of pagan worships all over the
Empffe by the oagan emperors of the Diocletianic school who were at war with Chris-
\ /- \ *k .
f ee v (l ? \ () '7i-. v ' pp - s65 - 6 ' ^ v - c (<*) 6 > A**' voL v
50, footnote 3, above); and this revival gave another hundred years' lease of life to
the Augustan paganism at Rome, as well as to the pagan worships of other parts of the
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 89
Time-span, it did not simply fall to pieces of itself but was deliber-
ately demolished by the fanaticism of the pagan archaist-emperor's
latter-day Christian successors Gratian and Theodosius; 1 and that,
so far from being accepted with the indifference with which so
many similar acts of religious sabotage were received in other
parts of the Hellenic World of the age, 2 this attack upon the once
artificially resuscitated paganism of Rome aroused a heart-felt
opposition which expressed itself first in a fifteen-years-long con-
stitutional struggle over an altar and statue of Victory (A.D. 382-
94)3 and finally in a military pronunciamiento engineered by the
pagan Prankish mercenary Arbogastes in which the Christian
soldier-emperor Theodosius's title to the Imperial office was
audaciously disputed by the pagan professor of literature Eugenius
(A.D. 392-4)^ The tenacity to which these facts bear witness is
evidence that Augustus had, after all, been as competent a builder
in his reconstruction of Religion at Rome as in the rest of his
handiwork; and we must infer that he knew what he was about
when he insisted upon reviving the primitive native Roman reli-
gion besides completing the acclimatization of the Greek religion
on Roman soil. Augustus must have divined that this native
religion, crude and discredited though it might be, had a hold on
Roman hearts which an imported .Hellenism could never acquire
on its own merits, however nicely it might suit the taste of culti-
vated Roman palates. He therefore deliberately grafted these
foreign slips on to a native stem; and this was the secret of the
strength of the stately tree whose grain almost turned the edge of
a Christian axe four hundred years later. 5
If we turn from the Hellenic World to the Japanese offshoot of
the Far Eastern Society, we shall find, in a latter-day Japanese
attempt to revive the native Japanese variety of .Primitive Pagan-
1 See IV. C (iii) (&) 12, vol. iv, pp. 226-7, above.
2 It is true that the pagan revolt in the West which was headed by the rhetor Eugenius
in A,D. 392-4 had been anticipated at Alexandria by a similar revolt, likewise under
professorial leadership, in A.D. 391 (GerTken, op. cit., p. 157). On the other hand the
cessation of the Olympian Games, after their last celebration in the year A.D. 393 (ibid.,
p. 159), does not seem to have made the same stir as the removal of the altar and statue
of Victory from the Senate House at Rome.
3 The altar and statue of Victory were removed from the Senate House at Rome by
the orders of the Emperor Gratian in A.D. 382 ; and this act which was intended to be,
and was taken as being, symbolic moved the cultivated pagan aristocracy of the capital
to protest with all the vigour that was compatible with their loyalty to the Imperial
Government. The last petition for restitution was rejected in A.D. 394.. The statue had
been brought to Rome from Tarentum and set up in the Curia Julia by Caius Julius
Caesar.
4 Fuller accounts of the last stand of Augustus's archaistically reconstructed Roman
paganism will be found in Gibbon, E. : The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, chap, xxxviii; and in Dill, S. : Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western
Empire (London 1905, Macmillan), Book I: 'The Tenacity of Paganism'.
5 The compositeness of the grain of the Roman paganism that was given this long
new lease of life through the arts of Augustus is illustrated by the fact that the statue
over which this Roman paganism fought its last fight was a piece of Greek workmanship.
90 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
ism which is traditionally known as Shinto, 1 another essay in
religious Archaism which has points in common, not only with
Augustus's achievement and with Professor Hauer's conceit, but
also with the religious policy which Bismarck attempted to carry
out after the foundation of the Second German Reich.
In degree of extravagance the revival of Shinto shows a greater
likeness to Hauerism than to Augustus's work; for, whereas the
native Roman paganism which Augustus successfully revived was
in his time still 'a going concern' in the sense that it had never been
officially disestablished, the movement for the resuscitation of the
native Japanese paganism did not begin until more than a thousand
years had passed since this primitive religion had been partly
supplanted, partly absorbed, and partly informed 2 by the higher
religion of the Mahayana. The Mahayana began to make its
spiritual conquest of Japan in the course of the sixth century of
the Christian Era 3 more than two hundred years before the date
at which Christianity was thrust upon Saxony at Charlemagne's
sword-point. And the archaistic revival of Shinto was started in
the seventeenth century of the Christian Era 4 at a date which
was likewise rather more than two hundred years before a 'return
to Woden' began to be preached in modern Germany.
In Japan, as in Germany, the first phase of the movement was
academic. The Japanese resuscitation of Shinto was put in train
by a Buddhist monk named Keichu (vivebat A.D. 1640-1701) whose
interest in the subject seems to have been primarily philological; 5
Keichu was followed by Motoori Norinaga (vivebat A.D. 1730-
1801), who was not only a scholar but was also a theorist applying
his scholarship to an imaginary reconstruction of an obliterated
ancestral faith; 6 and Motoori Norinaga was followed in his turn
1 Shinto means 'the Way of the Numina' (to use an impersonal Latin word which
may be a better translation of the Japanese original than 'gods' or 'spirits'). See Holtom,
D. C.: The National Faith of Japan: A Study in Modern Shinto (London 1938, Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner), pp. 13-14. The modern revival of Shinto is known as Fukko
Shinto ('Restoration Shinto') (ibid., p. 44).
2 See V. C (ii) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 97, footnote 3, and p. 147, footnote i; V. C (i) (d) 6
(5), vol. v, p. 528, footnote 2, above.
3 In this first chapter of its history in Japan the Mahayana, while nominally professed
by all subjects of the Emperor, was not in fact comprehended and assimilated by
Japanese souls_outside the narrow limits of a sophisticated court circle. The propagation
of .the Mahayana among the masses, in popular forms which the common man could
understand , did not begin until after the onset of a 'Time of Troubles' in the latter part
of the twelfth century of the Christian Era (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp, 97-8, above).
* Its antecedents can, however, be traced back as far as the fifteenth century (Holtom,
op. cit., pp. 39-41).
s There was a general revival of Japanese studies at and after the close of the seven-
teenth century (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul),
: 4 6 8). Holtom (op. cit., pp. 45-8) presents, as Motoori's principal predecessor, not
Keichu but Kamo-no-Mabuchi (vivebat A.D. 1697-1769).
6 In Japan in the middle of the eighteenth century there was a general romantic
revival of interest in the Japanese national past (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. i
(London 1910, Kegan Paul), p. 1 1). Motoori himself was both anti-rationalist and Anti-
Sinic (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 476-90). In this Anti-Sinism Motoori had had
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 91
by Hirata Atsutane (vivebat A.D. 1776-1843), who was not only a
theorist but was also a controversialist, and who launched an attack,
in the name of Shinto, upon the exotic religion of the Mahay ana
and the exotic philosophy of Confucianism. 1
It will be seen from the dates that the archaistic revival of a
primitive Japanese paganism was put in hand, like Augustus's
resuscitation of a primitive Roman paganism, immediately after
the foundation of a universal state; for in Japanese history the
universal state that put an end to an antecedent Time of Troubles'
was the Tokugawa Shogunate which was the fruit of the successive
labours of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and leyasu in the later
decades of the sixteenth and the earlier decades of the seventeenth
century of the Christian Era. 2 Whereas, however, the reinstate-
ment of the Roman paganism was carried out almost at one stroke
by the fiat of a political dictator, the revival of Shinto began as
a work of private enterprise 3 which took two hundred years to
advance or regress from the Varronian objectivity of a Keichu
to the Rosenbergian militancy of a Hirata Atsutane.
The Neo-Shinto movement had just arrived at this militant
stage when the Japanese universal state was prematurely shattered
by the impact of an aggressively expanding Western Civilization.
The rigorously maintained artificial isolation which had enabled
the Japanese to live for a quarter of a millennium as though Japan
were 'All that was under Heaven' had to be abandoned in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era in favour
of a diametrically opposite strategy of self-defence in which Japan
was to hold her own in a no longer avoidable Western environment
by learning to live as one of the nations of a Westernized World.
And when, upon the Revolution of 1867-8, this abrupt change
from a negative to a positive attitude towards the outer world was
given a symbolic expression in the liquidation of the Tokugawa
Shogunate and the official restoration of an Imperial Dynasty
which had been reigning (though not always governing) in an
unbroken succession since the dawn of Japanese history, 4 the now
forerunners. Kada Adzumaro (vivebat A.D. 1669-1736) had presented to the authorities
in A.D. 1735 a memorial advocating Japanese as against Sinic studies; and the campaign
b
x
1 The facts mentioned in this paragraph are, taken rom nesai, .: isory of
Japanese Religion (London 1930, Kegan Paul), pp. 37~9- _ . , _ . , 6s .
* See IV. C (ii) (6) 2, ,vol. iv, pp 88, 92, and 94; and V. C (i) (<fl 6 (8) Annex,
vol. v, pp. 655-7, above, as well as V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, pp. 186, 188-9,
and 191, below. --
3 The Tokugawa regime had a leaning towards Buddhism and regarded the JNeo-
Shinto movement with suspicion as a threat to the security of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The Neo-Shintoists' idealization and deification of the Imperial House did, in fact,
prepare the ground for the Restoration of A.D. 1868.
* During the Japanese 'Time of Troubles' and universal state the Imperial Dynasty
at Kyoto had, of course, been leading an obscure and shadowy existence on sufferance
92 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
militant Neo-Shinto movement so exactly accorded with a Zeit-
geist in which a no longer practicable xenophobia was being con-
verted into terms of the archaistically romantic Nationalism of the
modern West that it looked for a moment as though a once
academic conceit was now to have its fortune made for it by being
taken under the potent patronage of the new regime.
'The first step taken by the new Government in regard to Religion was
an attempt to establish Shinto as the religion of the State. The
National Cult Department ... an institution for ceremonial observance'
having little to do with matters of really religious or political signifi-
cance . . . was given the highest position among the government offices,
and Shinto was proclaimed the national cult or State Religion. 1 This
meant at the same time a vigorous suppression of Buddhism, because it
was a foreign religion and had flourished under the protection of the
Shogunate Government. All privileges granted to the Buddhist clergy
were abolished, and a large part of the properties belonging to the
Buddhist institutions was confiscated. A reign of persecution was
started. Buddhists were driven out of the syncretic Shinto sanctuaries
which they had been serving for ten centuries or more. Buddhist
statues, scriptures and decorations in those temples were taken out and
set on fire or thrown into the water. The "purification" of the Shinto
temples was achieved, and the severance of Buddhism and Shinto
ruthlessly carried out. . . . 2
'At one time it seemed as if Buddhism would be swept away by the
persecution, but the danger brought Buddhist leaders to united action.
... In the official circles, too, some realized that an entire suppression of
Buddhism was neither desirable nor possible, 3 and the Government was
induced gradually to modify their religious policy. The National Cult
was replaced by an Ecclesiastical Board in 1872,* under which a central
board of preachers was to superintend religious instructions. . . . The
Board was abolished in 1877, and the Buddhist bodies were granted
autonomy. Shinto was treated in the same way; 5 and its church bodies
from the militarists who were governing or misgoverning the Japanese World in the
Imperial Dynasty's name.
/Ayr 8 / Depa ^?x ent of Shinto w as set up as early as the first month of the first year
* i? ei iv^ I86 ?)> and was reorganized three times before the close of the fourth year
or tne Meiji bra Official instructors in Shinto were appointed by the Imperial Govern-
ment in November 1870 (Holtom, op. cit., pp. 54-5). AJ.T.
* For further details of this persecution see Holtom, pp. 56-8, AJ.T.
3 ine persecution was producing a disturbing and disruptive effect at a time of
stress in which there was an urgent need for national stability and unity (Holtom, pp. 58-
9)' A.J. i.
th* ^f^f Natjoiwl Cult Department had been concerned exclusively with Shinto,
the new Ecclesiastical Board or Department of Religion had Buddhism as well as
A^r^f ? e V- tS ^ffi^'f-Sti- Mter havin S failed between A.D. 1868 and
fi ?' *? **S* Budd ^ sr ? gthe field by force, the Imperial Government next tried,
trom 1872 to 1875, to brigade Buddhism with Shinto and to drill the pair of them into
I?n m * harness as a dual state religion (ibid., pp. 59-61). In 1875 this second
e^enmenun regulating the relations between Church nd State was abandoned in its
^^ 9 ov ^ rmnent save up the last remnants of its control over the appoint-
f PriVatC Sect8 - Buddhi8t - A ' D -
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 93
gradually emerged out of the State Religion, 1 while the ceremonies in
the Court and the communal Shinto cult were regarded as having
nothing to do with religious teaching, but as civic institutions. 2 Thus
subsided the frenzy of Shinto revival.' 3
The Western reader will not have failed to notice the curious
analogy between this unsuccessful offensive which was launched
against the Mahayanian Buddhist Church by a new regime in
Japan and the contemporary attack likewise ending in failure
which was made upon a Christian Catholic Church by a new
regime in Germany. Like Bismarck, the architects of the Japanese
Imperial Restoration were intoxicated by their success in endowing
their country with a new political structure which appeared to
answer to the needs of the times; and, like Bismarck again, they
conceived it to be their duty, and imagined it to lie within their
power, to make the new Nationalism prevail in the religious as
well as in the secular sphere. In Japan, as in Germany, the
nationalists had to be taught by a humiliating experience that the
'higher religions' which have sprung from the ruins of disintegrat-
ing civilizations with a message to deliver to all Mankind cannot
easily be dragooned to suit the momentary exigencies of parochial
politics. 4
Our survey of Archaism in the field of Religion has not been
exhaustive; for the examples which we have cited from the his-
tories of three civilizations the Western, the Hellenic, and the
Far Eastern can all be duplicated if we go farther afield. If
1 The legal separation of the autonomous private Shinto sects from the state-regu-
lated public Shinto establishment was carried out in A.D. 1882 (Holtom, op. cit., pp.
67-8). In 1938 thirteen private Shinto sects enjoyed official recognition, and their
aggregate membership was estimated at little less than 17,400,000 (ibid., p. 69).
Of these sects, six had been already in existence in the Tokugawa Period (A.D. 1600-
1867), six had come into existence during the Meiji Period (A.D. 1868-1912), and
one, which took final shape in the Meiji Period, had existed in the Tokugawa Period in
an inchoate form (Kato, Genchi: A Study of Shinto, the Religion of the Japanese^ Nation
(Tokyo 1926, Meiji Japan Society), p. i). *The one conspicuous point of identity
between the Shinto of the State and that of the people lies in the deities that are hon-
oured. The kami of Sect Shinto and those of State Shinto are for the most part one
and the same' (Holtom, op. cit., p. 69). The private Shinto sects differ from State Shinto
and resemble the 'higher religions' in the point of having personal founders (ibid.,
p. 68; Kato, op. cit., p. 210). A.J.T.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 707, footnote 2, above. On this point Kato,
in op. cit., pp. 2-3, expresses the opinion 'that even this State Shinto, which some
Japanese go so far as to speak of as no religion at all, is in reality nothing short of evidence
of a religion interwoven in the very texture of the original beliefs and national organiza-
tion of the people, camouflaged though it may be as a mere code of national ethics and
State rituals, and as such apparently entitled only to secular respect. . . . Shinto the
State Shinto as well as the Sectarian Shinto is in very truth a religion.' This authori-
tative Japanese opinion must carry weight. A.J.T.
3 Anesaki, M.: History of Japanese Religion (London 1930, Kegan Paul), pp. 334~o.
4 This is a truth against which the ministers of the 'lower religions' rebel. In the
words of a priest of the Atago [State Shinto] Shrine of Kyoto, quoted by Holtom, op.
cit., p. 293:
'The shrines are Religion. They are real Religion. They are perfect Religion. If the
statement will be permitted, it may be said that Christianity and Buddhism are side
movements in Religion. They are incomplete religions. They are secondary religions.
94 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
we glance, for instance, at the Hindu World under the British Raj,
we may espy in the Arya SamSj 1 an analogue of the Neo-Shinto
movement in its early days under the Tokugawa Shogunate. If we
glance at the Babylonic World, we may see in Nabonidus an
emperor of the Babylonic universal state who might have antici-
pated Augustus's archaistic tour de force if he had not come to
grief through being too poor a politician and too keen an archaeo-
logist. And, if we glance at the Iranic World, we may recognize a
contemporary parallel to Professor Haucr's extravaganza of pro-
posing to resuscitate a pre-Christian German paganism in the not
less extravagant conceit, with which some play has been made in
the Turkey of President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of bringing back
to life a dead and buried pre-Islamic Turkish wolf-worship, 2 Per-
haps, however, we have already carried our survey far enough to
bring out the psychological relation between the phenomenon of
religious Archaism and the experience of social disintegration.
() The Self-Defeat of Archaism,
If we now turn back and take a synoptic view of all the four fields
in which we have been watching Archaism at work, we shall notice
that in each field one or two of the examples which we have examined
in order to discover what Archaism is are also illustrations of an
apparent tendency in Archaism for the movement to defeat itself,
In the field of Institutions we can watch the two Heracleidae at
Sparta, and in their footsteps the two Gracchi at Rome, embark
on the archaistic enterprise of re-establishing an ancestral consti-
tution which is still nominally in force but which has admittedly
been ignored and even violated with a scandalous laxity. The
young reformers are whole-heartedly sincere and enthusiastic in
their pursuit of their archaistic aim; and yet their well-meant
activities produce results which are the exact opposite of their
single-minded intentions.* Instead of achieving a reform they
actually let loose a revolution which does not come to rest again
until it has swept the last remnants of the mirpto? TroAtre/a away,
Again, in the field of Art, we see a Pre-Raphaelitism which is
athirst to drink at the fountain-head of the Western artistic tradi-
tion being led by its archaistic quest into an anti-realism that dries
up all the water brooks and leaves a desert in which nothing can
1 An account of the Arya Samaj will be found in Farquhar, J, R: Modern Kfligious
Movements in India (New York 1919, Macmillan), pp. 101-39.
IK w something about the pre-Islamic Nestorian Christianity which gained
fSJn n ? P -? n i e ? urks in Central Asia b cfre they began to drift into Dar-ai-Islam
m*!hA rf' ( }l . Vo1 ' !/ PP.; 5 * 6 - 8 ' and v - C (i) (0 3, vol. v, p. 250, above); but it
whfrh Hf dlf * cul * to ldent '[y w *h ^surance the mortal remaini of a Turkish wolf-totem
which if authentic, must be pre-Christian as well as pre-lslamic.
Gracchi h **** Ut P int in Ms Com P a Qn f && <* Cleomtnes with the
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 95
live except the demon of Futurism. In the field of Language we see
the efforts to call back to life an extinct form of Turkish or Hebrew
or Irish succeeding in their tour deforce of conjuring articulate and
intelligible speech out of the silence of the grave but this only at
the price of defeating the archaists 7 own intentions by composing
a new language which the simpletons who once spoke the original
language as their mother-tongue might find it difficult either to
speak or to understand. 1 In the field of Religion we see the would-be
archaist Julian embarrassing the official representatives of a pagan-
ism which he is trying to bolster up by expecting these priests of
Hellenic divinities to behave as though they were clergy of the
Christian Church; 2 and we also see another would-be religious
archaist, Nabonidus, positively enraging the priesthood of the
Babylonic World to a degree of exasperation at which they are
ready to welcome the alien invader Cyrus with open arms as a
liberator from an indigenous regime which has insisted upon
making itself intolerable.
These instances of Archaism defeating itself are too numerous
and too consistent to be dismissed as mere tricks of Chance. It
looks as though there must be something in the essence of Archa~
ism that drives it into self-defeat in frustration of its conscious
purpose; and we may be able to put our finger on this disconcerting
factor when we remind ourselves that Archaism sets out to be no
mere academic exercise but a practical way of life, and that what
it promises to do is to grapple with the urgent human problem of
combating the malady of social disintegration. If he is to justify
his pretensions the archaist has to convince the philistine majority
of his public that the nostrum which he is offering them is demon-
strably capable of restoring an ailing social system to health. In
fact, the archaist is pledged to *make things work' again; and this
formidable commitment compels him to become a man of action
instead of remaining the pure archaeologist that, in his heart, he
would probably prefer to be.
1 There ia a story ben trwato* se non two that an eminent scholar of pure English
extraction, who had spent his life in Dublin on the archaistic task of resuscitating the
Irish language, at last made up his mind to harvest the reward for his long labour of
love by holding converse with the survivors of an Irish-speaking peasantry on the banks
of the Shannon, By the time when he reached his destination our scholar's eagerness
had mounted to such a pitch that he burst into a torrent of his own Neo- Irish in the
face of the first native whom he encountered on alighting from the train. After listening
in silence for a minute or two with a look of blank incomprehension on his face, the
native interrupted the visitor's flow of speech by remarking politely, in excellent English:
I am sorry, but I don't know any German/ The scholars choice vocabulary culled
from ancient Irish epics had been no more intelligible to the bilingual westerner than
so much Double-Dutch; and, finding" himself thu$ surprisingly addressed in a language
which he could not recognize as bemg either English or Irish, he had jumped to the
conclusion that the gentleman who was addressing him must be one of those German
engineers who were at that time superintending the construction of the Shannon Dam.
* See V. C 6) (e) 2, Annex H, vol. v, p. 584, above.
96 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The point may be illustrated by considering the contrast be-
tween an archaeologist's and a dentist's way of dealing with a
decayed tooth. When an archaeologist disinters a palaeolithic
burial his business is to preserve his trove in a glass case in the
exact condition in which he found it below the sod; so all that he
has to do to the skeleton's teeth is to coat them with some chemical
that will arrest their decay at the point which it has already reached.
His problem is a simple one; for in the museum curator's keeping
these teeth have no further function except to lie still and be looked
at; their biting days are over once for all. The dentist's problem
is not so easily solved; for what the dentist has to do with the
decayed tooth of his living patient is not to provide an archaeo-
logically-minded public with an informative 'museum piece', but to
provide a live human being with a tooth that will stop aching and
get back to work; so the dentist sets about 'restoring 5 the tooth in
a way that would outrage the archaeologist's sense of professional
honour. The dentist's first act is to whittle away the surviving
remnant of the authentic original tooth by grinding out all the
rotten parts ; his second act is to fill the cavity, which he has thus
deliberately enlarged, with foreign matter that will bite as hard as
though it were the natural ivory. When the dentist has accom-
plished each of these two things he proudly assures his patient that
he has given the old tooth a new lease of life; but this admirable
dentistry would infuriate our archaeologist if he fancied himself as
a headhunter. 'This charlatan', he would protest, 'professes to
have restored that tooth when, as a matter of fact, as you can
verify if you will look, he has removed the greater part of what
was left of the real tooth and has then tried to cover his fraudulent
tracks by inserting a mass of foreign matter which has been skil-
fully designed to deceive the layman's eye and make him believe
that the ' 'denture" at which he is looking is a genuine antiquity
and not (as it really is) a fake. This so-called dentistry is nothing
but an impudent deception of a credulous public.'
We may leave our two dramatis personae to continue an argu-
ment in which they will never be able to agree; t>ut, if we have
made it clear that Archaism is a kind of dentistry and not a kind
of archaeology notwithstanding the similarity of the names and
the archaist's mistaken belief that they mean the same thing then
we may find that we have arrived at an explanation of the para-
doxical fact that Archaism so often ends in defeating its own quite
sincerely archaeological intentions. The archaist would, in fact,
appear to be condemned, by the very nature of his enterprise, to
be for ever trying to reconcile Past and Present; and the proneness
of their competing claims to prove incompatible is the weakness of
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 97
Archaism as a way of life. The archaist is on the horns of a dilem-
ma which is likely to impale him, whichever way he may lean. If
he tries to restore the Past without taking the Present into con-
sideration,^then the impetus of Life an elemental force which he
can never arrest will shatter into fragments the brittle shell that
he is bent on retrieving. On the other hand, if he consents to
subordinate his whim of resuscitating the Past to the task of
making the Present viable, then, in the name of restoration, he will
be led on and on into 'scrapping' so much of what is left of the
Past, and -introducing so much new masonry to reinforce the
remnant, that his pious work of 'reconstruction' will be difficult
to distinguish from the Vandalism of naked demolition and re-
placement. On either alternative the archaist will find, at the end
of his labours, that unwittingly or unwillingly he has 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.
9. Futurism
(a) The Relation between Futurism and Archaism.
There is an antithesis between Futurism and Archaism that is
brought out by the mere juxtaposition of the two words ; yet the
obvious difference of orientation which distinguishes these two
ways of life is not so significant as are the characteristic features that
they have in common. Futurism and Archaism are, both alike,
attempts to break with an irksome Present by taking a flying leap
out of it into another reach of the stream of Time without aban-
doning the plane of mundane life on Earth. And these two alter-
native ways of attempting to escape from the Present but not from
the Time-dimension also resemble one another in the further
point of being tours de force which prove, on trial, to have been
forlorn hopes. 1 The two movements differ 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 and
distress which neither the futurist nor the archaist has any longer
the heart to hold; and this difference of direction is not a difference
of kind. At the same time, Futurism does differ materially from
Archaism in the degree in which it goes against the grain of human
nature; for, while human beings are prone to seek refuge from a
disagreeable Present by retreating into a familiar Past, 2 they are
g8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
equally prone to cling to a disagreeable Present rather than strike
out into an unknown Future.
The spectacle of Time perpetually ^marching forward over the
corpse of a Present that Time's scythe is perpetually mowing down
is so appalling to human minds that they are apt to recoil into
a passionate yearning for continuity, in the spirit of the mortal
worshipper's prayer to an immortal God in the Hundred and
Second Psalm:
'I said: "0 my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy
years are throughout all generations.
e "Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the Earth, and the Heavens
are the work of thy hands.
' "They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax
old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall
be changed; -
' "But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.
* "The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be
established before thee." ?I
In this expression of the pathos of Syriac souls in one chapter
of the long-drawn-out disintegration of the Syriac Society we see
Humanity seeking to win an exemption from the doom of being
carried away on the inexorable flow of the Time-stream by catch-
ing at the skirts of a divine Eternity which is naively conceived of
as a Present prolonged into infinity. 2
This natural human horror at the ever imminent prospect of the
annihilation of a Present which can never really be prolonged can
no doubt be counteracted, and even overcome, either by a philo-
sophical fortitude in facing hard facts without flinching or by a
religious intuition of a larger hope' lightening the darkness of death.
The philosophical response to the challenge of Mutability is to
weakness of recalling 'elder statesmen' to power in times of political crisis (as, for
example, they were recalled in many of the countries that were belligerents in the
General War of 1914-18). This is one of the classic examples of a vein of Archaism
that is instinctive and unreasoning. A rational calculation would lead to the conclusion
that these 'elder statesmen' are the last people to whom a community can safely commit
its destinies in an emergency, since, ex hypothesi, these 'dug-outs' are doubly incapaci-
tated in the first place by the lassitude of old age and secondly, and more seriously,
by the obsoleteness of their outlook and their habits. It is virtually impossible for them
to be abreast of the times, considering that the experience on which they have been
formed is bound to have been thrown out of date by the very onset of the crisis which
the 'elder statesmen 1 have to thank for their recall
1 Ps. cii. 24-8.
2 The yearning that is expressed in this passage is foredoomed to frustration, not
because it is utterly impossible under all conditions for the Human Soul to enter into
God's mode of being by attaining union with Him, but because it is not possible to
achieve this spiritual transfiguration without rising above the mundane plane of life.
The prayer in the last verse is for a continuity of human social life in This World as
a nuraculous special dispensation from the law' truly cited in the three preceding
verses which condemns all the works of God's creation, qua creatures, to be ephemeral.
As a statement, and a magnificent statement, of this 'law', w. 25-7, without w. 24 and 28,
have already been quoted in II. C (ii) (&) i, vol. i, p. 285, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 99
be heard in the concordant voices of an Epicurean poet and a Stoic
emperor whose consensus on this crucial point reveals a funda-
mental unity of outlook at the heart of two classic expressions of
the Hellenic philosophy which are superficially antagonistic to one
another. 1
Lucretius strikes a note which is as true to the temper of his
Master as it is remote from the spirit that is vulgarly attributed to
the Epicurean school:
cedit enim renun novitate extrusa vetustas
semper, et ex aliis aliud reparare necessest. . . .
materies opus est ut crescant postera saecla,
quae tamen omnia te vita perfuncta sequentur;
nee minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque.
sic alid ex alio nunquam desistet oriri,
vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu. 2
This Epicurean poetry is echoed by Marcus Aurelius in Stoic
prose:
'You are afraid of Change ? But nothing can happen without Change ;
it is something that is of the essence of the nature of the Universe. You
cannot even take a hot bath without the fuel undergoing one kind of
change, or digest your dinner without the food undergoing another. In
fact, without the possibility of Change there could be no satisfaction for
any of our needs; and in this light it becomes evident that, when it is
your own turn to change into something other than yourself, this is all
in the day's work just another necessity of Nature. ... In Nature's
hands the sum of things is like a lump of wax. At one moment she
moulds it into a toy horse; then she kneads up the horse in order to
mould the same stuff into a toy tree ; then she makes it into a mannikin,
and then into something else. The duration of each of these successive
shapes is infinitesimally short, but where is the grievance ? Does it do
a packing-case any more harm to be broken up than it does it good to be
knocked together?' 3
The religious response to the challenge which Philosophy meets
in this way is to be found in the New Testament in two variants
of one simile:
That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,' 4
and
'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone,
but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.' 5
For the relation between Epicureanism and Stoicism see V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 394,
i Cor. xv. 36.
5 John xii. 24.
iao THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
In these flashes of religious light 1 an apparently merciless sacri-
fice of a sensitive Present to a callous Future is seen as an illusion
in which the growing-pains of a single immortal soul have been
falsely construed into a war to the knife between two irreconcilable
adversaries. On this view the underlying reality is not an incon-
sequent Mutability but a triumphant Withdrawal-and-Return a
reality which is as glorious as the illusion is repulsive. 2 Yet,
whether they thrill us with their ecstasy or impress us with their
fortitude, these two diverse reactions to the prospect of annihila-
tion still testify with one accord to the unnaturalness of a Futurism
which spurns the Present instead of clinging to it and which springs
forward to meet the Future instead of cowering back to put off the
moment of its inevitable impact.
Here is a psychological tour de force which is keyed to a dis-
tinctly higher pitch than its archaistic alternative; and, in view of
this striking difference between Futurism and Archaism in degree
1 It is curious to observe the diffraction of these beams of light from thf New Testa-
ment in the labyrinthine preciosity of a modern Western poet. Yet it is indeed, the same
spiritual truth that is declared in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Canto vii, Stanza 58,
iri the judgement given by Nature in the contest between Mutability and Jove for the
lordship of tne Universe:
I well consider all that ye have sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be: yet being rightly wayd
They are not changed from their first estate ;
But by their change their being doe dilate ;
And turning to themselves at length againe,
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate :
Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne ;
But they raigne over Change, and doe their states maintaine.
The hope of transfiguration which is implicit in this movement of Withdrawal-and-
Return is enlarged upon in the following stanzas in the eighth canto of the same poem:
When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare,
Of Mutability, and well it way:
Me seemes, that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav'ns Rule ; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she beares the greatest sway.
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle
And love of things so vaine to cast away;
Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.
Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Upon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie :
For all that moveth doth in Change delight,
But thence forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
that great Sabbaoth God, grant me that Sabbath's sight.
z The two passages here quoted from the New Testament have been quoted already
"~??> passage at greater lengthin the analysis of the movement of Withdrawal-
and-Return in III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 258, above. In the two passages of .Greek poetry
that are quoted on the preceding page of the same volume the opposite belief that the
appearance of annihilation is no illusion but is an ultimate as well as inexorable reality
is expressed with a poetic pathos which reflects the same mood of resignation as the
Stoic and Epicurean note of philosophic fortitude, notwithstanding the difference of
tone between these two alternative variations on one theme.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 101
O f abnormality, it is remarkable to observe that a lighter penalty is
exacted for the wider aberration. While Archaism, as we have
seen, 1 is frequently required to pay the crushing penalty of defeat-
ing i ts own a i m by collapsing into Futurism, we shall find that
jr-uturism is sometimes rewarded for its greater transgression by
being allowed to transcend itself through rising into Transfigura-
tion. If we may liken the catastrophe of Archaism to the crash of
a rnotor-car which skids right round on its tracks and then rushes
to destruction in the opposite direction to that in which the un-
happy driver was steering before the machine escaped from his
control, the happier experience of Futurism may be likened to that
of a passenger on board a motor-driven vehicle who believes him-
self 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 at the
moment when it looks and feels as though an accident can no
longer be staved off the vehicle rises from the ground at a turn
of the unseen pilot's wrist and soars over crags and chasms in its
own element. While the archaist driver of our imaginary motor-
car fares worse than he has had reason to fear, the futurist passen-
ger in our imaginary aeroplane fares better than he has had any
right to expect.
The Breach with the Present.
The Breach in Manners.
The futuristic, like the archaistic, way of breaking with the
Present can be studied empirically in a number of different fields
of social activity; but we need not always map these out on pre-
cisely the same lines. We may vary the map to suit the subject;
and in our study of Futurism it may prove convenient to deal
separately with Manners and with Institutions; to bring Language
and Literature and the Visual Arts together under the common
head of Secular Culture; and to take Religion by itself, as we have
taken it before in our studies of Archaism and of the Sense of
Promiscuity.
In the field of Manners the first gesture in which Futurism is
wont to advertise itself is the exchange of a traditional for an out-
landish costume; and in the ubiquitously though still no more
than superficially Westernized World of the present day 2 we have
already been offered the spectacle of a host of non-Western socie-
ties, from China to Peru, abandoning a hereditary and distinctive
* For the superficially Sfthe^steroSatioii (so far as it has yet gone) of the surviving
non-Western Societies see I. B (in), vol. i, pp. 3S- 6 ! above.
102 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
dress and conforming to a drably exotic Western fashion as an
outward and visible sign of their voluntary or involuntary enrol-
ment in a vastly swollen Western internal proletariat.
The most famous, as well as the earliest, example of a forcible
process of external Westernization is the shaving of beards and
banning of kaftans in Muscovy at the turn of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries of the Christian Era by order of Peter the
Great. 1 In the third quarter of the nineteenth century this Mus-
covite revolution in costume was emulated in Japan. And in our
own Post- War Age similar circumstances have evoked similar acts
of tyranny in a number of non-Western countries in which a long-
postponed course of Westernization is now being taken by forced
marches under the lash of local dictators. In the forcibly Wes-
ternized Turkey of President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk the unveil-
ing of the women 2 has been the counterpart of the shaving of the
men in the forcibly Westernized Muscovy of Peter the Great; but
in the Islamic World of this age the main battle of Futurism in the
field of dress has been fought over the question of masculine head-
gear, which in this society has been traditionally invested with a
greater social and even political significance than any other article
of dress. 3 The landmarks in the progress of this struggle are the
Turkish law of November 1925 which has made it compulsory for
all male Turkish citizens to wear hats with brims, 4 and the corre-
1 The shaving of Muscovite beards was executed not merely by Peter's orders but
actually by the futurist Tsar's own hand upon certain conspicuous countenances. This
was, in fact, the gesture by which Peter, upon his return from his Western tour in the
autumn of A.p. 1698, elected to announce his programme of forcible Westernization to
some of the dignitaries of his hitherto Byzantine empire when they presented themselves
in order to welcome him home; and we may be sure that this 'positive act*, performed
by the Tsar in person, had a greater effect upon the Muscovite imagination than the
elaborate official regulations, more^ Occidentali, by which it was followed up. Some
details of Peter's futuristic campaign against the traditional Muscovite costume have
already been set out in III. C (ii) (5), vol. iii, p. 283, footnote I, above. In taking this
plunge into a forcibly imposed sartorial Futurism, Peter was blandly perpetuating the
methods, while abruptly reversing the policy, of his recent predecessors on trie Musco-
vite Imperial Throne. Before Peter's accession the Government of Muscovy had been
more conservative than the people, and its exercise of a tyrannical authority in the
domain of dress had therefore taken the form of a veto upon innovations. In the reign
of Peter's own father Alexei (imperabat A.D. 1645-76) the wearing of Polish costume had
been forbidden by a law of A.D. 1675 (see Bruckner, A.: Peter der Grosse (Berlin 1879,
Grote), p. 218); and in the same reign the offence of adopting the Western style of
coifTure had been punished by excommunication and dismissal from office (Briickner,
op. cit., p. 220). The father's tyrannical Conservatism, however, was a mild affliction
by comparison with the son's tyrannical Futurism; for Peter's father had merely been
lagging a short distance behind a small minority of his subjects, whereas Peter was
forging far ahead of ,the vast majority of his.
2 See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affair^ 1928
(London 1929, Milford), pp. 202-3.
3 See ibid., pp. 203-5, and Survey of International Affairs^ 1936 (London 1937,
Milfprd), pp. 777-8, as well as Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925,
vol. i (London 1927, Milford), pp. 73-5.
* The passage of this law had the effect of forcing all male Turkish citizens into
making a breach with one of the outward observances of Islam; for the Islamic form of
prayer requires the worshipper both to keep his head covered and to touch the ground
with his forehead; and it is impossible to observe both these prescriptions in any head-
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 103
s ponding decrees of Riza Shah Pehlevi of Iran and King Amanallah
_f Afghanistan which followed in 1928. T
The Islamic World in the twentieth century of the Christian
jjra i s not the on ty arena in which a hat with a brim has been
adopted as the battle-crest of a militant Futurism. In the Syriac
^Torld in the fourth decade of the second century B.C. the High
priest Joshua who was the leader of a faction in Jewry which
^as eager at that time to repudiate at least the external trappings
of the Jewish community's native cultural heritage was not con-
to advertise his programme by the verbal gesture of hellen-
g his own name from Joshua into Jason. The 'positive act'
which provoked the demonic reaction of the Maccabees was the
adoption by the younger priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, at
Joshua's instigation, of the broad-brimmed felt sun-hat which was
th.e distinctive headgear of the pagan dominant minority in the
Achaemenian Empire's Hellenic 'successor-states'. In the sight of
dress with a brim. In the summer of the year 1929 the writer of this Study noticed the
embarrassment which the new law was then inflicting upon the devout worshippers in
th.e Mosque of Sultan Mehmed Fatih in Stamboul (see Toynbee, A. J. : A Journey to
China (London 1931, Constable), p. 69); and it is difficult not to suspect though per-
hiaps no less difficult to prove that this was one of the effects which the law was deliber-
ately designed to produce. It is noteworthy that this futuristic imposition of the
Western brimmed hat upon male Turkish citizens in 1925 followed hard upon the heels
of a short-lived archaistic fashion of wearing the qalpdq, a brimless black lambskin cap
wiiich was a trivial part of the Ottoman Turks* heritage from the Eurasian Nomad
minority of their ancestors. It will be seen that the wearing of the qalpdq was the equi-
valent, in the field of dress, of the linguistic Archaism that has been purifying the
Ottoman Turkish language of the non-Turkish elements in its vocabulary (see V. C (i)
Oi) 8 (y), pp. 67-8, above). The change from the archaistic Eurasian qalpdq to the
futuristic Western Homburg hat was abrupt; for as late as April 1923, when the writer
of this Study paid his first visit to Angora, he soon discovered that the hat which he had
brought on his own head from London was anathema in Anatolia because in Turkish
eyes it was then still a symbol of the imperialism of the Western Powers and of the self-
assertiveness of the Orthodox and Gregorian Christian nz'ryefc. The qalpdq t which was
so soon to be supplanted by this ex-enemy headgear, had already supplanted' the fez;
and the fez, too, had been an innovation in its day. It had been introduced by Sultan
Mahmud II (imperabat A.D. 1808-39) as a* 1 alternative to the invidiously distinctive
variety of headgear that had previously been either obligatory or customary in the
Ottoman Empire. It is noteworthy that Mahmud does not appear to have made the
wearing of the fez compulsory except for public servants-.
* Riza Shah banned the sugar-loaf-shaped felt ^kuldh which, on the evidence of
A.chaemenian bas-reliefs, had been the customary Persian male headgear since at least
tHe fifth century B.C. but he was prudent enough to make a compromise with the
susceptibilities of his subjects in selecting his compulsory substitute. Instead of follow-
ing the precedent of the Turkish law of November 1925, R^ Shah constrained his
male subjects to wear, not the civilian Western hat of the day, but the so-called Kulafi
JPehlevi, a fancy head-dress, designed by the Shah himself, more or less on the pattern
of the contemporary headgear of officers in the French Army. King Amanallah wbo
tiad to deal with a population which was still more conservative than that of Persia
made the mistake which Riza Shah avoided. Amanallah did attempt to follow the
Turkish example: and this was the crowning folly that cost him his throne (see V. u m
(e) 3, vol. v, p. 333, above, and V. C (ii) (<z)', in the present volume, p. 234, below).
On the other hand, in the relatively progressive 'successor-state' of the Ottoman Empire
tHat has been established in 'Iraq, the first sovereign, King Faysal b. Husayn, exercised
an even greater prudence than RJ2a Shah; for the Taysal cap* which he introduced is
modelled, not on the peaked cap of the French Army, but on the soft and brimless
forage-cap of the British Army, in which any devout Muslim can perform his prayer-
clrill without impediment.
104 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the orthodox Palestinian Jews of the day this spectacle was as
shocking as it would be to the eyes of our twentieth-century
Palestinian Arab Muslims if the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem were
to air himself in the Haram-ash-Sharif with a sola topee on his
head. And in the Jewish case in point the rapid progress of the
futurist furore was soon to give the puritans reason; for the young
priests of Yahweh did not confine their revolutionary cult of
Hellenism to the wearing of the petasus. Their Hellenic headgear
was not so shocking as the Hellenic nakedness with which they
practised Hellenic sports in a Hellenic palaestra. Hellenic athletic
competitions led on to Hellenic dramatic festivals; and, almost
before the conservatively orthodox majority of the Palestinian
Jewish community had realized what, was happening, the 'raging
tearing campaign' of Futurism had arrived at its sacrilegious
culmination.
'They shall pollute the sanctuary of strength and shall take away
the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh
desolate/ 1
Jason's futuristic campaign had started as a voluntary movement;
and, for all its radicalism, it had not trespassed beyond the limits
of a secular field of action in which it might give offence to Jewish
taste without driving Jewish consciences to desperation. But the
Jewish High Priest Jason had been working under the patronage
of the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes; and the patron
held in the hollow of his hand a client who was merely the prelate
of one of those diminutive temple-states which were embedded
1 Dan. xi. 31. The crescendo movement of Jason's futurist *ramp' is depicted, in
colours which are as vivid as they are unflattering, in a celebrated passage in the Second
Book of Maccabees:
'After the passing of Seleucus [TV] and the accession of Antiochus the God Manifest
another 150 talents if he were also empowered by royal authority to establish a physical
training centre tytyzvaaiov) and a youth club (efafatov) and to register the inhabitants
of Jerusalem as citizens of Antioch. The King gave his assent; and the new High Priest
had no sooner taken up the reins of office than he set himself to transform his countrymen
into Hellenes. He brushed aside the royal charter that had been secured to the Jews by
the efforts of John the father of Eupolemus, and he made havoc of their lawful institu-
tions in order to make room for impious innovations. He took a peculiar pleasure in
installing his physical training centre under the very shadow of the citadel, enrolling
vogue and Renegadism such an impetus that the priests lost interest in the Liturgy,
looked down upon the Temple, neglected the sacrifices and cared for nothing but to enter
themselves for competitions in discus-throwing and to take their part in all the impious
performances in the ring. They despised what their forefathers had honoured, and
regarded Hellenic notions as the best in the world. In retribution for this they were
overtaken by senous misfortunes and received their punishment at the hands of the
very nation whose ways they had admired and wanted to ape in every particular. The
laws of Heaven cannot be defied with impunity, as the sequel will show' (2 Mace, iv,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 105
here and there in the vast body politic of the Seleucid Empire. 1
When it suited Antiochus's convenience he sold Jason's office over
Jason's head to a rival aspirant 2 who was not only a higher bidder
for the Jewish High Priesthood but was also a more violent futurist ;
and, when the evicted Jason descended upon Jerusalem from his
asylum in Transjordan and expelled his supplanter by a coup de
main, Antiochus promptly took advantage of the opening given
him by this act of Jewish rebellion in order to intervene personally
with a high hand. He marched on Jerusalem; crushed the revolt;
installed a Macedonian garrison; confiscated the treasure of the
Temple for the benefit of his own insatiable exchequer; and put
(as he supposed) the finishing touch to the work of Hellenization,
in which Jason had played his part as pioneer, by courteously
identifying 'the Heaven-God of Jerusalem'* with the Olympian
Zeus and graciously providing the necessary statue of the god
portrayed in the Emperor's own image to fill the void in a hither-
to bleakly vacant Holy of Holies. 4 'The Abomination of Desolation,
spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing where it ought not,' 5
was the swift and fearful nemesis of Joshua-Jason's futuristic
escapade. 6
The ultimate outcome of this Jewish essay in Futurism in the
second century B.C. was not a triumph like Peter the Great's but
a fiasco like Amanallah's ; for the Seleucid Power's frontal attack
upon the Jewish religion evoked a Jewish reaction of a violence 7
with which Epiphanes and his successors found themselves unable
to cope. 8 Yet the fact that this particular essay in Futurism
1 For these temple-states, -which were the debris of shattered civilizations, see IV. C
(iii) (c) 2 (j3), vol, iv, P. 312, footnote i, and p. 422, footnote 3; IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (a),
vol. iv, p. 471; and IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (/?), vol, iv, pp. 515-18, above.
2 We have no record of the Jewish name which was hellenized into Menelaus by
Joshua- Jason's supplanter (Sevan, Edwyn: Jerusalem under the High Priests (London
1904, Arnold), p. 80).
3 For this description of Yahweh, under which the tribal god of Jewry had been com-
mended by the Jews themselves to the notice of the Pagan World, see the passage quoted
from Eduard Meyer in V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 33, above.
* For the measures taken by Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem see Bevan, op, cit.,
pp. 81-2.
5 Mark xiii. 14; cf. Matt, xxiv, 15.
6 The swiftness of the nemesis is impressive if it is true that Antiochus a devastating
act of introducing the Hellenic idol into the Jewish Holy of Holies followed within eight
years of Jason's apparently innocuous act of putting his young priests into Hellenic hats.
7 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 68 and 72-3, above.
8 Eduard Meyer, in Ursprung und Anfdnge des Christentums, vol. 11 (Stuttgart and
Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 143, makes a suggestive comparison between Antiochus Epiphanes
and the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II.' The Seleucid Empire was already labouring
under the shock of its collision with Rome by the time when Antiochus Epiphanes {no
doubt unwittingly) challenged Jewry to a fight to the death with the Emperor s Helle-
nism. Within ten years of the conquest of Coele Syria by Antiochus the Great in 1 9 ?.
the Seleucid conqueror of the Ptolemy had been routed by Scipio Asiagenus at Magnesia
and had been compelled, as part of a peace settlement which was dictated to him by ^tne
Roman Government, to consent to a drastic limitation of Seleucid armaments. And
Antiochus Epiphanes himself had been publicly humiliated by a Roman Commissioner
before the waffi of Pelusium (see V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), Annex I, vol. v, p. 628, footnote 2,
io6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
happens to have been abortive does not make it any the less instruc-
tive; and one of the points which it illustrates is the impossibility of
indulging in Futurism within fore-appointed limits. The essence
of Futurism is a breach with the present; and, when once there has
been a lesion at any point in the fabric of social life, the rent will
extend itself and the threads will continue to unravel even if the
original rift was minute and even if the point at which it was made
lay on the outermost fringe of the web. The ethos of Futurism is
intrinsically 'totalitarian' ; and the evidence which points to this
conclusion is by no means confined to the single instance which
has led us up to it. Just as the Jew who takes to wearing thepetasus
soon learns to frequent the palaestra and the amphitheatre, so the
Muscovite who has been dragooned into wearing a Western wig
goes on to dance the fashionable Western dances and play the
fashionable Western card-games, while in a later generation the
Turk in a Homburg hat and the Persian in a Pehlevi cap cannot
be kept off the football field or out of the cinema hall. In these
cases, as in that, the abandonment of a traditional style of dress
leads on to a general revolution in manners; and this is not the end
of the futurist rake's progress. For, while in the Islamic World
to-day the post-war fever of Futurism is still in the innocuous
preliminary external stage of the Jewish movement under Jason's
brief regime, Japan, who anticipated Turkey by three-quarters of
a century in discarding her traditional male costume, is already
being haunted by the spectre of 'dangerous thought', while in Russia
where the change of costume occurred about a century and
three-quarters earlier than in Japan the process has culminated
in our day 1 in a campaign against the ancestral religion of the land
above) only a few months before he stormed the walls of Jerusalem and desecrated the
Temple. The main lines of Epiphanes* ill-starred policy can all be traced back to the
effects of Roman pressure. His abortive campaign of forcible Hellenization was an ill-
judged effort to reinvigorate his empire by consolidating it. His abortive invasion of
Egypt was a hazardous attempt to take advantage of the Romans' preoccupation with
Perseus in order to secure a belated territorial compensation for the loss of the former
possessions of the Seleucid Monarchy north-west of Taurus. The financial straits which
tempted Antiochus to resort to the fatal expedient of robbing his Jewish subjects
of their temple-treasures were the price of his own costly military adventure in Egypt
following upon the payment of the heavy war-indemnity which had been exacted by the
Romans from his predecessor Antiochus the Great. Before the Seleucid Government
was pushed or led into these fatal courses in consequence of its encounter with Rome,
its yoke had weighed lightly, by comparison with the rival Ptolemaic' Government's
yoke, upon its Orienta^ subjects' necks (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 65, above).
1 The pace of Futurism in Russia has, of course, been much slower than the pace at
which it moved in Palestine in the second century B.C.; for while, as we have seen, the
installation of 'the Abomination of Desolation* in the Holy of Holies may have followed
within eight years of the adoption of thepetasus by Joshua-Jason's young men, there is an
interval of no less than 228 years between the date of Peter the Great's effective accession
was the hand of an alien intruder; and the fact that Antiochus was not a Jew but a Greek
accounts both for the swiftness with which the Palestinian drama reached its culmina-
io8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
traditional Attic phylae and phratriae and gene with a brand-new
set of artificially invented and arbitrarily delimited phylae and
trittyes and demi which would foster the allegiance of their mem-
bers to the all-embracing city-state of Athens of which these new
geographical circumscriptions, unlike the old kin-groups, were
mere articulations without any prior or independent life of
their own. 1
This precedent from Hellenic history has been followed in our
Western World by the makers of the French Revolution whether
consciously, as part of their cult of Hellenism, or because they
lighted independently upon the same means for compassing an
identical end. Aiming at the political unification of France as
Cleisthenes had aimed at that of Attica, these French political
futurists did in fact adopt the Cleisthenic device of abolishing the
old provincial boundaries and levelling the old internal customs
barriers in order to turn France into a unitary fiscal area sub-
divided for administrative convenience into departments whose
monotonous uniformity and strict subordination were intended to
efface the memory of the historic provinces with their persistent
traditions of diversity and autonomy. To-day the departments of
France bid fair to prove, as the demes of Attica proved, the most
durable monuments of the revolution whose fiat first traced their
boundaries on the map; and already this feat of geographical
Futurism in France has had repercussions in other parts of
1 Cleisthenes' revolutionary reconstruction of the political map of Attica was justified
by its fruits; for it did produce precisely that overriding sense of loyalty to the state
which it had been intended to produce; and, with this artificial reinforcement, the
Athenian civic consciousness developed a strength and tenacity which could bear com-
parison even with the Spartiates* public spirit. The brilliance of Cleisthenes' success
as a revolutionary may perhaps be accounted for in part by the fact that this Athenian
political futurist was also the scion of a noble house with a strong family tradition. At
any rate, whether for this or for some other reason, Cleisthenes was one of those rare
revolutionaries that have had the insight to understand the potency of Conservatism
and the wisdom to harness this mighty social force for their own purposes. When
Cleisthenes set himself to replace the four historic phylae of Attica with ten brand,-new
phylae of his own invention, he took pains to invest his new creations with an air of
antiquity and a halo of sanctity. He solved the delicate problem of providing his new
ten tribes with names by drawing up a panel of a hundred names of mythical Attic
heroes and then persuading the Oracle at Delphi (where the Alcmaeonidae had influence)
to designate ten as being the most appropriate (Aristotle: Institutions of Athens, chap. 21).
The Cleisthenic 'tribes thus started life with a religious sanction which soon gave them
as powerful a hold upon the allegiance of the citizens enrolled in them as if they had been
in existence since time immemorial; and this new allegiance to the ten Cleisthenic
tribes, in contrast to the old allegiance to the four Ionic tribes, had the effect of fortifying,
instead of competing with, the members' simultaneous allegiance to the Athenian city-
state. (It is true that in Attica the Ionic tribes, too, in their day, may have started as
artificial articulations of the body politic which were copied, in this case, from Miletus
or some other city-state of Ionia in which these tribes were an indigenous institution
representing the several 'swarms' of migrants in the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung
whose political union in their new place of settlement had brought a new body politic to
birth (see II. D (iii), vol. ii, pp. 97-8, above). But, if the introduction of the Ionic tribes
into Attica really had been an anticipation of Cleisthenes' invention of his ten tribes, the
earlier political revolution had miscarried; for by Cleisthenes* time the Ionic tribes in
Attica had become incorporated into the indigenous kin-group organization of phratriae
and gen.)
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 109
Europe. It is true that the departments on the French model which
were instituted under the Napoleonic regime in those tracts of
Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries that were incorporated
into the Napoleonic Empire and its client states did not survive
the downfall of Napoleon and the consequent reduction of France
to her old limits by the re-establishment of the frontiers of A.D.
1792, Yet, although these departments in the French Revolution-
ary style in partibus peregrinorum were themselves ephemeral, their
negative effect upon the political map of Europe has been lasting
and profound; for in the short period of their currency they did
effectively obliterate the pre-existing political landmarks, and
thereby they cleared the ground for the erection of a united Italy
and a united Germany whose makers have been persistently in-
spired by the pattern of a united France until, in our own day, they
have turned imitation into caricature by carrying it to 'totalitarian'
lengths. 1 In Germany under the National- Socialist regime Herr
Hitler has been following out at any rate one of 'the Ideas of 1789*
in his move to replace the Lander of the Reich, with their unwel-
come historic associations of dynastic particularism, by Gaue in
which the essential unity of the Reich will be proclaimed in the
very artificiality of these new-fangled geographical articulations. 2
While Herr Hitler has been experimenting with a caution that
seems alien from the Nazi Sthos in this enterprise of remapping
'the Third Reich' on futuristic lines, his 'opposite number' Mon-
sieur Stalin has given characteristic expression to the Bolshevik
ethos in the geographical field by carrying to completion a far more
radical rearticulation of the internal divisions of the Soviet Union.
The thoroughness of the breach of continuity which has been
made by Stalin in this sphere becomes apparent when the new
administrative map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 3 is
superimposed upon the old administrative map of the Russian
Empire; for it would be hard to find a sector where the two sets
of lines coincide. The autonomous Uzbeg khanates and Cossack
republics have been swept away as unceremoniously as the sub-
divisions of those territories that used to be under the direct
administration of St. Petersburg; and these old administrative
*> See V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), Annex I, vol. v, pp. 636-42, above.
\ In theory the Gaue into which the National-Socialist Party has been remapping the
Third Reich* for certain purposes are archaistic restorations of the tribal communities
into which the German-speaking population of the Continent of Europe was divided in
the Dark Ages, before the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire. The practical
toman empire weathered away. _ .., .
3 See the English text of the Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics adopted [on the $th December, 1936] at the Extraordinary Eighth
Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R. (Moscow 1937, Co-operative Publishing Society of
Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R.), chap. 2, arts. 13 and 22-7.
no THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
units have been replaced by a complicated hierarchy of new ones
ranging from the constituent states of the Union down to a
number of autonomous republics and districts within their respec-
tive borders which bears no relation whatsoever to the old ad-
ministrative lay-out'. Stalin's motive in carrying out his geogra-
phical revolution has been the same as Hitler's and Cleisthenes',
His aim, like theirs, has been to make sure that the common
allegiance of his fellow citizens to the commonwealth as a whole
shall be stronger than their parochia! allegiance to any lesser
geographical unit. In pursuing this identical aim, however, Stalin
has acted with a subtlety in which he is perhaps a pioneer. Where-
as his predecessors and contemporaries have all alike sought to
attain their purpose of weakening the existing parochial loyalties
by effacing the landmarks to which these loyalties have attached,
Stalin has pursued the exactly 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.
Stalin has perceived in advance that one of the most formidable
impediments to the triumph of the Marxian 'ideology' among the
peoples of the Soviet Union is likely to be the attraction of the
alternative 'ideology' of Nationalism a competing Western poli-
tical idea which has already captured some of the most highly
cultivated peoples of the Union, such as the Ukrainians, Georgians,
and Armenians, and which is likely to continue to spread until its
leaven or virus will have infected even the most remote and
backward tribes in the mountain-fastnesses of the Caucasus and
Altai and in the tundras beyond the Arctic Circle. Recognizing
that this unwelcome triumph of Nationalism is at least as probable
as the triumph of the Communism which it is his mission to pro-
mote, Stalin has set himself to prevent the plague of Nationalism
from taking a virulent form by applying the homoeopathic treat-
ment of inoculation. He has thrown open to the peoples of the
Union so wide a scope for the satisfaction of nationalist proclivities
as to reduce to a minimum the danger that nationalist grievances
may be used as a 'red herring' to draw the peoples' feet away from
the path of Communism which Stalin wishes them to tread.
In this field, at any rate, Stalin knows what he is about; for he
is himself a Georgian by birth and he has thus had a direct experi-
ence of the stimulating effect of the old Imperial Russian policy
of repression upon national movements among non- Russian sub-
jects of the Tsar. It is therefore perhaps not improbable in the
light of the sequels to the French Revolution of A.D. 1789 and to
the Attic Revolution of 507 B.C. that the futuristic recasting of the
SCHISM IN THE SOUL in
administrative map of the Soviet Union under Stalin's auspices may
prove to be the most durable monument of the Russian Revolution
of A.D. 1917- And in that event Stalin who in other connexions
may chiefly be remembered as a politician who slily shepherded
his silly sheep back out of the Marxian wilderness in the direction
of the bourgeois fold will also have a second title to fame as a
statesman whose brilliant political homoeopathy saved some six-
teen per cent, of the land-surface of the planet from being ravaged
by the Western political plague of Nationalism with the extreme
virulence that is symptomatic of an 'ideological' germ when it is
attacking bodies social that have not been preconditioned for
resisting it.
Unhappily the homoeopathic treatment which the All-Union
Communist Party, under Stalin's inspiration, have applied to the
problem of Nationalism within the frontiers of the Soviet Union
has not been their policy in dealing with corporations and parties
and sects and classes. In this field their Futurism has taken the
form of a 'totalitarian* intolerance, and here their pernicious
example which has itself been inspired by the outlawry of the
Noblesse in the French Revolution has been all too faithfully
followed by the National- Socialist Party in Germany.
As for the breach in Institutions which takes the form of an
abolition of existing organs or offices of state, we may cite, as a
classical example, the abolition of the Roman Consulate by the
Roman Emperor Justinian. 1
The Breach in Secular Culture and in Religion.
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 revolution-
ary first founder of the Sinic universal state, 2 is said to have
systematically confiscated and burnt the literary remains of the
philosophers who had flourished during the Sinic 'Time of
Troubles', for fear that a transmission of this 'dangerous thought'
might thwart his own design of inaugurating a brand-new order
of society. 3 And in the Syriac World the Caliph 'Umar, who was
the veritable reconstructor of the Syriac universal state after it had
been in abeyance during a millennium of Hellenic intrusion upon
the Syriac World,* is reported to have written, in reply to an
1 See V. C (ii) (a), p. 224, below. 2 See V. C (ii) (a), p. 187, below.
3 According to Hackmann, H. : Chinesische Philosophic (Munich 192?. Remhardt),
p. 171, the 'dangerous thought* that Ts'in She Hwang-ti was particularly anxious to
suppress was the Mencian version of Confucianism.
4 For the Arab Caliphate as a 'reintegration* or 'resumption* of the Achaememan
Empire see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 73-7, above.
ii2 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
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 s they are pernicious
and ought to be destroyed/ 1
According to the legend, the contents of a library which had been
accumulating for more than 900 years were thereupon condemned
to be consumed as fuel for the heating of the public baths.
Whatever may be the proportions of fiction and fact in these
tales that attach to the names of 'Umar and Ts'in She Hwang-ti,
the burning of the books at Miinster under the militant Anabap-
tist regime of A.D. I534--5, 2 and in the whole of Germany after the
advent of Herr Hitler to power on the 3oth January, 1933, is
authentic history; and the motive which inspired our modern
Western National Socialists was undoubtedly that which the
legend ascribes to the Sinic futurist dictator.
Herr Hitler's Turkish contemporary President Mustafa Kemal
Atatlirk succeeded in producing an even sharper breach with the
Turkish cultural heritage by means of a less drastic but possibly
more effective 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, instead, into
a Western cultural mould; but, as an alternative to burning the
books in which the treasures of Iranic culture are enshrined, he
contented himself with insisting upon a change of Alphabet. A
law which was duly passed by the Great National Assembly at
Angora on the ist November, 1928, gave legal currency in Turkey
to a version of the Latin Alphabet which had been worked out for
the conveyance of the Turkish language at the dictator's orders;
and the same law went on to prescribe that all newspapers, maga-
zines, pamphlets, advertisements, and public signs must be printed
in the new Alphabet on and after the coming ist December; that
all business of public services, banks, and companies must be
conducted in it, and all books printed in it, on and after the ist
January 1929; that all administrative and legal forms, documents,
and records must be conceived in it on and after the ist June 1929;
and that, as from the last-mentioned date, the public was to
correspond in the new Alphabet with government departments,
* The anecdote is recounted by Gibbon in his inimitable manner (The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, li),
a For this outbreak at Monster in these years see V, C (i) (*) a, vol. v, pp. 167 and 170,
above. For the particular incident of the Burning of the BoU tee Crew Hunt, R, N,:
Jonn of Leyden m The Edinburgh Review, No. 507, vol. 349, January 1920, p. 86.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL n 3
banks, and companies. 1 The passage and enforcement of this law
made it unnecessary for the Turkish Ghazi to imitate the Arab
Caliph's melodramatic gesture* The classics of Arabic, Persian,
and Ottoman Turkish literature had now he-en effectively placed
beyond the reach of a rising generation of Turkish boys and girls
who might otherwise perhaps have been beguiled by the taste of
these forbidden fruits into rebelling against the destiny of Westerni-
zation to which they had been devoted by the will of their dictator.
There was no longer any necessity to burn the ancient books when
the Alphabet that was the key to them had been put out of cur-
rency. They could now be safely left to rot on their shelves In the
assurance that they would soon be as completely undecipherable
as a Sinic scroll or a Babylonic tablet to the whole of the Turkish-
reading public save for a negligible handful of specialist scholars, 2
In the banning of a script or the burning of a book the breach
with a cultural tradition is symbolized in a physical act; but the
essence of cultural Futurism is a mental revolution, and this may
be effectively carried through without being advertised in any
outward visible sign. The destruction of the library at Alexandria,
for example (if we may believe that the legend contains some
kernel of fact), was only one particular expression of the impulse
to break with Hellenism which was inherent in Primitive Islam; 3
and this impulse itself was inherited by the Primitive Muslims
from Christian and Jewish predecessors; for the revolt of Islam
was merely the victorious climax of a persistent attempt per-
petually sustained and renewed in despite of repeated discourage-
ments and failures to liberate a submeiged Syriac Civilization
from the incubus of a Hellenism which had originally imposed
itself on the Syriac World by naked force of arms* 4 In its first
phase this Syriac reaction against Hellenism had taken the form
of an archaistic recoil into the native Syriac tradition by way of
a pathologically meticulous observance and elaboration of the
Mosaic or the Zoroastrian law.* In its later phases the same
1 See Toynbte, A, | n nd Bouher, V 4 M.: Sunny o/ International Affair*,
III A (viii), especially pp. aaS-jo,
2 The change of Alphabet in Turkey *n A,D. xoj*8 ha* been touched upon already in
IV. C (ii) (a), vol iv, pp. 53-4, tfoovsj where I* hut been pointed out that the change
has been due to a deliberate act of policy ndl not to a Io* of technique.
3 At a later atagc > of course, the* Syrttc Cmlifcttjon *** * more sophisticated Islamic
guise drew more copiouily upon the mental riehc* of the Hellenic culture than it had
ever been willing to drmw in timei when it had *t*tl ben politically and even militarily
subject to a Hellenic ascendancy* Thit cultural contact between the Syriac and Hellenic
societies in the Age of the *Abbaiid Caliphate i* examined further in Pmrt IX, below.
* For this role of Ilm in the conflict between the Syriac and Hellenic cultures *ee
v n^% ? ol i l * PP" 9 " 1 J H. D (vi), vol. ft, p, 35; H D (vii), vol. ii, pp, a8$~8; and
C JW " W Annex, vol. v pp. 675-8, above.
s Thia phenomenon of 'SMEotitm % which ii one of the regular psychological con-
conutanta of the contact of eivilixntiona in the Sp*ce-dim!on ia examined further in
Part IX, below.
ii 4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
reaction found a futurist expression in a campaign to reconvert
from Hellenism the ci-devant Syriac masses who in the meantime
had been converted to this alien culture in a more or less super-
ficial way through being forcibly enrolled in the Hellenic internal
proletariat. This subterranean mental strife, which gradually pre-
pared the ground for 'Umar's lightning victory in a more flam-
boyant form of warfare, is described in the following passage from
the pen of a modern Western master of the subject:
The supremacy of the intellect and the disciplined acquisition of
knowledge by the understanding, which finds its perfected expression
in the [Hellenic] philosophical systems though it is also striven after
by Judaism, in Sirach, in his pursuit of the Chokmah or Divine Wisdom,
as well as in the interpretation of the Law is ousted by the forces of
emotion: the longing for redemption and for the gift of a peace that
passeth all understanding ; the longing for a direct union with the super-
natural world of God. This longing finds its satisfaction in the expec-
tant approach to the Godhead and in the mystical, intuitive form of
knowledge (Gnosis) to which this opens the way- In spite, or rather just
by reason, of its intellectual derangement, this Gnosis has the power to
create an inner sense of certainty, to overcome doubt, and to lull the
understanding to sleep ; and so the mediator between God and Man
the "Son" calls the simple souls to him and reveals this knowledge to
them, while they, for their part, make it their own with alacrity and
carry it with ease. The grain of truth that lies in credo quia absurdum 1
has found here an ideal expression. The phrase towers high above all
the repeated attempts from Paul's spurts of rabbinical logic onwards
to unite and harmonize faith with the rational form of knowledge. It
enunciates the contradiction between them quite clearly without any
mitigation of its harshness. . . . 2
'What we are witnessing here is the passing of the sceptre from the
educated to the uneducated from the upper strata, whose creative
force and capacity for achievement are exhausted, 3 to the masses below
them. The process moves steadily forward towards completion during
the early centuries of the Christian Era, and it manifests itself first in
the great religious movement that sets iu at the birth, and even before
the birth, of the Empire. This is the framework within which Chris-
tianity spreads 4 until finally it conquers all its competitors (though not
1 For the authentic words of Tertullian see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), voL v> p. 564, above.
A.J. 1
* In the passage here omitted Eduard Meyer depreciates the attempts of Clement of
Alexandria and Origen and their successors to restate the creed of Christianity in terms
of Hellenic philosophy. For a different appreciation of the work of these Christian
Fathers see the present Study, V. C (i) (<r) 4, vol. v, pp. 366-7, and V, C (i) (rf) 6 (8),
vol. v, p. 539, above. A.J.T,
3 The degeneration of creative into dominant minorities has been examined in this
Study in IV. C (iii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 123-4 and 131-2; V. C (i) (a), vol. v, p. 20; and V.
C (i) (&), vol. v, pp. 23-35, above. A.J.T.
* The futurist note can in fact be heard in those passages from the New Testament
and from the works of Saints Ambrose and Augustine that have been quoted in this
Study respectively in IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol. iv, pp. 246-9, and in V. C (i) (<f) 6 (8),
vol. v, p. 564, footnote 4, above. In those other contexts they have been quoted for the
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 315
without being influenced and modified hy them profoundly). But the
movement has a far wider sweep than that. It embraces every depart-
ment of cultural, spiritual* and social life and attains a complete
supremacy with the establishment of the absolute military monarchy
and the regime of the soldier-emperors from the third century onwards.* 1
On the intellectual plane the triumph of Futurism is consum-
mated when the heirs of the intellectual tradition of a once creative
but now merely dominant minority proclaim their own mental
bankruptcy by positively repudiating the cultural heritage which
they have failed to defend against the futurist attack and volun-
tarily embracing the anti-intellectual faith which has been the
deadliest weapon of their futurist assailants. 2 The 1 kllenic En-
lightenment had extinguished its own lamp long before Justinian
set the seal upon an accomplished fact by closing the now be-
nighted Athenian schools. 1
The illustrations of Futurism in this intellectual sphere that
have come to our attention at an earlier point 4 have been drawn
from the histories of the Hellenic and Hinic and indie civilizations
in the course of their disintegration; but there are other illustra-
tions nearer home that stare us in the face; for a futurist assault
upon the intellectual heritage of our Western Society is a recent
yet already conspicuous feature of our own current history. This
contemporary Western vein of anti-intellectual Futurism is in fact
a common element in movements which might seem at first sight
to be remote from one another* The same animus can be detected
in the harmlessly theoretical speculations of the gentle French
philosopher Bergscm and in the milttantly practical policy of the
Fascist and Communist worshippers of the idol of 'the Totali-
tarian State'. 5
Thought and literature Ate not, of course, the only provinces of
secular culture in which the heritage of the Present from the Past
is exposed to a futurist attack. There are other worlds for Futur-
ism to conquer in the visual and aural arts; and in another context 6
testimony which they hear to an objective truth- the operation of the principle of
7rpt7r^rta or 'the reversal of rote** which ii one of the fundamental facts of life. But
in enunciating tn objective tnjth th<re pMivftti tlsw incidentally express a subjective
state of mind, and that i the spirit of the futurist who feel* it to be his mission to cast
out and tread under foot the salt that has !tt hit itvour (Mitt, v, 13). A.J.T,
1 Meyer, .: Ursprung und AH/&W* At Ghritttntunu t vol. i (Berlin and Stuttgar
Cotta), pp. 289-90. Compare the quotation from C, G, Jung in V. C (i) (d) 6 (o), vol. v,
pp. 567-8, above, . .*/*/*
2 This metamorphosis of philosophies into religions his been txtmmccl in V. C (i)
(<0 6 (5), vol. v, pp. 545-68* above. v ., . ...
3 For the closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in A.D. 529 ** IV. C (m)
(c) 2 (a), vol. iv, pp. a7a~3 above, and V- C (ii) (a), in the present volume, pp. 223-4*
below, 4 Set V, C (i) {d) 6 (d), vol. v, pp, 545-^8, above,
s For the idolatrous worship of states sec IV, (iu) (<r) a (a) and ($), vol. iv, pp. 261-4231
above. For modem Western Man'* emotional revolt against his intellectual heritage
see Watkin E. L: Men and Ttnttetodt* (London 1937, Sheed & Ward).
6 In IV. C (ii) (a), vol. iv, pp, 5ia> abov.
n6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
we have already had occasion to take notice of the impulse which,
in our own Western World in our own day, is leading us to abandon
our traditional Western styles of music and dancing and painting
and sculpture in favour of outlandish innovations. It is, in fact,
our modern Western innovators in those fields who have coined
the word 'Futurism' in order to apply it to their own handiwork
in assertion of a claim to originality. In their case this boast is
proved false by the testimony of a bizarre borrowed plumage
which flagrantly betrays its incongruous Tropical African and
pseudo-Byzantine origins. The title 'futurist' might have been
assumed with better right by the genuine Byzantine school of
architecture and the other visual arts which, in an offensive that
started in the third and triumphed in the sixth century of the
Christian Era, made itself mistress of the entire domain of a mori-
bund Roman Empire by attacking and supplanting the Hellenic
school with one hand and the Egyptiac with the other. 1
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, and that is Iconoclasm.
The Iconoclast resembles the modern Western champion of cubist
painting or syncopated music in his repudiation of a traditional
form of Art, but he is peculiar in confining his hostile attentions
to Art in association with Religion, and in being moved to this
hostility by motives that are not aesthetic but are 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 common under-
lying principle has been translated into practice by different Icono-
clastic schools. The most celebrated school is the 'totalitarian* one
that is represented by Judaism and, in imitation of Judaism, by
Islam.
'Thou shalt not make unto thee any 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. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to
them nor serve them ; for I the Lord thy god am a jealous god.' 2
This ban upon all visual art without exception is the logical form
of Iconoclasm for a religion which claims to be coextensive with
life itself and which therefore refuses to recognize any distinction
between one sphere of life which is religious and another which is
secular. On the other hand the Iconoclastic movements which
have arisen within the bosom of the Christian Church have accom-
modated themselves to a distinction which Christianity, in con-
i See IV. C (ii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 57 and 54-5, above. 2 Exod. xx. 4-5-
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 117
trast to both Judaism and Islam, has always accepted from the
earliest date to which we can trace back the Christian Weltan-
schauung. Though the eighth-century outbreak of Iconoclasm in
Orthodox Christendom and the sixteenth-century outbreak in
Western Christendom may have been respectively inspired, at any
rate in part, by the examples of Islam in the one case and of Juda-
ism in the other, they did not either of them follow the Judaico-
Islamic school in going the length of banning the visual arts in
toto. They did not carry their offensive into the secular field; and
even in the strictly religious field, to which both the Western
and the Orthodox Christian Iconoclasts confined their attack, the
latter eventually acquiesced in a compromise with their Iconodule
adversaries which might seem to have given the 'image-worship-
pers' the best of the bargain. In return for the concession that
all three-dimensional representations of persons who were objects
of Christian adoration should thenceforth be banned by a tacit
common consent the Orthodox Christian Iconoclasts conceded,
for their part, that two-dimensional representations should be
countenanced even in the religious sphere; 1 and this arbitrary and
irrational ecclesiastical distinction between sculpture and painting 2
was justified of its political fruits, since it did bring a permanent
truce to the controversy over images in the Orthodox Church.
In Iconoclasm the spirit of Futurism in the religious field has
expressed itself symbolically in a physical act of destruction which
is comparable to the burning of books and the banning of scripts
in the secular sphere; but here too the same spirit also can be, and
has been, at work without any visible advertisement of its activity;
and the Iconoclastic movements which we have just been passing
in review are manifestations of a Futurism in the religious field
which extends beyond Iconoclasm over a vastly wider range of re-
ligious life. In our surveys of the internal and external proletariats 3
that are generated by the schism in the body social of a broken-
down and disintegrating civilization we have observed that both
branches of the Proletariat have been apt to express in religious,
as well as in political and economic, forms their revolt against the
ascendancy of a dominant minority and their repudiation which
1 Officially the images were restored in' Orthodox Chri8tendom in A.D. 843 without
any limitations or reservations; but the perpetuation of the Iconoclasts' ban in respect of
three-dimensional representations was not the less effective for being unavowed (see
Bury, J. B.: A History of the East Roman Empire, A.D. 802-867 (London 1912, Mac-
millan ) > Pp. 152-3).
* Presumably the distinction was based on the qualification of the term 'image by the
epithet 'graven' in the Second Commandment. Yet the commandment goes on (in the
passage quoted above) to forbid the use of visual art in general, sans phrase, and it has
never occurred either to the Jews or to the Muslims to draw the distinction which is
the basis of the present practice of the Orthodox Christian Church*
3 See V, C (i) (c) 2 and 3, passim, in vol. v, above.
n8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
is partly the cause of the revolt, and partly its consequence of
that dominant minority's cultural heritage. We have traced the
origins of the 'higher religions' (in so far as their appearance on
the scene of mundane history may be explicable in sociological
terms) to the reactions of internal proletariats ; and we have likewise
found that external proletariats have tended to assert their social
individuality on the religious plane either by appropriating to them-
selves some peculiar version, or perversion, of a 'higher religion*
or alternatively by creating a barbarian pantheon of their own in
the likeness of a war-lord's war-band. The spirit in which these
proletarian-born religions are embraced by their human foster-
parents as distinct from the sometimes utterly different spirit
which these religions reveal in themselves is manifestly an ex-
pression of Futurism in the sense which we have given to the word
in this Study; and, on this showing, Futurism in the religious field
extends over an enormous range which need not be re-explored
here, 1 since we have attempted to survey it already in bringing
the Proletariat on to our stage.
(y) The Self-Transcendence of Futurism.
Futurism is a way of life which leads those who seek to follow
it into a barren quest of a goal that is intrinsically unattainable.
Yet though the quest is barren and may be tragic it need not be
without value or importance; for it may guide the baffled seeker's
feet into a way of peace 2 along which he will perhaps allow himself
to be drawn now that he has stumbled upon it apparently by
chance, though he might not have been willing deliberately to
choose it in the first instance.
Futurism in its primitive nakedness is, as we have seen, 3 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 to 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
has shown itself, without need of trial, to be manifestly impracti-
cable, that the Soul will nerve itself to take the less natural line of
Futurism 4 as a last resort, and will attempt, in a recoil from some
1 It will suffice to recall our previous references to the forcible suppression of the
Hellenic paganism by the Christian Roman Emperors Gratian and Theodosius the
Great (see IV. C (iii) (b) 1 2, vol. iv, pp. 226-7, and V. C (i) (d) 8 (S), in the present volume,
p. 89, above).
* Luke i. 79 : 3 In V. C (i) (d) 9 (a), pp. 97-101, above.
* Futurism is not only less natural than Archaism psychologically: it is also socio-
logically more difficult than Archaism to embark upon (though not more difficult to
carry through to success, considering that Archaism and Futurism are both intrinsically
incapable of succeeding). The reason why Futurism is more difficult than Archaism to
launch is to be found in the fact (which we have noticed in V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p, 39 8
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 119
grievously shattered hope, to leap out of a blank and dreary
Present, not up-stream into a Past which is at any rate familiar,
even if it be now beyond recapture, but down-stream into a Future
that is conceived of as a state in which the shattered hope can
be repaired and resumed and realized.
The nature of this pure and by the same token purely mun-
dane Futurism can best be illustrated by citing some of the
classic historical examples of it.
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 a 'labour-force' for plantations and cattle-ranches in areas
that had been devastated in the Hannibalic War. 1 For these
expatriated slaves, whose need for a way of escape out of the
Present was extreme, an archaistic recoil into the Past was out of
the question. They could not dream of finding their way back to
Syria; and, even if the physical feat of repatriation had been prac-
ticable, they could hardly feel homesick for an alien Seleucid
regime or for the Seleucids' equally alien Achaemenian or Neo-
Babylonian or Assyrian predecessors. The pre- Assyrian cosmos
of Syriac city-states in which their ancestors had once been truly
at home was now buried deep in oblivion. These Syriac slaves
who had been conscripted into the ranks of a Hellenic proletariat
in a new world overseas could therefore not look back; they could
only look forward; and so, when their oppression became intoler-
able and they were goaded into physical revolt, the objective which
they set before their eyes, in order to give themselves heart in their
almost desperate enterprise, was to bring to pass an entirely new
thing. They made it their aim to establish a kind of inverted
Roman Commonwealth in which the existing order of Hellenic
Society was to be turned upside down by an exchange of roles
between the present slaves and their present masters. The project
was audacious, but in the circumstances it was not fantastic. In
a universe in which it had been possible for the insurgent slaves
themselves to suffer the extreme change of fortune which they had
already experienced, what reason was there to suppose that the
top-dog of to-day was immune from the possibility of meeting the
same fate to-morrow, or that the bottom-dog of to-day, for his
above) that, while Archaism makes its first appearance in the ranks of the Dominant
Minority, Futurism first arises in the Proletariat. This makes the launching of an
archaistic enterprise relatively easy and that of a futuristic enterprise relatively difficult,
because, in any disintegrating society, the Dominant Minority is ex hypothec in the
Oarl/^ltt nn ~1 *,U^ Tl 1 -j.-'-^ T _ _ .. - jT . 1 J.1 1 __ A _
saddle and the Proletariat ex hypothesi under the harrow.
' See II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 213-16; III. C (i) (6), vol. iii, pp.
(c) a, vol. v, pp. 66 and 69-70, above.
168-71; and V. C(i)
120 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
part, was debarred from the possibility of living to see his own
fortune's wheel come round again full circle?
In an earlier chapter of Syriac history the Jews had reacted in
a similar way to the destruction of the sovereign independent
Kingdom of Judah. 1 After they had been swallowed up in the
Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenian Empires and been scattered
abroad among the Gentiles they could not hope with any convic-
tion for an archaistic return to the Pre-Exilic dispensation in which
Judah had lived a life of parochial isolation. A hope that was to
be convincing must not be conceived in terms of a social environ-
ment which had disappeared beyond recall; and, since they could
not live without some lively hope of extricating themselves from
a present in which they were unwilling to acquiesce, the Post-
Exilic Jews were driven into looking forward to the future estab-
lishment of a Davidic kingdom in a shape which had no precedent
in Judah' s political past. The Jews now dreamt of the epiphany
of a scion of David's House who would restore David's kingdom
in the only fashion that was now conceivable in a world which had
been first shattered and then refashioned by the sweeping strokes
of a Sargon and a Nebuchadnezzar and a Cyrus. If the New
David was effectively to reunite all Jewry under his rule and
what but this was his mission? in an age in which the living
generation of Jews was scattered over the face of the Earth, then
he must gird himself to acquire a dominion to which his forebears
had never aspired in the highest flights of their ambition. He must
wrest the sceptre of the world-empire from the hands of its present
holder and must make Jerusalem become to-morrow what Susa was
to-day and what Babylon had been yesterday. In order to reunite the
Jews he must now reign as King of Kings over Jews and Gentiles
alike. And why, after all, should the coming champion of Jewry not
attain this pinnacle of power and glory ? In a world in which a Cyrus
or Seleucus could rise and a Cambyses or Antiochus the Great could
fall with the speed of the lightning when it flickers between the
Earth and the Firmament, 2 why should not a Zerubbabel have as
good a chance of world dominion as a Darius, or a Judas Macca-
baeus as an Antiochus Epiphanes, or a Bar Kokaba as a Hadrian ? 3
A similar dream once captivated the imaginations of 'the Old
Believers' in the Russian province of Orthodox Christendom. In
the eyes of these Raskolniks the Tsar Peter's version of Orthodoxy
was no Orthodoxy at all ; and yet at the same time it was impossible
1 The Jewish reaction has been discussed in IV. C (iii) (6) 12, vol. iv, pp. 224. 5 ;
V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 68-9; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), Annex, vol. v. pp. 657-0, above,
2 Luke x. 1 8.
3 . F/. ^ e belief ^ ^ omnipotence of Chance which is apt to prevail in times 6f
social disintegration and this with equal potency, whether the belief be unconscious
or unavowed or explicit see V. C (i) (d) 4, vol. v, pp. 4x3-19, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 121
to imagine the old ecclesiastical order triumphantly reasserting
itself in the teeth of a secular government that was now omnipo-
tent as well as Satanic. The Raskolniki were therefore driven to
hope for something which had no precedent, and that was for the
epiphany of a Tsar-Messiah who would be able as well as willing
to undo the Tsar-Antichrist J s sacrilegious work and restore the
Orthodox Faith in its pristine purity because he would combine
absolute mundane power with perfect piety. The Raskolniki
hugged this wild hope, because their only alternative was the bleak
prospect of waiting grimly for the Last Judgement. 1
The significant common feature of these historic exhibitions of
naked Futurism is that the hopes in which the futurists have sought
refuge and relief have all been set upon a purely matter-of-fact
fulfilment in the ordinary and familiar mundane way; and this
feature is conspicuous in the Futurism of the Jews about which
we happen to be unusually well informed because it has left behind
it a documentary record of its history.
After the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchad-
nezzar in 586 B.C. the Jews again and again put their treasure in
the hope of establishing a new Jewish state on the same purely
mundane plane whenever the play of oecumenical politics gave
them even the slightest encouragement for embarking on a fresh
attempt to translate their dream into reality. 2 The brief bout of
anarchy through which the Achaemenian Empire passed between
the death of Cambyses and the triumph of Darius the Gi;eat saw
Zerubbabel's attempt (circa 522 B.C.) to make Jerusalem the capital
of a new Davidic Kingdom. 3 In a later chapter of history the
longer interregnum in the rule of the Hellenic dominant minority
over its subject territories on Syriac ground west of Euphrates
an interregnum which was merely the incidental and temporary
by-product of a family quarrel between the Seleucid and the Roman
representatives of the domineering alien power* was mistaken by
1 See Wallace, D. Mackenzie: Russia (London 1877, Cassell, a vols.), vol. ii, chap, xx,
pp. 12-13; BrUckner, A.: Peter der Grosse (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 535-8; Mettig, C.:
uie. Europ&sierung Russlands im 18, Jdhrhundert (Gotha 1913, Perthes), pp. 161-72.
3 This dream was dreamed, in the years immediately after the Exile, by the author of
the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Meyer, E.: Geschichtc des Altertums, vol. iii (Stuttgart
1901, Cotta), pp. 180-1); and the first attempt to translate it,into reality was made by
the first party of Jewish exiles in Babylonia who availed themselves of Cyrus's permission
to them to return to Judaea. 'There was as yet no thought of founding a church; the
intention was to restore the political community, or at any rate a fraction of it, a rem-
nant", which was to provide a nucleus for the Messianic Empire that was shortly to be
expected' (ibid., p. 192).
3 For Zerubbabel's enterprise and its failure see ibid., vol, iii (Stuttgart 1901, CpttaK
pp. 194-6; eundem: Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine, 2nded. (Leipzig 1912, Hinncns),
pp. 311-13, above.
122 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the Jews for a triumph of the arms of the Maccabees; 1 and a
majority of the Palestinian Jewish community 2 were so heedlessly
carried away by this mirage of mundane success that they were
willing as 'Deutero-Isaiah* had been willing four hundred yeara
earlier 3 to throw overboard the now long-consecrated tradition
that the founder of a new Jewish state must be a son of David,
and to cry 'Hosanna' to a son of Hasmon instead, just because at
the moment the Maccabee might appear to have accomplished
what should have been a Davidic Messiah's appointed mundane
task. 4 Nor were the Jews cured of their crudely futuristic hope
of a new mundane Jewish commonwealth when in due course
the Hellenic political ascendancy, from which Palestine had tem-
porarily been released when the Romans had hamstrung the
Seleucid Monarchy, 5 was reimposed in the more formidable shape
of a dominion exercised in partibus Syriacis by Rome herself.
It was, of course, inevitable that Rome should eventually fill a
vacuum which Rome herself had created. However unwillingly,
she was bound to step into her Seleucid victims* shoes; and, con-
sidering that the Jews had been no match for their old Seleucid
masters until the Romans had deliberately tilted the scales in the
Jewish insurgents' favour, it was evident that a Jewish community
whose political fortunes Rome had made by one touch of her little
finger would find their new Roman masters irresistible when once
Pompey had decided to remove the" Hasmonaeun pawn from the
Palestinian square of Rome's oecumenical chess-board. If the
i Tacitus's biting censure of this Jewish error of political judgement has been quoted
already in V. C (i) (d) I, vol. v, p. 390, footnote 3, above. In a different context the un-
happy .outcome of the Maccabees' divagation into politics has been discussed in. "V. C (i)
(d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 657-9, above. ,
* It was to the credit of the Pharisees that they did not let themselves drift with the
tide of popular feeling, but parted company with the Maccabees just when, and just
because, the Maccabees put their treasure in the establishment of an earthly kingdom.
3 'Deutero-Isaiah* the sixth-century writer of a politico-religious work which has
been appended to the genuine text of the real Isaiah and now figures there as chaps, xl
Iv hails Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenian Empire, as the Lord's Anointed
(Isa. xlv. i), in the wild hope that the Persian conqueror may be moved to bestow his
world-empire upon the Jewsl
* For the new era which Simon Maccabaeus inaugurated in 142 B.C. to commemorate
the establishment of his new Jewish state, see V. C (i) (d) 9 (8), Annex, in the present
volume, p. 344, footnote 5, below. So far from being able to claim descent from David,
the Hasmonaeans were not even members of the Tribe of Judah. As priests they traced
their origin back, not to Judah, but to Levi. Davidic Messianism came into its own. again
after the 'mediatization* of the Hasmonaean principality by Pompey in 63 B.C. (Lagrange,
M.-J.: Le Messianisme chez lesjtdjs (Paris 1909, Gabalda), p. 10).
5 In the year 162 B.C. the Seleucids* stud of war-elephants at Apamea was literally
hamstrung, in execution of instructions from the Senate at Rome, by the orders of
Roman commissioners who were visiting the military head-quarters of the Seleticid Em-
pire on a tour of precautionary inspection (see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 215, footnote 3,
above). This barbarity cost the chairman of the commissioners, Gnaeus Octavius, his
life, since it was one of the outrages that moved Leptines to assassinate him (for the ham-
stringing of the elephants see Appian: Studies in Roman History, 'Rome and Syria',
chap. 46; for the assassination of Octavius see the present Study, V. C (ii) C)j in the
present volume, p. 219, footnote i, below).
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 123
Jews had been unable to shake off by their own unaided efforts
the yoke of a Seleucid Monarchy which had been only one, and
that by no means the strongest one, of five contemporary Great
Powers in the Hellenic arena, how could the Jews hope to measure
themselves against a Rome who in the meantime had swept away
not only the Seleucid Monarchy but every other rival Power in
the Hellenic World and had thereby transformed her own sole
surviving empire into a state that was universal and omnipotent?
The answer to these questions was as clear as day to the Idumaean
dictator Herod. He never forgot that he was ruler of Palestine
solely by the grace of Rome and of Augustus ; and so long as he
reigned over the Palestinian Jews he contrived to save them from
the nemesis of their own folly. 1 Yet, instead of being grateful to
Herod for teaching them so salutary a political lesson, his Jewish
subjects would not forgive him for being right; 2 and as soon as his
masterly and masterful hand was removed they took the bit
between their teeth and bolted down their futuristic path till they
crashed into the inevitable catastrophe. 3 Nor, even then, did a
single physical demonstration, of Rome's omnipotence suffice. The
experience of A.D. 66-70 was not enough to cure the Jews of
Futurism. The Diaspork had to repeat the appalling experiment
in A.D. 115-17, and the Palestinian Jewry to make yet another
trial of it in A.D. 132-5,4 before the hope of a new mundane Jewish
commonwealth was finally extinguished. 5 Bar Kokaba in A.D.
132-5 was pursuing the same end by the same means as Zerubbabel
about the year 522 B.C. 6 It had taken the Jews more than six and
a half centuries to learn by an agonizing process of trial and error
that Futurism simply would not work. 7
If this were the whole Jewish story it would not be an interesting
1 So long as Herod the Great was on the throne the Messianic movement in Jewry
was tentative and undecided (Lagrange, op. cit., p. 12).
2 Messianism began to raise its head after Herod had turned against Religion in
25 B.C. The first Messianic conspiracy in which the wife of Herod's brother Pheroras
played a leading part was hatched circa 7-6 B.C. (ibid., pp. 13 and 16).
s The first serious Messianic crisis was precipitated by Herod the Great's death in
4 B.C. Messianic insurrections became frequent after the death of Herod Agrippa I in
A.D. 44 (ibid., pp. 17 and 21-2).
4 For these Jewish insurrections against the Roman Imperial Government see the
authorities cited in V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 68, footnote 3, above.
5 The word 'finally* holds good, notwithstanding the recent rise of Zionism; for
Zionism is a mimesis of the contemporary Nationalism of the Western World and is not
a revival of the Jewish Futurism which was extinguished at last in the blood of the
followers of Bar Kokaba.
* Bar Kokaba's coinage seems to show that he set up a regular Jewish state (see
ibid.,pp. 317-18).
' The impracticability of Futurism is reflected in the spirit of the Apocalyptic genre -
of literature in which it found expression. 'C'est un recul tres caracte"ris<5 du sentiment
religieux tel qu'on le trouve dans les grands prophfetes et les psalmistes recul mal dissi-
mu!6 par un e*lan disproportion^ vers 1'inaccessible et 1'insondable. . . . L apocalypse,
tourne'e toute entiere vers Tavernr, se pre"occupe surtout des revolutions attendees. . . .
Les mattres, moins attentifs aux circonstances de Intervention divine, sont domines par
les idSes absolues qui doivent Stre la regie de la vie/ Ibid., pp. 135 and 147.
124 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
one, for it would be nothing but a monotonously repetitive record
of the inevitable and well-deserved misfortunes of a stiff-necked
people that was its own worst enemy. But this obstinate pursuit
of Futurism is, of course, only half the story and the less impor-
tant half at that. The whole story is that, while some Jewish souls
went on clinging to a mundane hope in the teeth of a succession
of disillusionments, other Jewish souls and even some of the
same souls in a different mood or through a different spiritual
faculty were gradually taught by che repeated failure of this
earthly quest 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 one
negative but the other positive were being unfolded simultane-
ously. The expected founder of the new mundane Jewish com-
monwealth was conceived of, appropriately enough, as a king of
human flesh and blood who would not miraculously live for ever
but would prosaically found a hereditary dynasty. 1 Yet the title
under which this future Jewish empire-builder was predicted
and under which every successive pretender to the role was
acclaimed, from Zerubbabel through Simon Maccabaeus down to
Simon bar Kokaba 2 was not melek, which in the Hebrew vocabu-
lary was the simple word for 'king' with no special connotations :
the word that became current and consecrated in this special
futurist sense was mfshiha* meaning 'the Anointed', and this was
an abbreviation for '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
until, in the end, it dominated the whole horizon.
To call a god in aid is not, of course, in itself an unusual pro-
cedure. It is probably as old a practice as Religion itself for a
person or people that is embarking on some formidable enterprise
to invoke the protection of their traditional tutelary divinity; and
it would have been strange if the Syrian slaves had not called upon
the name of the Dea Syra, Atargatis,* when they rose in revolt
against their Greek masters and Roman rulers in Sicily, or if the
pp! ?&$** P0int SCe GaU> A ' V n: BaoLXia ToG * (Heidelberg 1926, Winter),
2 For the recognition of Simon (or Symeon) bar Kokaba as the Messiah by Rabbi
Aqioa see ibid., p. 395, and Lagrange, op. cit., p. 316.
1tLnr C ' g *j V0n aU ' ^' &> P/ I7 3 footnote i, the title which in Greek is trans-
Hebrc^^l^ transliterated Mcooias is the Aramaic equivalent m?shi?}a of an original
n \ Se * V ^ C *^ (c) I' V L v ' P W I3 footn te 5, and V. C (i) (J) 7, in the present voluzne,
below. 5> ' "^ V * (H) (a) ' Amex "' m the present Volume, p. 383,
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 125
Jews had not called upon the name of Yahweh when they ven-
tured to measure their strength against the might of a Darius or
an Antiochus or a Nero or a Trajan or a Hadrian. The new depar-
ture lay not in the claim expressed in the title 'Messiah' that
the people's human champion had the sanction of a god behind
him; 1 what was new, and also momentous, was the conception of
the patron divinity'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 than
this that he was pictured as the divine protector of 'the Lord's
Anointed'.
This widening of the conception of the protecting divinity was
indeed imperatively demanded by the mundane situation of the
day; for the Jewish futurists post 586 B.C. were, after all, engaged
upon no ordinary political enterprise. They had set their hands
to a task which was, humanly speaking, an impossible one ; for,
when they had failed to preserve their independence, how could
they rationally hope to reconquer it and, what is more, to sup-
plant their own conquerors in the lordship of the World by the
strength of their own right arm ? To succeed in this tremendous
undertaking they must have behind them a god who was not only
competent to see fair play but was also capable of redressing a
balance that, on any human reckoning, was hopelessly inclined
against this god's terrestrial proteges. If the proteges were en-
gaged on a forlorn hope, then the protector must be nothing less
than omnipotent and it would follow from this that he must also
be actively and whole-heartedly righteous ; for only an all-powerful
godhead who cared for righteousness above everything else would
be both able and willing to exert himself with effect on behalf of
a people whose cause was just but whose worldly position was
insignificant.
Tor he that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is his
name. . . .
'He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud
in the imagination of their hearts.
'He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of
low degree.' 2
This, and nothing less than this, must be the power and the
performance of the divinity who stood behind the devoted human
leader of a futurist forlorn hope; and it was not only the Jewish
1 For a survey of other instances in which a mundane power that has come to feel
itself unequal to its task has called a god in aid and has placed itself under this divine
patron's aegis, see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp, 649-5?, above.
2 Luke i. 49 and 5 12.
iz6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
futurists that were forcibly led by their experience in the realm of
politics to this conclusion in the realm of theology. The Yahweh
who revealed himself behind the Jewish Messiah had his counter-
parts in the Ahuramazda who was the god behind the Zoroastrian
Saosyant (Saviour) 1 and in the Helios who was the god of Aris-
tonicus's Heliopolitae. 2 In the same hard school of Futurism three
separate contingents of proletarians made each independently,
under as many different names and aspects 3 the same sublime
discovery of the One True God. 4
When once this discovery has been made, a drama which, up to
this point, has been played on a terrestrial stage by human actors
with mundane aims acquires a new protagonist and at the same
time is transposed into a higher spiritual dimension. The human
champion who has been the hero hitherto in virtue of being cast
for the part of leading his brethren out of a mundane Wilderness
into a mundane Promised Land now sinks to a subordinate role,
while the divinity who has' originally been called in aid merely in
order to give supernatural power to the human elbow of 'the
Lord's Anointed* now comes to dominate the scene. God comes
to be recognized as the sole but sufficient saviour of a people that
has learnt by bitter experience that its human champion is after all
impotent, under any auspices, to save it in its dire extremity. The
human champion himself cannot be made equal to what has now
proved to be a superhuman task by the expedient of consecrating
him with a divine unction. A human Messiah is not enough. God
himself must condescend to play the part, which He alone can
effectively play, of serving His people as their saviour and their
king. 5
1 See V. C (i) (rf) n, p. 163, footnote i, below.
a For the Heliopolitae see IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (0), vol. iv, p. 507; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v,
pp. 469-70 and 179-82; V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 384; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (5), Annex, vol. v,
p. 692, footnote 2, above, and V. C (i) (d) n, Annex I, in the present volume, p, 351,
below.
3 For the contrast between the two different aspects of the One True God which were
apprehended respectively in the Jewish conception of Yahweh and in the Zoroastrian
conception of Ahuramazda see V. C (i) (d) 7, pp. 43-4, above.
* This discovery has already been dealt with as an aspect of the sense of unity in
V. C (i) (d) 7, pp. 37-49, above. In other contexts (e.g. in V. C (i) (c) 2, vol.'v, p. 82,
footnote 4, and in V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), Annex, vol. v, pp, 649-57, above) it is pointed out
that the rulers of universal states are apt (under pressure of the same political necessity
that drives the leaders of proletarian futurist fyneutes) to fall back upon the sanction of "a
tutelary deity to make good the failure of their own personal prestige.
s The emergence of the conception of Yahweh as king in the course of the develop-
ment of the religion of Post-Exilic Jewry is traced in detail by Freiherr A. von Gall in
Ba<nAia rov Qeov (Heidelberg 1926, Winter). 'The hope of a Messiah i.e. the hope
for the reappearance of a king of David's line can, of course, be only of purely Jewish
Post-Exilic origin. The impulse from which this hope started was given by the short-
lived kingdom of Zerubbabel. But as far as the majority of the Jews were concerned
it seems so far as we can judge from the surviving literature that the national form
of Messianic hope was still rejected even then. For pious Jews in the mass, Yahweh was
and remained the king of the expected new kingdom. This yearning for the kingship of
Yahweh himself was stronger than the yearning for the kingship of Yahweh's Anointed*
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 127
By this time any modern Western psycho-analyst who is reading
these lines and knows his duty will be raising his eyebrows. 'What
you have proclaimed as a sublime spiritual discovery turns out,'
he will interject, 'now that you have explained what you mean, 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 substi-
tutes. Their first conscript is a purely human champion; then,
when he cannot avail, they exchange him for a human champion
whose humanity is reinforced by an imaginary divine backing;
and finally, when even "the Lord's Anointed" breaks down, the
fools in desperation signal S.O.S. to a wholly fictitious divine being
whose alleged omnipotence is expected to make up for the proven
impotence of his human inventors. For the psychological prac-
titioner this rake's progress in escapism is as familiar a story as it
is a melancholy one.'
In taking account of this criticism we shall readily agree with
the psycho-analyst's strictures upon the childishness of calling on
a supernatural power to perform a mundane task which we have
first wilfully chosen for ourselves and have then discovered to be
beyond our own strength. We shall also find, on consideration,
that many of the futurists whom we have had under observation
have in fact fallen into this spiritual error and have duly paid the
material penalty which our psychological practitioner would no
doubt have predicted. In the Jewish case in point there were
certain schools of Jewish futurists who did persuade themselves
that Yahweh would take upon himself his worshippers' self-
appointed mundane tasks and would miraculously make up for
(ibid., p. 250). In von Gall's belief the title of king which was already applied to
Yahweh before the destruction of the mundane kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C. was
originally a mere cult title which he bore (in accordance with a Canaanite practice tnat
was pre-Israelite and non-Israelite) in his capacity of city-god of the ct-deuant J ebusite
city of Zion (ibid., pp. 41-2). According to von Gall it was this originally perhaps no
more than formal title that suggested the later idea of conceiving of Yahweh as king in
a more significant sense. Von Gall follows the growth of the idea in 'g 6 *^' 1 *
[i.e, Isa. xl-lv] (pp. 178-88) and in the Books of the Law (pp. 199-208). He seeks to
demonstrate that in the Achaemenian Age this hitherto purely native ^ h ^P^^f
Yahweh's kingship came to be informed and enriched by the
rmnas rrom tne iaea 01 a parocmai tuteiary uivmiiy j. * * ,.---. {*T r~_M J
into that of a universal and omnipotent godhead who was king of the whole World and
of all Mankind, and who would one day exercise from his ^ m ^f^
rogative of oecumenical dominion that was already his by right. This dir
Yahweh from Zion was to be inaugurated by a general judgement
well as Jews would be summoned to present themselves m Zion before the
god-king-judge*s judgement-seat (ibid., pp. 235-6),
128 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
their natural disappointments; and these Jewish futurists did, as
we have seen, all come to a bad end. There was the melodramatic
suicide of the Zealots who faced hopeless military odds 1 in the
fanatical faith that the Lord of Hosts would be a host in himself
on the side of his self-constituted human instruments; and there
has been the prosaic self-stultification of the Quietists who have
argued from the same erroneous premisses 2 to the exactly opposite
but in the end not less hopeless practice of abstaining from
taking any action of their own in a mundane cause which they have
decided to register as God's affair. 3 At the same time, however,
we shall remember that the fanaticism of the Zealots and the
Quietism of the Agudath Israel are not the only responses to the
challenge from the Hellenic dominant minority that were made by
the Jewish contingent of the Hellenic internal proletariat. There
was the response of the school of the Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai 4
and there was the response of the Christian Church ;s and, while
these two other responses both resemble Quietism in the negative
feature of being non- violent, they differ from Quietism and Zealot-
ism alike in the far more important positive point that they have
ceased to set their heart upon the old mundane purpose of Futur-
ism and have put their treasure, instead, in a purpose which is not
Man's but God's and which therefore can only be pursued in a
spiritual field of supra-mundane dimensions.
This point is of capital importance because it disposes, in these
cases, of the criticism which our psycho-analyst can direct against
both the Zealots and the Quietists with such deadly effect. To
call in God cannot be denounced as an infantile attempt to escape
from the hard necessity of facing the defeat of a human endeavour
if, in the act of invocation, the human actor simultaneously with-
draws his libido from his previous mundane aim. And conversely,
if the act of invocation does produce so great and so good a spiri-
tual 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.
At any rate, the onus of proof may now reasonably be laid upon
1 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 68, above.
2 The Quietists hold in common with the Zealots the erroneous idea that God will
have made it His own business to fulfil a purpose which His worshippers have chosen for
themselves and which is therefore intrinsically mundane. On the other hand they
charge the Zealots with impiety (and in this they are surely right) for supposing that, for
the accomplishment of a purpose which ex hypothesi God has indeed made His own to the
best of His worshippers* belief, God can have any need of help from human volunteers .
If we accept, for the sake of the argument, the premiss from which both the Quietists
and the Zealots start, we must find in the Quietists 1 favour.
3 For this attitud
from Zionism, see "
88, above.
See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 72-4, above.
3 For this attitude, which is illustrated by the present aloofness of the Agudath Israel
nrom Zionism, see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p, 76, and V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex III, vol. v,
p. 588, above. 4 See V. d(i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 75-6, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 129
the sceptic; and, pending his reply, we may allow ourselves to hold
that our description of this spiritual reorientation as a discovery
of the One True God was after all correct. A human make-believe
about the future of This World has given place to a divine revela-
tion of the existence of an Other World. Through the disappoint-
ment of a mundane hope we have been admitted to an apocalypse
or discovery of a reality which has been there all the time behind
the scenes of the narrow man-made stage that has hitherto set the
limits of our field of vision and of action. 1 The veil of the Temple
has been rent in twain.
It remains for us to take note of some of the principal stages in
the accomplishment of this immense feat of spiritual reorientation.
The social circumstances in which Man gains his first inkling
that God's purpose is other than, and better than, Man's own, are
vividly depicted in the following analysis of the religious experi-
ence of the peoples of the Syriac and Babylonic worlds under the
Achaemenian regime:
'The complete state of blessedness, on which human hopes are set,
is [evidently] not granted by the Divinity to his worshippers in this
present time ; if it were, the faithful would be bound to triumph over
all their adversaries and to see the supremacy of their god acknowledged
by all other nations. This means that the full power of the Divinity
is not destined to manifest itself until some future date; at the present
moment the Divinity is still engaged in a struggle. The process of shap-
ing the World is not yet at an end ; the ideal state of things has not yet
been attained ; the adversaries have not yet been annihilated. It is quite
natural that such eschatological hopes should assume the most lively
shape among nations, and in religions, which are being subjected to
some particularly severe pressure such hopes were developed by the
Prophets of Judah from as early a date as Isaiah's. But they were not
alone in this; for Zarathustra's teaching likewise conceives of life as a
struggle between two great powers a struggle which is to close with
the victory of Ahuramazda. 2 The struggle is pictured on the lines of
the Gods' great struggles at the creation of the World a creation that
has not reached its complete conclusion and so Eschatology becomes
a repetition and transformation of the creation-myths. 3 This is the
* The quest that originally led us into this Study was the hope of seeing through the
'shimmer of relativity in the foreground of historical thought (Part LA, vol. i, p. 10,
above). We have already observed that the ordeal of social disintegration may awaken
a sense of unity (V. C (i) (d) 7, in the present volume, pp. i-49 above). And we nave
noted how the two successive blows of the Crucifixion and the Ascension evoked the
Acts of the Apostles (II. D (iv), vol. ii, pp. 111-12, above). ,,,,,
* According to the same scholar (Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anf tinge des Chrtstentums,
vol. ii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 113), Zoroastrian influences played their
part in the translation of the Jewish conception of the Last Judgement from political
^Co^pare^n Gdl^'op". cit., p. 236: 'The Kingdom of God, which manifests itself
at the end of all things, also existed at the beginning of all things (citing Deut. xxxm.
5, and Ps. bcxiv. 12). Compare, further, Spengler, O.: Der Untergang des Abendlande^
vol. t (Munich 1920, Beck), p. 614, apropos of the Weltanschauung of the Western
130 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
point in which the Babylonia Mythology has exercised its greatest
influence. It has become the basis of a general conception which has
found its way into religions of the most diverse kinds.' 1
The essence of this conception is that a mundane scene which
was once looked upon as a stage for human actors (either with or
without superhuman backers) is now regarded as a field for the
progressive realization of the Kingdom of God. At first, however,
this new idea of the transfiguration of one world by the spiritual
irruption of another world of a higher spiritual dimension largely
clothes itself, as is to be expected, in imagery that is derived from
the old futurist idea of a mundane kingdom which is distinguished
from the present state of mundane affairs simply by its position in
the Time-stream and by its standard of mundane well-being, and
not by any intrinsic difference of spiritual quality. Against this
mental background 'Deutero-Isaiah' draws the lineaments of a
Kingdom of God* which transcends, while including, the idea of
a mundane kingdom, 3 but transcends it merely in the point that
both Man and Nature are depicted as experiencing a supernatural
and miraculous beatification, and not in the deeper sense of ex-
ceeding the familiar mundane dimensions of spiritual experience.
'Deutero-IsaiahV Kingdom of God is really nothing but a new
Earthly Paradise a Garden of Eden adapted to the requirements
of a human society which is still mundane though it is no longer
primitive and a distinct advance in spiritual insight is achieved
when this new Earthly Paradise comes to be thought of as only a
transitory state* which may last, perhaps, for a Millennium but
which is destined, at the end of its allotted term, to pass away with
the passing of This World itself.
This World must pass in order to give place to an Other "World
beyond it; and it is in that Other World that the true Kingdom
of God is now seen to lie; for the king who is to reign during the
P ^ e SUnSet f^ Scientific Age, at the stage when Scepticism is
momin g landscape stands out once more with
The mundane kingdom which is included in 'Deutero-IsaiahV Kingdom of God is
- o o
cha ? te V' *? 2 > f 0tnote 3, above) as J Achaemenian
Zlon instead of Susa for K* capital and the Jews
tfcorS-V wT ? * ^T^- iwi .. iuo u"g race, because the God of Israel has revealed to him
*? w i??T (and ! by ^P^on. not Ahuramazda) who has enabled Cyrus to conquer
^vJi S A '* I ^ thw . da y-i lre Mn < Dcutcio-l8aiah > is exposing himself , with
a vengeance, to the censure of our ^mn.ry psycho-analyst. He is conscripting Yahweh
i arms to the benefit of the Jews in order that
. UL^ ^ability to preserve the independence of their
i by being invested with the lordship of a universal state I
mdane kingdom was so deep that the Jewish prophet was
f +v,~ I ~T ^-"rt as ^ )rd 8 Pointed* (Isa. xlv. i) if that woiild secure
1 tnese Jewish hopes.
See von Gall, op. cit., index, s.v. Ztoischenreich.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 131
Millennium on a glorified Earth is not yet God himself, but is
merely a Messiah who is God's terrestrial deputy. The Lord's
Anointed* is, indeed, now portrayed as a supernatural figure, and
is.no longer thought of as an historical human potentate a Cyrus
or a Zerubbabel or a Simon Maccabaeus or a Simon bar Kokaba
who is singular only in having God's authority behind him.
This supernatural Messiah is all of a piece with a world that has
been reconverted into an Earthly Paradise for the last Millennium
of its existence. But it is manifest that the construction of a mira-
culous Millennium in This World, pending the replacement of
This World by another, is an untenable attempt at a compromise
between two ideas which are not only quite distinct but are also
in the last resort mutually incompatible. The first of these ideas
is the hope of a mundane kingdom which in no way differs from
the present in its spiritual quality and is merely projected into the
future in order to give scope for make-believe. The second idea
is that of a Kingdom of God which is not in Time at all either
present, future, or past and which differs from all temporal
mundane states in the radical way of being in a different spiritual
dimension, but which, just by virtue of this difference of dimension,
is able to penetrate our mundane life and, in penetrating, to trans-
figure it. 1 For making the arduous spiritual ascent to the vision
of Transfiguration from the mirage of Futurism the eschatological
scheme of a Millennium may be a convenient mental ladder; but
when once the height has been scaled the ladder can be allowed
to fall away; and therewith the mundane Futurism which has
evoked a vision of the Other World in response to the challenge of
its own unescapable bankruptcy will at last have been completely
transcended.
*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 save through the channels opened by the
Pharisee. It was among the people bent down beneath that iron neces-
sity 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 which 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
1 Physical similes for spiritual truths are bound to be imperfect and axe not unlikely
to be misleading; but, in terms of our modern Western Physical Science, the spiritual
action of the Other World on This World might perhaps be likened to the play of
Radiation upon Matter or to the sweep of a comet's tail through a cluster of planets.
This simile of Radiation has been employed already in V. C (i) (<*) i, vol. v, pp. 390-7,
above. For some alternative similes see V. C (i) (d) 1 1, in the present volume, pp. 1 57-
61, below.
1 32 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
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, wor-
shipped 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; the heavenly Son of Man and the earthly
Son of David, the Suffering Servant of the Hebrew Prophet and the
Slain God of the Greek Mystic, the Wisdom of the Hebrew sage and
the Logos of the Greek philosopher, all met in Him ; but He was more
than all.' 1
10. Detachment
Our inquiries into the nature and working of Futurism and
Archaism have now led us to the conclusion that neither of these
two ways of life is permanently viable and that the failure of both
of them is accounted for by the same fatal error. They are both
doomed to fail because both are attempts to perform the impossible
acrobatic feat of escaping from the Present without rising above
the spiritual plane of mundane life on Earth. 2 The difference
between them is a superficial difference of direction; and a flying
leap out of the Present which aims at alighting in another reach
of the Time-stream is bound to land disastrously on the rocks jiist
the same whether the leaping fish's unattainable goal happens to
lie up stream or down it. Archaism, as we have seen, defeats Itself
by veering round disconcertingly in mid air and recoiling like a
boomerang along a futurist course which runs exactly counter to
its aim, while Futurism transcends itself in the act of coming
disastrously to grief by rending the veil of mundane appearances
and bringing into view, beyond them, an Other World of a higher
spiritual dimension. The way of life in this Other World is thus
revealed to human souls on Earth through a recognition of the
bankruptcy of one of the two alternative ways of seeking a change
of life without leaving the mundane level; the mystery of Trans-
figuration is apprehended in a reaction against the fallacy of
Futurism. But the bankruptcy of Archaism which the archaist,
in his pursuit of his own fruitless quest, is equally bound to recog-
nize sooner or later may also bear fruit in a spiritual discovery.
The recognition of the truth that Archaism is not enough is a
challenge to which the baffled archaist must respond by taking
don 1904, Arnold), pp. 158 and 162.
PP. 9 <* in * present
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 133
some new spiritual departure, unless he is prepared to resign him-
self to an irretrievable spiritual defeat; and his line of least resis-
tance is to convert a flying leap that is heading for disaster into a
flight that will evade the problem of landing by taking permanent
leave of the ground. An experience of the impracticability of
Archaism inspires a philosophy of Detachment; and we shall do
well to examine this simpler way of rising above the mundane
level 1 a way which is the archaist's last resort when he finds
himself at bay before we venture to peer into the mystery of
Transfiguration.
The experience of life which leads to the conclusion that the
only way of life which solves the problem of life is to detach one-
self from life has been sketched with an elegant irony in the
following imaginary dialogue from the pen of a Hellenic man-of-
letters who lived in the Age of the Antonines without mistaking an
Indian Summer* 2 for a return of spring.
Charon: 'I will tell you, Hermes, what Mankind and human life
remind me of. You must, before now, have watched the bubbles rising
in the water under the play of a fountain the froth, I mean, that makes
the foam. Well, some of those bubbles are tiny, and these burst at once
and vanish, while there are others that last longer and attract their
neighbours till they swell to a portentous bulk only to burst without
fail sooner or later in their turn, as every bubble must. Such is human
life. The creatures are all inflated some to a greater and others to a
lesser degree and there are some whose inflation lasts as long as the
twinkling of an eye, while others cease to be at the moment of coining
into being; but all of them have to burst sooner or later.'
Hermes i 'Your simile is as apt as Homer's simile of the leaves.' 3
Charon: 'Yet, ephemeral though these human beings are, you see,
Hermes, how they exert themselves and compete with one another in
their struggles for office and honours and possessions though pne day
they will have to leave all that behind and come to our place with nothing
but one copper in their pockets. Now what do you think ? Here we are
on an exceeding high mountain. Shan't I shout to them at the top of
my voice and warn them to abstain from useless exertions and to live
their lives with Death constantly in mind? I will say to them: "You
silly fellows, why are you so keen on all that ? You had better stop put-
ting yourselves through it. You are not going to live for ever. None of
these earthly prizes is everlasting ; and nobody, at death, can carry away
any of them with him. One day, as sure as fate, the owner will be gone
as naked as he came and his house and estate and money will pass
for ever after to a constant succession of alien possessors." Supposing I
1 This philosophy of Withdrawal- without-Return has been touched upon already, by
anticipation, in III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 254-5, above.
For this diagnosis of the so-called 'Golden Age 1 of Hellenic history under the
regime of the Antonines see IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, pp. 5 8 ~ 6l > above.
3 Quoted in this Study in III. C (ii) (b), vol. iii, p. 257, above. AJ.T.
i 3 4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
were to shout this at them, or something like it, and could make myself
heard, don't you think they might stand to benefit enormously and might
also become vastly more sensible than they now appear to be?'
Hermes: *I am afraid, Charon, you are suffering under an amiable
delusion. I don't think you realize the condition to which they Iiave
been reduced by their ignorance and self-deception. Even with a gimlet
you couldn't now open their ears they have plugged them and plugged
them with wax (as Odysseus treated his companions for fear that they
might hear the Sirens singing). They wouldn't be able to hear you,
even if you screamed till you burst. In the world of men Ignorance
produces the same effect as Lethe in your Hades. All the same, there
are a few of them who have refused to put the wax into their ears ; and
these few do see life steadily, know it for what it is, and incline towards
the truth.'
Charon: Then shan't we shout to them, anyway?'
Hermes: 'Well, even that would be superfluous. You would only be
telling them what they knew already. You can see how pointedly they
have drawn away from the rest and how disdainfully they are laughing
at what is going on. Obviously they are finding no satisfaction at all in
all that, and are planning to make a "get-away" from Life and to seek
asylum with you. You know they are not exactly loved by their fellow
creatures for showing up their follies.'
Charon: 'Well played, sirs! But how terribly few there are of th.ern,
Hermes.'
Hermes: * Quite as many as are wanted.' 1
Having thus brought on to our stage the exponents of the
philosophy of Detachment, we may stay to watch them performing
their spiritual exercises. We shall find, as we look on, that the
practice of Detachment rises through successive degrees from an
initiatory act of still reluctant resignation to a climax at which the
adept deliberately aims at self-annihilation.
The attitude of mere resignation is illustrated by the consensus
between an Epicurean poet and a modern Western Hellenist who
has been professor and poet in one.
Quae mala nos subigit vitai tanta cupido?
certa quidem finis vitae mortalibus adstat
nee devitari letum pote quin obeamus . . .
nee prorsum vitam ducendo demimus hilum
tempore de mortis nee delibare valemus,
quo minus esse diu possimus forte perempti,
proinde licet quot vis vivendo condere saecla;
mors aeterna tamen nilo minus ilia manebit,
nee minus ille diu iam non erit, ex hodierno
lumine qui finem vitai fecit, et ille,
mensibus atque annis qui multis occidit ante. 2
1 Lucian: Char on > 21.
2 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 1077-9 and 1087-94.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 135
A lighter English echo of these massive Lucretian lines can be
heard in the following verses of Housman's:
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way. 1
The effort 6f making this act of resignation to Death may be
eased by the reflection that Death automatically draws his own
sting, since he caiinot extinguish life without also extinguishing
consciousness, pain, and desire.
Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortatts habetur;
et, velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris,
in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terraque marique,
sic, ubi non erimus cum corporis atque animai
discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti
scilicet haud nobis quicquam (qui non erimus turn)
accidere omnino potent sensumque movere,
non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo. 2
Here again there are English echoes playing round the Latin
theme.
Men loved urikindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears feU down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born. 3
And since this peace-bef ore-birth is a mirror or the peace-
after-death from which it is barely separated in time by the briel
i Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, .
* Lucretius: De Renm Natura, Book IIL II. 830-42-
3 Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xlvm.
i 3 6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
convulsion of life, the living Englishman may keep up his courage
by thinking of the dead Roman.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon. 1
It is the same consolation that is offered by a Stoic philosopher
in less harsh language:
'He sounds the retreat, throws open the door, and calls to you
"Come". Come whither? Why, to nowhere very dreadful, but only to
where you came from. Come to something that is familiar and akin.
Come to the elements: fire to fire, earth to earth, breath to breath,
moisture to moisture.' 2
Death automatically brings oblivion; and anyway the enjoyment
of life has limits which are inexorable because they are inherent
in the nature of life itself. Life is a movement which has its own
proper curve and span. Its secret lies in a succession; and there-
fore time unduly drawn out can bring nothing but satiety and
boredom.
'When you have come to the end of the time that has been allowed
you for watching the procession and taking part in the festivities, will
you make a fuss', asks our Stoic philosopher, 'on getting the signal to
leave, about making your bow and saying "thank you" for the treat and
then taking your departure ?'' Yes I will, because I still want to go on
having a good time.' 'You are not the only one. But, after all, festivi-
ties can't last for ever. So you really must come away and take your
leave with at least a show of gratitude and good grace. You must make
way for others. Others have to put in an appearance as you have done
in your time, and when they present themselves they must be found
room and lodging and board. But, if the first-comers won't get out of
their light, there will be nothing left for them. Don't be greedy; don't
be insatiable ; don't take up the whole world/ 3
Time is up, and, what is more, jou are not likely to enjoy
yourself if you overstay your welcome.
Praeterea versamur ibidem atque insumus usque
nee nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas.
sed, dum abest quod avemus, id exsuperare videtur
cetera; post aliut, cum contigit illud, avemus
et sitis aequa tenet vitai semper hiantis. , . .
omnia perfunctus vitai praemia marces. . . .
mine aliena tua tamen aetate omnia mitte,
aequo animoque agedum humanis concede: necessest. 4
1 Housman; A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xxxi.
. ^r^kWr^aniTo'" 1 ' chap - i3 - '*
Lucretius: De Rerwn Natwa, Book III, 11. 1080-4, 956, 961-2.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 137
Nor does the nemesis of satiety lie in wait only for individual
human beings; it overtakes whole generations.
Nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat
posteritas: eadem facient cupientque minores. 1
In fact,
*One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the
Earth abideth for ever. . . . The thing that hath been, it is that which
shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is
no new thing under the Sun/ 2
These words of a Syriac sceptic whose mind had perhaps been
chilled by a breath of the cold wind of Hellenic philosophy are
echoed in accents that are chillier still in the meditations of a
Roman Stoic sage:
*The rational soul ranges over the whole Cosmos and the surrounding
void and explores the scheme of things. It reaches into the abyss of
boundless Time and not only comprehends, but studies the significance
of, the periodic new birth (TTJV irepiobiKTjv TraAtyyevecrtav 3 ) of the Uni-
verse. These studies bring the rational soul to a realization of the truth
that there will be nothing new to be seen by those who come after us
and that, by the same token, those who have gone before us have not
seen anything, either, that is beyond our ken. In this sense it would be
true to say that any man of forty who is endowed with moderate intelli-
gence has seen in the light of the uniformity of Nature the entire
Past and Future.' 4
The purchase given by tedium for levering the Soul away from
its attachment to life is so familiar a commonplace of the philo-
sophers that an anthology of variations on the theme culled from
Seneca's works alone would be almost enough to fill a volume.*
Nor need any one wait till he has reached the point of satiety in
order to make the, after all, obvious discovery that mundane life,
as it is lived by the homme moyen sensuel, is at best insipid.
Lie down, lie down, young yeoman ;
The Sun moves always west;
The road one treads to labour
Will lead one home to rest.
And that will be the best. 6
1 Juvenal- Satires No i 11 147-8 a Eccles. i. 4 and 9.
3 For the history of this word irofeyycveorfa see V. C (i) @), vol. v, p, 27, footnote 2,
^Marcus' Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, Book XI, chap, i (compare Book VII,
chap. 49, and the present Study, IV. C (i), vol. iv, p. 28, footnote 2, above), ine
entire past andfuture' (^a rA ycyovoW^
Hesiodic formula (T<T* eW^eva Zp6 r> <?oW (Theogony, 1. 32 ; cf. I. 3*) ); Jen ^ reaUy
a reminiscence of Hesiod here, it illustrates the change of mood that had come ^over
Hellenic minds between Hesiod's and Marcus's day; for Hesiod imagined that ne
needed the inspiration of the Muses to gain a knowledge which in Marcus s view is
known to the average man of forty as a matter of course.
5 See, for example, Seneca
17-20; Ep. kxviii, 26.
orty as a matter o course. ii SS 6 and
: Epistulae Morales, fp. nair, 26; Ep. ^ J1 J *
6 Housman, A. E,: A Shropshire Lad, vu, ad Jin.
138 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
That is depressing; but (since sordidness is worse than insipidity)
it is not so repulsive as this :
Tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire ?
mortua cui vita est prope iam vivo atque videnti,
qui somno partem maiorem conteris aevi
et vigilans stertis nee somnia cernere cessas
sollicitamque geris cassa formidine mentem. 1
This drabness of the plain man's life is painful enough. Yet it is
not so excruciating as that morbid restlessness of the idle rich which
Lucretius depicts with deadly acumen in a passage that has been
quoted near the beginning of this Study as an epitome of the state
of mind of the Dominant Minority. 2
Any one who has ever been in this state of mind, or who has
even had an inkling of it at second hand through being haunted
by Lucretius's lines, will be inclined to agree with Seneca that life
is a synonym for punishment; 3 and he may even be persuaded to
agree with Lucretius that life is a Hell on Earth:
Atque ea nimirum quaecumque Acherunte profundo
prodita sunt esse, in vita sunt omnia nobis. . . .
hie Acherusia fit stultorum denique vita. 4
Lucretius's intuition is Macbeth's experience:
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. 5
But Macbeth lives on to sound still deeper depths of horror.
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty Death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
1 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 1045-9.
a Ibid., 11. 1053-70, quoted in I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 55, above. This is another Lyiicre-
faan theme on which Seneca has composed variations : e.g. in De TrcanqmLUtate^ ' chap.
2, ^15 (where Lucretius, Book III, 1. 1068, is quoted), and in'Ep. Mor. iii, 5.
j Si yelis credere altius veritatem intuentibus, ornnis vita supplicium est.* Seneca:
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 978-9 and 1023. The intervening lines
are occupied with an ingenious analysis of the genuine terrestrial equivalents of the
legendary tortures of Tantalus, Tityus, and Sisyphus and the legendary horrors of
1 artarus, Cerberus, and the Furies. (For a hypothesis regarding the origin of these
Hellenic legends see V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, pp. 522-3, below.)
s Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act in, Scene 2, 11. 19-23.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 139
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. 1
If life is as grim as that, death must be, by comparison,
agreeable.
Numquid ibi horribile apparet, num triste videtur
quicquam, non omni somno securius exstat ? 2
Seneca justifies his equation of life with punishment 3 by com-
paring the experience of living with that of being adrift on a
stormy sea 'from which the only haven is the harbour of death'. 4
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. 5
But, if that is sweet, it must be sweeter still ta be totally in-
sensible: to know nothing of others' feelings, besides feeling
nothing oneself.
Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation ;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation
O why did I awake? When shall I sleep again? 6
'When you will', replies the philosopher; for the time to take
action is at hand, and there are effective ways of detaching oneself
from life that can be followed if only one is in earnest to the point
of willing not merely the desirable end but also the arduous
means.
'Ethical prowess (aptTrj) can and will produce felicity (evSa^oviav)
and invulnerability (AirdOciav) and well-being (evpoiav) . . . and there is
one way only by which well-being can be reached: the way of Detach-
ment (d7rd<rra<w) from all morally neutral values (T&V aTrpoaiperuv). You
must not allow yourself to have a sense of property in anything; you
must surrender everything to God and to Chance . . . and must Concen-
trate upon one thing only the thing that is truly your own, and in which
no outside power can interfere.' 7
Spiritual exercises in the practice of Detachment fill many of
these 'Leaves from a Stoic Philosopher's Note-Book' out of which
1 Ibid., Act v, Scene v, 11. 19-28.
* Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 97-7-
3 See the sentence quoted on p. 138, footnote 3, above. .. t^moestatea
4 Seneca: Ad Polybium, chap. 9, 7: c ln hoc tarn procelloso et ad omnes tempestatea
exposito man navigantibus nullus portus nisi mortis est.
Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book II, 11. 1-4- u<, n rf1ed with a lighter
Housman, A. E. : A Shropshire Lad, xlvin; the same theme is handled wita a iignier
: Dissertation* , Book I, chap. 4, 3, and Book IV, chap. 4, 39-
140 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the foregoing sentences have been culled. 1 But if we follow the
path of Detachment far enough we shall find ourselves sooner or
later turning from a Hellenic to an Indie guide ; for, far though the
disciples of Zeno may go, it is the disciples of Gautama that have
had the courage to pursue Detachment all the way to its logical
goal of self-annihilation. 2
Detachment is, indeed, a matter of degree. One may play at it
in the game of a sophisticated 'return to Nature' that was played
by a Marie Antoinette in her Parisian dairy and by a Theocritus
in his Coan harvest-field. 3 One may carry this game to the length
of a pose, 4 as it was carried by a Diogenes in his tub and by a
Thoreau in his wigwam. 5 One may genuinely stake one's life
as an anchorite in the desert or as a yogi in the jungle upon the
efficacy of this would-be solution of the problem which life
presents. But a traveller along the path of Detachment who is to
reach the goal and win the reward must do more than stake his
life on the quest; he must detach himself from life to the point of
being in love with nothing but its negation. 6
To do this, of course, means flying in the face of human nature,
and even a willing spirit may be tempted to humour the weakness
of the flesh by accepting the assistance of a god to waft it on its
way towards so formidable a destination.
With the great gale we journey
That breathes from gardens thinned,
Borne in the drift of blossoms
Whose petals throng the wind;
Buoyed on the heaven-heard whisper
Of dancing leaflets whirled
From all the woods that autumn
Bereaves in all the World.
1 e.g. see also Book I, chap. 29, ircpl evora^ta?, and Book II, chap. 2, rrepi dr.
2 The Epicurean Hellenic ideal of imperturbability (arapa^ia) seems to have been
conceived and pursued independently in a disintegrating Sinic Society by Hsiin-tse,
_ 3 See V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 377; V. C (i) (d) 2, vol. v, p. 403; and V. C (i) (d) 8 (oc),
in the present volume, pp. 58-9, above. The game that is described in Theocritus's
seventh Idyll and in Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, Book II, 11. 20-33 (<> n which Seneca
has embroidered in Ep. Mor. xc, 40-3), is also portrayed in the picture by Giorgione
that goes by the name of La FSte Champfrre.
A Detachment that is no more than a game or a pose may be suspected of being
Abandon masquerading in a pretentious disguise (see V. C (i) (d) 2, vol. v, p. 403, above).
J See Thoreau, H. D. : Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston 1854, Houghton MifiUn).
_, . r S ii. -.. k.n.vv. ^A^ fvi n*-jj.f_yi*/w H*/ \.hJll*JJLCl UA^OfL V . J. J.J.. . J. ft&
Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad 1927, Academy of Sciences of U.S.S.R.),
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 141
And midst the fluttering legion
Of all that ever died
I follow, and before us
Goes the delightful guide,
With lips that brim with laughter
But never once respond,
And feet that fly on feathers,
And serpent-circled wand. 1
If one is really going to walk over the edge of a precipice, is it
not best to let oneself be led over it in this agreeable way by
Hermes Psychopompus ? Perhaps it is better to make certain of
the guide's identity before putting ourselves in his hands. And,
when we look into it, we shall find that the bearer of this imposing
Hellenic title is a will-o'-the-wisp who also answers to the Nordic
name of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Piper hypnotizes chil-
dren into falling in at his heels; but the trance in which they follow
him does not end for them in an escape from life; it ends instead
in their sitting in darkness and the shadow of death in the bowels
of a mountain into which the deceitful magician entices them.
And, even without having the Teutonic fairy-tale to warn him, the
Indie candidate for arhatship knows by intuition that the Hellenic
expedient of a conducted tour to Nirvana is a snare and a delusion.
If one takes an anaesthetic, one cannot commit hara-kiri; and in
order to achieve the greater tour deforce of spiritual self-annihila-
tion one must be alertly aware, from first to last, of what one is
about. The key that unlocks the gate of Nirvana is not an aestheti-
cally agreeable hypnosis but an arduous and painful mental strife
of the kind that is prescribed in the following passage from a
work of the Hinayanian Buddhist philosophy.
Tn one who abides surveying the enjoyment in things that make^for
grasping, craving (tanha) increases. Grasping is caused by craving,
coming into existence by grasping, birth by coming into existence, and
old age and death by birth. . . . Just as if a great mass of fire were burn-
ing of ten, twenty, thirty or forty loads of faggots, and a man from time
to time were to throw on it dry grasses, dry cow-dung, and dry faggots ;
even so a great mass of fire with that feeding and that fuel would burn
for a long time. . . .
'In one who abides surveying the misery in things that make for
grasping, craving ceases. With the ceasing of craving, grasping ceases;
with the ceasing of grasping, coming into existence ceases; with the
ceasing of coming into existence, birth ceases; and, with the ceasing of
birth, old age and death cease. Grief, lamentation, pain, dejection, and
despair cease. Even so is the cessation of all this mass of pain/ 2
1 Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xlii. .
2 Upaddna-sutta, ii. 84, quoted in Thomas, E. J.: The History of Buddhist Thought
(London 1933, Kegan Paul), p. 62.
i 4 2 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The reward that awaits the whole-hearted seeker after Detach-
ment at his journey's end is described by our Hellenic philosopher
in a characteristically political simile.
1 You see that Caesar appears to provide us with a great peace, because
there are no longer any wars or battles or any serious crimes of brigand-
age or piracy, so that one can travel at any season and can sail from
the Levant to the Ponent. 1 But tell me now: can Caesar also bring us
peace fr6m fever and from shipwreck, or from conflagration or earth-
quake or thunderbolt? Yes, and from love? Impossible. And from
grief? Impossible. And from envy ? A sheer impossibility in every one
of these predicaments. But, unlike Caesar, the doctrine (Aoyos-) of the
philosophers does promise to bring us peace from these troubles too. 2
And what does' that doctrine tell us? "My children'*, it says, "if you
listen to me, then, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you
will not be overtaken by sorrow or by anger or by a consciousness either
of constraint or of frustration. You will go through with it in a state of
invulnerability (a-rra&els Siafere), in which you will be free from all
these ills." This is a peace that is proclaimed not by Caesar (how could
Caesar proclaim it for us?) but by God through the voice of Philosophy
(Sta rov \6yov). And the philosopher who possesses that peace is master
of the situation even when he is single-handed. For he can look the
World in the face as he thinks to himself: "Now no evil can befall me.
For me there exists no such thing as a brigand or an earthquake. For
me there is nothing anywhere but peace, nothing but imperturbability
(rrdvra clpTJvrjs pevrd, irdvra drapagias)." >3
This Hellenic simile veils a metaphysical belief which is em-
braced in its elemental nakedness by a hardier Indie school of
thought.
'The world-process is ... a process of co-operation between . . .
subtle, evanescent elements ; and such is the nature of dharmas that they
proceed from causes and steer towards extinction. Influenced by the
element avidyd, the process is in full swing. Influenced by the element
prajna, it has a tendency towards appeasement and final extinction. In
the first case streams of combining elements are produced which corre-
spond to ordinary men; in the second the stream represents a saint. 4
The complete stoppage of the process of phenomenal life corresponds
to a Buddha. . . . The final result of the world-process is its suppression :
1 This sentence has been quoted already, apropos of the actual Pax Augusta, in V. C
(i) 00 7, P- 3, above. AJ.T.
2 These sentences have been quoted already in V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 16, footnote 2, above.
AJ.T
3 Epictetus: Dissertationes : Book III, chap. 13, 9-13.
4 With his body still alive
The saint enjoys some feeling,
But in Nirvana consciousness is gone
Just as a light when totally extinct.
Verses quoted by Candrakirti, and, after him, by Stcherbatsky, Th.: The Conception
of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad 1927, Academy of Sciences of U.S.S.R.), P- 184-
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 143
Absolute Calm. 1 All co-operation is extinct and replaced by immut-
ability (Asamskrta = Nirvana). . . . The Absolute (Nirvana) is inanimate,
even if it is something. It is sometimes, especially in popular literature,
characterized as bliss ; but this bliss consists in the cessation of unrest
(duhkha). Bliss is a feeling, and in the Absolute there neither is a feeling
nor conception nor volition nor even consciousness. The theory is that
consciousness cannot appear alone without its satellites, the phenomena
of feeling, volition, &c. ; and the last moment in the life of a Bodhisattva,
before merging into the Absolute, is also the last moment of conscious-
ness in his continuity of many lives.' 2
This absolute Detachment has perhaps never been attained, or
at least never as a permanent state, outside the school of the Indie
philosopher Siddhartha Gautama. 3 As an intellectual achievement
The body has collapsed,
Ideas gone, all feelings vanished,
All energies quiescent
And consciousness itself extinct.
Ibid.
z Stcherbatsky, Th. : The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word
'Dharma* (London 1923, Royal Asiatic Society), pp. 74 and 53. The same author, in
The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad 1927, Academy of Sciences of U.S.S.R.),
p. 40, describes the Hinayanian conception of Nirvana as representing 'some indefinite
essence of . . . forces which were active in phenomenal life but are now extinct -and
converted into eternal death 1 . See also, however, Radhakrishnan, Sir S.: Gautama the
B-uddha (London 1938, Milford), pp, 41-6, cited in this Study already in V. C (i) (c) 2,
vol. v, p. 134, footnote I, and in V. C (i) (d) 7, in the present volume, p. 18, footnote i,
above, for the view that Nirvana^ in Siddhartha Gautama's own conception of it, is not
a negation of existence but is 'a different, deeper mode of life* which 'is peace and rest
in the bosom of the Eternal*.
3 The Nirvana that is the normal and permanent goal of the Hinayanian Buddhist
arhat was, however, perhaps apprehended as a rare and fleeting experience by Plotinus,
whose Neoplatonism was the last of the schools of Hellenic philosophy.
*The ecstatic trance, in which the distinction between the mind and its ideas, the self
and self-knowledge, passes away, is not,- so Plotinus would have us believe, a mere
swooning and eclipse of the Soul while the World goes booming on, but a flight of the
Alone to the Alone. Sense and spiritual contemplation and mystic union are psycho-
logical states corresponding to cosmic climes, and growth in self-knowledge may be
described also as a journey of the Soul through the Universe to its far-off home. Only
this should be noted, that the actual attainment of the noetic state, when once the
Soul has been released from the bondage of rebirth, brings a cessation of what we
regard as personal existence. The heaven of the Nous has no place for memory of the
Soul's past lives, and Being there is not an immortality that denotes conscious continuity;
it is rather a blissful forgetfulness. And the last stage of identification with the One is a
complete loss of identity* (More, P. E. : Hellenistic Philosophies = The Greek Tradition
from the Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon: 399 B.C.-A.D. 451, vol. ii (Princeton*
1923, University Press), pp. 197-8).
On this showing, Plotinus's Visio Beatifica might be described as an entry into Nirvana
that is momentary instead of being permanent, but which is genuine for so long as it
lasts. On the other hand the common essence of the Neoplatonic and the Hinayanian
Buddhist experience is apparently not to be found in the experience of either the
Christian or the Islamic school of mysticism.
t Fand\ an important technical term of Sufism, meaning "annihilation, dissolution .
The Sufi who attains perfection must be in a kind of state of annihilation. . . . The
origin of the Muslim conception off and' has ... to be sought in Christianity, from which
it seems to be borrowed. -This conception simply means the annihilation of the indivi-
dual human will before the will of God an idea which forms the centre of all Christian
nnysticism. The conception thus belongs to the domain of ethics and not in the slightest
degree to that of metaphysics, like the nirvana of the Hindu. . . . The author of the
IZashf al-Mahjub expressly states that fand" does not mean loss of essence and destruc-
tion of personality, as some ignorant Sufis think' (Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 11 <London
7, Luzac),p. 52).
144 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
it is imposing; as a moral achievement it is overwhelming; tout it
has a disconcerting moral corollary; for perfect Detachment casts
out Pity, and therefore also Love, as inexorably as it purges away
all the evil passions.
The intellectual reasonableness of this appalling moral con-
clusion is most easily demonstrable in the case of the Gods, for
whom the human philosophy of Detachment can hardly find room
except in the contemptible role of spoilt children of the Universe. 1
The habitat of these unedifying privileged beings is the nearest
thing to an unearned Nirvana 2 (a virtual contradiction in terms !)
that Epicurus admits into his Cosmos.
Apparet divom numen sedesque quietae
quas neque concutiunt venti nee nubila nimbis
aspergunt neque nix acri concreta pruina
cana cadens violat semperque innubilus aether
integit, et large diffuso lumine rident.
omnia suppeditat porro Natura neque ulla
res animi pacem delibat tempore in ullo. 3
This Lotus-Eaters' 'no-man's-land' 4 was necessarily incom-
mensurable with, and therefore also necessarily insulated from,
the habitat of Mankind.
Illud item non est ut possis credere, sedes
esse deum sanctas in mundi partibus ullis.
tenvis enim natura deum longeque remota
sensibus ab nostris animi vix mente videtur;
quae quoniam manuum tactum suffugit et ictum,
tactile nil nobis quod sit contihgere debet.
tangere enim non quit quod tangi non licet ipsum.
quare etiam sedes quoque nostris sedibus esse
dissimiles debent temies, de corpore eorum. 5
It follows that neither the world which Mankind inhabits nor
Mankind itself is of the Gods' creation. And, apart from the sheer
physical impossibility of the hypothesis, what conceivable motive
could the Gods have had for creating anything, even if they had
had the power ?
1 The tendency of Philosophy to depreciate God in magnifying Law tias been
examined in V. C (i) (d) 7, pp. 18-28, above.
2 In Stcherbatsky, Th.: The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad 1927,
Academy of Sciences of U.S.S.R.), p. 15, it is pointed out that the saints in tHe Hina-
yanian Nirvana are, like the gods in the Epicurean /tercucoopua (see footnote 4., "below),
quiescent, inactive, and possessed of bodies of a special atomic structure.
3 Lucretius : De Remm Natura, Book III, 11. 18-24.
4 The term is strictly applicable; for Epicurus parked his gods in his ju.e-r<z/coor/xtei,
which, in the language of our modern Western astronomy, might perhaps be translated
as 'inter-nebular spaces'.
s Lucretius: De Remm Natura, Book V, 11. 146-54.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL I45
Quid enim immortalibus atque beatis
gratia nostra queat largirier emolumenti
ut nostra quicquam causa gerere aggrediantur ?
quidve novi potuit, tanto post, ante quietos
inlicere ut cuperent vitam mutare priorem? 1
Nor, whatever the myths may say, have the Gods ever inter-
vened in human affairs, any more than they have been responsible
for bringing the human race into existence.
Omnis enim per se divom natura necessest
immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur
semota ab nostris rebus seiunctaque longe.
nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri,
nee bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira. 2
And Lucretius's point has been anticipated, in still more shocking
lines of Latin verse, by his predecessor Ennius:
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus ;
nam, si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.
It would indeed be uncomplimentary to hold the Gods respon-
sible for works which 'ail from the prime foundation*.
Quod si iam rerum ignorem primordia quae sint,
hoc tarnen ex ipsis caeli rationibus ausim
confirmare aliisque ex rebus reddere multis,
nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
naturam rerum: tanta stat praedita culpa. 3
But there is another and a deeper reason why it would be im-
pious to credit the Gods with having anything to do with the
World, and this is that a perfect Detachment is the very hall-mark
of Divinity.
'Being blissful and incorruptible means having no bothers oneself and
causing none to others, and this in turn means being detached from all
feelings of anger or of gratitude. All that kind of thing is a sure sign of
infirmity.' 4
In a famous work of Indie literature a god is duly made to glory
in the Detachment which, in the passage just quoted, is attributed
by a Hellenic philosopher to the Godhead a priori.
i Ibid., Book V, 11. 165-9.
* Ibid., Book II, 11. 646-51.
3 Ibid., Book V, 11. 195-9.
* Epicurus, quoted in Diogenes Laertius: The Lives^ of the Philosophers, Rook^X,
cHap.^lSQiTO fj.aKa.piov KO.L a<f>daprov ovr* avro Trpav/uar* e^ei ovr aAAaj fra^e^et, a>or*
ovr opyals cure \a.pwi frvvex^rai' v aodfvft yap irav TO TOIOVTOV. This passage is also to be
found in a Latin translation in Cicero: De Natura Deorum, Book I, chap. 17 (section 45).
The same equation of action with infirmity is made in a passage of Plotinus which has
been quoted in this Study in III. C (ii) (&), vol. iii, p. 254, footnote 4, above.
146 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
'I am indifferent to all born things ; there is none whom I hate, none
whom I love.' 1
These words are placed in the mouth of a god, but it is a human
ideal that they express; for the tribe of philosophers is not less
prone than the tribes of Thracians and Ethiopians 2 to portray the
Gods in their huma,n makers' image ; and the same poem elsewhere
extols the same inhumanly complete Detachment as the hall-mark,
not of divinity, but of perfection in the soul of a human being.
'He whose mind is undismayed in pain, who is freed from longings for
pleasure, from whom passion, fear and wrath have fled, is called a man of
abiding prudence, a saintly man. He who is without affection for aught,
and whatever fair or foul fortune may betide neither rejoices in it nor
loathes it, has wisdom abidingly set.'
*The man whose every motion is void of love and purpose, whose works
are burned away by the fire of knowledge, the enlightened call "learned"/
"The learned grieve not for them whose lives are fled nor for them
whose lives are not fled.' 3
To the Indie sage's mind this heartlessness is the adamantine
core of philosophy; and the same conclusion was reached in-
dependently by the Hellenic philosophers as a result of following
likewise. to the bitter end a parallel line of escape from life. The
Hellenic sage who had struggled out into the sunshine of en-
lightenment might perhaps feel a greater sense of social obligation
to return to the Cave where the vast majority of his former fellow
prisoners were still languishing; 4 but this difference, such as it
was, between the Hellenic and the Indie philosopher's code was
superficial ; for, even if he did return, the Hellenic philosopher was
merely to go through the motions of showing > mercy upon his
suffering fellow creatures. He was not only free, but was in duty
bound, to leave his heart behind him. This personal obligation,
which the Hellenic philosopher remorselessly laid upon himself,
to preserve at all costs his hard-won invulnerability has been de-
scribed by a modern Western scholar 5 in terms so startling that
we might be inclined to suspect him of rhetorical exaggeration if
there were not chapter and verse to warrant every statement to
which he commits himself,
'The Wise Man was not to concern him&> 4f with his brethren ... he
was only to serve them. 6 Benevolence he w^s to have, as much of it as
1 Bhagavadgita, ix. 29 (English translation by Bamett\ L. D. (London 1920, Dent),
pp. 129-30). i
a See the quotation from Xenophanes at the beginning Af Part I. A, vol. i, p, i, above.
a Bhagavadgita, ii. 56-7 ; iv. 19 ; ii. 1 1 (Bamett's translation (cited in footnote i , above),
pp. 94, 104, 88). \ v
* For Plato's simile of the Cave see III. C (ii) (b), vol. iiA, pp. 249-52, above.
6 S^u* 11 ' E< R : :*< and Sceptics (Oxford 1913, Clarendon Press), pp. 66-7.
1 he sage will not feel pity, because he cannot feel it \Vithout himself being in a
pitiful state of mind; but everything else that is done by thofse who do indulge in that
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 147
you can conceive ; but there was one thing he must not have, and that
was love. Here, too, if that inner tranquillity and freedom of his was to
be kept safe through everything here too, as when he was intending to
acquire objects for himself, he must engage in action without desire. 1
He must do everything which it is possible for him to do, shrink from no
extreme of physical pain, in order to help, to comfort, to guide his fellow
men, but whether he succeeds or not must be a matter of pure indiffer-
ence to him, If he has done his best to help you and failed, he will be
perfectly satisfied with having done his best. The fact that you are no
better off for his exertions will not matter to him at all. Pity, in the sense
of a painful emotion caused by the sight of other men's suffering, is
actually a vice, 2 The most that can be allowed when the Wise Man
goes to console a mourner, is that he should feign sympathy as a
means of attaining his object; but he must take care not to feel it. He
may sigh, Epictetus says, provided the sigh does not corne from his
heart. 3 In the service of his fellow men he must be prepared to sacrifice
his health, to sacrifice his possessions, to sacrifice his life ; but there is
one thing he must never sacrifice: his own eternal calm.' 4
emotion will also be done by him and this readily and high-mindedly. He will succour
a sorrowful neighbour without joining in his grief. He will give a helping hand to the
castaway, hospitality to the exile, alms to the destitute. ... He will allow a mother's
tears to -purchase the freedom of her son, will release the prisoner from his chains and
the gladiator from his barracks, and will even give burial to the criminal's corpse. But
he will do all this without any mental agitation or any change of countenance' (Seneca:
De dementia, Book II, chap. 6, 1-2). AJ.T.
1 'If you are kissing a child of yours or a brother, or a friend never put your
imagination unreservedly into the act and never 'give your emotion free rein, but curb
it and check it (like the mentors who stand behind the conqueror in his triumphal car to
prompt him to remember that he is only a human being). It is up to you to be your own
prompter and to remind yourself that the being whom you love is mortal, so that what
you are loving is not your own property. It has been given to you only temporarily, and
the gift is not irrevocable or absolute. It is like a fig or a bunch of grapes that one has
at the appointed season; and if one goes on craving for it in wintertime one is a fool. It
is equally foolish to crave for one's son or one's friend out of season; that is just another
form of asking for figs in winter. . , . Indeed, there is no harm in accompanying the act
of kissing the child by whispering over him: "To-morrow you will die'" (Epictetus;
Dissertations, Book III, chap. 24, 85-8). The whole chapter which is entitled 'The
impropriety of being emotionally affected by what is not under one's control* is more
or less apposite. A.J.T.
2 'Pity is a mental illness induced by the spectacle of other people's miseries, or
alternatively it may be defined as an infection of low spirits caught from other people's
.troubles when the patient believes that those troubles are undeserved. The sage does
not succumb to suchlike mental diseases. The sage's mind is serene and is immune
from being upset by the incidence of any external force. The noblest ornament of human
nature is greatness of soul; but such greatness is not compatible with grief; for grief
bruises the mind and prostrates it and shrivels it up; and the sage does not allow that to
happen to him even in calamities that are his own. . . . Pity is next-door neighbour to
pitifulness (misericordia vicina est miseriae). . . . Pity is a vice of minds too prone to be
appalled at the sight of misery. If you expect the sage to feel pity, you might almost
as well expect him to weep and wail at somebody else's funeral' (Seneca: De dementia,
Book II, chap. 5, 4-5, and chap. 6, 4). A.J.T.
3 'I do not say that it is inadmissible to groan; the point is that the groan must not
come from the heart* (Epictetus: Dissertationes, Book I, chap. 18, 19). It would per-
haps be unfair to Epictetus to overlook the fact that this precept is given apropos of a
physical pain afflicting oneself. At the same time Dr. Bevan is no doubt fairly entitled
to assume that the precept has a wider application than this in Epictetus's philosophy.
AJ.T.
+ 'The sage will always keep the same calm and unmoved countenance^ which he
could not do if he permitted himself to feel sorrow* (Seneca: De dementia, Book II,
chap. S ,5). AJ.f.
i 4 8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Nor, among the dominant minority in a disintegrating Hellenic
Society, was this repulsive ideal a mere uncoveted monopoly of a
handful of pedants and prigs. The most sensitive and lovable and
popular of all the Latin poets has deliberately drawn his hero in
the unfeeling philosopher's image; and his heartlessness is the
sign in which Aeneas conquers at the crisis of his career, when he
successfully steels himself like an oak standing up to a storm
against Anna's supreme appeal on Dido's behalf.
Mens immota rnanet; lacrimae volvuntur inanes. 1
A modern Western Hellenist has used his art to preach this
sophisticated philosophy in the name of the plain man. In the
grave e in the nation that is not' sings a Shropshire Lad,
Lovers lying two by two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom, all night through
Never turns him to the bride. 2
Yet, in pressing its way to a conclusion which is logically inevitable
and at the same time morally intolerable, the philosophy of Detach-
ment ultimately defeats itself; and it is in vain that its exponents
wring a grudging recognition of their fortitude, and even of their
nobility, out of the petrified hearts of their audience. In the very
act of unwilling admiration we are vehemently moved to revolt. It
was the sorrows of Dido and not the virtues of Aeneas that appealed
to Saint Augustine in his unregenerate youth; and he lived to
write as a saint in middle age: It is not true that "No god ever
enters into relations with Man" even if Plato did say so, as
Apuleius says he did.* 3 The philosophy of Detachment does not,
after all, provide a solution for the problem which it sets out to
solve; for in consulting only the head and ignoring the heart it is
arbitrarily putting asunder what God has joined together.* This
philosophy falls short of the truth by refusing to take account of the
Soul's duality in unity; and therefore the philosophy of Detach-
ment has to be eclipsed by the mystery of Transfiguration. The
Hinayana makes way for the Mahayana,* Stoicism for Christianity,
the arhat for the Bodhisattva, 6 the sage for the saint.
1 Virgil: Aeneid, Book IV, 1. 449.
2 Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad, xii.
3 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book IX, chap. 16, quoting Apuleius: De Deo Socratis,
chap. 4, 21 (edited by Lutjohann, Chr.: Greifswald 1878, Kunike): 'Nam, ut idem
Flato ait, nullus deus^miscetur hominibus [0e<k oe dvfydWw ov piywai. Symposi
20 A sed hoc r '
^ . Symposium,
203 AJ , sed hoc praecipuum eorum sublimitatis specimen e'st, quod nulla adtrectatione
nostra contain inantur/ 4 Matt xix. 6.
s For the eruption of the Mahayana out of the Hinayana see V. C (i) (c) z, vol. v
PP. 133-6, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), vol. v, p. 552, above.
For the antithesis between Bodhisattva and arhat see further V. C (i) (d) 1 1, p. 1 64,
footnote 3, below. ^
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 149
ii. Transfiguration
We have found that the experience of being constrained to live
jj?. the adverse social environment of a disintegrating civilization
confronts the Soul with a spiritual problem which is, no doubt,
Demanding a solution all the time but which can be more or less
successfully ignored or evaded so long as the Soul is able to float
lazily on the flowing tide of a civilization that is still in growth.
VVhen this latent problem of life is forced upon the Soul's attention
fry the hard fact that a way of life which has hitherto been taken
for granted is now failing to work, the Soul is driven into searching
for a substitute, and we have already passed in review three dif-
ferent attempts to find one; but, so far, our survey has brought us
each time to the dead 6nd of a blind-alley. The way of Archaism
ends in self-defeat, the way of Futurism in self-transcendence, the
\vay of Detachment in self-stultification. There is, however, one
way left for us still to explore, and that is the way to which we have
provisionally given the name of Transfiguration. 1
As we gird up our loins to take this fourth and last turning a
clamour of disapproving and derisive voices assails our ears. Shall
we allow ourselves to be intimidated by this chorus of protest?
Shall we abandon at this point a course of exploration which has
hitherto proved as disappointing as it has been laborious? It is
tempting to yield to the promptings of weariness and disillusion-
ment. Yet, before we do give in, it may be well to consider whether
we really wish to resign ourselves to remaining imprisoned in a city
of destruction like rats in a trap so long as there is still one
possible egress left untried. And it may also be well to ask our-
selves whether the hostile chorus is really a bad augury. For
whose, after all, are these voices that are eager to deter us ? When
we look the hostile chorus in the face we see before us nothing
more formidable than the sullen countenances of the baffled
philosophers and futurists (the archaists have been so deeply dis-
couraged by their own fiasco that they have not had the heart to
join in the outcry). Are these familiar companions of our previous
journeys now likely to give us good advice ? Will they not be prone
to be unduly discouraged by their own unfortunate experience,
and unduly sceptical about an alternative road which might con-
ceivably arrive at the goal which the roads of Futurism and De-
tachment have failed to reach? And is their unquestionable emi-
nence in their respective spheres of action and of thought a cogent
reason for accepting their authority? May not this be the moment
to remind ourselves of the principle of Tre/cnTrc-ma 'the reversal of
i See V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 390 and 39&-7 above.
150 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
roles' upon which we have stumbled at an earlier stage of our
inquiry? 1 This principle of irony and paradox is mighty in its
operation. A study of history reveals in every act and scene of the
play the truth that
'God hath chosen the foolish things of the World to confound the
wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the World to confound
the things which are mighty.' 2
This truth which we can thus verify empirically is also known to
us intuitively. And in the light and the strength of it we may
brave the disapproval of futurists and philosophers alike by step-
ping boldly out in the footprints of a guide who is neither Simon
bar Kokaba nor Hermes Psychopompus.
'The Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom ; but we',
writes Paul to the Corinthians, 'preach Christ Crucified unto the Jews
a stumblingblock and unto the Greeks foolishness.' 3
Why is Christ Crucified a stumbling-block to futurists who have
never succeeded in eliciting the sign which they require ? And
why is He foolishness to philosophers who for their part have
never succeeded in discovering the wisdom after which they seek ?
If we press these two questions, we may not only put ourselves in
a position to take a more exact measure of those two spiritual
blind-alleys : we may also (and this is of much greater moment) be
able to make some progress in exploring the mysterious way of
life along which the Apostle is beckoning us.
Christ Crucified is foolishness to the philosopher (be he of a
Greek or of an Indian school) because the philosopher's ultimate
aim is Detachment; and therefore the philosopher cannot compre-
hend how any reasonable being who has once attained that for-
bidding goal can be so perverse as deliberately to relinquish what
he has so hardly won. What is the sense of withdrawing simply in
order to return ? 4 This passes the understanding of a philosopher
who knows by his own experience how heavy a toll of fortitude and
perseverance the feat of withdrawal must have taken from any
human being who has successfully achieved it. And a fortiori the
philosopher is completely nonplussed at the notion of a God who
has not even had to take the trouble to withdraw from an unsatis-
factory World, because He is completely independent of it by
virtue of His very divinity, but who nevertheless deliberately enters
into the World, and subjects Himself there to the utmost agony
1 In IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol. iv, pp. 245-61, above. See also V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), vol. v,
pp. 501-5, above.
2 i Cor. i. 27, quoted already in IV. C (iii) (,c) i, vol. iv, p. 249, above.
3 i Cor. i. 223.
* For the contrast between the pagan philosopher's withdrawal and the Christian
mystics withdrawal-and-return see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 249-63, above.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 151
that God or Man can undergo, for the sake of a race of beings of an
immeasurably inferior order. 'God so loved the World that He
gave His only begotten Son ?' r That is the last word in folly from
the standpoint of a seeker after Detachment. 'He saved others ;
himself he cannot save !' 2
The fact is that
'Mankind has two different ideals before it ; and I do not see how the
ideal of Detachment is compatible with the ideal of Love. If we choose
one, we must forgo the other ; each ideal appears faulty when judged by
the measure of the other. With the one goes to a large extent the intel-
lect of Ancient Greece and of India, with the other the Christian Church
and the hearts of men, the anima naturaliter Christiana; for neither in
Greece nor India nor China have the philosophers been the whole of
the people nor their philosophy the whole of the philosophers.
'There have been things tending to obscure this divergence between
the two ideals. The language used by the Stoics or Buddhists about
benevolence may often be taken to be inspired by the Christian ideal of
Love. On the other hand the Christian ideal has involved Detachment
from many things, from "the care of this world and the deceitfolness of
riches" 3 and the lusts of other things, and much of the language used
about this sort of Detachment in Christian books may seem to point to
the ideal of Ancient Greece and India. 4 The Stoic sage strenuously
labouring to do good and indifferent whether good is done, sighing with
his stricken friend, but not from the heart, is a figure serving well to bring
home to us the difference. And we may see, I think, that the Stoics and
sages of India could say no less without giving up their whole scheme.
'If the supreme end is Tranquillity, of what use would it be to set the
Wise Man's heart free from disturbance by cutting off the fear and
desire which made him dependent upon outside things, if one immedi-
ately opened a hundred channels by which the World's pain and unrest
1 John iii. 16. This view of what God's feeling and attitude and purpose and action
may be seems to have been a Syriac discovery (see V. C (ii) (a), P : .?76, footnote 5,
below). * Mark xv. 31. 3 Matt. xiii. 22.
* For example, the following words of Saint John of the Cross might readily be taken
in a Stoic or Hinayanian Buddhist sense at a first reading:
'There is no Detachment if desire remains Detachment . . . consists in suppressing
desire and avoiding pleasure; it is this that sets the Soul free, even though possession
may be still retained. It is not the things of This World that occupy or injure the Soul,
for they do not enter within, but rather the wish for, and desire of, them, which abide
within it. The affection and attachment which the Soul feels for the creature renders
the Soul its equal and its like, and the greater the affection the greater will be the like-
ness. Love begets a likeness between the lover and the object of his love (Saint John
of the Cross: 'The Ascent of Mount Carmel' in The Mystical Doctrine of Saint John of
the Cross (London 1934, Sheed & Ward), p. 10),
And these three words give the key, not only to this passage, but to the whole spirit ana
aim of the Christian mysticism. The unspoken because unquesuoned premiss ol toe
argument is that the motions of affection and attachment are only to be inhibited in so tar
as they are directed towards the creature and not towards the Creator. The fun 01 tne
Christian practice of Detachment is not to mortify love but to vivify it when it is a love
of God. And the truth that love begets a likeness between the lover and ^ ct f
his love' is as true of the love of God as it is of the love of the things of This World.
A.J.T.
i 5 2 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
could flow into his heart through the fibres, created by Love and Pity,
connecting his heart with the fevered hearts of men all round ? A hun-
dred fibres! one aperture would suffice to let in enough of the bitter
surge to fill his heart full. Leave one small hole in a ship's side, and you
let in the sea. The Stoics, I think, saw with perfect truth that if you
were going to allow any least entrance of Love and Pity into the breast,
you admitted something whose measure you could not control, and
might just as well give up the idea of inner Tranquillity at once. Where
Love is, action cannot be without desire ; the action of Love has emi-
nently regard to fruit, in the sense of some result beyond itself the one
thing that seems to matter is whether the loved person really is helped
by your action. Of course you run the risk of frustrated desire and dis-
appointment. The Stoic sage was never frustrated and never dis-
appointed. Gethsemane, looke'd at from this point of view, was a signal
breakdown. The Christian's Ideal Figure could never be accepted by
the Stoic as an example of his typical Wise Man.' 1
No, and neither could the Stoic's Ideal Figure ever be accepted
conversely by the Christian as a prototype of his Christ or even as
an analogue of his Christian saint. The shortcomings of the pagan
philosophy from the Christian standpoint have been starkly ex-
posed by a saint who has the advantage of being a philosopher
as well in an argument which proceeds from the Christian postu-
lates that 'God is Love' 2 and that 'perfect Love casteth out fear'. 3
'In the Hellenic philosophy there are two schools of thought with
regard to those mental emotions which are called in Greek TrdOrj and in
Latin either "perturbations" (in the usage of Cicero and others) or
"affections" (alias "affects") or else "passions" (a more exact translation
of the Greek, which is employed, for example, by Apuleius). These
perturbations or affections or passions are declared by one school to
attack the sage too [as well as the plain man], only in the sage they are
moderate and subject to reason, so that the mind maintains its supremacy
and imposes on these passions a system of laws which restrain them
within proper bounds. This school is the Platonico- Aristotelian. . . .
But there is another school, represented by the Stoics, which does not
admit that the sage is attacked by any passions of this kind at all. . . .
When all is said, [however,] the difference of view, in regard to passions
and mental perturbations, betweeri the Stoics and other philosophers
is infinitesimal; for both schools agree in seeking to make the mind and
reason of the sage immune from the passions' dominion. . . , The
Christian doctrinef, on the other hand,] subordinates the mind itself to
God, to be ruled and aided by Him, and subordinates the passions
to the mind, to be governed and curbed by it until they are converted
into instruments of justice. Consequently in our Christian discipline
the question that is asked is not whether the religious mind feels anger,
but why it feels it; not whether it feels sadness, but what makes it sad;
1 Sevan, E. R.: Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford 1913, Clarendon Press), pp. 6070.
2 i John iv. 8 and 16, 3 x John iv. 18.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 153
and not whether it feels fear, but what it is afraid of. To be angry with
the sinner in order that he may receive correction ; to be sorry for the
sufferer in order that he may win liberation ; to be fearful for the soul in
peril lest it may go to perdition : I can hardly imagine these emotions being
deliberately condemned by any one in his senses. Yet even the emotion
of pity is usually censured by Stoics. . . . Far better, far more humane,
and far more consonant with religious feeling is what Cicero says in his
praise of Caesar: "None of your virtues is more admirable or more
lovable than your sense of pity." After all, what is pity but sympathy
in our own heart for somebody else's misery a sympathy which
peremptorily commands us to give our help if we can ? And this emotion
works in the service of reason when pity is bestowed without prejudice
to justice as, for example, when we give to the needy or forgive the
penitent. Yet, while such a master of language as Cicero did not hesi-
tate to call this sense of pity a virtue, the Stoics are not ashamed to
include it in the catalogue of the vices. . . . [Well,] if emotions and affec-
tions which come from a love of .the good and from a holy charity
are to be called vices, we might as well allow the real vices to be called
virtues. . . .
'If we are entirely without these emotions while we are subject to the
infirmity of this [earthly] life, that really means that there is something
wrong with our way of living. The Apostle abhorred and castigated
certain persons whom he has described as being, among other things,
without natural affection? and one of the psalms, likewise, censures
those of whom it says: / looked for some to take pity, but there was none. 2
To be entirely without pain while we are in this place of misery is
assuredly "a state which can only be purchased at a prohibitive price in
inhumanity of mind and in insensibility of body" as has been felt, and
been put into words, even by one of the secular men-of-letters. On this
showing, the state which in Greek is called ctTiafea 3 (and which in Latin
would be called "impassibility" if that were a possible Latin word) 4 may
be a thoroughly good state, and even an extremely desirable one, 5 but
is quite incompatible with this life if we understand this state (which is
a mental, not a physical, experience) to mean living without those
affections which assail us, and upset our minds, in an irrational way.
This is the verdict, not of nonentities, but of the most profoundly
religious and extremely just and holy souls. If we say that we have no
sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in -us. 6 "Invulnerability"
(a.7ra0La) in this sense will not be achieved until Man is without sin. As
1 Rom. i. 31. 2 Ps. box. 20.
3 This Greek word airdQeia is rendered in this Study (for reasons given in V. C (i) (d) i ,
vol. y, p. 394, footnote i, above) by the English word 'invulnerability' and not by the
English word 'apathy'. AJ.T. .
+ This word which Saint Augustine has coined on the pattern of a Greek original,
only to reject it as an inadmissible monstrosity, has, of course, since been adopted as a
technical term in the theological vocabulary of the Western Christian Church. AJ.T. ^
5 In examining and criticizing the Peripatetic and Stoic ideal of Imperturbability
Saint Augustine quotes (De Civitate Dei, Book IX, chap. 4, adfin.\ as an illustration of
the admirable element in it, the Virgilian line (Aeneid, Book IV, 1. 449) which has been
quoted in this Study in V. C (i) (d) 10, p. 148, above. AJ.T.
6 i John i. 8.
154 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
things actually are, a life without outward misdemeanour is as good a
life as we can aspire to ; but any one who imagines that he is living with-
out sin is not achieving freedom from sin but is merely rejecting the
chance of forgiveness. On the other hand, if "invulnerability" is to be
taken in the other sense of a state in which the mind is completely proof
against any feeling, surely every one would consider an insensibility of
this degree to be something worse than all the vices. So, while it can
be said without absurdity that the perfect state of beatitude will know
no sadness and will feel no prick of anxiety, nobody who is not alto-
gether blinded to the truth will say that in that state there will be no
love and no joy. If, however, "invulnerability" merely means a state
in which there is no fear to terrify us and no anguish to torment us, such
"invulnerability" is to be shunned in this life if we desire to live it, as it
should be lived, in God's way, but it is to be frankly hoped for in that
blessedly happy life which is promised to us as our everlasting future
condition. . . .
'The eternal life of blessed happiness will have a love and a joy which
will be not only right states of feeling but also assured states, while it
will be wholly free from anxiety and anguish. ... As for the cornmon-
wealth or society of the irreligious who are living not in the way of
God but in the way of Man ... it is convulsed by these depraved feelings,
which upset it like mental diseases. And, if this commonwealth lias any
citizens who make some show of controlling such emotions and more or
less keeping them within bounds, they become elated with such an
irreligious pride that any success that they may have in reducing their
mental distress is counterbalanced by a proportionate degree of mental
inflation, while if there are a few of them who moved by a vanity which
is as inhuman as it is rare have set their hearts on making themselves
entirely proof against being affected by any emotion whatever in any
way, such creatures merely lose their last shred of humanity without
ever attaining to a true tranquillity. For a thing does not become right
just through being hard, or wholesome just through being stupid/ 1
Having followed Saint Augustine in this counter-attack upon
the philosophers in whose sight Christ Crucified is foolishness, 2
1 Saint Augustine: De Ctvitate Dei, Book IX, chaps. 4 and 5, and Book XIV, chap. 9.
3 The first draft of the present chapter drew from Professor Gilbert Murray, who
kindly read it at that stage, a defence oi the philosophers which the writer of this Study
is glad to be able now to incorporate into the final draft, in the hope that it may serve
here as a corrective to any bias in his own presentation of the issue between the -way of
Detachment and the way of Transfiguration.
'You take late Stoicism in one of its most over-intellectualized doctrines as standing
for Greek philosophy altogether : mere intellect as against Christian love. But compare
Zeno, fragment 263, where the thing that binds his TroAircta together is *J3pa>s t and that
Eptas a god. Compare also fragment 88, where the motive spirit is not merely an atrima
rattonalis, but also creates beauty. This is different from pure intellectualism. Again,
according to Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072 B, the Final Cause produces motion by being
loved. It is the love of God, "Epcos, that produces all the motion of the World. Of course
they tended to / shrink from the use of the word "Eo&s, just as the Christians did ; but
Epicure's jptAta is pretty strong^ Fragment 52: i? <$iAia ncpLxopcvcirriv OlKOvu.vrjv *m>i/r-
roucra 67) irdaiv -rjp.lv eyip<a0cu em rov /ia/capta/xov it dances round the World calling
us to awaken to our blessedness. Also fragment 28 : we must run risks for the sake of <PtXta.
Compare fragments 23 and 78, where the two things that matter are Zb^t'a and <P*A/a.*
The writer of this Study heartily agrees that there is a strong vein of Christianity In
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 155
we may go on to deal with the futurists for whose feet He is a
stumbling-block.
The Crucifixion is a stumbling-block in the way of Futurism
because the death on the Cross bears out by a logic of events that
leaves nothing more to be said the declaration of Jesus that His
Kingdom is not of This World; 1 and, for the Jewish Zealot, this
declaration is a contradiction in terms which is not just fatuously
illogical but is shockingly impious. The sign which the futurist
requires is the announcement of a kingdom which will be bereft
of all meaning if it is not to be a mundane success. With what
intent has Yahweh promised to send his Chosen People a king who
will reign over them as 'the Lord's Anointed' ? And by what token
will this Messiah be recognized ? The Messiah's token and task
is to be, as we have seen, 2 the seizure of the sceptre of world-
dominion out of the hands of some Darius or Antiochus or Caesar,
and the raising of the Jews to the rank of ruling race in place of the
Persians or the Macedonians or the Romans, as the case may be.
Thus saith the Lord to his Anointed, to Cyrus [or Zerubbabel or
Simon Maccabaeus or Simon bar Kokaba or whatever may be the name
of the hero of the hour], whose right hand I have holden, to subdue
nations before him (and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before
him the two-leaved gates ; and the gates shall not be shut) :
' "I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight; I will
break in pieces the gates of brass and cut in sunder the bars of iron ; and
I will give thee the treasures of darkness 3 and hidden riches of secret
places." '*
How was this authentically futurist conception of a Messiah to be
reconciled with the words of a prisoner who answered Pilate
'Thou sayest that I am a king', 5
and then went on to give so fantastic an account of the royal
mission on which he claimed that God had sent him?
*To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the World,
that I should bear witness unto the truth/ 6
The disconcerting words might perhaps be contested or ignored,
many of the exponents of Hellenism and, conversely, a strong vein of Hellenism in
many of the exponents of Christianity. In quoting Hellenic expressions of the philosophy
of Detachment and Christian expressions of the religion of Love he has not meant to
imply either that the Christians have never fallen below the ideal of Love or that the
Hellenes have never risen above the ideal of Detachment. He has not been attempting
*o make a critique of either Christianity or Hellenism. His sole concern has been to
Bring out the respective meanings of Detachment and Transfiguration by quoting
testimonies that his readers will accept as loci classic*.
' John xviii. 36. a In V. C (i) (d) 9 (y) PP- * 2^3, above.
3 It was not the Jews but the Macedonians who eventually appropriated the contents
of the Achaemenian treasuries. A.J.T.
* Isa. xlv. 1-3 (i.e. 'Deutero-Isaiah'), cited in V. C (i) (<f) 9 (y), P- * above -
* John xviii. 37. 6 John rviii. 37-
i 5 6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
but the malefactor's death could neither be undone nor be ex-
plained away; and we have observed, in the classic case of Peter's
ordeal, how grievous this stumbling-block was. 1
The Kingdom of God, of which Christ Crucified is King, Is in
fact spiritually incommensurable with any kingdom that could ever
be founded or ruled by a Messiah envisaged as an Achaemenian
world- conqueror who has been turned into a Jew and been pro-
jected into the future. As far as this Civitas Dei enters into the
Time-dimension at all, it is not a mere dream of the future but is
a spiritual reality which is at all times present in This World 2
besides existing and, indeed, just because it exists as well in an
Eternity and an Infinity that are in a supra-mundane spiritual
dimension. 3 If there are any moments in Time which can in some
sense be regarded, in a Christian Weltanschauung, as historical
dates of particular irruptions of God's Kingdom into This World,
they are moments that are hallowed by descents of the Holy Ghost
upon Jesus at his baptism or upon the Apostles on the Day of
Pentecost. 4 When
'they asked of him saying: "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again
the Kingdom to Israel?" ... he said unto them: "It is not for you to
1 See V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 392-3, above.
2 The interpretation of Luke xvii. 21 has been discussed in V. C (i) (d) i t vol. v,
p. 396, footnote i, above.
3 See V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), p. 131, footnote i, above.
* This is perhaps the point where the gulf between the conception of Transfiguration
and the conception of Futurism is at its narrowest. For, while on the one side the trans-
figuration of This World through its irradiation by the Kingdom of God is conceived
of as being in some sense apprehensible as an historical process in Time, it is also true
on the other side, as we have had occasion to notice already, that in the Weltanschauung
of Futurism the difference between the present regime against which the futurist is in
revolt and the future .kingdom on which his hopes are set is not regarded as being simply
or even, 'in the last analysis', essentially determined by the difference between the
present and the future tense of the verb 'to be*.
When he is driven into a corner by the bankruptcy of his mundane policy the
futurist eventually admits, as we have seen (in V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), pp, 128-31, above), that
the stormy advent of the kingdom of his hopes will be in the nature of an apocalypse
rather than of an act of creation. The triumphant destruction of the present dispensa-
tion, when this is at last duly achieved, will not be like the clearing of a hitherto encum-
bered site for the erection of a brand-new building. It will be like the rending of a
veil in order to bring into view a hitherto invisible kingdom that has been in existence
in the background all the time and has merely been awaiting the hour appointed for its
revelation. Even at the earlier stage at which the futurist's hope of a substantial
mundane success has not yet evaporated he will be willing to admit that the catastrophe
to which he is looking forward is in the nature of a revolution; and, as we have observed
in another context (in IV. C (iii) (>) i, vol. iv, pp. 135-6, above), Revolution shares
with Revelation the particular feature that concerns us here. The outbreak of a revolu-
tion in the bosom of a body social is not an event that can be explained in terms of that
body alone without reference to anything existing outside it. The superficial phenome-
non of the violent substitution of new elements for old elements in the structure of the
body in which the revolution is taking place is always found to be the effect of a less
obvious yet more significant piece of action in a larger field ; and this action consists in
the play, upon the revolutionary body, of some external force which must, ex hypothesi,
have been in operation, and therefore in existence, before the outbreak of the revolution
of which this foreign body has been the cause.
On this showing, it would seem as though the abstract conception of Futurism cannot
be minted into the coin of concrete thought without being stiffened by the addition of
a transfigurational alloy which is decidedly foreign to it.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 157
know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own
power. But ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come
upon you." yi
The presence of the Kingdom of God in This World is manifested
in the operation of the Spirit; and this operation, which since the
beginning of Time has never been withheld though it may now
and then have been suddenly intensified transfigures the World
and, in transfiguring, redeems it, according to a tenet that is at the
same time a touchstone of Christianity.
'In the conception of the Church that is, the organized body of
believers as a thing in itself, to be worked for and fostered, lies the
true point of difference between Catholicism and Gnosticism, between
Aphraates and The Acts of Thomas. To the convert of Judas-Thomas
there was literally nothing left on this Earth to live for. . . . The old
civilization was doomed, but this religious Nihilism puts nothing in its
place. To the orthodox Christian, on the other hand, the Church stood
like Aaron between the dead and the living, as a middle term between
the things of the Next World and of This. It was the Body of Christ and
therefore eternal ; something worth living for and working for. Yet it
was in the World as much as the Empire itself.' 2
But how can the Kingdom of God be authentically in This
World and yet also be essentially not of it? 3 This is a question
which we are bound to ask but cannot be sure of being able to
answer, since it brings to light an apparent contradiction in our
conception of the relation between the subject and the object of
the act of Transfiguration, and this problem may be intractable to
attempts to solve it in terms of logic; but, if we are willing^to
acknowledge that the nature of Transfiguration is a mystery that
passes our understanding as we have seen that it, has passed the
understanding of philosophers whose intellects have certainly not
been inferior to ours! we may perhaps be rewarded for a sober
recognition of the limits of our intellectual power by finding our-
selves able to peer into the mystery through the imagery that con-
veys the intuition of the poets.
Perhaps the simplest image of the relation of the Kingdom of
God to This World is a geometrical simile. We may liken their
relation to that between a cube and one of the squares that are
presented by the solid figure's faces. If the cube were not there
the square would not be there either; yet this does not mean that
the relation of square to cube is that of part to whole; for part and
whole must be things of the same kind, whereas square and cube
are figures of different dimensions.
1 Acts i. 6-8.
2 Burkitt, F. C.: Early Eastern Christianity (London 1904, Murray), pp. 210-11.
3 This question is implicit in John xvii. 16 and in i John ii. 15-17*
i S 8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
This simile incidentally brings out one of the differences be-
tween the Christian conception of the Kingdom of God and the
Hellenic conception of the Cosmopolis \ l for the 'City of Zeus' is
described by Marcus Aurelius as 'a supreme commonwealth' of
which the 'City of Cecrops' and the other commonwealths of that
order 'are no more than houses'. 2 In this description the relation
between a mundane commonwealth and the Cosmopolis is clearly
defined as a relation of part to whole; and this means that the
Cosmopolis, unlike the Civitas Dei, is conceived of as being a
society of the same spiritual dimensions as the oecumenical empire
of Rome or the parochial city-state of Athens. If, in the imagery
of our simile, we once more represent our mundane society by a
square, then the Cosmopolis will assume the likeness, not of a
cube, but of the surface of a chess-board, which differs geometri-
cally from the single chequer in nothing but the superficial feature
of extending over an area that is sixty-four times larger.
An alternative image of the relation between the Civitas Dei and
This World may be drawn from a recent enrichment of our
archaeological knowledge which has been a surprising and exciting
consequence of our acquisition of the art of flying.
The new technique of aerial photography has lately been reveal-
ing to us traces of the handiwork of our human predecessors which
for ages past have been totally invisible to successive generations of
human beings who have been living and working ploughing and
building on the very sites on which these traces are imprinted.
So long as we have had our feet on the ground, in immediate con-
tact with these enduring marks which our predecessors' labours
have left on the face of the Earth, we have been totally blind to
something that has been lying there under our noses. It is only
in the air that our eyes have been opened; for it is not until we
have parted company with the surface of the Earth, and have
climbed hi our aeroplane to an altitude at which we seem to have
lost all contact with the ground for practical purposes, that we
begin to enjoy this novel enhancement of our powers of visual
observation. The fact is that the hitherto unobserved physical
traces of past human activities consist of undulations or discolora-
tions which are so slight in themselves that they are only visible
in a field of vision of a vastly wider sweep than can be commanded
by an eye that is approximately on their level. To be perceived
they must be caught in a bird's-eye view; 3 and, now that we are
I See V. C (i) (d) 7, Annex, pp. 332-8, below.
a Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, Book III, chap, n, and Book IV,
chap. 3, quoted in V. C (i) (d) 7, Annex, p. 335, below.
Even on a bird s-eye view the traces that are a matter of colour and not of contour
are often invisible on the bare ground and only come to light in the springing corn; for
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 159
able to emulate the vision of a hawk or kite by training upon the
ground from an aeroplane a camera fitted with a telescopic lens
we can demonstrate to the astonished yokel, whom we have taken
up with us on our survey-flight, that his native village lies within
the circumvallation of a Roman camp of which he and his forebears
have never suspected the existence although they have in fact
been sleeping every night within that historic rampart, and have
been crossing it daily as they have plodded to and fro between
their cottages and their fields, from generation to generation.
I he relation of the English village to the Roman camp offers
us an image of the relation between This World and the Civitas
Dei that may give us some further insight into that mystery. At
any rate, if we work the simile out, we shall find that it presents a
number of illuminating aspects.
In the first place we see two settlements camp and village-
coexisting on the same site. In the second place we see that it is
possible for them to coexist in defiance of the geometrical axiom
that two different objects cannot simultaneously occupy the same
space because the respective modes of their simultaneous exis-
tence are not identical in quality. The fields and cottages of the
village provide the inhabitants with physical food and shelter; the
ramparts of the camp have provided them with institutions and
ideas in virtue of which they are now living together as social
animals. In the third place we see that, although the village is
palpable whereas the camp is not even visible except on a bird's-
eye view, the inhabitants of the site are dependent on the camp, as
well as on the village, for commodities which are necessities of life.
Indeed, the camp's contribution is, if anything, more important
than the village's if it is true, as it seems to be, that, in the course
of the evolution of Life, Sub-Man had to become a social animal
as a preliminary step towards becoming human. 1 Without the
social heritage which they have derived from the invisible empire
of which the camp has been an outpost, the inhabitants of the palp-
able village would find themselves unable to keep up that social
co-operation which is the necessary moral condition for the up-
keep of their material well-being.
There is yet another point, which is perhaps the most significant
of the truths that our simile brings to light; and this is that the
existence of the empire, and its effect on the villagers' lives, are
the cause of the discoloration is a slight change in the chemical composition of the soil
through a replacement of the natural strata by man-made deposits consisting in part
of the debris of human artifacts; and, even in an aeroplane photograph, this local
difference in the soil may not be apparent except when it is reproduced and, in the
process, exaggerated in the colour and height and thickness of a crop that has been
sown on the site.
1 See I. C (iii) (c), vol. i, p. 173, footnote 3, above.
160 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
facts which are entirely independent of the beneficiaries' awareness
of them. The moment at which the yokel first descried the out*
line of the camp as he leant over the side of the aeroplane with the
archaeologist at his elbow to tell him where to look and what to
look for was not, of course, the moment at which he first began
to draw benefit from the legacy of the oecumenical empire of which
the camp was once a local point d'appui. As a matter of fact, he
began to draw his profit in times before he was born or conceived;
for the social heritage which he derives from the empire has been
handed down to him by a long line of ancestors. And the fact of
the empire's existence has been having its effect just the same,
even though the villagers may not have been aware till this moment
that their village lay within the empire's bounds and perhaps
not even aware that there was any such thing as this empire within
their horizon.
Even if they do now begin to perceive as a consequence of a
belated Pisgah-sight from the cock-pit of a newly invented flying-
machine some glimmer of what the empire has been doing all the
time for them, as well as for their forefathers, their belated dis-
covery of the empire is even now not likely to extend very far
beyond the immediate neighbourhood of their own local habitat.
Will the local clue that has just been given them enable them to
infer that the empire that has swum into their ken has a vastly
wider ambit than the field of vision which has been opened up to
them by a single flight in an aeroplane circling just above their
home parish ? Have they the imagination to picture in their mind's
eye the long roads running from camp to camp, and through
forum and municipium, till they lead to Rome and out of Rome
again to the banks of the Danube and the Euphrates and to the
fringes of the Syrian and the Libyan desert? Can they conceive
of a Roman Peace which spreads its mantle over Dura and Duros-
torum and Timgad as well as over Verulam and Chester ? And can
they comprehend that the eifect which the Roman Empire is having
upon their own lives is also being exerted upon the lives of their
contemporaries in distant countries under different climes? It
hardly seems probable that a majority of the latter-day beneficiaries
of the Roman Empire will have gained even an inkling of the full
extent of the Roman domain, or of the full range of the Imperial
Government's operation, from their discovery of the presence of
a Roman camp within the bounds of their English parish; and we
can conceive of a state of affairs in which all knowledge of the
Roman Empire has been irretrievably lost; for even those physical
traces that are, as it happens, still visible from the air might easily
have vanished completely in the course of the centuries that went
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 161
by before aeroplanes were invented. If that had been the order of
events, and if our air-survey had therefore after all brought no
Roman camp into view on the site of our English village, would
this defeat for Archaeology have wiped off the slate of History
either the fact or the effect of the Roman Empire's existence ? The
answer is, of course, in the negative ; and the truth which we can
grasp in its mundane application to the Roman Empire can be seen
by analogy to be true of the Kingdom of God and of that King-
dom's King.
That was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into
the World. He was in the World, and the World was made by Him, and
the World knew Him not.? 1
To know Him and, through Him, the Kingdom over which
He reigns it is not enough for our yokel in his aeroplane to see
the World with the eye of a hawk. The man must be given an eye
which not only magnifies but also penetrates into other dimen-
sions. What he needs is the eye of a poet,
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour. 2
And the poet who has this vision of the transfiguration of This
World by the Kingdom of God must also be something of a pro-
phet, for he must have an intuition of the Godhead which poetry
alone cannot give him. The act of Transfiguration is a mystery
because it is an act of God and an effect of God's presence and
this is a truth which has been less obscure to the Jewish futurist
than to the Greek philosopher.
The world which was set forth in the philosophy of Poseidonius had
many features in common with the world of "Enoch", but "Enoch's"
world was not an end in itself. "Enoch" tells us of the World to show
us that everything in it is prepared for the inevitable Judgement of the
Most High. . . . There is no Great Day in the world of Poseidonius . ^ .
[and] this is the world that Israel refused to accept. The rarefied air
of the Stoic heaven was one in which the Jew did not easily breathe. . . .
He demanded an ultimate reward for his labour, even at the price of
punishment for his faults : otherwise the World seemed to him meaning-
less. And so, when the Jew does contemplate the World as a whole, as
is done in "Enoch", it is all placed under the eye of God, who made it
and whose Judgement upon it will give it its meaning. ... In the last
resort the difference between Poseidonius and "Enoch , between ^late
Hellenic Civilization and the Jews that refused to be dominated by it, is
symbolized in the sentence from the Fourth Book of Ezra, which says
i. 9-to. a Blake, William: Auguries of Innocence.
1 62 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
directly and in so many words: "The Most High hath not made one
world, but two". 1 This is the essential thing, the central doctrine that
animates all the Apocalypses And those who cling to the belief that
human history is not altogether meaningless and that it marches, how-
ever slowly and haltingly, to a definite goal, ought to regard the ideas
enshrined in books like "Enoch" with sympathy.' 2
In this revelation of a reality which the veil of Futurism masks
until it is rent, the relation between the Kingdom of God and-
This World can be seen now no longer in an image but direct
(albeit still darkly, through a glass) 3 as a manifestation of God's
all-pervading presence and activity.
world invisible, we view thee,
world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there ?
Not where the wheeling systems darken
And our benumbed conceiving soars!
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing. 4
But how in fact can God's will be done on Earth as it is in
Heaven? In the technical language of Theology the omnipresence
of God involves His immanence in This World and in every living
soul in it, as well as His transcendent existence on supra-mundane
planes of being. In the Christian conception of the Godhead His
transcendent aspect is displayed in God the Father and His im-
manent aspect in God the Holy Ghost; but the distinctive and
also crucial feature of the Christian Faith is the doctrine that th6
Godhead is not a Duality but a Trinity in Unity, and that in His
aspect as God the Son the other two aspects are unified in a Person
who, in virtue of this mystery, is as accessible to the human heart
as He is incomprehensible to the, human understanding. In the
person of Christ Jesus Very God yet also Very Man the divine
society and the mundane society have a common member who in
1 4 Ezra vii. 50.
2 Burkitt, F, C.:>wwA and Christian Apocalypses (London 1914, Milford), pp.
3 i Cor. xiu. 12. + Thompson, Francis: In No Strange Land.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 163
the order of This World is born into the ranks of the Proletariat
and dies the death of a malefactor, while in the order of the Other
World He is the King of God's Kingdom and a King who is God
Himself and not God's less-than-divine deputy. 1
^ Christian conception of Christ the King has points both of likeness to and of
difference from both of the two Jewish conceptions of Yahweh the King (see V. C (i)
(d) 9 (y), p. 126, footnote 5, above) on the one hand, and of the Messiah on the other.
Christ is, like Yahweh, a king who is also God; but at the same time Christ's divinity
differs from Yahweh's in being not exclusively transcendent; and on this account
Christ's kingship can be felt as a concrete and personal exercise of royal authority,
whereas the awful remoteness and aloofness of the God of Israel from his worshippers
makes it difficult for them to conceive of Yahweh's kingship as a real function which is
something more than a formal title of honour. In this point of realism and it is a point
of capital importance the figure of Christ the King bears less resemblance to that of
Yahweh the King than to that of the Messiah; and it is no accident that the very name
of Christ is derived historically from the title (in its Greek dress) of the king whose com-
ing was awaited by the Jewish futurists. The Christian idea of Christ's kingship agrees
with "the Jewish expectation of the Messiah's kingship in conceiving of the kingship as a
reality; but at the same time it differs from this Jewish expectation in believing the king
to be God instead of expecting him to be a man sent by God as His human deputy. This
point of difference-|-and it is of not less capital importance than the point of likeness
between the Christian view of Christ and the Jewish view of the Messiah comes out in
the significant fact that the connotation of the word 'Christ' has been exactly reversed
in the process of being taken over into the Christian out of the Jewish vocabulary, In
its literal and original meaning of 'the Lord's Anointed' the title 'Christ' signifies that
its bearer is himself some one other than, and lower than, God who has invested him
with his office. On the other hand, in the Christian usage the name 'Christ* signifies
that its bearer is God besides being the man who bears the name of Jesus. For a
Christian, -calling Jesus 'Christ' proclaims, Him to be God as well as man, while for a
Jew the addition of the title 'Christ' to the name Jesus would rule out the possibility of
Jesus being a god (e.g. one of the false gods worshipped by the Gentiles), and would
certify that he was a purely human emissary of Yahweh.
On this criterion the Zoroastrian figure of the SaoSyant or Son of Man, who is to be
the king of the Zwischenreich for the period of the Millennium (see V. C (i) (d) 9 (y),
pp. 136 and 130-1, above), is to be classed with the Jewish figure of the Messiah who is
to be the king of the future Jewish universal state, and not with the Christian figure of
Christ \Vho is the king of the Kingdom of God. It is true that the SaoSyant is credited
with certain apparently superhuman qualities and powers, but it is none the less clear
that he is conceived of as being, like the Jewish Messiah, both less than divine and other
than the One True God. The essential humanity of the SaoSyant is guaranteed by his
line *ge he is to be of the seed of Zarathustra, as the Messiah is to be of the seed of
David and his relation to Ahuramazda, like the relation of Yahweh's Anointed to
Yahweh, is that of an agent and emissary, not that of an aspect or avatar. (See Gall,
A. von: BaaiAeia rot? 0oO (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), index, s.w. Saosyant and
Menschensohn.) ,
In the Jewish conception of the Messiah the point of capital importance about his
birth is his legitimate descent in the male line from David, and this of course rules out
all idea of the Messiah being born of a virgin (see V. C (ii) (a), p, 268, footnote 5,
below). According to von Gall, op. cit., p. viii, however, Jesus rejected the role or the
Jewish Messiah in identifying himself with the Zoroastrian Son of Man, and, according
to the Zoroastrian Mythology (ibid., pp. iz6 and 418-19; cf. Meyer, E.: Ursprungund
Anfange des Christentums, vol. ii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 68), both the bon
of Man and the Primal Man, of whom the Son of Man is an avatar, are virgin-bom.
Apart from his virgin birth, the Zoroastrian Son of Man has other features and pre-
cn.ce uetween me indigenous jewisw wnucpuv** wi *~ ^* __
introduced by the importation, into Jewish minds, of the Zoroastnan <
Son of Man is pointed out by Lagrange, M.-J. : Le Messiamsme chez Us Jutfs (
GabaldaV p. 06: - * T,
<Le Messie . . . eleve k ces hauteurs, est d^sormais au niveau des conceptions escnato-
logiques les plus ^endues et les plus spiritualisdes. II y pourra ^.^^ *!?!
aisement que Tie Messie, fils de David, roi d'lsrael et conquest Mais il faut cons tatsr
aussi que ce n'est plus le meme personnage. Ce n'est pas une solutwn du P^? **
par des conceptions nouvelles et par la tradition sur 1'homme-Messie; cest 1 option
exclusive d'un des deux elements qu'il cut fallu conciher.
164 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
But how can two natures one divine and the other human be
both present at once in a single person? We must be able to give
some answer to this question if we are to be sure that we are not
just reciting a meaningless form of words when we say that the
link between the Kingdom of God and the Society of This World
consists in the possession of a common member who is truly
native to each of these two diverse spiritual climes. Answers, cast
in the form of creeds, have been worked out by Christian Fathers
in terms of the technical vocabulary of the Hellenic philosophers;
but this metaphysical line of approach to the problem is perhaps
not the only one open to us. We may find an alternative starting-
point in the postulate that the divine nature, in so far as it is
accessible to us, must have something in common with our own;
and, if we look for one particular spiritual faculty which we are
conscious of possessing in our own souls and which we also can
attribute with absolute confidence to God because God would be
spiritually inferior even to Man (quod est absurdum) if this faculty
were not in Him but \were nevertheless in us then the faculty
which we shall think of first as being common to Man and God
will be one which the philosophers wish to mortify, 1 and that is
the faculty of Love.
This stone which both Zeno and Gautama have so obstinately
rejected is become the head of the corner 2 of the temple of the
New Testament. 3 In the instruction given to Nicodemus, Love is
1 See V. C (i) (d) 10, pp. 145-8, and the present chapter, pp. 150-4, above.
2 Matt. xxi. 42 (quoting Ps. cxviii. 22). In this Study this text has been quoted
already in IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol, iv, p. 248, above.
3 Love has also become the axle-tree of the vehicle of the Mahayana; and its conquest
of Buddhism is more surprising than its outburst in Christianity; for the Christian
religion of Love is in conscious and deliberate revolt against the Stoic philosophy of
Detachment, whereas the Mahayanian religion of Love purports to be fulfilling the
Hinayanian law and not destroying it though, in Hinayanian eyes, the Mahayanian
Bodhisattva is a Hinayanian arhat manqut (see V. C (i) (rf) 10, p. 148, above). The
Bodhisatrva is in fact an arhat who, at the moment when his age-long efforts to attain
Detachment have brought him at last to the brink of Nirvana, refrains from immediately
entering into his rest through taking the final step that would precipitate him into the
bliss of self-annihilation, and decides, instead, to postpone the consummation of his
own spiritual career and this, may be, for countless ages more in order to devote
himself to the self-imposed task of helping other beings, by communicating to them
some of the light of his own enlightenment, to reach, and perhaps to pass, the verge on
which the Buddha-to-be now himself stands voluntarily poised (see Thomas, E. J.:
The History of Buddhist Thought (London 1933, Kegan Paul), pp. 169-72). A follower
of Christ will agree with the follower of the Mahayana that the Bodhisattva who, for
love of his fellows, forbears to drink of the liberating elixir of Lethe when the cup is at
his lips, is overcoming the Self in a far profounder sense than the arhat who exercises
his duly earned right to consummate his own self-annihilation without being deterred
by any pity for a groaning and travailing creation. The labour of Love to which the
Bodhisattva dedicates himself is not unworthy to be compared with the self-sacrifice of
Christ; and there is a Mahayanian counterpart of the Christian Kingdom of God in the
Paradise into which a being who finds himself in the toils of This World may be born
at his next birth if in his present life he has called, in a spirit of true faith, upon the
name of the Bodhisattva whose name is Amitabha ('Measureless Light') or Amitayus
('Measureless Life'). It is true that this analogy is imperfect. In the first place Arnida
is not God; m the second place his Paradise is not an eternal abode, but only a Zwischen-
retch beyond which the nonentity of Nirvana still patet immane et vasto respectat hiatu
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 165
revealed as being both the motive that moves God to redeem Man
at the price of incarnation and crucifixion, 1 and the means that
enables Man to win access to God. 2 The working of Love in
God's heart in moving God to suffer death on the Cross is
brought out in the Synoptic Gospels in their account of the cir-
cumstances in which Jesus announces to His disciples that His
destiny is the Passion instead of being a Jewish Messiah's conven-
tional worldly success. He forbears to reveal to them this, for
them, appalling truth until His divinity has been guessed by Peter
and has been manifested in the Transfiguration; but, as soon as
He has made His epiphany as God, He at once breaks silence
about His Passion. 3 The meaning of these revelations in this
sequence surely is that a Love which loves to the death is the
essence of God's nature. As for the working of Love in human
hearts as a means of access for Man to God, it is extolled as the
sovereign and sole indispensable means to this supreme end of
Man in the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle of Paul the
Apostle to the Corinthians. And, if we try to take a comprehensive
view of the constitution of the Civitas Dei, and inquire what
miraculous spiritual force it is that makes it possible for its diverse
members, human and divine, to dwell together in unity, 4 we find
that Love is the life-blood of this supra-mundane body social and
the arcanum imperil 5 of its divine king. The secret is divulged in
the fourth chapter of the First Epistle General of John. The love
of God for Man as manifested to Man in Christ Crucified
calls out in Man an answering love for God ; and this love of Man
for God (which is also a manifestation of the spirit of a God-
head who is immanent in the Soul of Man, as He is in all things) 6
(Eliot, Sir Charles: Japanese Buddhism (London 1935, Arnold), p. 106); and in the
third place the bliss of Amida's 'Pure Land' is depicted as that of a sort of ethenal
Lotus-Eaters' Garden of Eden (ibid.), lite the bliss enjoyed by the Hellenic gods in
the Epicurean intermundia (see V. C (i) (d) 10, p. 144, above). There is, however, one
feature of capital importance that is common to the Civitas Dei as conceived of by barat
Augustine and to the Paradise of Amida as conceived of by, for example, Ryoyo bhogei
(vivebat\.v. 1314-1420), a Japanese Mahayanian Father who was the Seventh Patriarch
of the Jodo Sect (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 96-103, above), and who taught that
'Amida is omnipresent and his Paradise is simply absolute reality if we can change our
" ' ' nines as they really are, we can be in the Pure Land here and
for the Japanese adaptation of the Mahayanian cult c
pp. 96-103, above.)
i John iii. 13-17. t * John iii. 3-8.
3 For this association between Jesus's prediction of His Passion and the immediately
antecedent revelations of His divinity see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 74, and ". C (i) i W) i,
vol. v, pp. 392-3 above, and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, in the present volume, p. 383, below.
4 K email, x. * Tacitus: Annals, Book II, chap.. 36-
6 This love of Man for God, which is both a response to, and a manifestation of, Ood s
*
(*
,
love for Man, is expounded as follows by Saint Thomas Aquinas: S
2, a, 2 ae. Q. 24. Art. 2: 'Charity (Caritas) is a kind of friendship -
towards God, whicH is founded upon the communication [b y God .to Man] of eternal
bliss. This communication, however, is of the order, not of the gifts of Nature, but ot
i66 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
flows on Earth along the channel of Man's love for his human
brother.
'Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No
man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth
in us and His love is perfected in us.' 1
In virtue of this Love which is equally human and divine and
which is therefore able to circulate through all the members of the
Civitas Dei, the Kingdom of God has a peace of its own which is
not the philosophic peace of Detachment. 2 It is in these negative
terms that the Peace of God is enigmatically proclaimed by Christ
the King:
'Peace I leave with you ; my peace I give unto you. Not as the World
giveth give I unto you.' 3
The riddle is wrestled with and read, perhaps, as far as it can
be read by human minds on Earth in the following passage of
Saint Augustine's magnum opus:
'The peace of the Heavenly Commonwealth (caelestis dvitatis) is a
perfectly organized and perfectly harmonious common participation in
the enjoyment of God and of one another in God (societas fruendi Deo et
invicem in Deo)* . . . The commonwealth of the irreligious, in which
the gifts of Grace, because, as is written in Romans vi. 23, "the gift of God is eternal 4
life*'. It follows that Charity itself likewise exceeds the capacity of Nature; but some-
thing that exceeds the capacity of Nature cannot either be natural or be acquired through
natural faculties, because a natural effect cannot transcend its own cause. It follows that
Charity cannot either be implanted in us by Nature or be acquired by haturakpowers.
It can only be acquired by an incoming of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father
and the Son, and whose indwelling in us is identical with the creation of Charity in us
(cwus partidpatio in nobis est ipsa Caritas creata).'
This divine transfiguration of the human Soul has also been described by Plato
(Theaetetus t 176 A-B) in words that he puts into the mouth of Socrates:
'Evil cannot cease to be, for there must ever be something that is the -antithesis of the
good; and it cannot be situate in Heaven; so it must necessarily haunt This World and
prey upon Mortality. So one must seek to fly, as quickly as may be, hence thither. This
&e> Kara TO owarov). -And becoming like to God means becoming rationally righteous
and holy (opotwais d StWov /cat oaiov fiera foovrjoeats ywcoOcu).' In these three sen-
tences Plato successively rejects the mundane Utopias of Archaism and Futiirism; takes
the path of Detachment; and pushes on to the goal of Transfiguration without halting
at the station of Nirvana. If he had added, with Saint Thomas, that Transfiguration
(ofMuoais) cannot be achieved by Man's natural powers, but only by a gift "of God's
grace, this passage would have been completely Christian. And in another passage
(Letters, No. 7, 341 C-D), where he writes of 'light caught from a leaping flame', he has
come very near to describing the miracle of Pentecost. Transfiguration is, as we have
seen (in III. C (u) (a), vol. iii, pp. 245-6, above), the ideal relation for which Mimesis
an unsatisfactory substitute. If we now ask ourselves what it is in Transfiguration that
Mimesis lacks, we shall answer, with Saint Thomas, that it is the gift of God's grace.
1 i John iv. ii-i2. For the modern Western philosopher Bergson's intuition of the
truth that a commori love for the One True God is the only feeling that can effectively
take the place, and fulfil the function, of that common hatred of some human enemy
which is the emotional bond between the members of a primitive society, see V. C (i),
(d) 7, pp. X2-I3, above, and Part VII, below.
2 For the contrast which Epictetus draws between the Pax Augusta and the Pax
Zenomca see V. C (i) (J) 7, pp. 3 and 16, footnote 2, and V. C (i) (d) 10, p. 142,
abv 3
u . ,*...,. , , on xv. 27.
* llu A 8 definition is also given, in the same words, in the passage quoted in V. C (i)
u, Annex II, p. 367, below. A.J.T.
SCHISM IN THE SOUL 167
God does not bear rule or receive obedience an obedience that con-
sists in offering sacrifice to Him alone, so that the mind rules the body,
and the reason the vices, with uprightness and loyalty such a common-
wealth will be without the reality of justice. For, although the mind may
appear to be ruling the body, and the reason the vices, quite creditably,
neither of them will be at all properly fulfilling its task if it is not itself
serving God in the way in which God 'Himself has ordained that He
should be served. For how can a soul be mistress of the body and of the
vices if it is ignorant of the True God and is not amenable to His
rule? . . . The very virtues that it believes itself to possess the virtues
through which it rules the body and the vices are vices rather than
virtues if this soul addresses them to the winning or the holding of any-
thing except God. For, while some people consider that the virtues are
genuine and sincere precisely when they are addressed to themselves
and are not cultivated for any ulterior object, the truth is that in such
conditions they become puffed up and conceited, and are accordingly
to be accounted not virtues but vices. What gives life to a physical
organism is something which does not proceed from it but which is
above it; and, analogously, what gives happiness in life to a human
being is something which does not proceed from human nature but
which is above human nature.' 1
The last sentence of this passage perhaps points to the solution
of that spiritual problem which is inexorably presented to the Soul
by the poignant experience of mundane life in a disintegrating
society. We have found that it is impossible to escape from an
intolerable Present either by taking flying leaps up or down the
stream of Time or again by seeking to achieve a complete Detach-
ment from life at the cost of annihilating the Self. We have now
gained a glimpse of an alternative way of life which does promise
'to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to
guide our feet into the way of peace* ; 2
and this happy issue out pf our afflictions is to b6 found in enroll-
ing ourselves as citizens of a Civitas Dei of which Christ Crucified
is king. This way of taking our departure from the City of Destruc-
tion is not an act of truancy; it is 'a withdrawal according to plan' ;
and the plan as Christ's Passion proclaims is not to save our-
selves by escaping from a dangerous and painful mundane en-
tanglement, but to seize the initiative hi order, at our own peril,
to save the City of Destruction from its Jdoom by converting it
to the Peace of God. For the human citizen of the City of God
who is still in the flesh, this movement of spiritual withdrawal-
and-return may entail if the soldier is singled out for special
1 Saint Augustine: De CivitaU Dei, Book XIX, chaps. 13, 24, and 25-
2 Luke i. 79.
168 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
honour an act, not of truancy, but of martyrdom; but the
martyr's goal is not Gautama's goal of self-annihilation: it is
Christ's goal of self-fulfilment through self-surrender. *Xo this
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the World/ 1
The member of a disintegrating mundane society who has taken
this road has a surer hope, and therefore a deeper happiness, than
the merely 'once-born' member of a mundane society that is still
in growth; for he has learnt the saving truths that 'the Most High
hath not made one world, but two', 2 and that the human wayfarer
who still finds himself a sojourner in This World is not on that
account beyond the pale of the Other World but is travelling all
the time within the domain of the Kingdom of God and is at
liberty to live as a citizen of this omnipresent commonwealth here
and now, if he is willing with all his heart to pay allegiance to
Christ the King and to take upon himself those obligations of
citizenship which Christ has consecrated by voluntarily fulfilling
them in person. This entry into the Kingdom of God is a second
birth; 3 and, for the 'once-born' denizen of This World, the dis-
covery that it is possible to obtain this freedom 4 is like finding
treasure hid in a field, or finding one pearl of great price. 5 Such
a trove is to be bought even at the cost of selling all that the finder
has. And the reckoning of spiritual values that is made in these
two parables of the Kingdom of God has been anticipated by the
testimony of the first and greatest and most Christian of all the
Hellenic philosophers:
Tn the struggle that will decide whether good or evil is to prevail in
us the issue is immeasurably greater than at first sight it might seem to
be; and therefore we must not allow ourselves to be carried away by
anything in the World not by honours, not by riches, not by power,
and not by poetry either. For none of these things is worth the price of
neglecting Righteousness and the rest of what constitutes Virtue. . . .
We must do everything that lies in our power to attain to Virtue and
Wisdom in This Life. The prize is so splendid and the hope is so
great.' 6
1 John xyiii. 37- * 4 Ezra vii. 50, quoted already on p. 162, above.
3 John iii. 3-8. 4 Acts ;mi. 28. s Matt. xiii. 44-6.
6 Plato: Respttblica, 608 B, and Phaedo, 114 c, These two passages are brought into
this relation with each other by More, P. E., in Christ the Word = The Greek Tradition
from the Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon: 3W B.C.-A.D 451, vol. iv {Prince-
10^1927, University Press), p. 17$, footnote 8 , The original Greek runs: Mzya.* . . . o'
aytav, . v> ^eyas, y oux poo$ 5o*ei ( TO Yo^arov 17 KC/COV yeveatfai, wore ovrt npij crrapB^ra
ovre Ywj/zaoiy ovre apw ouoetu.^ ovoe ye irovqrutfi agiov apsXijaaj, SIKOIOOWT;? re KOI
T>TS aAAijs 1 aperies (608 B) . . . aMa . . . ^prj . . , -jrdv irotelv cuare apcrfjs /ecu </)pov3Jcrect>$ ev
TO) ia> ^raaxelv KoXbv yap TO <0Aov *al 17 eAms ftcyaAi? (1140). With these passages
of Plato, JVIore, in^loc. cit., brings into comparison Sophocles: Electro, 11, 1491 a : Aoycov
yap ov\vvv eoriv dyojv, oMd <rrj$ ifwxfjs -rrepC, and also Saint Athanasius: Ep. ad Episc.
Aegypti^et Libyae, chap. 21 (Migne, J.-P.: Patrologia Graeca, vol. xxv, col. 588): <$
TOU 7Tpi Travros ovros r}fj.lv aywvos. The same reckoning of spiritual values is to be found
in Mark vui. 36-7 (= Matt. xvi. 26, and Luke ix. 25), and in Lucretius' : De Rerunt JWatura.
Book III, 11. 1071-5 (already quoted in I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 55, footnote 3, above).
PALINGENESIA Z 6 9
(e) PALINGENESIA
We have now completed our survey 1 of four experimental ways
of life which are so many exploratory attempts, to find some practi-
cable alternative to a familiar habit of living and moving at ease in
a growing civilization. When this comfortable road has been
remorselessly closed by the catastrophe of a social breakdown,
these four ways present themselves as the alternative possible
by-passes. One piece of knowledge that we have gained from our
survey of them is some notion of the essential differences between
their respective natures.
We have found that the paths of Archaism and Futurism are
two alternative substitutes for the growth of a civilization which
are both of them incompatible with growth of any kind, since they
both deliberately aim at a breach of continuity, and the principle
of continuity is of the essence of the movement of growth in what-
ever terms we may try to describe or define it. Archaism is an
attempt to take a flying leap out of the mundane Present back-
\vards into an already vanished mundane Past, while Futurism is
an attempt to take a similar leap forwards into a still invisible
mundane Future. In both of these tours de force the would-be
breach of continuity is precisely what makes the spiritual acro-
batic feat attractive to those souls that attempt it; and the common
vice of Futurism and Archaism is thus not only manifest but also
manifestly fatal. Futurism and Archaism are sheer negations of
growth, and that is the whole of their tragedy. On the other hand,
Detachment and Transfiguration, which are another pair of alter-
native substitutes for the swan-path of a growing civilization, both
differ alike from Archaism and from Futurism in what is the
capital point; for, unlike Archaism and Futurism, Detachment and
Transfiguration are both of them reactions to the breakdown of a
civilization which are still, in themselves, ways of growth if we
are to judge by the criterion of growth that we have tried to work
out in an earlier part of this Study. 2
The essential feature in which the movements of Detachment
and Transfiguration diverge from those of Archaism and Futurism
is, as we have seen, that they are not attempts to escape from the
Present without abandoning the level of mundane life, but are
endeavours to act upon a belief that there can be no salvation
from that sickness of the Soul which the breakdown of a civilization
brings to light through any less radical remedy than a change of
spiritual clime or dimension; 3 and this is another way of saying
i In V. C (i) (<f) 8-1 r, above.
* See Part III. C (i) (c) and (d\ vol. :ii, pp. 174-2*7, above.
3 See V, C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 394, above.
x 7 o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
that both Detachment and Transfiguration are examples of that
'transference of the field of action* from the Macrocosm to the
Microcosm which manifests itself qualitatively in the spiritual
phenomenon of 'etherialization'. 1 If we are right in believing that
these are, symptoms of growth, and right again in believing that
every example of human growth will always be found to have a
social as well as an individual aspect, 2 and if we are also bound
to assume ex hypothesi that the society to whose growth the move-
ments of Detachment and Transfiguration thus bear witness can-
not be any society of the species 'civilizations' considering that
a disintegrating society of that species is the City of Destruction
from which either movement is an endeavour to escape then we
can only conclude that the movements of Detachment and Trans-
figuration bear witness to the growth of a society, or societies, of
some other kind or kinds.
Is the singular or the dual the right number to use in referring
to the social medium in which our two movements of Detachment
and Transfiguration take place ? The best way to approach this
question may be to ask ourselves another: What is the difference
between the two movements of Detachment and Transfiguration
in terms of social growth ? If they are both of them manifestations
of social growth and yet are different from one another, does their
difference reflect a distinction between two species of society which
differ specifically from one another as well as from the species
called 'civilizations' ? Or does the difference between Detachment
and Transfiguration reflect a difference of social growth which is
not one of kind but merely one of degree ? Are the two movements
both of them manifestations of the growth of a single species of
society and perhaps even of a single unique representative of this
species at two different points on a course that runs through a
succession of stages from genesis towards prime ? When we put
our question in this way, we shall see that we already have grounds
for giving it the second of the two possible answers; for we have
already apprehended 3 though this not yet in terms of growth
but so far only in terms of direction the relation which our
two movements bear to one another. While Detachment is a
simple movement of sheer withdrawal, Transfiguration is a com-
pound movement whose first beat is likewise a withdrawal but
whose second beat is a return. The difference between an act of
1 See Part III. C (i) (c) and (d), vol. iii, pp. 174-217, above.
2 This belief follows from the fact that Man is 'by nature a social animal*, in the
sense that Man's pre-human ancestors did not, and could not, become human until they
had first attained to sociality. (For Aristotle's thesis and Eduard Meyer's argujcnent in
favour of it see I. C (iii) (c), vol. i, p. 173, footnote 3, above.)
3 In V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 394-7; V. C (i) (d) 10, in the present volume,
and V. C (i) (d) n, p. 151, footnote 4, above.
pp. 132-3;
PALINGENESIA 171,
withdrawal and an act of withdrawal-and-return 1 is riot a difference
between one road and another but merely a difference in the
number of stages traversed. And these two different degrees of
progress may both be attained on a single road along which both
the travellers are moving in the same direction.
The actual identity of the road in the case of the two progresses
here in question can be tested and confirmed by taking account of
the goal. We have seen what is the goal of that movement of
withdrawal-and-return which we have called Transfiguration. The
aim of Transfiguration is to give light to them that sit in darkness 2
and to make the darkness comprehend this light that is shining in
it; 3 and this aim is pursued by seeking the Kingdom of God in
order to bring its life, which is 'the light of men',* into action or
rather into visibility, since God is in action always and every-
wherein the field of life in This World. The goal of Trans-
figuration is thus the Kingdom of God. And there is a manifest
difference, which is not just one of place but rather one of dimen-
sion and of kind; between this Civitas Dei and the pair of mundane
Utopias a 'City of Cecrops' and a 'City of the Sun' that are the
respective goals of Archaism and of Futurism. But what is the
relation between the Civitas Dei and the Nirvana that is the goal
of Detachment ? Are these two supra-mundane goals of human
endeavour two mutually exclusive alternatives ? Or is only one of
the two truly a goal, while the other is merely a halting-place on
the way ? We have seen already that the second of these two
theoretical possibilities is the fact. The Hinayanian Buddhist
arhat, for whom Nirvana is the be-all and end-all, is, in terms of
Bergson's simile, 5 like the driver of a locomotive who has mistaken
a station for the terminus; and the arhat's misapprehension is
shared by the Bodhisattva.who, out of compassion towards other
living beings, stays poised on the brink of Nirvana for aeons of
aeons. The Bodhisattva is like an engine-driver who, having come
within view of the station and having seen that the signal just this
side of it permits him to pass, pulls up at the signal-box and
quixotically sets the signal against himseE But there is also
another driver whose train is neither the Hinayana nor the Miaha-
yana, and that is the Christian mystic who recognizes the station
for what it is and manfully opens the throttle again, after the
mdmentary pause which the time-table prescribes, without being
deterred by the blackness of the tunnel that engulfs the track
1 The nature of this compound motif of Withdrawal-and-Return has been examined
in III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 248-63, above.
2 Luke i. 79, 3 John i. 5. * John i. 4.
s See the passage of Bergson that has been quoted in III. C (iij(j), vol. iii, pp. 234~5
above.
172 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
when this station has been left behind. This driver knows that
he has not yet reached the terminus; and his will to reach it is
so strong that it carries him through that 'dark night' in which the
road that leads to the goal of the movement of Transfiguration
makes its crucial reversal of direction from 'withdrawal' towards
'return'. 1
It would thus appear that, in bearing witness to the growth of
some kind of society that is neither a civilization nor a Utopia, the
two movements of Detachment and Transfiguration are two pieces
of evidence for a single passage of life. Both of them are reactions
to the disintegration of a civilization; and, in the imagery of the
Sinic Weltanschauung, the disintegration of a civilization discharges
itself, as we have seen, in a full cycle of the alternating rhythm of
Yin-and-Yang. 2 In the first beat of the rhythm a Yang-movement
which has been destructive passes over into a Yin-state which is
a peace of exhaustion; but the rhythm is not arrested at the dead
point (as the philosophy of Detachment seeks to quench Life in
Nirvana) ; it passes over again from the Yin-state into a Yang-
movement which, this time, is not destructive but is creative (like
the Christian Faith that carries the Soul on beyond Detachment
into Transfiguration). This double beat of the rhythm of Yin-
and-Yang is that rendering of the motif of Withdrawal-and-Return
on which we stumbled not far from the beginning of the present
Part of our Study, and for which we there provisionally coined the
name of Schism-and-Palihgenesia.3 Our intervening study of
'schism* first in the Body Social and then in the Soul has been
long and laborious; but it has led us to the threshold of *palin-
genesia' at last.
In this Study the word 'palingenesia', like the word 'proletariat', 4
has been commandeered to serve our purpose ; and in, the act of
laying hands upon it we have noted 5 that its literal meaning
'recurrence of birth' has in it an element of ambiguity. The
'recurrence' might refer exclusively to the event of birth or alter-
natively its reference might extend to the nature of the thing born;
and, while in the latter use the word 'palingenesia' would mean a
repetitive rebirth of something that has been born before, in the
former use it would mean an unprecedented new birth of some-
thing that is now being born for the first time. We have observed
1 See the passages quoted from Bergson in loc. cit. and in III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii,
pp. 255-6, above.
2 For Yin-and-Yang see Part II. B, vol. i, pp. 201-4; for the analysis of the dis-
integration of a civilization in terms of Yin-and-Yang see V. C (i) (b), vol. v, p. 26, above,
3 In V. C (i) (b), vol. v, p. 27, above.
* For the sense in which the word 'proletariat* sused in this Study see I. B 1 (iv),
vol. i, p. 41, footnote 3, above.
s In V. C (i) (b), vol. v, p. 27, footnote 2, above.
PALINGENESIA 173
in the same place that a recurrent birth of some identical thing was
probably the idea in the minds of the Stoic philosophers by whom
(as far as can be ascertained) the word 'palingenesia* was originally
coined; but we have kept a free hand for ourselves to use the word
in our own context in either of two meanings that are both of them
equally legitimate. We have now to decide for ourselves which of
the alternative meanings we are to adopt.
Are we to use 'palingenesia' in the sense of a rebirth of the actual
civilization that is in course of disintegration ? This would be a
literal application of one of the two possible meanings of the word ;
but this cannot be our meaning; for it is a meaning which expresses
the aim, not of Transfiguration, but of Archaism. 1
Then is our 'palingenesia' to mean, not, perhaps, the literal
rebirth of an existing civilization that is in disintegration, but the
replacement of this now irretrievably damaged specimen by
another representative of the same species ? This cannot be our
meaning either ; for that is the aim, not of Transfiguration, but of
Futurism ; and, if the process is repeated ad infinitum and is trans-
lated from the mundane on to the cosmic scale, the result is the
cyclic rhythm 2 which, in the history of Hellenic thought, was
proclaimed to be the fundamental 'law' of the Universe by Stoic
and Epicurean philosophers who apparently were not put out by
the incongruity between their rotativist conception of the nature of
Reality and their ethical aim of Detachment.
The Indie philosophers who have pursued the same aim have
had the courage to bend their theories into conformity with it, and
have set themselves to break the Wheel of Existence as the only
sure way of escape from being broken on it. Is the Nirvana that
is attained by a complete extinction of desire the 'palingenesia*
that we have in mind? No, that is impossible; for Nirvana and
'palingenesia' are terms that are mutually exclusive. The very
definition of Nirvana is that this is the state that supervenes when
birth has ceased to recur; and, however far-fetched the imagery to
which we may have recourse in attempting the impossible feat of
depicting *a perfect and absolute blank', we can be certain before-
hand that this particular image will have no place in our picture.
1 In this archaistic meaning TroAtyycveata is synonymous with aTTOKaraarams the
noun of which the verb is used La Mark ix. 12 : 'Elias verily cometh first and restoreth
hings.' In the Jewish Weltanschauung of Jesus's age this archaistic
. all things.'
'restoration' was not an end in itself, but was merely a prelude to the fulfilment of the
futuristic hope of a Messianic kingdom; and the Archaism had accordingly acquired a
certain Messianic tinge. Elias' restoration of Israel to its state in the age before the
beginning of the Syriac 'Time of Troubles' was to be not just a restoration but a super-
naturally glorified revision of the vanished past (see V. C (i) (<*) 9 (y)> PP- i3-i
2 For the cyclic theory of the rhythm of the Universe see IV. C (i), vol. iv, pp. 23-38,
above.
174 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Nirvana may be a new state whether of existence or of non-
existenCe or of both or of neither but the process by which this
state of absolute negativity is reached cannot be conceived of as
a 'birth' by any stretch of the imagination.
There is one other alternative meaning which the word 'palin-
genesia' can bear. If it means neither the rebirth of a disintegrating
mundane society nor the new birth of another representative of the
same mundane species nor yet the attainment of a supra-mundane
state which is reached by escaping from all birth of every kind, it
can only mean an attainment of another supra-mundane state to
which the image of birth can be illuminatingly applied because
this other state is a positive state of life though this in a higher
spiritual dimension than the life of This World. That is the
'palingenesia' of which Jesus speaks to Nicodemus, 1 and wliich He
proclaims in another place in the same Gospel as the sovereign
aim of His own birth in the flesh.
4 I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly.' 2
That is a 'palingenesia' in which the work of creation is resumed,
but not as a 'vain repetition*.
Neuen Lebenslauf
Beginne
Mit hellem Sinne,
Und neue Lieder
Tonen darauf. 3
The theogony which the Muses had once recited to one of the
shepherds of Ascira at the moment when a growing Hellenic
Civilization had been bursting into flower 4 finds its antiphony in
another theogony which was sung to shepherds of Bethlehem by
* John iii. 3-8. 2 John x. 10.
3 Goethe: Faust, II. 1622-6, quoted already in II. C (ii) (ft) I, vol. i, p. 289, above.
Dey, J.: /TaAiy^evefffa (Munster i. W. 1937, Aschendorff), pp. 161-2 and 167 8, points
, out that, in Saint Paul's theology, the spiritual rebirth of the Soul is conceived of
as the beginning of a process, not as the end of one. This Pauline 'palingenesia* does not
bring with it a simultaneous and instantaneous spiritual perfection. It rather introduces
into the Soul a spiritual leaven, and Time and Effort are of the essence of the subsequent
process of leavening the lump.
* In retrospect it is manifest that Hesiod's poetry is a product of the- eve of the^ brief
flowering- time- of the Hellenic culture; but such an account of Hesiod's place in history
would have astonished and exasperated the poet himself. Hesiod believed that he was
living in the last stage of a long course of social decline; and his cry of anguish (Works
and Days, 11. 174-201) at the harrowing thought that he has been born into the Iron Age
is the most poignant passage of any in his surviving poems. Was Hesiod tragically mis-
taking the ferment of growth for the disintegration of decay ? Or was he anticipating, in
a flash of intuition, one of the two possible answers to a question which was to be pro-
pounded by Pkto long .afterwards, on the morrow of the Hellenic Society's break-
down? Plato once asked himself, as we have seen (in IV. C (i), Annex, vol. iv, pp. 585-8,
above), whether the true catastrophe of a civilization might prove to be its rise and hot
its fall. Was Hesiod answering this question before it had been framed ?
PALINGENESIA I75
angels 1 at a moment when a disintegrating Hellenic Society was
suffering the last of the agonies of its Time of Troubles' and was
falling into the coma of a universal state. The birth of wfaich the
angels then sang was not a rebirth of Hellas and not a new birth
of other societies of the Hellenistic species. It was the birth in the
flesh of the King of the Kingdom of God.
(II) AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION
(d) THE RELATION BETWEEN DISINTEGRATING CIVILIZATIONS
AND INDIVIDUALS
The Creative Genius as a Saviour.
The problem of the relation between civilizations and indivi-
duals has already engaged our attention in the course of pur
attempt, in an earlier part of this Study, 2 to analyse the process
of growth; and, now that we have come to the point at which we
must attempt to make a corresponding analysis of the process of
disintegration, the same problem presents itself again. This time,
however, we need not start from first principles, as we found it
advisable to start when the problem confronted us- first; for the
elements of this problem are the same in both sets of circumstances.
If the institution which we call a society consists in the common
ground between the respective fields of action of a number 6f
individual souls, 3 then we may take it that this is its constant and
uniform consistency so long as it is in existence at all. In respect
of this fundamental point it makes no difference whether the
society happens to be in growth or in disintegration. In either of
these two possible phases of social life it is equally true that the
source of action is never the society itself, but is always some
individual soul; 4 that the action which is an act of creation is
always performed by a soul which is in some sense a superhuman
genius; 5 that the genius expresses himself, like every living soul,
through action upon his fellows; 6 that in any society the creative
personalities are always in a minority; 7 and that the action of the
genius upon souls of common clay operates more rarely by the
perfect method of direct illumination than through the second-
best expedient of a kind of social drill which enlists the faculty of
mimesis in the souls of the uncreative rank-and-file and thereby
1 For this assonance between- Hesiod: Theogony, 1L 1-34, and Luke ii. 8-20, see
further V. C (i) (d) u, Annex I, pp. 363-4* below.
2 In IIL C (ii) (a), vol. iii, pp. 217-48, above.
a For this definition of what a society really is, see ibid., p. 230, above.
4 Ibid., pp. 230-1, above. 5 J?d., pp. 232-4, above.
6 Ibid, pp. 234-7 above. 7 Ibid., pp. 237-44, above.
176 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
enables them to perform 'mechanically' an evolution which they
could not have performed on their own initiative. 1 All this is
ground that is fundamental to the problem of the relation between
a civilization and the individual souls that are its 'members', what-
ever the phase through which the civilization may be passing ; and,
since we have covered this ground already, we need not go over it
again, but may proceed at once to look into the more superficial
features in which the fundamentally constant and uniform relation
between the society and the individual does differ according to
whether the society happens to be moving in one or the other of
its two alternative directions.
What differences, then, can we detect? Do we find, for instance,
that, when a society stops growing and begins to disintegrate, the
individuals who take the lead are no longer creative personalities ?
If the change from growth to disintegration did involve such a
change as this in the nature of the society's leadership, then that
would be a difference which could hardly be treated as superficial;
but as a matter of fact we have discovered already that the differ-
ence in the leadership of a society when it is growing and when it
is disintegrating is not the difference between creativity and the
absence of it. For, while it is true that one of the symptoms of
social breakdown and causes of social schism is the degenera-
tion of a minority that has been able to take the lead in virtue of
being creative into a minority that attempts to retain the lead by
sheer physical domination, 2 we have also seen that the Seces-
sion of the Proletariat which is the answer that the Dominant
Minority evokes from the members of the society whom it shuts
out from its now closed and privileged circle is achieved under the
leadership of creative personalities for whose activity there is now
no scope except in the organization of opposition to the incubus
of uncreative powers that be. 3 Thus the change from social
growth to social disintegration is not accompanied either as cause
or as effect by an extinction of the creative spark in the souls of
individuals or by a change from creative, to uncreative leadership.
Creative personalities continue to arise and also continue to take
the lead in virtue of their creative power. All that happens is that
they now find themselves compelled to do their old work from a
new loots standi in a society which, in breaking down, has been
rent by a schism.
1 III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, pp. 244-8, above.
2 For this degeneration of a creative into a dominant minority see I. C (i) (a), vol. i,
pp. 53-5; V. C (i) (a), vol. v, pp. 17-20; and V. C (i) (c) i, vol. v, pp. 3558, above.
For the inherent weakness in the device of mimesis which is at least partly responsible
for this disaster see III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, pp. 245-8; III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 374; and
IV. C (iii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 122-33, above.
3 See V. C (i) (6), vol. v, pp. 29-35, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 177
Then does the difference lie in the occasion that brings a poten-
tial creativity into action ? In a growing civilization, as we have
seen, 1 a creative personality comes into action by taking the lead
p. making a successful response to some challenge which confronts
{jim in common with the uncreative rank-and-file of the society of
^hich they are all Members'. In a disintegrating civilization
Challenge-and-Response is still the mould of action in which the
^ystery of creation takes place, 2 but the creative leader's task now
Begins at a different stage and has a different objective. In a grow-
ing civilization the creator is called upon to play the part of a con-
queror who replies to a challenge with a victorious response; in
a, disintegrating civilization the same creator is called upon to play
the part of a saviour who comes to the rescue of a society that has
failed to respond because the challenge has worsted a minority
that has ceased to be creative and that has sunk into being merely
dominant. Perhaps we have here put our finger upon the true
nature of the change in the relation between the rank-and-file
of a society and its creative leader when the society passes out of
growth into disintegration. It is a difference in the character of
the spiritual warfare that the society is waging. In terms of this
military simile a growing society is taking the offensive and there-
fore looks for the leadership of a conqueror who will show it how
to capture fresh ground for its advance, whereas a disintegrating
society is trying to stand on the defensive and therefore requires
its leader to play the more thankless but by the same token
perhaps also more heroic part of a saviour who will show it how
to hold its ground in a rearguard action.
It follows that, in a disintegrating society, the would-be saviour
\vill appear in diverse guises that Will vary with his choice of his
defensive strategy and tactics. There will be would-be saviours of
a disintegrating society who will refuse to despair of the Present
and will lead forlorn hopes in an endeavour to turn the tide and to
convert the rout into a fresh advance, without being willing to
'retreat according to plan' for the sake of even temporarily breaking
off contact with an enemy who has at any rate momentarily gained
the upper hand. There will also be saviours from a disintegrating
society who will seek salvation along one or other of four alternative
possible ways of escape which we have reconnoitred already. 3
The saviours who belong to these other four schools will all agree
In ruling out the idea of trying to hold the present front line, and
a fortiori the idea of trying to push it forward. They will all begin
i In II. C (ii) (5), vol. i, pp. 271-338, and Part II. D, vol. ii, passim, above,
Challenge-and-Response cannot fail to be found anywhere where there is
since our formula is simply a description of Life itself in terms of Will.
3 In V. C (i) (d) 8-1 1, pp. 49-168, above.
178 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
operations by executing a strategic retreat from the disintegrating
social structure of the mundane Present; but it is only in this first
negative step that they will take the same line. The saviour-
archaist and the saviour-futurist will try to evade the problem of
facing defeat by attempting to elude the enemy altogether. The
archaist will seek to elude him by making a forced inarch to a
position so far to the archaisf s own rear, and so deeply ensconced
in the jungle-clad fastnesses of the Past, that the enemy will never
be able to follow him up. The futurist will seek to achieve the
same result by the bolder method of putting his troops on board
aeroplanes and landing them far in the rear, not of his own lines,
but of the enemy's. There remain the two alternative strategies
of Detachment and Transfiguration, and the saviour from a dis-
integrating society who "follows one or the other of these will
appear in quite a different guise. Along the path of Detachment
he will present himself as a philosopher taking cover behind the
mask of a king, and along the path of Transfiguration as a god in-
carnate in a man. 1 Let us try to apprehend the present object of our
study as he passes through this series of Protean metamorphoses,
The Saviour with the Sword.
The would-be saviour of a disintegrating society is necessarily
a saviour with a sword; but a sword may be either drawn or
sheathed, and the swordsman may be discovered in either of two
corresponding postures. Either he may be laying about him with
naked weapon in hand, like the Gods in combat with the Giants
as they are depicted on the Delphic or on the Pergamene frieze,
or else he may be sitting in state, with his blade out of sight in its
scabbard, as a victor who has 'put all enemies under his feet'. 2
The second of these postures is the end towards which the first
is a means; and, though a David or a Herakles, who never rests
from his labours until he dies in harness, may be a more romantic
figure than a Solomon in all his glory or a Zeus in all his majesty,
the labours of HeraklSs and the wars of David would be aimless
exertions if the serenity of Zeus and the prosperity of Solomon
were not their objectives. The sword is only wielded in the hope
of being able to use it to such good purpose that it may eventually
have no more work to do ; but this hope is an illusion; for it is only
in fairyland that swords cut Gordian knots which cannot be untied
byfingers. * All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword' 3
1 According to Pauly-Wissowa: Real-Encyclopadie der Klassischen Altertumszuissen-
schaft, 2nd edition, Halbband v, col. 1215, this conception of the Saviour as a god incar-
tiate is an Oriental idea which is foreign to the connotation of the Greek word, acorrjp in
its original Hellenic usage. On this question see V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, passim, below,
2 i Cor. xv. 25 (a reminiscence of Ps. ex. i). 3 Matt. xxvi. 52.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 179
is the inexorable law of real life; -and the swordsman's belief in a
conclusive victory is an illusion. While David may never be
allowed to build the Temple, Solomon's building is built only to
be burnt by Nebuchadnezzar; and, while HeraklSs may never win
his way in this life to the heights of Olympus, Zeus plants his
throne upon the formidable mbuntain's summit only to court the
doom of being hurled in his turn into the abyss into which his own
hands have already cast the Titans. 1
Why is it that a disintegrating society cannot, after all, Be saved
by the sword even when the swordsman is genuinely eager to
return the weapon to its scabbard at the earliest possible moment
and to keep it there unused and unseen for the longest possible
period of time ? Is not this twofold action of drawing and sheath-
ing again a sign of grace which ought to have its reward ? The
warrior who is willing to renounce, at the first opportunity, the use
of an instrument which he is only able now to lay aside because he
has just u&ed it so successfully must be a victor who is also a
statesman, and a statesman who is something of a sage. He must
have a large measure of saving common sense (aaxf>po<wvrf) and at
least a grain of the more etherial virtue of self-control (ey^pareta). 2
The renunciation of War as an instrument of policy is a resolution
which promises to be as fruitful as it is noble and wise; and, when-
ever it is taken with sincerity, it always arouses high hopes.
lam Fides et Pax et Honos Pudorque
priscus et neglecta redire Virtus
audet, apparetque beata pleno
Copia cornu. 3
In these lines, written to be sung at a public celebration of the
beginning of a new era of Hellenic history which was to reproduce
a happier past, 4 Horace seems to be consciously chanting the
palinode to Hesiod's poignant lament over the reluctant retreat of
the two saving goddesses Aedos and Nemesis from Earth to
Olympus under pressure of the onset of the Age of Iron. 5 Why
1 In the theodicy of Aeschylus Zeus succeeds in avoiding the doom that has over-
taken his predecessors Uranus and Cronos (see Agamemnon, 11. 160-83, and Professor
Gilbert Murray's reconstruction of the denouement of the Promethean Trilogy wnicb
has been touched upon in this Study in Part III. B, vol. iii, pp. Il6 7*? ^ '
him on his Olympian throne in gilded chains in order that he might serve tbeir turn as
a roi faineant for their Cosmopolis (see V. C (i) (<*) 7, PP- above and V ' C w W 7,
Annex, pp. 337-8, below). . . . , . ,.
2 For this virtue which is one of those that find scope in societies that are ui dis-
integration see V. C (i) (rf) I, vol. v, p. 377, and V. C (i) (d) 2, vol. v, pp. 399-403, above-
3 Horace: Carmen Saecvlare> 11. 57-60. , .
/ For the Ludi Saeculares as an expression of Archaism see V. C (i) (d) 8 (a), p. 51,
5 He8iod: e pForfeW Days, 11. 197-201. (For Hesiod's philosophy of history see V.
^ (i) () P* 17,4, footnote 4, above.)
i8o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
are these seemingly legitimate expectations doomed to be dis-
appointed as they were in the signal failure of the Pax Augusta
to achieve the perpetuity that was' of the essence of the poet's
hopes ? Is there, then, 'no place of repentance' P 1 Can the Trium-
vir who has once perpetrated, and profited by, the proscriptions
never truly transfigure himself into a Pater Patriae ? The answer
to this agonizing question has been given in an Horatian ode by an
English poet upon the return of a Western Caesar from a victorious
campaign in which the victor seemed at last to have triumphantly
completed his military task. A poern which purports to be a paean
in honour of a particular victory sounds the knell of all Militarism
in its last two stanzas :
But thou, the War's and Fortune's son,
March indefatigably on ;
And, for the last effect,
Still keep the sword erect.
Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A power, must it maintain. 2
This classically phrased verdict upon the career of the earliest
would-be saviour with the sword in the modern history of our
Western Civilization has a sting in its tail which pricks with a still
sharper point in the nineteenth- century mot that' 'the one thing
which you cannot do with bayonets is to sit on them'. An instru-
ment that has once been used to destroy life cannot then be used
to preserve life at the user's convenience. The function of weapons
is to kill; and a ruler who has not scrupled 'to wade through
slaughter to a throne' will find if he tries to maintain his power
thereafter without further recourse to the grim arts which have
gained it that sooner or later he will be confronted with a choice
between letting the power slip through his fingers or else renewing
his lease of it by means of another bout of bloodshed. The man
of violence cannot both genuinely repent of his violence and per-
manently profit by it. The law of Karma is not evaded so easily
as that. The Saviour with the Sword may perhaps build a house
upon the sand but never the house upon a rock. 3 And he will not
be able to build for Eternity vicariously by the expedient of a
division of labour between a blood-guilty David and an innocent
Solomon; for the stones with which Solomon builds will have been
of David's hewing; and the veto pronounced against the father
1 Meravoias yap TQTTOV ovx r)$pe. Heb. xii. 17, apropos of Esau.
2 Marvell, Andrew : An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.
3 Matt. vii. 24-9.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 181
'Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast
been a man of war and hast shed blood' 1 spells doom for a house
built by the son on the father's behalf.
This ultimate failure of all attempts to win salvation with the
sword is not only proclaimed in poetry and myth and legend ; it is
also demonstrated in history; for 'the iniquity of the fathers' who
have had recourse to the sword is visited 'upon the children unto
the third and fourth generation'. 2 In our own day the descendants
of the Protestant English military colonists whom Cromwell
planted in Ireland to hold a conquered Catholic country down
have been evicted from their ancestors' ill-gotten estates by the
very weapons of violence and injustice to which they owed their
cursed heritage; and, at the moment when these woids were being
written in August 1937, the wealth of a British community ~ of
business men in a treaty-port and settlement at Shanghai which
had been founded on the iniquity of 'the Opium War' of A.D.
1840-2 was being destroyed by Japanese and Chinese hands which
had been schooled in Militarism by the example of past British
success in temporarily transmuting military violence into com-
mercial profit. Nor are these two judgements of History excep-
tional. The classic saviours with the sword have been the captains
and the princes who have striven to found or have succeeded in
founding or have succeeded in preserving or have striven to pre-
serve the universal states into which the disintegrating civilizations
pass when they have lived through their Times of Troubles' to
the bitter end; and, although the passage from Time of Troubles'
to universal state is apt to bring with it so great an immediate
relief for the tormented children of a disintegrating society that
they sometimes show their gratitude to the successful founder of
a universal state by worshipping him as a god, 3 we shall find, when
1 i Chron. xxviii. 3. 2 Exod. xx. 5 and xxxiv. 7; Num. xiv. 18. g
3 For the deification of political potentates in general, and of the sovereigns of uni-
versal states in particular, see V. C (i) (<*) 6 (3), Annex, vol. v , pp. 648-57, above. It
has been suggested in that context that it would hardly be possible for a ruler to secure
formal worship as a god without having already won the gratitude and affection of his
subjects in the capacity of a human saviour; and indeed the deification of a ruler ought
almost be described as the translation of this spontaneous popular feeling wtocBtoul
language. But, if it be true that no ruler who has not been recognized as a saviour can
be a successful candidate for deification, it is by no means true that, ccffljrady, , the
official conferment of divine honours is a necessary consequence of the existence of the
matched in depth and sincerity by the feelmg/whicn is P^ ea . X . OT t ? " c p*g S
Emperor in a work written more than a quarter of a century after his death ^by Philo of
Alexandria. In his L egatio ad Gaium, 143-?, the Jewish philosopher salutes Augustus
^'Wha^oTthe he who towered above the ordinary level of human nature i
virtues, and who to signify his combination of supreme ^dictatorial ^power with :
distinction of character-was the first to be called Augustus ^(a title ; wc^
not inherit from his forefathers like an heirloom, but which he did transmit to
1 8a THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
we come to study these universal states more closely, 1 that they
are at best ephemeral, and that if, by a tour deforce, they obstin-
ately outlive their normal span they have to pay for this unnatural
longevity by degenerating into social enormities 2 which are as
pernicious in their way as either the 'Times of Troubles' that
precede the establishment of universal states or the interregna
that follow their break-up at the normal age.
The association between the histories of universal states and the
careers of would-be saviours with the sword does not merely
testify in a general way to the inefficacy of force as an instrument
of salvation: it enables us to survey the evidence empirically by
giving us a convenient clue for sorting out the would-be saviours
of this kind and marshalling them in an order in which it becomes
possible to pass them in review.
The first to march past will be the tragic battalion of would-be
saviours with the sword who have slashed with blades as futile
as the Danaids' sieves at the welling wars of a 'Time of Troubles'.
In the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' (circa 431-31 B.C.) we can
perceive, in the first generation, the gallant .figure, of a Lacedae-
successors fraught with a dignity with which he himself had first invested it) ? At the
moment when Augustus took charge of the government of the World, he found the
World's affairs in a state of perturbation and confusion. Islands were competing for
primacy with continents, and continents with islands, under the leadership and
championship of the most eminent men in Roman public life. More than that, the prime
divisions of the Habitable World were struggling for political supremacy Asia against
Europe and Europe against Asia and the nations of the two contending continents had
risen up, even from the ends of the Earth, and had set themselves to wage devastating
wars against one another in all habitable lands and on all navigable seas. Everywhere
there were battles and sea-fights, until almost the entire human race was on the verge of
complete annihilation through mutual slaughter but for one man, one leader, Augustus,
who deserves to be called the Averter of Catastrophe (dAcfi/ca/cov). This is that Caesar
who calmed the storms that had broken in every quarter, and who cured the plagues that
had descended from South and East upon Hellenes and Barbarians alike and had
run like wildfire right away to West and North, disseminating horrors over the inter-
vening lands and seas. This is he who did not merely loosen, but actually struck right
off, the fetters in which the World had lain fa&t bound and crushed. This is he who put
an end both to open wars and to clandestine -wars in the shape of brigandage. This is
he who cleared the sea of pirates and filled it with merchantmen. This is he who
salvaged all the city-states and set them at liberty ; who brought order out of disorder
(o TTJV drof tav ctj raf iv ayayaiv) ; who tamed and reconciled all the unsociable, savage
nations ; who multiplied Hellas in a host of replicas of herself (o r^v pkv 'EhXdoa 'jEAAcwn
m>AAa s -n-a/oau^TJaas) ; who hellenized the most vital sections of the world of Barbarism;
the Guardian of Peace; the distributor, to each and all, of what was their due; the
benefactor who bestowed, without stint, on the public every gift that he had to give, and
who never in his life hoarded up for himself any treasure that was fine or good.'
This prose of Philo's is as magnificent a tribute, in its way, as Virgil's verse. Yet this
Jewish enthusiast for Augustus and his work would have rejected as a shocking blas-
phemy any suggestion that he should express his gratitude towards a human saviour by
paying him those divine honours that, in Philo's belief, were payable exclusively to the
One True God. Philo can have been under no temptation to worship his human hero
Augustus in place of.the God of Israel though it is possible that Philo's mind may have
moved in the inverse direction and that his conception of the providence of God may
have been influenced by his acquaintance with the providence of Augustus (for this
interesting conjecture see Charlesworth, M. P.: The Virtues of a Roman Emperor
(London 1937, Milford), p. ifc). i In Part VI, below,
2 For the social enormities that are the alternatives to revolutions see IV. C (iii) (b) i,
vol. iv, pp. 135-7, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 183
monian Brasidas giving his life to liberate the Greek city-states in
Chalcidke from an Athenian yoke only to have his work undone
within less than half a century by other Lacedaemonian hands
which were to open the way for a Philip of Macedon to place a
heavier yoke upon the neck of every state in Hellas save Sparta
herself. 1 At Brasidas 1 heels stalks the sinister figure of his country-
man and contemporary, Lysander, who successfully liberated the
Greek city-states along the Asiatic shores of the Aegean and gave
the Athenian 'thalassoqracy* its coup de grdce only to bring upon
the former subjects of Athens the chastisement of Lacedaemonian
scorpions in place of Attic whips and to set his own country's feet
upon a path that was to lead her, in thirty-three years, from
Aegospotami to Leuctra. Thereafter each successive generation
adds some figure to our parade. We see a Theban Epaminondas
liberating the Arcadians and Messenians and punishing Sparta as
Lysander had punished Athens only to stimulate the Phocians to
inflict the same punishment on Thebes herself. We see a Mace-
donian Philip ridding Hellas of the Phocian scourge and being
hailed as 'friend, benefactor, and saviour' 2 by the Thebans and
Thessalians who had been the principal sufferers from it only to
extinguish the freedom of these two Hellenic peoples that once had
been so naive as to 'think the whole world of him'. 3 And we see
an Alexander seeking to reconcile the Hellenes to a Macedonian
hegemony by leading them on the quest of making a common
prize of the entire Achaemenian Empire only to lose for Macedon
the hegemony which his father had won for her, and to feed the
flames of Hellenic civil war by pouring into the rival war-chests
of his own successors a treasure which the Achaemenidae had been
accumulating for two centuries. 4
A parallel and contemporary procession of unsuccessful saviours
with the sword can be observed in that other half of the Hellenic
World which lay to the west of the Adriatic. 5 We have only to
recite the catalogue of their names Dionysius the First and
Dionysius the Second, Agathocles and Hiero and Hieronymus in
order to perceive that the failure of each of these dictators in turn,
is proclaimed in the bare fact of his needing a successor to grapple
with the same task all over again. In another context 6 we have seen
that the problem of saving Hellenism in the west by establishing
1 For the relations between Sparta, the Chalcidians, and Macedon between 432 and
338 B.C. see III. C (ii) (6), Annex IV, vol. iii, pp. 480-6, above.
* Demosthenes: De Corona, chap. 43. 3 Ibid.
./See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (a), vol. iv, p. 485; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 62-4; and
V. C (i) (d) n, in the present volume, p. 155, footnote 3, above; and V. C (11) (6),
pp. 289-90 and 318-19, below.
s See III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 357, footnote x, and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j8), Annex I, vol.
v, p. 590, above.
6 In III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 312, above.
184 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
an union sacrde which would be strong enough to resist the dual
pressure of Syriac rivals from Africa and barbarian interlopers
from Italy remained unsolved until the fertile seed-bed of Hellenic
culture in Sicily was devastated by being turned into the arena of
a struggle for oecumenical dominion between Carthage and Rome.
The Times of Troubles' of other civilizations present similar
spectacles. In the Sumeric 'Time of Troubles' (circa 2677-2298
B.C.) we find Sargon of Agade (dominabatur circa 2652-2597 B.C.)
being besought by the Assyrian pioneers beyond Taurus to deliver
them out of the hand of the local barbarians j 1 and we see Naramsin
(dominabatur circa 2572-2517 B.C.) representing himself on a
notorious stele as the deliverer of the plains of Shinar from the
depredations of the highlanders of Gutium. 2 But Naramsin's, if
not Sargon's, title to rank as a saviour is impugned by the ensuing
bout of Gutaean domination over the heart of the Sumeric World
(circa 2429-2306) ; 3 for this barbarian counterstroke was the
nemesis of Akkadian militarism. In the Orthodox Christian World
the same battalion of would-be saviours is represented by figures
who are more sympathetic without being more effective. In the
main body of Orthodox Christendom we see Alexius Comnenus
(imperabat A.D. io8i-m8) 4 snatching a prostrate East Roman
Empire out of the jaws of Normans and Saljuqs with all the
intrepidity of a David rescuing his lamb from the lion and the
bear. 5 And a century later we see a Theodore Lascaris refusing
to despair of the republic after the unprecedented and overwhelm-
ing catastrophe of A.D. 1204, and turning at bay, behind the walls
of Nicaea, against the Prankish conquerors of the holy city of
Constantine. But all this Byzantine heroism was in vain. For in
the tragic history of the East Roman Empire the French Goliath
who came prowling on the Fourth Crusade did not, after all, share
the fate of the Norman bear and the Saljuq lion; and the eventual
recapture of Constantinople by Michael Palaeologus, which
seemed at the moment to have crowned Theodore Lascaris' work
with a posthumous success, proved in the sequel only to have sealed
the East Roman Empire's doom by showing the f Osmanlis the
way from the Asiatic to the European side of the Black Sea Straits. 6
In the history of the Russian offshoot of the Orthodox Christian
1 See I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. no, and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 262, above.
2 For the self-exposure of militarism in this work of Sumeric art see V. C (i) (c) 3,
vol. v, p. 262, above, and V. C (h) (6), in the present volume, p. 296, below. For the
nemesis of Naramsin's militarism see also I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 109, and V. C (i) (c) 3>
vol. v, p. 203, above. 3 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 262, above.
* See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (ft, Annex II, vol. iv, pp. 619-20, above, and V. C (ii) (b), in
the present volume, p. 298, below. 5 i Sam. xvii. 34-6.
6 For the Nicene Greek reoccupation of Constantinople as a prelude to the establish-
ment of a universal state in Orthodox Christendom by the 'Osmanlis see Part III. A,
vol. iii, p. 27> above, and V, C (ii) (6), in the present volume, p. 298, footnote 7, below,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 185
Society we may discern counterparts of an Alexius Comnenus and
a Theodore Lascaris in Alexander Nevski (regnabat A.D. 1252-63)
and Dmitri Donskoi (regnabat A.D. 1362-89), who wielded their
swords for the salvation of the Russian World, during its separate
Time of Troubles' (circa A.D, 1078-1478), from the simultaneous
assaults of Lithuanian pagans and Teutonic Crusaders on the
north-west 1 and of Mongol Nomads on the south-east. 2 These
Russian heroes of Orthodox Christendom were happier in their
generation than their Greek peers, since the fort which they held
so valiantly against such heavy odds was not, in the next chapter
of the story, to fall into alien hands. Yet Alexander and Demetrius
were no more successful than Alexius or Theodore in fulfilling
their personal task of bringing a Time of Troubles' to an end.
These saviours with the sword whose lot has fallen in Tfmes
of Troubles' are patently cast in the mould of Herakles without
a touch of Zeus; but the next battalion that comes marching at
their heels consists of half-castes between the Herculean and the
Jovian type who are not dispensed from performing Hercules'
labours but are also not condemned to perform them without any
hope of obtaining Jove's reward. These Jovian Herculeses or
Herculean Joves are the forerunners of the successful founders of
universal states. They play the part of a Moses to a Joshua or an
Elias to a mundane Messiah or a John the Baptist to a Christ 3
(if the would-be saviours of a mundane society may properly be
brought into comparison with the harbingers of a kingdom which
is not of This World). Some of these forerunners die without
passing over Jordan or obtaining more than a Pisgah-sight of the
Promised Land, while there are others who succeed in forcing the
passage and in momentarily planting the standard of their kingdom
on the farther bank; but these audacious spirits who seek to wrest
a premature success out of the hands of a reluctant Destiny are
visited, for their temerity, with a punishment that is escaped by
their peers who recognize, and bow, to, their fate; for the universal
states which they prematurely set up collapse, like houses of cards,
as swiftly as they have been erected; and the jerry-builders'
abortive labours only find a place in history as a foil to display the
solidity of the work of successors who retrieve the disaster by re-
building the fallen edifice in granite instead of pasteboard.
The Moses who dies in the Wilderness is represented in Hellenic
history by a Marius, who showed the way for a Julius to follow
in the next generation, though Marius's own hesitant and clumsy
1 See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 172, and Part III. A, Annex II, vol. iii, p. 4*4, above.
2 See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 154, and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 311-12, above.
3 For the analogy between Elias and John the Baptist see Matt. rvu. 10-13, and
Mark ix. 11-13.
1 86 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
moves towards the establishment of an egalitarian dictatorship not
only failed to introduce a reign of order but grievously aggravated
an existing state of anarchy. In the Japanese offshoot of the Far
Eastern Society we may perceive in a different social setting
a more constructive counterpart of Marius in a Nobunaga who
girt up his loins to break in the wild horses of an unbridled feudal-
ism. 1 And Nobunaga, in his turn, has a more sympathetic Andean
counterpart in an Inca Viracocha who spent in heroically stem-
ming the torrent of Chanca invasion an energy which might other-
wise have earned the reward of anticipating the achievements of
a Pachacutec. 2 In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the
career of the Inca Viracocha is matched by that of the 'Osmanli
Bayezid Yilderim, who came within an ace of anticipating Meh-
. med the Conqueror's double achievement of capturing Constan-
tinople and settling scores with Qaraman, when 'the Thunderbolt'
was blasted in mid-action by the sudden and irresistible impact of
a still mightier military force. 3 In the main body of the Far
Eastern World the Manchu restoration of a Mongol-built universal
state was more to the credit of the forerunner Nurhachi (regnabat
A.D. 1618-25), who never set foot inside the Great Wall, than it
was to the credit of his faMant successor Shun Chih (imperabat
A.D. 1644-61), in whose reign the seat of the Manchu power was
triumphantly transferred from Mukden to Peking. In the Sumeric
World the task of throwing off a Gutaean yoke was taken in hand
by Utiichegal of Erech (Uruk) before it was carried through by
Ur-Engur of Ur.
Next to this vanguard who see, but never set foot on, the
Promised Land comes a second company of forerunners who
momentarily subdue the monster of anarchy but this not so
decisively that he cannot raise his head or show his teeth again.
In the Hellenic World a Pompey and a Caesar divided between
them the task of reforming a Roman anarchy into a Roman Peace
only to share the guilt of undoing their common work by turning
their arms against each other.
Heu quantum inter se bellum, si lumina vitae
attigerint, quantas acies stragemque ciebunt. . . .
ne, pueri, ne tanta animis adsuescite bella
neu pztoiae validas in viscera vertite vires. 4
* Nobunaga assumed dictatorial power de facto in A.D. 1568, and he was effectively
master of more than half the provinces of Japan when he met a premature death by
violence in A.D. 1582 (Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London IQ3*>
Cresset Press), pp. 397 and 401). "
a For the Inca Viracocha's career see II. D (iv), vol. ii, pp. 102-3, above. In the Inca s
career, as in Marius's, the outstanding feat was the stemming of a tide of barbarian
invasion.
3 For the 'Osmanli Bayezid Yilderim'a career see II. D (iv), vol. ii, p. 102, above.
* Virgil: Aeneid, Book VI, 11. 828-9 and 832-3.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 187
But remonstrance fell on deaf ears; the rival war-lords condemned
a world which it was their joint mission to save to be scarified by
another bout of Roman civil war; and the victor triumphed only
to be 'rejected', like Esau, 'when he would have inherited the
blessing*, and to find 'no place of repentance, though he sought
it carefully with tears'. 1 Caesar did not expiate the deaths of
Pompey and Cato by his famous clemency 2 in the hour of his
apparent omnipotence. The slayer who had stayed his sword
from further slaughter had nevertheless to die by the daggers of
defeated adversaries whose lives he had spared; and in dying this
tragic death Caesar bequeathed yet another bout of civil war as his
unwilled legacy to a piteous world which he had sincerely desired
to save. The sword had to take a further toll of life and happiness
before the task which Caesar and Pompey had so lightly thrown
to the winds was well and truly executed at last by Caesar's
adopted son.
Augustus did succeed, after the overthrow of the last of his
adversaries, in demobilizing the swollen armies that were left on
his hands on the morrow of the Battle of Actium; 3 and in the Sinic
World Ts'in She Hwang-ti performed the same hazardous feat of
statesmanship after he had destroyed the last rival of Ts'in by the
conquest and annexation of Ts'i. 4 But this touch of grace in the
heart of the violent-handed Sinic Caesar did not reprieve his
handiwork. The Sinic universal state which the Ts'in Emperor
had put together fell to pieces at his death ;* and the work had to
be done all over again by Han Liu Pang.
In Syriac history Ts'in She Hwang-ti and Divus Julius have
their counterpart in Cyrus, the would-be bringer of a Pax Achae-
menia to a world that had been lacerated by a furor Assyriacus.
It was in vain that Cyrus (as the story goes) paid heed to the sign
sent from Heaven by Apollo and repented of the evil that he
thought to do 6 unto Croesus, 7 Instead of burning his vanquished
adversary alive, Cyrus took Croesus for his trusted counsellor
only (according to the Herodotean tale) 8 to lose his life, years
afterwards, through acting on bad advice which Croesus had given
1 Heb. xii. 17, quoted on p. 180, footnote i, above.
2 See V, C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 78, above.
3 For the penitence of Augustus see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 78; V. C (i) (d) 5, vol. v,
P. 435J V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 648, above; and V. C (i) (d) 7, Annex,
in the present volume, p. 332, footnote i, below. This penitence evoked a gratitude
which in turn expressed itself in a deification of the repentant militarist (see the third
of the four passages here cited).
4 See Cordier, H. : Histoire Gin&rale, de la Chine, vol. i (Paris 1920, Geuthner), pp. 200
and 202.
s See V. C (i) (d) 4, vol. v, p. 418, above. 6 Jer. xviii. 8,
7 The story is told by Herodotus in Book I, chaps. 86-7, and has been cited Jn tlus
Study already in its application to Croesus in IV. C (in) (c) I, vol. iv, p. 252
above. 8 Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 206-14.
1 88 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
him in good faith. The last word on Cyrus's career was spoken
by the queen of the Nomads when she promised to satisfy the
Persian war-lord's insatiable appetite for blood; and Tomyris duly
carried out her threat on the stricken field by filling a wine-skin
with the blood of the slain and dabbling in it the lips of Cyrus's
corpse. Nor was it only Cyrus himself who perished by the stroke
of the weapon which he had drawn; for the death of the Achae-
menid empire-builder was capped by the collapse of his imposing
edifice. Cambyses played the same havoc with Cyrus's Pax
Achaemenia as a Gaius and a Nero played with Octavian's Pax
Augusta; and Darius had to salvage Cyrus's ruined work, as
Vespasian salvaged Augustus's and Liu Pang Ts'in She Hwang-ti's.
In the same Syriac World more than a thousand years later,
when the Arab war-lord 'Umar brought a long interlude of Hellenic
intrusion to a tardy end by emulating the Persian war-lord Cyrus's
lightning-swift feats of conquest, the captor of Jerusalem showed
the same clemency as the captor of Sardis only to demonstrate
once again that, for the would-be saviour with the sword, there is
'no place of repentance'. Once again a sword-built edifice
collapsed as soon as the builder's sword-arm had been put out of
action. After 'Umar's death his work like Cyrus's was first
shamefully wrecked and then brilliantly salvaged though, in the
history of the Caliphate, Cambyses' and Darius's roles were both
of them played, turn and turn about, by the versatile genius of a
single Arab statesman. Mu'awiyah coldly condemned a world
that had just been exhausted by the last round of an inconclusive
struggle between Rome and Persia to be further harried by an
Arab civil war in order that the astute Umayyad might filch the
political heritage of the Prophet Muhammad out of the incom-
petent hands of the Prophet's own cousin and son-in-law. 1
In the Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern World we see Hide-
yoshi bringing the work of his master Nobunaga to the verge of
completion 2 only to divert his energies, with a Julian levity, to
the wanton enterprise of carrying the flame of war into Korea 3
before stamping out the last embers of it in Japan, with the result
that Hideyoshi's work had to be re-performed after his death 4 by
leyasu at the cost of a Battle of Sekigehara* and a siege of Osaka. 6
In genius Hideyoshi was as conspicuously superior to leyasu as
Julius was to Octavian ; and the moral of both the Japanese and the
Hellenic story is that of Aesop's fable of the Hare and the Tortoise.
* For the irony of this outcome of Muhammad's political career see V. C (i) (<*) 6 (8),
Annex, vol. v, pp. 675-7, above.
2 Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press),
3 IXIA.D. 1592. * In A.D. 1598. B IHA.D. 1600. * InA.D. 1614-15.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 189
A mediocre ability which never deviates from the pursuit of a
single aim may go farther in politics than a wayward genius which
is master of everything except its own caprice. Yet this moral is
perhaps not borne out by the history of the establishment of the
Mughal Raj which served as a universal state for the Hindu World.
In this Mughal version of the play Babur was the Cyrus whose
work was undone by a Humayun who was as unfortunate as 'All
and as disastrous as Cambyses; and Akbar was the Darius who
retrieved the disaster and reconstructed the edifice ; yet, if Babur
and Akbar were to be measured against one another in respect of
either genius or caprice, it would be Akbar and not Babur who
would carry off the palm. 1 If we tilrn our attention from the
Mughal Raj, which was the first to provide the Hindu World with
a universal state, to the British Raj, which took up the same task
after the Mughal Raj had prematurely broken down, we shall
notice, here too, a distinction between the respective achievements
of two successive generations of British empire-builders: the
generation of the Wellesleys (circa A.D. 1800-30), who revealed the
promise of a Pax Britannica when they broke the power of Tipu
Sahib in Mysore and of the Marathas in the Deccan; and the
generation of the Lawrences (circa A.D. 1830-60), who turned
promise into performance by breaking the still more formidable
power of the Sikhs in the Panjab and then riding the storm of a
Mutiny in which the newly launched ship of British state in India
came as near to foundering as the Achaemenian Empire came in
the general revolt against the tyranny of Cambyses.
There is, however, a third company in our battalion of fore-
runners, and this is composed of Herculeses who hand on to suc-
cessors the fruits of their own labours without ever tasting these
fruits for themselves, but also without any break or setback. In
the Babylonic World, Nabopolassar (imperabat 626-605 B.C.) spent
his life in compassing the death of the Assyrian tiger in order that
Nebuchadnezzar (imperabat 605-562 B.C.) might sit, unchallenged,
on the throne of a Neo-Babylonian Empire which could not stand
secure until Nineveh lay in ruins. In the Indie World, when the
Indie universal state which had been founded by the Mauryas was
re-established by the Guptas, Samudragupta (imperabat circa
A.D. 330-75) played Nabopolassar to Chandragupta I I's Nebuchad-
nezzar (Chandragupta II Gupta imperabat circa A.D. 375-4I3). 2
These forerunners whose heritage is transmitted in peace are not
far from being true founders of universal states; and, if we now
pass to these, we shall find the roll-call easy to recite.
i For Akbar's genius see V. C (i) (d) 6 (5), Annex, vol. v, pp. 6 9 9-74, above.
* See V. C (i) (d) 9 (ft, Annex, pp. 34i-*> below -
igo THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The true founder of the Hellenic universal state was Augustus
(rather than Divus Julius); of the Sumeric, Ur-Engur; 1 of the
Egyptiac, Mentuhotep IV 2 (the prince of the Eleventh Dynasty
who reigned circa 2070/60-2015 B.C. and established the so-called
'Middle Empire'). In Egyptiac history Mentuhotep IV has a
double in the person of Amosis 3 (the first sovereign of the Eigh-
teenth Dynasty and the founder of the so-called 'New Empire')
owing to the extraordinary restoration of the Egyptiac universal
state after an interlude of barbarian rule. 4 If we pass from the
Egyptiac to the Andean World, we shall find that the Inca Pacha-
cutec's claim to be the true founder of the Andean universal state
a claim which is implicit in the title World Changed for the
Better' 5 is borne out by the facts of Andean history. 6 And, to
continue our catalogue, Nebuchadnezzar (rather than Nabopo-
lassar) was the true founder of the Babylonic universal state, 7 and
Chandragupta Maurya the founder of the Indie universal state, 8
while Chandragupta II Gupta 9 an Indie empire-builder who
lived and reigned nearly 700 years after Chandragupta Maurya's
day is entitled to rank as the second founder of the Indie uni-
versal state, since it was he who made the decisive contribution 10 to
its reconstruction after an interlude of Hellenic intrusion. To
resume: Han Liu Pang (rather than Ts'in She Hwang-ti) was the
true founder of the Sinic universal state; Darius I (rather than
Cyrus) the true founder of the Syriac universal state; and Mu'awi-
yah (rather than 'Umar) the true second founder of the Syriac
universal state, inasmuch as Mu'awiyah was the true founder of
the Arab Caliphate which took up and carried through the Achae-
menian Empire's uncompleted task 11 after an interlude of Hellenic
intrusion upon Syriac ground which had lasted for the better part
of a millennium. 12 In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the
Pax Ottomanica, which performed the functions of a universal
See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 106 ; V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 497 ; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (8),
above. 3 See I. C (ii), vol. i, p. 138, above.
* For this peculiar feature of Egyptiac history see ibid., pp. 138-9, above,
5 For the meaning of the title 'Pachacutec' see further V. C (ii) (a), Annex I, p, 374.
footnote 2, below.
6 See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 121, and II. D (iv), vol. ii, p. 103, above.
7 See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 138, above. 8 gee I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 86, above.
For the Gupta Dynasty's role in Indie history see ibid., p. 85, above.
10 This decisive contribution was the annexation of the Saka 'satrapy' in Western
India ; and that event, which took place at some date in the last decade of the fourth
century of the Christian Era (see ibid., p. 86, above, and V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex II,
vol. v, p. 604, above), must have been the work of Chandragupta II Gupta (impcrabat
A.D. 375-413).
11 See I. C (i) (b\ vol. i, pp. 76-7, above.
12 Alexander the Great broke into Syria in the year 333 B.C.; the Emperor Heraclius
evacuated Syria in A.D. 638.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 191
state, was established by Mehmed 'the Conqueror' of Constanti-
jiople. 1 In the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom the
founder of the universal state was the Tsar Ivan III (imperabat
^.D. 1462-1505), since the decisive event in the expansion of the
principality of Moscow into an oecumenical empire was the annexa-
tion of the Republic of Novgorod in A.D. 1478.2 In the main body
of the Far Eastern World the Pax Mongolica was established by
Chingis Khan. In the Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern Society
the true founder of the universal state was leyasu (rather than
Hideyoshi). In the Hindu World the true founder of the Mughal
Raj was Akbar 3 (rather than Babur), while the true founders of the
British Raj were the Lawrences (rather than the British empire-
builders of the preceding generation).
To the eyes of an historian of a later age, who can see the careers
of these founders of universal states in the light of a distant sequel,
their Jovian figures do not stand out as being strikingly different
from the Herculean figures of their predecessors. But to the eyes
of a contemporary observer, who cannot see things in perspective,
there seems to be all the difference here between failure and suc-
cess. The founders of the universal states appear at the moment
to have triumphantly achieved a success which their predecessors
have striven for manfully but in vain; and the genuineness of this
success appears to be guaranteed not merely by the effectiveness
of the founders' own lives and deeds (however eloquently these
facts may speak), but most decisively of all by the prosperity of the
founders' successors. Solomon's glory is the most telling evidence
for David's prowess. Let us therefore now continue our survey of
saviours with the sword by passing in review these Solomons who
are born into the purple. The swords of the porphyrogeniti are
speciously muffled in the folds of an imperial robe; and, if ever we
see them show their true colours by displaying the hidden blade,
we shall always find that this act of self-betrayal has been prompted
by wantonness and not enjoined by necessity. If salvation with the
sword is to be 'justified of her children', 4 it must be now, in this
Solomonian generation, or never in the whole history of the dis-
integrations of civilizations, So let us inspect our Solomons closely.
In the estimation of later generations of 'Osmanlis it was Mehmed the Conqueror
who raised the Ottoman Power to the rank of an oecumenical empire; but the credit
for this achievement properly belongs neither to Mehmed the Conqueror (imperabat
A.D. 1451-81) nor to his forerunner Bayezid the Thunderbolt (imperabat A.D. 1389-1402),
but to their predecessor Murad I {imperabat A.D. 1360-89), since the decisive event in
the establishment of the Pax Ottomanica was the conquest of Macedonia in A.D. 1371-2,
and not the capture of Constantinople in A.D. 1453. . . . , ._ j
* See IV. C (ii) (*) 2, vol. iv, p. 88; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 312, above; and
V. C (ii) (6), in the present volume, p. 39> below. . .
3 See V. fc (i) (c) 3t vol. v, p. 304! above. The decisive event which raised the Mughal
IUj to the rank of an oecumenical empire was the annexation of Gujerat in A.D. 1572-
4 Matt. xi. 19; Luke vii. 35.
192 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The reigns of these Solomons constitute those relatively happy
periods of partial peace and prosperity which look like 'Golden
Ages' if we confine our view to the life-spans of the universal states
in which they occur, but which can be seen to be really * Indian
Summers' as soon as we extend our field of vision to include the
whole life-span of the civilization in whose history the coming and
going of a universal state is only one of a number of incidents in a
long tale of disintegration. 1 An empirical survey of these 'Indian
Summers' will bring out two salient features of this historical
phenomenon. We shall find that they display a striking uniformity
of character combined with an equally striking inequality of
duration.
We have seen that the Hellenic 'Indian Summer' began at the
accession of the Emperor Nerva in A.D. 96 and ended at the death
of the Emperor Marcus in A.D. 180; and these eighty-four years
amount to not much less than a quarter of the total duration of a
Pax Romana which, in the terms of the conventional chronology
which dates by public events, may be reckoned to have begun in
31 B.C., on the morrow of the Battle of Actium, and to have ended
in A.D. 378, on the day of the Battle of Adrianople. The 'Indian
Summer' which the main body of the Far Eastern World enjoyed
under the Pax Manchuana lasted rather longer than this, if its
beginning is to be equated with the definitive subjugation of the
South by the Emperor K'ang Hsi in A.D. 1682, and its end with the
death of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung in A.D. 1796. In the history of
the Egyptiac Society the 'Indian Summer' of 'the New Empire*
lasted longer still from the accession of Thothmes I circa 1545
B.C. to the death of Amenhotep III in 1376 B.C. But all these spans
are surpassed in the duration of the 'Indian Summer' of *the
Middle Empire', which was the original Egyptiac universal state;
for this first Egyptiac 'Indian Summer' was almost coeval with the
Twelfth Dynasty, which reigned, from first to last, circa 2000-
1788 B.C. ; 2 and, even if we date the onset of winter from the death
of Amenemhat III in 1801 B.C., 3 the spell of sunshine covers half
the total duration of a Pax Thebana that lasted in all for about four
centuries, if its beginning is to be equated with the accession of
Mentuhotep IV circa 2070/2060 B.C. 4 and its end with the irruption
of the Hyksos circa 1660 B.C. 5
These 'Indian Summers' that have lasted through successive
1 For the nature of these 'Indian Summers' see IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, pp. 58-61 1
above,
2 ?? e l ' C (ii )' vo1 ' *' p * I3< 7> and IV - c (") (&) 2. vol. iv, p. 85, above.
3 Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (2), srd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin
1913, Cotta), p. 301.
* Ibid., p. 257, the present Study and chapter, p. 190, above,
s Meyer, op. cit., vol. cit v pp. 302 and 305,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 193
reigns, and in at least one case for almost the whole period of a
dynasty, differ notably in length from other 'Indian Summers*
which are also manifestly authentic examples of the same social
phenomenon, but which have not outlasted the reign of some
single sovereign with whose name they are identified.
In the history of the Sumeric universal state, for instance, the
* Indian Summer* was confined to the reign of the Emperor Dungi
(imperabat circa 2280-2223 B.C.), whose death was followed by a
rapid onset of winter. In the history of the Andean universal state
the * Indian Summer' of Tupac Yupanqui's reign (imperabat circa
A.D. 1448-82) began to fade out in the reign of his immediate suc-
cessor Huayna Capac; 1 and the first touch of frost made itself felt
in the feud between Huayna Capac's rival heirs, before the Incaic
Empire and, with it, the Andean Civilization itself was wiped
out by the sudden swoop of a storm-cloud from the unsuspected
farther shore of a distant Atlantic. In Indie history a Mauryan
Indian Summer' in the reign of the Emperor A?oka (imperabat
273-232 B.C.) was followed in 185 B.C. by the blight of Pushya-
mitra's usurpation of power, 2 while a Guptan 'Indian Summer' in
the reign of Kumaragupta I (imperabat A.D. 413-55) was followed,
in the very year of the serene emperor's death, by the blight of an
irruption of Eurasian Nomads which was the first wave of a de-
vastating deluge. 3 The Sinic 'Indian Summer* scarcely extended
beyond the limits of the reign of the Emperor Han Wuti (imperabat
140-87 B.C.), whose 'forward policy' against the Eurasian Nomads
was possibly the 'beginning of evils' in the history of a Prior Han
Dynasty which both attained and passed its zenith in Wuti's life-
time. 4 In the history of the Pax Mongolica in the main body of the
Far Eastern Society the 'Indian Summer' in the reign of the Great
Khan Qubilay (imperabat A.D. 1259-94) was followed in A.D. 1368
by the eviction of the Mongols from Intramural China. 5 In the
history of the Arab Caliphate the celebrated 'Indian Summer* in
the reign of Harun-ar-Rashld (imperabat A.D. 786-809) shines out
so brilliantly thanks to the depth of the darkness in which this
pool of light is framed. The splendours of an 'Abbasid Caliph who
was profiting by the cumulative results of the labours of a long line
of Umayyad predecessors are set off on the one hand by an ante-
cedent bout of anarchy in which Harun's 'Abbasid forebears had
wrested the Caliphate out of the Umayyads' grasp, and on the
For this view see Means, P. A. : Ancient Civilizations of the Andes (New York 193 * ,
I P C 0) 4 (&) vol i p. 86, above. See ibid., p. 85, above
4 See V. cTO 2, vol'. p. i 4 , footnote 4, and V. C (i) (0 3, vol. v, p. 271, above,
and V. C (ii) (i), in the present volume, p. 295, below.
5 See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. xi; IV. C (if) (&) 2, vol. iv, p .87; and IV. C (m) (c) 3 (),
vol. iv, p. 491, above.
194 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
other hand by a subsequent d6Mcle, in which Harun's 'Abbasid
successors fell into a humiliating bondage to their own Turkish
body-guard.
In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the Pax Ottomanica
produced its 'Indian Summer' in the reign of Suleyman the Mag-
nificent (imperabat A.D. 1520-66) an 'Osmanli prince who emu-
lated 'in real life* the legendary glory of his Davidic namesake.
Suleyman's Western contemporaries were affected like the Queen
of Sheba by the vastness of this latter-day Solomon's dominions
and the abundance of his wealth and the grandeur of his buildings ;
'there was no more spirit in' them. 1 Yet the curse which the
biblical Solomon lived to bring down on himself was also incurred
by Suleyman. 'The Lord said unto Solomon: "Forasmuch as this
is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my
statutes which! have commanded thee, I will surely rend the king-
dom from thee and will give it to thy servant." ' 2 In another con-
text 3 we have observed that Suleyman the Magnificent was the
Ottoman Padishah who sapped the foundations of the Ottoman
social system by making the first breach in the fundamental rule
that the Padishah's Slave-Household must be recruited from per-
sons who were infidel-born, and that Muslim freemen should be
ineligible for enlistment ex officio religionist In tolerating the
enrolment of Janissaries' sons among the *Ajem-oghlans, Suleyman
opened the flood-gates for a disastrous dilution of the Janissary
Corps ; and this self-inflicted catastrophe duly rent the kingdom from
the 'Osmanli Padishah and gave it to his 'human cattle* the ra'lyeh.
If we now turn our eyes from the main body of Orthodox
Christendom to its offshoot in Russia, we may hesitate at first sight
to recognize a counterpart of Suleyman the Magnificent in his con-
temporary Ivan the Terrible (imperabat A.D. 1533-84). Are a reign
of terror and an 'Indian Summer' compatible ? The two atmo-
spheres will strike us as being so sharply antipathetic to one
another that we may question the possibility of their co-existing
in a single place and time. Yet the record of Ivan the Terrible's
achievements may compel us to admit that his reign was an 'Indian
Summer' of a sort; 5 for this was the reign which saw the prince of
1 i Kings x. 5. * i Kings xi. 11.
3 In Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 44-5, above.
* See ibid., pp. 34-5, above.
s There are other reigns in the histories of other universal states which we may be
content to annotate with a question-mark. In the history of the Tokugawa Shogunate,
which fulfilled the functions of a universal state in the disintegration of the Far Eastern
Civilization in Japan, can we, for example, discern two shafts of autumn sunlight flicker-
ing round the reigns of the Shoguns lemitsu (fungebatur A,D. 1622-51) and Yoshimune
(fungebatur A,D. 1716-44)? The reader may perhaps find his own answers to this pair
of questions if he consults Sansom, G. B. : Japan, A Short Cultural History (London
1932, Cresset Press), p. 447, and Murdoch, J. : A History of Japan, vol. iii (London 1926,
Kegan Paul), p. 314.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 195
Muscovy assume the style and title of an East Roman Emperor and
justify this audacity by the conquest of Qazan and Astrakhan and
the opening-up of the White Sea and Siberia. This was assuredly
an Indian Summer', albeit with thunder in the air; and this read-
ing of Ivan the Terrible's reign is confirmed by the sequel. Before
the Emperor's death a shadow was thrown athwart the sinister sun-
light of his reign by the outcome of a war for the acquisition of a
sea-board on the Baltic which dragged on even longer than the war
subsequently waged for the same purpose by Peter the Great, 1 but
which ended in a miserable failure that was at the opposite pole
from Peter's brilliant success. And when Ivan had gone to his
account the strokes of misfortune fell thick and fast upon the body
politic which he left behind him. The year 1598 saw the extinction
of the House of Rurik, and the years 1604-13 saw a temporary
collapse of the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state 2 from
which it did not fully recover till the reign of Peter the Great.
If we now glance back at our catalogue of 'Indian Summers'
that have endured for longer than a single reign, we shall observe
that these too, for all their staying-power, have succumbed to the
onset of winter in the end. In the Hellenic World Marcus was
followed by Commodus, and Alexander Severus by -'the Thirty
Tyrants'. In the main body of the Far Eastern Society Ch'ien
Lung was followed by Hung Hsiu-ch'uan. 3 In the Egyptiac World
in the days of 'the New Empire' Amenhotep III was followed by
an Amenhotep IV who has made himself notorious under his self-
chosen title of Ikhnaton, while in the days of 'the Middle Empire* the
long series of majestically alternating Amenemhats and Senwos-
rets gave way at last to a dynasty in which no fewer than thirteen
* Ivan the Terrible's War of Livonia lasted for twenty-five years (from A.D. 1558 to
1583); Peter's Northern War lasted for twenty-two years (from A.D. 1700 to 1721 : see
III, C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 283, footnote 3, above). . *:.
* This period of collapse at the close of the first chapter in the history of the Russian
Orthodox Christian universal state has been remembered by Posterity as the Time ? t
Troubles* par excellence (see I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 53, footnote 2; II. D (v), vol. u,
pp. 157 and I7 6; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iV, pp. 90 and 91 ; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 311, foot-
note 2 above; and V. C ii) (6), in the present volume, p. 3",. below); and * is from
this original Russian use of the phrase that we have borrowed it, in this Study,] to denote
one particular stage in the disintegration of any broken-down ?vihzafcon J^s stage
is the chapter that opens with the breakdown itself and closes with ^.
that accompanies the eventual establishment of a universal state; "4
the Russian Orthodox Christendom the 'Time , of Tables' in tins
would run from the decline of the power of the Prmcipahty of Kiev ?
see Klmtschewskij , W
^riod of co apai in the early years of the sixteenth century, w*cft goes oy ^ u
of the 'Time of Troubles' in the Russian tradition would, m J^^^-Et only
'recurrence' of an earlier 'Time of Troubles* which had been temporarily DU y
temporarily surmounted by the establishment of a PaxM
3 For this leader of the Far Eastern internal proletariat ui t
-r _.._._, *U-* K*. M -4-V.^ -naTvi* *T"oirk inff . see V. L- IIJ ItJ
3 For this leader of the Far Eastern internal P^- ftTvoT v p7 107, footnote i,
of resurgence that bears the name 'T'aip'ing' , see V. C (i) (0 2, vol. v, p. 107,
above.
ig6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
ephemeral emperors successively seized and lost the Imperial
Throne within the brief span of a quarter of a century. 1
Our survey of 'Indian Summers* has thus, it would appear, been
leading us to the conclusion that the careers of the Solomons de-
cisively refute, instead of decisively vindicating, the claim of the
sword to be convertible into an instrument of salvation ; for, whether
an 'Indian Summer* lasts out the life of a dynasty or comes and
goes within the briefer span of a single reign, we have seen that it
is in any case essentially something transitory. The glory of
Solomon is a glory that fades; and, if Solomon is a failure, then
David and David's forerunners have wielded their swords in
vain. The truth seems to be that a sword which has once drunk
blood cannot be permanently restrained from drinking blood
again, any more than a tiger who has once tasted human flesh can
be prevented from becoming a man-eater from that time onwards.
The man-eating tiger is, no doubt, a tiger doomed to death; if he
escapes the bullet he will die of the mange. Yet, even if the tiger
could foresee his doom, he would probably be unable to subdue the
devouring appetite which his first taste of man-meat has awakened
in his maw; and so it is with a society that has once sought salva-
tion through the sword. Its leaders may repent of their butcher's
work; they may show mercy on their enemies, like Caesar, and
demobilize their armies, like Augustus; and, as they ruefully hide
the sword away, they may resolve in complete good faith that they
will never draw it again except for the assuredly beneficent, and
therefore legitimate, purpose of preserving the peace against
criminals still at large within the borders of their tardily established
universal state or against barbarians still recalcitrant in the outer
darkness. They may clinch this resolution with an oath and rein-
force it with an exorcism ; and for a season they may appear to have
successfully achieved the pious tour deforce of bitting and bridling
Murder and harnessing him to the chariot of Life ; yet, though their
fair-seeming Pax Oecumenica may stand steady on its grim founda-
tion of buried sword-blades for thirty or a hundred or two hundred
years, Time sooner or later will bring their work to naught.
Time is, indeed, working against these unhappy empire-builders
from the outset; for sword-blades are foundations that never settle.
Exposed or buried, these blood-stained weapons still retain their
sinister charge of karma\ and this means that they cannot really
turn into inanimate foundation-stones, but must ever be stirring *
1 These thirteen emperors, who reigned from firat to last circa 1788/5-1760 B.C.,
appear to have all belonged to a single dynasty, though the Imperial Crown seems to have
made its rapid transit from head to head by violence more often than not (see Meyer, E, ;
Geschichte des Altertums, vol. (i), part (2) 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, CotU),
p. 302).
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 197
the dragon's-tooth seed that they are to spring to the surface
in in a fresh crop of slaying and dying gladiators. Under its
serene mask of effortless supremacy the Oecumenical Peace of a
u niversal state is fighting, all the time, a desperate losing battle
Against an unexorcised demon of Violence in its own bosom;
and we can see this moral struggle being waged in the guise of a
conflict of policies.
Can the Jovian ruler of a universal state succeed in curbing that
^satiable lust for further conquests which was fatal to Cyrus? 1
ad, if he cannot resist the temptation debellare superbos, can he
any rate bring himself to act on the Virgilian counsel parcere
iectis ? 2 When we apply this pair of tests to Jovius's performance,
shall find that he seldom succeeds in living up for long to his
own good resolutions.
If we choose to deal first with the fortunes of the conflict
between the alternative policies of expansion and of non-aggres-
sion in the relations of a universal state with the peoples beyond
its pale, we may begin by considering the Sinic case in point, for
there could have been no more impressive declaration of a deter-
mination to sheathe the sword than Ts'in She Hwang-ti's immense
work of consolidating the unco-ordinated fortifications of the
former Contending States of the Sinic World, where these had
marched with the Eurasian Steppe, into the single continuous ram-
part of his Great Wall.3 Yet Ts'in She Hwang-ti's good resolution
to refrain from stirring up the Eurasian hornets' nest was broken,
as we have seen, less than a hundred years after the Ts'in emperor's
death, by the 'forward policy* of his Han successor Wuti. 4 In the
history of the Hellenic universal state the founder himself set a
practical example of moderation to his successors by abandoning
his attempt to carry the Roman frontier to the Elbe, 5 before he
bequeathed to them his famous counsel to be content with pre-
serving the Empire within its existing limits, without attempting to
extend it. 6 Augustus's attitude is illustrated by Strabo's account
of a current controversy over the question whether the Augustan
rule might allow of a British exception. 7 And, although this parti-
cular breach of the rule was eventually committed with an apparent
impunity, Trajan afterwards demonstrated the soundness of Au-
gustus's judgement when he ventured to break the rule on the
grand scale by attempting to realize Crassus's and Julius s and
* See p. 1 88 above a Virgil: Aeneid, Book VI, 1. 853-
3 See U D (v), vol. ii, p. 119, and V. C (i) (*) 3. vol. v, p. 270, above.
above.
, . , . ,
See V, C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 271, above.
See V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex I, vol. v, p. 593, above.
J>io Cisams: History of Rome, Book LVI, chap. 33- g footoote 4
This passage of Strabo has been quoted in II. D (vu), vol. 11, p. *2, +
198 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Antonius's dream of conquering the Parthian Empire. The price
of a momentary advance from the hither bank of Euphrates to the
foot of Zagros and the head of the Persian Gulf was an intolerable
strain upon the Roman Empire's resources in money and men.
Insurrections broke out not only in the newly conquered territories
between the conqueror's feet but also among the Jewish Diaspora
in the ancient dominions of the Empire in his rear; 1 the clear sky
of a nascent Hellenic 'Indian Summer' was momentarily overcast;
and it took all the prudence and ability of Trajan's successor
Hadrian to liquidate the formidable legacy which Trajan's sword
had bequeathed to him. Hadrian promptly evacuated all his pre-
decessor's Transeuphratean conquests ; yet he was able to restore
only the territorial, and not the political, status quo ante helium,
Trajan's act of aggression made a deeper mark on Transeuphratean
Syriac minds than Hadrian's reversal of it; and we may date from
this epoch the beginning of a change of temper in the Trans-
euphratean tract of the Syriac World which was fostered by Roman
relapses into a recourse to the sword 2 until the reaction in Iran
declared itself at length in sensational fashion in the revolutionary
replacement of an Arsacid King Log by a Sasanid King Stork, 3 and
the consequent resumption of that militant counter-attack against
the Hellenic intruder which had succeeded in evicting Hellenism
from its footholds in Iran and 'Iraq in the second century B.C., but
had latterly been in suspense since the conclusion by Augustus, in
20 B.C., of a Romano-Parthian 'peace with honour'. Under the
auspices of the second padishah of the Sasanian line the Trajanic
breach of the Augustan rule in A.D. 113-17 found its nemesis in
A.D. 260 in a repetition of the disaster which had been inflicted
upon Roman arms in 53 B.C. by the Parthians. 4
In Egyptiac history we see the Theban sword that had been
drawn in a Befreiungskrieg by Amosis (imperabat 1580-1558 B.C.)
and wielded in a revancheby Thothmes I (imperabat 1545-15 14 B.C.)
1 For the insurrection of the Jewish Diaspora in Gyrene and Egypt and Cyprus in
A,D. 115-17 see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 68, footnote 3; and V. C (i) (</) 9 (y), in the
present volume, p. 123, above.
* Trajan's error of A.D. 113-17 was repeated by Marcus in A.D. 162-6, by Septimiua
Severus in A.D. 195-9, and by Caracalla in A.D. 216-18, These three Roman wars of
aggression were accompanied by annexations which carried the Roman frontier east-
ward from the Middle Euphrates to the Khabur and thereby recaptured for Hellenism
a belt of Synac territory which had been liberated from the Seleucidae by the Arsacidac
at the turn of the second and the last century B.C. But this recovery of ground in
Mesopotamia was offset in 'Ir2q by the indiscriminate barbarity of Marcus's *nd
Severus s soldiery, who sacked the citadel of Hellenism at Seleucia as mercilessly as the
head-quarters of the Arsacid power at Ctesiphon. And it was a still worse blow for
Hellenism when the twice perpetrated sack of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the second century
otthe Christian Era was avenged by Sapor's twice perpetrated sack of Antiochin A,D, 253
and 258-9. ^ 3 See V. C (i) (e) 3, vol. v, p. 216, above.
* in A.D. 200, as in 53 B.C., a Roman army laid down its arms; but the captivity of
Valerian was more humiliating than the death of Crassua.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 199
being deliberately sheathed by the Empress Hatshepsut (im-
perabat 1501-1479 B.C.) only to be wilfully drawn and wielded
again by Thothmes III (imperabat 1479-1447 B.C.) as soon as
Death had removed Hatshepsut's restraining hand. 1 The karma of
the Militarism which governed the policy of 'the New Empire* for
the next hundred years (circa 1479-1376 B.C.) could not be extin-
guished by Ikhnaton's passionate repudiation of a policy which he
had inherited from four predecessors any more than the nemesis
of Nebuchadnezzar's militarism could be averted by Nabonidus's
childish device of ignoring the unwelcome realities of his imperial
heritage and seeking to forget the cares of state in the delights of
archaeology. Nor, in the history of the Indie universal state, could
A?oka j s renunciation of War as an instrument of his imperial policy 2
save the noble emperor's successors from losing the Maurya power
by the same lethal arts that A9oka's grandfather Chandragupta had
employed in gaming it.
In the history of the Ottoman Power Mehmed the Conqueror
(imperabat A.D. 1451-81) deliberately limited his ambitions to the
enterprise of making his Pax Ottomanica conterminous with the
historic domain of Orthodox Christendom (not including its off-
shoot in Russia) ; 3 and he resisted all temptations to encroach upon
the adjoining domains of Western Christendom and the Iranic
World, But partly, no doubt, because his hand was forced by the
aggressiveness of Ismail Shah Safawl Mehmed's successor Selim
the Grim (imperabat A,D. 1512-20) broke Mehmed's self-denying
ordinance in Asia/ while Selim's successor Suleyman (imperabat
A.D. 1520-66) committed the further error which was ultimately
still more disastrous and which could not be excused on Selim's
plea of force majeure of breaking the same self-denying ordinance
in Europe as well. In consequence the Ottoman Power was
rapidly worn down by the grinding friction of a perpetual war-
fare on two fronts against adversaries whom the 'Osmanli could
In thua standing out as an exception to a rule that prevailed afterwards *s well as
before, Hatshepsut's reign in the series of the Eighteenth Egyptiac Dynasty has a
Svriac analogue in the reign of the Umayyad Caliph 'Umar II (imperabat A.D. VT^ao).
When <Uma? succeeded to the throne at Damascus he recalled the Arab army t
besieging Constantinople (see II. D (v), Annex, vol. u, P/ 400; and III. C (n) (6), ,
pp, 275-0, above); a wthdraw his troo
&e half-conquered t
Annex VIll? vol. ii, .
member of &s dynasty who took his prof
took and kept after he had
/ti frl^\^^^^ took and kept after he had ^^^^^
wickedness of War by his personal experience of the horrors i of his own -successful war
of gre*aion against Kalinga, has been touched upon m V. C (i) (<*) 6 (8), Annex,
P " * aC
* Fo r a ^ig C feature of the policy of Mehmed Fatih see I. C (i) (, Anne* I, vol. i,
pp. 360-7 1, above. ,
4 See I. C (i) (6), Annex I, vol. i, pp. 384-8, above.
200 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
repeatedly defeat in the field but could never put out of action. And
this Selimian and Suleymanian perversity came to be so deeply in-
grained in the statecraft of the Sublime Porte that even the collapse
that followed Suleyman's death did not produce any lasting revul-
sion in favour of a Mehmedian moderation. The squandered
strength of the Ottoman Empire had no sooner been recruited by
the statesmanship of the Kopriilus than it was expended by Qara
Mustafa on a new war of aggression against the Franks which was
intended to carry the Ottoman frontier up to the eastern bank of
the Rhine. Though he never came within sight of this objective,
Qara Mustafa did emulate Suleyman the Magnificent* s feat of lay-
ing siege to Vienna. But in A.D. 1682-3, as in A.D. 1529, the boss
of the Danubian carapace of Western Christendom 1 proved to be
too hard a nut for Ottoman arms to crack; and on this second
occasion the 'Osmanlis did not fail before Vienna with impunity.
The second Ottoman siege of Vienna evoked a Western counter-
attack which continued, with no serious check, from A.D. 1683 to
A.D. 1922, and which did not expend itself until the 'Osmanlis had
not only been bereft of their empire but had even been compelled
to renounce their ancestral Iranic culture as well, as the price of
retaining possession of their homelands in Anatolia. 2
In thus wantonly stirring up a hornets' nest in Western Christen-
dom, Qara Mustafa, like Suleyman before him, was committing
the classic error of Xerxes when the successor of Darius 3 launched
his war of aggression against Continental European Greece and
thereby provoked a Hellenic counter-attack which immediately
tore away from the Achaemenian Empire the Greek fringe of its
dominions in Asia, and which ultimately led to the destruction of
the Empire itself when the work begun by the sea-power of Athens
under the auspices of Themistocles was taken up and completed
by the land-power of Macedon under the auspices of Alexander.
In the history of the Hindu World the Mughal Raj produced its
Xerxes in the person of the Emperor Awrangzlb (imperabat A.D.
1659-1707), whose unsuccessful efforts to assert his authority over
Maharashtra by force of arms provoked a Maratha counter-attack
which ultimately destroyed the authority of Awrangzib's succes-
1 For the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy's function as a carapace see I. C (iii) (&),
vol. i, p. 156, footnote i ; II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 177-90; and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 325-?,
above.
2 See II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 186-8, and Part III. A, vol. iii, pp, 46-7, above.
3 Darius had, of course, extended the bounds of the Empire in his day as, for that
matter, had Trajan's predecessor Augustus and Suleyman's predecessor Mehmed the
Conqueror. But the wars of Darius, like those of Augustus and Mehmed, differed from
the wars of the Emperor's successors in the vital matter of the objective. Darius was
seeking, not to expand his dominions ad infinitum> but on the contrary to bring their
expansion to a definitive close by finding and establishing a 'scientific frontier* (see
Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. iii (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), p. 96).
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 201
s ors in the metropolitan provinces of their empire on the plains of
Hindustan. 1
It will be seen that, on the first of our two tests of ability to
sheathe the sword, the rulers of universal states do not make a very
good showing; and, if we now pass from the test of non-aggression
against peoples beyond the pale to our second test of toleration
towards the populations that are already living under the vaunted
pax Oecumenica, we shall find that Jovius fares hardly better in
this second ordeal thpugh the receptivity which we have seen 2 to
be characteristic of empire-builders might seem likely, on the face
of it, to make toleration come easy to them.
The Roman Imperial Government, for example, made up its
mind to tolerate Judaism and abode by this resolution in the face
of severe and repeated Jewish provocations; but its forbearance
was not equal to the more difficult moral feat of extending this
tolerance to a Jewish heresy that had set itself to convert the Hel-
lenic World. In the very first collision between the Roman authori-
ties and the Christian Church the Imperial Government took the
extreme step of making the profession of Christianity a capital
offence ; and this declaration of war to the death was the only one
of Nero's acts of savagery that was not rescinded by the tyrant's
successors on the Imperial Throne. 3 The motive of this pro-
scription of Christianity as a religio non licita by the rulers of the
x It may be noted that the British Raj in India which was established on the
ruins of the Mughal Raj and took over its function of providing a Pax Oecumenica
for the Hindu World had _passed through a phase of boundless ambition which was
reminiscent of the temper of an Awrangzlb and a Xerxes and a Qara Mustafa and a
Suleyman the Magnificent and a Thothmes III and a Trajan. The vastness and
rapidity of the achievements of the British empire-builders of the generation of the
Wellesleys so far turned their successors' heads that they seem for a moment to have
dreamed of carrying .their frontier north-westward from the banks of the Jumna to the
banks of the Oxus (see V, C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 305-6, above). The extent of these
British ambitions in Asia in the 'eighteen-thirties* may be gauged by the range and
audacity of the reconnaissances that were made by Burnes (see loc. cit., p. 305, footnote 2)
on the eve of the Anglo- Afghan War of A,D. 1838-42; but the annihilation of the British
army that occupied Kabul and the execution of Stoddard ai d Conolly when they pushed
a, in Burnes' footsteps, to Bukhara caused the British empire-builders to abandon
versy among
expansion in Asia was attacked on grounds of morality as well as on those of expediency ;
and. although the annexation^ Sind in 1843 was followed in 1849 by the annexation ot
the Panjab, the British Raj never sought to trespass beyond the North- West frontier
which it inherited in that year from the ci-devant Sikh principalities. The subsequent
alternating trials of a 'close border' and a 'forward' policy were a mere matter ot
military tactics ; and this tactical controversy did not reflect any variation of political
aim. The steadiness of the British- Indian Government's determination never to repeat
policy of the British Raj <
^ In V. C (i) (d) 6 (a), vol. v, pp, 439-45, above. r:n* T P -
3 This point is made by Tertullian in Ad Nat., Book I, chap. 7 (Mi^ne J.-P..
Patrologia Latino, vol. i, col. 567): 'Permansit, erasis omnibus, hoc solum instotutum
INeronianum. 1
202 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Hellenic universal state is as significant as the sequel. The element
in Christianity that was intolerable to the Imperial Government was
the Christians' refusal to accept the Government's claim that it
was entitled to compel its subjects to act against their consciences. 1
The Christians were disputing the sword's prerogative; and, in
defence of its laesa majestas, the weapon which Augustus had con-
trived to sheathe came shooting out of its scabbard again, like a
snake out of its hole, to join battle, this time, with a spiritual
power which could never be defeated by the strokes of a temporal
weapon. So far from checking the propagation of Christianity, the
martyrdoms proved to be the most effective agencies of conver-
sion ; 2 and the eventual victory of the Christian martyr's spirit over
the Roman ruler's blade bore out Tertullian's triumphantly defiant
boast that Christian blood was seed. 3
The Achaemenian Government, like the Roman, set itself in
principle to rule with the consent of the governed and was like-
wise only partially successful in living up to this policy in practice.
1 This question of principle, which underlay the practice of imposing the death-
penalty in case of a refusal to f perform, on demand, the outward formalities of the ritual
of Caesar- worship, is brought out clearly by Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anfdnge des
Christentums, vol. iii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1923, Cotta), pp. 510-19. The same scholar
points out in op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 552-65, that during the Hellenic 'Indian Summer 1 the
Roman Imperial authorities deliberately forbore to carry the execution, of their policy
to its logical conclusion. ^ Between Nero and Decius, Domitian was the only emperor
who personally took the initiative in ordering a persecution (p. 553); and, "while Trajan
did not repeal the Neronian decree that had made the profession of Christianity a capital
offence, he mitigated its practical working by ruling that the initiative in procuring con-
victions was not to be taken by the public authorities and that anonymous denunciations
were to be ignored as an abuse which et pessimi exempli nee nostri saeculi est (Correspon-
dence between Trajan and Pliny the Younger, No. 97 [98]). Thereafter Hadrian ruled
(without formally revoking Trajan's ruling) that denunciations of Christians must take
the form of an action at law; that the prosecutor must prove, not merely that the
defendant was a Christian, but that he had committed a specific offence against the law;
and that, if he failed to win his case, he himself should be liable to punishment (Seeck, O. :
Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, vol. iii, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart 1921, Metzler),
p. 295). Under these rulings the profession of Christianity, while still officially pro-
scribed, was largely, though never more than precariously, tolerated (Meyer, op. cit., vol.
cit., pp. 562-4). This humanely inconsequent compromise did not outlast the saeculum
for which it was devised. Even before the 'Indian Summer' faded out, the Government
of the Emperor Marcus was swept into a campaign of persecution by the fury of a
populace which had turned savage under the double scourge of war and plague (Seeck,
op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 297-9); and, when the storm broke, it was not long before the
Government of the Emperor Decius abandoned the Trajanic compromise and imposed
a test on every subject of the Empire (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 76, above). 'In
accordance with the "law" which governs the religious development of the Imperial
Age from first to last, the fanaticism that moved the populace to its deeds [of violence]
gradually mounted from below upwards. Just as the new religion itself gradually forced
its way up into the dominant social strata, so likewise the hatred of Christianity which
was entertained by its opponents spread paripassu. The two currents that here met and
broke in waves against one another were currents of an identical nature' (Seeck, op. cit.,
vol. cit., p. 301).
2 'You cannot fail to see that our having our heads 'cut off or being crucified or being
thrown to the beasts or into bondage or to the flames or being subjected to all the other
forms of torture does not make us abandon our profession of faith. On the contrary, the
more of these martyrdoms that there are, the more we increase in numbers through the
excess of conversions over martyrdoms.' Justin: Dialogus, chap, no (Migne, J.-P.:
Patrologia Graeca, vol. vi, col. 729).
3 'Plures emcimur quoties metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum.*
lertullian: Apologeticus, chap. 50 (Migne, J.-P.: Patrologia Latina, vol. i, col. 535).
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 203
It did succeed in winning the allegiance of the Phoenicians and
the Jews, but it failed in the long run to conciliate either the
Babylonians or the Egyptians. The magnanimity with which the
Tynans were forgiven by Cambyses for their refusal to serve
against their Carthaginian kinsfolk, 1 and the Jews forgiven by
Darius for Zerubbabel's abortive essay in high treason, 2 sufficed
to confirm a loyally which these two Syriac peoples were inclined
in any case to feel towards a Great King whose sword had saved
them from Babylonian oppressors in the one case and in the other
from Greek competitors. But the conciliation of the Babylonian
priesthood by Cyrus and of the Egyptian priesthood by Darius
was an ephemeral tour de force m t no tact or cajolery could perma-
nently reconcile the heirs of the Babylonic and Egyptiac civiliza-
tions to an alien domination; and Egypt and Babylon never ceased
to rise in revolt till Babylon was crushed by Xerxes and Egypt
by Ochus. 3
The 'Osmanlis had no better success in conciliating their rcfiyeh
notwithstanding the wideness of the scope of the cultural, and
even civil, autonomy that they conceded to them in the millet
system. 4 The liberality of the system de jure was marred by the
high-handedness with which it was applied de facto; the Ottoman
Government was never able completely to win the ra'iyeh's hearts ; 5
and the perilously practical fashion in which they displayed their
disloyalty, as soon as a series of Ottoman reverses afforded an
1 See Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 17 and 19.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), in the present volume, p. 121, above
3 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 94 and 123, and V. C (i) (c) 4, vol. v, pp. 347-8, above,
and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, in the present volume, p. 442, below.
+ Mehmed the Conqueror himself (see IV. C (iii) (c) z (5), Annex II, vol. iv, p. 622,
above) went so far to meet the susceptibilities of his non-Muslim subjects that one of
his first acts after his capture of Constantinople was to invite the clergy of the Orthodox
Church to elect a new Oecumenical Patriarch ; and, when they presented George Scholarius
as their candidate, the Ottoman master of the Orthodox Christian World took care to
ratify the election in accordance with the procedure that had been customary under the
East Roman Imperial regime (see Phrantzis, G.: Chronicon, Book III, chap, n, ed. by
Bekker, I. (Bonn 1838, Weber), pp. 304-7).
s The friendly relations between Muslims and Dhimmls which prevailed in the
earlier days of the Ottoman regime are described in Gibb, H. A. R., and Bowen, H.:
Islamic Society and the. West, vol. i (London 1939, Milford), chap. 14 (see the passage
quoted in the present Study, IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, p. 69, footnote i, above). For the
subsequent change from friendliness to antagonism see op. cit., vol. i, chap. 13. The
growth of this antagonism can be measured and dated by the history of the relations
between the two communities in the trade-guilds. Originally the Muslim and Dhimmi
practitioners of the same trade belonged to the same guild, which would include all
the masters of that craft without distinction of religion. From about the middle of the
seventeenth century of the Christian Era onwards, however, the guilds began to split
into fractions corresponding to the religious divisions between the craftsmen (Gibb and
Bowen, op. cit., vol. i, chap. 6). The date of this untoward social change is significant.
It coincides with the period of anarchy between the death of Suleyman the Magnificent
and the advent of the statesmen of the House of Koprulu (see the present chapter, pp.
207-8 and 208-9, and V. C (ii) (b), p. 299, below). Compare the corresponding coinci-
dence in date between the Decian persecution of the Christian Church and the period
of anarchy through which the Roman Empire passed between the death of Marcus and
the accession of Diocletian.
204 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
opening for treachery on the ra'iyeh's part, gave the successors of
Selim the Grim some reason to regret that this ruthless man of
action had been deterred (if the tale were true), 1 by the joint
exertions of his Grand Vezlr Pin Pasha and his Sheykh-al-Islam
Jemali, from carrying out a plan to exterminate the Orthodox
Christian majority of his subjects as he did in fact exterminate
an Imami Shi'i minority. 2
In exerting himself, with success, to defeat Sultan Selun's
atrocious project, Sheykh Jemali was moved not merely by his own
personal feelings of humanity but by the standing orders of the
Islamic Canon Law which it was the Sheykh's professional duty
to uphold. The Sherfah required the Commander of the Faithful,
or his deputy, to give quarter to non-Muslims who were 'People
of the Book' 3 if these forbore to resist the sword of Islam by force
of arms, and so long as they gave and kept an undertaking to obey
1 See Hammer, J. von: Histoire de V Empire Ottoman (Paris 1835-43, Bellizard,
Barthes, Dufour et Lowell, 18 vols.-f-Atlas), vol. iv, pp. 364-5. (This story has been
referred to already in V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 706, footnote i, above.)
'C'est surtout pour les chr6tiens et les Grecs de Constantinople que Djemali rut un
veritable arjge sauveur, lorsqu'apris le massacre des schus, Selim eut 0011911 1'idee non
moms pieuse d' organiser une tuerie generate des Chretiens, ou du moins de leur retirer
leurs eghses. A cette occasion, il proposa & Djemali cette question captieuse : lequel est
le plus meritpire, de subjuguer le monde entier, ou de convertir les peuples a rislarnisme ?
Le moufti, qui ne devina pas les intentions de Selim, re"pondit que la conversion
des infideles etait incontestablement 1'ceuvre la plus meritoire et la plus agreeable a Dieu.
Aussit6t Selim ordonna au grand-vizir de changer toutes les e"glises en mosque*es,
d'interdire le culte des Chretiens, et de mettre a mort tous ceux qui refuseraient d'em-
brasser rislarnisme. Le grand-vizir, effraye de cet ordre sanguinaire, se consulta avec
Djemali, qui, sans le savoir, avait, par son fetwa, sanctionne 1'arrSt de mort des Chretiens;
le resultat de leur conference fut le conseil donne secretement au patriarche grec de
demander & comparaitre devant le Sultan. Selim refusa d'abord d'aquiescer a la pri&re
du patriarche; mais il finit par se rendre aux representations du grand-vizir et d\i moufti.
Le patriarche, accompagne de tout son clerge*, fut done admis a paraitre devant le diwan
a Ajadrinople; ii appuya ses reclamations sur Tengagernent solenneUement pris par
Mohammed II, lors de la conquete de Constantinople, de ne point convertir les e*glises
en mosque" es et de laisser aux cnre'tiens le libre exercice de leur culte; il invoqua avec
eloquence le Koran, qui defend la conversion par la force et ordonne la tolerance envers
les nations non musulmanes, moyennant le paiement de la capitation. L'acte constatant
la promesse sign^e par Mohammed II avait e"te" detruit dans un incendie; mais trois
vieux janissaires qui, soixante ans auparavant, avaient assiste" au siege de Constantinople,
attesterent que le Sultan avait en effet engage sa parole sur ces trois points aux deputes
qui lui avaient apporte les clefs de la ville dans un bassin d'or. Selim respecta les dis-
positions du Koran et la parole de son aleul pour ce qui regardait la liberte' du culte ;
mais il ajoutait que la loi ne disait pas que d'aussi beaux edifices que les e*glises chre.
toennes dussent etre profanes plus longtemps par 1'idoiatrie. En consequence, il ordonna
ae changer toutes les eghses de Constantinople en mosques, dc Sparer celles qui
etaient pres de tomber en mines et d'en eiever d'autres en bois, afintie ne point porter
atteinte au droit des nationaux et des etrangers professant le christianisme. Si Selim,
grace a 1 humamte du grand-vizir Piri-Pacha et du moufti Djemali, n'a pas souil!6 la
nn de son regne par un massacre general des infideles, comme il en avait souille le com-
mencement par le massacre des herdtiques, il leur enleva toujours leurs plus beaux
temples/ J *
* For Selim's massacre of the Shi'ah in Anatolia in A.D. "1514 see I. C (i) (6), Annex I,
vol. i, pp. 362 and 384, above.
3 On a strict interpretation c
were the Jews
, ry y i Ii< ^ .__. ^^.. v > v ^ v vj. vku^A ^Ugxi^j. XCilJJlUIlS ""IH LJL1.C Xll. a L> LJlttl,"C lJ
the Zoroastnans and eventually to the Hindus as well. See IV. C (iii) (6) la, vol. iv,
pp. 225-6; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 674, footnote 2, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION zos
the Muslim authorities and to pay a super-tax. This was, in truth,
the principle which had been followed by the Primitive Arab
Muslim empire-builders, and their faithfulness to it is one of the
considerations that account for the amazing rapidity with which
they accomplished their work. As soon as the preliminary raids
gave place to permanent conquests on the grand scale, the Caliph
'Umar intervened to protect the conquered populations against the
rapine, and even against the rights, of the Arab Muslim soldiery; 1
it was 'Uthman's unwillingness to abandon 'Umar's policy that
cost the third of the Caliphs his life ; 2 and in this matter the Umay-
yads 3 showed themselves worthy successors of the 'Rightly Guided*
Four. Mu'awiyah set an example of tolerance* which was followed
not only by the later Umayyads 5 but also by the earlier 'Abbasids. 6
Yet the latter days of the 'Abbasid regime did not pass 7 without
being disgraced by outbreaks of mob violence against Christian
subjects of the Caliphate who had by this time dwindled in num-
bers from a majority to a minority of the population as a result of
the mass-conversions to Islam that heralded the break-up of the
universal state and the approach of a social interregnum. 8
In the history of the Mughal Raj in India Awrangzib departed
from a policy of toleration towards Hinduism which Akbar had
bequeathed to his successors as the most important of their arcana
imperil? and this departure was swiftly requited by the downfall
of the empire which Akbar had built up. 10
Our survey has revealed the suicidal importunity of a sword that
has been sheathed after having once tasted blood. The polluted
weapon will not rust in its scabbard, but must ever be itching to
1 Omar's policy was emulated, in the history of the expansion of our own Western
Society, in the efforts of the Spanish Crown to protect its 'Indian' subjects against the
rapacity and brutality of the Spanish conquistadores (see Kirkpatrick, F. A., in The
Cambridge Modern History, vol. x, pp. 260-9 an< i 2 77)
3 For the nature of 'Umar's policy and the causes of 'Uthman's assassination see
Wellhausen, J.: Das Arabische Reich und sein Sturz (Berlin 1902, Reimer), pp. 21 and
27-31. For the liberality of the Arab Caliphate towards its non-Muslim subjects in
general, as well as in particular cases, see op. tit., pp. 15-16, 18-20, 188-90, 206.
3 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 675-7 and 74-5, above.
* Wellhausen, op. cit., p. 84.
s See, for example, the eulogy of the Caliph Yazid I (imperabat A.D. 680-3) from the
pen of a Christian chronicler which has been quoted in V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 226, above.
6 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 677-8 and 706, above.
7 The turnjng-point seems to have come in the caliphate of Mutawakkil (imperabat
A.D. 847-61).
8 For these outbreaks, which were reminiscent of those against the Christian 'Diaspora 1
in the Roman Empire in the reign of the Emperor Marcus (p. 202, footnote i, above J,
see Tritton, A. S. : The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects (London 1930, Milford),
especially chaps. 4 and 9."
9 Tacitus: Annals, Book II, chap. 36. ,
10 On the other hand it must be admitted that an earlier universal state which had
stood on the same ground had anticipated Akbar's toleration without escaping Aw-
rangzib's punishment. The Guptas had adhered to Hinduism without persecuting
Buddhism (see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 706, above), yet their empire had
been as ephemeral as the Mughal Raj was.
206 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
leap out again as though the disembodied spirit of the would-be
saviour who first had recourse to this sinister instrument could now
find no rest until his sin of seeking salvation along a path of crime
had been atoned for by the agency of the very weapon which he
once so perversely used. An instrument that is powerless to save
may yet be potent to punish; the penitently sheathed sword will
still thirst implacably to carry out this congenial duty; and it will
have its way in the end when it has Time for its ally. In the fullness
of Time the din of battle which has ebbed away towards the fringes
of Civilization till it has passed almost out of ear-shot 1 will come
welling back again in the van of barbarian war-bands that have
gained the upper hand over the garrisons of the limes by learning
from them, in the effective school of a perpetual border warfare,
the winning tricks of the professional soldier's trade; 2 or, more
terrifying still, the dreadful sound will come welling up again in the
resurgence of an Internal Proletariat that has turned militant once
more to the consternation of a Dominant Minority which has been
flattering itself that this profanum vulgus has long since been cowed
or cajoled into a settled habit of submissiveness. The spectres of
war and revolution that have latterly passed into legend 3 now once
again stalk abroad, as of old, in the light of day; and a bourgeoisie
which has never before seen bloodshed now hastily throws up ring-
walls round its open towns out of any materials that come to hand:
mutilated statues and desecrated altars and scattered drums of
fallen columns and inscribed blocks of marble reft from derelict
public monuments. 4 These pacific inscriptions are now anachron-
isms; for the 'Indian Summer 1 is over; the 'Time of Troubles' has
returned ; and this shocking calamity has descended upon a genera-
tion which has been brought up in the illusory conviction that the
bad times of yore have gone for good! 5
1 In the heyday of the Pax Romana an observer who travelled from Rome to Cologne
would have met with no troops on his road, between his last sight of the garrison of the
capital and his first sight of the garrison of the frontier along the Rhine, save for a single
cohort urbana which was stationed at Lyons; and this detachment was only 1,200 men
strong (see Mommsen, Th.: The History of Rome: The Provinces from Caesar to Diocle-
tian (London 1886, Bentley, z.vols.), vol. i, p. 88, footnote 3).
* See V. C (i) (c) 3, passim, in vol. v, above, and Part VIII, passim, below.
3 See the passages of Aehus Aristeides* In Romam quoted in V. C (i) (c) 4, vol. v,
pp. 343-4, above.
4 Of all the improvised fortifications of this type that the writer of this Study has
seen, the example that speaks most eloquently to the eye is the wall of the antique
citadel that looks down to-day, with an air of open-mouthed amazement, upon the new-
fangled capital city of the Turkish Republic at Angora. The historian's mind will also
be conscious of a still more dramatic contrast between these fortifications round the
citadel of Angora and the famous inscription on the wall of the Temple of Augustus ;
for this contrast embodies in visual form the whole tragedy of the relapse from an
'Indian Summer* into a recurrent 'Time of Troubles'.
s Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddamdt, McG. de Slane's translation (Paris 1863-8, Imprimerie
Imperiale, i vols.), vol. ii, pp. 46-8) points out that, while both the sword and the pen
are indispensable instruments of all governments at all times, the sword is at a premium
and the pen at a discount at the beginning of an empire's career, when it is being founded,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 207
We have now followed the high tragedy of the saviours with the
sword into an act in the drama which makes it plain, in retrospect,
that our dramatis personae have been foredoomed to failure. But
lost causes are the mothers of heroism; and we should be denying
ourselves the sight of some of the finest examples of the type of
hero that we are now passing in review if we coldly turned our
backs upon the stage of history at this poignant moment. Upon
the recurrence of the 'Time of Troubles', Zeus yields the stage to
Herakles once more; and, if we sit the play out, we shall bear
witness, when the curtain falls, that we have never seen Herakles
show himself to such advantage as in this forlorn hope.
In Hellenic history this sympathetic part \yas played by a series
of Illyrian soldiers Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, Cams who were
successively invested with the purple because they had the courage
to wear it in an age when it had become a veritable shirt of Nessus,
and who duly justified their sensational rise to fortune by inde-
fatigably striking off one after another of Anarchy's hydra-heads
until they had cleared the field for the entry of their Jovian com-
patriot Diocletian. In the recurrence of the Egyptiac 'Time of
Troubles' after the decease of the Twelfth Dynasty we may espy
the handiwork of some forgotten Egyptiac Aurelian in a slight and
transient but unmistakable rally of the Egyptiac Society circa
1760 B.C. ;* and in the duplicate recurrence of the same tribulations
in the days of 'the New Empire' after the death of Amenhotep III
we can discern four indubitable counterparts of our four Illyrian
heroes in the soldierly figures of the fighting pharaohs Seti I
and Ramses II and Merneptah and Ramses III. 2 These Egyptiac
saviours, like their. Illyrian counterparts in Hellenic history, were
novi homines, and so was the tradesman Minin who rose up to
deliver the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom from the
troubles of A.D. 1604-13. Minin, however, had a companion-in-
arms, Prince Pojarski, who had been recruited from the ranks of
the Russian dominant minority; and the role of saviour in a recur-
rent Time of Troubles' has sometimes even been assumed by a
vigorous scion of an imperial dynasty whose previous decadence
has been the immediate cause of the catastrophe. Such were the
careers of the Achaemenid Great King Artaxerxes Ochus (mpe-
rabat 358-338 B.C.) and of the 'Osmanli Padishah Murad IV
(imperabat A.D. 1623-40); and the demonic vein that reveals itself
and again at the end, when it is breaking up, while, in between, there is a middle period
of security, prosperity, and ease during which, conversely, the sword is at a discount and
x ^^Mwlr^TGeschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (2), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and
^elTtWj, W' PP. Q*"3 and ioc; IV. C ffi a, vol. iv, p. 85; IV. C
(iii) (c) 2 (]3), vol. iv, p. 42 i; and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 269, above.
ao8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
in the ethos of both of these grim militarists is perhaps an indication
that their common effort to turn back the course of dynastic history
was too extreme a tour de force for flesh and blood to undertake
with impunity. We may close our catalogue of 'Illyrians* with the
name of one saviour of this class who was not either a porphyro-
genitus or a novus homo. In the middle of the nineteenth century
of the Christian Era, when the T'aip'ing insurrection was on the
point of sweeping a degenerate successor of Ch'ien Lung off the
Imperial Throne at Peking, the Ts'ing Dynasty obtained a fifty
years* reprieve thanks in large measure to the prowess of a general
who came in consequence to be known among his own compatriots
as * Chinese Gordon 1 , but who really to confess the shocking
truth was a 'South Sea Barbarian 1 whose sword-arm had been
hired by the Emperor in his dire extremity though the Son of
Heaven knew very well that this mercenary saviour's barbarous
blood had not in it even a tincture of the celestial ichor of the
Children of Han.
We need not now linger much longer over a history that con-
tinues to repeat itself; but we may observe that, if the 'Illyrians*
faithfully fulfil their task, their prowess may make it possible for
Hercules Redivivus to withdraw in favour of Jupiter Redux. The
labours of Aurelian opened the way for Diocletian to make his
entry on to the stage as a second Divus Julius, and for Constantine,
in his turn, to play Augustus to Diocletian's Caesar. And these
second founders of the Hellenic universal state have their counter-
parts in the histories of other civilizations. In the Sumeric World,
for example, Ur-Engur's Empire of Sumer and Akkad was re-
founded by an Amorite prince of Babylon, Hammurabi, after it
had been wrecked by a successful revolt on the part of its Elamite
subjects, 1 and had lain in ruins thereafter for not less than two and
a half centuries. 2 In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the
demonic exertions of the 'Osmanli Padishah Murad IV were fol-
lowed up by the constructive labours of the Albanian vezirs of the
House of Kopriilii (fungebantur A.D. 1656-76; 1687-8; 1689-91;
1697-1702; i7io), 3 who gave the Pax Ottomanica a new lease of
1 For this catastrophe and its sequel see V. C (ii) (6), pp. 297-8, below.
2 There was an interval of 233 yeaxs between the capture of the Emperor Ibisin of
Ur in 2180 B.C. and the accession of the Emperor Hammurabi of Babylon in 1947 B.C. ;
and it took Hammurabi many years of hard labour to accomplish his task of restoring
unity and peace to the Sumeric World by welding together again, after so long an in-
terval, the fragments into which the original Empire of Sumer and Akkad had been
broken up.
3 The succession of Grand Vezirs of the House of Koprulii was as follows : Mehmed
1656-61^ Mehmed's son Ahmed 1661-76; Mehmed's son-in-law Siawush 1687-8;
Mehmed's son Mustafa 1689-91; Mehmed's nephew Hiiseyn 1697-1702; Mustafa's
son Nu'man 1710. The family ability for administration and diplomacy showed itself
in varying measure in all but the last of these six members of the House. On the debit
side we have, however, to place Qara Muatafa, who was Grand Vezir, with irretrievably
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 209
fVr> * lasrted until the out break of the great Russo-Turkish War
K * 1J 768 74. In the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom
the seeo nci founder of the universal state was the Tsar Peter the
~, rea ^TrtfterGLbat dejure inde db A.D. 1682, sed de facto tantum inde
A .L * * *?^S>)> who roused the Russian body social out of a torpor
it: had lain since the convulsions of A.D. 1604-13 by giving
U: ir y ection of an alien culture - x
- establishment of a universal state after its overthrow in
a re ^ Urre nt: 'Time of Troubles' has in some cases been accom-
plished -to such good effect that it has resulted in a return of at
y l a P 3 -!^ similitude of the long-since departed 'Indian Summer*.
f ^T "^: 1uss i an offshoot of Orthodox Christendom, for example,
the ln.cila.rx Summer' which had visited Muscovy in the reign of
Ivan IV (iinperabat A.D. 1533-84), thanks to the foundation of a
umversa.1 state by Ivan III (imperdbat A.D. 1462-1505), returned
at the accession of Catherine II (accessit A.D. 1762), and lasted, this
time, till t:hie death of Alexander I (obiit A.D. 1825), thanks to the
re-cstat>Hshment of the Russian universal state on a new basis by
Peter thL5 Great (imperdbat A.D. 1682-1725). And in the Hellenic
World H>iocletian and Constantine did their work so well when
they r^oonstructed, on new foundations, the dilapidated political
edifice of Julius and Augustus, that they made it possible for the
Emperor* Justinian to radiate all the glory of a Solomon in his
codifica/tiorx of the Roman Law and his building of the dome of the
Churctt of t:h.e Holy Wisdom and his recovery of the Empire's lost
dominions in Africa and Italy 2 though Justinian did not begin to
reign (zmp&rdbat A.D. 527-65) until 149 years had passed since the
defeat ;arx<i death of Valens at the Battle of Adrianople, 3 243 since
the accession of Diocletian, 292 since the death of Alexander
r-esxilts, from 1676 to 1683. Qara Mustafa was not a KoprUlti, but he came
frnm ME^rasifxixi, in the neighbourhood of the K5pruliis' home-town of Vezir Koprii in
Nfitftb"XCu*t:x'xi. Anatolia, and on this account he was given his education by the gene-
roaiw of vdCehxned Kflprtilii a bad day's work for the Ottoman Empire!
* It ta interesting to observe that the Romanov Emperor who was the second founder
of tH*t Nl icmoovite oecumenical empire in the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom
rworiedt, <rxo doubt, quite independently) to an expedient which had already been
I&mteti t>y the KLoprttlu vezirs who were die second founders of the Ottoman oecumem-
a! smpsjre Irx the main body of Orthodox Christendom. The identical cure for an iden-
ttetl ifiem<5 which was applied with successful results in both cases was to invigorate
in tfltemio t>ody social by a process of blood transfusion (in a metaphorical sense). The
K#Pfttlt5 had drawn their supply of fresh life-blood from the Orthodox Christian ra lyek
of the PiBldLiahah (see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 222-8, above); Peter drew his from the free
wk of Western Christendom (see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 278-83, above).
* In thct opinion of the writer of this Study this glory of Justinian s was purchased
like that of so xnany other princes of the same Solomonian type at a cost which was
ftucittltv disastrous, as witness the immediate and abysmal and never-retrieved collapse
3T3w ' 1 I^Ilenio body social, as well as the Roman body politic, after the vainglprious
emperor** death. (On this point see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j5), vol. iv, pp. 326-8, above, and
*h*ree**t chapter in the present volume, pp. 223-5, below.)
I r f iSTtlniflzx has a happier Indie counterpart in the Emperor Harsha (tnperabat A.D.
' - entered upon his auspicious reign some 130 years after .fcne Huns had
Guptas as the Visigoths dealt with Valens.
2io THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Severus, and 347 since the death of Marcus in A.D. 180: a date that
had marked the end of the original 'Indian Summer* which had
lightened for a time the darkness of a disintegrating Hellenic
Society in the Age of the Antonines before the recurrence of the
Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' in the third century of the Christian
Era.
At this eleventh hour in the long decline of the Hellenic Civiliza-
tion, Justinian's Solomonian glory was a luxury out of season which
had to be paid for at a fancy price; and, forty-five years after
Justinian's death, a bill of a staggering magnitude was duly pre-
sented to the magnificent emperor's devoted successor Heraclius
when he was summoned from Carthage to defend Constantinople
against a Persian invader whose advance-guard had by then already
pushed its way unhindered right across the Asiatic torso of Jus-
tinian's Mediterranean empire from the banks of the Khabur to
the shores of the Bosphorus. Heraclius, with his ominous name,
is a typical representative of the saviour with the sword in his final
appearance on the stage, when the tragic actor once for all lays
aside a Jovian mask that has now become utterly incongruous, and
once more plays Herakles in the only scene that it is any longer
possible for even a HSrakISs to play. This scene is the death of
a 'Die-Hard' ; a 'Die-Hard' is a soldier who offers up his life for a
cause when he is convinced that all but Honour is already lost ; and,
as a classic example of the type, the Roman Emperor Heraclius is
worthy to rank with the British Colonel Inglis whose call to his
men first put the phrase into currency. 1
Heraclius spent twenty-four years out of a reign of thirty-one
on the desperate enterprise of trying by force of arms to prevent
the Syriac provinces of the Hellenic universal state from shaking
off at last an incubus of Hellenic domination which had been
weighing upon them ever since the overthrow of the Achaemejaian
Empire by the arms of Alexander the Great, The sword of
Heraclius could not avail to stem a tide of Syriac resurgence
which had been flowing for at least eight centuries in the Trans-
euphratean, and for at least four centuries in the Ciseuphratean,
i In the verbal armoury of English party politics in the twentieth century of the
Christian Era the term 'Die-Hard' has come to be used as a shaft of ridicule to be shot
at a politician who makes a parade of his intention of 'dying in the Iwt ditch* in defence
of some political cause that is patently lost, and this particularly if hi* opponents have
reason to expect that the poseur will prudently resign himself to the inevitable when it
actually comes to the point. This latter-day connotation of play-acting does not, how-
ever, attach to the sobriquet in its origin. The authentic *Die-H*rdr are an infantry
regiment of the British Army; and the Fifty-Seventh won their nickname a* a title of
honour at the Battle of Albuera in A.D, x8x i. In an engagement in which the regiment
Colonel at his word.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 211
territories of the Syriac World by the time when Heraclius was
called in to Hellenism's rescue. The Syriac counter-attack was by
then already victorious on the deeper planes of life in religion,
in language, in architecture, in art and, even on the superficial
planes of politics and war, the liberation, by Syriac arms, of the
homeland of the Syriac culture had already been momentarily an-
ticipated during the recurrence of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles'
in the third century of the Christian Era, when Zenobia of Pal-
myra had brought the whole of Syria under her rule and had
even pushed her outposts across the Taurus and the Nile. 1 It is
evident that Heraclius in the seventh century was courting disaster
by venturing to repeat Aurelian's barely successful counterstroke. 2
Heraclius did succeed, at the end of eighteen years of strenuous and
audacious campaigning, in pushing the Persian invader back from
Chalcedon to Tabriz and imposing on the Sasanian Empire a
peace-settlement which restored the territorial status quo ante bel-
lum. Yet the Persian champion of Syriac liberty had no sooner laid
down his arms than an Arab champion stepped into his place in
the arena and pitted his fresh vigour against a war-worn Roman
Army; and this immediate return, from an unexpected quarter, of
a tide which Heraclius had thought himself to have stemmed for
good, was a challenge to which the weary emperor's spirit was not
equal. In his fight to save Syria from the Arabs Heraclius aban-
doned after six years a struggle which he had kept up for eighteen
years against the Persians, and withdrew from Antioch to Con-
stantinople to die there broken-hearted. 3
Heraclius is not the only famous 'Die-Hard' whose figure looms
up for a moment in the last scene of the tragedy of the disintegra-
tion of the Hellenic Society. The historic fame of the African
emperor has been outshone by the legendary glory .of a British
prince who is reputed to have spent his life, and met his death, in
a vain effort to roll back a tide of barbarian invasion from the
coasts of Ultima Thule; and the legend of Arthur possibly reflects
through the double refraction of Welsh epic and French romance 4
the authentic history of an Artorius 5 who did indeed surpass his
fellow Roman Heraclius in stoutness of heart if he faced his fearful
* For the historical relation between Zenobia's 'successor-state' of the Roman Empire
in Syria and Mu'iwiyah'a see I. C (i) (), vol. i, p. 74, footnote 4, and II. D (i), vol. ii,
P "*Vce mt*C (ii) (b\ vol. iii, p. 369, footnote 4? and IV. C (iii) (c) z (ff) vol. iv, p.
330, above,
3 See II. D (vxi), vol. ii, pp. 287-8, above. ,,.*, < ,
* For the attractiveness of the Welsh imagination of the Heroic Age to a medieval
Weutern taste see H. (vii), vol. ii, pp. 339-4, above.
* For a. faint indication of a possibility that the historical Artorius may have been a
lew attractive character than the legendary Arthur, see V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex III, vol. v,
p. $09, footnote 2, above.
212 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
odds, and died his 'Die-Hard's* death, in defending, not the all
but impregnable citadel of the Hellenic World, 1 but an outlying
and exposed province which had been abandoned by the Central
Government and had lost touch with the torso of the Empire be-
fore ever Artorius drew his sword.
If we turn our eyes from the Hellenic scene to the spectacle of
other dissolving societies and crumbling empires, the mouths pf
other 'Die-Hards' will answer our roll-call with their 'Morituri te
salutamus'. In the dotage of the 'Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad
in an age when the glory of Harun had long since been eclipsed by
the humiliations that Harun' s successors had suffered at the hands
of barbarian praetorians and heretical Buwayhid mayors of the
palace, 2 and when only two generations were still to run before
the advent of the annihilating catastrophe of A.D. 1258 we see the
Caliph Nasir (imperabat A.D. 1180-1225), whose reign happened
to fall in the trough between the Saljuq and the Mongol wave of
a Eurasian Nomad Volkerwanderung, showing the hardihood to
profit from this momentary relief by successfully re-establishing
the rule of the Commander of the Faithful in regions, beyond the
bounds of the metropolitan province of 'Iraq, where the authority
of Nasir's predecessors had been merely nominal for some three
centuries past. 3 In the death-agonies of the Ottoman Empire we
catch a glimpse of an intrepid 'Die-Hard' in the figure of 'Osman
Pasha successfully delaying for nearly five months the descent of
a Russian avalanche from the Balkans upon Constantinople by his
stand at Plevna from the 2Oth July to the loth December, 1877.
1 The strength of Constantinople lay in a masterly collaboration between Art and
Nature that saved the city from capture in the crisis of A.D. 626 (see II. D (v), Annex,
vol. ii, p. 400, above). At a moment when Heraclius himself at the head of an expe-
ditionary force into which he had drafted the best of what remained of the Roman
Army; was engaged in the far interior of Asia on a thrust at the Sasanian Empire's
heart (see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, p. 269, footnote 4, and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j9), vol. iv, p. 330,
above), the Emperors base of operations at Constantinople had to withstand a con-
certed attack from the Persians on the Asiatic and the Avars on the European side. The
city was saved by the Roman Navy's command of the waters of the Straits, which made
it impossible for the two hostile forces to join hands.
2 For the domination of the Buwayhids at Baghdad see I. C (i) (6), Annex I, vol. i,
p. 356, above.
3 See the article on Nasir in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. This caliph had the temerity
to implicate himself in the military struggles between the 'successor-states' of the
Caliphate in Iran and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and he succeeded in temporarily making
himself master of Khuzistan by successively playing off the Khwarizmshah against the
Saljuq and the Mongol against the Khwarizmshah. This hazardous play with an un-
stable Balance of Power was less statesmanlike than the simultaneous efforts that NSsir
made to rehabilitate the Caliphate by peaceful means. On the one hand he tried to heal
the ancient religious schism in Islam by conciliating the ShTah of both the Imami and
the Isma'ili persuasion. On the other hand he tried to rally the princes of Dar-al-Islam
round his own person by reorganizing the religious order of the Futuwwa into something
like an order of knighthood with himself as its head. Nasir's rally was perhaps in Ibn
uddenly gives such an imposing exhibition of s
as to create the impression that its decay has been arrested. But this is merely the last
flare of a light that is- on the point of going out.'
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 213
But 'Osman and Nasir and Arthur and Heraclius alike must yield
the palm of valour to those Inca 'Die-Hards' who after the deaths
of Huascar and Atahualpa and the fall of Cuzco and Ollantay-
Tampu and the overthrow, in the twinkling of an eye, of an Andean
universal state which it had taken three centuries to build up 1
still refused to despair of a republic which had just been annihi-
lated before their eyes by irresistible invaders from an unknown
world that lay beyond the Andean horizon. 2 In the fastnesses of
the Vilcapampa Mountains the Inca Manco dared without gun-
powder, and even without steel to defy a Spanish victor who was
already armed with European lethal inventions that have since been
turned by their inventors to such terrible account. Manco died
unconquered; and, when one of his sons, Sayri Tupac, capitulated,
the other, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, still carried on the unequal
struggle. These men of the Bronze Age held out against the men
of the Explosive Age for thirty years before Vilcapampa fell at
length and the last of the Incas, Tupac Amaru, was taken prisoner
and put to death by a Spanish Viceroy of Peru in A.D. i57i. 3
The Saviour with the Time-Machine.
The salvation o/a disintegrating society is so unpromising a task,
and the sword so clumsy an instrument for its execution, that it
is not surprising to find other schools of saviours arising as the
process of disintegration takes its course in spite of all the swords-
manship of Jovius and Herculius, These other schools all agree
with one another, in opposition to the saviours with the sword, in
professing to pursue a negative aim. The mundane Present which
the swordsman is still struggling to salvage is for them a City
of Destruction which it is neither possible nor desirable to save.
Salvation from, and not of y Society is therefore their common
watchword; but this is the highest common factor in their several
purposes; for each of these four schools, as we have seen,4 follows
out the aim of salvation from Society along a different path of
escape, and they differ further in their choice of instruments and
in their drawing of the bounds of the city whose dust they are pro-
posing to shake from off their feet. Let us begin by reviewing those
archaist and futurist saviours from Society who draw the line at
the mundane Present without abandoning the whole plane of life
on Earth, and whose instrument is a 'time-machine' which is to
* See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 122, above.
a The shattering effect of this unheralded catastrophe upon the moral of the Incas
subjects (see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 90-3, above) is the foil against which we should
appraise the fortitude of the 'Die-Hard* remnant of the Incas themselves.
3 See Markham, Sir Clements: The Incas of Peru (London 1910, Smith Elder),
pp. 256 and 274-96.
4 In the present chapter, pp, i77~8, above.
214 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
transport them, by some stroke of magic, clean out of a Present
which has gone awry into a still unblemished Past or a not yet
blemished Future.
The notion of a 'time-machine 5 has been conceived by Lewis
Carroll in a passage of his Sylvie and Bruno and applied by Mr
H. G. Wells in a fascinating book which has The Time-Machine for
its title. Mr. Wells makes use of Lewis Carroll's conceit in order to
carry his readers, on the wings of his imagination, vast distances
up and down the Time-stream with pauses here and there to
view an exotic landscape through the pilot-showman's seductive
lens. This conducted tour in the 'time-machine' is a parable of the
recent achievements of a modern Western Homo Mechanicus in
extending the range of his knowledge of, and power over, the
Material Universe. But a conceit out of which Mr. Wells has
fashioned a hymn of whole-hearted praise to Mr. Straker 1 has been
turned to account by its subtle inventor for the deeper purpose of
moving our Homo Mechanicus not to self-praise but to self-criti-
cism, and perhaps to self-abasement, by a touch of satire which
pulls the handy man up short by reminding him of the limitations
of what can be done by clockwork.
Lewis Carroll's thrust goes home because his point is a simple
one. He allows his ingenious clockwork-maker to outwit Nature
and cheat Destiny in one move of the game only to find that he
might just as well have spared himself the pains, since in the next
move Destiny and Nature compass the self-same results that they
would have produced anyway if the little man had never tried to
monkey with them. In Lewis Carroll's fable the observer who
holds the magic watch confidingly sets back the hands when he
sees the bicyclist come to grief, as he spins round the corner, over
the cardboard box that has tumbled out of the draper's cart. At
the magician-mechanic's sleight of hand Time duly recoils, and
this time the philanthropist promptly snatches up the treacherous
box before the bicyclist arrives on the scene. Hi presto the trick
has worked ! For the bicyclist, spinning recklessly round the corner
as before, is this time not caught out by colliding with an un-
expected obstacle, but shoots on smoothly down the street. Yet,
alas! the appearance of one moment is given the lie by the reality
of the next; for, when the moment arrives at which, in the first
version of the playlet, the bicyclist was lying cut and bleeding after
taking his toss, lo and behold! the same moment reveals him in the
same plight in the second version just as though Philanthropy
and Magic had not, after all, conspired together to whisk away the
stumbling-block from in front of the luckless rider's giddy wheel.
1 For Mr. Straker see Shaw, G. B,: Man and Superman, passim.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 215
In this Lucianic parable Lewis Carroll was gently hinting to his
complacent Western contemporaries that it was a vain imagination
to fancy that mundane realities could be exorcized by mechanical
arts. And this apologue of the generation of the velocipede may
be capped by another drawn from the everyday experience of the
generation of the automobile. A driver whose car is running badly
may throw out the clutch, with a sigh of relief, when his road
happens to bring him, in the course of its ups and downs, to the
head of a gentle downward incline. 'So free-wheeling is the remedy
for engine-trouble', our motorist lazily ruminates. 'How extra-
ordinary that so simple a solution should never have been hit upon
before.' But as he sits back and congratulates himself, the incline
suddenly plunges into a steep descent, and on the instant he re-
members that his brakes, as well as his engine, are out of order.
No chance of avoiding a crash now except by going back into
bottom gear! But by this time the car is racing so swiftly downhill
that the result of putting in the clutch now is to strip the cogs off
the gear-wheels and to check the car's impetus with a jerk that
sends it skidding across the road through a dry-stone wall which
masks a precipice.
The moral of our post-Carrollian parable is that the new-fangled
'time-machine' is as incapable as the old-fashioned sword is of
permanently eliminating Violence when once Violence has entered
in. The driver who free-wheels down the slope does succeed, for
a moment or two, in silencing the noise and stilling the jolts and
jars of a labouring engine; but the disaster that overtakes him
the moment after proves his remedy to have been worse than the
disease. The car that now lies overturned at the bottom of the
ravine, with its gears stripped and its driver's corpse pinned under
the steering-wheel, is in a worse case than the car which, only just
now, was travelling right-side-up along the road however dis-
agreeably its engine might have been knocking and its ignition
have been missing fire.
It was, no doubt, theoretically possible that the gentle incline
which has lured the unfortunate driver to his horrid fate might
have continued all the rest of the way to his journey's end; and if
luck had so far favoured Lim he might have free-wheeled on in
fine style till gravity brought him to a standstill at the door of the
Roadside Hotel. To translate our imagery into terms of a piece of
history that has several times engaged our attention before, we can
imagine a devout Jew, who has taken to heart the lesson of Bar
Kokaba's failure, seeking salvation in the manipulation of the
'time-machine' without being taught by another disaster that he
has not yet discovered a sure way of extricating himself from the
216 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
endless chain of Violence. Our Jewish Quietist and his descen-
dants for the next sixty generations may succeed in living, without
disaster, in an archaistic and a futuristic Utopia simultaneously.
They may successfully render themselves insensible to the pain-
fulness of the mundane Present by a minute observance of a God-
given law and by a patient expectation of a Kingdom of God which
is to be established on Earth in God's own good time by God's
omnipotence alone, without the lifting of one human finger. Yet,
even if an unconscious but unconscionable desire 'that we also may
be like all the nations' 1 had not inveigled the sixty-first generation
of our Jewish Quietists into a hazardous attempt to put itself into
gear with the militant nationalism of a twentieth-century Western
World, 2 one single example of a recourse to the 'time-machine'
and this an experiment which, up to date, has escaped a crash but
has not yet evaded a question-mark would hardly avail to in-
validate a conclusion that is forced upon us by the rest of the
historical evidence. This conclusion is that as a rule which is
not disproved by its exceptions the would-be saviour with the
'time-machine' is apt, sooner or later, to become so embarrassingly
entangled in the intricacies of his own clockwork that he is con-
strained in the end to throw the ingenious piece of mechanism
aside and to pick up in despair his predecessor's rusty sword which
Straker has so far contemptuously left to lie in the gutter where
Bayard dropped it.
If we wish to test this rule by an empirical survey it may be
convenient to review in the first place the saviour-archaists who
have set the 'time-machine' to jump backwards, and in the second
place the saviour-futurists who have jerked the lever of fantasy in
the opposite direction to make the machine jump forwards. In the
sequel to both of these manoeuvres we shall see a primitive demon
of Violence who has been deftly shown out of the door come slyly
creeping in again through the window.
In considering the archaistic variation on tjiis theme we may
begin with an illustration which we have examined in this Study
already in another context. 3 The notion of a 'Nordic Race' which
is hypothetically superior to the rest of Mankind in virtue of its
physical descent was first conceived and launched by de Gobineau
as a neat verbal retort to the grim physical violence which, in the
French Revolution, the Jacobins had used upon the Noblesse. De
Gobineau effectively exploded the pedantic antiquarianism of those
revolutionary leaders of a French proletariat who had sought to
1 i*Sam. viii. 20.
! frtki9 interpretation of Zionism see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 252-4, above.
^Lo L v (u) (a) * vo1 ' *' pp< 2l6 ~ 21 ' and ' m V - C P) W 8 (<*), in the present volume,
pp. 56-8, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 217
lend an air of respectability to their act of vengeance against a
French dominant minority by representing themselves as descen-
dants of the wronged and cultivated Gauls, while their adversaries
were held up to odium, and condemned to extermination, as
descendants of the barbarous and outrageous Franks. But this
amiably academic French political jeu d* esprit began to breed a
violence of its own when it passed out of de Gobineau's hands into
those of a Nietzsche and a Houston Stewart Chamberlain whose
caricatures of de Gobineau's theme helped to inspire the masters
of the Second German Reich to act the part of 'the Blond Beast* in
the real life of the international arena. And now, in the third
generation, the platonically archaistic Essai sur Vlnegaliti de$ Races
Humaines has borne an ultra- Jacobin harvest in the Anti-Semitic
enormities of a Third German Reich which has taken the French
archaist's fantasy in deadly earnest and has based its policy, at
home and abroad, upon a doctrine of 'Blood and Soil'.
This sinister metamorphosis of Archaism into Anti-Semitism in
the latest chapter of the history of the Western Civilization has a
Hellenic parallel. The eventual establishment of the Hellenic uni-
versal state in the form of a Roman Empire left a sting of resent-
ment in the hearts of the citizens of Alexandria, who could not
forget that, if the Battle of Actium had gone the other way, their
own city might have become the metropolis of the Hellenic world-
state. 1 A Greek bourgeoisie who, two hundred years back, had
remained unmoved by the stirring call of a Spartan hero and had
felt no temptation to follow Cleomenes into the streets in order to
wrest their liberty by force of arms from the hands of a Macedonian
autocrat 2 were now roused at last when the prize of civic pre-
eminence was wrested away by an upstart Oscan city from an
Alexandria whose citizens could point to the Tomb of Alexander
himself and the Museum and Library of Ptolemy Soter 3 as their
own city's unchallengeable title-deeds to metropolitan rank. 4 In
1 For this unfulfilled historical possibility see V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 37, footnote i, above.
2 Plutarch: Lives of Agis and Cleomenes, chap. 58 (see further V. C (n) (a), Annex
s^hat Ptolemy I was the founder of the Museum and Library is probable but not
quite certain in the present state of our knowledge. .
* There is some evidence to show that, as a result of her annexation to the Roman
Empire after the Battle of Actium, Alexandria lost, not only her perhaps rattier nebulous
primacy among the cities of the Hellenic World, but also some of the solid substance
of her municipal self-government (see Jones, A. H. M. : The Cities of the Eastern Roman
Provinces (Oxford I 9 37, Clarendon Press), pp. 311-12). It must be added that accord-
ing to the same authority (pp. 304 and 471), the Romans were only carrying farther a
process of Gleichschaltung which the Ptolemies had already begun. A civic council of
Alexandria seems to have existed under the earlier Ptolemies, but to have been abolished
by the later Ptolemies before the Roman conquest No doubt the 'totalitarian structure
of the Ptolemaic state and the 'servile* character of native Egyptian social life under the
Ptolemaic regime (see IV. C (ii) (&) 2, vol. iy> p. 85., footnote 5, above) made an unpro-
pitioua environment for Hellenic political institutions.
2i 8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
an age when the political liberation of Alexandria was no longer
even a forlorn hope, but had become a sheer impossibility, succes-
sive generations of Alexandrian city-fathers now intrepidly, though
inconsequently, offered up their lives on the altar of civic pride by
assuming, in face of the Roman Imperial authorities, an attitude
of defiance which left a reluctant Caesar no choice but to pro-
nounce the death-sentence. The 'Acts of the Pagan Martyrs' in
the reigns of Claudius and Trajan and Hadrian and Commodus
were still being treasured by the Greek community in Egypt in the
third century of the Christian Era, as is witnessed by the narratives,
dating from that later age, that have been recovered in part by the
ingenuity of our modern Western papyrologists. 1 But the piquant
name which has been given to these anonymous works of Greek
literature by our Western scholars is misleading in at any rate one
point that is of capital importance. These martyrs to the civic
pride of Alexandria may resemble the martyrs to the religious faith
of the Christian Church in the courage, and even truculence, with
which they refused to bow the knee to an Imperial Government
which held them physically at its mercy. But the Christian martyr's
glory of being the victim of a violence with which he had never
polluted his own hands was not shared with Stephen and Polycarp
by Lampon and Isidore and Antoninus and Appian, These Alex-
andrian recalcitrants against Roman authority had Jewish blood on
their hands before their own blood was shed by a Roman sword
which might fairly claim in this case to be vindicating a laesa
majestas. The Greeks of Alexandria, who were impotent to assail
the Roman Imperial Government itself with any missiles except
innocuous words, were wont to satisfy their craving to \ent their
spite in some more effective way than this by massacring their
Jewish neighbours. 2 From the Jewish community in Alexandria
it was occasionally possible for the Greek community to take a toll
of lives before the Roman garrison could intervene; and these
Alexandrian Jews were odious to the Alexandrian Greeks because
1 For the fragments of this genre of Egyptian Greek literature of the Imperial Age
that have turned up on scraps of third-century papyrus see Meyer, E. : Ursprung und
Anf&nge des Christentums, vol. iii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1923, Cotta), pp. 539-48; and
Bell, H. I.: Juden und Griechen im Rdmischen Alexandria (Leipzig 1927, Hinrichs),
PP- *4-44-
2 These periodic massacres of Jews by Greeks in an Alexandria whose Greek citizens
weresmarting under a Roman yoke that had been weighing upon their city's neck since
the Battle of Actiurn will remind a Western reader, in the present generation, of the
persecution of the Jews in a post-war Germany by National- Socialist Gentiles who
., _ 7 __ r __. ^.,, ..n,j t ui ^wu-iotj Ulliat. JHWll"VJCi,llllH Vjrc.lH.llC5>, CU1U IIUI
the (jerman Jews, who had beaten Germany in the field and then dictated the terms
of peace. But, so long as Germany was disarmed, the true authors of the Versailler
Diktat were beyond her reach; and in these circumstances the Nazis seized upon the
German Jews as vicarious targets for a German stroke of revenge.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 219
the Romans deliberately favoured them as a make-weight against
the flagrant disloyalty of the Greek citizens of the second city of the
Empire. Fragmentary though our evidence is, it would hardly be
rash to assume that some guilt, direct or indirect, for the shedding
of Jewish blood could be brought home to every one of those
Alexandrian Greek 'martyrs' who were condemned to death by the
Roman Government in the course of the first two centuries of the
Christian Era. 1
We have now found two cases one in Western and the other in
Hellenic history in which an attempt to evade hard present facts
by harking back to an irretrievably lost state of past national or
civic glory has only resulted in a savage outbreak of Anti-Semitism.
And the same spectacle which would be comic if it were not
tragic of a saviour-archaist finding himself constrained to throw
away his new-fangled 'time-machine* and snatch up his predeces-
sor's old-fashioned sword instead is afforded by the histories of
would-be constitutional reformers who have sought salvation in an
attempt at a return to some ancestral constitution or 'patrios
politeia'. 2
In the second phase of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' we have
seen 3 this ironic fate overtaking a pair of Heracleidae at Sparta and
a pair of Gracchi at Rome. In each of these two parallel political
tragedies the originator of the reform movement a Lacedae-
monian Agis and a Roman Tiberius had a horror of violence and
lawlessness which was so genuine and so extreme that the would-be
reformer actually allowed himself to be murdered by political
opponents who did not scruple to resort to these e methods of
1 At an earlier stage in the establishment of the Roman domination over the non-
Roman sections of a Hellenic dominant minority the Greek ruling class in the Seleucid
Monarchy had produced a 'pagan martyr' who had the hardihood to strike at a repre-
sentative of Rome herself, instead of seeking defenceless scapegoats among Rome's
Oriental prote'ge's. In the year 162 B.C., at Laodicea, Gnaeus Octavius, the chairman
of a Roman commission of inspection, was assassinated by a Greek nationalist named
Leptines (see V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), p. 122, footnote 5, above). The assassin aggravated the
enormity of his offence by boasting of it in retrospect ; and thereafter with a view to
saving his city and his sovereign from the consequences of his act he voluntarily
repaired to Rome, unfettered and unguarded; delivered himself into the hands of the
Roman Government; and made a jaunty appearance at the bar of the Senate. From
first to last he prophesied that the Romans would not touch a hair of his head; and the
denouement proved him right. For the Senate characteristically preferred the diplo-
matic advantage of retaining a grievance of the first order against the Seleucid Govern-
ment to the emotional satisfaction of avenging their murdered representative; and
accordingly they took care not to accede to the Antiochene Government's proposal that
the Senate should inflict on Leptines whatever punishment they might think good.
Roman diplomacy kept the diplomatic incident open at the price of letting the criminal
go scot free (see Polybius, Book XXXI, chap. 33, and Book XXXII, chap. 3; Meyer,
op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 237-9).
a This particular expression of Archaism has been examined already in V. C (i) (d)
8 (a), pp. 52-6, above.
3 In Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 76-?; IV. C (iii) (6) 9, vol. iv. p. 205 ; IV. C (iii) (c) 3
(J3), vol. iv, p. 508; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 70-1 and 78; V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 388-
9 ; V, C (i) (<) 8 (a), in the present volume, pp. 52-3 ; and V. C (i) (d) 8 (*), p. 94,
above.
220 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
barbarism', in the conviction that this was a lesser evil than it would
be for him to give the lie, by getting in the first blow, to the very
principles that he was upholding at his own peril. Yet even these
two martyrs to a belief in Non- Violence had in one sense brought
their deaths upon their own heads by having stooped, on their side, to
a violence which was not redeemed by the fact that it was not
physical. Before they lost their lives by the hands of some of their
countrymen, both Agis and Tiberius had already broken some of
the fundamental laws of their country's constitution ; and this in
itself was enough to stultify the endeavours of statesnien whose
political programme was the thesis of the sacrosanctity of a con-
stitutional heritage. The martyr hands that were innocent of
having literally shed blood cannot be acquitted of the charge of
having wielded the figurative sword of illegality; and the martyrs
each inspired a successor who drew from the tragedy of his pre-
decessor's fate the disastrous moral that his fatal error had been a
lack of 'realism'.
In girding themselves for the task of making a second attempt
to carry out their predecessors' enterprise a Cleomenes at Sparta
and a Gaius at Rome did not forbear to draw and use the physical
sword which had been abjured by an Agis and a Tiberius. 1 This
second pair of Hough-minded' reformers atoned for their recourse
to violence by meeting, after a delusive momentary success, with
the same failure and the same death as their 'tender-minded' pre-
decessors. And their fate, in its turn, led a third pair of political
adventurers to act on the theory that 'realism', if it was to do its
work, must be carried to the point of a 'totalitarian' ruthlessness.
By putting this theory into practice, Sulla at the cost of proscrib-
ing half Rome and devastating all Samnium did succeed, half a
century after Tiberius Gracchus's death, in imposing something
which passed for a 'patrios politeia' and in making this travesty of
his country's ancestral constitution last long enough to allow the
cold-blooded dictator himself to die comfortably in his bed . Sulla's
Spartan counterpart Nabis did not in the end escape the assassin's
knife; yet Nabis, too, lived long enough not only to complete the
social revolution into which Agis' reform had been turned on
Cleomenes' sword's point, but also to bring Messene and Argos,
as well as Lacedaemon, under his tyrannically subversive rule, and
to baffle a Roman commander who had just succeeded in beating
the Macedonians.
If we turn again from Hellenic to Western history we may ob-
l Cleomenes appears to have resorted to violence without hesitation or compunction.
Gaius Gracchus was torn in two ways and never whole-heartedly abandoned the gentle
for the violent path (on this point see V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, pp. 378 and 393, below).
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 221
serve in the present context that our Civil War in England was
precipitated by endeavours that had been made, in all good faith,
to vindicate for the Parliament at Westminster a historic preroga-
tive which, in its champions' belief, had been unlawfully set aside
by a Royal Power that had recently been fortifying itself with a
new administrative technique of Italian provenance. 1 And we may
further observe that the soldier whose sword brought victory to
the Parliament's cause played far greater havoc with the Constitu-
tion, in his autocratic role of Lord Protector of the Commonwealth,
than King Charles had ever sought to play while he was sitting
precariously on the throne of his ancestors. In the same Western
World in our own day a Cromwellian violence has been used in
Italy by a dictator who claims that by this means he has managed
to give his countrymen back their 'patrios politeia' in the shape of
his 'corporative state'. 2
In the tragedy of Ottoman history we can see the two Hellenic
series, Agis-Cleomenes-Nabis and Tiberius-Gaius-Sulla, repro-
duced in the series Selim III-Mahmud II-Mustaf a Kemal. Sultan
Selim (imperabat A.D. 1789-1807) was the first Ottoman statesman
to take in hand the task of saving the heritage of his ancestors when
the jeopardy into which it had fallen had been startlingly revealed
by the disastrous outcome of the Russo-Turkish War of I768-74- 3
Like Agis and Tiberius Gracchus, Sultan Selim set himself to
restore a 'patrios politeia' which had been the palladium of the
State; like them, he found himself driven to pursue reform along
the paradoxical path of innovation; and like them, again, he died
a violent death at the hands of political opponents whom he had
the courage to defy but not the ruthlessness to crush. In the next
act of the Ottoman play Mahmud II (imperabat A.D. 1808-39)
played Cleomenes' and Gaius's part with all the ruthlessness of
Sulla and all the patience of Bismarck. For an opportunity to
avenge his predecessor, Mahmud waited, not ten years, like^Gaius,
but eighteen ;4 during all that time he kept his own counsel, in con-
trast to Gaius's almost ostentatious display of his intention to seek
revenge; and in consequence Mahmud succeeded in extirpating
the Janissaries and dying in his bed as comfortably as Sulla him-
self. Why was it, then, that this Ottoman play required a third act,
and Sultan Mahmud a successor? The reason was that bultan
Sellm's would-be archaizing reform had turned in Sultan Mah-
mud's hands into a Westernizing revolution which even Mahmud
forbore to carry right through. Mahmud required a successor
HI- A, ^ * P- 4S, above.
+ Ibid., pp. 49-50. above.
222 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
because, 'under the strenuous conditions of the Modern World',
the 'Osmanlis could not hold their own if they halted half-way
between their broken-down indigenous institutions and an im-
perfectly assimilated Westernism. A 'totalitarian' Westernizer was
needed to finish Mahmud's work if the ' Osmanlis were to be saved ;
and in our own day this third Ottoman saviour has appeared in the
person of President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk. The Ghazi has been
able to carry his people with him along a road of Westernization
a outrance> on which their forefathers would never have followed
the Sultans, thanks to the Greek invasion of Anatolia in A.D. 1 1919-
22; for this home-thrust opened the eyes of the Ottoman Turks to
the truth that they were fighting now for their very existence and
no longer just for their empire. 1
This survey of would-be saviours with the 'time-machine' in the
ranks of the Dominant Minority may close with two cases in which
the revulsion from the 'time-machine' to the sword took place
within a single lifetime.
The Roman Emperor Julian set himself to reinstate and re-
invigorate by peaceful means the religion and culture of Hellenism
when these had been pushed to the wall by a Christianity that had
been enjoying an Imperial patronage since the conversion of Con-
stantine. The moment when Julian was enabled to put this policy
in hand upon his receipt of the news of the death of the Emperor
Constantius while Julian himself was on the march from Gaul to
Constantinople was separated by an interval of no more than
fifteen months (December, A.D. 36i-March, A.D. 363) from the
moment when the new master of the Hellenic World marched on
eastwards into the domain of the Sasanidae on a campaign in which
he was to lose his life. These fifteen months were all the time that
Julian had for putting his policy into effect; yet, short though this
span was, it was long enough to see the Apostate's original policy
change in two respects. Instead of being able to restore the pre-
Constantinian regime and pre-Christian dispensation in their
authentic shapes, Julian found himself constrained to wage his
cultural and religious war on Christianity by organizing a pagan
Antichurch on a Christian pattern 2 which was as alien as Chris-
tianity itself was from the genuine Hellenic Sthos; and at the same
time Julian failed to live up to his ideal of an enlightened tolerance.
He was quickly disappointed of his romantically unrealistic expecta-
tion that, as soon as the Christian Church was deprived of its recent
advantage of enjoying official support, a Hellenism that had really
been moribund long before the conversion of Constantine would
1 See II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 187-8, above.
* See V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex II, vol. v, p. 584, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 223
recapture its lost ground by the use of no other weapons than its
own intrinsic merit and charm. In his treatment of his Christian
subjects Julian had already crossed the line dividing a contemptu-
ous toleration from a hostile discrimination before his activities in
the field of domestic affairs were suspended by his departure for
the Persian War; and, if it had been his fate to return victorious, it
is difficult to believe that he would not have blackened his reputa-
tion sooner or later by crossing, in turn, the further line between
discrimination and persecution. 1
Julian's failure in the fourth century of the Christian Era to put
the clock back to a pre-Constantinian hour of Hellenic history was
not more signal than Justinian's failure to accomplish the lesser
tour deforce of putting the clock back to Constantine's time in the
sixth century. Justinian set himself to restore the Constantinian
regime in all its aspects. Once again, as of old, the Empire was to
be Latin-speaking, Orthodox, and integral ; yet, in every sphere, the
autocrat's endeavours to achieve his archaistic aim resulted in a
sensational self-defeat.
Justinian's wars for the recovery of the provinces that had fallen
into barbarian hands merely devastated the Imperial territories
that were reconquered while it impoverished those that had
hitherto remained intact; and the conquests bought at this price
proved ephemeral. In extirpating the Ostrogoths the would-be
Restitutor Orbis Romani was actually clearing the ground for an
immediate occupation of Italy by the more barbarous Lombards,
and in extirpating the Vandals he was redeeming a patrimony in
Ifriqiyah for the Berbers and the Arabs. 2 Justinian was no more
fortunate in his ecclesiastical policy. The ecclesiastical war which
he waged against the Monophysitism of his subjects in the Oriental
provinces was as unsuccessful as his military warfare against the
barbarians, since it utterly failed of its intended effect of making
the Catholic Church oecumenical once more in fact as well as in
name. Justinian did not succeed in brow-beating Syria and Egypt
back into Orthodoxy.3 What he did achieve was to alienate their
affections so deeply and so lastingly that, in the next two genera-
tions, they welcomed the Persian armies of Chosroes and the Arab
armies of 'Umar as deliverers from a Melchite yoke. As for the
closing of the schools at Athens and the building of the Church of
Saint Sophia at Constantinople, the first of these two of Justinian's
i Julian's failure to establish in the Roman Empire a Neoplrtonic Church in lieu of
the Christian Church has been touched upon in V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 147: V . CCi)
(d) 6 (8), vol. v, pp. 565-7; V. C (i) (c) a, Annex II, vol. v, p. 584; and V. C (i) (d) 6
(5), Annex, vol. v, pp. 680-3, above.
v 2 See III C (i) (b). vol. iii, p, 162, above.
s This failure of Justinian's Anti-Monophysite campaign has been touched upon
already in V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), Annex, vol. v, p. 679, above.
22,4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
acts gave the coup de grdce to Hellenic learning and the second to
Hellenic architecture; and, while it is true that the intellectual
tradition of Plato and the architectural tradition of Ictinus were
both of them already in articulo mortis by the time when Justinian
thus sped them on their way to death, 1 these parting shots at Hel-
lenism were nevertheless strange gestures from an enthusiast for a
Roman Empire whose historic raison d'etre had been to serve as a
Hellenic universal state. It might seem equally strange that the
Consulate, which had been the classic magistracy of the Roman
Commonwealth, should have been abolished by an emperor who
had undertaken the task of codifying the Roman Law; 2 yet this
particularly conspicuous act of constitutional Vandalism was all of
a piece with Justinian's legal enormity of abrogating the authority
of the original texts on which his Code and Digest and Institutes
were based, as soon as these compilations were published.
Hasty, ill arranged, and incomplete though they might be, 3
Justinian's new law books were at least a mighty monument of the
Latin language ; yet, when the emperor who had just re-established
the authority of the Constantinopolitan Imperial Government over
the Latin-speaking lands of Africa and Italy had to supplement the
law which he had codified, he found it advisable, as a matter of
practical convenience, to publish his novellae in Greek! There
could have been no more ironical illustration of the self-frustration
of Justinian's policy; for the publication of his own new legislation
in Greek was an admission of the fact that in his day the Latin
speech of the City of Constantine was being supplanted by a
Levantine vernacular; 4 this linguistic revolution at Constantinople
bore witness, in its turn, to the devastation and depopulation of the
Imperial City's Latin-speaking European hinterland; and for this
social catastrophe in the Latin-speaking provinces in the Balkan
Peninsula Justinian himself bore a heavier responsibility than any
1 For the senile decay of the Athenian intellect see IV, C (m) {<:) 2 (), vol. iv, pp.
269-74; v - C (i) (<0 6 ($), vol. v, pp. 563-7; and V. C (i) (<*) 8 (y), in the present volume,
PP. 78-80, above; for the abandonment of the Hellenic style of architecture sec IV. C
(n) (a), vol. iv, pp, 54-5, above.
* For the abolition of the Consulate by Justinian see V. C (i) (c?) 9 (). p. xxi, above.
3 For the contrast in spirit, aim, and efficacy between Justinian's codification of the
Roman Law and the contemporary codification of monastic law in Saint Benedict's
Rule see III. C (n) (), vol. lii, pp. 265-6, above. Justinian fell between two stool*.
While on the one hand his compilations were an inferior substitute for the original* out
of which they were excerpted, on the other hand they still reflected the social conditions
of a more highly cultivated age faithfully enough to be inappropriate to the social con-
ditions of the ruder age into which they were launched (on this latter point ee Taylor,
\ A Mediaeval Mind (London 191 1, Macmillan, 2 vols.) V <>L ii pp, 24* and 248),
7 h - L? , m which Jus^nian's novellae were cast was an official variety of the Attic
Koirf which had been minted in the chancelleries of the Hellenic 'successor-state*' of the
Achaemenian Empire and had remained current, under the Roman regime, in the
Oreek and .Onentr.1 provinces of the Hellenic universal state; but the colloquial Greek
which was replacing a colloquial Latin in the streets and fora of Constantinople in
Justinian a day was no doubt already in transition from the KQWJ to Romaic,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 225
other man 1 an invidious distinction for a Roman Emperor whose
own native province was Dardania, and who delighted in being able
in consequence to boast that Latin was his mother-tongue. 2 Yet,
while during Justinian's reign Greek thus gained on Latin in those
Balkan territories of the Empire, including the capital itself, in
which the Dardanian emperor was eager to keep Latin alive, Jus-
tinian was equally unsuccessful in his linguistic policy in the
Oriental provinces. South-east of Taurus Justinian's intentions
in regard to the Greek language were the opposite of what they
were north-west of the Bosphorus; for in Syria and Egypt he was
indirectly working to keep alive the established Greek ecclesiastical
language of a Catholic Church whose cause he was championing
against Monophysite dissenters. Yet, just because the Greek lan-
guage was traditionally associated with the Orthodox Faith in this
part of the Empire, the successful resistance of the Monophysites
to Justinian's pressure on Orthodoxy's behalf was reflected in the
linguistic field in the adoption of the Syriac and Coptic vernaculars
as vehicles for a Monophysite liturgy and literature, in place of a
Greek which was now doubly odious in Oriental Christian ears as
an alien tongue which was the sign oral of the Melchites. This un-
fortunate identification, in the Oriental provinces, of the Greek
language with a losing ecclesiastical cause was the direct result of
Justinian's policy ; and it sealed the doom of Greek in a region in
which the KOWTJ had been the unchallenged vehicle of culture and
administration for not much less than nine hundred years.
These interlocking failures of Justinian's policy in diverse fields
amount, all told, to a total bankruptcy; and the story of this fiasco
can be recapitulated in one sentence. Justinian produced results
which were the opposite of his intentions because his pursuit of
Archaism invariably led him into a use of force.
The saviour-archaists whom we have passed in review up to this
point have all been representatives of the Dominant Minority; but
there is a second company of saviours of the same class who arise
in the External Proletariat when its liberty, or even its very exis-
tence, is threatened by the aggressiveness of some expanding
civilization. When an external proletariat is fighting for its life
against a civilization which, almost ex hypothesi, is its superior in
material force, the members of the hard-pressed primitive society
inevitably look back with regret to the easier and less anxious life
which their forefathers used to lead before this external pressure
began to disturb their peace. This regret for a happiness that is
past may turn into a dream of harking back to it; and a people that
* See IV. C (Hi) (c) 2 (j?), vol. iv, pp. 327-8 and 397-8, abov
* See ibid,, p- 326, footnote 2, above.
226 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
is dreaming this dream will lend a ready ear to a prophet who
promises to translate it into reality. A collision with external
forces which has brought disaster and distress in its train is thus
apt to excite a movement for jumping clear of the Present and
landing safe by a backward twist of the magic lever of the 'time-
machine* in some previous stage of existence in which the har-
rassed society's life was once free from ills that have since been
brought upon it by its undesired contact with a hostile and cor-
roding alien presence.
This archaistic reaction to the painful experience of collision with
an alien social force for which the victim is no match is not, of
course, peculiar to societies of the primitive species. A primitive
society that has been drawn into the External Proletariat of some
expanding civilization is in no different case from a civilization that
has collided with a more powerful society of its own species. In
this identical situation the weaker party be it a civilization or a
primitive society is apt to make an identical response; and the
particular response that we here have in view is examined in greater
detail, under the title of 'Zealotism', 1 in a later part of this Study
that is concerned with the contact between civilizations in the
Space-dimension. 2 In the present place we need not explore
further the psychological phenomena in which 'Zealotism' displays
itself, but may confine ourselves to a review of the saviours of the
'Zealot* type who arise in the External Proletariat.
There is no reason in theory why these barbarian saviour-
archaists should have recourse to violence in working out their way
of salvation; 3 but an empirical survey will show that in practice the
barbarian saviour with the 'time-machine' refrains from taking to
the sword still more rarely than his counterpart who tries to take
the same archaistic way of escape out of the miseries of a dis-
integrating civilization. Indeed, the only non-violent barbarian
saviours with the 'time-machine' whom we shall find ourselves able
to muster are those prophets who arose among the Red Indians
when these primitive inhabitants of North America were being
overwhelmed by an immense wave of inflowing European popula-
tion which was aggressively sweeping westward from coast to coast
of the continent.* And even the followers of these Red Indian
preachers of salvation through non-resistance were driven in the
end, by sheer despair, to hasten the consummation of their doom
by taking up arms. 5 The rest of the barbarian saviours of this class
1 This term has been coined out of the name 'Zealots', which was applied to a party
in Jewry that made itself notorious ID the conflict between Jewry and Rome in the first
and second centuries of the Christian Era. 2 Part IX, below.
3 On this point see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 331, footnote i, above.
* For these Red Indian prophets see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 328-31, above.
s Ibid., pp. 331-2, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 227
present themselves with the 'time-machine' in one hand and the
sword in the other. Their posture is that of the Horatii holding the
Transtiherine bridgehead against Lars Porsenna; but their fate is
more cruel than that of the legendary Roman heroes, for the bar-
barian swordsmen's heroism seldom avails to purchase for their
tribesmen the time to break the bridge before the invader can pass;
and in facing enormous odds in a vain attempt to place their home
beyond the reach of the aggressor's arm they more often meet the
death of those two Horatii who fell than they escape with their lives
like the two slain Roman heroes' brother Publius, The Redskin
Sitting Bui! wiping out Custer's troop of United States cavalry and
surviving the feat to die in his bed in Canada is a far rarer figure in
the annals of barbarian Archaism on the war-path than the Sudani
standard-hearer at the Battle of Omdurman indomitably offering
his breast to the machine-gun bullets as he still holds the MahdJ's
standard defiantly aloft with his feet astride the corpses of his
fallen comrades,*
This barbarian martyr may stand as the type of a tragic company
whose roH-caH is too long for UK to recite. Honoris causa we may
single out the names of Caesar's Arvernian victim Vercingetorix
and Justinian^ Ostrogoth victim Totila and Charlemagne's Saxon
victim Widukind,* We may recall the scene of the Negus Theodore
blowing out his own brains as he charged, like a lion at bay, out of
the ring-wall of ft fortress which he had obstinately deemed im
pregnahlt* until his Magdala was on the point of capture by a
British expeditionary force. We may mourn f Abd-al-Qldir'$
heroic failure to save Algeria, and "Abd^l-Karlm's to save the
Moroccan Rf f , and BhamyFa to save the Highlands of the Caucasus,
from a modern Western imperialism that has armed itself with the
lethal weapons of *the Machine Age* ; and we may pay equal respect
to a Viriathus who failed to save his Lusitania from a Roman
imperialism 1 which was in effect m irresistible as our own, even
though it was not equipped with our present technical facilities for
the wholesale destruction of life and property* We may appreciate
the intractability, while abhorring the savagery, of a Stenka Razin
and a Pugachev* who successively led the revolt of the Cossack
marchmen of the Russian Orthodox Christendom against the
rclontlcaa determination of a Muscovite imperialism to round up
these a*nti*barbariani s into the corral of a Russian universal state,
* For *bi Mah4l Muhammad AJ*m*d*s itadtrahip of * revolt of the Kordofftinl Ar*h*
fftimt tHf penetration of th* Nilotic Hudaa t>y in KgyptoOttoman imptri!i*m equipped
wuh Wcntern wtftfnmi * ibid,, pp, ao# footnote 3* W 1 ^ 3*** footnote % and 324,
ihtivc, 3 S3e* sb*d, t p. 319,
* Far thi? irtpping of Kb* btrbtnmn* in dh# Iberian Peninsula tec ibid*, pp, aos-4,
*b >v*, * So* V. C <i) Cr) a, vol. v, p, 104., above-
* Tht Cotaacfca, who wr mtrchmtn from ih aundpoint of the Huat ian Orthodox
228 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
and break them in to leading the servile life of an internal prole-
tariat. 1 And we may lay a wreath on the graves of the obscure
heroes who captained the Nairi highlanders in their stand against
the Assyrians, 2 the Transcaspian Tiirkmens in their stand against
the Russians, 3 the Araucanians in their stand against the Spaniards,*
and the Maoris 5 and the Pathans 6 in their stand against the British.
After this review of would-be saviours with the 'time-machine'
who have taken the direction of Archaism, we must complete our
present survey by reviewing their futurist counterparts: but we
may not find it easy here to draw any hard-and-fast line of demarca-
tion. To begin with, we have seen 7 that it is in the very nature of
Archaism to defeat itself by breaking down into Futurism; and we
have just been giving ourselves an empirical demonstration of the
working of this historical 'law' in our survey of archaist-saviours
in the ranks of the Dominant Minority. In one instance after
another we have found that, in the act of resorting to the violence
into which their Archaism leads them against their will, these
enthusiasts for a vanished Past have veered round, involuntarily
but unavoidably, out of an archaistic into a futuristic course. The
same transmutation of Archaism into Futurism can be observed
in the ranks of the External Proletariat; and here the change is not
only promoted by a tendency that is innate in Archaism, and is not
only precipitated by a resort to force, but is also foreshadowed, and
perhaps even fore-ordained, in the history of the genesis of the
body social in which the transmutation takes place.
In other contexts 8 we have observed that, within the brief Time-
span of some 6,000 years during which the species of societies that
we have agreed to call 'civilizations* has been in existence up to
date, the radiation of the civilizations that have already come and
gone has travelled so far and so fast that it has long since made its
mark upon every primitive society that it has not destroyed. And
it is safe to assume that this brand of an alien culture will have
burnt deep into the flesh of a ci-devant primitive society that has
come to such close quarters with an expanding civilization as to
Christendom (see II. D (v), vol. ii pp. x$5~7 and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 313-1$,
above), were in origin members of the external proletariat or the Golden Horde (see
V, C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 283, above).
* For the eventual success of the Russian Imperial Government in turning the
Cossacks into 'running dogs* of a Muscovite imperialism see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v,
pp. 3x3-15, above.
* See II, D (v), vol. ii, p. 135, and IV. C (iii) (<:) 3 ()> vol. iv, p. 475, above,
s See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 323, footnote 3, above.
* See V, C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 323, above,
s See ibid.
* See ibid., pp. 305-8, and 332-3, and the present chapter and volume, p. 201 foot-
note i, above.
7 In V. C (i) (d) 8 (), pp. 94-7, above, _,..,. , ,
In Part II. A, vol. i, pp. 185-7, and in V. C (i) (<:) 3, vol. v, pp. 196-7, mbove.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 229
have been conscripted into its imperious neighbour's external
proletariat. It is therefore also safe to predict that even the most
fanatically archaistic-minded leader of an external proletariat will
find himself unable to carry his Archaism to 'totalitarian* lengths.
When he has done his utmost, his tribe will still retain some tinc-
ture of the very civilization from which its would-be saviour has
been striving to keep its life clear; and this alien cultural tincture
will infuse a vein of Futurism into the Archaism of the saviour-
archaist himself.
This ineradicable element of Futurism in the life and leadership
of an external proletariat that is reacting in the 'Zealot 1 way to the
pressure of an aggressive civilization is most evident in the field
of military technique. For the Red Indian saviour- archaists were
perhaps unique among their kind in carrying their objection to the
use of the White Man's tools to the point of forbidding their fol-
lowers to use in self-defence the fire-arms with which their White
assailants were engaged in annihilating them. 1 In other cases the
leaders who have arisen to preach salvation-through-Archaism to
the rank-and-file of hard-pressed societies of either species have
usually allowed and frequently enjoined at least this one excep-
tion in the practical application of their saving principle ; and, in
granting to their followers this single licence of fighting an aggres-
sive alien enemy with his own weapons, they have unintentionally
opened in their curtain-wall a breach which can never be closed
again but which will be worn ever wider by an inflow of alien in-
fluences that will start as a trickle to end in a flood. The impossi-
bility of borrowing this or that element of an alien culture at
choice, without eventually making an unconditional surrender to
the intrusive alien force, is a fundamental law of the contact of
cultures which is examined in this Study in other places. 2 In the
present context we are only concerned with this 'law' in so far as
it throws light upon the cause of the change of orientation from
Archaism to Futurism which is so frequently to be observed in the
reaction of an external proletariat towards the dominant minority
against which it is up in arms. When once the barbarian has
adopted the weapons of the enemy civilization there are two clear
alternatives before him: either he will succumb to the enemy
through failing to master the borrowed art, or else he will survive
through learning in time to beat his master at his own game. If
i For this remarkable veto see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v p. 331, above.
a See V C (i) (<*) (j3), pp. 106-7, above, and Parts IX and X, passim below. For the
particular operation oFtfcJs law in the intercourse between an external Proletariat and
I dominant minority across the stationary frontier of a universal state see V. C (i) , W
6 ()7vol, v, pp. 450-80, and V. C (i) (d) 7, in the present volume, p. 4, footnote 4,
above: and Part VIlI, passim, below.
230 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
we translate this pair of alternatives, as we must, from their literal
application in the limited field of military technique into terms that
cover the whole of life, we shall conclude that an external prole-
tariat has a choice between being exterminated by the dominant
minority with which it is at grips or else overcoming its adversary
and stepping into his shoes. And this is, in effect, a choice between
an Archaism which spells defeat and a Futurism which may be the
key to victory. A barbarian saviour-archaist'who is resolved at all
costs to avoid the romantic doom of a Vercingetorix must embrace
the futuristic ambition of a Visigothic war-lord whose 'dream was
to see "Gothia" substituted for "Romania" and Atawulf seated on
the throne of Caesiar Augustus'. 1
In the ranks of the External Proletariat, Atawulf in this mood
of his unregenerate youth 2 may stand as the type of the saviour-
futurist. And this Visigothic raider of a Hellenic universal state is
an exceptionally articulate representative of a host of barbarian
war-lords who have been impelled by a usually quite unreflective
appetite for loot and fame to lead their war-bands into the derelict
domain of a disintegrating society where the unsophisticated bar-
barian interlopers may still find an eldorado when the delicately
nurtured heirs of the kingdom have already perished miserably
there of want and exposure. When Atawulf thus supplants
Honorius, the first thing that is apt to strike an observer is the
contrast between the triumphant avenger of Vercingetorix and the
discomfited successor of Caesar. What can there be in common
between the war-lord who is making his fortune by the sword and
the emperor who has lost the courage to use the weapon even in
defence of his heritage ? Yet we have seen 3 that the Goth's vic-
torious swordsmanship has been learnt in a Roman school; and if
we now look into the next chapter of the story we shall perceive
that Caesar's barbarian conqueror is a barbarous caricature of
Caesar himself, instead of being, as might appear at first sight, a
'noble savage' whose act of rapine is all but justified in equity by
the immensity of the splendid robber's moral superiority over his
degenerate victim.
In the history of the expansion of the Hellenic Civilization at any
rate, the radiation of the expanding society's political institutions
and ideas among the barbarians round about is almost as much in
1 Orosius, P.: Adversum Paganos, Book VII, chap. 43, quoted already in V. C (i) (c)
3, vol. v, p. 227, above.
^ The tendency, illustrated by Atawulf 's second thoughts, for a victorious barbarian
saviour-futurist to experience a revulsion from Violence towards Gentleness, and from
Satanism towards Conservatism, has been examined ibid., pp. 223--7, above. This
tendency is also illustrated, as we have there seen, by the careers of a Theodoric, a
Yazid, and even an Alaric.
3 In V. C (i) (rf) 6 (a), vol. v, pp. 459-69, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 231
evidence as the radiation of its military technique. In another con-
text 1 we have seen how the republicanism which was one of the
prominent political tendencies of Hellenism in its growth-stage
spread from its cradle in Hellas into the barbarian hinterland of the
Hellenic World until, by the time when Tacitus was writmg his
Germania, this new-fangled Hellenic institution, in its north-west-
ward line of advance through Italy and Gaul, had supplanted its
old-fashioned predecessor, the patriarchal hereditary monarchy,
among all the peoples including even the recent immigrants of
Teutonic speech on the left bank of the Rhine, while it had
already begun to undermine the traditional form of kingship among
the Transrhenane Frisians and Cherusci. By Tacitus's day, how-
ever, at the turn of the first and second centuries of the Christian
Era, this typical institution of the growth-stage of the Hellenic
Society, which was then still winning converts on the verge of
Ultima Thule, had, of course, long since lost its hold upon the
heart of the Hellenic World; for by this time more than five hun-
dred years had passed since the growth of the Hellenic Civilization
had been cut short by the breakdown of the year 431 B.C.; and a
republicanism which was bound up with a phase of Hellenic history
which had thus ended in disaster had soon been unceremoniously
elbowed away from its native ground by a Macedonian counter-
attack of patriarchal monarchy 2 and by the rise, under this and other
constitutional masks, of would-be saviours with the sword. In an
age in which the Hellenic institutional wave of republicanism was
still making its way, unspent, in the North European barbarian
no-man's-land beyond the Rhine, the following wave of dictator-
ship had already arrived at the frontiers of a Hellenic universal
state which owed both its creation and its preservation to a mono-
poly of dictatorial power in the hands of Caesar Augustus. In the
next chapter of Hellenic history this second wave, in its turn,
travelled on into the Transrhenane no-man's-land in the wake of its
precursor, and its progress was marked by a repetition, inpartibus
barbarorum, of the institutional revolution which had already taken
place in a disintegrating Hellenic World.
During the interval between the generation of Tacitus^ who was
writing in the early days of the Hellenic 'Indian Summer', and the
generation of Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived to record the
Empire's irretrievable military disaster at Adrianople in A.D. 378,
both the budding republicanism of the barbarian communities
in the neighbourhood of the Roman limes and the sheltered
1 In V C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 213, footnote i, above,
a For ihTs anachronistic recrudescence of patriarchal monarchy in the heart of the
Hellenic World between 379 B.C. and 168 B.C. see III. C (11) (i), Annex IV, vol. 111,
pp. 485-7, above.
232 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
patriarchalism of the remoter barbarians beyond the range of
the frontier war-zone 1 were blighted by the malignant growth of a
new form of government 2 which a Hellenic political philosopher
would have diagnosed as 'tyranny' and would have assigned, in
his classification of constitutions, to the same category as the con-
temporary Caesarism of the Roman Empire.
'The binding force formerly possessed by kinship was now largely
transferred to the relationship between "lord" and "man", between
whom no bond of blood-relationship was necessary. . . . The form of
government truly characteristic of "the Heroic Age" ... is an irrespon-
sible type of kingship resting not upon tribal or national law which is
of little account but upon military prestige. . . . The princes of "the
Heroic Age" appear to have freed themselves to a large extent from any
public control on the part of the tribe or community. . . . The force
formerly exercised by the kindred is now transferred to the comitatus>
a body of chosen adherents pledged to personal loyalty to their chief. . . .
The result of the change is that the man who possesses a comitatus
becomes largely free from the control of his kindred, while the chief
similarly becomes free from control within his community.' 3
Is this profound revolution in the institutional life of a primitive
society that has been conscripted into an external proletariat a
phenomenon that is peculiar to the history of the North European
external proletariat of the Hellenic Society? Or is it a revolution
that is apt to overtake any external proletariat as a consequence of
its relations with a disintegrating civilization across the stationary
frontier of a universal state ? The second of these two alternative
possibilities would appear to be the nearer to the truth ; for the
passages that have just been quoted from the work of a modern
Western scholar all refer to both of two external proletariats of
which the author is here making a comparative study. And, if the
historical evidence reveals the war-lord, with his war-band, thus
asserting himself, in an unmistakably identical fashion, among the
Teutonic-speaking barbarians beyond the pale of the Roman
Empire and among the Greek-speaking barbarians in the conti-
nental hinterland of the Minoan 'thalassocracy', we may venture
to infer that an Atawulf who repeats the exploits of a Pelops and an
Atreus 4 is a typical example of a type of barbarian saviour- futurist
that is apt to make its appearance in the external proletariat of any
1 For the survival of the patriarchal monarchy in Tacitus's day among the Suebi, the
Goths, and the Swedes see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 213, footnote i, above.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 4, footnote 4, above.
3 Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1,912, University Press), pp. 365,
390-1, and 443.
* Pelops, like Atawulf, acquired his kingdom by marrying a royal heiress ; and Atreus,
in his turn, succeeded to the heritage of the Perseidae thanks to a marriage connexion
though in this case the lady was the barbarian interloper's sister and th.e degenerate
emperor's mother, in contrast to the affair of Galla Placidia, who was Honorius's sister
and Atawulf J s bride.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 233
disintegrating civilization. We need not call the roll of Atawulf J s
peers; for, in bringing the External Proletariat on to our stage in
an earlier chapter, we have already made so many of them march
past us at the head of their warriors 1 that the figure of the bar-
barian saviour-futurist is by this time familiar to us. In this place
it is perhaps more pertinent to observe that, however distinctive in
themselves, and distinct from one another, our Atawulf-type and
Vercingetorix-type may be, it is by no means easy to be sure in
every case whether a barbarian saviour with the 'time-machine*
belongs to the Gallic archaist's or to the Gothic futurist's company.
In the External Proletariat, at any rate, a distinction which is
plain in principle is in practice difficult to draw because the re-
placement of a saviour-archaist by a saviour-futurist as the leader
on the barbarians' side in the tug-o'-war along the frontiers of a
universal state takes place by way, not of an abrupt mutation, but
of a gradual evolution ; 2 and in the course of this long-drawn-out
chapter in the history of the struggle between the External Prole-
tariat and the Dominant Minority there will be some barbarian
leaders who will remain archaists with impunity and others who
will become futurists without escaping disaster.
As examples of the type of the triumphant barbarian archaist we
may cite the obscure leaders of the Scythians who foiled Darius's
attempt to extend the Achaemenian Empire on to the Black Sea
Steppe; the Cheruscan leader Arminius who foiled Augustus's
attempt to extend the Roman Empire into the North European
Forest ;3 the Sa'udi leaders of the Wahhabis 4 who threw off circa
A.D. 1830 the Egypto-Ottoman yoke which Mehmed 'All had
fastened upon their necks only about twelve years before at the
cost of a nine years' war (gerebatur A.D. i8io-:8); 5 and the
Gutaeans who not only held out when they were assaulted in their
native mountain fastnesses by Naramsin (dominabatur circa 2572-
2517 B.C.), but survived to take their revenge upon a disintegrating
Sumeric Civilization whose earlier convulsions had launched the
1 See V. C (i) (c) 3, passim, in vol. v, pp. 194-337, above. . , ,
2 See V C (i) (c) 3 vol. v, pp. 208-10, above, and Part VIII, passim, below.
3 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 205, and V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex I, vol. v, p. 593, above.
* See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 294-6 and 333~4, above.
s Even at the cost of this amount of time and blood and treasure Mehmed All would
probably have gained no more ground in Arabia than Darius gamed m Scythia as the
result of a single campaign, if the 'Osmanli empire-builder had not had, and taken the
opportunity to enhance the fighting power of his troops by borrowing from the Western
World a discipline and a technique which were alien from the Ottoman spirit ot that age^
though the West itself had perhaps learned these arts in an Ottoman school (see Part
III. A, vol. iii, p. 38, footnote 2, and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (y), vol. iv, p.^SO, above).
This adventitious aid enabled Mehmed 'AH in Arabia to emulate Justinian s achieve-
ment in Italy. But his tour deforce of asserting the dominion of a C *^G^
over the Najd was just as ephemeral as Justinian's analogous tour deforce of asserting
'the dominion of a Constantinopolitan Government over the Basin of the Po (whicn
Justinian's exertions merely converted from a Gotnia into a Lombardy).
234 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Akkadian militarist upon his career of aggression when, less than
a hundred years after Naramsin's death, the Gutaean war-bands
descended upon the Sumeric Society's homeland on the plains of
Shinar and kept their yoke upon their victims' necks for four suc-
cessive generations (circa 2429-2306 B.C.). 1
As examples of unsuccessful barbarian futurists we may cite
from the history of the Hellenic World the Suevian war-lord
Ariovistus, 2 and the obscurer war-lords 3 of the Cimbri and the
Teutones, 4 who dreamed the dream of Atawulf five hundred years
too soon and paid the penalty for their precocity by encountering,
not Honorius, but Marius and Caesar. These successive roles
which were played by an Ariovistus and an Atawulf on the North
European front of the Roman Empire have their analogues on its
West African front in the careers of a Jugurtha who came within
an ace of succeeding 5 at the stage at which Ariovistus failed, and
a Gildo who only just failed 6 at the stage at which Atawulf was suc-
cessful. In an intermediate age, and at the eastern extremity of the
North European front, we see a Decebalus who had the makings
of a Theodoric being blasted by the thunderbolt of a Juppiter
Trajanus. From the history of the main body of the Orthodox
Christian Society we may cite the Serb war-lord Stjepan Dusan
(domindbatur A.D. 1331-55), who achieved the success of a Theo-
doric (though his achievement was as ephemeral as his Ostrogothic
counterpart's) at a stage of the Orthodox Christian 'Time of
Troubles' which corresponds to the times of Jugurtha and Ariovistus
in the history of the Hellenic World. 7 If we turn to the history of
the 'Great Society' of the Westernized World of our own age we
may cite, from the vast company of its dramatis personae. King
Amanallah of Afghanistan, who has come to grief through reck-
lessly forcing the pace in attempting to put into effect a policy of
salvation-through-Futurism 8 which his moderate and circumspect
Wahhabl contemporary King 'Abd-al-'Aziz of Sa'udl Arabia has
been carrying out with signal success. 9
1 See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 109; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 203 and 262, and the present
chapter and volume, p. 184, above, and V. C (ii) (6), pp. 296-7, below.
2 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 219 and 223, above.
3 Ariovistus has been raised out of a like obscurity, not by any prowess of his own,
but by the accident that his Roman conqueror Caesar was as great a master of the pen
as he was of the sword, whereas Marius merely performed, without recording, his feat
of exterminating the Cimbri and Teutones.
See V. C (i) (c) 3, .vol. v, p. 218, above,
s See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (0), vol. iv, p. 507, and V. C (i) (c~) 3, vol. v, p. 218, above.
6 For the wave of barbarian aggression which began to beat upon the West African
front of the Roman Empire in the last quarter of the fourth century of the Christian
Era, see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 221, above.
7 For the Serb domination over Macedonia in the latter part of the Orthodox Chris-
tian 'Time of Troubles' see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 293-4, above.
8 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 332-3, and V. C (i) (d) 9 (j9), in the present volume,
p. 103, above. 9 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 333-4, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 235
We can also cite at least one unsuccessful barbarian leader who
is bafflingly amphibious. Is the Sicel leader Ducetius (ducebat
circa 466-440 B.C.) to be classified as an archaist or as a futurist?
At first glance we may see nothing but an archaist in the man who
led the last of the native barbarians in their last stand against the
Greek colonists of Sicily. Is not this a hero of the same class as
the Red Indian Chief Sitting Bull or the Sudani standard-bearer
at the Battle of Omdurman ? But a closer examination of Ducetius
brings to light one futuristic feature after another.
In the first place Ducetius's original enterprise, with its ambi-
tious aim of uniting all the surviving Sicel communities into a
single commonwealth, was manifestly inspired by the example of
two miniature empires which had recently been exercised by
Greek city-states over Sicel perioeci the empires which had been
won respectively for Agrigentum by her despot Theron (domina-
batur circa 488-472 B.C.) and for Syracuse by the Deinomenidae
dominabantur circa 485-466 B.C.). 1 In the second place Ducetius
not only emulated the ambitions of contemporary Greek empire-
builders in Sicily but also imitated the methods of contemporary
Hellenic statesmanship ; for the device by which he sought to give
his new Sicel commonwealth cohesion was to 'synoecize' it into a
city-state a la grecque with its civic centre at Palice. 2 In the third
place, after he had courted and incurred disaster by falling foul of
Agrigentum and Syracuse simultaneously, 3 Ducetius threw him-
self on the mercy of his victorious Syracusan adversaries and
acquiesced in their decision to send the defeated Sicel patriot into
an honourable exile at Corinth the mother-city of Syracuse in
the heart of Hellas. In the fourth and last place Ducetius, so far
from becoming estranged from the alien civilization which had
now proved itself more than a match for his barbarian arms,
became instead so complete a convert to Hellenism that he even-
tually returned from Corinth to Sicily, not as a refugee who^had
broken out of prison and was shaking the dust of his captivity
from off his feet, but as the Sicel leader of a new swarm of Greek
1 For these Agrigentine and Syracusan 'empires' see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 21 1-12,
above; for the Deinomenidae see III. C (ii) (&), vol. Hi, p. 357, footnote i, above.
Ducetius's attempt to set up a Sicel empire in Sicily which was to take the place of both
these Greek empires was made immediately after the Deinomenids fall from power.
2 Herein Ducetius anticipated by a whole generation the Macedonian King Perdiccas
II's creative achievement of inducing the ChalcioUan Greek communities em pa/oyj to
'synoecize' themselves at Olynthus circa 432 B.C. (see III. C (u) (&), Annex IV, vol. in,
P '3 48 Compare ) the similar and similarly disastrous^rror of statesmanship which was
committed by the Rlfi barbarian saviour-archaist Abd-al-Kanm m A.D. 1925, when,
not content with being at war with the Spaniards, he invaded the French L Zone of
Morocco and thereby drove the French into a military co-operation with the = Sparaards
which sealed the Rifi patriot's doom (see Toynbee, A. ]. Survey of International Affairs,
1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), Part II, sections (viHvin)).
236 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
colonists. When death overtook him thereafter on the soil of his
native island, it found him engaged once again, in this last phase
of his career, on his original enterprise of attempting to unite all
the surviving Sicel communities into a single commonwealth
organized, more Hellenico, as a city-state. But Ducetius had not
been blind to the lesson of his previous failure, and this time he
started to build his Sicel state round a Greek nucleus. This was
the significant difference between Ducetius's first experiment in
'synoecism' at Palice and his second experiment at Calacte. And
if Fate had granted him the time to carry this second essay in
empire-building to completion his Sicel hands would have reared
a political structure with a Greek apex and a Sicel base which
would have conformed exactly to the Hellenic pattern of the ante-
cedent Siceliot Greek empires which had centred, not on Calacte,
but on Syracuse and Agrigentum.
The case of Ducetius illustrates the difficulty of sorting out into
an archaist and a futurist group, with a hard-and-fast line of
demarcation between them, the would-be saviours with the 'time-
machine' who have arisen in the External Proletariat. But when
we turn to the Internal Proletariat we shall perhaps not reckon
a priori on being confronted by any corresponding problem. One
of the hall-marks of membership of the Internal Proletariat is an
apparently congenital inability to make the archaistic response to
the challenge of social catastrophe. It can therefore be taken for
granted that every would-be saviour with the 'time-machine* who
arises in the Internal Proletariat will be a saviour-futurist; and
this certainty might be expected to simplify the rest of our present
survey. There is, however, one complication, and that lies in the
fact that the futurist leaders of the Internal Proletariat are not all
of them drawn from the Internal Proletariat's own ranks. 1
At an earlier point in this Study we have noticed the proclivity
of the Dominant Minority to succumb to a process of 'proletariani-
zation' which takes the form of 'vulgarization* when the Internal
and not the External Proletariat is the proletarian object of the
Dominant Minority's mimesis. 2 And in the present chapter we
have seen that this transfer of social allegiance to the Internal
Proletariat from the Dominant Minority, which in a Commodus
is the last extravagance of a wanton luxury, may be the first
necessity of a baffled idealism in a Gaius Gracchus. It is, indeed,
one of the tragic ironies of the Dominant Minority's fate that the
idealists who arise in its ranks should tread the same path of social
i See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 71, above.
* For this phenomenon of 'vulgarization* see V. C (i) (d) 6 (a), vol. v, pp. 445~59>
above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 237
migration as the wastrels. And it is even more tragically ironical
that Gracchus should involuntarily work far greater havoc through
a nobility to which Commodus could never rise than Commodus
can work through a vulgarity into which Gracchus would never
fall. Yet this is the melancholy truth. For, while Commodus
rapidly reduces himself to impotence by a course of social truancy
which is also one of spiritual demoralization, Gracchus's spirit is
fortified by a decree of social outlawry which is passed upon him,
not by any viciousness in himself, but by the impenitence of adver-
saries in his own household who cannot forgive him for calling in
question the right of his own class to the enjoyment of its ill-gotten
privileges. And so, in the sequel, Commodus is uneventfully
swallowed up by a slough in which he has delighted to wallow,
whereas Gracchus breathes a demonic energy and an explosive
driving-force into the souls of the proletarians into whose company
he has been thrust by the hostile hands of his own kin and kind.
This revolutionary alliance between an outcast saviour-archaist
and an outcast Internal Proletariat is perhaps in some sense fore-
ordained from the very beginning of the archaist's career, though
it is no part of his original intentions or expectations. The essential
feature and supreme attraction of the 'patrios politeia' which the
archaist originally sets out to re-establish is its freedom from social
cankers that are penalties of social breakdown and symptoms of
social disintegration. His aim is to restore the moral health of
Society, and his prescription for dealing with the Proletariat is not
to set it in the seat of the Dominant Minority but to abolish both
classes at one stroke by closing the breach between them. But the
social physician who undertakes to heal the body social by getting
rid of the Proletariat in this way is committing himself to a policy
of righting the wrongs of the proletarians ; for the schism in Society
can only be repaired by restoring to its proletarian members the
'stake' in Society of which they have been wrongfully deprived. 1
And this plank in the archaist-reformer's platform is an insuper-
able stumbling-block for his fellow members of the Dominant
Minority, because the Proletariat's loss has been the Dominant
Minority's gain. In their eyes the archaist's programme of reform
is sheer treason against the reformer's own class, while in his eyes
their opposition simply shows them up as hypocrites whose pro-
fessions of public spirit disgracefully break down as soon as their
pockets are touched. Misunderstanding breeds alienation; and,
when the tension rises to breaking-point and the Dominant
i For the original meaning of the Latin word proletariiLe. persons whose only
'stake* in Society is the fruit of their own physical procreation see I. B (iv), vol. i, p. 41.
footnote 3, above.
238 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Minority casts the contumacious reformer out, the thwarted and
disillusioned idealist now almost joyfully parts company with his
own kin and kind and throws himself crying 'I will be your
leader* into the arms of a Proletariat which by this time is waiting
with arms outstretched to receive him. The Proletariat is content
to take the archaist-outcast at the Dominant Minority's valua-
tion. In their eyes he is a champion of the proletarian cause who
has sacrificed for their sake everything in the world except their
gratitude and trust; and they give practical expression to these by
adopting the outlaw as their leader. This dramatic situation is
one which we have encountered in this Study before. The stone
which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the
corner.' 1 Paul turns away from the Jews who refuse him a hearing,
and delivers his rejected message of salvation to the Gentiles' open
ears. And, while in Jewish eyes the Pharisee-Apostle of Christ is
an odious renegade, in Paul's eyes the Jewry of his generation is
an Esau sacrilegiously repudiating his birthright.
When we pass in review the legion of saviour-futurists who have
led the Internal Proletariat in their desperate revolts against an
intolerable oppression, we see turncoats or outcasts from the
ranks of the Dominant Minority fighting shoulder to shoulder
with comrades who are proletarian-born, and in the confusion of
the conflict the social antecedents of each dust-begrimed and
blood-bespattered figure are nof always easy to ascertain.
In the wave of insurgency that swept across the Hellenic World
in the seventh decade of the second century B.C., 2 a movement
which was launched in Sicily by the Syrian slave Eunus and the
Cilician slave Cleon was taken up in Asia Minor by a pretender
to the throne of the Attalids who was denounced by his opponents
as a bastard. 3 With which of his contemporaries is Aristonicus
to be classed ? With Eunus or with Tiberius Gracchus ? Eunus
assumed the royal name Antiochus when he proclaimed himself
king of a community of freedmen; and another insurrection of the
slaves in Sicily was captained by a Salvius who called himself
King Tryphon. This Salvius-Tryphon was adopting as his throne-
name a sobriquet that had been borne as a nickname by an adven-
turer who in the preceding generation had momentarily usurped
the diadem of the Seleucidae. And this Diodotus-Tryphon's role
at Antioch had been as equivocal as Aristonicus's role at Perga-
mum. In the third and last act of the Sicilian tragedy, which was
1 Matt, xxi, 42, quoting Ps. cxviii, 22. Compare Mark xii. 10; Luke xx. 17; Acts iv.
ii ; Eph. ii. 20; i Pet. ii. 7. The passage has been quoted in this Study already in IV.
C (hi) (c) i, vol. iv, p. 248, and in V. C (i) (d) ii, in the present volume, p. 164, above.
2 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 68-71, above.
3 Strabo: Geographica, Book XIV. chap. 38 (p. 646); Justin: Historiae Philippicae,
Book XXXVI, chap. 4, 6.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 239
played about half a century after the last of the local slave-revolts
had been crushed, 1 the enterprise of establishing an Anti-Rome on
Sicilian ground was taken up by an insurgent who, so far from
being of servile blood, was a true-born son of Pompey the Great.
Sextus Pompeius 2 was driven into the arms of a beaten but un-
reconciled proletariat when the Second Triumvirate included his
name in their proscription-list. And thereafter, with Sicily for his
head-quarters and with Oriental freedmen in command of his fleet,
he avenged the defeats of Eunus and Salvius on the children of the
Rupilii and Luculli and emulated the atrocities of the Cilician
pirates who had been swept off the seas by this Roman outlaw's
father.
Before he gained possession of his maritime stronghold in Sicily,
Sextus had foutid asylum in a Pyrenaean fastness in the country
of the Lacetani ; and from this Spanish base of operations he had
repeated the exploits of Sertorius, 3 a refugee-partisan of Marius
who, in an earlier round of a hundred-years-long Roman civil war,
had held out in Spain for a decade against the elsewhere victorious
lieutenants and successors of Sulla. It was an extraordinary feat
of arms for the master of a couple of backward provinces to keep
at bay, foi that length of time, the forces of a Roman Government
which not only held Rome itself but also commanded the resources
of all the rest of the Roman Empire. What was the secret of
Sertorius's astonishing success ? When we look into the history of
this Roman outlaw, we find that after he had actually been driven
out of Spain into Morocco by a Sullan expeditionary force he was
able to recover his foothold in the Peninsula thanks to being
invited by the recently conquered Lusitanians to come over and
help them against the imperialism of the Roman outlaw's own
compatriots. 4 In other words, Sertorius (in Hispania militabat
circa 82-72 B.C.) was able to set Rome at defiance because he had
been invested with the mantle of Viriathus (militabat circa 150-
140 B.C.). A barbarian people who had been forcibly transferred
from the external to the internal proletariat of -an aggressively
expanding civilization in consequence of the failure of a native
leader to stem the tide of Roman conquest, now called in one of
their conquerors to deliver them from a yoke in which they had
not yet learnt to acquiesce; and in this last act of the Spanish
tragedy the Roman turncoat avenged the defeat of the Lusitanian
patriot.
* The second of the slave-revolts in Sicily had lasted from about 104 to 100 B.C.;
Sextus Pompeius's occupation of the island lasted from about 43 to 36 B.C.
a See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 71, above. * See ibid.
* Like Hamilcar Barca a hundred and fifty years or so before him and the Arab
Muslim conquerors some eight hundred years later, Sertorius made his descent on
Spain from Africa at the head of a force which included a contingent of Berber troops.
240 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
In Italy in the same impious age we see the Roman senator
Catiline (insurgebat 63-62 B.C.) 1 treading in the footprints of the
runaway gladiator Spartacus (insurgebat 73-71 B.C.).* In the
modern Western World we can espy, among the renegades from
a dominant minority who put themselves at the head of the insur-
gent German peasants in A.D. 1 524-5,3 a counterpart of Aristoni-
cus in the ex-Duke of Wiirttemberg Ulrich, and counterparts of
Sertorius and Sextus Pompeius in the knights Florian Geyer and
Gotz von Berlichingen. And in the Westernized Russian World
of our own day we ourselves have lived to see the dreams of
Spartacus and Catiline translated into reality by the hand of a
master-revolutionary who was not a workman and not a peasant
and not (as Pugachev had been) 4 a Cossack and not (as Minin had
been)s a butcher. The extraordinary genius who succeeded in
establishing a 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat* on the ruins of the
empire of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great was not himself
of proletarian origin. Lenin 6 was baptized as Vladimir Ulianov,
and the father who gave him this respectable name was a gentle-
manly official in the Imperial civil service.
This survey of revolutionary leaders of the Internal Proletariat
who have been recruited from the ranks of the Dominant Minority
will perhaps have sufficed to show that the political prophet with-
out honour who withdraws as an outlaw to return as a saviour on
a different social plane is a figure of far-reaching historical impor-
tance. We shall not learn much about the true character and
worth of these social migrants by taking note of the provisional
verdict that has been passed on them by their contemporaries, for
it is a matter of common form for them to be execrated as turn-
coats by their own kin and kind and to be lauded as martyrs by
their new-found comrades. We must form our own opinion on
the evidence before us; and this empirical method seems likely to
lead us on the whole to a favourable judgement; for, if we repeat
our roll-call, we shall find that the ne'er-do-wells of the type of
Catiline and the desperadoes of the type of Sextus Pompeius and
Sertorius are outnumbered by the disinterested and self-sacrificing
idealists among whom we must reckon not only an Agis and a
Cleomenes and a Tiberius and a Gaius Gracchus, who will be
accorded the title by a general consensus, but also, at least pro-
visionally, an Aristonicus and a Lenin, whose claim if we do give
them the benefit of the doubt will evoke a volley of indignant
protests. The final judgement on satanist-saviours such as these
1 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 71, above. 2 See ibid., p. 70, above.
3 For the Peasants* Revolt see ibid., p. 167, above.
* See the present chapter, p. 227, above. * See ibid., p. 207, above.
6 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 179-80 and 181-8, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 241
must be left to Time and History; but in regard to the outlaw-
saviours in general there are certain matters of fact which we may
venture to state here and now. In the first place these outlaws are
apt to include in their number some of the noblest souls that are
ever born into the Dominant Minority of a disintegrating civiliza-
tion. In the second place their nobility is the cause of their being
cast out by their own kin and kind. In the third place this is the
cause of their adoption as leaders by their new proletarian com-
rades. In the fourth place the 'clouds of glory* which these social
migrants trail, as they make their painful transit across a monstrous
social gulf, do not thereafter 'fade into the light of common day 1 .
The outlook and ideals and standards and examples with which
the saviour-outcasts' advent irradiates the Internal Proletariat's
murky native 'ideology' are the only elements of the futurist
Weltanschauung that survive the inevitable failure of the futurists'
forlorn hope. After 'the City of the Sun 1 has shown itself to have
been a 'City of Destruction', the alien light in which it was momen-
tarily and bewilderingly apparelled can still be seen shining above
the smoking ruins and the blood-soaked sod; and then at last this
glory can be recognized for what it is. It is the celestial light that
streams from the mansions of the City of God. 1
Now that we have followed the saviour-outlaw to his journey's
end, and have recognized the source of the light which this torch-
bearer carries with him, we need not go on to call the roll of the
native proletarian leaders with whom he throws in his lot, since
we have reviewed these once already in bringing the Internal
Proletariat on to our stage. 2 Our survey of would-be saviours
with the 'time-machine' may therefore close at this point with a
summary of our findings; and these can be" stated in a single
sentence : the 'time-machine' has proved to be the fraud which it
was accused of being by its quizzical inventor* 3 This pretentious
piece of clockwork is not, after all, an effective substitute for the
sword. The sword's results cannot be attained without shed-
ding blood and taking life; and such murderous work can only
be done by dint of the sword's cutting edge. That is why the
would-be saviour with the 'time-machine' invariably rejects his
new-fangled instrument and gets to work again with his well-
proved weapon as soon as things become serious just as, in our
British warfare in the eighteenth century, the Scottish clansmen
used to throw their muskets away and draw their claymores
1 The track which this light imprints, in its transit, on 'the sensitive medium of
legend is examined, in one particularly momentous test case, ih V. C (ii) (a), Annex 11,
pp. 376-539, below.
2 In V. C (i) (c) 2, passim, in vol. v, pp. 58-194, above.
3 For Lewis Carroll's elegant exposure of the catch in the mechanism of the time-
machine 1 see the present chapter, p. 214, above.
242 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
whenever they were coming to close quarters with the 'redcoats'.
Our present inquiry, as far as we have yet carried it, has shown
us that, while there may be no salvation in the sword, there is none
in clockwork either. But happily these are not the only means of
salvation to which human souls have had recourse in response to
the challenge of a disintegrating civilization. We must carry the
inquiry farther.
The Philosopher masked by a King.
A means of salvation that does not invoke the aid of either
'time-machine' or sword was propounded in the first generation
of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' by the earliest and greatest of
Hellenic adepts in the art of Detachment.
'There is no hope of a cessation of evils 1 for the states [of Hellas]
and, in my opinion, none for Mankind except through a personal union
between political power and philosophy and a forcible disqualification
of those common natures that now follow one of these two pursuits
to the exclusion of the other. The union may be achieved in either of
two ways. Either the philosophers must become kings in our states, or
else the people who are now called kings and potentates must take
genuinely and thoroughly to philosophy.' 2
In suggesting this cure for social troubles which were not
peculiar to the Hellenic World of Plato's day but which are apt
(as the Hellenic sage divined) to beset the mundane life of Man
in all times and places and circumstances, Plato is at pains to
disarm, by forestalling, 'the plain man's* criticism of the philo-
sopher's prescription. He introduces his proposal as a paradox
which is likely to bring down upon the sage's head a deluge of
ridicule and disrepute. If he doesn't look out he will be mobbed,
and he will be lucky if he isn't massacred! Yet, if Plato's paradox
is a hard saying for laymen be these kings or commoners it is
an even harder saying for philosophers. Is not the very aim of
Philosophy a Detachment from Life? 3 And are not the pursuits
of Detachment and of Salvation incompatible to the point of being
mutually exclusive? How can one set oneself to salvage a City
of Destruction from which one is rightly struggling to be free?
How, then, is the sage to reconcile the spiritual exercise to which
1 Plato's ^phrase /ca/cav TravXa rate iroAcci sounds like a reminiscence of Thucydides 1
^
phrase apyfj /^eyaAouv KCLK&V rfj * jEAAaSi which has been quoted in this Study in IV. C (ii)
(&) i, vohiv, p. 62, above. The outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, to which
the Thucydidean phrase refers, was the social debacle from which Plato was fain to
rally the Hellenes of his own generation.
a Plato: Respublicai 473 D, repeated in -199 B and 501 B. The passage has been quoted
already in this Study in Part III. A, vol. iii, p. 93, above.
3 See V. C (i) (d) 10, pp. 132-48, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 243
he has dedicated his life with a residual scruple of conscience which
he can neither justify without ceasing to be a philosopher nor
overcome without ceasing to be a man ?
In the sight of the philosopher the incarnation of self-sacrifice
Christ Crucified is a personification of folly. 1 Yet few philo-
sophers have had the courage to avow this conviction, and fewer
still to act upon it, without at the same time giving Conscience
something of her due. For the adept in the art of Detachment has
to start as a man who is encumbered with the common human
feelings and who is born, ex hypothesi, into a 'Time of Troubles*.
The sorrows and sufferings of the age, which have impelled this
human being to follow the philosophic way of life, are manifestly
pressing no less cruelly upon his contemporaries. He cannot
ignore in his neighbour a distress of which his own heart gives
the measure, or pretend that a way of salvation which is com-
mended by his own experience would not be equally valuable to
his neighbour if only it were pointed out to him. Is our philo-
sopher, then, to handicap himself by lending his neighbour a
helping hand ? In this moral dilemma it is vain for him to take
refuge in the Indie doctrine that Pity and Love are vices, 2 or in
the Plotinian doctrine that 'action is a weakened form of contem-
plation'. 3 Nor can he be content to stand convicted'bf intellectual
and moral inconsistencies of which the Stoic Fathers a Zeno and
a Cleanthes and a Chrysippus are roundly accused by Plutarch.
This eclectic malleus Stoicorum is able to quote texts in which the
third of the three doctors condemns the life of academic leisure
in one sentence and recommends it in another within the limits
of a single treatise.* And, in so far as these philosophers of the
Stoic school did declare in favour of self-sacrifice in the cause of
social service, Plutarch charges them with having failed to practise
in their lives the conduct which they were preaching in their
publications and their lectures.* We need not attempt to ascertain
whether Plutarch's damaging accusations against Zeno and Zeno's
disciples are altogether well founded. But we may remind our-
selves of Plato's reluctant decision that the adepts who had mas-
tered the art of Detachment could not be permitted to enjoy for
ever afterwards the sunlight into which they had so hardly fought
their way. With a heavy heart he condemned his perfected philo-
sophers to redescend into the Cave for the sake of helping their
i i Cor. i. 23, already quoted in V. C (i) (<f) u, p. 15, above.
a ffotilu^ i^lir^ilTquoted in this Study in III. C (ii) (*), vol. iii, p. 254,
a V See the two passages quoted from Chrysippus's De Vitis, Book IV, in chapters 2
and 20, respectively, of Plutarch's De Stoicorum Repugnantits.
s Ibid., chap. 2.
244 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
unfortunate fellow men who were still sitting 'in darkness and in
the shadow of death, fast bound in misery and iron'; 1 and it is
impressive to see this grievous Platonic commandment being
dutifully obeyed by Epicurus.
The Hellenic philosopher whose ideal was a state of unruffled
Imperturbability (arapagia) was also, apparently, the one and only
private individual before Jesus of Nazareth to acquire the Greek
title of Saviour (acor^p). That honour was normally a monopoly of
princes and a reward for services of a public nature. 2 Epicurus's
unprecedented distinction was an unsought consequence of the
cool-headed philosopher's good-humoured obedience to an irre-
sistible call of the heart. 3 And the fervour of the gratitude and
admiration with which Epicurus's work of salvation is extolled in
the poetry of Lucretius makes it clear that, in this case at least,
the title was no empty formality bvt was the expression of a deep
and lively feeling which must have been communicated to the
Latin poet through a chain of tradition descending without a break
from Epicurus's own contemporaries who had known him, and
adored him, in the flesh. The Lucretian hymn of praise to a
saviour who has braved the direst terrors and dared the farthest
flights in order to liberate his fellow men from the prison-house of
Superstition has been quoted in this Study already in a different
context. 4 In another passage the same poet compares his Master's
writings to the flowery pastures of the honey-bees, and declares
these 'golden sayings' to be worthy of immortal life because they
dissipate the terrors of the mind and push back the walls of the
World. 5 In a third passage Lucretius hails his saviour-philosopher
as a god in words which Virgil afterwards adapted to the apothe-
osis of a saviour-statesman.
Deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi,
qui princeps vitae rationem invenit earn quae
nunc appellatur sapientia, quique per artem
fluctibus e tantis vitam tantisque tenebris
in tam tranquillo et tarn clara luce locavit. 6
above.
or public life, j,j.<.vau VL u^mg guuu. J.UA J.HJ nuug UUL intellectual worjt, aim majting mac
an excuse for living out their lives in peace and quiet', is given by Aelian : Variae His-
toriae, Book III, chap. 17.
2 See Pauly-Wissowa: Real-Encydopddie der Klassischen Alter tumszoissenschaft, 2nd
ed., second series, Halbband v, col. 1214. Ibid., col. 1218, it is pointed out that OCDTTJP
is not yet used as a standing epithet of Christ in the Pauline Epistles.
3 For this see the evidence cited by Professor Gilbert Murray in V. C (i) (d) n,
p. 154, footnote 2, above.
* Lucretius: De Rerum Natura: Book I, 11. 62-79. quoted in II. C (ii) (6) i. vol. i.
p. 299, above.
5 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 1-17.
6 Ibid., Book V, 11. 8- 12 , imitated by Virgil in Eclogue I, 11. 6-10 (see V. C (i) (d)
o (o), Annex, vol. v, p. 648, footnote 4, above).
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 245
This paean may sound extravagant in Christian ears; and yet,
If we would speak true,
Much to the Man is due
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reserved and austere
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot), 1
could bring himself, for the sake of his fellow men, to play the
uncongenial part of a saviour-king at the cost of sacrificing an
Imperturbability which, for this sage who had sought and found
it, was the pearl of great price.
The paradoxical history of Epicurus brings out the grievousness
of the burden which the philosophers have to take upon their
shoulders if, in setting themselves to carry out Plato's prescription,
they follow the alternative of themselves becoming kings; and it is
therefore not surprising to find that Plato's other alternative of
turning kings into philosophers has proved highly attractive to
every philosopher with a social conscience, beginning with Plato
himself. After considering the possibility that 'sometime either
in the boundless Past or in the Present (in some non-Hellenic
clime, far beyond our horizon) or else in the Future first-rate
philosophers somehow have been or are being or will be con-
strained to undertake the government of a state', 2 Plato goes on
to examine the alternative possibility that 'there might be sons of
kings or potentates who were born philosophers'. Aiid he submits
that when they had been born with this natural endowment it
would not be absolutely inevitable that they should be carried off,
and that however difficult it might be for them to be saved alive
it would at the same time hardly be possible to maintain that no
single one among them all would ever be saved in all time. 3 In
this passage Plato exerts his great powers of persuasiveness to
demonstrate the theoretical possibility that a saviour of souls from
the wreck of a disintegrating society might be thrown up by the
fortuitous operation of Time and Nature and Chance. 4 But a
theory which satisfies the intellect of a thinker in his arm-chair may
not avail in practice to relieve him of the necessity of shouldering a
social burden which will fall remorselessly on the philosopher's own
shoulders if he cannot find any one else to play the part of Atlas.
1 With these lines of .Marvell's on Cromwell compare Aristocreon's couplet on
Chrysippus, quoted by Plutarch in op. cit., chap. 2.
* Plato: Respubtica, 499 c. 3 Ibid., 502 A-B. m
* This theoretically possible but practically improbable Platonic means of salvation
may be compared with the Epicurean means of creation through one 'infinitesimal
swerve' (exiguum clinamen) of a single atom (see Lucretius: De R&rum Natura, Book 11,
1. 292).
246 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The answer to the question whether it is practical politics for
our philosopher to count upon the spontaneous generation of
philosophically minded princes will depend, of course, upon the
actual frequency of the occurrence of this natural phenomenon;
and a survey of the histories of the disintegrations of civilizations
up to date will show that the miracle is quite as rare as Plato
admits it to be in his disarming apologia for this tentative solution
of his problem. In another context 1 we have come across two
princes born into two different worlds at dates more than a
thousand years apart who each made it his mission to use his
princely power for promoting the moral unity of Mankind without
having been prompted, so far as we know, by any philosopher-
mentor. 'Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to
dwell together in unity' 2 was at any rate never suggested to Alex-
ander the Great by a tutor who held that all non-Hellenes, and
especially those in Asia, were slaves by nature, and whose political
ideal, even for a Hellenic commonwealth, was a dominant mino-
rity living parasitically upon the fruits of the labours of a servile
proletariat. 3 And, if it is certain that Alexander did not learn his
lesson from Aristotle, it is at least not proven that he learnt it from
any other source than his own experience of things human and
divine. 4 Nor is there any evidence to impugn Ikhnaton's title to
originality though we know so much less about Ikhnaton's up-
bringing and antecedents than we know about Alexander's that in
this Egyptiac case the argumentum ex silentio is far from being con-
clusive. The most that we can say is that, in the present state of
our knowledge, both Ikhnaton and Alexander would appear to fall
within Plato's category of kings' sons who were born philosophers,
who lived to reign, and who attempted, on the throne, to trans-
late into political practice a philosophy that was apparently all
their own.* At the same time we shall find that these two
1 In V. C (i) (<f) 7, pp. 6-12, above. 2 p s> cxxxiii. r.
3 The^ extremeness of the cpntrast between Alexander's vision of Homonoia and
Aristotle's conception of Hellenism as a cultural superiority carrying with it a title to
political and economic privileges is brought out in Tarn, W. W. : Alexander the Great and
the Unity of Mankind (London 1933, Milford), p. 4. For Aristotle's gospel of social
salvation through caste see the present Study, Part III. A, vol. in, pp. 93-7, above.
* The evidence on this question is brilliantly examined by Tarn in op. cit.
s We are bound to speak in these guarded terms in presenting Alexander's and
Ikhnaton's claims to originality; for, while it is hardly conceivable that Alexander can
have acquired direct from Ikhnaton himself the philosophical idea which was common
to these two princes considering that, in all probability, Alexander did not even know
that such a person as Ikhnaton had ever existed it is not inconceivable that the Mace-
donian and the Theban philosopher-king may have each derived the idea, quite in-
dependently of one another, from a common source. On the one hand we know that
the conception of a brotherhood of all Mankind through the common beneficence of
God, as this is expressed in Ikhnaton's Hymn to the Aton, was anticipated in Egyptiac
literature in an earlier hymn written at least a generation before Ikhnaton's day which
was addressed not to the Aton but to the tutelary god of Thebes who had been raised
by Ikhnaton's predecessor Thothmes III to the divine presidency of a Pan-Egyptiac
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 247
names exhaust our list; and this result of an empirical test will
lead us to the conclusion that, if the philosopher is really in
earnest in his quest for a philosophically minded prince who
will satisfy the demands of the philosopher's social conscience
and will thereby absolve the philosopher himself from going
into politics, then the philosopher cannot afford simply to sit
back and let Nature, uncontrolled, take her utterly wayward
course. He must personally take a hand to the extent at any
rate of developing and improving upon Nature where she
shows herself susceptible of philosophic cultivation. If the
philosopher wishes to insure against the risk of being called upon
to play Atlas himself, he must be willing at least to play Atlas'
mentor.
This solution of the philosophers moral problem has been
propounded by the Stoic Father Chrysippus.
The sage', he says, 'will readily put up with the institution of
kingship, because he will turn it to account. And if he cannot be
Pantheon under the title of Amon-Re (for this anticipation of Ikhnaton's intuition see
V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 695, footnote 2, above). On the other hand we know
that a deep impression was made upon Alexander's mind by what passed between him
and the priests of Amon when he visited the god's oracle-shrine in the Oasis of Siwah
in 331 B.C. According to Plutarch (Life of Alexander, chap. 27), Alexander wrote to his
mother Olympias that he had received certain private answers from the oracle which he
would communicate to her, and her only, on his return. This message, if authentic,
might of course be no more than a hint of the declaration, which the oracle is reported
to have made to Alexander, that his true father was not Philip the son of Amyntas but
was the god himself. And while this declaration was taken seriously by Alexander who
could hardly help being thrilled at hearing himself hailed as the son of a divinity whom
the Hellenes identified with Zeus it might have meant no more on the lips of the
Egyptiac priests themselves than an official recognition of Alexander as a legitimate heir
to the throne of a Pharaoh who had continued to bear the title of an adopted son of Re
long after he had ceased in fact to be regarded as being himself a living god (see IV. C
(iii) (c) 2 (J8), vol. iv, pp. 412-13, and V. C (i) (<J) 6 (S), Annex, vol. v, p. 653, above).
It is possible, however, that even if these were the words and the meaning of the oracle
of Amon when it was consulted by Alexander there may still have been something more
than that in the Egyptiac divinity's communication to the Hellenic 'war-lord; and some
such larger message may be the source of Alexander's saying that 'God is the common
father of all men, but he makes the best ones peculiarly his own* (Plutarch: Life of Alex-
ander, chap. 27, quoted in V. C (i) (d) 7, p. o, above). Did the oracle go on to tell
Alexander that, in so far as his divine parentage was not a mere official formality but was
a living spiritual truth, this parentage was no single human being's peculiar prerogative,
and that, in making the best of his children peculiarly his own, God was charging them
with the mission of bringing their fellow men to perceive and live up to the truth that
all men were brothers in virtue of God's common fatherhood ? In other contexts (in
I. C (ii), vol. i, pp. 140-4, and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 Q9), vol. iv, p. 413, above) we have seen that
the principal motif in the drama of Egyptiac religious history was the gradual admittance
of the common man to a share in certain religious hopes and consolations which had
originally been the monopoly of. a divine king and his privileged courtiers. This
gradually achieved realization of the spiritual brotherhood of all men may nave been
furthered by the elevation of Amon, the originally parochial god of Thebes, to the status
of a high god who was the common lord and benefactor of all Mankind up to the farthest
limits of the sweep of Pharaoh's sceptre (for the elevation of Amon to this position
by the Emperor Thothmes III see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), vol. v, pp. 530-1, and V. C (i)
(rf) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 653-4 and 695, above). Was the brotherhood of Mankind
through the common fatherhood or at any rate the common providence r -of God one
of the special tenets of the worship of Amon-Re, from Thothmes Ill's time onwards i
And was this mystery successively and independently learnt from the lips of Amon s
priests by Ikhnatoh in the fourteenth and by Alexander in the fourth century B.C. t
24B THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
King himself he will be at the King's elbow both in peace and in war
(crv[Jij3[,a)crT(U fiaaiXel /cat crTparevaerai juera ^SaatAecos").' 1
And more than a century before these words were written by
Chrysippus the policy which they formulate had been put into
action by Plato.
No less than three times in his life Plato voluntarily, though
reluctantly, emerged from his Attic retreat and crossed the sea to
Syracuse in the hope of converting a Sicilian despot to an Athenian
philosopher's conception of a prince's duty. In his encounter, on
his first visit, with the hard-bitten Dionysius I, Plato's expectations
may not have been great; but his hopes rose higher when the
founder of the second dynasty of Syracusan despots was succeeded
by a son who had been saved by his father's criminal success in
wading through slaughter to a throne from the horrid necessity of
gaining his own throne by so unpropitious a method. Plato's
failure to make a philosopher-king out of Dionysius II was the
great practical disappointment of Plato's life. Yet the unexpected
barrenness of his second and third visits to Syracuse was par-
tially redressed by the unexpected fruitfulness of the first; for the
shaft which, on that first campaign, the Attic archer had shot into
the Sicilian air had smitten the heart of a statesman who became
the brother-in-law of each of the Dionysii in turn besides being the
uncle of the younger of them. When', Plato wrote long after-
wards in retrospect, 'I conversed with Dio, who was then still
quite a young man, and instructed him in my notions of the prin-
ciples of ethics as a practical ideal for him to act upon, I suppose
I had no idea that, all unwittingly, I was really in some sense
paving the way for a future overthrow of despotism.' 2 In the
fullness of time Dio put down from his seat a nephew and brother-
in-law who had refused to play that part of philosopher-king for
which Plato had perhaps rather arbitrarily cast him; and, when
Dio, installed in Dionysius's place, brought down upon himself
the tragic verdict of being capax imperil nisi imper asset,* the enter-
prise which had proved too much for this self-consciously en-
lightened Syracusan prince was executed by the un-self-consciously
public-spirited Corinthian freeman Timoleon. 4
Plato's relation to Dio is the classic example of the influence of
the philosopher behind the throne in a situation in which the
monarch and his mentor are in immediate personal contact. In
later acts of the Hellenic Time of Troubles' this situation is
1 Chrysippus: De Vitis, Book I, quoted by Plutarch: De Stoicorum Repugnantiis,
chap. 20.
2 Plato's Letters, No. 7, 327 A.
3 Tacitus: Histories, Book I, chap. 49.
* See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (]3), Annex I, vol. iv, pp. 589-91, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 249
reproduced in the relation of the Borysthenite 1 Stoic philosopher
Sphaerus to the Spartan King Cleomenes III, 2 and in the relation
of the Cumaean Stoic philosopher Blossius to the Roman states-
man Tiberius Gracchus and to the Pergamene revolutionary
Aristonicus. 3 In the history of the Hindu World the acts of the
Emperor Akbar the founder of a Mughal Raj which served as a
Hindu universal state reflect the results of the Emperor's personal
converse with a number of diverse spiritual advisers: Muslim,
Zoroastrian, Christian, and Jain.* In the history of the Western
World in its so-called 'modern* chapter we can likewise discern in
the acts of a Frederick and a Catherine and a Joseph the results
of the personal intercourse between these 'enlightened* Hohenzol-
lern and Muscovite and Hapsburg monarchs and the contemporary
French philosophers from Voltaire downwards. 5
Such direct personal relations are no doubt the most effective;
but it is not impossible for a philosopher-mentor to find ways and
means of exerting his influence on less onerous terms. For ex-
ample, when the founder of the Stoic school was besought by the
restorer of the Macedonian monarchy to come over into Mace-
donia and help him, 6 Zeno did not choose to leave his Attic
cloister in order to hang about a Pellan court, but sent his disciples
Persaeus and Philonides as his proxies. 7 Nor is it only on princes
1 Sphaerus was a Borysthenite according to Plutarch (Lives of Agis and Cleomenes,
chap. 23), but a Bosporan [i.e. a native of the Cimmerian, not the Thracian, Bosporus ?]
according to Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Philosophers, Book VII, chap. 177).
* Since, according to Plutarch, op. cit., loc. cit., Sphaerus's sojourn at Sparta, in the
course of which the future king imbibed the philosopher's teaching, had already begun
when Cleomenes was still a child, it may be conjectured that Sphaerus's influence was a
factor in the political career not only of Cleomenes but also of the Agiad saviour-king's
Eurypontid predecessor and ensample Agis IV (see Bidez, J. ; La Citi du Monde et la
Cite du Soleil chez les Stoidens (Paris 1932, Les Belles Lettres), p. 38).
3 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. i79~8o, above.
* For Akbar's mentors, and for this eclectically minded monarch's attempt to found
a new 'fancy religion* of his own by combining some of the elements of their respective
doctrines, see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Anne* vol. v, pp. 699-704, above.
s The eighteenth-century French philosophers were admittedly inspired by seven-
teenth-century English forerunners; the writings of these English philosophers had been
an academic response to the political challenge of a conflict between Crown and Parlia-
ment; and the English revolutions of the seventeenth century had been precipitated by
a previous impact of Italian institutions and techniques and ideas upon Transalpine
Europe (for the political reaction that was evoked, in England, by the enhancement of
the royal power through an infusion of Italian efficiency, see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii,
PP- 357-63, above).
* For Antigonus's bent towards philosophy see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 132, above, and
Tarn, W. W.: Antigontts Gonatas (Oxford 1913, Clarendon Press), chap. 8: 'Antigonus
and his Circle.*
7 Though Persaeus was Zeno's favourite disciple (and incidentally his fellow country-
man), he does not appear to have proved himself an altogether satisfactory substitute for
the Master himself; and he had an unfortunate end after his Macedonian pupil-patron
had eventually disposed of him by making him exchange a mentor's job for a viceroy's.
Antigonus placed Persaeus in command of the Macedonian garrison of Corinth; and
here, in 243 B.C., the philosopher-in-harness allowed himself to be taken by surprise by
the soldier-statesman-in-embryo Aratus of Sicyon. Thus Zeno's experiment in playing
mentor to a prince at second hand did not turn out very well; and toe philosopher who
did have an effect upon King Antigonus Gonatas' life and work was neither Zeno's
disciple nor Zeno himself but Bion the Borysthenite a free lance who atoned for his
250 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
who are his own contemporaries that a philosopher-mentor is able
to produce an effect at second hand. For, when the Stoic emperor-
philosopher Marcus Aurelius (vivebat A.D. 121-80) mentions, in
the roll-call of his spiritual creditors, 1 the names of two Stoic
philosophers Sextus of Chaeronea and Quintus Junius Rusticus
who had personally instructed him in his youth, he is citing only
the last of many links in a golden chain of Stoic mentors of Roman
statesmen which can be traced back without a break, through a
quarter of a millennium and more, from the age of Marcus and
Rusticus to the age of Scipio Aemilianus (vivebat circa 185-129
B.C.) and Panaetius.
This Rhodian Stoic Father of the second century B.C., who had
sat, with Blossius, at the feet of Antipater of Tarsus, was the
mentor of Marcus in a deeper sense than either Rusticus or Sextus.
For, though the two Stoic tutors of the future emperor may have
been the most celebrated representatives of their school in their
day, they would never have had an opportunity to do their work
had it not been for their distant Rhodian predecessor who had
planted the first shoots of Stoicism in Roman soil. And the chain
of philosopher-mentors that runs back from Rusticus to Panaetius
has its parallel in the chain of statesmen-pupils that can be traced
from Marcus through Domitian's victims Herennius Senecio and
Arulenus Rusticus and Vespasian's victim Helvidius Priscus and
Nero's victims Seneca and Thrasea Paetus and Claudius's victiih
Caecina Paetus and Caecina's wife Arria, who showed her husband
how to die, till we come to Cato Minor the Roman Stoic proto-
martyr 2 and finally to Panaetius's own pupil Gaius Laelius
Sapiens, a contemporary of Scipio Aemilianus and Tiberius
Gracchus who managed to live into the early years of the Roman
century of revolution (133-31 B.C.) without allowing himself to be
robbed of his sweetness and serenity.
The chain of Stoic mentors that runs back to Panaetius from the
Emperor Marcus's tutors Rusticus and Sextus has a Neoplatonic
parallel. Maximus of Ephesus (vivebat circa A.D. 300-71), who
was the personal instructor of the Emperor Julian (vivebat A.D.
331-63), was himself a disciple of Aedesius, who had been in his
day the favourite disciple of lamblichus ; and the nonsense which
disreputability by taking the trouble to answer in person the philosophically inclined
prince's call. According to a modern Western scholar (Tarn, op. cit., p. 235),
'It is probable that Bion's relations with Antigonus were very much closer than written
tradition gives us any idea of. Among the fragmentary notices that remain relative to
the two men or to their sayings, the parallels in language are too frequent and curious
to be accidental.'
In support of this view, Tarn (op. cit., p. 236, footnote 47) quotes six examples.
1 This roll-call occupies the first book of Marcus's Meditations.
* For Cato Minor and the influence of his example on later generations of Roman
Aristocrats see V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, p. 390, and V. C (i) (d} 3, vol. v, p. 405, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 351
lamblichus had imported into the philosophy of Porphyry and
Plotinus had been principally inspired by a work from the pen of
a Babylonian medicine-man (a namesake of the Emperor Julian's)
who had practised his trade on Hellenic ground in the reign of
Marcus Aurelius. 1 This Julian the medicine-man stands to Julian
the Emperor as the philosopher Panaetius stands to the Emperor
Marcus.
There are also cases of a philosopher exerting an influence upon
a prince or statesman across a gulf of time without any chain of
intermediaries. For example, Gaius Gracchus was manifestly in-
fluenced by the ideas of his elder brother Tiberius's mentor
Blossius 2 though it is certain that Blossius died seven years
before the year of Gaius's first tribunate, 3 and uncertain whether
Gaius had been in personal touch with Blossius even in the years
before the date of the philosopher's flight from Italy after the
murder of Tiberius. 4 Timoleon, again, can hardly have been
unaffected by the ideas of his precursor Dio's mentor Plato* when
he accepted the mission of sailing to Syracuse in Dio's wake
though by the year in which Timoleon set sail Plato had been
some three years dead, 6 and there is no record of any personal
intercourse between the Attic philosopher and the Corinthian
statesman during Plato's lifetime. The Indie philosopher Sid-
dhartha Gautama exerted his influence upon the Mauryan Emperor
A9oka after a Time-interval of more than two centuries, if the
Buddha died in 487 B.C. and A9oka came to the throne in 273 B.C.
But perhaps the most extraordinary example of this exertion of
influence at long range is Confucius's effect upon the minds and
lives of the two Manchu emperors K'ang Hsi and Ch'ien Lung.
The first of these two Confucian princes did not begin to reign
until more than two thousand years had passed since his mentor's
death; the Far Eastern Society into which K'ang Hsi was born
was sundered from the Sink Society, in whose bosom Confucius
himself had lived and taught, by a social interregnum which
deepened the gulf dug by Time; and K'ang Hsi himself was not
1 For the abortive Neoplatonic Church which lamblichus tried to found and Julian
to establish see V. C (i) (<J) 6 (8), vol. v, pp. 565-7, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v,
pp. 680-3, above. For the Emperor Julian's debt to the Babylonian medicine-man of
the same name see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 680, footnote 3, above.
2 For Blossius's relation to Tiberius Gracchus and to Aristonicus see V. C (i) (c) a,
vol. v, pp. 179-80, above.
3 Gaius Gracchus was Tribune of the Plebs for the first time in 123 B.C. ; Blossius had
committed suicide after the defeat of Aristonicus in 130 B.C.
, 4 Blossius appears to have fled from Italy to Pergamum in 132 B.C., and it was only in
this year that Gaius Gracchus returned to Italy from Spain.
s For Plato's general idea of the right relation between philosophy and politics see
the passage quoted from The Republic on p. 242, above. For Dio's spiritual debt to
Plato, as this was estimated by Plato himself, see Plato's Seventh Letter, passim.
6 Timoleon sailed in 344 B.C.; Plato had died yatftf B.C.
2S 2 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
even a native-born soft of the Far Eastern Civilization, but was a
cultural convert from a horde of recently installed barbarian con-
querors. The influence of Confucius upon K'ang Hsi was a
brilliant posthumous consolation prize for the disappointment, in
Confucius's own lifetime, of the hopes of a Sinic sage whose offers
of service had been rejected by the Sinic princes of the day; 1 and
this posthumous reversal of fortune was as ironic as it was extreme,
for, in offering himself in the role of mentor, the Sinic sage
had not just been making a half-hearted compromise with an
importunate conscience in the manner of his Hellenic and Indie
counterparts. In Confucius's eyes the role which Confucius never
succeeded in playing effectively until long after his death was no
grudgingly paid debt to the ineradicable human nature of the
social animal under the sage's cloak: it was for him the only role
in which a philosopher could properly follow his spiritual calling, 2
Our survey of philosopher-mentors has revealed some notable
instances of successful education. The state of the Indie World
under the rule of Gautama's pupil A^oka and that of the Hellenic
World under the rule of Panaetius's pupil Marcus bear out Plato's
contention 3 'that social life is happiest and most harmonious
where those who have to rule are the last people who would choose
to be rulers'. And there are other enlightened monarchs who,
though they may not have quite lived up to that standard, have at
any rate testified to the truth. Antigonus Gonatas, for example,
'when he saw his son behaving all too violently and insolently
towards his subjects, said to him "Don't you know, my boy, that
our monarchy is only a glorified slavery?" >4 'Frederick William
called himself "the field marshal and finance minister of the King
of Prussia", Frederick the Great "the first servant of the State".**
Yet, in spite of a few successes such as these, our general conclu-
sion will be that the device of serving Humanity through the soul
of a king as a ventriloquist talks to his audience through the
mouth of his puppet is not a satisfactory solution of the philo-
sopher's personal problem of paying his moral debt to Society
without abandoning his own precious Detachment.
We observe that a Dionysius II, who had been born and brought
1 Confucius's career of contemporary failure and posthumous success has been cited
as an example of Withdrawal-and-Return in III. C (li) (6), vol. iii, pp. 328-30, above*
* In Confucius's view the ultimate purpose of self -cultivation,, which was the
Superior Person's first duty, was the purification of his neighbour and of the entire
community. Confucius thought of himself, not as a happily detached. ag, but as *n
unfortunately unemployed man of action (see MaspeVo, H. : jLa Chine Antique (Fri
1927, Boccard), pp. 466-7 and 543).
3 In Respublica 520 t>, quoted in this Study already in III. C (ii) (&) voL iii, p, 353,
above. 4 Aelian: Variae Historiae, Boot II, chap. 20.
s Bruford, W. H.: Germany in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge 1935, Univeriity
Press), p. 28.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 253
up in the purple, turned out to be as unpromising a subject for
Plato's educative efforts as a Dionysius I who had had to seize his
power by force; and neither of the two Dionysii is so discouraging
a case for the experimental philosopher as their kinsman Dio ; for
Dio had the double advantage of possessing an aptitude for philo-
sophy without being either a reigning despot or a despot's heir
apparent; yet his mere proximity to a throne had spoilt Dio to a
degree which made it almost a foregone conclusion that he would
come to grief in the high-minded enterprise on which he eventu-
ally embarked, Dio aspired to transfigure his native city-state of
Syracuse into Plato's ideal commonwealth by appearing in the
role, not of saviour-despot, but of saviour-liberator; but the sequel
to his coup of ejecting his despot-nephew Dionysius was tragically
ironic. The would-be liberator lived to commit a tyrant's crimes
before dying a tyrant's death which left the coast clear for his
evicted kinsman to come back again, And the sequels to the
labours of other philosopher-kings and philosopher-statesmen
have been equally disappointing. Though Timoleon was able to
execute Dio*s unfulfilled design, even Timoleon's success was no
more than ephemeral By the date of the Corinthian elder-states-
man's death at Syracuse, Agathocles had already been born at
Thermae to become a greater scourge to the Siceliots than either
of the Dionysii. The sequel to the career of Sphaerus's pupil
Cleomenes was the tyranny of Nabis and the subsequent collapse
of the Lacedaemonian body politic. The sequel to the career of
Blossius's pupil Tiberius Gracchus was a century of revolution
and civil war which tore the Roman body politic to pieces and was
only brought to an end at the price of acquiescence in a permanent
dictatorship. The sequel to the philosophic eclecticism of Akfaar
was the religious bigotry of Awrangzlb* The West European
enlightenment which seeped through philosophical channels into
Central and East European courts in the eighteenth ccntuty
brought in its trail an infection of the West European political
virus of Nationalism which first attacked the bourgeoisie and is now
ravaging the masses- Bion's pupil Antigonus Gonatas was suc-
ceeded in due course by a Philip V, whose personal folly undid the
political results of Gonatas* personal self-discipline* Panaetius's
pupil Marcus deliberately broke with an admitabte custom of
adoption, which had been inaugurated by Nerva, in order to
bequeath the Principate to his own physical offspring in the person
of Commodusf The Babylonian medicine-man's pupil and name-
sake Julian taught Theodoslus how to turn a Neoplatonist em-
peror's fanaticism to a Christian fanatic's account* The personal
holiness of Gautama's pupil A$oka did not save the Mauryan
254 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Empire from collapsing at a blow from the fist of the usurper
Pushyamitra. And in the Far Eastern World the eighteenth-
century splendour of the reign of Confucius's pupil Ch'ien Lung
was followed, within little more than forty years from the death
of this second Manchu philosopher-emperor, by an age of disasters
and humiliations which was opened by the first salvo of British
naval ordnance in 'the Opium War' and which was not yet in sight
of its end in a year which was the ninety-eighth anniversary of that
sinister date.
Nor is the picture different when we turn from these kings who
have been made philosophers by force of example to those who
have been born philosophers without requiring mentors. Ikhn-
aton's vision of peace through fraternity was marred, even before
the Egyptiac visionary's death, by the beginning of the break-up
of 'the New Empire' ; and in the sequel even the homelands of the
Egyptiac Society in the Nile Valley were only saved from bar-
barian clutches by the rude hands of soldier-emperors who un-
ceremoniously thrust their way on to a throne which Ikhnatoxi and
his like were too delicate to hold. As for Alexander's vision of the
same ideal goal of human endeavours, it did, as we have seen, 1
continue to haunt the Hellenic World thereafter. But the im-
mediate sequel to Alexander's career was not Augustus's partially
successful translation of a Macedonian dream into a Roman reality.
The immediate sequel was the warfare of diadochi and epigoni
who contended with one another, for two live-long generations,
over the spoils of the Achaemenian Empire in campaigns that
ravaged the domains of no less than five civilizations. 2 The prac-
tical effect of Alexander's career was thus the very opposite of the
philosophic war-lord's intentions. So far from living to establish
the ideal Pose Oecumenica of which he dreamed, he merely lived to
destroy an actual Pax Achaemenia which he only learnt to appre-
ciate at its proper worth after he had dealt it its death-blow. 3
Thus an -empirical survey which registered a certain amount of
I l V - C (0 (4) 7, PP. 6-1 1, above.
the .ordfc uSSSS' W ^J^ac, B aby i on i C) and Indie worlds were all involved in
a sordid struggles of the Macedonian conguistadores.
DD 2 ^^f^^^^y Appreciation of Persian virtues see V. C (i) (e) I, vol. v,
pp.. 51-2, and V. C (i) (c) 7, m the present volume, p. 9, above. This feat of
'' b th t0 ?* 8 - Ub ^ of Alexander's' genius and to the probity
* Personal attitude towards an imperial people with whom he had
aS th r and "TOlSaer. Alexander was able to rise
. o se
? e * n P art and P arcel of the Hellenic tradition
the failu of Xerxes' attempt
HeUenes of Alexander's own
tb.'^ o f the
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 255
success at the first assay now reveals an overwhelming preponder-
ance of failure when the investigation is pursued, beyond the first
chapter, to the end of the story. The philosopher-king be he a
philosopher born or the receptive pupil of a philosopher-mentor
turns out, after all, to be incapable of saving his fellow men from
the shipwreck of a disintegrating society. To this extent the facts
speak for themselves ; but we have still to ask whether they also
provide their own explanation. And, if we consult them again with
this question in mind, we shall again find that they duly yield an
answer.
This answer is indeed implicit in the passage of The Republic in
which Plato introduces on to his stage the figure of the prince who
is a born philosopher. After putting forward his postulate that,
sometime and somewhere, at any rate one such born philosopher-
prince will live to ascend his father's throne and will there make it
his business to translate his own philosophical principles into
political practice, 1 Plato eagerly jumps to the conclusion that
*a single one such ruler would suffice if he could count on the
consent of the governed (iroXw e^cov TraSo^ev^v) to carry out in
full a programme that looks quite impracticable under existing
conditions 1 . And the conductor of the argument then goes on to
explain the grounds of his optimism. ' Supposing', he continues,
'that a ruler were to enact our ideal laws and introduce our ideal
social conventions, it would assuredly not be beyond the bounds
of possibility that his subjects should consent to act in accordance
with their ruler's wishes.' 2
These final propositions are manifestly essential to the success
of Plato's scheme for making a philosopher's Utopia work out f in
real life'; but they are no less manifestly dependent upon an
enlistment of the faculty of mimesis; and at earlier points in this
Study 3 we have observed that this resort to a kind of social drill
with the object of bringing and keeping an uncreative rank-and-
file abreast of a creative leader is a short cut which is apt to bring
those who take it to destruction instead of expediting their journey
towards their goal. The inclusion of any element of coercion
mental or physical in the social strategy of the philosopher-king
would therefore perhaps suffice in itself to account for his failure
to bring to pass the salvation which he professes to offer; and, if
we examine his strategy more closely from this standpoint, we
shall find that his use of coercion is particularly gross. For, though
Plato is at pains to give the philosopher-king's government the
* For this postulate of Plato's see the present chapter, p. 245, above.
* Plato: Respublica, 502 A-B. ,
J In III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, pp. 245-8, and IV. C (iii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 1 19-33, above.
2S 6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
benefit of the consent of the governed, it is evident that there
would be no purpose in the philosopher's surprising personal
union with a potentate who is to be an absolute monarch unless
the despot's power of physical coercion is to be held in readiness
for use in case of necessity; and the case in point is as likely to
arise as it is obvious to foresee.
'The nature of the peoples is inconstant, and it is easy to persuade
them of a thing, but difficult to hold them to that persuasion. Accord-
ingly it is expedient to be so equipped that, wheri their belief gives out,
one will have it in one's power to make them believe by force/ 1
In these wholesomely brutal words Machiavelli brings out a
sinister feature in the strategy of the philosopher-king which Plato
almost disingenuously slurs over. If ever the philosopher-king
finds himself at a point at which he is no longer able to gain his end
by the exercise of charm or bluff, he will throw away his copy-book
of moral maxims and proceed to enforce his will by laying about
him with a sword which he took care not to lay aside when he
exchanged his royal robe for a philosopher's mantle. Even a Mar-
cus reluctantly resorted to this ultima ratio regum, and that not
only against Parthian and Marcomannian fighting-men beyond the
frontier, but also against unarmed and unresisting Christians in
the interior. 3 Such a denouement is a scandal which brings the
philosopher-king's whole profession into disrepute; for the mantle
is an even more deceitful cloak than the robe for concealing a lethal
weapon. Once again we are presented with the shocking spectacle
of ' Orpheus changing into a drill-sergeant; 3 and in this case the
simile is a literal description of the fact; for the king who drops the
philosopher's mask is a drill-sergeant whose instruments are not
the psychological devices of 'personal magnetism* and 'the confi-
dence trick 1 , but the physical weapons of the cat-o*-nine-tails and
the firing-squad.
If a flagrant resort to coercion thus turns out to be the false step
that explains the failure of the philosopher-king when he is a philo-
sopher born, the same explanation holds good a fortiori ^when the
philosopher-king is merely the royal pupil of an academic mentor.
In proof of this it will be sufficient to take note of Plato's analysis of
his own motives for accepting the invitation to revisit Sicily which
he received, on Dio's initiative, from the Younger Dionysius after
the accession of that prince to his father's throne at Syracuse.
'After [the death of the Elder Dionysius] Dio came to think that
perhaps he might not for ever remain solitary in holding the views which
1 Machiavelli, Niccold: // Principe, chap. 6, quoted already in V. C (i) (d) r, voL v,
p. 380., footnote 3, above. a See p. 202, footnote i, above.
3 For this simile see IV. C (Hi) (a), vol. iv, p. 123, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 257
he himself had acquired as a result of the proper instruction [imparted
to him by Plato during the Athenian philosopher's earlier" visit to
Syracuse]. He noticed, from observation, that the same views were
taking root in other minds too not in many, but any way in some; he
thought that, with Heaven's help, [the Younger] Dionysius might per-
haps come to be numbered among these converts ; and, if anything like
that did happen, this in turn, as Dio saw it, would raise his own life, and
the life of the whole Syracusan community, to a hardly imaginable
degree of felicity* Further, Dio thought it essential that at all costs I
should come to Syracuse post-haste to collaborate with him in all this.
He had not forgotten our previous intercourse with one another and how
effectively this had stimulated in him a passion to live the life that was
finest and best If he could now achieve the same result in Dionysius,
which was what he had set himself to do, then he had great hopes of
being able to make the life of happiness and truth into a general and
permanent institution of the country, without the bloodshed and the
loss of life and the other evils that have come to pass in the event.
'Having come to these conclusions which were right Dio persuaded
Dionysius to send me an invitation, and at the same time he sent a
personal message of his own, begging me to come post-haste at all costs,
before others would have time to gain Dionysius's ear and divert him
into some other way of life than the best way. At the risk of prolixity I
shall recapitulate the considerations with which Dio supported his plea.
"What opportunities", he asked, a are we to wait for that could be more
favourable than those which have now been presented by a heaven-sent
piece of good fortune?" And he went on to dwell, in detail, upon the
extent of the Dionysiaft dominions in Italy and Sicily, and upon his
(Dio's) own power in the state; upon Dionysius *s youth and the in-
tensity of his passion for an education in philosophy ; upon the ripeness
of his (Dio*s) own nephews and other intimate friends for conversion to
the doctrine and the way of life which I consistently preached ; and upon
the strength of the influence which they would have on Dionysius, in
helping to convert him along with them- "And so (he concluded) now,
if ever* is the moment for a realization of all our hopes of a personal
union between philosophy and political power 1 in a state of large
calibre*"
'These with many others in the same strain were the arguments
with which Dio sought to prevail upon me. As regards my own opinion,
it was divided between an anxiety on the score of how things might go
with the young people -considering how volatile are the passions of
youthand how often theyreact by "going into revejcse"- andaconfidence
in the character of Dio, which was, I knew, stable by nature and was
now also fortified by the comparative maturity -ef his age. So I long
debated and hesitated whether I should go, as I was asked, or what I
should do, till in the end I inclined to the opinion thatif ever a philosopher
was to set himself to realise his ideas about legislation and government,
* Se the jMiswge from Th* Republic, 473 c-t>> that has been quoted in Part IIL A,
voU iii, p. $3, and agtux in tbe present chapter and volume, p* 4a above. AJ.T.
258 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
this was just the occasion for making that experiment, since I now had
only to convince one person thoroughly and at this one stroke I should
have achieved a whole world of good.
'These were the considerations that led me to take the bolder course
and set out from home, not at all in the spirit with which some people
have credited me, but under a most powerful moral compulsion, not to
lose my own self-respect, as I was in danger of losing it if I were to be
convicted, in my own judgement, of being simply nothing but a mere
voice a fellow who would never take action, not even a hand's turn, if
he could help it. I was also afraid of waking up to find that I had proved
false, among other things, to my friendship with my former host, Dio,
and this at a time when he was really in no little danger. Suppose that
some misfortune were to overtake him and he were to be banished by
Dionysius and his other enemies and then arrive at my door as a fugitive
and interrogate me like this : "Plato, I come to you as an exile, not asking
for, or wanting, foot and horse for fighting my enemies, but wanting and
asking for those persuasive arguments with which you, of all men, as
I know, have the ability to arouse in young men an enthusiasm for
goodness and righteousness and, in the same act, to bring them into
friendship and good-fellowship with one another, whenever occasion
arises. It is because I have been left in want of this assistance on your
part that I have now had to leave Syracuse and appear here and now on
your door-step. But it is not this plight of mine that is the worst re-
proach to you ; for what about your obligations to Philosophy ? Are you
not always singing her praises and complaining that she is without
honour among the rest of Mankind ? Yet hasn't she, like me, now been
betrayed as far as it has lain with you ? If we had happened to be living
at Megara, no doubt you would have come to my aid in the cause in
which I was invoking your help, on pain, if you had hung back, of feeling
yourself the vilest creature on Earth. And now, [when I have called
you to Syracuse,] do you really think that you could plead the length
of the journey and the immensity of the voyage and the fatigue as a
valid defence against an imputation of cowardice ? You know very well
that you would not have a leg to stand on!"
'If J had had to meet this attack, what plausible answer would there
have been for me to make ? Just none at all. And so I came for the most
unimpeachable of reasons that mortal man could ever have. And on
this account I left my own occupations, which were by no means
despicable, and put myself under a tyranny which might well be thought
unbecoming both to my teaching and to myself. In coming in spite of
all this, I acquitted myself of my duty to Zeus Xenios and cleared my-
self of all reproach on the part of Philosophy who would have been
put to shame in my person if, through defect of hardihood and courage,
I had got myself into real disgrace.' 1
If this analytical reminiscence is a true account of the workings
of Plato's mind at the time when Dionysius's invitation was awaiting
1 Plato, Letter No. 7, 327 3-329 B.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 259
Plato's answer, it tells us that Plato's mission was doomed a priori
to failure; for neither of the two principal considerations that
he here attributes to himself can bear examination. We here see
the philosopher not only yielding to the temptation to exploit the
use of the despot's material power as a short cut to the translation
of a Utopia into 'real life', but even being influenced by a self-
regarding feeling which looks less like a genuine prick of conscience
than like a twinge of the scholar's painful sense of inferiority to the
man of action; and, whether we adopt the more or the less chari-
table of these two alternative interpretations, we are bound to
discern in either of them a latent lack of confidence in the policy
of Detachment on which, ex hypothesi, the philosopher has staked
his personal hope of salvation.
In fact, the philosopher-king is doomed to fail because he is
attempting to unite two contradictory natures in a single person.
The philosopher stultifies himself by trespassing on the king's
field of ruthless action, while conversely the king stultifies himself
by trespassing on the philosopher's field of loveless and pitiless
contemplation. 1 Like the saviour with the 'time-machine', the
philosopher-king is driven, sooner or later, into proclaiming his
own failure by drawing a weapon which convicts him of being a
saviour with the sword in disguise. If the sword spells self-defeat
and the 'time-machine' self-deception, the philosopher's mantle
and the prince's mask>are emblems of hypocrisy; and, since 'hypo-
crite' and 'saviour* are incompatible roles, our search for a genuine
saviour must be carried further.
The God Incarnate in a Man.
We have now examined three different epiphanies of the creative
genius who is born into a disintegrating society and who bends his
powers and energies to the task of coping with the challenge of
social disintegration by finding and making some effective re-
sponse. We have reviewed in turn the would-be saviour of Society
who puts his trust in the sword, and the would-be saviours from
Society whose respective instruments are the 'time-machine' and
the philosopher-king. And in each case we have found that the
vaunted way of salvation leads nowhere but to the brow of a preci-
pice. There is no salvation in the sword. It proves impossible
after all, as might have been expected a priori, to make a deadly
weapon do the very opposite of the work for which it has been
designedly forged. However cunning the hand that wields it, and
i For this attitude of mind, which in Greek is called Ocwpia, see III. C (ii) (&), vol. iii,
p. 253, and V. C (i) (4) 10, in the present volume, pp. 144-8* above.
z6o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
however well-meaning the will that governs the hand, the sword
can neither be compelled to bring salvation nor prevented from
dealing the destruction which it is its nature to bring to pass. The
would-be saviour with the sword is self-condemned to self-defeat;
and in exposing him for the failure that he is we have also
exposed his two competitors; for we have found that both the
would-be saviour with the 'time-machine' and the sage who
operates as the mentor of a philosopher-king are apt, at the critical
moment, to drop their pretentious instruments and take to the
old-fashioned killing-tool. We have thus reduced our three osten-
sibly diverse types of would-be saviour to the single figure of a
man with a sword. Whether the weapon happens at the moment
to be drawn or sheathed or cloaked, it is the only means of salvation
which the man has to offer in the last resort.
What conclusion are we to draw from this series of disillusion-
ments ? Do they signify that any and every attempt to find and
bring salvation is doomed to end in destruction if the would-be
saviour is merely a human being? Let us remind ourselves of the
' context of the classic statement of the truth which we have been
verifying empirically in this chapter. 'All they that take the sword
shall perish with the sword* are the words of a saviour who gives
this as his reason for commanding one of his followers to sheathe
again a sword which this henchman has just drawn and used. In
thus taking to the sword at the critical moment, the henchman has
done his best according to his present lights. 1 He has taken his
own life in his hands for the sake of playing the mart on his Mas-
ter's behalf. But the Master swiftly and sternly rejects an offer of
self-sacrifice that is made in this militant form. So far from follow-
ing up this first blow with a general counter-offensive in the
fashion of Judas Maccabaeus 2 or Ismail Shah SafawP or Guru
Govind Singh,* Jesus of Nazareth first heals the wound that
Peter's sword has already inflicted,s and then delivers his own
person up to suffer the last extremes of insult and torment.
Nor is Jesus moved- to choose this agonizing alternative by any
fear that, if he did take to the sword, he might be courting a mili-
tary defeat. Thinkest thou', he says to Peter, 'that I cannot now
pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve
legions of angels ?'* And to Pilate he says: If my kingdom were
W ^? < S conve . rsion / r ? m a futurist's militancy to the gentleness of a soul which
abov?^ meaning of the Transfiguration see V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 392-3,
ahoy!!* V ' (I) W 2 ' V0l< V> P> 68 ' an4 V ' C (i) (df) 6 < 8 >> Almt ^ vo1 ' 7> PP- 6 57-9,
pp 3 . 6 S 6?-5," aio ( ve W> ***** If ^ *' PP ' 366 ~ 88 ' and V ' C (i) 6 > **** vol v >
4 See V. CG) (*) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 665-8, above.
5 Luke ^ 5i. P * 6 Matt. xxvi. 53.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 261
of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be
delivered to the Jews; but now is my kingdom not from hence.' 1
Jesus's motive for refusing to take to the sword is thus not any
practical calculation that, in the particular circumstances, his own
force is no match for his adversaries'. He believes that, if he did
take to the sword, he could be certain of winning all the victory
that swordsmanship can procure. Yet, believing this, he still re-
fuses to use the weapon. Rather than conquer with the sword he
will die on the Cross.
In choosing this alternative in the hour of crisis, Jesus is breaking
right away from the conventional line of action which has been
taken by the other would-be saviours whose conduct we have
studied. What inspires the Nazarene saviour to take this tremen-
dous new departure ? We may answer this question by asking, in
turn, what distinguishes him from the saviours who have refuted
their own pretensions by turning into swordsmen. The answer is
that these were men who knew themselves to be no more than
human, whereas Jesus was a man who believed himself to be the
Son of God. 2 Are we to conclude that 'salvation belongeth unto
the Lord*, 3 and that, without being in some sense divine, a would-
be saviour of Mankind will always be impotent to execute his
mission in act and deed ? 4 Now that we have weighed and found
wanting those soi-disant saviours who have avowedly been mere
men, let us turn, as our last recourse, to the saviours who have
presented themselves as gods.
To pass in review a procession of saviour-gods, with an eye to
appraising their claims to be what they profess to 'be and to do
what they profess to do, is perhaps an unprecedentedly presump-
tuous application of our habitual method of empirical study. And,
if we are to venture upon the attempt, it may be easiest to begin
with those claimants whose performance of the saviour-god's part
has been the most perfunctory. Let us start with the deus ex
machina and try to ascend from this possibly infra-human level
towards the ineffable height of the deus cruci focus. If dying on the
Cross is the utmost extreme to which it is possible for a man to
go in testifying to the truth of his claim to divinity, appearing upon
the stage is perhaps the least trouble that an acknowledged god can
decently take in support of a claim to be also a saviour.
On the Attic stage in the century which saw the breakdown of
1 John xviii. 36.
2 For the association between the revelation of Jesus's divinity and the announcement
of his Passion see V. C (i) (d) n, p. 165, with footnote 3, above. 3 Ps. iii. 8.
4 In V. C (i) (rf) 9 (y), pp. 124-32, above, we have already observed how this
conclusion forces itself upon would-be saviours of the futurist school as the insistent
lesson of their own repeated and cumulatively disastrous failures to achieve their aim
by their own method.
262 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the Hellenic Civilization the deus ex machina was a veritable god-
send to embarrassed playwrights who, in an already enlightened
age, were still constrained by a tenacious convention to take their
plots from the traditional corpus of Hellenic Mythology. ' If the
action of the play had in consequence become caught, before its
natural close, in some, humanly speaking, insoluble tangle of moral
enormities or practical improbabilities, the author could extricate
himself from the toils in which he had been involved on account of
one of the conventions of his art by resorting to another of them.
He could appeal to his stage-manager for help, and that obliging
and resourceful technician would promptly wheel or hoist on to
the stage a god out of the blue to effect a denouement. This is the
role of Artemis in Euripides' Hippolytus and of Athena in the same
poet's Ion and Iphigeneia in Tauris\ and this trick of an Attic
dramatist's trade has given scandal to scholars. The solutions of
human problems that are propounded by these Olympian inter-
ventionists neither convince the human mind nor appeal to the
human heart. Was Euripides simply making use of a traditional
convention of his art without troubling to question or criticize it ?
That can hardly be believed of a 'high-brow' who was patently a
born sceptic, and whose natural scepticism had been vehemently
stimulated by a catastrophic social experience in which it had been
his fortune to participate. Or was he perhaps just professionally
incompetent? Was he driven to resort to this clumsy trick by
finding that he had tied himself into knots from which he could
see no other way of escape? No, it is impossible to attribute such
silliness to an intelligence which in all else is so dazzlingly clever.
The puzzle seems to admit of only one solution. If our fifth-
century Attic dramatist was not a 'low-brow' and not a fool, must
he not have been a knave ?
It has, in fact, been seriously suggested by one modern Western
scholar that Euripides never brings on a deus ex machina without
having his tongue in his cheek. According to Verrall, the sly
Athenian rationalist has made this quaint traditional convention
serve Ins own purposes by using it as a screen for sallies of irony
and blasphemy upon which he could hardly have ventured with
impunity if he had come out into the open. This screen is ideal
in texture, since it is impervious to the hostile shafts of the poet's
low-brow adversaries while it is transparent to the knowing eyes
of his sophisticated brother sceptics. In fact, the Euripidean use
of the deus ex machina is an artistic tour deforce which is a con-
summate artist's chef d'ceuvre.
*JV S ? ?* uch to Sa 7 that on the Euripidean stage whatever is
said by a divinity is to be regarded, in general, as ipso facto discredited.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 263
It is in all cases objectionable from the author's point of view, and almost
always a lie. "By representing the deities he persuaded men that they
did not exist.** 1 . . . This character of mere theatrical and conventional
pretence, contradictory to the sense of the part and transparent to the
instructed reader, which Lucian 2 rightly attributes to the machine-
gods of Euripides, is nowhere better illustrated than by the Athena of
the [Iphigeneia in Tauris].'*
In this play the goddess ostensibly intervenes in order to stop
a barbarian tyrant from catching and killing some distinguished
Hellenic fugitives. In VerralPs opinion this 'happy ending* is not
meant to be taken seriously. The spectator of the performance
or reader of the text is intended to understand that the play is
after all a tragedy. The fugitives are not really going to escape
their persecutor's clutches; it is made perfectly clear, all along,
that they have not a dog's chance; and, what is more, they do not
morally deserve any miraculous reprieve; for it cannot be denied
that they have brought this fate upon themselves by trying to
practise a fraud upon their barbarian captor. Well, but is not
Thoas a savage in fighting whom all is fair? Yes, but are not his
captives Hellenes who should scruple to retort even to savagery
with deceit? 4 And how did these representatives of Civilization
come to place themselves in the false position for which they are
going to pay so tragic a penalty? Were they not let in' by the very
divinities who are now letting them down'? What possessed
Orestes to think of stealing the holy image of the Tauric Artemis ?
Was it not Apollo who sped him on this knavish errand with the
promise that, if he brought the stolen statue to Athens, he might
hope to win as his reward a breathing-space from the cruel malady
which had descended upon him as the penalty for the commission
of a greater crime in obedience to a previous behest of the same
divinity ? s
The same scholar applies the same apparatus critiats to the
interpretation of Euripides' Ion. Just as, according to Verrall,
Iphigeneia and Orestes and Pylades and the chonjs of Attic
women are not miraculously reprieved by Athena but are tragi-
cally put to death in the sight and hearing of any audience that
1 Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae, 11. 450-1, apropos of Euripides,
2 Lucian: Zeus Tragosdus, 41.
3 Verrall, A. W.: Euripides the Rationalist (Cambridge 1895, University Press),
pp. 138 and 201.
4 A modern Western reader who finds Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris too alien in its
atmosphere for him to appreciate its point can see this 'ancient* drama replayed in
'modern* dress if he will attend a performance of William Archer's The Green Goddess.
The colloquy between the Rajah and the parletnentaire ex machina from the rescue
squadron of the R.A.F. raises an issue 'What is Civilization?' which is precisely the
issue that arises (undeclared) between Thoas and Athena.
s Enripides; Iphigeneia in Tauris, 11. 85-92 and 1438-41 b.
264 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
has ears to hear and eyes to see so, according to the same inter-
preter, the illegitimacy of Ion's birth and the unchastity of Creusa's
life before her marriage are tragically exposed through the thread-
bareness of the veil which Athena makes a pretence of throwing
over this pair of scandals. 1
If there is any substance in Verrall's interpretation of Euripides*
plays, it would seem to be the practice of the Euripidean gods
first malevolently to inveigle the human dramatis personae into
putting themselves in the wrong, and then heartlessly to abandon
their dupes to a doom which ought in justice to overtake the
divine mischief-makers and not their human victims, But who,
'in the last analysis', are these odious divinities ? Have they really
any independent existence in themselves ? Are they not, rather,
the mythical 'externalizations' of psychological forces that 'in real
life' are immanent in the souls of the human actors ? And is not
Euripides' esoteric theme the moral frailty of his own enlightened
countrymen and contemporaries ?
On this showing, the dens ex machina is nothing but a caricature
of the human saviour with the 'time-machine', whose trick we have
seen through already. 2 In bringing this mountebank on to his
stage in the mask of a god and not of a mortal the playwright is
hinting to his audience that he intends this character to be taken
satirically in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, and not seriously in the
spirit of Mr. Wells. 3 The deus ex machina thus turns out to be a
joke and that a bitter one. And the Olympians would hardly
be able to rehabilitate themselves even if they could convince us
that Verrall's theory is moonshine and that the Euripidean Artemis
and Athena are genuinely doing all that they are professing to do.
Morally it makes little difference whether a miraculously 'happy
ending' is a genuine miracle or a fake; for it cannot in either case
save a tragedy from being anything but what it is. What are we
to think of divine shepherds who neglect their duty towards their
human flocks until the wretched sheep have fallen into the deepest
moral errors and suffered the utmost spiritual agonies 'of which
their nature is capable? Are we to acquit them of blame just
because, at the thirteenth hour, they are kind enough to avert
by an exercise of magical power which costs them no exertion
on o ur
2 5l *k c P resent chapter, pp. 213-42, above.
- mdT ** * aditlonal diviniti
.
divinities in the Hellenic World has its
de P re ation of the members of a kindred
9 " 20 ' ; bove >' fn dth <*** a human enlightenment
at which ** once "** colours havc
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 265
some of the material consequences of moral disasters which, owing
to theft neglect, are now beyond repair? Divinities who behave
like this cannot defend themselves by pleading that they are prac-
tising what has been preached to them by human philosophers; 1
for Epicurus, as we have seen, 2 had not the heart, when it came
to the point, to lower his own conduct to the level of his doctrine;
and, if a human sage knew better than to take a heartless philosophy
seriously, even when he had invented it himself, his divine dis-
ciples, too, ought to know better a fortiori. Nor is the practice of
tempering a habitual neglect with an occasional intervention
morally salvaged by expanding the field of the deus ex machines
perfunctory performance from the stage of the theatre at Athens
to the sum-total of the Universe, as Plato expands it in a myth
which we have already quoted in another context. 3 The deus ex
machina is indefensible in any field and on any hypothesis. And
yet we need not be discouraged by this outcome of our first essay
towards a survey of saviour-gods; for a train of ideas that starts
with a conceit may end in a revelation. If 'Cloudcuckooland' can
open human eyes to the Kingdom of Heaven, 4 it is not impossible
that the deus ex machina may put us, if we persevere, on the track
of another epiphany of God which 'unto the Greeks' was likewise
'foolishness' 5 the figure of "Christ on the Cross.
If putting in an appearance as a deus ex machina is the cheapest
of all the ways in which a god can present himself to Man as his
saviour, the next cheapest kind of epiphany is an avatar. At first
sight, perhaps, it might seem to imply a considerably greater ex-
penditure of divine time and trouble when a god condescends to
exchange his proper form for a tenement of human flesh and to
linger in this shape on Earth for the length of a human lifetime,
instead of just for the duration of the last act of a play. On closer
scrutiny, however, the apparent generosity dwindles. In point of
time those three score years and ten must count for much the same
as three minutes in the consciousness of an immortal who has Eter-
nity to play with; and in point of trouble the divinity who is living
through an avatar is apt, we shall find, to avail himself of his
latent supernatural powers as soon as things look nasty. In Euri-
pides' Bacchae Dionysus does not dream of allowing a deluded
Pentheus to have his way with this divinity in human disguise.
When it comes to the crisis the camouflaged god, with one wave
of his magic wand, causes Pentheus' own womenkind to tear
1 See V. C (i) (<f) 10, pp. 144-6, above.
a See the present chapter, pp. 244-5, above. .
3 See the passages from Plato's PoUticus that have been quoted m W. C (i), vol. iv,
pp. 26-7, above.
4 See V. C (i) (<*) u, Annex I, below. 5 i Cor. u 23-
266 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the wretched man to pieces in the blind frenzy of their orgiastic
religious exaltation.
The god recovered from the bout ;
Th& man it was that died.
In thus meanly drawing upon his reserves of superhuman potency
Dionysus is breaking the rules of his own game, like the human
saviour with the 'time-machine' and the human philosopher-king
when they drop their pretences and take to their swords. But the
god is behaving more detestably than his human counterparts; for
the crisis that moves him to make use of his hidden weapon is one
that he himself has deliberately provoked. This god incarnate has
kept his human assailant in ignorance of his superhuman bugbear's
true nature in order to lure the silly fellow into a cruel trap. The
show of patience and humility with which the mysterious stranger
replies to the headstrong prince's ill-usage of him in the first act
of the play is neither sincere nor disinterested. It is not Dionysus's
intention to put Pentheus out of countenance, and so win him to
repentance, by eventually revealing his own identity. His plan is
to catch him out, and his temper is malicious.
Nor does Dionysus, in his sojourn among men, always make
even so much as a pretence of being other than an Olympian. The
best part of Dionysus's earthly career is devoted to a campaign of
world-conquest in which the divine aggressor takes advantage of
his supernatural powers in order to anticipate (or emulate), at his
ease, the human exploits of Sesostris and Alexander. And woe
betide the human potentate who ventures to offer resistance to
the conqueror-god's triumphal progress. For the crime of suc-
cessfully repelling this Olympian invader, Lycurgus King of the
fidones pays the same dreadful penalty that is exacted from Pen-
theus King of Thebes for his refusal to acknowledge Dionysus's
divinity. But the principal theatre of Dionysus's military prowess
lies neither in Boeotia nor in Thrace. Dionysus, like Alexander,
glories chiefly in being the conqueror of India; and on this Indian
soil the Hellenic deity's brutal epiphany has its analogues in the
avatars of Shiva and Vishnu. 1 As for Shiva, he is nothing but
Destructiveness personified. And even Shiva's divine antithesis is
capable of sinking to Dionysus's level when Vishnu goes on the
war-path in the guise of a Krishna or a Rama.
If the avatar thus turns out to be morally almost as repulsive
as the epiphany ex machina, the demigod, who presents himself
next, is a decidedly more sympathetic figure. We Jiave only to
1 For certain likenesses and differences between these two Hindu worships and
Christianity see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 138, and V. C (i) (d) 7, in the present volume,
PP- 47-9> above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 267
cast our eye over the goodly company of these heroes: a Sumeric
Gilgamesh; a Hellenic Herakles and Asklepios and Castor and
Pollux and Perseus and Achilles and Orpheus; and a Sinic con-
tingent that includes, among others, the 'culture-heroes' Yu and
Yi and Yao and Shwen. 1 These half-divine beings in human flesh
live out their lives on Earth without benefit of that privilege of
arbitrarily contracting out of the game which the full-blown gods,
in their avatars, retain and abuse. The labours of H8rald.es are at
least as serviceable to Mankind as Dionysus's escapades ; yet the
sufferings which such labours must entail for the labourer in the
natural human course of events are suffered by HSraklSs as genu-
inely as though he were no more than an ordinary mortal. The
divinity of the demigods is housed in common clay; and they have
to contend with all the challenges which present themselves to
'Man that is born of a woman'. 2 The demigod, too, 'is of few
days, and full of trouble' ; and he is not even exempted from having
to do battle with Man's 'last enemy'. 3 The demigod and this is
his glory is subject, like Man, to Death.
Still less remote from our common humanity are the authentic
human beings who have been credited by their fellows with the
half-divine parentage that is the demigods' birthright. The divine
paternity which in Euripides' play is ascribed by Athena to Ion
has also been attributed to princes and sages that are no legendary
figures but are well-known historical characters who have unques-
tionably lived in the flesh, and whose acts and thoughts are on
record in documents that must rank as unimpeachable evidence.
In the Hellenic tradition not only Ion and Asklepios, but also
Pythagoras and Plato and Augustus, have been reckoned among
the sons of Apollo ; and not only Hrakl6s and the Dioscuri and
Perseus, but also Alexander, among the sons of Zeus, while Apol-
lonius of Tyana has been reckoned alternatively as a son of Zeus
or as either a son of Zeus or a son of Proteus. 4 The common form
of the tale is that the human hero's human mother is visited by
a superhuman mate who usurps the place of her lawful human
husband.s Apollo ousts Mnesarchus and Ariston and Octavius;
1 See Maspe*ro, H.: La Chine Antique (Paris 1927, Boccard), pp. 26-32.
2 Job xiv. i. 3 i Cor. xv. 26.
4 'When Apollonius's mother was pregnant with him she was visited by an apparition
(iao/ia) of an Egyptian divinity (Scu/zovos) it was the Proteus who keeps on changing
shape in Homer. The woman was not afraid, and asked him what kind of a child she
was going to bear. "Me" was the apparition's reply; "Who are you ?" she asked; "I am
~~ . _ - , Tk Irt/iol KUf Tim A T^llrtnins'R home country.
Proteus, the Egyptian god/* said he The local belief [in Apollonius's home country,
the Tyanitis] is that Apollonius was a son of Zeus; but Apollonius himself calls himself
the son of [his mother's human husband] Apollonius. Philostratus : Apollomus^of
Tyana, Book I, chaps. 4 and 6. For the common features in the stories of Apollonius
and of Jesus see Seeck, O. : Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, vol. iii, 2nd
ed. (Stuttgart 1921, Metzler), pp. 183-4. , , P , r
s When the tale is told of historical characters whose official parents are both of them
2 68 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Zeus-Amon ousts Philip. Sometimes the divine visitor presents
himself in the form of a man, sometimes in the form of an animal,
and sometimes in the form of a thunderbolt or a ray of light.
Zeus-Amon is fabled to have visited Alexander's mother Olympias
in the form either of a thunderbolt or of a snake, 1 and in the course
of ages this fable has travelled far and wide. In Italy it was trans-
ferred in the third century B.C. from Alexander to Scipio Africanus
Major 2 and in the last century B.C. to Augustus ;* in Central Asia
by the fifteenth century of the Christian Era it had come to be
transferred to a legendary common ancestor of Chingis Khan and
Timur LenM In an etherial version the same story is also told of
a man of the people who has outshone every one of these kings
and statesmen and philosophers.
'These tales have their counterpart in the Christian legends of the
birth of Jesus ; and the version followed by Matthew exhibits the direct
influence of the Hellenic motif. 3 This influence has not, of course, been
perfectly well known, it is, of course, easier to deny the paternity of the human father
than the maternity of the human mother. It would probably be difficult to cite a
genuinely historical personage who has been credited, like Orpheus and Achilles, with
a mother who was a goddess.
i Both fables are recounted, side by side, in Plutarch's Life of Alexander, chaps. 2-3-
* See Livy, Book XXVI, chap. 19. The Roman historian, who retells the tale with a
sneer, doea not inform us whether Scipio's, as well as Alexander's, snake-father was
identified with Zeus, or whether his identity was left in doubt.
3 *In Asclepiadis Mendetis Theologumenon libris lego.' Suetonius: Life of Augustus,
chap. 94.
* See Herzfeld, E.: 'Alongoa* in Der Islam, vol. vi (Strassburg 1916, Trttbner),
L ray of light. The legend :
Alongoa's reputed descendant Timur Leak at Samarqand, and in this context it is
brought into connexion with the story of the Annunciation to Mary, as this is told in the
' e same
19) in the Zafarnamah of Timur's biographer Sharaf-ad-
Din 'AH YazdJ (for whom see II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 149, above). It is not, however,
through the Qur'an that the tale has attached itself to Timur's and Chingis' legendary
common ancestress Alongoa. The tale, as it is told in this context, has come direct from
the Alexander Romance (Herzfeld, ibid., p. 326), as is attested by the heroine's .name ; for
'Alongoa* is a transparent travesty of Olympias (in the inscription on Timur's tomb the
name is written, in the Perso-Arabic Alphabet, \yu ^t\ ; and, if we may assume that the
ambiguous letter A has been pointed A [qaf] in mistake for k [fa] at some weak link in a
long chain of literary transmission, we arrive at an earlier form 'Alanfoa* which is very
near indeed to the original Greek).
3 "The view that the Messiah has to be born of a virgin is notoriously quite unknown
to the Jews; it is a purely Christian (pagan) myth' (Meyer, E. : Ursprung und Anf&nge des
Ckristentums, vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 60, footnote 2), which attaches,
not to the Jewish Messiah, but to the Zoroastrian SaoSyant (Meyer, op. cit., vol. ii (1921),
p. 68; von Gall, A.: BaatAcia TOV BOV (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), pp. 418-19). In the
Jewish view the Messiah is a man with nothing superhuman, and a fortiori nothing
divine, about him (on this point see V. C (i) (d) u, p. 163, footnote I, above). To a
Jewish mind the Christian attribution of a divine paternity to Jesus seems like a lapse
from the slowly and painfully attained monotheism of the Chosen People of the One
True God into one of the grossest and most unedifying superstitions of a Hellenic
paganism. This Jewish reproach against Christianity is forcefully expressed in a passage
placed in the niouth of the Jewish disputant in the Dialogus cum Tryphone Judaeo>
chap. 67 ( Migne, J.-P. : Patrologia Graeca, vol. vi, col. 629) of the Christian philosopher,
sat vivebat aevi Christiani saeculo secundo) :
Scripture [Isa. vii. 14] does not read Behold a virgin shall
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 269
transmitted through any literary channel ; what has happened is that the
popular ideas that have been diffused far and wide through all peoples
and all religions have been laid under contribution for the benefit of the
Christian myth. Be that as it may, the correspondence between Matthew
and the legend of the birth of Plato is as exact as it could possibly be.
Before Mary's marriage with Joseph has been consummated, she be-
comes with child IK Trveu/taros dytov = ^aa/za '^TroAAama/coV cruveyeyero
rfi UepLKTiovrj (Olympiodorus). Joseph proposes to put her away when
the Angel of the Lord (the maTak Yahweh, the representative of the
Godhead, as so often in the Old Testament) appears to him in a dream
and reveals to him what has come to pass and what is his son's future.
In obedience to this revelation Joseph "did as the Angel of the Lord
had bidden him and took unto him his wife and knew her not till she
had brought forth her first-born son" the exact instructions that are
given to Plato's father.' 1
conceive, and bear a son, but Behold a young woman shall conceive, and bear a son and so
on to the end of the passage that you have just quoted. And the whole prophecy refers
to Hezekiah in whose life events in consonance with this prophecy can be shown to
have taken place. There is, however, in the mythology of the so-called Hellenes, a story
of how Perseus was gotten upon Danae, when she was a virgin, by Jhe streaming upon
her, in the form of gold, of the [demon] whom the Hellenes called Zeus. You [Christians]
ought to be ashamed of reproducing this Hellenic tale, and ought to admit that this
Jesus is a human being of human parentage. And, if you want to prove from the Scrip-
tures that he is the Christ, your thesis ought to be that he was accounted worthy to be
singled out for being the Christ because he led a perfect life in conformity with the Law.
But beware of telling tall stories (repoLToXoyeiv) if you do not want to be convicted of
being as silly as the Hellenes are." '
Justin, however, is not ashamed of finding himself in the Hellenes' company. In his
what you say of Perseus'. AJ.T.
1 Meyer, E. : Ursprung und Anfdnge des Christentums, vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921,
Cotta), pp. 56-7. This modern Western scholar has not, of course, been the first to
point out the parallelism between these two stories. As he himself mentions in the same
context (op. cit, p. 55, footnote 4), the Christian father Origen (in his Contra Celsum,
Book I, chap. 37) 'cites the story of the birth of Plato as a parallel to the birth of Jesus,
with the object of making it clear to the Hellenes that what is related in the Gospels is by
no means incompatible with Hellenic ideas'. ('In an argument with Hellenes it is quite
in place to bring in Hellenic tales in order to show that we [Christians] are not unique
in telling this extraordinary tale [of the virgin birth and divine paternity of Jesus], There
are Hellenic authors who have deliberately recorded, as a thing within the bounds of
possibility and this with reference, not to Ancient History or to "the Heroic Age", but
to what happened only yesterday or the day before that Plato was born of Amphictione 1
when Ariston had been debarred from having sexual relations with her until she should
have given birth to the child begotten by Apollo.' Migne, J.-P.: Patrologia Graeca,
vol. xi, col. 732.) How is this parallel to be explained? Are we to suppose that the story
of the birth of Jesus was adapted from that of the birth of Plato or Pythagoras or
Alexander or Scipio Africanus or Augustus? It is true that the stones attributing a
divine paternity to these pagan Hellenic heroes must all have been in circulation by the
time when the sources of the Gospels began to take shape. Yet, although the hypothesis
of a direct mimesis is thus tenable in point of chronology, it is improbable in itself. It
seems more likely that the parallel between the birth-stories of Jesus on the one hand
and of our five pagan Hellenic heroes on the other is due, not to an adaptation of the
later story from one or other of the earlier stories, but to an independent derivation of
each of the six stories from a common source. The essence of each of the six stories ia
that it ascribes to an historical character the semi-divine parentage that is the birthright
of a demigod. And, if we compare the birth-story of Jesus with that of Herakles, we
shall find a still greater number of points of correspondence than Meyer has pointed out
in his comparison of the birth-story of Jesus with that of Plato. The parallel between the
birth-stories of Jesus and Herakles is set out in Pfister, Fr.: 'Herakles und Christus' in
ArcfuvfarReltgionswissenschaft, XXXIV, Heft 1/2 (Berlin and Leipzig 1937, Teubner),
270 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
This divine paternity of a saviour born of a woman is a form
of epiphany which brings the saviour-god into a perfect intimacy
with human kind. But how is the nature of fatherhood to be con-
ceived of if God is the subject of it ? Can God's fatherhood really be
supposed to take the form of an act of physical procreation ? It
would be hard to say whether the suggestion is the more shocking
when the divinity is pictured as masquerading in the body of a
human seducer or when this sordid realism is evaded by the
childishly grotesque device of turning a god into a beast and a
myth 1 into a fairy-tale. In whatever physical shape the god may
be portrayed, a literal paternity cannot be attributed to him with-
out making blasphemous nonsense of his fatherhood in the judge-
ment of any human soul that is morally sensitive and intellectually
critical. If the hero's divine father was really behaving like a
human rake, there is no reason why the hero should have turned
out better than any other child that has been born out of lawful
wedlock. On the other hand, if it be accepted that the hero has
displayed an unmistakably superhuman prowess, and if it be
granted that a spiritual endowment which cannot be of human
origin can only be accounted for as the gift of a divine parent, then
the nature of the divine paternity with which the hero must be
credited will have to be conceived of in the non-corporeal terms
in which it is in fact presented in our Christian version of the
Hellenic myth. 2 ' If God has begotten a Son, the divine act must
be an eternal truth and not an occurrence in Time. And if God
can create the Universe by uttering a word, 3 then assuredly he can
?p. 46-7. Amphitryon, the husband of HerakleV mother Alcmena, refrains, like both
oseph and Ariston, from having sexual intercourse with his newly wedded wife until
she has conceived and born a child whose paternity is not human but divine. But
between the birth-stories of Jesus and HSrakle's there is a further point of resemblance!
that is not to be found in the birth-story of Plato. Before the birth of the divine child
the child's mother and her husband change their residence Alcmena and Amphitryon
from Mycenae (Alcmena's native city) to Thebes ; Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to
Bethlehem-^so that the child has a birth-place (a Judaean Bethlehem or a Boeotian
Thebes) which is not his parents' home (in a Galilaean Nazareth or an Argive Mycenae). ,
We may conjecture that the birth-story of HeraJkles is the archetype of the birth-stories
of all our six historical Hellenic heroes (see further V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, p. 469,
below).
1 For the view that the story or drama of the encounter between the Virgin and the
Father of her Child is a mythological image of the mystery of Creation, see II. C (ii) (6) i ,
vol. i, p. 272, above.
2 In expounding the parallelism between the Christian and the Hellenic Mythology,
Saint Justin Martyr (First Apology, chap. 21, in Migne: Patrologia Graeca, vol. vi,
col. 360) implicitly absolves the Hellenic motif of divine paternity from the imputation of
grossness which is usually read into it. 'When we say that the Logos, which is the first
offspring of God, has been begotten without sexual intercourse the Logos who is Jesus
Christ our Master and that this [Jesus Christ] has been crucified and has died and has
risen again and has ascended into Heaven, we are saying nothing novel, for we are saying
nothing that is not to be found in the stories of the sons that are attributed, in your
Hellenic Mythology, to Zeus.*
j The Jewish conception of a creative 'Word' ('Memra') of God may be either an
independent discovery of the Jewish religious genius or else a Jewish adaptation of the
Hellenic conception of the 'Logos' (see Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christen-
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 271
send his Son into the World by making an Annunciation. 1 This
is the common foundation of all varieties of Christian belief con-
cerning the manner in which the saviour-god has made his his-
torical epiphany. But this primary common ground leaves some
critical secondary questions outstanding. To whom, and at what
moment, and in what circumstances, will the creative Annuncia-
tion be made ?
If it be agreed that God's way of revealing himself as a father
is to speak with the voice of the Spirit to a human soul, it may
still be debated whether the Father is to be expected to announce
His divine intention to the human mother of His Son at the moment
when her child is physically conceived. May it not be more god-
like to confer the grace of this divine paternity upon a soul which
has already reached the threshold of its human maturity and has
already proved its worthiness of sonship by offering itself to God
without blemish or reserve? 'God is the common father of all
men, but he makes the best ones peculiarly his own/ 2 This adop-
tive kind of fatherhood is not unknown even among men. Even
in the gross economy of a purely mundane society the physical
act of procreation is not the only means by which a man can
acquire a son. As an alternative to the begetting of a child whose
character is ex hypothesi an unknown quantity, the would-be father
may adopt a grown man who has already shown himself capable
of taking over the heritage which his adoptive parent has to hand
on. And, if this heritage be one that carries heavy responsibilities
and imposes exacting tasks involving many people's welfare, then
a conscientious man of affairs be he householder or prince may
well find greater comfort in a son of his choice than in a son of
his loins. In such a spirit the second Scipio Africanus 3 adopted Scipio
Aemilianus; Divus Julius adopted Octavian; and Nerva initiated
a succession of imperial adoptions which ran through Trajan and
Hadrian and Pius to Marcus. In the Age of the Antonines it had
come to be almost a constitutional convention of the Roman
Empire that the Principate should be transmitted by adopting a
successor and not by begetting one. Did Marcus do well when
he broke Nerva's 'Golden Chain* for the benefit of his own child
tums t vol. ii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), pp. 103-4, and the present Study, V. C (i)
tums t vo. i tuttgart an Berlin 1921, otta), p
(d) 6 (8), vol. y, p. 39, with footnote 4, above).
1 Had this idea already struck the mind of a H
ready struck the mind of a Hellenic poet-prophet in a generation that
waa born before the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization r
Xaftovaa 8' cppa Alov ai/jevSel X6ya>
yeiva.ro ircuS' ape^^,
oV aloJvos /ta/cpot? iravoAj9ov,
Aeschylus: Supplices, 11. 500-2.
* This 'logion*, attributed to Alexander the Great, has been quoted already in
V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 9, above.
3 This physical son of Scipio Africanus Major was himself prevented by ill-health
from carrying on his father's work.
272 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Commodus ? And, if adoption works better than procreation when
the father is a human prince and the heritage a mundane empire,
may it not be better, a fortiori, when the father is God himself and
when the business on hand is Man's salvation?
The belief that a Son of Man may in this way become a Son of
God has declared itself, in the first instance, in the deification of
oecumenical monarchs. 1 In some oecumenical empires the adop-
tion of the prince by the god has been conceived of as taking place
at the moment of the prince's accession, and in others as being
deferred until after his death. Posthumous apotheosis appears to
have been the rule among the Hittites and in Japan; adoption-
upon-accession in the Egyptiac and Sumeric and Sinic and Andean
worlds ; while in the Hellenic World the two practices came into
currency side by side 2 with the strange consequence that a Hel-
lenic ruler in the Age of Disintegration might find himself already
an object of worship in his own lifetime in certain parts of his
dominions or among certain classes of his subjects, while elsewhere
he must be content with the knowledge that he would receive
or at any rate become a candidate for receiving the same honours
as soon as he had ceased to be present in the flesh. 3 This belief in
divine paternity by adoption has had the same social history as the
cruder belief in divine paternity by procreation. While it likewise
makes its first appearance as an expression of the awe in which an
oecumenical ruler is held by his subjects, it also likewise breaks
these original bounds and comes to be extended to commoners
instead of remaining a monopoly of kings. In the history of the
disintegration of the Hellenic Society the earliest example of the
deification of a man of the people is to be found in a comedy. In
the closing verses of Aristophanes' Birds the chorus hail Peithe-
taerus as 'God of Gods' (Sau^vcw zWprarc) when, in reward for
the feats of having founded 'Cloudcuckooland' and blockaded
Olympus into an abject surrender, the Athenian cockney makes a
triumphal epiphany with the sceptre of Zeus in his hand and with
1 For Caesar-worship and its limitations see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (5), vol. Iv, pp. 348-^
and V. C (i) (rf) 6 (3), Annex, pp. 648-57, above. V ' ' W ' ' PP 34 ^*
2 This seems also to have happened in certain overseas domains of the Hindu World
Java, Camboja, Champa where we have evidence for a deification of monarchs of
which there are only slight traces in the main body of the Hindu Society in Continent*!
India (Eliot, Sir Ch.: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold. 3 vob.) voL i
pp. "57^0, already cited in V. C (i) (rf) 6 (8), Annex, p. 653, footnote 4, above,
3 This was the situation of the Roman Emperors in the Age of the Principle, In
Rome itself, and in those parts of the Ager Romanus that were peopled by communities
of Roman citizens, a princeps was in no circumstances accorded divine honours till after
Greek and Oriental provinces and protectorates of the Empire, while in Egypt a Roman
Emperor automatically 'became an adopted son of Re upon his accession, in virtue of his
recognized status of being a legitimate Pharaoh.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 273
'the Queen' on his arm as his heavenly bride. 1 But a scene which,
in the first generation of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles', had thus
been played in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens as the crowning
extravaganza of a fantastic farce was replayed four and a half
centuries later on the banks of the Jordan in an amazingly different
setting and spirit. In the story of the Gospels the designation of a
Nazarene carpenter as the Son of God is presented as the opening
revelation of a mystery which was to culminate in the Crucifixion
and which was nothing less than God's scheme for Man's salvation.
In all four Gospels 2 it is told of Jesus that he was designated as
the Son of God after his baptism in Jordan by John, as he was
coming up out of the water, 3 And in the earliest, as well as in the
latest, of the four the whole story begins with this act of adop-
tion, and not with any account of the saviour-god's conception or
birth or infancy or upbringing. 4 There is, of course, an apparent
1 For this extraordinary finale of the Birth see further V, C (i) (d) n, Annex I,
below.
a Matt. iii. 16-17; Mark i. lo-n ; Luke iii. 21-3; John L 33-4.
J In all the three Synoptic Gospels this designation of Jesus as the Son of God is
represented as having been both visual and aural. The Spirit of God is seen descending
upon Jesus in the likeness of a dove, and simultaneously the voice of God is heard from
Heaven proclaiming Jesus to be God's beloved Son in whom God is well pleased. In the
Gospel according to Saint Mark the story is told in words which seem to imply that the
vision was aen and the voice heard by Jesus alone in a flash of spiritual enlightenment,
The words used in Matthew would seem to imply that the vision was seen by Jesus alone,'
hut that the voice was addressed to and therefore, presumably, heard by the specta-
tors. Inversely, the words used in Luke would seem to imply that Jesus alone heard the
voice, but that the spectators saw the vision. In the Gospel according to Saint John no
mention is made of the voice, \yhile, in regard tft the vision, it is explicitly stated that this
wa seen by John, and is implicitly suggested that it was not seen by any one else -not
even by Jeaus himself,
* It is noteworthy that this story of the Designation of Jesua, at his baptism, as the
Son of Gtxi is not omitted in either of the two Gospels which preface this story with an
account of Jcsus's birth and which represent him as having acquired his divine paternity
at the moment of his physical conception and therefore, by implication, not at the
moment of his baptism, when, according to Luke iii. 33, he was about thirty years old.
The internal evidence can hardly fail to produce on the mind of the literary critic an
impression that the form of the story m which this begins with the baptism and
Designation of Jesus in his prime is the original form, and that the Lucan and Matthaean
prologues represent a later accretion. The discrepancy between an 'adoptionist' gospel
tnd its 'conception!**:' preface is particularly conspicuous in Luke. In the first place
Luke iii. aa reads, in one set of manuscripts (I>, a, b c, ff &c., with the support of
Clement of Alexandria); 'Thou art my beloved Son; this day hava I begotten thee\ in place
of the standard reading: *Thou art my beloved Son; in thte I am wfll pleased' ; and it is
not impossible that this discarded reading may be the authentic original text (Streeter,
B. H: WhtFour Gospels (London 1924* MtcmiUftn), p. 143; cf. pp. 188 and 276). In the
second place the vagueness of the estimate of Jesus** age at the moment of the Designa-
tion seems to imply (in contradiction to what is told in chapters i and ii) that little or
nothing was known about his life before this event, which is represented as having
occurred at his firs- public appearance. In the third place the genealogy of Jesus's
human ancestry (which, curiously enough, is introduced into the story in both Luke and
Matthew, while it ia not to be found m Mark, where there is nothing with which it
would be incompatible) is placed in Luke immediately after the account of the Designa-
tion, which would be the natural place for it if this were the beginning of the atory,
whereas in Matthew it is placed, les* awkwardly, at the opening of the pretace, before the
account of the Annunciation. In the fourth place the genealogy-~and this not only in
Luke but also m Matthew is traced through Joseph, with the implication that Jesus
was in the physical sense Joseph's son, and not through Mary, though Mary is the sole
physical parent of Jfesus according to the story tola in both these Gospels in their
274 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
discrepancy between this account, in all the Gospels, of the adop-
tion of Jesus as the Son of God in the prime of his manhood and
the account of his conception by the Holy Ghost which precedes
the account of the adoption in the Gospels according to Saint Mat-
thew and Saint Luke. And this raises difficult problems of literary
criticism and theological exegesis which have exercised scholars
and have divided Christians. 1 Is 'adoption' or 'conception' the
proper description of a humanly ineffable utterance of the Creative
Word that gave God a man for his son and Mankind a god for their
saviour? At what moment in Jesus's human life on Earth did a
divine wave of salvation break upon the shoals of Time in the
course of its everlasting passage over the boundless ocean of
Eternity? 2 Instead of attempting to answer a question that is
humanly unanswerable, it may perhaps be more useful to suggest
that the two words 'adoption* and 'conception', which bear their
literal meaning in the crude Hellenic embryo of the myth, have in
our Christian version acquired a new connotation which is neither
legal in the one case nor physical in the other, but is in both cases
metaphorical. The essence of the Christian mystery lies in a belief
that God has made himself, by means that have been spiritual and
not corporeal, the father of a son who has lived and died on Earth
as a man in the flesh. This belief in an incarnation of Divinity
postulates in its turn the further belief that the human vehicle of
the Godhead has been a physical reality with a physiological origin;
and, on every Christian interpretation of the story, Jesus the Son
of God is deemed to have been born, in the literal physical sense
of the word, by a human mother. The issue on which the *adop-
tionists* and 'conceptionists' part company is not either the
question whether God made himself the father of a man by a
prologues (in the Lucan genealogy (Luke lii. 38), in contrast to the Lucan prologue, it is
not Jesus, but Jesus's first human forefather Adam, who is the Son of God). With this we
may compare the double paternity that is ascribed to both Alexander and Hrakie.
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, chap. 2, records that Alexander was believed to be a
Heracleid on his father s (i.e. Philip's) side, and an Acacid on his mother's, besides
recounting the story of his father's being, not Philip at all, but Zeus-Amon (the story of
Alexander s divine paternity, as recounted by Plutarch, comes closer to the Matthaean
than to the Lucan prologue to the story of the Gospels: Herzfeld, op. cit., pp. 326-7).
Similarly HSraklSs is represented as being both the son of Amphitryon and the son of
^eus (Jrnster, op. cit., p. 47).
* For the traces of an 'adoptionist' Christian Church which appears to have been
overwhelmed, withqut having been completely obliterated, by a following wave of the
conceptiomst Christianity which now prevails, see IV. C (iii) (*) 2 (flf. Annex III,
vol. iv, P 624-34, above. The 'adoptionist' type of Christianity nas manifestly
n C ^ er J! A* 7 - -iff ^ cw^ptionist* type has with the Mahayanian cult of the
Bodhisattva Amitabha (Amida). < In the oldest documents he is a man who become* Ta
Buddha in the traditional manner. The fundamental idea is not that God i Love but
rather that Love is God : lovmgkindness raised Amida to a place which may be called
divine .(Eliot, Six -C^i Japanese Buddhism (London 1 93 S> Arnold), p. 304).
inL^ 17 1S f TS 1 1 f - a d - CCp faction between Eternity ancTYizne; it it the
** mt ^'-Berdy. N-: The Meaning if Hutvry
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 275
non-corporeal act or again the question whether the man of flesh and
blood had a physical origin. The two schools agree in answering
both these questions in the affirmative. They are divided on the
question whether the physical procreation of Jesus was normal or
miraculous; and it may be neither uncharitable nor unreasonable
to suggest that this point of discord sharp though it be is minute
by comparison with the expanse of the encompassing field of
harmony.
In any case a theophany can never avail in itself to fulfil the
promise of salvation. Whether machina or avatar or conception
or adoption be the means that God elects for making his divine
intervention in a human tragedy, an epiphany must lead on to a
Passion if God Manifest is to become Man's Saviour by proving
himself *a very present help in trouble*. 1 Suffering is the key to
salvation, as well as to understanding; 2 and a saviour's suffering
must fathom the uttermost depths of agony. Even a Hellenic
philosopher whose idea of salvation was Detachment has demanded
an extremity of suffering from the sage who is to testify to his
fellow men that Justice is an end in itself which is to be ensued at
any cost for the sake of its own absolute and infinite value. The
testimony, as Plato perceives, will only carry conviction if the just
man bears it out by submitting to be scourged and racked and
shackled, to have his eyes seared with red-hot irons, and finally to
be impaled after having gone through every lesser torture. 3 In
imagining this extremity of suffering for an utterly unselfish object,
Plato assuredly had in mind the historic martyrdom of his own
master Socrates, 4 And this human martyr who gave his witness
at Athens in the year 399 B.C. was following the example of super-
human prototypes whose labours and tribulations undergone for
the sake of Mankind were the themes of the holiest legends in the
Hellenic cultural heritage. Even the hero Achilles had deliberately
cut short his brief allotted span of life on Earth for the sake of
avenging the death of a comrade, Hrakl6s had toiled, and Pro-
metheus endured, 5 and Orpheus died, for all men. And even the
death of this dying demigod was not the acme of divine suffering
in the panorama of the Hellenic Weltanschauung. For, though no
living being can pay a greater price than life itself, the life of a
demigod is not so precious as the life of a god of unalloyed divinity ;
1 Pa, xlvt. i,
For the Aeschylean it&Q*i ttMos see I. C (w) 0), vol. i, p, 169. footnote x ; II. C (ii)
(&) i, vol. i, p. 298; IV. C (iii) ) 1 1. vol. iv, p. 218; IV. C (in) (c) 3 (), vol, lv, p. 5*41
V. C (i) (r) 2, vol. v, p. 78; arid V, C (i) (<f) 4, vol. v, p, 4x6, footnote 3, above.
3 Plato: Retpublica, 360 32-36* c. quoted again in V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, p, 494i
, - . . , , , i
* Some analogies between the theophany and Pawion of Socrates and the theophany
and Paation of Jesus are examined in V, C (ii) (a), Annex II, pp 486-951 below.
* For the Passion of Promethewa aee ill. B, vol. Hi, pp. 1x3-27, above.
276 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
and behind the figure of the dying demigod Orpheus there looms
the greater figure of a very god who dies for different worlds under
diverse names for a Minoan World as Zagreus, 1 for a Sumeric
World as Tammuz, 2 for a Hittite World as Attis, 3 for a Scandina-
vian World as Balder, 4 for a Syriac World as Adonis ('Our Lord'),*
for an Egyptiac World as Osiris, 6 for a ShTi World as Husayn, for
a Christian World as Christ.
Who is this god of many epiphanies but only one Passion?
Though he makes his appearance on our mundane stage under a
dozen diverse masks, his identity is invariably revealed in the last
act of the tragedy by his suffering unto death. And if we take up
the anthropologist's divining-rod we can trace this never varying
drama back to its historical origins. 'He shall grow up before him
as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground.'? The Dying
God's oldest appearance is in the role of the evtayro? Satjucov, the
spirit of the vegetation that is born for Man in the spring to die for
Man in the autumn. 8 And both the epiphany and the Passion of
this nature-god bring material benefits to Mankind that are plainly
indispensable for the physical salvation of the race. If the grass
were not clothed in glorious raiment to-day in order to be cast into
the oven to-morrow, 9 the fire on the householder's hearth would
go out for lack of fuel ; and, if the wheat did not ripen for the sickle,
the husbandman would harvest no grain-store for the impending
winter and no seed-corn for the following spring. Man profits by
the nature-god's death, and would perish if his benefactor did not
1 See I. C (i) (&), vol. i, pp. 98-9, and V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 85, above.
2 See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 115, footnote i, and V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 148-9, above.
3 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 149, above.
* See ibid., p. 150, above.
s See ibid., p. 149, above. In the Syriac Mythology the theme has a variation
(see V. C (i) (<2) u, p. 162, above) which is reproduced in the Christian Theology.
Side by side with the figure of a god who dies for the World in his own person there
is the figure of a god who so loves the World that he gives his only begotten son
to save^ it (John iii. 16). The original Syriac myth, in its Phoenician version, is pre-
served in a passage from Philo of Byblus's Greek translation of the work of the Phoeni-
cian author Sanchuniath6n which is quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Praeparatio
Evangelica, Book I, chap. 10 (Migne, J.-P. : Patrologia Graeca, vol. xxi, col. 85) : 'Cronos,
whom the Phoenicians call Israel [in cap. cit, col. 81, above, his name is given as II]
a king of Phoenicia who, after his departure from this life, was consecrated into Cronos*
Star had an only begotten son (vtov ftovoyev^) by a local nymph called Andbret (they
called him lefid, which is still the word for "only begotten" in Phoenician). When
Phoenicia was overtaken by immense dangers arising from war, Cronos arrayed his son
in royal insignia, set up an altar, and sacrificed his son upon it.' In the Israelitish version
of the same Syriac myth the fatal consummation of the sacrifice of Isaac is averted at the
last moment; the son and the father are ordinary human beings and not demigods; and
the sacrifice of the son is undertaken by the father on the initiative, not of the father
himself, but of the father's god (Gen. xxii). In the saga of Jephthah (Judges xi) the only
child is transposed from a son into a virgin daughter who is a Syriac counterpart of the
Hellenic Iphigeneia.
6 See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 150-2, as well as I. C (ii), vol. i, pp. 137 and 140-5,
above. 7 I sa . liii. 2.
f p or ^e annual tragedy of the cviavros SOIJLKUV as a prototype of the movement of
Withdrawal-and-Return see III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 256-9. above.
9 Matt. vi. 30.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 277
die for him perpetually. 'He was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace
was upon him and with his stripes we are healed.' 1 That is one
aspect of the salvation which the Dying God's epiphany and
Passion bring to Man. But an outward achievement however
imposing and however dearly paid for cannot reveal the mystery
at the heart of a tragedy. If we are to read the secret, we must look
beyond the human beneficiary's material profit and the divine pro-
tagonist's material loss. The god's death and the man's gain are
not the whole story. We cannot know the meaning of the play
without also knowing the protagonist's circumstances and feelings
and motives. Does the Dying God die by compulsion or by
choice ? With generosity or with bitterness ? Out of love or in
despair? Till we have learnt the answers to these questions about
the saviour-god's spirit, we can hardly judge the value of the
salvation that Man will derive from his death. We cannot tell
whether this salvation will be merely a profit for a man through
a god's equivalent loss, or whether it will be a spiritual communion
in which Mafi will repay, by acquiring (like a light caught from a
leaping flame'), 2 a divine love and pity that have been shown to
Man by God in an act of pure self-sacrifice.
In what spirit, then, does the Dying God go to his death? If
we address ourselves once more to our array of tragic masks and
adjure the hidden actor to reply to our challenging question, we
shall see the goats being separated from the sheep, and the tragedy 3
being transfigured into a mystery, under this searching test. Even
in Calliope's melodious lamentation for the death of Orpheus there
is a jarring note of bitterness which strikes, and shocks, a Christian
ear when it rings out of one of the most beautiful poems in Greek.
TWV TratSajv ^At^v ou8e Scots
'Why do we mortals make lament over the deaths of our sons,
seeing that the Gods themselves have not power to keep Death
from laying his hand upon their children?' What a moral to read
into the Dying God's story! So the goddess who was Orpheus'
mother would never have let Orpheus die if she could have helped
it; and ergo, if even the Gods are thus impotent to satisfy their
dearest wishes, then the only reasonable attitude for feebler beings
to adopt when- the same pangs of bereavement come upon them is
i Iga. liii. 5. ]
* Plato's Letters, No. 7, 341 C-D. quoted already in III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, p. 24S> and
in V. C (i) (d) n, in the present volume, p. 165, footnote 6, above. _ t
3 The word 'tragedy 1 means literally what the performance was originally: a goat-
chant'.
+ Elegy on the death of Orpheus by Antipater of Sidon (floruit circa 90 B.C.).
278 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
a posture of dull resignation barely relieved by the faintest thrill
of malicious pleasure at the greater discomfiture of the mightier
Olympians. Like a cloud that veils the Sun, the Hellenic poet's
thought takes the light out of Orpheus* death. But Antipater's
poem is answered in another masterpiece which responds to it like
antistrophe to strophe, though it was written at least two hundred
years later, and that in a Judaic Greek which would have grated on
the aesthetic sensibilities of the exquisite Sidonian Hellenist.
Tor God so loved the World that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting
life. For God sent not his Son into the World to condemn the World,
but that the World through him might be saved. 11
When the Gospel thus answers the elegy, it delivers an oracle.
Olos KCTTwrai, rol Se cr/a<4 ataaovaiv. 2 'The one remains, the many
change and pass.' 3 And this is in truth the final result of our survey
of saviours. When we first set out on this quest we found our-
selves moving in the midst of a mighty marching host; but, as we
have pressed forward on our way, the marchers, company by com-
pany, have been falling out of the race. The first to fail were the
swordsmen, the next the archaists, the next the futurists, the next
the philosophers, until at length there were no more human com-
petitors left in the running. In the last stage of all, our motley host
of would-be saviours, human and divine, has dwindled to a single
company of none but gods ; and now the strain has been testing the
staying-power of these last remaining runners, notwithstanding
their superhuman strength. At the final ordeal of death, few, even
of these would-be saviour-gods, have dared to put their title to the
test by plunging into the icy river. And now, as we stand and gaze
with our eyes fixed upon the farther shore, a single figure rises
from the flood and straightway fills the whole horizon. There is the
Saviour; 'and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand;
he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied^
(b) THE INTERACTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS IN DIS-
INTEGRATING CIVILIZATIONS
The Rhythm tf Disintegration.
^ In the last chapter we have studied the effect of the disintegra-
tion of a society upon the individuals who are born into it in this
unhappy phase of its history. We have seen that in a disintegrating
body social the 'member* who has in him the spark of creative
1 John iii. 16-17.
I $& S f eyt Book XI. 4 9S> quoted in V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 44, above.
3 Shelley: Adonats, 1, 460. 4 Isa. liii, vv. lo-n.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 279
genius finds his field of social action in the role of a saviour. We
have passed in review the diverse types of would-be saviours who
arise in response to the challenge that social disintegration pre-
sents. And we have found that the only claimant to the title who
makes his claim good is the saviour from Society who does not
allow himself to be deflected from his aim. The would-be saviour
from Society who lapses into the role of a would-be saviour
of Society is condemning himself to the failure that is in store for
his comrade who has cast himself for this role deliberately. It is
only in so far as he succeeds in finding, and showing, the way into
an Other World, out of range of the City of Destruction, that the
would-be saviour is able to accomplish his mission. And this con-
clusion, to which we have just been led as the result of an empirical
survey, will confine the present chapter, a priori, within a narrower
compass than its predecessor. For in this chapter we are not con-
cerned with the destinies of the pilgrims who are moved by the
awful prospect of impending catastrophe to break out of the
doomed city and shake off the dust of their feet, 1 If the leader
whom they are following in their exodus is a saviour indeed,
he will lead them into the Kingdom of God and there build them
a New Jerusalem. *And he led them forth by the right way, that
they might go to a city of habitation' 2 but that is another story. 3
In the present chapter our business is with these pilgrims' unhappy
fellow citizens who remain sitting in darkness and in the shadow
of death,* whether through lack of the imagination to foresee their
city's doom or through lack of the courage to forestall it by making
their escape. Our business now is with the interaction between
individuals in disintegrating civilizations; and this means that we
shall not be so much concerned with the relations of the uncreative
rank-and-file with creative personalities or minorities, since, ex
hypothesis the creators are being moved, ex officio creatwitatiSj to
leave the doomed city at the head of the departing bands of
pilgrims,
Exccss^re omnes t adytis arisque relictis
di quibus imperium hoc steterat 3
We shall therefore mainly be studying the relations between an
uncreative rank-and-file and a minority that in most of its activities
is not creative either, but is merely dominant 6
1 Matt* x. 14, * Pa* cviu 7.
3 The question whether the New Jerusalem can be brought down to Earth in the
shape of a univeml church *$ discussed in Part VII, below*
* Pa. cvii. *<x
* Virgil; AeneM, Book II, II 351-1, quoted already in this Stucty in I. C (i) (a), vol. i,
P. 57, footnote x; in II, D (vi)> vol, ii t p, 216; and in IV, C (m) (c) 2 <jS) ,vol. jv,
p 349^ above.
See V. C (i) (), vol. v pp* 23-35, above. The Dominant Minority deserves its
name, since it ree on force, and not on charm, for the maintenance of its hold. At the
28o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
This means in turn that we shall not find our key this time in
that movement of Withdrawal-and-Return which is the key to the
interaction between individuals in civilizations that are still in the
growth-stage. 1 All the same, we shall not find the rhythm of social
disintegration altogether unfamiliar, for we shall recognize in it
several other movements which we have learnt to know in studying
the processes of genesis and growth. Indeed, we have observed
already at an earlier point in this Part that the disintegration of a
civilization, like its growth, is a process that is both continuous and
cumulative; 2 that the process has a rhythm which is repetitive ;3
that each beat of the music follows from the last and leads on to the
next; 4 and that the basis of this periodic rhythm is the principle of
Challenge-and-Response. 5 In the same context, however, we
have also noted 6 a point of difference between the rhythm of disin-
tegration and the rhythm of growth which is clearly of capital
importance.
In the growth-rhythm each successive beat is introduced by the
presentation of a new challenge which arises out of a successful
response to a previous challenge, and which is met, in its turn, by
a successful response to itself out of which, again, another new
challenge arises. This is the nature of the growth-rhythm ex
hypothesi, since on the one hand the movement could not be con-
tinuous if a successful response were the end of the whole story,
while on the other hand the movement could not be one of growth
if any of the responses to any of the challenges were to prove, not
successes, but failures. A failure to respond -to a challenge success-
fully is the essence of the catastrophe of social breakdown which
cuts short a process of growth and gives rise, in its place, to a pro-
cess of disintegration. A disintegrating society is failing ex hypo-
thesi to respond to a challenge that is presented to it; and so long
as a challenge "remains unanswered it will continue to hold the
field. This means that a disintegrating society is confronted all the
time by a single challenge the particular challenge over which it
has broken down instead of being called upon^ like a growing
society, to deal with a series of challenges which are severally
different from one another. And this means, in turn, that the
periodicity which is one of the features that the process of dis-
integration has in common with the process of growth cannot be
accounted for by the same explanation. While the growth-beats
same time as we have observed in cap. cit., pp. 33-4 the Dominant Minority cannot
be entirely lacking in creative power, since the schools of philosophy and the universal
states are the Dominant Minority's handiwork, and both these works bear witness to the
creativity of the hands that have made them.
1 I** 4 11 ' C r^ ^' vol< *"' pp< *4 8 "377> above.
a See Part V. B, vol. v, pp. 12-13, above. 3 Ibid., p. 12, above.
4 Ibid., p. 12, above. * Ibid., pp. 11-12, above. * Ibid., pp. 12-13, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 281
arise out of a series of successes in responding to a series of different
challenges, the disintegration-beats arise out of a series of failures
to respond to a single challenge; and, if the disintegration-process,
like the growth-process, is continuous, this must be because each
successive failure sows, in failing, the seeds of a fresh attempt.
This must be the nature of the disintegration-rhythm because, if
any one of the failures to respond to the unanswered but inexorable
challenge were to prove so conclusive as absolutely to close the
door upon all possibility of making any further endeavours, that
would mean that, in this particular beat, the process had come to
a stop and the disintegration-movement had thus ended as of
course, it must end sooner or later in the rigor mortis.
Thus, while the disintegration-movement resembles the growth-
movement in having Challenge-and-Response for its basis, it does
not turn this basis to the same account in building its periodicity-
structure. In the growth-movement each beat of the rhythm
consists in a new performance of the drama of Challenge-and-
Response which is at the same time a new rendering; in the dis-
integration-movement the beats are merely repetitive performances
of one rendering of the play that never varies so long as this run
of the play lasts; and, if we were to try to formulate the two series
of beats as though they were mathematical progressions, we should
find that we had to describe them in different terms. Our formula
for the growth-progression would be a challenge evoking a suc-
cessful response generating a fresh challenge evoking another
successful response and so on, pending a breakdown* ; our formula
for the disintegration-progression would be 'a challenge evoking an
unsuccessful response generating another attempt resulting in
another failure and so on, pending dissolution'. Rout-rally-
relapse is the form of the disintegration-process that any failure to
respond to a challenge sets in train. And this is the pattern of the
dance that the individual 'members 1 of a disintegrating society lead
one another.
This interaction between individuals in a disintegrating society
may be described in a military simile.
The failure of a response results in a retreat in which ground is
lost and discipline is relaxed; but the d6bicle is neither complete
nor final, because the very danger and disgrace of it call out latent
powers of leadership and latent habits of obedience. On some line,
at some moment, some officer will temporarily succeed in checking
the fugitives' flight and re-forming their ranks; the shaken army will
then once more face the enemy and allow itself to be led into
another attack upon the objective that it has failed to capture in the
previous engagement; and for a time it will almost look as though
282 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the fortunes of the battle might be retrieved. But these reviving
hopes soon prove delusive; for the recovery of moral upon which
the leaders are counting in their hope for better success at a second
attempt is no more than a fair-weather courage. The rally has only
been achieved after the discomfited army has succeeded in breaking
contact with a victorious enemy by shamefully taking to its heels,
and it only lasts so long as the troops are not led back into action.
Their recovery is more than offset bf the shock of finding them-
selves once again under fire ; and the result is another d6b&cle which
is more serious than its predecessor.
In the sphere of human activity from which our simile is taken
we have seen a tragic illustration of this process in our own world
and generation. On the East European front in the General War
of 1914-18 the Russians suffered in 1915 a military disaster which
resulted in the first place in a great military retreat and in the
second place in a great political revolution. In 1917 the Tsardom
was overthrown and was replaced by a Liberal parliamentary
government. This change of political regime was followed by a
moral rally; and thereupon pressure was brought to bear upon the
new Government of Russia partly by its nationalist supporters
at home and partly by its West European allies to turn this moral
rally to military account by launching a new offensive. Against
their better judgement the new Russian Government reluctantly
consented to do what was being so insistently demanded of them,
and the consequences were ruinous beyond their worst forebod-
ings. After an indecisive initial success the new offensive broke
down; and the disaster of 1917 quite eclipsed that of 1915. In
1917 the Russian army did not simply retreat: this time it melted
away. And the political revolution in which the military disaster
was reflected once again was this time far more violent and more
destructive than it had been on the former occasion. The Liberal
regime which had momentarily taken the place of the old auto-
cracy was now swept away by Bolshevism; and one of the first acts
of the Bolshevik Government of Russia was to make peace at
Brest-Litovsk on the enemy's terms.
This illustration brings out the grim truth that the process of
social disintegration is a galloping consumption. The rider's
desperate efforts to rein in the runaway horse do not avail to bring
the frantic animal to a halt. They merely stampede him into
plunging on again, with a demonic impetus, along his breakneck
course.
If Rout-and-Rally is thus the rhythm in which the individual
'members' of a disintegrating civilization are prone to interact with
one another, does this rhythm assert itself on the large scale as
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 283
well as on the small ? Can we discern it in the broad lines of the
historical process of social disintegration with which we have now
made ourselves familiar?
If, with this question in mind, we now cast our eye over the
conspicuous features of the disintegration-process, we shall find
an unmistakable example of a rally in the foundation of a universal
state, and an equally unmistakable example of a rout in the fore-
going 'Time of Troubles* ; and we shall also find that the process
does not exhaust itself in this single beat of the rhythm; for the
establishment of the universal state is not the end of the story.
For a time it may look as though this were something better than
a rally from a rout. Is not the universal state a genuinely, even
if belatedly, successful response to the challenge that has remained
unanswered since the original breakdown ? This challenge usually
seems to take the form of a warfare between parochial sovereign
states which threatens to become deadly unless the institution of
parochial sovereignty can be transcended. Is not this condition
for salvation fulfilled in the establishment of a unitary state of
oecumenical range? And does not this justify the creators and
preservers of a universal state in expecting that their handiwork
will endure for ever? The answer seems to be that the establish-
ment of a universal state is a response which falls short of success
because it has been achieved both too late and at too great a cost.
The stable door has been bolted only after the steed has fled. The
cease-fire has been sounded only after the soldier has been dealt
a mortal wound. The sword has been sheathed only after it has
drunk so deep of blood that its thirst for bloodshed can never now
be slaked until it has stolen out of its scabbard again and buried
its blade up to the hilt in the body of the blood-guilty swordsman. 1
And, whatever the explanation, there is at any rate no doubt about
the fact; for the march of events proves incontrovertibly that the
universal state has an Achilles' heel, and that its belief in its own
immortality is nothing but an illusion. 2 Sooner or later the univer-
sal state passes away; and its passing brings the disintegrating
society to its dissolution. In the terms of our formula the rally
that is represented by the foundation of a universal state is followed
by a relapse when the society in extremis is either attacked and
devoured by some aggressive contemporary or else dissolves in an
interregnum out of which an affiliated civilization eventually
emerges. 3
1 The truth of the saying that -'they that take the sword shall perish with the sword'
is impressively demonstrated by the transitoriness of a universal state's Pax Oecumenica
(see V. C (ii) (a), pp. 191-306, above).
z For this belief, and its ironical nemesis, see Part VI, below.
t 3 For these two alternative endings to the life of a disintegrating civilization see IV. C
(ii) (6) i and 2, vol. iv, pp. 56-114, above.
*8 4 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Thus in the disintegration-phase of the history of any civiliza-
tion we can trace a movement of the disintegration-rhythm through
at least one beat and a half. A rout which begins at the breakdown
of the civilization is eventually followed by a rally which begins
at the foundation of its universal state and which is eventually
followed in its turn by the breakdown of this universal state's Pax
Oecumenica. This latter breakdown marks the beginning of another
rout which, instead of being followed by another rally, runs on
unchecked until it results in annihilation.
On this grand scale the pattern is conspicuous ; but, if we look
into the movement of disintegration more closely, we shall perceive
that the beats which catch our attention first are not the whole of
the tune: they are major beats that are interspersed with at least
as many minor ones.
While it is true, for example, that the foundation of a universal
state marks the beginning of a rally, and its breakdown the begin-
ning of a rout, it is not true that the. rally maintains itself con-
tinuously, without flagging, from the first until the second of these
two moments. In our survey of saviours with the sword we have
passed in review the company of the 'Illyrians*, 1 whose mission is
to re-establish the Pax Oecumenica of a universal state after the
society has suffered a relapse into anarchy; and this is as much as
to say that, 'in the last analysis', the reign of the Pax Oecumenica
proves not to be a single continuous regime, but to resolve
itself, under the analyst's lens, into a couple of minor reigns with
a minor interregnum in between them; On this showing, the
periodicity-formula for a universal state is not a single beat of
Rally-and-Relapse but a double one; and, if we employ a more
powerful microscope, we may be able to carry our analysis farther.
For example, if we focus upon the Roman Empire, which was
the Hellenic universal state, we shall easily discern the minor
interregnum beginning after the death of Marcus in A.D. 180 and
ending at the accession of Diocletian in A.D. 284* which splits the
total span of the Pax Romana into two discontinuous bouts: the
first bout ending in the year of the death of Marcus and beginning
in the year of the Battle of Actium (commissum 31 B.C.), while the
second bout begins in the year of the accession of Diocletian and
ends m the year of the Battle of Adrianople (commissum A.D. 378).
flut, rf we now take the first of these two bouts of the Pax Romana
(durabat 31 .B.C.-A.D. 180) and analyse this in its turn, we shall find
tfcat even this bout did not run quite continuously from beginning
* c (ii) ( * } pp - 2 7 ~ 8 ' above -
^
. C (u) (a), in the present volume, p. 207, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 285
to end of its own relatively short span. Even within this sub-
period we can put our finger, at the year A.D. 69, 'the Year of the
Four Emperors', on a sub-interregnum which is undoubtedly a
genuine example of its kind, however mild 'a case we may pro-
nounce it to be judging by the length of its duration and the
degree of its anarchy in comparison even with the minor
interregnum of A.D. 180-284 and a fortiori with the major inter-
regnum which began in A.D. 378 and which was never retrieved.
If we now turn from the Roman Empire to the Tokugawa
Shogunate, which was the universal state of the Far Eastern
Society in Japan, we may be able to carry our analysis to yet a
further degree of refinement. The Pax Tokugavoica (durabat A.D.
1600-1868) did not last out its natural term, because it was over-
taken and overwhelmed by the impact on Japan of the alien
civilization of the West; yet, even within this exceptionally short
Time-span, a modern Western scholar has detected three sub-
relapses and two sub-rallies between the foundation of the
Tokugawa Shogunate in the year of the Battle of Sekigehara
(commissum A.D. 1600) and its abrupt end in the year of the Meiji
Revolution (actum I868). 1
Again, in the major interregnum that follows the decisive break-
down of a Pax Oecumenica^ it is possible in some cases to discern
a sub-rally punctuating a debacle which at first glance appears to
run on and out, without any check at all, into a never-retrieved
annihilation. In the major interregnum that followed the decisive
breakdown of the Pax Romana in A.D. 378, we can espy a sub-rally
of this kind in the reign of Justinian (imperabat A.D. ' 527-65).*
In Indie history Justinian has a counterpart in Harsha (imperabat
A.D. 6o6-47), 3 who temporarily arrested the ebb of a tide which,
by the time when Harsha came to the throne, had been running
out, unchecked, for no less than four generations since the decisive
breakdown of the Pax Guptica in the eighth decade of the fifth
century of the Christian Era. And, if Harsha is an Indie Justinian,
the ' Abbasid Caliph Nasir 4 who for a moment successfully re-
asserted the temporal authority of his office more than three
hundred years after its eclipse in the ninth century of the Christian
Era may be called a Syriac Heraclius. In Sinic history the
major interregnum that followed the decisive breakdown of the
1 See Murdoch, J.: A History of Japan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul), p. 427^
According to Murdoch, the initial rally, which began with leyasu's great victory in A.D.
1600, did not continue for more than seventy years without flagging, and from first to
last the Bakufu regime experienced the following vicissitudes: 1600-70: rally; 1670-
1709: relapse; 1709-51: rally; 1751-86: relapse; 1786-93: rally: 1793-1868: relapse.
z For Justinian as an example of a 'Second Solomon*, see V, C (ii) (a), pp. 209-10,
above. For the disastrous effects of Justinian's Archaism see cap. cit., pp, 223-5, above.
3 See V. C (ii) (a), p. 209, footnote 3, above. * See ibid., p. 212, above.
286 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Pax Hanica in the last quarter of the second century of the
Christian Era was momentarily interrupted in this case after an
interval of about a hundred years when the political unity of the
territories which had formerly been embraced in the Sinic univer-
sal state was temporarily restored under the dynasty of the United
Tsin (imperdbant A.D. 280-3 ly). 1 This Sinic sub-rally in the
course of a major interregnum was impressive so long as it lasted ;
but in the sequel it proved as costly a luxury as Justinian's blaze
of magnificence. In the Sinic, as in the Hellenic, case the dis-
solving society was harrowed by more cruel tribulations after the
abortive rally than it had ever undergone before it. For example,
the 'successor-states' of the Sinic universal state in the first bout
of the interregnum, which had followed immediately upon the break-
up of the empire of the Posterior Han at the turn of the second and
third centuries of the Christian Era, had been the indigenous Sinic
principalities that still live on in the realm of romance under the
name of 'the Three Kingdoms'. On the other hand the 'successor-
states' by which the empire of the United Tsin was supplanted
in its turn were carved out of the flesh of the Sinic body social by
barbarian invaders. 2
If we turn, in the third place, from the major interregnum
which follows the decisive breakdown of a Pax Oecumenica to the
'Time of Troubles' that precedes its establishment, we shall find
that this phase, too, in the disintegration of a civilization is not
really uniform in colour or seamless in texture. The rout that is
precipitated by the breakdown of a civilization does not run quite
unchecked until the moment of the rally that is marked by the
foundation of a universal state. Just as the Pax Oecumenica of a
universal state is punctuated by a minor interregnum which splits
its reign into two discontinuous bouts, so the anarchy of a 'Time
of Troubles' is punctuated by a minor recovery which breaks the
seizure up into two distinct paroxysms.
If, in the light of these considerations, we now try to strike a
mean between an over-simple and an over-subtle analysis, we
may be inclined to concentrate our attention upon a run of the
disintegration-rhythm in which it takes three and a half beats of
the movement of Rout-and-Rally to cover the journey from the
breakdown of a civilization to its dissolution. Let us test our
periodicity-pattern, as it presents itself on this scale, by our
usual empirical method. Do the histories of the disintegrations of
the civilizations whose histories are known to us fall naturally into
this shape? Our survey will necessarily be confined to cases in
' fee I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 88; IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, p. 65, footnote 3; and V. C
(1) W 3, vol. v, p. 272, above. 2 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 273, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 287
which our evidence is sufficient and in which, at the same time,
the normal course of events has not been distorted out of all
recognition by the disturbing impact of external forces. These
conditions are fulfilled in the histories of the Hellenic and Sinic
and Sumeric civilizations, and again in the history of the main
body of the Orthodox Christian Society. The history of the
Hindu Civilization has likewise followed a normal course which
in our day is all but complete. And we shall also find it worth
while to look at the histories of the Syriac Civilization, the Far
Eastern Society both in Japan and in China, the Babylonic
Civilization, the Orthodox Christian Society in Russia, and the
Minoan Civilization in spite of the irregularities which deform
the first five of these six histories in their later chapters.
The Rhythm in Hellenic History.
The Hellenic example may be convenient to take first, because
the challenge that worsted the Hellenic Civilization is one which
has been the common bane of most of the civilizations whose
breakdowns and disintegrations are on record, and at the same
time one which is nowhere more easy to identify than it is in the
Hellenic case in point. The challenge under which the Hellenic
Civilization broke down was manifestly the problem of creating
some kind of political world order that would transcend the
institution of Parochial Sovereignty. And this problem, which
defeated the generation that stumbled into the Atheno-Pelopon-
nesian War of 431-404 B.C., never disappeared from the Hellenic
Society's agenda so long as such a thing as Hellenism survived in
any recognizable form. 1
The moment of the breakdown of the Hellenic Society is not
difficult to date; it can be equated with the outbreak of the Atheno-
Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C.; and we can be equally confident
in dating the establishment of the Pax Romany which served as
the Hellenic Pax Oecumenica, from Octavian's victory at Actium
in 31 B.C. Can we also discern a movement of Rally-and-Relapse
in the course of the Time of Troubles' that extends between these
two dates ? If we scan the history of the Hellenic World during
the four centuries ending in 31 B.C., the vestiges of an abortive
pre-Augustan rally are unmistakable.
One symptom is the social gospel of Homonoia or Concord 2
which was preached by Timoleon (ducebat 344-337 B.C.) in Sicily
and by Alexander (imperabat 336-323 B.C.) in a vaster field east of
* See IV. C (iii) (6) io> vol. iv, pp. 206-14; IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (]8), vol. iv, pp. 303-15 > and
V. B, vol. v, p. 12, above.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 7, pp. 6-8, above.
a88 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
the Adriatic. 1 Another symptom of a rally is the subsequent
prescription by two philosophers, Zeno and Epicurus, of a way
of life for citizens of a commonwealth which was not any parochial
city-state but was nothing less than the Cosmopolis 2 A third
symptom is a crop of constitutional experiments the Seleucid
Empire, the Aetolian and Achaean Confederacies, the Roman
Commonwealth which were all of them attempts to transcend
the traditional sovereignty of the individual city-state by building
up political: communities on a supra-city-state scale out of city-
states which had been persuaded or coerced into playing the part
of constituent cells of a larger body politic, 3 A fourth symptom is
the endeavour to put new life into a dead-alive 'patrios politeia'
which was made by certain high-minded sons of the Hellenic
dominant minority the two Heracleidae at Sparta and the two
Gracchi at Rome 4 who idealistically overrated the blessings
which their country had derived in times past from its traditional
constitution when this had been 'a going concern', and who were
naively blind to the dangers of attempting to reinstate an obsolete
institution which had now become an anachronism as well as a dead
letter. 5 A fifth symptom is a certain considerateness towards
civilian life and property which appears to have been shown by
the belligerents in the wars of Alexander's successors. 6 A sixth
symptom is the social re-enfranchisement, post Alexandrum> of the
women and slaves. 7 It will be observed that these symptoms of a
rally in the course of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' extend over
four or five generations, reckoning from Timoleon's to Cleomenes' , 8
so that it is not easy to pin this rally down between definite dates ;
but, if we try to determine the period in which all this promise
seemed nearest to being translated into performance, -we may be
inclined to single out the breathing-space of half a century between
the death of Pyrrhus in 272 B.C. an event that marked the end of
* For the respective missions of Timolepn and Alexander as a philosopher-statesman
an iphilosopher-kingsee V. C(ii) (a), pp. 248, 251, and2 5 3, and pp. 246 and 254, above.
* * or the Hellenic conception of the Cosmopolis see V. C (i) (d) 7, Annex, pp. 332-8,
3 For this crop of constitutional experiments in the third century B.C. see IV. C (iii)
OO^jLjS), vol. iv, pp. 309-13, above. k '
" ""' *** 'philosophies
e they lived
ntemporanei . . _. _ N .
itory of Rome,
he Hellenic W
>n h!!t C f nVen S ?u^ >the P aS8 . a e iwted ^ IV. C (iii) (ft) 3, vol. iv, p. 147, foot-
*Yf tte;A^^^ < redit * L
I fee IV. C (iii) ft) 14, vol. iv, pp. 239-40, above
And leavimr the nt,Vm rt f ^ n~,u.- out of the rec konmg, for the reason
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 289
the strife over the division of the heritage of Alexander the Great
and the outbreak of the Hannibalic War in 218 B.C. This rela-
tively prosperous spell of Hellenic history in the third century B.C.
is not incomparable with the earlier spell of rather greater pros-
perity and almost equal length which in the fifth century had
intervened between the repulse of Xerxes and the outbreak of the
Atheno-Peloponnesian War; and the two general wars which
respectively cut the two breathing-spaces short were disasters of
an approximately equal magnitude. It will be seen that, if the
third century B.C. witnessed a rally which almost looked like a
return of the Periclean Age, this rally was followed by a relapse
which was at least as serious a debacle as the breakdown in which
the Periclean Age had found its tragic end. 1
Can we diagnose the weak point in the rally that accounts for its
ultimate defeat ? The weakness arose out of a sudden great increase
in the material scale of Hellenic life that had been a by-product
of the first paroxysm of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles'. Hellenic
arms which had been exercised and sharpened in a hundred years
of internecine warfare were turned against non-Hellenic targets
towards the end of the fourth century B.C.; and, in practised
Macedonian and Roman hands, these formidable weapons then
conquered, and in conquering annexed to the Hellenic World, the
domains of four alien civilizations 2 as well as vast tracts of Barbar-
ism. 3 This sudden change of material scale seriously and, as it
turned out, fatally aggravated the difficulty of solving the un-
solved problem on the solution of which the fate of the Hellenic
Civilization hung. The problem, as we have seen, was that of
creating some kind of political world order that would transcend
the traditional sovereignty of the individual city-state; and, while
the change of material scale did promise to serve this end in one
negative way by making the maintenance of City-State Sovereignty
impossible, the same change also had a positive consequence
which militated and this with far greater effect against the
endeavour to bring a world order into being.
Experiments in overcoming a traditional parochialism which
were unprecedentedly successful in themselves were now turned
1 On a first view of Hellenic history we were content to trace the disintegration of
the Hellenic Society back to the Hannibalic War and to let our investigations rest at that
point for the time being (see I. B (iv), vol. i, pp. 40-2, above). It was not till we had
come to grips with the problem of the breakdowns of civilizations that we took this
inquiry up again and this time traced the story farther back, through an earlier chapter,
from the Hannibalic War of 218-201 B.C. to the Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431-404
B.C. '(See IV. C (ii) (&) i, vol. iv, pp. 61-3, and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 213, above.)
2 The Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, and Indie. .
3 For this sudden territorial expansion of the Hellenic World at this time see III. C
(i) (a), vol. iii, pp. 140 and 150-1 ; III. C (i) (d), vol. iii, p. 197; IV. C (in) (c) 2 (a), vol.
iv, p. 265; IV! C (iii) (c) 2 (J3), vol. iv, pp. 305-6; and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 214, above.
29 o THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
to account, not for the large and vital purpose of creating an all-
embracing Hellenic world order, but for the petty and perverse
purpose of forging new-fangled Great Powers of a supra-city-state
calibre which would be capable of continuing, on the new scale of
Hellenic affairs, the internecine warfare that had been waged on
the old scale by a Sparta and an Athens and a Thebes with such
disastrous effects upon the life of the society in which all these
parochial communities had their being. Thus the political shape
which the Hellenic Society assumed in the new chapter of Hellenic
history that had been opened by Alexander's passage of the Helles-
pont 1 was something that was at the opposite pole from a political
world order. When the epigoni of the diadochi of Alexander had
fought one another to a standstill and the dust of battle had had
time to settle down, the political landscape that became visible in
the fourth decade of the third century B.C. revealed a cluster of
pygmy states at the heart of the Hellenic World compassed about
by a ring of giant Powers whose ambitions were set, and energies
bent, upon the perilous game of contending with one another in
the central arena for the prize of a hegemony over its puny and
defenceless denizens. 2 Both the geographical expansion of the,
Hellenic World that had been achieved by Macedonian and
Roman military prowess and the constitutional progress in trans-
cending city-state sovereignty that had been accomplished by
Aetolian and Achaean and Seleucid and Roman statesmanship had
been seized upon, and successfully misapplied, for the purpose of
recruiting the strength of the new competitors for a military
ascendancy. And these giants' only notion of how to employ their
huge physical powers was to refight the battles of Athens and
Sparta with a titanic violence that had never come within those
old-fashioned belligerents' capacity.
The inevitable consequence was a repetition in the third century
of the catastrophe which the Hellenic Society had brought upon
itself once already in the fifth century. In that earlier age the
city-states which had indulged in 'temperate contests' with one
another during the half-century following the repulse of Xerxes
had eventually fallen into the internecine conflict of 431-404 B.C.
And now, in the third century, the new Great Powers of supra-
city-state calibre which had taken Athens' and Sparta's place
proved likewise unable to contend with one another for longer
than half a century without stumbling, in their turn, into a disaster.
The respite that had begun after the death of Pyrrhus ended in the
1 For this 'new era' of Hellenic history see V. C (i) (d) 9 (j3), Annex, p. 340, below.
3 For this constellation of Hellenic political forces in this age see III. C (ii) (6), vol.
iii, pp. 310-13 and 339-4*) and IV. C (iii) (c) -2. (a), vol. iv, pp. 265 and 268-9, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION . 291
Hannibalic War of 218-201- B.C. And this time the havoc was
proportionate to the unprecedented material 'drive' of the con-
flicting forces. The overthrow of Athens in 404 B.C. ha.d been
followed by nothing worse bad enough though this might be
than a series of indecisive epilogues to the Great War which had
ended at Aegospotami. Sparta, Thebes, and Macedonia in turn
had won and lost ail originally Athenian hegemony. On the other
hand the overthrow of Carthage in 201 B:C, was followed by the
destruction or subjugation of three other Great Powers in a series
of decisive conflicts from which Rome emerged as the sole sur-
viving combatant. Zama was followed by Cynoscephalae and
Magnesia and Pydna; and the cumulative effect of half a century
of catastrophic warfare (218-168 B.C.) upon the stamina of the
Hellenic Society of the day was so devastating that the victor's
triumph was immediately followed by a series of social convulsions
which racked the victor himself quite as cruelly as his victims and
which left the whole Hellenic body social mortally enfeebled by
the time when this second paroxysm of the Hellenic 'Time of
Troubles' was brought to an end at last through the tardy con-
version of a Roman Anarchy into a Roman Peace. 1
In the history of the disintegration of the Hellenic Society we
have now verified the occurrence of one perceptible rally and one
flagrant relapse between the original breakdown of the Hellenic
Civilization in 431 B.C. and the establishment of a Hellenic Pax
Oecumenica in 31 B.C.; and, since we have already taken note 2 of
the subsequent relapse and rally that intervened between the first
establishment of the Pax Romana in 31 B.C. and its final break-
down in A.D. 378, we can now report that the disintegration of one
historic society, at any rate, does in fact present itself in the pattern
of a run of three and a half beats of a recurrent movement of Rout-
and-Rally. Let us see whether this finding is confirmed in other
cases.
The Rhythm in Sinic History.
If we turn to the Sinic case next we shall identify the moment
of the breakdown of the Sinic Civilization with the date of the
disastrous collision between the two Powers Tsin and Ch'u in
634 B.C., 3 and the moment of the establishment of a Sinic Pax
i Saint Augustine, in De Civitate Dei, Book III, chaps. 18-28, surveys the ev^s of
this second paroxysm of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles*, from the outbreak of the
Hannibalic War to the establishment of the Pax Augusta; and in chaps. 29-30 he sub-
mits that at any rate the climax of this paroxysm i.e. the Roman stasis and civil wars
of 133-31 B.C. had been more dreadful than any of the experiences of his own genera-
tion, not excluding Alaric's sack of Rome in A.D. 410.
* In IV. C (i), vol. iv, p. 8; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 219; V. C (i) (d) 6 (S), Annex,
vol. v, p. 649; V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, p. 207; and the present chapter,
p. 284, above.
3 See IV. C (ii)r (6) i, vol. iv, p. 66, above.
292 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Oecumenica with the overthrow, in 221 B.C., of Ts'i by Ts'in a
'knock-out blow* which left Ts'in alone alive as the solitary sur-
vivor in an arena now littered with the corpses of all the other
Great Powers of the Sinic World. 1 If these are the two terminal
dates of the Sinic 'Time of Troubles', are there any traces of a
movement of Rally-and-Relapse within the intervening period?
In the Sinic, as in the Hellenic, case the answer to this question
is in the affirmative.
There is a perceptible rally in the course of the Sinic Time of
Troubles' round about the generation of Confucius (vivebat circa
55 1-479 B.C.) ; and this rally may be taken to have been inaugurated
by the disarmament conference of 546 B.C., 2 in which a serious
attempt was made to grapple with the fundamental problem of
Sinic international politics.
In the Sinic World the dangerous political constellation into
which the Hellenic World fell post Alexandrum 3 that is to say, not
until half-way through the Hellenic Time of Troubles' had
already taken shape in the last phase of the growth of the Sinic
Society, before its breakdown. Even as early as that, the geogra-
phical expansion of the Sinic culture had produced the political
effect of encircling the older states in the cradle of the Sinic
Civilization with a ring of younger states which outclassed their
elders in material calibre as decidedly as these surpassed the^^r-
venues in every other respect. 4 The catastrophe of 634 B.C. can
perhaps be traced back to the failure of a previous attempt to deal
with this awkward situation by international co-operation. In
681-680 B.C. the pygmy states in the heart of the Sinic World had
organized themselves into a Central Confederacy under the presi-
dency of the eastern Great Power, Ts'i, with the object of opposing
a collective resistance to the pressure of the preponderant and
aggressive southern Great Power, Ch'u. But, although this Central
Confederacy was equipped with a permanent constitution which
provided for recurrent assemblies of the heads of states with the
Prince of Ts'i as their convener, 5 its existence did not avail to
prevent 'power polities' from becoming the dominant factor in
Sinic international relations; and the conference of 546 B.C. repre-
sented a fresh attempt 6 to rescue the Sinic World from a chronic
1 For the significance of this event see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 80, above
2 See cap. cit., vol. cit., pag. cit.
3 See the present chapter, pp. 289-91, above.
4
on, rganzaon, an story o ts nc entral Confeeracy see
ibid., pp 299-301. The Assembly was convened annually for the first four years of the
Central Confederacy s existence, but thereafter only at longer intervals which were of
no nxed length.
6 Between the foundation of the Central Confederacy in 681-680 B.C. and the calling
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 293
warfare which, in and after the Tsin-Ch'u War of 634-628 B.C.,
had ceased to be temperate and had become internecine. This time
the two Great Powers which for eighty-eight years past had been
struggling inconclusively for the prize of hegemony were implored
by Sung which was one of the most ancient and most respectable
of the pygmy states at the centre to lay aside their mutually
incompatible ambitions and to assume a joint presidency of the
Central Confederacy on a footing of equality .with one another;
and this statesmanlike diplomacy did secure a breathing-space for
an already grievously self-lacerated Sinic body social.
What the Sung Government accomplished in 546 B.C. gave an
opportunity in the next generation for a sage who had been born
in the neighbouring central state of Lu about five years before the
date of the conference. Confucius was able to devote his life to
the self-imposed mission of saving the Sinic Society from suicide
by converting its princes to a philosophically archaistic way of
living and ruling. 1 But Confucius's personal experience gives the
measure of the rally which the conference of 546 B.C. had in-
augurated, for Confucius is perhaps the supreme example of a
prophet who has been not without honour save in his own time.
A sage who was to be honoured superlatively by Posterity after the
Sinic World had been tragically overtaken by the catastrophe from
which the posthumous herd had hoped to save it, found himself
unable to gain the ear of any contemporary ruler. And, if Posterity
has been right in recognizing in Confucius's prescription the
sovereign cure for Sinic troubles, then it is not to be wondered at
that the generation who refused to take this healing medicine
when the cup was brought to their lips should have fallen into a
relapse which was to prove to be still graver than the seizure that
had almost been the death of their fathers.
The first warnings of fresh trouble had already declared them-
selves quite early in Confucius's own lifetime. For example, the
Covenant of 546 B.C. had been broken by Ch'u in 538 after one
renewal in 541. 2 But a disturbing factor to which the relapse of
the Sinic Society post Confucium can be traced back more directly
is the decline and fall of the principality of Tsin, This northern
of the conference of 546 B.C. the Central Confederacy had one conspicuous success
when, in the successive assemblies of 655 and 653 B.C., it succeeded in regulating the
succession to the throne of the Imperial Dynasty of the Chou. At the second of these
two meetings the Governments there represented appear to have subscribed to a
Covenant of five articles, in which they pledged themselves to act upon certain rather
vaguely formulated principles of political and social behaviour. (See Hirth, F.: The
Ancient History of China (New York 1908, Columbia University Press), pp. 209-10.)
1 Confucius's career has been taken as an illustration of the motif of Withdrawal-and-
Return in III. C (ii) (b\ vol. iii, pp. 328-30, above, and as an illustration of the sage's
endeavour to save souls by proxy in V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, p. 252, above.
2 See Maspero, op. cit., p. 348.
294 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Great Power, which had been the first Sinic state to militarize
itself, 1 was also the first to go to pieces. 2 Since about 573 B.C.
there had been signs that the central government of Tsin was
losing its hold over its feudatories; from 497 B.C. onwards this
weakening of the central authority in the state began to be reflected
in a process of internal disintegration; in the course of the fifth
century the principality virtually dissolved into a mere congeries
of fiefs; and this anarchy was only overcome at the cost of the life
of the principality itself. About the year 424 B.C. Tsin broke up
into three 'successor-states' Chao, Han, and Wei which secured
diplomatic recognition in 403. This was the signal for a fresh out-
break of internecine warfare in the Sinic World ; and that warfare
was now waged in a larger arena and with a greater intensity than
the pre-Confucian bout.
The increase in the extent of the arena was directly due to the
break-up of Tsin; for the three 'successor-states' of the defunct
principality were none of them of a calibre to play the part of a
Great Power effectively; and their individual weakness was en-
hanced by the interlacement of their territories and by the mutual
hostility of their governments; so that the eifect of the change was
to add three new members to the cluster of pygmy states at the
heart of the Sinic World. On the other hand the ring of giants
on the periphery was not broken, but was merely expanded, by the
transference of the territories of the ci-devant northern Great
Power from the outer circle to the inner; for all this time the Sinic
World as a whole had continued steadily to expand ; and by the
time when Tsin collapsed a younger Power, Yen, which had lat-
terly come into existence to the north of Tsin, was ready to step
into the defunct northern Power's place. As for the increase in
intensity that accompanied this increase in the scale of the warfare
between the Sinic Great Powers, it is commemorated in the trivial
yet significant fact that the name Chan Kuotht [period of] con-
tending states' which is properly applicable to the whole of the
period between the outbreak of war between Tsin and Ch'u in
634 B.C. and the conquest of Ts'i by Ts'in in 221 B.C., has actually
been confined, in the usage of Sinic historiography, to the second
of the two paroxysms 3 into which the Sinic 'Time of Troubles' is
divided by the respite which began at the conference of 546 B.C.
1 See Maspe"ro, op. cit., p. 322.
2 Seelbid. pp. 345, 353, 362-3, and 367-8, for the principal stages in a decay which
was a gradual process.
* The beginning of the Chan Kuo period seems to have been sometimes reckoned
from 403 B.C. (the date of the diplomatic recognition of the three 'successor-states 1 of
Tsin) and sometimes from 479 B.C. (the sup]
the usage of the term does not seem ever to ]
fucius's lifetime or, a fortiori, the bout of i
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 295
The second paroxysm engraved so much more harrowing an im-
pression upon Sinic minds that it came to be thought of as the
'Time of Troubles' par excellence.
* Avec la chute du Tsin, ce n'est pas seulement un des grands etats qui
avait disparu, c'etait aussi tout un ideal d 'organisation politique sous
la forme d'une sorte de confederation respectant dans une certaine
mesure les droits des princes locaux: a partir du v e siecle, le vieux
systeme des hegemonies etait bien mort, et ce n'est pas pour le ressus-
citer & leur profit que les grands 6tats lutterent, ce fut pour s'agrandir
directement aux depens de leurs voisins plus faibles, jusqu'a ce que le
triomphe definitif d'un seul re'alis&t pour la premiere fois 1 'unite absolue
du monde chinois entier.' 1
Thus in Sinic, as in Hellenic, history we can verify the occur-
rence of one perceptible rally and one flagrant relapse between the
original breakdown of the society and the establishment of its Pax
Oecumenica\ and, if we go on to inquire whether the Sinic, like the
Hellenic, Pax Oecumenica was punctuated by a relapse and a rally,
we shall find this question easy to answer in the affirmative. The
break in the continuity of the Pax Hanica is marked by a literal
interregnum (durabat A.D. 9-25) which intervened between the
fall of the dynasty of the Prior Han and the establishment of a new
dynasty which had no genuine connexion with the House of Liu
Pang, though it assumed the name of 'the Posterior Han' in a
barefaced endeavour to gloze over its lack of any legitimate title
to the Imperial Throne. The historical fact of the interregnum
disposes of this fiction of continuity, and the bout of anarchy was
longer de facto than dejure\ for the Prior Han had let the reins of
government fall from their hands about half a century before they
lost the throne itself to the usurper Wang Mang. 2 It will be seen
that the subsequent decisive breakdown of the Pax Hanica to-
wards the close of the second century of the Christian Era, when
the Posterior Han collapsed in their turn, was the fourth debacle,
reckoning from the initial disaster of 634-628 B.C., in the history
of the disintegration of the Sinic Society; and, since this fourth
debacle was not successfully retrieved by the abortive rally in the
time of the United Tsin, 3 the number of standard beats of the
movement of Rout-and-Rally that can be counted in the course of
the disintegration-process from first to last turns out in Sinic, as
in Hellenic, history to be three and a half.
1 Maspe'ro, op. cit., pp. 390-1.
2 This collapse of the Prior Han is perhaps to be explained, at least in part, as an
effect of the strain of the great wars of conquest on the Eurasian Steppe which had been
launched by the Emperor Wuti (see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 271, above).
3 See pp. 285-6, above.
2 9 6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
The Rhythm in Sumeric History.
If we pass from Sinic history to Sumeric we shall register the
same reading here again; for in the course of the Sumeric 'Time
of Troubles' a beat of Rally-and-Rout is distinctly, even if only
faintly, perceptible, while the life-span of the Sumeric universal
state is punctuated by a counter-beat of Rout-and-Rally which is
unusually emphatic.
If we date the beginning of the Time of Troubles' 1 from the
career of the Sumerian militarist Lugalzaggisi of Erech (Uruk)
and Unima (dominabatur circa 2677-2653 B.C.) 2 and equate its end
with the foundation of a Sumeric universal state by Ur-Engur of
Ur (imperdbat circa 2298-2281 B.C.), 3 we may detect, in the life-
time of the Akkadian militarist Naramsin (dominabatur circa 2572
2517 B.C.), at least one symptom of a rally in a sudden notable
advance in the field of visual art which had been achieved between,
the generation of Naramsin and that of his predecessor Sargon
(dominabatur circa 2652-2597 B.C.). 4 At the same time this very
increase, in this age, of the Sumeric Society's powers of visual
representation has served to testify that this succes$ful cultivation
of the arts of peace was not accompanied by any renunciation of
Militarism. The scene portrayed on Naramsin's celebrated stele
cries out for a nemesis that duly overtook the hero's successors. 5
Within a quarter of a century of Naramsin's death the Akkadian
power had been shaken by disputes over the succession to the
throne; 6 within sixty-two years the sceptre had passed back from
Akkad to Erech; and within eighty-eight years the Gutaean bar-
barians who had been brought to bay and slaughtered by Naramsin
in .their native mountain fastnesses had taken their revenge by
descending upon the plains of Shinar and imposing their own rule
on both Akkad and Sumer. 7 This interlude of barbarian domina-
tion which marked the acme of the second paroxysm of the
Sumeric 'Time of Troubles* lasted for 124 years (circa 2429
1 The dates given in the following paragraphs for events in Sumeric history are all
taken, except where other references are given, from Meyer, E. : Die Aeltere Chronologic
Babyloniens, Assyriens und Aegyptens (Stuttgart and Berlin 1925, Cotta).
2 See I. C (i) (&), vol. i, p. 109, above.
3 See 1C (i) '(&) vol. i, p. 106 j , V C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. y, p. 4 97; V. C (i) (d) 6 (S),
Annex, vol. v, pp. 650-1; and V. C (11) (<z), in the present volume, p. 190, above.
For this advance for which one of the most striking pieces of evidence is afforded
by the stele on which Naramsin has commemorated his aggression against the high-
landers of Gutium see Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (a), 3rd ed,
(Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta), p. 533.
s For Naramsin's militarism and its nemesis see also I, C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 109; V. C
(i) (<0 3, vol. v, pp k 203 and 262; and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, p. 184.,
above.
6 The triennium, circa 2491-2489 B.C., which saw no less than four successors of
Naramsin come and go may be compared with the Roman 'Year of the Four Emperors*.
7 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 262, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 297
2306 B.C.) before Utuchegal of Erech (militabat circa 2305-2299
B.C.) made his abortive, and Ur-Engur of Ur (imperdbat circa 2298-
2281 B.C.) his successful, attempt to establish a Pax SumericaJ-
The Time-span of this Pax Sumerica extends between Ur-
Engur' s accession circa 2298 B.C. and Hammurabi's death circa
1905 B.C. ; but when we look into the course of Sumeric history be-
tween these two dates we find that in this case the 'Peace' is a thin
shell encasing a wide welter of anarchy. 2 The peace which Ur-
Engur succeeded in establishing did not remain unbroken for
more than 118 years. It was suddenly and violently interrupted
when in 2180 B.C. Ur-Engur's fourth successor, the Emperor
Ibisin, was defeated and taken prisoner by a host of Elamite rebels.
Thereupon 'the Empire of the Four Quarters' broke into frag-
ments. The triumphantly insurgent province of Elam not only
recovered its own independence: it also imposed its rule upon a
portion of the metropolitan territory of the Sumeric universal
state in Shinar, which was now organized into a client-state of
Elam with its capital at Larsa and with an Elamite prince installed
there as the vassal of an Elamite suzerain who was the King of
Elam itself. In other parts of Shinar the tradition of the Empire
of Ur was carried on by a 'Realm of the Two Lands' 3 with its
capital at Isin; but this relic of the Sumeric universal state was not
strong enough to hold together the provinces on which the Elam-
ites had not laid hands. This or that city-state (imprimis Erech)
was perpetually asserting its independence here and there; and
130 years after Ibisin's catastrophe a new 'successor-state' with a
greater future was carved out of the former domain of the Empire
of Ur by Amorite marchmen who made themselves masters of
Babylon in 2049 B.C. From first to last the tide of anarchy that
had broken loose in 2180 B.C. went on flowing for more than 200
years. The first sign of a recoil from disruption towards consoli-
dation was the conquest and annexation of the Empire of Isin by
the Elamite client-state of Larsa circa 1954-1948 B.C. The work
of re-union was completed in 1918 B.C. when Rimsin of Larsa, the
Elamite conqueror of Isin, was overthrown in his turn by Ham-
murabi, the Amorite prince of Babylon. In virtue of this feat
* See I. C (i) (Z>), vol. i, p. 106; V. C (i) (d) 6 (y), vol. v, p. 497; V. C (i) (d) 6 (8),
Annex, vol. v, pp. 650-1 ; and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, p. 190, above.
* The following facts and dates in the history of this recrudescence of the bumenc
'Time of Troubles* are taken" from Meyer, E. : Geschichte des Alter turns, vol. i, part (a),
3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta), pp. 559-69. as corrected by the same scholar
in his Die Aeltere Chronologie Babyloniens, Assyrians und Aegyptens (Stuttgart and Berlin
1925, Cotta), pp. 26-31.
3 i.e. Sumer and Akkad. After the catastrophe of 2180 B.C. the demi-emperors at
Isin reverted to this original style and title of the Emperor Ur-Engur and abandoned
the more ambitious style and title of 'the Empire of the Four Quarters which had been
introduced by Ur-Engur's successor Dungi (see V. C (i) (<*) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 651,
above),
298 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Hammurabi justly regarded himself as the successor of Ur-Engur
and Dungi; 1 and there was a moment when he was effectively
master of the whole of Dungi's 'Empire of the Four Quarters',
Elam included. But Hammurabi's restoration of the Pax Sumerica
was as ephemeral as it was far-reaching, For the author of it was
hardly in his grave before the Sumeric Society was swept off its
feet again in a fourth and final debacle from which it never rallied. 2
The Rhythm in the History of the Main Body of Orthodox Christen-
dom,
The now familiar pattern reappears, just complete, in the dis-
integration of the main body of Orthodox Christendom, and again
this time all but complete in the disintegration of the Hindu
Society.
We have identified the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian
Society with the outbreak of the great Romano-Bulgarian War of
A.D. 977-1019 ;3 and the eventual establishment of a peace which
was oecumenical for the main body of Orthodox Christendom
though it did not extend to the offshoot of this civilization on
Russian soil may be dated from the Ottoman conquest of Mace-
donia in A.D. I37I-2. 4 In between these two termini of an Ortho-
dox Christian Time of Troubles' we can discern a rally led
by the East Roman Emperor Alexius Comnenus (imperabat A.D.
io8i~iii8),s a consequent respite which lasted through the reigns
of the next two sovereigns of the Comnenian Dynasty, and a
relapse into which the society fell in the ninth decade of the
twelfth century. 6 The subsequent tribulations of Orthodox Chris-
tendom, ^which were only ended by the establishment of a Pax
Ottomanica? were still more grievous than the earlier troubles
i i S coto7 er '6* :Gwc ^^
3 | ee ^x?' ?i' 7S?' ' PP- Io6 and IIO > ^ IV - c () (*) i, vol. iv, pp. 63-4, above.
abovl 66 Ol) C } l ' V L iv ' P ' 72 ' "K* IV ' C V &> 2 <#' voT iv, pp. 390-1,
note^aWe 111 ' A ' ^ **' P ' 27) "^ V> (ii) ^ ** the P* esent volume P- *9i> foot-'
volume! p^i^bove*' Annex11 ' vo1 ' iv > PP- 619-20, and V. C (ii) (a), in the present
fnr+h^f* ^ k ?' e / t th ^ S d ?? 1 !7 8 ^ e P enalt y tha * Orthodox Christendom had to pay
V!r " , 1 ? dyna ^ w ^ had forgotten its founders mission of bringing salvation
SDirifof ^ g ^ SOClety ' T e J u u ccessors of Alexius I Comnenus succumbed to a fatal
dventure f^ ch ha ^ first taken possession of the East Roman Govern-
e IV ' C ("> ^ * 0). VoL iv ' PP- 399"
J f th 5 Orth dx Christian 'Time of Troubles' was faintly
^ ^ the success of the Nicene
putting together again some of the
.. broken up between A.D. 1186 and A.D. 1204. In
S^J 01 ^' 27 ' ^ J* C (ii) (fl >' in the P resent volui ^ e ' P :
in the rirf! rS ?? e Nl ene Gr . eek achievements have been taken as symptoms of a turn
in the tide of disruption, and as portents of the later and greater achievements of the
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 299
which had been momentarily overcome by the prowess of Alexius
Comnenus.
The Pax Ottomanica which was inaugurated by the Ottoman
conquest of Macedonia in A.D. 1371-2 eventually collapsed under
the shock of defeat in the great Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74;
but, while this collapse marked the decisive breakdown of a regime
that had been first established four hundred years earlier, the
Ottoman annals of the intervening centuries present plain evidence
of an anticipatory relapse that was retrieved by a temporary rally.
The relapse is to be discerned in the rapid decay of the Padishah's
Slave-Household after the death of Suleyman the Magnificent in
A.D. I566. 1 The rally is heralded in the subsequent experiment of
compensating for the demoralization of the qullar by taking the
Padishah's Orthodox Christian rcflyeh into partnership with the
free Muslim citizens of the Ottoman commonwealth who had
now seized the reins of power without any longer insisting that
the ra'lyeh should become renegades as the price of their admission
to a share in the government of the state. 2
This almost revolutionary innovation, which was introduced in
the seventeenth century by the statesmanship of the vezirs of the
House of Kopriilu, 3 won for the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth
century a breathing-space which is still wistfully remembered by
the 'Osmanlis of a later day as 'the Tulip Period 1 . During this
brief spell (circa A.D.. 1718-36) the ruling class of an empire that
was already standing on the defensive against the Franks and the
Russians was still able for a moment to rest from the toils of war
and to forget the cares of state in the recreation of cultivating a
flower. 4 The breathing-space, however, was as short as it was
pleasant; for, even before it began, the statesmanlike salvage-
work of the Kopriiliis had been fatally sabotaged by the reckless
'Osmanlis. Yet, if the Nicene Greek attempt at political reconstruction is to be ^regarded
as a sub-rally, it must also be written off as an abortive one; for the Principality of
Nicaea did not enlarge its dominions, but merely shifted its centre of gravity, when it
conquered Adrianople in A.D. 1235 and Macedonia in A.D. 1246 and Constantinople
itself in A.D. 1261. As fast as these Greek princes of Nicaea acquired territories in
Europe from Greek or Latin rivals, they lost territories in Asia to the Turks. For the
subsequent flashes of religious and artistic light in Orthodox Christendom in the four-
teenth century see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j8), vol. iv, pp. 359-61, above.
1 For this decay see Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 44-7, above.
2 For this experiment see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 223-5, and Part III. A, vol. iii, pp.
47-8, above.
3 See V. C (ii) (a), pp. 208-9, above. These Albanian statesmen performed the same
service for the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century of the Christian Era as the
Illyrian soldiers had performed for the Roman Empire in the third century.
* For this interlude of dilettantism in the grim history of the Ottoman governing
qu*un grand nombre d'individus avaient ik cette e*poque en France et dans les Pays-Bas,
pour la culture des tulipes* (p. 65). See also Jorga, N. : Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs
(5 vols:), vol. iv (Gotha 1911, Perthes), Book II, chap. 4, pp. 361-99.
300 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
militarism of Mehmed Kopriilu's unluckily chosen protege Qara
Mustafa. 1 This megalomaniac had wasted the precious strength
which the Kopruliis had been nursing back into the Ottoman body
politic on a new attempt to conquer Western Christendom a
military task which had proved to be beyond the Ottoman Em-
pire's power when this had been still at its height in Suleyman the
Magnificent's lifetime. Qara Mustafa's folly had precipitated the
great war of 1682-99, in which the ascendancy had passed once
for all from the Ottoman to the Prankish side. 2 And, although the
Kopniliis' work did avail to stave off disaster for three-quarters
of a century from A.D. 1699 to A.D. 1774 the nemesis of Qara
Mustafa's wanton stroke was merely postponed and was not
averted. The military disaster of A.D. 1768-74 proved irretrievable
because, by that time, the ra'lyeh whose support the Kopriiliis had
enlisted were ceasing to be content with a partnership in the
government of a declining Ottoman Empire and were being cap-
tivated by the ambition of carving up the decrepit Ottoman body
politic into young national states of their own in the fashion of the
rising peoples of the West. 3 The sequel to th decisive breakdown
of the Pax Ottomanica which was Orthodox Christendom's Pax
Oecumenica in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was not
a rally: it was a merger of the main body of Orthodox Christen-
dom in a 'Great Society' of a Western complexion. 4 And thus we
see that in Orthodox Christian history, too, the process of dis-
integration has run through three and a half beats of the move-
ment of Rout-and-Rally from first to last.
The Rhythm in Hindu History.
In the history of the disintegration of the Hindu Society the
final half-beat is not yet quite due, since the second instalment of
the Pax Oecumenica which in the Hindu World has been pro-
vided by the British Raj is not yet quite over. 5 On the other
1 See V. C (ii) (a), p. 208, footnote 3, above.
2 See Part in. A, vol. iii, pp. 46-7, above.
3 For the Westernization of the 'OsmanUs' Orthodox Christian rciiyeh, and for the
political consequences of their cultural conversion, see II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 181-6; II.
D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 226-8; and IV. C (ii) (i) 2, vol. iv, pp. 76-8, above.
4 See ibid.
5 Since the usual span of a Pax Oecumenica including both its two instalments and
the bout of anarchy in between them seems to be round about four hundred years,
and since the original establishment of the present Pax Oecumenica in the Hindu World
may be equated (if there is any virtue in a conventional date) with the conquest of
(jujerat by* Akbar in A.D. 157233 being the event which, perhaps more than any other,
marked the elevation of the Mughal Raj from a parochial to an oecumenical status the
break-up of the British Raj was to be expected, on this showing, within thirty or forty
years of the time of writing in A.D. 1938. At that moment, however, it seemed rather
m( j re P, rot)able that the history of India would take a different turn; for the establishment
and collapse and re-establishment of a 'sub-continental' Pax Oecumenica was not the
only expenence of first-rate historical importance which India had undergone by then
since Akbar s day. In the meantime the contact between India and the Western World,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 301
hand the three earlier beats of Rout-and-Rally have all left some
trace on the record of Hindu history. The third beat of the three
has been particularly emphatic; for in this beat the rout ? is repre-
sented by the collapse of the Mughal Raj in the eighteenth century
of the Christian Era and the 'rally' by the establishment of the
British Raj in the nineteenth century; 1 and these two instalments
of peace which are separated from one another in Time by no
less than a hundred years of virulent anarchy have been the work
of two gangs of empire-builders who are as alien from one another
as they both are from their Hindu rcftyth* The rally-stroke of the
second beat of the rhythm is equally clear. It is represented by
the establishment of the Mughal Raj in the reign of Akbar (impera-
bat A.D. 1556-1602). The foregoing rout-stroke is not so con-
spicuous. But, if we peer into the history of the Hindu 'Time of
Troubles', which ends in the reign of Akbar and begins in the
latter part of the twelfth century of the Christian Era with an
outbreak of internecine warfare among the Hindu Powers of the
age, 3 we shall notice in between the tribulations of India under
the heel of the Ghaznawls and Ghuris and Slave- Kings in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Christian Era and the similar
tribulations that were inflicted upon her in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries by the Lodi Afghans and by Akbar's own ancestor
Babur some signs of a temporary relief in an intervening period
which begins with the accession of f Ala-ad-Dln in A.D. 1296 and
ends with the death of Firiiz in A.D. 1388.4 If the second beat of
Rout-and-Rally in Hindu history, which ends in the establishment
of the Pax Mogulica, may be taken as beginning with the collapse
of Firuz's regime after its author's death, we jnay see in the pre-
ceding establishment of 'Ala-ad-Din's regime the end of a first
beat of Rout-and-Rally which begins with the original breakdown
of the Hindu Civilization in the twelfth century of the Christian
Era.
The Rhythm in Syriac History.
These cases in which a run of three and a half beats of the dis-
integration-rhythm can be traced throughout or almost through-
which Akbar himself had done much to promote, had increased to a degree of intimacy
at which India had ceased to be a world m herself and had become, instead, one of the
members of a new 'Great Society' of a Western complexion. In A.D, 1947 a British Raj
which had served as a second instalment of a Hindu Pax Oecumenica transformed
itself into a pair of independent states an Indian Union and a Pakistan which became,,
members of a world-wide political society without ceasing at this stage to be members
of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
1 See V. C (ii) (<x), pp. 189 and 191, above. * Anglic* 'ryot .
3 See IV. C (ii) (6) 2, vol. iv, pp. 99-100, above.
* The slave-households that were maintained by these two Turkish empire-builders
in Hindustan have been brought into comparison with the Ottoman Padishah's Slave-
Household in Part III. A, vol. iii, p. 31* footnote i, above.
302 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
out its entire course may be supplemented by a glance at several
other cases in which the same pattern can be made out, beyond
mistake, in a run that is incomplete.
In Syriac history, for example, the disintegration-process was
interrupted immediately after the third rally by a militant irruption
of Hellenism into the Syriac World in the train of Alexander the
Great; but down to that point, which in this case was as far as the
process went, it followed the regular course which we have learnt
to recognize in other instances. The third rally of the Syriac
Society had been achieved, on the eve of Alexander's epiphany, by
the Achaemenian Emperor Artaxerxes Ochus (imperabat 358-338
B.C.), 1 who had crushed a coalition of rebellious satraps and had
followed up that victory by the reconquest of Egypt. 2 The rou.1:
which Ochus was stemming had set in about the turn of the fifth
and fourth centuries B.C. (the first portent had been the secession
of Egypt from the Achaemenian Empire in 404 B.C.; and the im-
punity with which the Egyptians had repudiated their allegiance
to the Great King had nerved other rebels, less remote from Susa,
to follow this Egyptian example). But the ddgringolade of the
Achaemenian power in the reigns of Darius II and Artaxerxes II
was not, of course, the first chapter of Achaemenian history. It
marked the collapse of an effective Pax Achaemenia which had
first been established by the successive labours of Cyrus arxd
Darius the Great 3 and which had not been more than locally dis-
turbed by Xerxes 5 fiasco in the hinterland of the North- West
Frontier. 4 And that first establishment of the Pax Achaemenia in.
the sixth century B.C. had been the second rally of the Syriac
Society in the course of its disintegration. The Achaemenian
Empire was the universal state which had put an end to the Syriac
'Time of Troubles' ; and in another context 5 we have identified the
original breakdown of the Syriac Society, which had brought the
Syriac Time of Troubles' on, with an outbreak of internecine
warfare among the parochial states of the Syriac World which had
occurred towards the end of the tenth century B.C. after the death,
of Solomon. Between, Solomon's generation and Cyrus's, can we
observe any symptoms of a first rally and a second rout? One
1 This grim Achaemenid 'saviour* has been inspected, in company with the Ottoman
Padishah Murad IV, in V. C (ii) (a), p. 207, above.
z See V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p, 94, and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 245, footnote 4,^ above,
and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, in the present volume, p. 442, below.
3 For the respective contributions of these two empire-builders see V. C (ii) (a), j>p.
187-8 and 190, above.
* The Achaemenian Raj in Southwestern Asia was no more seriously shaken by tKo
disastrous failure of the Persian invasion of European Greece in 480-479 B.C. than the
British Raj in India was by the even more disastrous failure of the British invasion, off
Afghanistan in A.D. 1838-42.
s In IV. C (ii) (ft) i, vol. iv, pp. 67-8, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION >w
plain token of a rally in the course of the intervening age is a coali-
tion of Hyriac forces which defeated an Assyrian aggressor at the
Battle of Qarqar in 853 ar. 1 Conversely, \\c may diagnose a runt
in the subsequent relapse of the Syriac states into a fratricidal
strife that made it easy for Ti^Iath-PilmT III and Harmon to
conquer piecemeal in the eighth century iu\ a cosmos of Hyriac
city-states which had not found it difficult in the ninth century to
keep Shalmaneser II! at hay by making common cause against a
common alien enemy.
The Rhythm in the History <?///ir Far Rastfrn Civilization in "Japan.
In the disintegration of the Far Hastern Society in Japan the
duration of the Pax Tukugaufiftt has been cut shnrU as we have
seen, by the coHision of Japan with t!u West; and the observable
fluctuations in the fortunes of the Tokugavva Shopunate, so long
as it lasted, are of a shorter wave-length than the normal run of the
dismtcgratiwi-rbytbm which we an* investigating; at the moment, 2
On the other hand the first two heats of this standard run of
rhythm can be detected in the preceding chapter of Japanese
history- 1 which ends with the establishment of a /kv Ocewneniea
by Hiiieyoshi (dttminakatur A,n. 1582 <;K) and which begins in
the latter part of the twelfth century of the Christian Kra with the
overthrow of the regime of 'the Cloistered Kmpcrora* in the military
revolutions of A.n. 1 156 and 1160 and 1183 5.*
A first rally, in reaction to this original breakdown, can he dis*
cerned in ;m attempt to rc-cttahliah a civilian government which
was made immediately after the downfall* in A,I>, 1333, of the
military regency which had been ruling Japan from* Kamakura
since A.IK 1184,** Thin rally, however* waa abortive.* Within five
yearn the restored civilian regime had been superseded by a new
military regency* which WM not the ie& true to type because it
made the conciliatory gesture of establishing its official head-
quarters at Kyotothe ancient Imperial Capital instead of simply
entrenching itself in the north-eastern stronghold from which
* Fr the !tat)v *if Q*r*|f nve iM p. 67* tnti IV, C (in) (r) 3 f^) vl, v, jj, 468,
muttjic i, 471. (txiuitttff 3, ami 47$ t m*v.
* For Mtmfttrh'tt iriily*j f ih rhythm of ihu Tolditfumi Shtigunair *rr the pr*rn<
iptrr, iv Ji**5, frmimtttf i, ibuvr,
, t .
* For Mtmfttrh'tt iriily*j f ih rhythm of ihu Tolditfumi Shtigu
rhiptrr, iv Ji**5, frmimtttf i, ibuvr,
3 Ktir Nirhtrrn 1 * <irttmtii>n f ihit pri**;l a Hf Air df Mifi^
fhf Lp'l rr V, <: It) (r| 3, vnl v, p, o& fctotnoie 6> iiHovir,
* i-'wr H)4rymht* role iit Ipnv mstctry ww V, C {**) C) rm, *
* Fr ih<* revolutionary *'H*fe of r#Kim i )i^i *r^ IV, i (n
Wivr, F*r thr *nrrfflffn nd ndtrlywg diyfcnftttutticm b#tu ( rrn
,
and flic Ithui uf thr Kwn *w 1J If (v), vtl, ,
'* Sre Samttm t i, II: J^t # ^4 *^^Nf| CWfirrit/ History
'* Sre Samttm t i, II: J^t # ^4 *^^Nf| CWfirrit/ History {I*untJn ion, l'rriet
* w*l, j. t iMi MunlcMfh* J* ; 4 itiitory/y*p<i* t vol. i(l*otufan iy io t Krtf*n l ? u(K |< 5.1M.
Ihe ctviliitn lin^nsl Ciuvrnmnt it Ryuto hid rnndu nc prvviou* attempt, a early
w A.I*, mi, it ovtnhfow h Kamtituri l*kury (ibid,, r* 44*)-
w A.I*, mi, it ovtnhfow h Kamtituri l*kury (ibid,, r* 44*)-
' Ibid,, p. 554, * Ibttt., p. 5
304 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Japan had been ruled for 150 years by Minatnoto Yoritomo and
his successors. This swift reversion to Militarism was the first
symptom of a fresh rout. In the days of the Shoguns of the Ashi-
kaga Dynasty who succeeded one another at Kyoto from A.D. 1338
until the last of the line was hustled off the stage by Hideyoshi in
A.D. 1597, Japan suffered worse tribulations than she had known in
the days of the previous line of Shoguns who had succeeded one
another at Kamakura from 1184 to I333- 1
The immediate sequel to the establishment of the Ashikaga
Shogunate was the unprecedented scandal of a schism of the
Imperial House itself into two rival courts. This enormity, which
was a sin against religious ritual as well as a breach of political
etiquette, had to be atoned for by fifty-five years of civil war
(gerebaturA.D. 1337-92) ; 2 and, even when the Ashikaga Shogunate
acting in the name of the court which was its puppet eventually
succeeded in suppressing the rival court which had refused to
acknowledge its title, the tale of calamities did not cease. 3 In the
fifteenth century of the Christian Era a feudal anarchy which the
Shoguns were impotent to reduce to order goaded an intolerably
oppressed peasantry into a chronic state of revolt and stimulated
the monasteries to militarize themselves in flat defiance of all
precepts of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle as the only
alternative to becoming the lay militarists' victims. 4 In the War
1 Sansom, op. cit., p. 342. * Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 584-6.
3 Between the end of the War of the Rival Courts in A.D. 1392 and the beginning of
the War of Onin in A.D. 1467 there was a minor rally (Sansom, op. cit., pp. 345, 358,
and 371).
4 This militarization of the monasteries during the Japanese 'Time of Troubles' can-
not be entirely explained as an unavoidable'measure of self-defence which was forced
upon the monks by the turbulence of the worldlings among whom their lot had been
cast. ^ The metamorphosis, in Japan, of monks into fighting-men which was completed
in this age had a long history behind it, and, while it was partly an effect of the break-
down of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan, it was also one of the antecedents and
clauses of this catastrophe. The first recorded case of monks taking up arms in Japan
occurred in the seventh decade of the tenth century of the Christian Era (see Eliot, Sir
Charles : Japanese Btiddhism (London 1935, Arnold), p. 246, and the present Study, IV.
C (ii) (6) 2, vol. iv, p. 94, footnote 2, above); and in this case the militant monastery
was not defending itself against a lay aggressor, but was resorting to war as a method of
asserting its claims against a rival religious house. Thus, when the militarization of the
monasteries in Japan is traced back to its origins, it becomes apparent that this was one
of several symptoms of a relapse into barbarism which was the cause of the breakdown
of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan, and not a consequence of it. In other contexts
we have observed that this -relapse was the nemesis of a cultural tour deforce by which
the hot-house plant of Far Eastern culture had been transplanted from its kindly native
soil and climate on the Asiatic Continent into the uncongenial environment of the
Japanese Archipelago (for this feature of Japanese history see II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 158-9,
and IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 94, above). Conversely, one of the labours that had
to be performed by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi in order to accomplish their mission of
imposing a Pax Oecumenica by force was to break the military power of the monasteries,
which in their day was at its apogee.
'During all the latter half of the sixteenth century [of the Christian Era] Buddhism
was an important force in Japan, but, strange to say, more conspicuous as a military and
political force than in its proper sphere. The principal monasteries appear on the scene
from time to time in exactly the same way as the great military houses with armies and
forts of their own, with territorial ambitions and designs to crush or annex their rivals.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION* 305
of Ontn (gerffaitur A.n. 14(17 -77) the Imperial City of Kyoto was
devastated by strcct-fiRhtiny; between cuntetulinjj provincial forces
who made the capita! their arena. In flit- sixteenth century the
Shoguns were overtaken by the ignominious hitv which their pre-
decessors had inflicted on the Ivutperors, The Sh<n*un\ tie jure
powers were mm exervisetl dffactn by a Kvv,mryo; ami this travesty
of government by the deputy of a dejmty was perhaps the one thing
worse than no government at all 1 This was the state uf misery to
which Japan hud been reduced by the second paroxysm of "her
Time of Troubles* before her convulsed and writhing frame was
farced into a stntit^wniDtcotit by die successive exertions of Nobu-
naga and Hkkycmhi and Iryuau (militahunt A, in 1549 1015),*
The Rhythm in tht History HJ tht Main iiw/y uf M/* Far Eastern
In the history of the main body of the Far Kastcrn Society the
process of disintegration took an abnormal turn at ;w earlier sta^e
than in Japan ; for t wherean in japan the Mu* CMwirmr^ which had
been impo>etJ by Htdk'yoshi and had been organized by leyasu
lasted for more than two and it half centuries before the impact of
the West precipitated the Meiji Revolution of A.I>. x86K, the Pax
Ottummiat which wa intposcd on China by alien Mongol amis
between A,U, ucH) 1 and A,I>. nHo did not remain unchallenged for
more than nexenty yearn iHrforr it was shaken <tf by a Chinese
insurrection which began about A,I*. 1 35 1 and which persisted until
the Mongol imnuirm had tntrn driven riht *mt of Intramural
China into their native wiidrrncn* beytmd the (treat Wall* This
Chinese countcrntrnkc wa followed in itn turn by a back-wa^h
of barbarian invasion in which the Manchim rc-cHtubIishc<i the
But
tt. Thrte ^*#* irvitlrntly * tUfttfrf tHti ih* tunmry riuuht tor wlr4 by
[, hkr Tttrt, THr ir#l?r* tl )|im Iifr*i*]ir4 <ht <lftn*r liut Hrrr %4rh
mit! Ukr war if^m4V Hrii^wt 4 urh* tMwf* *|*. ir, j, 301),
Thr crniuvy Ivmt-ni ?be tiprnint f iHr Wdi *iC Onm m AJ*, t4&? ntl N
ftiiunt(i<ittn tiit thvinUirtikt i^mrns 4# ftrto *ri 4.t 15^8 jMrrtiw tt hivr t*rr ihe H-ornl
phase *f flic >*HiIr t4 ih* Jt|tii **r*mr **l Trijut40" (SnMinu op, u* H y*$i, ,1^4-5
ami 4tt> ^OK tf * Jviftnu thw hamir^l Vr*r* ihl the- lour jKiniUr jrtpanrir 'higher
ret(Kn'(K V.t'ltJir) a, veil, v f *f* M ^fe -to| 4 nUivr) w^rr thv hrighi f ihcif intlu
(Simtim, oj, ni,* pp. jl*6 7),
thr rwprtuvc r*4ft nf ih* ||WK?* Mvititrii tl$t Ht wtr4 jw*f V, C C)
in
died irt tlir year JnHovu^g tu 1*6 1 rampiftll *if*tn-l thr c**?lf of OsAka. Hulryu*hi rui
ivytiu itmk wp mitm *muitiwH*ftlf with yw r^ibt m A, I*, iss^'
J THi^KrvftMt i H*^w t*rn iH* dun* *( Clunaii K^n** t*r*( IMMIMUU vifwn tltv nfimi*
jpaljit^ 0f Tni(UK, whivh w i rfih**f*ftw hrhrMn 'Miuffcwwif'irtiir 1 **l the !vrp;re
<>f Tan and HufiMt Hu ifiadi on ih? fur mure imjH>rt4ut nnrth-r^airni barh*fj*n
W'cmtir-iiutA'-'ifW |>niKijstl^y of th* Km wi* w UurMrhrd umit juu. un.
* Kr *h? IVwr &$&*&wlwii t tmr mam tmdy of ih F*r liwrt^m }M*cMrty ti C<*r the
auccmfiil Ch**ii*t r*rucm ipt*n* it, i II, I) () wt , pp, tai-a; IV, C () (fe) 3,
vpl. iv, pp, $6*7; n4 V, C (*) {) 4* 4 v, p
306 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
empire which the Mongols had won and lost; and this interlude
has been followed by the impact of a Western Civilization which
has collided with China as well as with Japan in the course of its
ubiquitous modern expansion. In a period of Chinese history
which has been dominated by this capricious play of external
forces it is not to be expected that the pulse of the disintegrating
society should register the normal beat. On the other hand, in the
'Time of Troubles' of the disintegrating Far Eastern Society in
China, as in Japan, we can detect two beats of Rout-and-Rally
which are of the standard wave-length.
In the main body of the Far Eastern Society we have identified
the end of the 'Time of Troubles* with the completion of the
Mongol conquest of China in A.D. 1280,* and the beginning of it
with the decay of the T'ang Dynasty in the last quarter of the
ninth century of the Christian Era; 2 and in the interval between
these two termini there are clear traces of both a rally and a relapse,
On the political plane this first rally in the history of the dis-
integration of the main body of the Far Eastern Society declares
itself in the establishment of the Sung Dynasty in A.D. 960, In the
field of technique it declares itself particularly in a remarkable
advance in the art of printing. 3 In the field of visual art it declares
itself in the rise of a school of painting which is the fine flower of
Far Eastern achievement in this line.* In the field of abstract
thought it declares itself in the work of the five Neo- Confucian
philosophers (vivebant A.D. 1017-1 2Oo), 5 who reinterpreted Con-
fucius in the light of the Mahayana as, in the contemporary Western
World, the Schoolmen read the philosophy of Aristotle into the
doctrines of Catholic Christianity. In the field of social theory
and practice the same rally is represented by the Neo- Confucians'
bugbear Wang An Shih. 6
* See IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 86-7, above.
2 See ibid., pp. 86 and 87-8, above,
3 See Carter, T. F.: The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward,
revised edition (New York 1931, Columbia University Press), chap. 10. 'In invention,
what the T'ang period conceived, the Sung era put to practical use. The magnetic
needle, used in the main in earlier times either as a toy or for the location of graves, was
applied to navigation. Gunpowder, already known and used for fireworks, was during
tne Sung Dynasty applied to War. Porcelain was so developed as to become an article
of export to Syria and Egypt. A similar development took place in printing' (p. 55),
According to the same authority, op. cit., p. 32, block printing for the production of
books had been invented as early as the reign of T'ang Ming Hwang (imperabat A.0,
712-56).
* See Munsterberg, O.: Chinesische Kunstgeschichte, vol. i (Esslingen 19 10. Neff)
p. 204.
See Part II. B, vol. i, p, 202, above.
to have been to increase the prosperity of the state by alleviating the burdens of the
peasantry, on whose shoulders the political superstructure rested. His most important
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 307
The subsequent relapse declares itself in the tragic career of the
connoisseur-emperor Huitsung (imperabat A.D. 1 101-25). l Hui-
tsung's life-work was the making of a collection of works of art, and
he lived to publish a catalogue of this, in twenty volumes, in A.D,
i r 20. But the unfortunate collector lived on to see his collection
dispersed when, five years later, the city of Kaifeng, in which it
was housed, was attacked and captured by the Kin barbarians from
Manchuria not because these uncultivated invaders coveted the
possession of Huitsung's artistic treasures, but because Kaifeng
happened also to be the political capital of the Sung Empire. This
was a challenge which Huitsung was utterly unprepared to meet;
and in the last chapter of his life he had to atone for his neglect of
his political duties during a reign of twenty-five years by lingering
on for another ten years as a refugee, or prisoner, in the tents of
the Kin barbarians' evicted predecessors the Khitan an asylum
in which the unhappy exile could neither exert himself as an
emperor nor enjoy himself as a connoisseur. 2 While Huitsung was
thus languishing in limbo, the barbarians whom he had so lament-
ably failed to keep at bay were conquering the northern provinces
of the Sung Empire ; and this Kin war of conquest, which went on.
from A.D. 1124 to A.D. 1 142 and did not stop until the invaders had
reached the line of the River Hwai and the watershed between
the Yellow River and the Yangtse, signalized the second rout in the
disintegration of the main body of the Far Eastern Society as the
first rout had been signalized by the earlier loss of sixteen frontier
districts to the Kin's predecessors the Khitan between the years
A.D, 927 and A.D. 937.3 This second rout was not followed by a
rally until the Mongols supplanting the Kin as the Kin had sup-
planted the Khitan completed the barbarian conquest of China
by pushing on from the northern watershed of the Yangtse to the
southern sea-board of China, which they reached in A.D. 1280, It
measures were aimed at protecting the peasants against the twin scourge of the tax-
collector and the money-lender. His success is attested by the increase in the population
of the Sung Empire on the evidence of the census returns during the period in which
Wang An Shih's new laws were an force. And the mass-revolts which his critics pro-
phesied never broke out. The new laws were in force throughout the reign of Wang An
Shih's Imperial patron the Emperor Shfintsung (imperabat A,D. 1068-85). Upon this
emperor's death Wang An Shirrs reactionary opponents regained the upper hand, and
the new laws were in abeyance during the minority of Shfintsung's successor Chfitsung
(imperabat A.D. io86~noo). One of the young emperor's first acts, however, upon
,. -,-, ;sung's (____,_ _._ , .__..
force again from the date of this appointment, which was made in A,D. 1094, down to
the invasion of Northern China by the Kin, imperante Huitsung, in A.D. 1124.
1 See Mtinsterberg, op. cit., p. 249.
3 Huitsung'* Babylonia counterpart, the archaeologist-emperor Nabonidus (sefe V. C
(i) (d) 8 (8), p. 94, above), was felictor opportunitate mortis. He was already in his
grave when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was overwhelmed by Cyrus.
3 See II. D (v), vol. n, p. 121; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 86; and V. C (i) (c) 3, vol.
v, p. 308, above.
3o8 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
will be seen that in the main body, as in the Japanese offshoot, of
the Far Eastern Society the 'Time of Troubles' falls into two
paroxysms which are separated from one another by a perceptible
breathing-space.
The Rhythm in Babylonia History.
If we turn from the main, body of the Far Eastern World to the
Babylonic Society, we shall find that the Neo-Babylonian Empire,
which served as a Babylonic universal state, was cut short S pre-
maturely as the Far Eastern universal state that was provided by
the Mongols. Indeed, the respective lives of the two regimes were
of an almost equal brevity, if we reckon the reign of the Pax
Mongolica in China as running from A.D. 1280 to A.D. I3SI, 1 and
that of the Pax Chaldaica in Babylonia as beginning with the
annihilation of the last Assyrian fighting force at Harran in 610 B.C. 2
and ending with the capture of Babylon by Cyrus in 539 or 538 B.C.
At the same time we shall find that, if we cast our eyes back from
the prematurely ended universal state to the antecedent Time of
Troubles', at least a fragment of our disintegration-pattern can be
recognized at this stage in Babylonic history, as in Far Eastern.
The second paroxysm of the Babylonic 'Time of Troubles', which
clearly ends in the holocaust of 610 B.C., no less clearly begins with
the act of aggression against Babylonia which was committed by
King Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria in 745 B.C.; for this act sowed
the seeds of a hundred years' war between the two principal
Powers of the Babylonic World, and that war had the decisive
battle of Harran for its grand finale. 3
The Rhythm in the History of Orthodox Christendom in Russia.
These cases in which a glimpse of our disintegration-pattern can
be caught in the earlier, though not in the later, stages of the dis-
integration-process are balanced by inverse cases in which the
pattern is visible in the later stages though not in the earlier. The
history of the offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Society in Russia,
for example, offers a contrast in this respect to the otherwise
analogous history of the offshoot 1 of the Far Eastern Society in
Japan.
The Russian 'Time of Troubles' (in the sense in which the term
is used in this Study, and not in the original Russian usage of the
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 309
words) 1 may be taken as having been brought to a close by the
union of Novgorod with Muscovy in A.D. 14782 an act of political
consolidation which marks the establishment of a Pax Oecumenica
and as having been opened by the decay of the principality of
Kiev in the last quarter of the eleventh century, 3 when the political
centre of gravity of the Russian World shifted from the Upper
Dniepr to the Upper Volga. 4 Concomitantly with this politico-
geographical change, the exotic plant of Orthodox Christian culture,
which at Kiev had been kept artificially in the exquisite condition
to which it had been brought by a Byzantine gardener's art, ran
wild and at the same time reverted to a barbaric coarseness as the
price of becoming acclimatized to a natural life in the open air in
this forbidding Russian clime in which it had only managed to
keep alive hitherto on condition of being confined in a hothouse. In
other contexts 5 we have noticed an analogy between this chapter
of Russian history and a corresponding chapter of Japanese history
and this on both the political and the cultural plane. The north-
eastward shift of the Russian political centre of gravity from
Kiev in the Dniepr Basin to Vladimir in the Volga Basin has its
analogue in the north-eastward shift of the Japanese political
centre of gravity from Kyoto in Yamato to Kamakura in the
Kwanto. In Japan, as in Russia, this geographical movement was
accompanied by a relapse into anarchy and barbarism. And in the
next chapter of the story again in both cases alike the back-
woodsmen themselves stepped in to rally the disintegrating society
from a rout which was their own barbaric handiwork. The Pax
Muscoviana which was established in A.D. 1478 has its counterpart
in the Pax Tokugawica which was established at the turn of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era by the
cumulative labours of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and leyasu. These
points of likeness between Russian and Japanese history from the
original breakdown until the establishment of the universal state
are so striking that we should expect a priori also to find a Russian
parallel to the abortive attempt which was made in the course of
the 'Time of Troubles' in Japan to bring back the political centre
of gravity from the north-east to the south-west, and at the same
time to revert from a military to a civilian regime. Yet, if we look in
Russian history for the equivalent of the Japanese flash-in-the-pan
1 For this difference between the conventional usage in this Study and the traditional
Russian usage see the references in V. C (ii) (), p. 195, footnote 2, above, and in the
present chapter, p. 311, footnote 4, below.
2 See IV. C <i5 (?) 2, vol. iv, p. 88; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 312; and V. C (ii) (a),
in the present volume, p. 191, above.
3 See IV. C (ii) (&) 2, vol. iv, p. 96, above, with the authorities there cited in foot-
note i.
* See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 154, above.
5 Ibid., p. 158, and in Iv. C (ii) (6) 2, vol. iv, pp. 91-6, above.
3 io THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
in the fourth decade of the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, 1
we shall find ourselves drawing blank. 2
On the other hand, when we come to the next chapter of the
story, in winch the Time of Troubles' has given place to a Pax
Oecumenica y we shall find, when we look for traces of our dis-
integration-pattern in the respective histories of the two societies
at this stage, that there is again a discrepancy but that this time it
is the other way round. In this chapter, too, the analogies between
the two histories are striking. 3 In both Russia and Japan a hibernat-
ing society has been overtaken by a collision with the alien civiliza-
tion of the West before it has completed the normal hibernation
period; and in both cases the statesmanship of the society whose
repose has been thus abruptly and perilously disturbed has shown
itself capable of coping with the emergency. 4 In Japan, as in
1 See the present chapter, p. 303, above.
2 The abortive endeavour in the fourth decade of the fourteenth century of the
Christian Era in Japan to bring back the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory from
Karnakura in the Kwanto to Kyoto in Yamatp was made about 150 years after the
beginning of the Japanese 'Time of Troubles', if we are right in dating the breakdown
of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan in about the last quarter of the twelfth century
of the Christian Era. And, if we are also right in dating the breakdown of the Orthodox
Christian Civilization in Russia about a hundred years earlier than that, then in the
Russian field we ought to focus our attention upon the fourth decade of the thirteenth
century of the Christian Era and inquire whether, at or about that time, there was an
abortive attempt to bring back the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory from Vladimir
in the Volga Basin to Kiev on the Dniepr. This inquiry yields a negative answer. So
far from recapturing her ancient status of political primacy in that decade, Kiev suffered
in A.D. 1240 the supreme disaster of being stormed and sacked by the Mongol host of
Batu Khan; and from this blow she has never fully recovered. At the same time we
shall .observe that, while the Russian sceptre did not return to Kiev either then or at
any later date, it did pass back from the north-eastern principality of Vladimir, which
had likewise been prostrated by Batu's hammer-stroke, to a south-western principality
in whose domain Kiev came to be included though this not as the capital but only
as an outlying dependency. The fortunate Russian principality which thus rose to a
position of relative power and prosperity in an age that was one of deep adversity for
the Russian World as a whole was Red Russia or Galicia (see V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 312,
footnote i, above), During the ninety years that elapsed between Batu's onslaught upon
the Russian World in A.D. 1238-40 and the gravitation of the hegemony over what was
left of Russia to the principality of Moscow in A.D. 1328, Galicia was the leading Russian
state. One of the reasons for Galicia's primacy among'the Russian states, in these earlier
decades of the period of Tatar domination was the accident of a geographical position
which counted for most in the years when the Tatar yoke was at its heaviest. Galicia
was ensconced among the foothills of the Carpathians in the hinterland of the western
extremity of the Don-to-Carpathians Steppe (see Part III. A, Annex II, vol. iii, p. 401,
above), and its capital, Halicz, on the banks of the Upper Dniestr, was more difficult
for Tatar raiders and tribute-collectors to reach than either Kiev on the Dniepr (in a
district which now came to be known as the Ukraina or 'borderland* par excellence) or
even Vladimir in the Upper Basin of the Volga. Thus Galicia's fortune was made by
a Mongol conquest of Russia which had overthrown Vladimir and crushed Kiev; and,
in the light of this episode of Russian history, we may speculate on what might have
happened in Japan if Qubilay's invasion of Japan in A.D. 1281, instead of being the
disastrous failure that it was, had been as brilliantly successful as Batu's invasion of
Russia in A.D. 1238 (for the contrast between the respective outcomes of these two
Mongol enterprises see IV. C (ii) (fc) 2, vol. iv, pp. 92-4, above). In that hypothetical
event, would the hegemony in Japan have passed from Kamakura not to- Kyoto, which
would then in all probability have suffered the fate of Kiev, but to one of the remoter
islands of the Japanese Archipelago ?
3 See IV. C (ii) (6) 2, vol. iv, pp. 82-3 and 88-91, above.
* In the light of the catastrophic aequel to Peter the Great's brilliant attempt to solve
'the Western Question' in Russia, we may hesitate to award him the victor's palm; and,
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 311
Russia, a non- Western universal state has been skilfully trans-
formed into a national state member of a 'Great Society' of a
Western complexion. But here, once more, the points of likeness
only throw into sharper relief the discrepancy in the disintegration-
pattern. Whereas the disintegration of the Japanese Society during
the prematurely interrupted currency of the Pax Tokugawica ran
in a rhythm with a wave-length that was shorter than the standard, 1
the normal run of the disintegration-rhythm is conspicuously
visible in the course of the Pax Muscoviana in spite of the fact that
the Russian universal state was overtaken and interrupted at a still
earlier stage than the Japanese by the impact of an alien social
force. 2 Between its foundation in A.D. 1478 and its decay in the
latter ^part of the nineteenth century 3 the Russian universal state
experienced one notable relapse and one notable rally. The relapse
was the bout of anarchy in the early years of the seventeenth
century which is known as the Time of Troubles' in the Russian
historical tradition.* The rally was the subsequent recovery,
which was not less astounding than the fall which it retrieved. And
the single beat of Rout-and-Rally which is struck out by this
sequence of a downward followed by an upward movement in so
steep a curve punctuates the history of the Pax Muscoviana into
two, separate chapters which are sharply divided by an interregnum
that has made up for the shortness of its length by the virulence of
its anarchy. In Russian, as in Sinic, history this punctuation of a
Pax Oecumenica by a short and sharp interregnum is emphasized
by a change of dynasty. The transference of the Sinic Imperial
on this showing, we shall be "well advised also to reserve judgement on the Japanese
statesmanship which carried out the Meiji Revolution of A.D. 1868. We have to reckon,
with the possibility that the tragic view of the Westernization of Russia which an alien
observer in A.D. 1938 was constrained to take in the light of Russian history since
A.D, 1825 might also be taken with regard to the Westernization of Japan by a Posterity
as far removed in time from the year 1868 as our own generation is removed from the
year 1689. (This point has been touched upon already in IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 88-
90, above.)
1 See the present chapter, p. 285, above.
2 While the Japanese universal state had been in existence for rather longer than two
and a half centuries by the time of the Meiji Revolution, the Russian universal state had
not been in existence for much longer than two centuries before the advent of Peter the
Great (see IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 88, above).
3 The outer shell of the Tsardom was not, of course, broken until A.D. 1917, but the
spirit^had departed from the body at least half a century before that; and, if we wish to
identify the end of the Pax Muscoviana with some conventional date, the assassination
of the Tsar Alexander II in A.D. 1881 will come nearer the mark than the abdication of
the Tsar Nicholas II in A,D. 1917. On the same principle the end of the Pax Romana is
to be identified with the Goths' victory at Adrianople in A.D. 378 and not with their
capture of Rome itself in A.D. 410; the end of the Pax Hamca with the palace revolutions
that began circa A.D. 172 and not with the final eviction of the Posterior Han Dynasty from
the Imperial Throne in A.D. 221 ; and the end of the T'ang regime with the great catas-
trophe of A.D. 878 (see IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 87-8, above) and not with the official
abdication of the last of the T'ang emperors in A.D. 907,
* See I, C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 53, footnote 2; II. D (v), vol. ii, pp. 157 and 176; IV. C (ii)
(i) 2, vol. iv, pp. 90 and 91-2; V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, p. 311, footnote 2; and V. C (ii)
(a), in the present volume, p. 195, footnote 2, above.
3 i2 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Sceptre from the Prior to the Posterior Han 1 has a Russian parallel
in the elevation of the parvenu Romanovs to an Imperial Throne
left vacant by the extinction of the ancient House of Rurik.
Vestiges in Minoan History.
There is perhaps one other case in which our disintegration-
pattern can be detected in the history of a universal state without
being discernible in the foregoing Time of Troubles', and that is
in the disintegration of the Minoan Society. In a field in which our
evidence is still exclusively archaeological and also still only frag-
mentaryeven in this unilluminating medium our findings can
only be tentative. Yet, while the history of the Minoan 'Time of
Troubles' is far too obscure to warrant our venturing upon any
analysis at all, we may perhaps provisionally interpret the archaeo-
logical strata in historical terms when we come to the following
chapter. In other contexts 2 we have hazarded the conjecture that
the Minoan Society, in the course of its disintegration, lived
through a universal state that must have been founded after the
first destruction of the Cretan palaces at the break between the two
stratigraphically attested periods which our archaeologists have
labelled 'Middle Minoan IF and 'Middle Minoan III'; and we
have suspected that a violent overthrow of our supposed universal
state may be the political event that is commemorated in the second
destruction which overtook the same palaces, some centuries later,
at the break between 'Late Minoan IF and 'Late Minoan III*
circa 1400 B.C. If these two termini give the measure of the total
span of the duration of 'the thalassocracy of Minos', does the dim
light of the archaeologist-miner's lamp enable us to discern any
intervening vestige of a beat of Rout-and-Rally ? It is perhaps not
altogether too fanciful to read a political punctuation into the
change of technique and style which is the basis of the archaeo-
logists' distinction between 'Late Minoan I' and 'Late Minoan IF.
Symptoms in Western History.
While a Minoan game of blind-man's-buff may not add much
to our knowledge, its very uncertainty may serve to warn us that
we are now approaching the limits of the field within which it is
possible to pursue with any profit our empirical investigation into
the occurrence of the disintegration-rhythm in its standard run of
three and a, half beats from beginning to end of the process. The
results that we have obtained already suffice, however, to show that
1 See the present chapter, p. 295, above.
2 In I. C (i) (a), vol. i, pp. 92-3; IV. C (ii) (6) i, vol. iv, pp. 64-5 J and V. C (i) (<0 3,
vol. v, p. 236, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 313
the pattern which we have been studying does occur with a con-
siderable frequency. And this conclusion leads us irresistibly to a
final question. If our pattern has proved to be one of the regular
features of the disintegration-process in the histories of those civili-
zations that have unquestionably made the dreadful transit from
growth to decay, is it legitimate to argue in the inverse direction?
Supposing that we are confronted with the history of a civilization
which it is peculiarly difficult for us to see in perspective, shall
we be warranted in pronouncing that this society is already in a
state of disintegration on the strength of finding in its history the
imprint of our now familiar disintegration-pattern ?
Our problematical case is, of course, the history of the society
into which we happen ourselves to have been born. At the begin-
ning of this Study 1 we took note of the difficulty with which any
Western observer will have to contend, ex officio originis, if he tries
to take, en voyage, the bearings of the ship on board which the
observer himself is sailing into the uncharted waters of an unknown
Future. The position of our Western Society in our age cannot
become known with any certainty of knowledge till the voyage has
come to an end; and so long as the ship is under way the crew will
have no notion whether she is going to founder in mid-ocean
through springing a leak or be sent to the bottom by colliding with
another vessel or run ashore on the rocks or glide smoothly into a
port of which the crew will never have heard before they wake up
one fine day to find their ship at rest in dock there. A sailor at sea
cannot tell for which, if for any, of these ends the ship is heading
as he watches her making headway during the brief period of his
own spell of duty. To plot out her course and write up her log
from tart to finish is a task that can be performed only by ob-
servers who are able to wait until the voyage is over, since it will
only be then that the unexplored Future, into which the ship is for
ever sailing so long as she is in motion at all, will have been con-
verted, without any dubious residue, into a traversed and recorded
Past; and such observers must, ex hypothest, be members of some
other society that will still be alive when ours has ceased to exist,
since their post of observation must, again ex hypothesi, lie not
on board the ship, but somewhere outside of her gunwales. Yet,
granting that the present position of our now still living and mov-
ing Western World cannot be ascertained in this accurate and
comprehensive way by observers who are handicapped, as we are,
by the fact of living and moving and having our being in the society
that is the object of observation, may there not he some rough-
and-ready means by which even we, here and now, can reckon,
* In I. B (iv), vol. i, pp. 36-7, above.
314 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
within a margin of error that will be not excessive for practical
purposes, approximately where we stand? And may not a clue
have been put into our hands by the acquaintance with the stan-
dard run of the disintegration-rhythm that we have gained in the
present chapter through a comparative study of the histories of
other civilizations than our own in which we have the advantage
of knowing the whole story? Suppose that the pattern which we
have now detected in the histories of so many disintegrating civili-
zations were to prove to be discernible in our own Western history
too. Might that not be regarded as presumptive evidence that our
own civilization has already been overtaken by a process of dis-
integration which is known for certain to have been the fate of so
many other representatives of the species ?
If we look into our Western history with eyes sharpened by the
practice of the survey that we have just been making, do we in fact
perceive, here too, the now familiar beats of the movement of
Rout-and-Rally?
On this point there is one observation that we can make at once
and have in fact made already: 1 our Western Society, whether it
be already in disintegration or not, has at any rate certainly not yet
arrived at the second rally in the disintegration-process; for this
second rally is regularly marked by the establishment of a Pax
Oecumenica', and a Pax Oecumenica is a state to which our Western
Society has certainly not yet attained. Why is it, though, that we
are as undoubtedly we are so acutely aware of this fact? The
answer to that question is that, in our generation in the West, we
are no longer content, as our forebears were so complacently, to
see our society remain partitioned among a number of parochial
sovereign states that are apt to assert their sovereignty by going to
war with one another. Unlike our forebears, we in our generation
feel from the depths of our hearts that a Pax Oecumenica is now a
crying need. We live in daily dread of a catastrophe which, we
fear, may overtake us if the problem of meeting this need is left
unsolved much longer. 2 It would hardly be an exaggeration to say
that the shadow of this fear that now lies, athwart our future is
hypnotizing us into a spiritual paralysis that is beginning to affect
us even in the trivial avocations of our daily life, 3 And, if we can
screw up the courage to look this fear in the face, we shall not be
rewarded by finding ourselves able to dismiss it with contempt as
nothing but a panic phobia. The sting of this fear lies in the un-
deniable fact that it springs from a rational root. We are terribly
1 In Part IV. A, vol. iv, p. 3, above.
2 SBC. IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (jS), vol.- iv, pp. 318-20 and 405-8, above.
3 Written in the autumn of 1937.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 315
afraid of the immediate future because we have been through a
horrible experience in the recent past. And the lesson which this
experience has impressed upon our minds is indeed an appalling
one. In our generation we have learnt, through suffering, two
home truths. The first truth is that the institution of War is still
in full force in our Western Society. The second truth is that, ,in
the Western World under existing technical and social conditions,
there can be no warfare that is not internecine. These truths have
been driven home by our experience in the General War of A.D.
1914-18 ; but the most ominous thing about that war is that it was
not an isolated or unprecedented calamity. It was one war in a
series; and, when we envisage the whole series in a synoptic view,
we discover that this is not only a series but also a progression. In
our recent Western history war has been following war in an
ascending order of intensity; and to-day it is already apparent that
the War of 1914-18 was not the climax of this crescendo move-
ment. If the series continues, the progression will indubitably be
carried to ever higher terms, until this process of intensifying the
horrors of war is one day brought to an end by the self-annihilation
of the war-making society.
We may now remind ourselves that this progressive series* of
Western wars, of which the War of 1914-18 has been the latest but
perhaps not the last, is one of two chapters of a story that we have
already studied in another context. 1 We have observed that the
history of our Western warfare in the so-called 'Modern Age' can
be analysed into two bouts which are separated from one another
chronologically by an intervening lull and are also distinguished
from one another qualitatively by a difference in the object or at
any rate in 'the pretext of the hostilities. The first bout consists
of the Wars of Religion 2 which began in the sixteenth century
and ceased in, the seventeenth. The .second bout consists of the
Wars of Nationality, which began in the eighteenth century and
are still the scourge of the twentieth. These ferocious Wars of
Religion and ferocious Wars of Nationality have been separated
by an interlude of moderate wars that were fought as 'the Sport of
Kings'. This interlude manifestly did not begin on the Continent
till after the end of the Thirty Years' War in A.D. 1 648, and in Great
Britain not till after the Restoration of the Monarchy in England
in A.D. 1660 ; and it is equally manifest that the lull did not outlast
the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War in A.D. 1792, even
if we leave it an open question whether it, survived the American
1 In IV. C (iii) (6) 3 and 4, vol. iv, pp. 141-85, above.
2 See V. C (i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 160-1, and V. C U) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 668-72,
above.
3 i6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
Revolutionary War of A.D. 1775-83* On a narrower reckoning we
might confine the Time-span of the 'Golden Age' of eighteenth-
century moderation between the dates- A.D. 1732 and A.D. 1755, if
the eviction of a Protestant minority from the Catholic ecclesiastical
principality of Salzburg in A.D. 173 is to be taken as the last
positive act of religious persecution in Western Europe, and the
eviction of a French population from Acadia in A.D. 1755 as the
first positive act of persecution for Nationality's sake in North
America. 2 In any case the interlude is palpable; and, whatever
dates we may choose to adopt as the props for a conventional
scheme of chronological demarcation, the play will fall into the
same three acts in the same sequence, and this sequence of acts
will present the same plot. This underlying plot, and not the
superficial time-table, is the feature that is of interest for our
present purpose. And in the plot of this three-act play, with its
couple of bouts of ferocious warfare and an interlude of moderate
warfare in between them, can we not discern the familiar pattern
of a couple of paroxysms, separated by a breathing-space, which we
have learnt to recognize as the hall-mark of a 'Time of Troubles' ?
If we scrutinize in this light the picture that is presented by the
modern history of our Western World, we shall find that the cap
does at any rate fit to a nicety.
If the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century
is to be taken as a symptom of social breakdown, then the first
rally of a since then disintegrating Western Society is to be seen
in the movement in favour of religious toleration which gained the
upper hand, and brought the Wars of Religion to an end, in the
course of the seventeenth century. This victory of the Principle
of Toleration in the religious sphere duly won for several succeed-
ing generations that interlude of moderation which gave an ailing
Western World a welcome breathing-space between a first and a
second paroxysm of its deadly seizure. And the cap fits again when
we observe the fact that the relief was only temporary and not per-
manent, and when we go on to inquire into the reason. For our
empirical study of the rhythm of the disintegration-process has
led us to expect to see a rally give way to a relapse; and it has also
1 We have already observed (in IV. C (iii) (6) 3, vol. iv, pp. 147-9, and in IV. C (Hi)
(b) 4, vol. iv, pp. 1634 and 165-7, above) that the testimony of the American Revolu-
tionary War is self-contradictory and therefore ambiguous. When we consider the
moderateness of the terms which a victorious France imposed upon a defeated Great
Britain in A.D. 1783, we shall be inclined to pronounce that in that year Moderation waa
still reigning. On the other hand, when we consider the treatment of the defeated United
Empire Loyalists by the victorious insurgents in the ci-devant British colonies in North
America, we shall be no less inclined to pronounce that by that time the reign of a
fanatical Nationalism had already set in.
2 For these two acts of eighteenth-century persecution and their significance see
IV. C (iii) (6) 4, vol. iv, pp. 164-5, above.
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 317
led us to expect to find that this monotonously repeated tale of
failure can be explained in each case by some particular element of
weakness by which th abortive rally has been vitiated. Are these
expectations fulfilled in the Western case in point ? We are bound
to reply that, in this case too, the reason for the failure of the rally
is as clear as the fact of it is conspicuous. Our modern Western
Principle of Toleration has failed to bring salvation after all because
(as we must confess) there has been no health in it. 1 The spirits
that presided over its conception and birth were Disillusionment,
Apprehension, and Cynicism, not Faith, Hope, and Charity; the
impulse was negative, not positive; and the soil in which the seeds
were sown was arid.
'Some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth, and
forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth ; and
when the Sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root
they withered away.' 2
A Principle of Toleration which unexpectedly clothed the stony
heart of our modern Western Christendom in a sudden crop of
fresh verdure when the fierce sun of religious fanaticism, had burnt
itself out into dust and ashes, has wilted no less suddenly and no
less unexpectedly now that the fiercer sun of national fanaticism
has burst blazing through the firmament. In the twentieth century
we are seeing our seventeenth-century Toleration making an un-
conditional surrender to a masterful demon whose onslaught it has
proved incapable of withstanding. And the cause of this disastrous
impotence is manifest.
A Toleration that has no roots in Faith has failed to retain any
hold upon the heart of Homo Ocddentalis because human nature
abhors a spiritual vacuum. If the house from which an unclean
spirit has gone out is left empty, swept, and garnished, the
momentarily banished possessor will sooner or later enter in again
with a retinue of other spirits more wicked than himself, and the
last state of that man will be worse than the first. 3 The Wars of
Nationalism are more wicked than the Wars of Religion because
the object or. pretext of the hostilities is less sublime and less
etherial. The moral is that hungry souls which have been given
a stone when they have asked for bread 4 cannot be restrained from
seeking to satisfy their hunger by devouring the first piece of
carrion that comes their way. They will not be deterred by a warn-
ing from the giver of the stone that the heaven-sent carrion is
1 The Sthos of this modern Western Principle of Toleration has been examined in
IV. C (iii) (6) 3, vol. iv, pp. 142-3 and 159- in IV. C (iii) (&) 4, vol. iv, p. 184; in IV.
C (iii) (b) 12, vol. iv, pp. 227-8; in IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (a), Annex, vol. iv, pp. 643-5 J and in
V. C (i) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 669-71, above. z Matt. xiii. 5-6.
3 Matt. xii. 43-5; Luke xi. 24-6. 4 Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. zi.
3 i8 THE PROCESS OF I>ISINTEGRATION
poisoned; and, even when the threatened agonies duly begin to
wrack the miserable scavengers' entrails, they will persist in feasting
upon the tainted meat with an unabated appetite until death ex-
tinguishes their greed as once in Sicily a routed Athenian army
that had gone mad with thirst as it walked through dry places,
seeking rest and finding none, drank heedlessly of the waters of the
River Asinarus while the enemy was shooting them down from
the bank and the stream was running foully red with the blood
of the dying drinkers' already slaughtered comrades.
There is yet another point in which our modern Western history
conforms to the pattern of a disintegrating society's 'Time of
Troubles' ; and this is perhaps the most alarming of all these points
of congruence. Our survey has shown us that, as a rule, the
paroxysm which follows the intermediate breathing-space is more
violent than the paroxysm which precedes it; and this rule is cer-
tainly exemplified in our Western case if the Wars of Nationality
are to be taken as the second paroxysm of our seizure and the Wars
of Religion as the first.
Our forebears who fought that earlier cycle of ferocious Western
wars may not have been behindhand in the will to work havoc, but
fortunately for themselves and for their descendants they
lacked the means which we now have at our command unfortu-
nately for our children and for ourselves. No doubt the Wars of
Religion were much worse and this in point both of rancour and
of command of resources and of technical ability to turn these
resources to account than the Western warfare of previous ages
in which our Western Christendom was still unquestionably in
growth. The Wars of Religion had been anticipated by the inven-
tion of gunpowder and by voyages of discovery that, at least on the
material plane, 1 had extended the range of the Western Society
from one small corner of the Eurasian Continent to the hinterlands
of all the navigable seas on the face of the planet. The bullion that
had been accumulating in the treasuries at Tenochtitlan and Cuzco
was ultimately expended on paying mercenaries to fight in the
Wars of Religion on European battle-fields, after the discovery,
conquest, and rifling of the Central American and Andean worlds
by the Spanish conguistadores just as, after the corresponding
geographical expansion of the Hellenic World through the exploits
of Alexander, the treasures piled up by Achaemenian policy 'at
Ecbatana and Susa found their way into the hands of mercenaries
who fought in the wars of Alexander's diadochi and epigoni on
c > reveal ^self between the respective extensions
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 319
battle-fields in Greece. 1 And the professional soldiery that was
maintained in a sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century West-
ern World out of this sudden huge increase in the Western princes'
supplies of the precious metals was not only more numerous than
the old feudal militia of Transalpine Western Europe. It was also
more formidably armed and, wqrse still, more ferociously enraged
against an enemy who now, as a rule, was not only a military
opponent but was also a religious miscreant in the eyes of his
adversary. The unprecedented violence with which the Wars of
Religion were imbued by the combined operation of these several
causes would doubtless have shocked both Saint Louis and the
Emperor Frederick II if they could have returned to life to witness
the Western warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But we may also as confidently presume that the Duke of Alva and
Gustavus Adolphus would have been shocked to an equal degree
if they, in their turn, could have returned to life to witness the
subsequent Wars of Nationality. This later cycle of ferocious
Western wars which began in the eighteenth century, and which
has not ceased in the twentieth, has been keyed up to an unpre-
cedented degree of ferocity by the titanic driving-power of two
demonic forces Democracy and Industrialism which have en-
tered into the institution of War in our Western World 2 in these
latter days when that world has now virtually completed its
stupendous feat of incorporating the whole face of the Earth and
the entire living generation of Mankind into its own body material.
Our last state is worse than our first because, in this vastly ex-
panded house, we are possessed to-day by devils more terrible than
any that ever tormented even our seventeenth-century and six-
teenth-century ancestors.
Are these devils to dwell in our empty and swept and garnished
house till they have driven us to suicide ? If the analogy between
our Western Civilization's modern history and other civilizations'
'Times of Troubles' does extend to points of chronology, then a
Western 'Time of Troubles' which appears to have begun some-
time in the sixteenth century may be expected to find its end some-
time in the twentieth century; and this prospect may well make us
tremble; for in other cases the grand finale that has wound up a
'Time of Troubles' and ushered in a universal state has been a
self-inflicted 'knock-out blow' from which the self-stricken society
i See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (a), vol. iv, p. 485; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 62-4; V. C (i)
(d) u, in the present volume, p. 155, footnote 3; and the present chapter, pp. 289-90,
above,
* For this impact of Democracy and Industrialism upon War see IV. C (iii) (&) 3,
vol. iv, pp. 141-55, above. For the advent of these two demonic forces see Part I. A,
vol. i, pp. 1-2, above.
320 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
has never been able to recover. Must we, too, purchase our Pax
Oecumenica at this deadly price ? The question is one which our
own lips cannot answer, since the destiny of a live civilization is
necessarily as obscure to its living members as the fate of a dead
civilization is to scholars when their only clues are undeciphered
scripts or dumb artifacts. We cannot say for certain that our doom
is at hand; and yet we have no warrant for assuming that it is not;
for that would be to assume that we are not as other men are ; and
any such assumption would be at variance with everything that we
know about human nature either by looking around us or by
introspection.
This dark doubt is a challenge which we cannot evade; and our
destiny depends on our response.
'I dreamed, and behold I saw a man cloathed with rags, standing in
a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and
a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book and
read therein ; and as he read he wept and trembled; and, not being able
longer to contain, he broke out with a lamentable cry saying "What shall
It was not without just cause that Christian was so greatly dis-
tressed.
'I am for certain informed [said he] that this pur city will be burned
with fire from Heaven in which fearful overthrow both myself with
thee my wife and you my sweet babes shall miserably come to ruine,
except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found,
whereby we may be delivered.'
What response to this challenge is Christian going to make?
Is he going to look this way and that way as if he would run, yet
stand still because he cannot tell which way to go until the fire
from Heaven duly descends upon the City of Destruction and the
wretched haverer perishes in a holocaust which he has so dismally
foreboded without ever bringing himself to the point of fleeing from
*T V^f-r * come? Or wil1 he be gin to run and run on crying
late! Life! Eternal Life!' with his eye set on a shining light and
Jus feet bound for a distant wicket-gate? If the answer to this
question depended on nobody but Christian himself, our know-
ledge of the uniformity of human nature might incline us to predict
that Christian s imminent destiny was Death and not Life. But in
the classic version of the myth we are told that the human pro-
tagonist was not left entirely to his own resources in the hour that
was decisive for his fate. According to John Bunyan, Christian
was saved by his encounter with Evangelist. And, inasmuch as it
cannot be supposed that God's nature is less constant than Man's
AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION 321
we may and must pray that a reprieve which God has granted to
our society once will not be refused if we ask for it again in a con-
trite spirit and with a broken heart. 1
(Ill) STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION
We have now arrived at the close of our inquiry into the process
of the disintegrations of civilizations ; but, before we take leave of
this subject and turn our attention to other problems, there is one
more manoeuvre to be performed if we are to carry our present
operations to their completion. Now that we find ourselves at last
at the end of a road on which we have been travelling for so long,
we are in a position to look back with an eye to taking in, at one
view, the whole of the ground that we have traversed; and such a
retrospect will perhaps throw light on a question which at this
stage we can hardly leave unasked. In making a journey that, at
least in certain stages, may have seemed, while we were on the
march, like an aimless wandering in the wilderness, have we per-
chance been following a single guiding thread ? Now that we have
surveyed the whole course of disintegration by going laboriously
over the ground, does the process prove to be governed by any
master-tendency ?
If we address ourselves to this concluding question we may
obtain a clue to the answer in the findings that we have reached
already in the last chapter before this. 2 In studying the inter-
action between individuals in disintegrating civilizations we have
been led into an examination of the rhythm of the disintegration-
process, and in this rhythm we have detected an element of uni-
formity a uniform run of three and a half standard beats of the
movement of Rout-and-Rally which is apparently so definite and
so constant that, on the strength of its regularity, we have almost
ventured to cast the horoscope of one civilization that is still alive
and on the move. If, with this clue in our hands, we now cast
our eyes backward, we shall find that this tendency towards uni-
formity is the key-note, not only of the last chapter, but of the
whole of the present part of this Study. In that uniform rhythm
the principle of uniformity is manifesting itself only in a superficial
way. In earlier chapters we have already come across some more
significant expressions of uniformity in the uniform schism of dis-
integrating societies into three sharply divided classes and in the
uniform works of creation that are respectively produced by each
of these. We have seen dominant minorities uniformly working out
philosophies and setting up universal states; internal proletariats
* Pss. xxxiv. 1 8, li. 17. a In V. C (ii) (6), above.
322 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
uniformly discovering 'higher religions' which aim at embodying
themselves in universal churches; and external proletariats uni-
formly mustering war-bands which find vent in 'heroic ages'. 1
The uniformity with which these several institutions are generated
in the body social of a disintegrating civilization is indeed so per-
fect that it is possible to display this aspect of the disintegration-
process in tabular form. 2 But this is still not the most impressive
of the ways in which the tendency towards uniformity declares
itself in the histories of disintegrating civilizations. The uniformity
of institutions that is revealed by a study of schism in the body
social is not so illuminating as the uniformity of ways of behaviour,
feeling, and life that is revealed by a study of schism in the Soul. 3
The conclusion to which this retrospective reconnaissance brings
us is that in the histories of civilizations standardization is the
master-tendency of the process of disintegration in antithesis to
the differentiation which we have found, at an earlier point, 4 to be
the master-tendency of the process of growth. And this conclusion
is only what we should expect a priori. For, if differentiation is the
natural outcome of a succession of successful responses to a series
of different challenges, standardization is no less manifestly the
natural outcome of a succession of unsuccessful responses to a
single challenge which monotonously continues to present itself so
long as it thus remains unanswered. 5
This fundamental difference between the processes of disintegra-
tion and of growth is brought home in the simple parable of
Penelope's web.
v6a Kal rffiariri pev u^aiVecr/cev fteyav iarov,
vvtcras & a\\VaKv, e^ret SaiSas Trapafletro. 6
When the faithful wife of the absent Odysseus had promised her
importunate suitors that she would give herself in marriage to one
of them so soon as she had finished weaving a winding-shqet for old
Laertes, she used to weave away at her loom in the day-time day
by day and then spend the night-watches night by night in un-
picking her last day's work. If we look into the differences between
the heroine's day-work and her night-work we shall perceive that
the most obvious difference is not the only one. The most obvious
difference is, of course, that in the day-time Penelope was making
. J The, three classes into which a disintegrating society splits up, and these classes'
respective works, have been examined in V. C (i) (c\ passim, above
K J i C A e tob !f ?? u^f"* 1 st ates, philosophies, higher religions, and barbarian war-
bands at toe end of this chapter, on pp. 3*7-31, below.
?l e Y- C W W' Passim, above. 4 j n m. C (Hi), vol. iii, pp. 377-90, above.
~ '
' Odyssey, Book'll, 11. 104-5.
STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 323
something, whereas at night she was undoing what she had just
made. But there is another difference, besides, which is more
pertinent to our present purpose. When the webster set up her
warp and began to weave her weft each morning she had at her
command an unlimited choice of patterns. If she chose she could
make it her practice never to weave the same pattern more than
once; and she could have kept up this practice without flagging,
even if she had succeeded in carrying on her surreptitious game
not just for three years but for thirty. The number of possible
natterns was infinite; and, since every different pattern would re-
quire from the webster a different set of movements of eye and
hand and body, it was open to Penelope to allow herself an infinite
variety in the execution of her daily task. But, when each night she
had the torches brought in, and set to work to unpick what she had
woven between morn and eve, her night- work was monotonously
uniform; and from this monotony there was no escape; for, when
it came to unravelling the web, the pattern made no difference.
However complicated the particular set of movements that had
been required for the weaving of the pattern of the day, one simple
movement, and this one only, was allowed by the nature of the task
of undoing the day's work. The simple movement of drawing the
threads has an obligatory rhythm upon which it is inherently im-
possible to ring any changes at all.
For this inevitable monotony of her night-work poor Penelope
is assuredly to be pitied. To have to work into the small hours is
hard enough anyway; and the toil becomes excruciating if it is not
only hard but dull. If its hardness and dullness led nowhere the
drudgery would be quite unbearable. What was it, then, that
nerved the heroine to endure this self-imposed penance year-in
and year-out ? What inspired her was a song in her soul that was
the unfaltering accompaniment of her repetitive night- work no less
than of her varied daily task; and that song was 'ilayhi marjiT: 1
'With Him will I be reunited.' In drawing the threads by night
after weaving them during the day Penelope was not blindly
repeating a meaningless round of ineffectual labour. She was
working and living in hope; and her hope was not disappointed;
for those three years spent on a drudgery that kept the suitors at
bay just enabled her to tide over the latter end of the decade of
Odysseus' absence. The hero returned to find the heroine still
his ; and the Odyssey duly ends in the reunion of the devoted wife
who has resisted the suitors' importunity with the devoted hus-
band who has been proof against the blandishments of Calypso. 2
1 'Ilayhi marji'ukum' : 'To Him is your return': Qur'anx. 4, quoted in III. C (iii),
vol. iii, p. 390, above. * See II. D (i), vol. ii, pp. 23-4, above.
324 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
If, then, as it turns out, even Penelope has neither woven nor
drawn her threads in vain, what of the mightier weaver whose work
is our study and whose song our ears have caught already in an
earlier part of this book ?
In Lebensfluten, im Tatensturm
Wall* ich auf und ab,
Webe hin und her!
Geburt und Grab
Bin ewiges Meer,
Bin wechselnd Weben,
Bin gliihend Leben,
So schafF ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid. 1
The work of the Spirit of the Earth, as he weaves and draws his
threads on the Loom of Time, is the temporal history of Man as
this manifests itself in the geneses and growths and breakdowns
and disintegrations of human societies; and in all this welter dffife"
and this tempest of action we can hear the beat of an elemental
rhythm whose variations we have learnt to know as Challenge-and-
Response and Withdrawal-and-Return and Rout-and-Rally and
Apparentation-and-Affiliation and Schism-and-Palingenesia. This
elemental rhythm is the alternating beat of Yin and Yang; 3 and
in listening to it we have recognized that, though strophe may
be answered by antistrophe, victory by defeat, birth by death,
creation by destruction, the movement that this rhythm beats out
is neither the fluctuation of an indecisive battle nor the cycle of a
treadmill. 3 The perpetual turning of a wheel is not a vain repeti-
tion if,, at each revolution, it is carrying a vehicle that much
nearer to its goal; and, if 'palingenesia* signifies the birth of some-
thing new, and not just the rebirth of something that has lived and
died any number of times already,* then the Wheel of Existence is
not just a devilish device for inflicting an everlasting torment on a
damned Ixion. On this showing, the music that the rhythm of Yin
and Yang beats out is the song of creation; and we shall not be
misled into fancying ourselves mistaken because, as we give ear, we
can catch the note of creation alternating with the note of destruc-
tion. So far from convicting the song of being a diabolic counter-
feit, this doubleness of note is a warrant of authenticity. If we
listen well we shall perceive that, when the two, notes collide, they
produce not a discord but a harmony. Creation would not be
; f t 1 * 1 i 50 - 1 " 9 ' qu( 2!? k ^ n - B ' vo1 - ** p - 204 > above -
<?' V f L - *' pp - I 9 6 - 2 4, above.
, vol. iv, pp. 23-37, above
present volume '
STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 335
creative if it did not swallow up in itself all things in Heaven and
Earth, including its own antithesis.
But what of the living garment that the Earth Spirit weaves ? Is
it laid up in Heaven as fast as it is woven, or can we, here on Earth,
catch glimpses at any rate of patches of its etherial web ? What are
we to think of those tissues that we see lying at the foot of the loom
when the weaver, in the course of his tempestuous activity, has
been at work unravelling ? In the disintegration of a civilization
we have found that, though the pageant may have been insub-
stantial, it does not fade without leaving a rack behind. When
civilizations pass from breakdown through disintegration into
dissolution, they regularly leave behind them a deposit of universal
states and universal churches and barbarian war-bands. What are
we to make of these objects ? Are they mere waste-products of the
disintegration-process a tangle of spoiled threads from a piece of
tapestry which the weaver, on an impulse of his inscrutable
caprice, has willed to unpick before it has been half completed ?
Or will these debris prove, if we pick them up, to be fresh master-
pieces of the weaver's art which he has woven, by an unnoticed
sleight of hand, on some more etherial instrument than the roaring
loom that has ostensibly been occupying all his attention and
energies ?
If, with this new question in mind, we cast our thoughts back
over the results of our previous inquiries, we shall find reason to
believe that these three objects of study are something more than
by-products of social disintegration; for we came across them first 1
as tokens of Apparentation-and-Affiliation; and this is a relation
between one civilization and another. Evidently, therefore, these
three institutions cannot be explained entirely in terms of the
history of any single civilization; their existence involves a relation
between one civilization and another; and, to this extent at any
rate, they must be independent entities with a claim to be studied
on their own merits. But how far does their independence carry
them ? In dealing with universal states 2 we have found already that
the peace which they bring is as ephemeral as it is imposing; and
in dealing with barbarian war-bands 3 we have found, again, that
these maggots in the carcass of a dead dvilization cannot hope to
live longer than it takes the putrefying corpse to dissolve into its
clean elements. Yet, though the war-bands may be foredoomed to
the premature death of Achilles, the barbarian hero's short life
leaves at least an echo behind it in the poetry that commemorates
1 In I, ,C (i) (a), vol. i, pp. 51-63, above.
* In V. C (ii) (a), pp. 181-213, and V. C (ii) (6), passim, above.
3 In I. C (i) (a), vol. i, pp. 58-62, above.
32 6 THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
an 'heroic age'.' And what is the destiny of the universal church in
which every higher religion seeks to embody itself?*
It will be seen that we are not in a position at present to answer
our new question off-hand; and at the same time it is clear that we
cannot afford to ignore it; for this question holds the key to the
meaning of the weaver's work; and a yearning that tantus labor nan
sit casw will not allow us to rest without trying to unlock the secret
of this mystery. Our Study is not at an end; but we have arrived
at the verge of the last of our fields of inquiry.
i -See I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 62; II. D (iii), vol. ii, pp. 94-6; and V. C (i) (f) 3, vol. v,
PP i W 3 el'ave ataUdy asked ourselves this question, without having yet tried to answer
it, in V. C (i) (c) 4, vol. v, pp. 371-6. > bove -
STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 327
I S 1 i
JJ ffifi si ,
ills II I|p sei 3 I
i si musics i g %
\D MOO CO 00 O> 10
O O. W CO
JQ Q Q q
< < < <'
Q QfifiQ Q qq^<
vJ vl v>
m i
id
=t
ID fi-
C-3
*B,SOQ
A u
i I
i J
P
o^ fl
I
'o
J&
S.5B S K B 5S,^ a
III 1 1$ IK S
g| I l|| ^| g
&S? s < ..-J s
312
JcvS
<&
a) w o>
S^^
in p
o o> w o <u
p
S3
S ^W|.|. _ ^
'^!|li ? <5 %||
^|3-s5| | -alSlI
niiiiii
M M
N M w
? I r
00 ^ gj N
M H M *P
fc i i i
O M n M
M M M M
Q Q Q Q
1
41 S
s
1 3
s I
.
1 >1
ill
I]!
> S ft
s 3?
S-S
ff
^ g
h Q>
f J 1
* S^
iill^
i
1-1
328
THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
TABLE II. Philosophies
Civilization
Philosophy
Egyptiac
Andean
Sinic
Syriac
Indie
Western
Hellenic
Babylonic
Atonism (abortive)
Viracochaism (abortive)
Confucianism
Moism
Taoism
Zervanism (abortive)
Hinayanian Buddhism
Jainism
Cartesianism
Hegelianisrn 1
Platonism
Stoicism
Epicureanism
Pyrrhonism
Astrology
1 Hegelianism confined to the field of social affairs = Marxism
Marxism transplanted from the Western World to Russia =
Leninism.
STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 329
TABLE III. Higher Religions
Civilization
Higher Religion
Source of Inspiration
Sumeric
Tainmuz-worship
indigenous
Egyptiac
Osiris-worship
alien [?] (Sumeric [?])
Sink
The Mahayana
alien (Indo-Helleno-Syriac)
Neotaoism
indigenous but imitative (of
the Mahayana)
Indie
Hinduism
indigenous
Syriac
Islam
indigenous
Hellenic
Christianity
alien (Syriac)
Mithraism
alien (Syriac)
Manichaeism
alien (Syriac)
The Mahayana
alien (Indie)
Isis-worship
alien (Egyptiac)
Cybele-worship
alien (Hittite)
Neoplatonism
indigenous (ci-devant philo-
sophy)
Babylonic
Judaism
alien (Syriac)
Zoroastrianism
alien (Syriac)
Western
Bahaism
alien (Iranic)
The Alirnadlyah
alien (Iranic)
Orthodox Christian
Imam! Shi'ism
alien (Iranic)
(main body)
Bedredduiism
semi-alien (Iranic tincture)
Orthodox Christian
Sectarianism
indigenous
(in Russia)
Revivalist Protes-
tantism
alien (Western)
Far Eastern
Catholicism
alien (Western)
(main body)
T'aip'ing
semi-alien (Western tincture)
Far Eastern
Jodo
semi-alien (from Far Eastern,
(in Japan)
main body)
Jodo Shinshu
indigenous (from Jodo)
Nichirenism
indigenous
Zen
semi-alien (from Far Eastern,
main body)
Hindu
Kabirism and
Sikhism
semi-alien (Islamic tincture)
BrahmS Samaj
semi-alien (Western tincture)
330
THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
a
l
1
I|i| ^
a
W
!
I
I
cow
5 1
c
g 2 w
1J I
233 2
l
i3,
i in i ill 1
ill
W
I
I
S,
"EL O
^ '-a
STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 331
5 MO
9-wj
BHj
III
llij]
I1-. "8
ANNEXES
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7
THE HELLENIC CONCEPTION OF THE 'COSMOPOLIS'
THE Hellenic conception of the Cosmopolis may be illustrated by
a cento of quotations from Latin and Greek authors. Of the four
who are drawn upon below, the first, Cicero, lived on the eve of the
foundation of a Roman Empire which provided the Hellenic World
with a universal state and Hellenic minds with a terrestrial image of
the constitution of the vaster commonwealth of the Universe. The
other three Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus lived and worked in
the social environment of an established Roman Empire at dates
which all fall within the first two centuries of the Roman Peace.
Both Marcus and Seneca were called upon to -govern the Empire;
and they both of them drew from their ideal of the Cosmopolis the
moral strength to perform a burdensome and thankless mundane
task for the sake of which Marcus sacrificed his happiness and
Seneca forfeited his life though Seneca's death at Nero's hands
was not so ironical a tragedy as Cicero's death at the hands of a
Triumvirate which included the future Augustus. 1
The first concern of these Hellenic philosophers in their dis-
quisitions on the Cosmopolis was to demonstrate its existence; and
the following proofs, on closely parallel lines, are offered by Cicero
and by Marcus. Cicero's argument runs thus:
'Man has a primary social bond with God in their common possession
of Reason seeing that there is nothing higher than Reason, and that
this highest of all faculties is to be found in Man and in God alike.
Those, however, who have Reason in common have Right Reason in
common as well ; and, since Right Reason is another name for Law (lex),
we human beings must be regarded as being associated with the Gods
through the bond of Law likewise. But those who share the same law
are living under the same juridical dispensation (w), and this implies
that they are members of the same commonwealth. If, however, they
are subject to the same authorities and 'powers, then they are also sub-
ject, a fortiori, to the heavenly ordinance and to the Divine Intelligence
1 In retrospect Augustus seems to have recognized that the eloquent voice which
he had allowed Mark Antony to silence with the sword had been one of the heralds of
Augustus s own life-work. At any rate this seems a legitimate reading of the following
anecdote in Plutarch's Life of Cicero, chap. 49 :
'I have heard that, many years later, Augustus once came into a room where one of
nis grandchildren (a child of his daughter's) was sitting reading one of Cicero's works,
ine boy was horrified and tried to hide the book under his coat; but his grandfather
saw what he was doing, took the book, started to read it, and stood there reading on
and on until he had been through a considerable part of the volume. Then he handed
it back to the child with the words: "A great writer, my boy, a great writer and a great
patriot. .
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7 333
and to Almighty God. And so the whole of this Universe is to be re-
garded as one single commonwealth of gods and men.' 1
Marcus's argument follows much the same course:
'If we have Intelligence in common, we must also have in common the
Reason (Aoyos) in virtue of which we are reasonable creatures ; and from
this it would follow that we have in common, again, the Reason that
tells us what to do and to leave undone- From this it would follow that
we have Law (v6po$) in common; from this that we are citizens; and
from that, again, that we are members of some kind of polity (rcoXir^v^a).
If so, the Universe is like a commonwealth (TTO'AIS-) ; for what other polity
can any one think of which has a membership comprising the entire
Human Race ? And is not this all-embracing commonwealth the only
conceivable source of the intelligent and reasonable and law-abiding
veins in our own human nature?' 2
The conception of the Universe as a commonwealth, at which
Marcus and Cicero have arrived by this road, is worked out as
follows by Epictetus:
'This Universe is one commonwealth, and the substance out of which
it has been fashioned is likewise one; and there is in its economy an
inevitable periodicity which makes things give place to one another
one thing dissolving as another comes on into existence, and some
things remaining unmoved while others are in motion. And everything
is full of friends: in the first place gods but also human beings, who are
likewise natural friends because they have been designed by Nature for
living as members of one human family. In the natural course of this
family life some have to keep each other company and others have to
part company ; and while we may rejoice in the companionship we must
not grieve at the separation.' 3
One of the excellences of the constitution of the Cosmopolis is
the harmonious solution of the problem of the distribution of
allegiance between the cosmic commonwealth and the terrestrial
parish and this is a topic on which we shall obtain the clearest
light from those Hellenic philosophers who were at the same time
Roman citizens; since Rome, as we have seen, 4 had been more suc-
cessful than any other terrestrial community in the Hellenic World
in reconciling Cicero the citizen of the municipality of Arpinum
with Cicero the citizen of an oecumenical Roman State. The
analogous reconciliation of allegiances on the cosmic scale is pro-
pounded as follows by Seneca:
'We have to envisage two commonwealths., There is a great one
1 Cicero: De Legibus, Book I, chap. 7.
2 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, Book IV, chap. 4.
3 Epictetus: Dissertationes, Book III, chap. 24, icii.
* In III. C (ii) (6), Annex IV, vol. iii, p. 481; IV. C (iii) (&) 10, vol. iv, pp. 208-14;
and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (j8), vol. iv, pp. 310-13, above. See also V. C (ii) (6), in the present
volume, p. 291, above.
334 ANNEX TO V. C (i) (<*) 7
truly deserving of the name which embraces both gods and men and
in which we do not let our eyes dwell on some ^significant comer but
include in the bounds of our polity all that is under the Sun. And then
there is that other commonwealth in which we have been enrolled by
the accident of birth-an Athens or a Carthage or some other ^state wi Ji
a citizenship that is not oecumenical but is rarely parochial. Some
people work for both commonwealths the greater and the lesser
simultaneously; others exclusively for the lesser; and others, again,
exclusively for the greater. It is in our power to serve this greater
commonwealth in retirement as well as in active life: and indeed I^am
inclined to think that in retirement we can actually serve it better.
The points here made by Seneca are put more pithily by Marcus :
'Qua Antoninus I have Rome for my commonwealth and country;
qua "human being I have the Universe. The public interest of these two
commonwealths gives the whole measure of my own private good.
If an apparent conflict of duties does arise, the philosopher may
take it for granted that his duty to the Universe takes precedence.
As Seneca sees it,
'When we have given the sage a commonwealth that is worthy of him
by giving him the Universe, he will not be cutting himself off from the
common weal by going into retirement. On the contrary, he will per-
haps be leaving a hole in the corner in order to pass out into a greater
and more spacious life, and to realize when he finds himself on the
heights of Heaven the lowliness of the seat on which he sat whence
used to take the chair DT mount the tribunal. Let it sink into your mind
that tfis sage is never so active as when he has brought within his pur-
view the sum of things human and divine/ 3
The same answer is given to the same question by Epictetus in
his dissertation on the perfect practitioner of the Cynic discipline:
*I suppose you want to ask me whether the Cynic sage will go into
politics? You blockhead! What greater field of political activity do you
propose to give him than the field in which he is actually at work? Is
he to take the floor at Athens and make a speech on revenue or supply
when his role is to address the whole World Athens and Corinth and
Rome in the same world-wide audience and to take for his subject, not
supply or revenue or peace or war, but the Soul's prosperity and ad-
versity, good fortune and bad fortune, slavery and freedom ? You see
a man working in a field of political activity of that titanic scope, and
you ask me whether he will be going into politics? Suppose you go on
to ask me whether he will take office, and once more I shall say to you:
You fool! What greater ofiice could he conceivably hold than the office
that he is exercising already?* 4
1 Seneca, L. A.: Ad Serenum de Oft'o, chap. 4.
z Marcus, op. cit., Book VI, chap. 44.
a Seneca, L. A.: Epistolae, Book VII, Ep. kviii, 2.
* Epictetus: Dissertations, Book III, chap. 22, 83-5.
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7 335
In the last resort the Commonwealth of the Universe has a claim
upon the sage's allegiance to which the parochial commonwealth
must give Way; for
'Man [is] a citizen of the supreme commonwealth, in which the other
commonwealths are no more than houses;' 1
and this simile reappears in the Stoic philosopher-emperor's con-
fession of faith:
'Everything that is in harmony for thee, O Universe, is harmonious
for me likewise. Nothing that is in season for thee is for me either
premature or tardy. All is fruit for me that is brought by thy seasons, O
Nature. From thee all things proceed ; in thee all things subsist ; to thee
all things return. The worldling says "O beloved City of Cecrops", and
shalt thou not say "O beloved City of Zeus"?' 2
The philosopher may even rise to a height at which the parochial
commonwealth fades out of view and leaves the Soul free to live
the life of the 'City of Zeus' without any other claim on her atten-
tion.
'If there is truth in what the philosophers say about the kinship
between God and men, is not the moral of this, for us men, that one
should do like Socrates and never say, when asked one's nationality, that
one is an Athenian or a Corinthian, but always answer that one is a
native of the Universe (KOCT/UOS) ? Why is it that you call yourself an
Athenian, instead of calling yourself simply by the name of the corned
in which your vile body happened to be deposited at birth? Isn't it
obvious that you call yourself an Athenian or a Corinthian because the
area that is denoted by the name of Athens or Corinth is intrinsically
more important and at the same time comprehends not merely the
corner in which you were actually born, but also the whole of your
house and, in short, the roots of your family tree ? Well, any one who
has studied the economy of the Universe will have learnt that the
greatest and most important and most comprehensive of all things is
this combine of men and God^crvcrr^a TO e dvBpcbircov /cat o), and
he will also have learnt that God has been the source of life not only for
my father and for my grandfather, but for everything that comes to life
and grows upon the face of the Earth, and particularly for creatures
endowed with Reason, since these alone are capable of enjoying a true
intercourse with God thanks to the links by which Reason binds them
to Him. A man who has learnt this may properly be called a native of
the Universe and a son of God;' 3
These words of the philosopher-slave Epictetus are echoed by
a fellow Stoic who had to reconcile his freedom of the City of
1 Marcus, op. cit., Book III, chap, r i, quoted already in V. C (i) (d) 1 1, p. 158, above.
2 Ibid., Book IV, chap. 23, quoted already in V. C (i) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 384 and 395,
above.
3 Epictetus: Dissertationes t Book I, chap. 9, 1-6.
336 ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7
Zeus with the slavery of being the sovereign of the Roman Empire.
'Live as though you were on a mountain; for it makes no difference
being, here or there if, wherever one is, the Universe is one's common-
wealth. . . . [And] if, when you find yourself approaching your end, you
concentrate upon caring for nothing but your higher self and the spark
of divinity that is in you . . . then you will be a man who is worthy of the
Universe that has begotten you and at least you will no longer be a
stranger in your own true native country.' 1
The Hellenic sage whose citizenship of the Universe thus swal-
lowed up his citizenship of Rome or Athens did not make the mis-
take of imagining that he was thereby being translated from a
harder to an easier state of existence.
'All this that you see this sum of things human and divine is a
unity. It is a vast body of which we are the members. Nature brought
us into the World already bound to one another by the ties of kinship,
when she fashioned us from the same elements and placed us in the
same environment. It was she who planted a mutual love in our hearts
and made us social animals. It was she who created Right and Justice.
It is by her enactment that it is more painful to inflict injury than to
suffer it. Let us obey her command by holding out our hands to those
who need our succour. Let us have on our lips and in our heart the line
"I am a child of man and there is nothing human which does not touch
me". 2 Let us hold in common what we have, for we have been born [to
a common lot]. Our human society is like nothing so much as an arch
which would fall if the stones did not mutually support one another,
whereas it actually remains imposition just because they do.' 3
This exhortation of Seneca's is capped by Epictetils:
'You are a citizen of the Universe and a member of it and not one of
the menial members either, but one of those in authority ; for you have
the intelligence to follow the divine economy and to work out its
sequence. What, then, is the citizen's vocation ? It is to have no private
interests of his own and to take no action in vacua, but rather to act as
one's hand or foot would act if they were reasonable beings with the
intelligence to follow the laws of Physiology for we may be sure that,
if they were endowed with Reason, these members would yield to no
impulse and entertain no desire without reference to the welfare of the
whole organism. On this showing, the philosophers are profoundly
right in saying that if the man of honour could foresee the future he
would be a consenting party to his own sickness and death and disable-
ment, because he would perceive that his personal lot was an integral
part of the order of the Universe, and that the whole was more important
than the part, and the commonwealth than the citizen.' 4
This duty of self-surrender to the operation of the laws of the
i Marcus, op. cit., Book X, chap. 15, and Book XII, chap. i.
a This line has already been quoted in this Study in V. C (i) (d) 7, on p. 8, above.
AJ.T. 3 Seneca, L. A.: Epistolae, Book XV, Ep. xcv, 52-3.
* Epictetus: Dissertationes, Book II, chap. 9, 3-5.
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7 337
Commonwealth of the Universe has received a sublime expression
in the following adjuration with which Marcus concludes his
colloquy with himself:
'Man, you have enjoyed the franchise of this mighty commonwealth ;
what difference does it make to you whether your term has been five
years or three? To be treated in accordance with the law is equitable
treatment, however it may work out for the individual. So where is the
hardship if you are removed from the commonwealth by the action, not
of a tyrant or of an unjust judge, but of Nature herself by whom you
were originally introduced. Isn't it just like the actor being given his
dismissal from the stage by the public authority that has engaged him ?
"But I haven't played my five acts ; I have only played three of them!"
Quite true; but then Life happens to be a three-act play. And what
constitutes a complete play is a matter for the decision of the power who
was once the author of your composition and is now the author of your
dissolution and in neither of these events have you any say. So take
your departure with a good grace ; for he who dismisses you is gracious/ 1
In this passage the Stoic sovereign of the Roman Empire sub-
mits himself to the Olympian sovereign of the Cosmopolis with the
absolute devotion that is doubtless due to the supreme authority
in a truly 'totalitarian* state; yet there is an earlier passage in
Marcus's meditations in which the philosopher's faith in the exis-
tence of a constitution of the Universe seems to falter and throw
him back upon a bleak reliance on the self-respect of a self that can
look for no support in the Macrocosm.
( The cyclic movements of the Universe repeat themselves, up and
down, from aeon to aeon ; and one of two alternatives must be the truth.
Either the All-Pervading Intelligence takes a fresh initiative each time
and, if that is the truth, it is for you to acquiesce in it or else It took
one primal initiative once for all, and everything else is a consequence
of that in which case, why extenuate yourself? For this would imply
a sort of unbroken continuum. It amounts to this, that if God exists
all's well with the world, while, if the ultimate reality is something with-
out rhyme or reason, that is no excuse for you to take this chaos for your
own standard of behaviour/ 2
In these tragic cries we seem to hear the voice of a devoted
citizen of the Cosmopolis who has suddenly awoken to find that
Zeus has absconded from his presidential post and has left his
faithful servant to bear the burden of Atlas on his solitary human
shoulders. Marcus himself could never have been guilty of such a
betrayal. He bore the terrestrial burden of the Roman Principate
till he dropped dead under its weight. But Marcus's Christian
readers ought not to be too hard on Marcus's Zeus; for Zeus, after
* Marcus, op. cit., Book XII, chap. 36. 2 Ibid., Book IX, chap. 28.
33 8 ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 7
all, had never asked to be elected president of a cosmic republic;
he'had started life as the disreputable war-lord of a barbarian war-
band; and all that we know about him goes to show that this was
the life that he enjoyed. If a Zeus whom the philosophers had
belatedly caught and caged was unable to endure an eternity of
enforced respectability as the senior inmate of a Stoic reformatory,
have we the heart to blame the poor old fellow for proving in-
corrigible ?
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) g (0)
NEW ERAS
ONE of the simplest and most natural ways of celebrating an at-
tempt to make a breach with the Present by taking a flying leap
into the Future is to inaugurate a 'new era*.
This may be done in formal terms, as when the authors of a new
political regime decree that all documents and events are to be
dated officially by their subjects as from the Year One of the reign-
ing Government's accession to power. On the other hand a new
era may obtain a wide currency, and exert a profound influence
upon the Weltanschauung of people who have come to think in
terms of it, through being adopted by a free consensus without the
intervention of any political authority as, for example, the new
era of Hellenic history post Alexandrum came to be adopted as the
principal landmark in the historical retrospect of most of the post-
Alexandrine Greek historians.
Apart from this superficial distinction between an official and a
spontaneous origin, new eras can be classified in a more significant
way according to the nature of the breach which they com-
memorate. This breach may be merely the transition from one
chapter to the next in the unbroken history of a single society; or
it may be one of those sharper and deeper interruptions of con-
tinuity that are produced by the impact 'of one society upon
another. 1 In this sphere the inauguration of a new era may cele-
brate either the experience of conversion to an alien civilization or
the still greater spiritual travail of conversion to an alien religion.
It may be convenient to consider each of these different kinds of
new era separately in an ascending scale measured by the extent
of the breach which they celebrate.
The most notorious Western example of the official inauguration
of a new era to mark the advent of a new political regime is the
substitution, in Revolutionary France, of Years of the Revolution
for Years of Our Lord. In our own day this Revolutionary French
conceit has been followed by the Fascist Regime in Italy, in curious
contradiction with the Fascists' vociferous repudiation of 'the Ideas
of 1789', and with an even more curious disregard for the obvious
consideration that a French era which remained in currency for so
short a span of time is an inauspicious precedent for an Italian
regime which boasts itself to be building for Eternity. The experi-
ence of an independent nationhood which has not only maintained
1 The Contact of Civilizations with one another is dealt with in Parts IX and X below.
34 o ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) g (0)
itself for more than 150 years but has gone in the meantime from
strength to strength would give a greater justification to the
Government of the United States if it were to decide to-day to date
its own official transactions from the year of the Declaration of
Independence; and it is a not impossible tour deforce for a North
American historian to begin his unofficial story with the landing of
the Pilgrim Fathers or at any rate with the voyages of Cabot and
Columbus as an Alexandrian or an Antiochene historian, in his
place and day, might have begun with the crossing of the Helles-
pont by Alexander. In Hellenic historiography the new era which
starts from Alexander's passage into Asia and destruction of the
Achaemenian Empire has its counterpart in another new era which
starts from the foundation of a New Rome on the Bosphorus by
the Emperor Constantine; and this latter-day Hellenic era post
Constantinopolim conditam, which remained a landmark for the
affiliated Orthodox Christian Society after the Hellenic Society
itself had gone into dissolution, has its analogue in a latter-day
Sumeric era, post primam regum Babylonis dynastiam institutam,
which the affiliated Babylonic Society likewise continued to take as
its chronological starting-point.
To return to our own society, we shall find that almost any
modern Western economic historian even if he has been born and
brought up, not in the New World overseas, but in the European
homeland of our civilization is capable of producing in a medieval
quadrangle and under the shadow of a Gothic spire a history pur-
porting to record the economic achievements of Man which will
begin with the Industrial Revolution and will ignore all that hap-
pened, either in the Western World or elsewhere, before the advent
of the so-called 'Machine Age'. 1 In the same futurist spirit a
student of the history of modern Western science or even of
modern Western philosophy may sometimes yield to the tempta-
tion to start with the radiation of the North Italian culture into
Transalpine Europe at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies of the Christian Era.
The unofficial new era, starting circa A.D. 1500, which is com-
monly taken to mark the beginning of the so-called Modern Age
of Western history, is on the borderline between the kind of new
era which signalizes merely the beginning of a new chapter in the
domestic history of a single society and the other, more profoundly
'epoch-making', kind which signalizes the impact of one civiliza^
tion upon another. The conventionally accepted signal of the
1 The contrary view that Man's greatest technical triumphs have been his earliest,
and not his most recent, has been put forward in this Study in III. C (i) (6), vol. iii,
pp. 158-9, above.
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) g () 34^
beginning of our Modern Age has affinities in two respects with
the eras that signalize an impact. In the first place the North
Italian culture which radiated out over the Transalpine parts of the
Western World at that time was a variation of the Western culture
which had differentiated itself on Italian ground during a period
of political insulation which had lasted for some two centuries to
a degree at which the Italians felt and called their Transalpine
fellow Westerners 'barbarians', while the Transalpine peoples
made a silent but eloquent acknowledgement of the Italians' ac-
complished superiority in an imitation of Italian ways which in this
case was unquestionably the sincerest form of flattery. 1 In the
second place this Italian version of the Western culture, which had
already surpassed the Transalpine version by its own efforts, was
enriching itself still further, by the time when it was radiating
abroad, by drawing upon the treasures of the Hellenic culture
which had been brought within its reach by a renaissance of
classical Latin and Greek letters. 2 Thus, for Italy herself, the
Quattrocento introduced a new era which was marked by a contact
in the Time-dimension with the defunct Hellenic Society, while,
for Transalpine Western Europe, the Cinquecento introduced in its
turn a new era in which this Italian contact in Time with Hellenism
was transmitted to the Transalpine countries through the agency
of a contact in the Space-dimension between this Transalpine ruck
of Western Christendom and the now superior Western Civiliza-
tion of contemporary Italy.
Another new era that is likewise on the borderline between a
mere beginning of a new chapter of domestic history and a collision
between two different civilizations is the Seleucid Era which runs
from the October of the year 312 B.C. In the minds of the Seleu-
cidae themselves this era simply commemorated the definitive
establishment of the authority of the Dynasty through the tri-
umphal re-entry of Seleucus Nicator into Babylon on the day that
was taken as the initial date; and in this aspect the Seleucid Era is
comparable to our modern Western eras of the French Revolution
or of the Fascist Regime, while it is precisely analogous to the
Gupta Era, running from the 26th February, A.D. 320,* which
commemorates the definitive inauguration of the authority of the
Gupta Dynasty that eventually re-established the Indie universal
state after an interlude of Hellenic and Nomadic intrusion which
1 See I. B (i), vol. i, p. 19; III. C (ii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 299-305 and 341-57; and IV. C
(111) (c) 2 (a), vol. iv, pp. 274-5, above,
2 F or t he correct usage and the popular misuse of the term 'Renaissance* see IV. C
(in) (c) 2 (a), vol. iv, p. 275, footnote i, above. t
3 See Snr'th, V. A.: The Early History of India, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1914, Clarendon
Press), p. 280.
34Z ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 9 ()
had followed the premature fall of the Mauryas.' In the minds of
the Hellenic contemporaries of the Seleucidae, both inside and
beyond the frontiers of the Seleucid Empire, the official Seleucid
Era probably stood for much the same thing as the unofficial era
which ran from Alexander's passage of the Hellespont some
twenty-two years before Seleucus Nicator's re-entry into Babylon.
Alexander had destroyed the Achaemenian Empire; Seleucus had
founded the principal Hellenic 'successor-state' of the Achae-
menian Empire in Asia; and either event would serve to mark the
sudden vast territorial expansion of the Hellenic World in that
generation. For the Hellenes this expansion was a domestic event,
though this an outstanding one, in their own Hellenic history. The
expansion, however, had been achieved at the Syriac World's ex-
pense; and the sudden violent interruption of the continuity of
Syriac history through the irruption of an alien Hellenism was the
event for which the Seleucid Era stood in the minds of Syriac
peoples who continued to reckon by it long after the Seleucid
Dynasty itself had passed away. 2
This diverse significance of the Seleucid Era in different eyes has
an analogue in the history of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan,
where the Meiji Era, which runs from the year A.D. 1868 of the
Christian Era, commemorates two events that are distinct from
one another notwithstanding their close historical association. On
the one hand the new Japanese Era commemorates the domestic
event of the restoration of the Imperial Dynasty to a position of
authority which it had certainly not enjoyed since A.D. uga, 3 and
perhaps not since A.D. 858.* On the other hand it commemorates
the deliberate 'reception' of the alien civilization of the West a
landmark in the history of the contact between the Far Eastern and
the Western culture which eclipses in importance the domestic
Japanese political revolution that was one of its corollaries.
The corresponding 'reception' of the Western Civilization in the
Russian province of the Orthodox Christian World at a date about
1 For the role of the Guptas in Indie history see I. C (i) (b\ Vol. i, p. 85, above. The
inaugural date of the Gupta Era anticipates the actual foundation of the Gupta Empire
(as distinct from the embryonic Gupta principality) by about thirty years, and the
expansion of this empire to the dimensions of a universal state by about seventy years
(see V. C (ii) (a), pp. 189-90, above).
* The Seleucid Era was not only widely adopted but was also widely imitated by
dynasties and commonwealths which, instead of taking over the Seleucid Era itself,
preferred to institute rival eras of their own (see Meyer, E. : Geschichte des Altertwns^
vol. i, Dart (i), 4th ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 241 ; Tarn, W. W. t The
Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 359).
3 The date of Yoritomo's formal appointment to the new office of Shogun after his
substitution of a Minamoto for a Taira military ascendancy in the Revolution of A.D.
1183-5 and his simultaneous removal of the seat of the de facto government of Japan
from Kyoto to Kamakura. ' '>
* The date of the establishment of the ascendancy of the House of Fujiwara over the
Imperial Government at Kyoto.
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 9 ($ 343
two centuries and three-quarters in advance of its 'reception' in
Japan is not commemorated in any official era ; yet the reign of the
Emperor Meiji is not a more epoch-making period in the history
of Japan than the reign of the Tsar Peter the Great in the history
of Russia; and, if we wish to date the beginning of the new age of
Westernization in Russia from some particular year, we have
several choices at our disposal. 1 We can choose the year A.D. 1689,
which is the date, not of the official beginning of Peter's reign, but
of his actual advent to power; or we can choose the i6th May,
1703, which is the date of the beginning of the building of St.
Petersburg. The foundation of St. Petersburg by Peter was a
symbolic act >of the same significance as the foundation of Con-
stantinople by Constantine. The Roman Emperor who had made
it his mission to convert the Hellenic World to Christianity built
himself a new capital which was to be Christian from the start; 2
and a new capital which was to be Western from the start was built,
in pursuance of corresponding considerations of statecraft, by the
Muscovite Tsar who had made it his mission to westernize all the
Russias.
The conversion of a society to an alien religion is the third type
of epoch-making event that is apt to find expression in the in-
auguration of a new era. A new era commemorating the conversion
of the Hellenic World to Christianity would most naturally be
dated from some event in the career of Constantine the Great
though it might be difficult to select one single event for the pur-
pose, since Constantine's establishment of Christianity as the or
an official religion of the Roman state was (like the Emperor's
own personal adoption of Christianity) a gradual and perhaps never
quite completed process and not either an abrupt or a totalitarian*
act.3 Constantine's career was indeed regarded, as Alexander's had
been regarded, by later generations as a landmark in Hellenic his-
tory which virtually amounted to a new beginning. But this un-
official consensus of feeling was not given expression in the
establishment of a Constantinian Era ; and after the break-up of the
Roman Empire and the concomitant dissolution of the -Hellenic
i We should be less in doubt if we had to choose a date for the inauguration of the
Communist regime under which, in our own day, the process of Westernization, begun
by .Peter the Great, is being carried forward with mcomnarahlv aren^r intAoi>tr ; *k~
c Republics, we snouid ftave little hesitation in dating our Bolshevik Era from the
seizure of power in Petrograd by Peter's authentic successor Lenin on the yth November
(New Style, which is the s>5th October, Old Style), 1917.
! *? S 18 ^ 011 * Constantino's purpose was only partially achieved; for the newly laid
out city that was officially dedicated by its Imperial founder to Christ admitted into its
e a^ovT 1 W0rship of ^ Goddes9 Tyche' (see V. C (i) (d) 4, vol. v, p. 413,
T; . J - H ' Ba y nes in Constantine the Great and
Church (London 1929, Milford),
344 ANNEX TO V. C (i) (<0 9 (#
Society the event that stood out the most prominently in retrospect
to Christians belonging to new societies that were Christian from
the start was not the conversion of the HeUenic World to Chris-
tianity in the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine but the
revelation of Christianity itself through the Incarnation of Christ.
Accordingly, the era which gained currency in Western Christen-
dom from the post-Hellenic interregnum onwards was an era
which took for its initial date the supposed year of the birth of
Jesus; but it is noteworthy that this practice of reckoning by years
of the Christian Era has prevailed only in Western Christendom,
where the evocation of a ghost of the Roman Empire has been a
fiasco and the renaissance of Hellenic letters has been tardy. In
Orthodox Christendom, where a ghost of the Roman Empire was
effectively evoked and Hellenic learning effectively reborn in the
eighth century of the Christian Era, 1 civil servants continued to
date by fiscal 'Indictions' 2 and historians by Tears of the World'.
In the Orthodox and the other non- Western Christendoms the
reckoning by Years of the Christian Era has eventually been intro-
duced as an automatic and ironical consequence of their capitu-
lation to the culture of a Western Society which has itself ceased
to be intrinsically Christians without having taken the trouble to
remove the traditional Christian imprint from its official calendar.
We have still to mention a new era which purports to signalize
a greater new departure in the way of life on Earth than any of
those that we have passed in review so far, and that is the Advent
or, in the Christian version of the belief, the Second Coming 4 -
of a supernatural saviour who is to inaugurate a Millennium of life
which will still be a life on this Earth and in the flesh, but a life to
be lived under unprecedented and unimaginable conditions of
righteousness and felicity. This belief, iri which the beginning of
the new age is not equated with some already accomplished event 5
* For this momentous divergence between the respective courses of events in Western
and in Orthodox Christendom from the eighth century onwards see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (p),
vol. iv, pp. 320-408, with Annexes II and III, above.
* i.e. periodical tax-assessments.
3 For the metamorphosis of a once Western Christian Society into a merely Western
Society at the beginning of the Modern Age of our Western history see I. B (iii), vol. i,
p. 34, above, and Part VII, below. The neutral word 'metamorphosis* can be^ interpreted
to mean either purification or sterilization according to the interpreters 'ideological
bias; but it can hardly be denied that the process has been, whether for better or for
worse, some kind of 'boiling-down* or 'Bowdlerization' which has had the effect of turning
thirlr soup into thin.
* This concept of a Second Coming has .been examined in III. C (ii) (&), Annex I,
vol. iii, pp. 462-5, above.
* In another context (V. C (i) (<f) 9 (y), in the present volume, pp. xao-^a, above) it
has been suggested that the expectation of ,a Millennium is apt, in the historical sequence
of ideas, to arise as a middle term between the expectation of an entirely mundane
ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 9 (ft 345
but is discerned in the future by the eye of Faith, seems to be a
Zoroastrian idea which Judaism has borrowed and handed on to
Christianity. 1 We need not attempt to analyse it in this place,
since we have examined it already in another context. 2
Maccabaeus succeeded in establishing the ephemeral Hasmonaean 'successor-state* of
the Seleucid Empire, was taken as the initial date for a new era in which Jewry was to
reckon by the years of the Messianic Kingdom which the Hasmonaean principality was
blindly assumed by its partisans to be (see von Gall, A. : BacriXeia rov Qeov (Heidelberg
1926, Winter), pp. 388-0).
1 See V. C (i) (d) 7> P- .43, footnote 4, above.
* In V. C (i) (a) g (y), in the present volume, pp. 129-32, above.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) u
'ARISTOPHANES' FANTASY OF CLOUDCUCKOOLAND'
IN the chapters 1 to which this Annex attaches, we have studied in
succession four alternative ways of trying to escape from the
Present which suggest themselves to souls that are being ex-
cruciated by the agonizing experience of living in a society that is
in process of disintegration. In these chapters we have concerned
ourselves mainly with the points of difference between these
diverse inward reactions to a single supreme social challenge. We
have observed the contrast between the two ways Archaism and
Futurism which are attempts to escape from the Present without
abandoning the plane of mundane life, and the other two Detach-
ment and Transfiguration which recognize and act upon the
truth that the only possibility of genuinely escaping from the
Present lies in renouncing This World altogether and migrating
into a different spiritual clime. 2 Again, we have observed the
contrast between the three ways Archaism, Futurism, and De-
tachmentwhich are so many variations upon an act of sheer
withdrawal, and the fourth way Transfiguration which is an act
of withdrawal-and-return. 3 There is, however, one feature, com-
mon to all four ways, which we have so far taken for granted, and
this is that' all four are apt to be pursued (to judge by our survey
up to this point) with a uniform earnestness which is as tragically
intense as the challenge of social disintegration is pitilessly im-
portunate. This last feature perhaps demands further considera-
tion; for, as a matter of historical fact, the importunity of the
challenge is not of one constant degree from beginning to end of
the process. The long descent that leads from the first breakdown
of a society to its final dissolution is not only gradual but is not
even continuous; the routs are punctuated by rallies; 4 and a
spiritual pressure which in the end becomes intolerable is not
imposed upon the Soul in its full force at the outset, but is the
cumulative product of successive turns of a social screw. On this
showing, we might expect a priori to find that the earnestness of the
reaction which the pressure evokes in its victims takes time, like
the pressure itself, to arrive at its maximum; and this expectation
seems to be borne out by the actual history which has been
reserved for examination in this Annex of one particular idea,
V. C(i)(rf)8-ii,above.
2 For this contrast see V. C (i)
volume, pp. 169-70, above. 3 "
4 The movement of Rout-^--^^,
examined in V. C (ii) (6), passim, above.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) u 347
expressing the will to escape, which eventually came to inspire a
grimly earnest political movement and a raptly earnest religious
one, but which made its first recorded appearance on the stage of
history as ajeu d' esprit.
When Saint Paul exclaimed that the Christ Crucified whom he
was preaching was foolishness in the sight of tfie Greeks who seek
after wisdom, 1 he was almost certainly not aware of the literalness
of the sense in which these words were true, for he was almost cer-
tainly unconscious of the historical chain of associated ideas which
linked the - Tarsian Apostle's own faith with a fantasy that had
germinated in the fertile imagination of the Athenian dramatist
Aristophanes more than four hundred and fifty years back in the
first generation of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles'. The links of
this chain hang together, nevertheless, without a break; for Christ
Crucified is the King of the Kingdom of God ; the Kingdom of
God is more commonly known in the New Testament by the name
of the Kingdom of Heaven; and the Kingdom of Heaven was
introduced by Aristophanes to his Attic audience in the guise of
'Nephelococcygia' or 'Cloudcuckooland' a city of refuge in which
the citizens are neither gods nor men but birds.
Aristophanes' Birds was produced at the Great Dionysia in the
spring of the year 414 B.C. ; and this was a critical moment in Hel-
lenic history; for the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization,
which had been heralded by the outbreak of the Atheno-Pelopon-
nesian War in 431 B.C., and had then seemed for a moment to have
been averted after all by the patching-up of a peace in 421 B.C.,
had been made irretrievable by the sailing of an Athenian armada
to Sicily in the summer of 415 B.C., just before the play was com-
posed. The atmosphere in which the Birds was written and pro-
duced was therefore tense; an,d at the same time the tension was
not yet of the agonizing degree to which it afterwards swiftly rose
when the Peloponnesians occupied Decelea in the following spring
and when the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily was annihi-
lated in the following autumn. In the spring of 414 B.C. the
malaise in Athenian souls was already sufficiently uncomfortable to
give topical interest to 'a play of escape', but not yet sufficiently
disturbing to warrant any suggestion that there could be anything
in this idea of an escape except an entertaining fantasy. The play
appears to be innocent of any direct allusion to current military and
political events ; 2 but it is studded with words and phrases and
1 i Cor. i. 22-3, quoted in V. C (i) (d) 11, p. 150, above.
* This feature of the Birds is commented upon as follows by a modern Western
connoisseur of the Attic drama:
*It does seem strange that the poet should have had this successful pursuit of a great
kingdom in the clouds staged just at the time when, as Thucydides and Plutarch tefl us,
Athens was going mad after a kingdom in the west almos| as cloudy, and yet should have
34 g ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
incidents that have an historical significance and a consequent
emotional timbre for latter-day readers which they cannot have
had for a playwright and an audience who were deliberately playing
the fool and who were able to enjoy themselves with an unfeigned
light-heartedness in that spring of 414 B.C. because they were
mercifully unaware of the calamities that k were in store for their
own generation next year and for succeeding generations through-
out the next four centuries. In echoing down the steeps of a Hel-
lenic Time of Troubles* these incidents and phrases and words
that were contrived and coined by Aristophanes and were received
by his Athenian countrymen and contemporaries as a delectable
piece of deliberate foolishness have called forth unintended and
portentous reverberations; and, if we look and listen, we may hear
Aristophanes' nonsensical phrases turn into political and religious
watchwords, and see his farcical incidents reproduce themselves
as acts of high tragedy played out on the stage of 'real life'.
If we wish to assist at a dramatic performance that lasted four
or five hundred years instead of the few hours that it took to play
the Birds in 414 B.C., we may find it convenient first to remind our-
selves of Aristophanes' plot and then to follow out its traces along
two of the historic lines of escape from the Hellenic 'Time of
Troubles' in one direction along the violent political line of
Futurism, and in another direction along the non-political and
non-violent line of approach to a spiritual Transfiguration of This
World through its irradiation with the light of the Kingdom of
God.
The plot of Aristophanes' play is the recapture by the Birds,
under the leadership of a human being, of 'the Kingdom* of the
Universe which had belonged to the Birds originally before the
Gods usurped it.
The Birds' sharp-witted human leader in this brilliantly suc-
cessful coup d'&at is a truant citizen of Athens, Peithetaerus ('Mr.
Plausible'); and the opening of the play discovers him, in the
company of his compatriot Euelpides ('Mr. Hopefulson'), making
intended no particular political reference. Nevertheless it is impossible to discover any
direct allusion, or even any clear attitude towards the schemes for the conquest of Sicily
and Carthage. It cannot be an intentional encouragement of them, yet on the other hand
it does not read like satire. It seems to be just an "escape" from -worry and the sordid-
ness of Hfe, away into the land of sky and clouds and poetry. If people want a cloud
empire, here is a better onel* (Murray, Gilbert: Aristophanes: A Study (Oxford 1933,
Clarendon Press), chap. 6: 'The Plays of Escape' (Birds), pp. 155-6).
In the Athenian mood of the year and the day (which was a holiday m a year of
anxiety but not of disaster) a direct allusion to the hazardous military adventure on
which Athens was at that moment staking her political fortunes might have been irritat-
ingly unwelcome to Aristophanes' audience. And we may perhaps discern in the play-
wright's choice of subject for the Great Dionysia of 414 B.C. the same tact which he
afterwards showed in taking the even more pointedly non-political theme of the Frogs
for a play that was to be produced at the Lenaea of 405 B.C., on the gloomy morrow of
Arginusae and eve of Aegospotami.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 349
tracks from an Athens which is not that tragic City of Destruction
from which Christian flees at the outset of the Pilgrim's Progress,
but a ridiculous City of Botheration in which a fellow never has a
moment's peace from summonses and demand-notes. The trek-
kers are looking for a new home on some soft spot where they can
be sure of a quiet life (11. 27-48 and 121-2); they apply to the
hoopoe on the chance that he may happen to know of such a place
(11. 114-22); and, when he fails to make any helpful suggestion,
Peithetaerus himself is struck by a bright idea. Why should ^not
the Birds exploit their air-power as the Athenians have exploited
their sea-power? The Birds are masters of the clouds and heaven,
and this area is the strategic key to the command of the Universe.
If the Birds now found and fortify a city here they will have Man-
kind at their mercy like insects' (1. 185) and will be able to *do
in' the Gods; for they will be able to intercept the sweet savour of
sacrifice on its way from Earth to Olympus and so to starve the
Olympians into surrender as the Melians had been starved out in
416 B.C. by an Athenian naval blockade (11. 162-93 anc ^ 5S"""&37)<
No sooner said than done. The heavenly city for which Peithe-
taerus invents (11. 809-25) the name of 'Cloudcuckooland* ('Nephe-
lococcygia') is duly built (1L JX22-63); 1 the air-lines along which
the savour of sacrifice has been wont to ascend from Earth to
Olympus are duly cut (11. 1514-24); and the Gods are quickly
forced into a capitulation by this hostile exercise of a veritable
'power of the air'. 2 In return for the raising of the aerial blockade
they have to agree to hand back to the Birds the sceptre which
Zeus has usurped, and also to hand over 'the Queen' (Bcto-SWa) 3 to
the Birds' ci-devant human leader Peithetaerus. In implementa-
tion of the terms Peithetaerus ascends to Olympus and returns to
'CloudcuckoolancP with Zeus* thunderbolt in his hand and *the
Queen* on his arm in the shape of a buxom bride (1L * 535*4* a **d
1713-14). The closing scene is a marriage-feast, and in the last
two lines of the play the chorus hails the happy bridegroom as a
conquering hero and a God of Gods,
TtfveXXa
'Who is the Queen ?* Peithetaerus asks when Prometheus gives
him the 'tip* to insist on the surrender not only of Zeus' sceptre but
1 Unlike the never-to-be-completed lines of circumvallation with which *# At&jmiin
expeditionary forcfe in Sicily was trying to cut the land-communication* of Syncui* tt
the very moment when the Birds was being acted under the lee of the Acropolis* of
Athens.
3 Sic (as the scansion show*): JBao&fftft, not BcuwA*&, and therefore 'Queen*, not
'Sovereignty' or 'Kingdom' (Sheppard, T. J. in Fasciculus Joanni WiUi* Clark &&&*&*
(Cambridge 1909, University Press), p. 532).
350 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
of 'the Queen* as well. Prometheus' answer is that she is c a lovely
girl who keeps in her store-cupboard Zeus' thunderbolt and ^the
rest of his bag of tricks: statesmanship, law-and-order, discretion,
naval bases, vituperation, tithe-collector, and dole' (11. I537-4 1 )*
And, though this answer may leave us still guessing, 1 we can at any
rate identify the kingdom over which this Queen from Heaven has
come down to reign. This Aristophanic caricature is the first ap-
pearance in Hellenic dress of a kingdom that is not of This World.
If we follow the fortunes of the idea through the subsequent
chapters of the Hellenic Time of Troubles', we shall find it
assuming two forms one political and the other religious which
both agree in taking Aristophanes' jest in earnest but otherwise
differ from one another toto caelo.
In the political line of evolution the first step which took rather
more than a century was the metamorphosis of the 'Cloud-
cuckoolancT which had been a poet's conceit into a 'Kingdom of
Heaven' which was the Utopia of a pair^of scholars. One of these
scholars, Euhemerus, was the protege, and the other, Alexarchus,
was the brother, of the post- Alexandrine war-lord Cassander (in
Macedonia dominabatur 3 16-298 B.C.). Cassander's protege had, to
be content with describing his Utopia in a book in which Heaven
(Uranus) figured as the first founder of an oecumenical empire, 2
Cassander's brother was able to command the means of bringing
the Kingdom of Heaven down to Earth by setting up in real life an
oecumenical empire on a miniature scale. On a patch of ground,
given to him by Cassander, at the neck of the Athos Peninsula, 3
Alexarchus built and peopled for all the world like Peithetaerus
in the play a model city-state which was to be a practical sample
i Mr. Sheppard, op. cit., pp. 533-4, points out that the festival of the Great Dionysia,
at which the Birds was produced, followed only a few weeks after the festival of the
Anthesteria, in which the principal rite was a sacred marriage between the god Dionysus
himself and a mortal woman who was 'the Queen* (in this case not BaaCXeia but BaoaAia-
oa) in virtue of being the wife of the King Archon (a ghost of a long since vanished
authentic kingship which lingered on to perform the ritual functions of a Rex Sacrifi-
culus). Mr. Sheppard further points put that the Anthesteria, in their turn, were pre-
ceded by a festival in which the principal rite was a sacred marriage between Zeus and
Hera. Thus, at the season of the Great Dionysia, sacred marriages were in the air.
Mr. Shepjpard's conclusion (op. cit., p. 540) is that 'Peithetairos . . . recalls to the
audience 2eus, with a touch of Dionysus. Basileia recalls the Basilissa, not without a
touch of Hera. The whole scene is at once a reminder of two brilliant functions of
Athenian ritual, and, in itself, to the superstitious an effectual ceremony for the pros-
perity of Athens and the fertilizing of the crops*,
* Tarn, W. W.: Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind (London 1933, Mil-
ford), p, 24.
3 The site bore traces of a ship-canal which had been dug, some two hundred years
bick, at the command of the Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes in order to give passage to
his fleet in a campaign which was to make the Achaemenian Empire literally oecumenical
by bringing the Hellenic World under the dominion to which the Syriac and Babylonic
worlds and portions of the Egyptiac and Indie worlds were already subject. In the
immediate neighbourhood the tangle of sea-girt, tree-clad hiUa between the isthmus and
the mountain was one day to harbour a confederation of Christian monasteries of the
Basilian Order in which Alexarchus*s experiment was to be practised upon the CivitasDei.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 35*
of the ideal world-commonwealth; and he called this city 'Urano-
polis' ( the Heavenly City') and its citizens 'Uranidae' ('the Chil-
dren of Heaven'). 1
lam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto! 2
The title which Alexarchus conferred upon himself in his role
of ruler of this Heavenly City was not 'Heaven' but 'the Sun' ; 3 and
the constitution of the Solar City was set out in a Utopia-on-
Paper which became only less famous than Euhernerus's work
by lambulus, a social theorist who may have been a younger con-
temporary of Euhemerus and Alexarchus, though we know no
more than that he wrote at some date between 290 and 132 B.C. 4 In
lambulus's hands the Kingdom-not-of-this-World was dragged
out of the scholar's study into the arena of political controversy;
for lambulus's 'Heliopolis' was a Utopia that was classless and
communistic. 5 The last step was to translate this egalitarian ideal
into real life; and the experiment was duly made. The reason why
we know that lambulus's book must have been written before the
year 132 B.C. is that this was the date of the desperately serious
attempt of Aristonicus of Pergamum to set up in Western Anatolia
a revolutionary proletarian commonwealth which its would-be
founder inaugurated under the name of 'Heliopolis' and doubtless
intended to build up on the pattern of the imaginary Solar City of
lambulus. 6 Thus the Heavenly Kingdom which had been staged
as a joke by Aristophanes at Athens in 414 B.C. was fought for to
the death in Asia, 282 years later, by the last of the Attalids. In
Aristonicus's hands, however, blood and iron did not show them-
selves to be such efficacious materials for empire-building as they
were one day to prove in Bismarck's; for in 132 B.C. the 'strong man
armed' was quickly overcome by a stronger than he'. 7 Aristonicus's
callow Pergamene 'Heliopolis' succumbed to the overwhelming
power of Rome; 8 and that was the miserable end of 'Cloudcuckoo-
land's' audacious descent into the arena of futurist politics.
* Tarn, op. cit., pp. 21-2. Alexarchus's experiment on the Athos Peninsula must
nave been a going concern* at the moment when it gave birth to a daughter city-state
of the same name m Pamphylia (Tarn, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cam-
bnd^ 1938, University Press), p. 12). * Virgil: Eclogues, No, IV, 1, 7.
3 Tarn Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind, pp. 23-3, According to
Bidez, J. : La Citi du Monde et la Cite du Soleil chez les Stolciem (Paris 1932, Les Belle*
^ettre - enance, and was impo
Cleanthes of Aasoi,
, . i u one et a ite u oe cez les Stolciem (Paris 1932, Les Belle*
i^ettres),pp 32-4, this role of the Sun-God was of Oriental provenance, and was imported
into the Hellenic Weltanschauung by Zeno of Citium's disciple Cleant
ano ' t -
Q,
r\f \ i" 1 ' P ' *$' loc> cit ' ; Bidez P- fr- PP- 37-91 and the present Study, V C
v rrn 5? kV p A 9 ' 7 ' 8 i 2 ' footn ote t> and l8o >' v ; c W W *> vo1 * v > P- 3*4; and
V. M!) (d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, p. 692, footnote 2, above.
arn, op. cat., pp. 9-10. Tarn dates the outbreak of Aristonicus's insurrection
352 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
When we turn from Politics to Religion we shall be struck by
certain correspondences between the Birds and the New Testa-
ment which are perhaps sufficiently numerous and remarkable to
raise the question whether they are fortuitous assonances or the
vestiges of a chain of literary tradition of which nothing now hap-
pens to survive except the beginning and the end. 1
The point of correspondence which we may do well to examine
first, because it is the point which is of the greatest intrinsic impor-
tance, is the assertion made in both these contexts that a man
is God. In the Birds, as we have seen, 2 this claim is made for
Peithetaerus by the chorus ; in the Gospels it is made for Jesus both
by Peter 3 and by Jesus himself; 4 and, if Aristophanes gives this
piece of 'foolishness' a place of honour as the crowning joke of his
play, that is no doubt because his Attic audience agreed with the
Jewish High Priest in feeling such a claim to be the last word in
blasphemy. 5 Thus the formal elements of the incident in the
Gospels and in the Birds are the same however profound the
difference in spirit and meaning and outcome between the comic
scene in the theatre at Athens, where the blasphemously deified
protagonist is carried off the stage in mock triumph, and the tragic
trial in the High Priest's palace at Jerusalem, in which the prisoner
who declares himself to be the Son of God is condemned to death
and led away to execution. 6
The imagery in which Jesus is represented in the Gospels as
making his claim to divinity is taken, of course, from the thirteenth
* The possibility that such a tradition may have propagated itself without being
umnterruptedly conscious and uniformly deliberate by allowing itself, at some stage,
to drift, for part of its way, down the primitive mental stream of 'folk-memory*, is
examined in V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, pp. 438-64, below. Whatever the channel or the
means of conveyance, it is at any rate certain that, somehow or other, the motifs of Attic
works of literature written before the end of the fifth century B.C. did sometimes find
their xvay, post Alexandrian, into works of Oriental literature and did thereby succeed
in giving a new Hellenic turn to old Oriental tales. A conspicuous case in point is the
infusion of the HippoIytus-and-Phaedra motif into the traditional Jewish'story of Joseph
and Potiphar's wife as this is retold in The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in
the Antiquities of Josephus (see Braun, Martin: Griechischer Roman und Hellemstische
Oetchtchtschreibung (Frankfurt a. M. 1934, Klostermann), pp. 23-117, and eundem:
History and Romance in Graeco-Oriental Literature (Oxford 1938, Blackwell), pp. 44-95).
* Sec p. 349, above,
a Matt. xvi. 16 = John vi. 69: 'Thou art the/that Christ, the Son of the Living God.'
i? C c^J* 8 ? 011 **"^ passages in the other two Gospels the claim is not to divinity but
r 7 - *p Messiahhood (Mark viii. 29 = Luke ix. 20); and, according to the orthodox
jewisji belief, the concepts of Messiahhood and divinity are mutually exclusive (see
* *Y' * 9 > passim, and V. C (i) (d) n, p. 163, footnote i, above).
* Matt. xxvi. 6s T 4 (anticipated in xxiv. 30, and in xvi. 28) ; Mark xiv. 61-2 (anticipated
m xw. 26, and in ix. i); Luke xxii. 69-70 (anticipated in ix. 26-7).
/Jj i c ,? me whe f the B * rd * was produced at Athens there were still ten more years
(sea quotes!) to run before Lysander (an unknown name in 414 B.C.) was to enjoy at
vW\ ^ftS*? 00 of bcb * **"> first of * Hellenes to be given divine honours (see
v - c (i) (<f) 6 (S), Annex, vol. v, p. 648, above).
^The motif of mock-acceptance of a claim which the mockery stigmatizes as pre-
"3 does, of course, occur in the story of the Passion. But the claim which is
in the crown of thorns and the purple robe is not the claim to be God but
k be the Lord's Anointed King.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 353
and fourteenth verses of the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel,
in which the Zoroastrian conception of the coming of the SaoSyant
the saviour whose superhuman yet also less than divine status is
indicated in his title of 'the Son of Man' 1 has been seized upon
by a Jewish poet-publicist, writing circa 166-164 B.C., as a vehicle
for the expression of Jewry's hopes of mundane salvation in its
desperate resistance to the high-handed Hellenism of Antiochus
Epiphanes. 2 Yet, although the idea by which Jesus's claim is in-
spired may thus be of Zoroastrian origin, the key words both of the
imagery in the Book of Daniel and of the narrative in the Gospels
are words which are also to be found in a cento of quotations from
the Birds.
The passage in the Book of Daniel (vii. 13-14) runs as follows:
'Behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven
(eVl r&v v<f>X&v rov ovpdvov) and came to the Ancient of Days, and
they brought him near before him. And there was given him
dominion (efovor'a).'
The passage in the Gospel according to Saint Mark (xiv. 61-4)
runs as follows:
The High Priest asked him and said unto him: "Art thou the Christ,
the Son of the Blessed?" And Jesus said: "I am and ye shall see the
Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power (TTJS- Svvdpeais) and
coming in the clouds of heaven (fierd ra>v vefaXwv rov ovpavov)." Then
the High Priest rent his clothes and saith: "What need we any further
witnesses ? Ye have heard the blasphemy".' 3
The passages in the Birds which this passage in the Gospel calls
to mind are the following:
Peithetaerus: 'I spy a great coup which the Birds can bring off, and
a way of getting power (StWfuv), if only you do what I tell you.'
(11- 162-3-)
Peithetaerus: 'Did you see anything?' Hoopoe: 'Just the clouds and
heaven (TO.? ve<f>\a$ ye Kal rov ovpavov). 9 Peithetaerus: 'Well, isn't that
the fairway of the Birds ?' (11. 178-9.)
Peithetaerus: 'Well, what name shall we give our city then? 1 Chorus:
'Some utterly vacuous name which we will take from the clouds and
from the supernal regions.' Peithetaerus: 'Will "Cloudcuckdoland" do
for you ? ... It is the same as the Phlegraean Plain the place where the
1 See V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), pp. 126 and 130-1, and V. C (i) (d) n, p. 163, footnote i,
above.
2 For Antiochus Epiphanes' policy of forcible Hellenization see V, C (i; (d) 9 (/?),
pp. 103-5, above.
3 In the corresponding passage according to Saint Matthew (xxvi. 63-5) the Marcan
text is reproduced in substance (including, in particular, all the words that have been
quoted above t in the original Greek, except that the Marcan p^rd is here replaced by
the Danielic em). In the corresponding passage according to Saint Luke (xxii. 66-71)
'the right hand of the power of God' has been retained but the 'coming in the clouds
of heaven has been omitted.
354 ANNEX I TO V, C (i) (d) n
Gods took on the Giants, and walked away from them, in a competition
in false pretences.' (11. 817-19 and 824-5.)
Chorus (to Peiihetaerus): *0 God of Gods!' (11. 1764-5.)
If these correspondences are not to be dismissed as a fortui-
tous concourse of accidents, but are to be taken as evidence for
some chain of literary reminiscence which runs (through however
many missing links and altered meanings) from Aristophanes'
Birds to the Book of Daniel and thence to the Gospels, then
we may see in the change of connotation that has come over the
word 'power' en route 1 an example of the working of the principle
of 'etherialization'. 2 And this may recall a passage from the
Gospel according to Saint Matthew (vL 26) which we have quoted
already in our examination of that principle at an earlier point in
this Study. 3
* Behold the fowls of the air : for they sow not, neither do they reap nor
gather into barns (dwroflij/cas) ; yet your heavenly father feedeth them.
Are ye not much better than they ?'
The first of the three points that are made in this passage of the
Gospel namely, the point that a bird's life is happy in being
care-free is also made in the following passage of Aristophanes'
play:
Euelpides: *And what is life like here this life that one leads among
the Birds ?' Hoopoe: 'It is not without charm when you come to try it.
Well, first you have to live without a purse.' Euelpides: 'And that at
one stroke takes half the falsity out of life.' Hoopoe: 'And then we
browse in gardens on white sesame-grains and myrtle-berries and
poppy-seed and cress.' Euelpides: 'You seem to live like a bridal pair
on honeymoon.* (11. 155-61.)
A comparison of the two passages shows that, while an identical
idea is the theme of both of them, this idea is not expressed in
identical words or even in identical illustrations; and in this case,
as in the other which we have just examined, it is possible to point
out passages of Jewish, literature which are older than the Gospel
though not older than Birds* from which the Gospel may have
1 This change in the meaning of the Greek word StW;us from the sense of 'military
power' to that of 'divine power* is recoided not only in the vocabulary of Christianity
but also in that of the abortive contemporary religion of the Samaritan Simon Magus
(see V. C (i) (d) 6 (8). Annex, vol. v, p. 685, footnote 3, above), of whom it waa asserted
by his worshippers that ofef *' * *-*--- -* *>-- * ^ '* -- -^
, . , . , , ,
ovros eoriv 17 St/veuus rov &ov 17 /t^yoAiy (Acts viii. 10),
2 For this principle see III. C (i) (c), vol. iii, pp. ? 74-92, above.
3 In III. C (i) (c), vol. iii, p. 191. In that place the chapter of the Gospel has been
wrongly cited as vii instead of vi.
* The Book of Job is at any rate not older than the Birds, though its date of compo-
sition is on any hypothesis sufficiently early to make it unlikely that any Hellenic influ-
ences should have found their way into it. On the other hand, as far as the question 6f
date goes, there would not be the same a priori unlikelihood of Hellenic influences being
traceable in the Psalms.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) u 355
been borrowing. The variant of the same parable in the Gospel
according to Saint Luke (xii. 24) runs :
'Consider the ravens; for they neither sow nor reap which neither
have storehouse (ra^lov) nor barn (aTrodrjKrj) ; and God feedeth them.
How much more are ye better than the fowls ?'
And this version, in which the theme is enunciated with reference,
not to birds in general, but to birds of one particular kind, has at
least two antecedents in the Jewish scriptures :
'He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry*
(Psalm cxlvii, verse 9);
and
'Who provideth for the raven his food ? When his young ones cry
unto. God, they wander for lack of meat' (Job xxxviii. 41).
These two passages not only agree with the passage in Luke, and
differ from the passage in the Birds, in speaking of ravens in par-
ticular and not of birds in general; they further differ from the
Birds, while agreeing this time not only with Luke but with
Matthew as well, in the point that they make. They do not re-
mark, as both Aristophanes and the Gospels do, that the birds
obtain their livelihood without having to practise the rational and
provident but, by the same token, anxious economy which is
Man's characteristic way of earning his living; but they do declare,
as the Gospels do but Aristophanes does not, that this enviable
insouciance is practicable for the birds because their food is pro-
vided for them by God. On this showing, the passage in the
Gospels can be at least partially accounted for as a derivative from
Jewish sources; and, if this were all, the point of correspondence
between the Gospels and the Birds which has no counterpart in
the Old Testament might conceivably be dismissed as a freak of
Chance. We have, however, to take into account another passage
of pagan Hellenic literature which is unmistakably related to the
passage in the Gospels by a literary kinship which is distinctly
closer than that which links the Gospels in this instance to the
Book of Job and to the Hundred and Forty-Seventh Psalm; and
that is a passage from one of the works of Gaius Musonius Rufus,
a Stoic philosopher who was a contemporary of the authors of the
two Gospels here in question. 1
This passage of Musonius is a fragment of a dialogue between a
Stoic sage and a lay inquirer. The layman is putting the difficulties
1 On the assumption that the Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint Luke
in A.D. 95.
356 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
that deter him from responding to the philosopher's se.rious call to
a detached and blissful life, and the philosopher is trying to resolve
the layman's doubts.
Layman: 'That is all very well; but I am a poor man financially
destitute and I have a swarm of children. Where am I going to find
the means to bring them up?* Philosopher: 'Well, how do these little
birds that are much more destitute than you ar.e the swallows and
nightingales and larks and blackbirds manage to bring up their young?
Homer, too, has something to say about that: "And as a bird proffers a
morsel, when at last she gets one, to her unfledged young, though she
is sore an hungred herself . . . ."* Are these creatures superior to Man in
intelligence ? The question can only be answered in the negative. Well,
are they superior in physical strength ? The answer is in the negative
a fortiori. Well, do the birds store (cwr<m'0Tai) food and hoard it?' 2
It will be seen that, in contrast to Aristophanes, Musonius not
only propounds the same theme as the Gospels, but also propounds
it in the self-same words and images (e.g. Musonius's arcoriderai
corresponds to the cwroftj/cq of both Gospels, and his ^vAacrcra to
the rajLcetov of the Gospel according to Saint Luke). And a still
more striking proof of literary kinship is the fact that the text of
Musonius contains two of the three points that are made in the
Gospels, whereas the passage in the Birds and the pair of passages
from the Book of Job and from the Hundred and Forty-Seventh
Psalm only contain one of these points apiece. The three points
are as follows: (a) the Birds manage to live without practising a
human economy; 3 (jS) they manage this because their food is given
them by God; (y) if the birds can manage it, then we human
beings, who are so much their superiors, can certainly manage it
a fortiori. Of these three points, (a) is common to the Gospels
and the Birds and Musonius; (j3) is common to the Gospels and
1 Iliad, Book IX, 11. 323-4. A.J.T.
2 This passage of Musonius will be found in The Rcndel Harris Papyri of Wood-
brooke College, Birmingham, edited by Powell, J. E. (Cambridge 1936, University
Press), Part I, No. i, pp. 4-5. Before the discovery of the papyrus containing this text,
the whole of that portion of the fragment which has been quoted above, save for the
opening words 'That is all very well', was unknown to modern Western scholarship;
for these words were the last in the extract that had been handed down by a continuous
literary tradition. The text of the fragment in this already known shorter form, in which
the parable of the birds is not included, will be found in O. Hense's edition of Musonius
(Leipzig 1905, Teubner), Fragment No. XVA, pp. 78-9. The identity of this already
known fragment with the papyrus text, in which the name of the author was missing,
was first pointed out by Mr. M. P. Charlesworth; and it was also he who drew the
attention of the writer of this Study to the Jewish pedigree of the ravens in Luke xii. 24.
3 This point (a) is also made apropos, not of the^birds of the air, but of the beasts
apparatus, in contrast to the helplessness of the puling human babe, proves the thesis
(enunciated ibid., 11. 198-9):
nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
naturam rerum: tanta stat praedita culpa.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 357
the pair of passages from the Old Testament; (y) is common to the
Gospels and Musonius. Thus Musonius not only has one point in
common with the Gospels that is not to be found in either Aristo-
phanes or the Old Testament: he also has a second point in com-
mon with the Gospels which is not to be found in the Old Testa-
ment but is to be found in Aristophanes (though it is to be noticed
that in this point Musonius comes less close to Aristophanes than he
comes to the Gospels, since there is some community of imagery
and vocabulary between him and the Gospels, but not between
him and Aristophanes).
The exact literary relation between these several passages of
Christian and Hellenic and Jewish literature is perhaps impossible
to trace out with any certainty. Since Musonius and the authors
of the Gospels appear to have been contemporaries, it is theoreti-
cally conceivable in the absence of evidence for determining the
exact dates of publication of their respective works that Musonius
may have borrowed direct from the Evangelists, and equally con-
ceivable, vice versa, that the Evangelists may have borrowed from
Musonius. But neither of these theoretical possibilities will seem
very probable when we consider the greatness of the gulf which
in that generation still divided the cultivated circles of the Hellenic
dominant minority, to which Musonius belonged, from the Syriac
section of the Hellenic internal proletariat which was the cradle of
the Christian Church. On the whole it seems more probable that
Musonius and the authors of the Gospels were each drawing
independently on some common source to which Aristophanes and
the Jewish scriptures had each made some contribution (though,
as likely as not, an indirect one). 1
1 There is a parallel to this rather baffling three-cornered literary relation between
Aristophanes, the New Testament, and Musonius in another three-cornered relation
between the New Testament and a pair of pagan authors of whom, in this second case
likewise, one was pre-Christian while the other lived and wrote in the Christian Era.
In this second case the piece of imagery in the Gospels that is matched by this pair of
correspondences in pagan Greek literature is found in Matthew and Mark, and there is
a vestige of it in Luke as well. The pre-Christian Greek author in this case is not
Aristophanes but Aeschylus. The post-Christian author is Philostratus (vivebat circa
A.D. 170-250).
The passage of Philostratus that is reminiscent of both Aeschylus and the Gospels
occurs in Philostratus's work on the Hellenic philosopher-thaumaturge Apollonius of
Tyana, whose long life was approximately conterminous with the first century of the
Christian Era. Near the beginning of his own book Philostratus recounts the following
story of Damis a previous biographer of Apollonius who was his subject's contem-
porary and disciple.
'On one occasion 'he [Damis] was being harried by a critic with a loose tongue and
a malicious mind who made the point that it was all very well for Damis to put on
record important things like Apollonius's maxims and speculations, but that when he
went on to pick up tiny trivialities he was doing like the dogs who feed on the scraps
that fall from the feast. At this point Damis cut in with the retort that "If there are
feasts of the Gods at which it is gods that are feeding, then as a matter of course there
will be servants in attendance who will see to it that even the scraps shall not be lost
when these are scraps of ambrosia!"* (Philostratus: Apollonituof Tyana,#ook I, chap. 19).
There is patently some literary connexion between this passage of Philostratus and
358 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
There are two more assonances between the Birds and the
Gospels which perhaps deserve notice here in spite of their both
being trivial in themselves for the possible bearing that they may
have upon the more important correspondences that have been
examined above. The Informer's plaintive question 'What else
would you have me do ? For I do not know how to dig' 1 is echoed
in the Unjust Steward's discreet reflexion: What shall I do?
For ... I cannot dig.' 2 And Jesus's enigmatic saying that 'the
Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by
force' 3 is anticipated by Euelpides* satirical remark that at Athens
'aliens are pushing their way in by violence' 4 at the very time when
he and Peithetaerus, who are native-born Athenian citizens, are
leaping out of their native land with both feet in the air. 'I cannot
dig' sounds as though it must have been a proverbial apologia for
the practice of any easy but discreditable trade; and, if it was a
mot that passed from mouth to mouth wherever the Attic KOIVTJ
was spoken, it might find its way into works of literature at wide
intervals of time and place without there being any literary kinship
between the diverse works in which it made its appearance. On
the other hand, the motif of outsiders making a forcible entry into
a commonwealth which has won prestige abroad is perhaps too
Mark vii. 27-8 (with its counterpart in Matt. xv. 26-7, and its vestige in Luke xvi. 21,
where 'crumbs falling from the table* are also mentioned in juxtaposition with 'dogs',
though in this context it is not the dogs that eat the crumbs, but the beggar Lazarus).
If Philostratus has taken his story about Damis from Damis himself, who was a con-
temporary of the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, then the literary problem here is
precisely parallel to that of the relatir-a between the Gospels and Musonius. And the
echo of Aristophanes in Musonius likewise has its parallel in an echo, in Philostratus,
Aeschylus would appear to be independent of his relation to the New Testament; for
Damis's word 'feasts' (Satrcs), as reported by Philostratus, comes nearer to Aeschylus's
word 'banquets' (Sewrauv), as reported by Athenaeus, than it comes to the word 'table'
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. On the other hand the Aeschylean epigram lacks the
feature, which is common to Philostratus and the Gospels, of scraps of human food
falling and being eaten by dogs ; and it also stands in vacuo, whereas the corresponding
sayings that are attributed to Damis and to the Syro-phoenician woman are both intro-
duced, in the contexts in which they respectively occur, as disarming retorts to a provo-
cation. The points that are common to all the three contexts are: (a) some one gives an
arrestingly humble estimate of his own worth in a simile taken from the dinner- table;
(/J) the parable consists in a depreciation of the part by comparison with the whole
whether the part be a crumb falling from the table or a slice carved from the joint.
We may also notice a correspondence between the Gospels and a passage in the work
of a Stoic philosopher of a later generation than that of Musonius and Damis. 'Can I
really fear somebody to whom I -am able to abandon my body ?* (Epictetus : Dissertations,
Book I, chap. 23, 13) sounds to a Christian ear like an echo of Matt. x. 28, and Luke
xii. 4, though the master whom Epictetus here believes himself to be following is not
Jesift but Diogenes.
1 rt yapnaScty, aKairreiv yap OVK cirtarafiai (Birds, 1. 1432).
2 rt Trotmro), ort . . . aKairrew OVK toYvw (Luke xvi. 3).
3 17 j5oaiAia rwv oupavaiv jSia Jerat, iccu j8taaral apird^ovaiv aunjv
vi, 16). For a further assonance tr j ^' ..-..-*-
lirds and a saying that is attributed
Annex II, p. 41^5, below.
* o pv yap cov OVK daros effj3iacTOi (Birds, 1. 32).
,- , , w *> aunjy (Matt. xi. 12; cf. Luke
xvi, 1 6). For a further assonance between this pair of sayings in the Gospels and the
Birds and a saying that is attributed to King Cleomenes III of Sparta see V. C (ii) (a),
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 359
complicated an image to pass, like *I cannot dig', into popular
currency; and, if this motif first appears in a context where it does
explain itself, and then reappears and this with a clear verbal
echo 1 in a diiferent context where its meaning is obscure, it
would be a not unreasonable inference to suppose that the later
context in which the motif occurs is related to the earlier by a
literary tradition in which a motif that originally served a purpose
has been mechanically preserved after it has ceased to have a point
and even ceased to be intelligible.
There is one more question that may conveniently be discussed
in this Annex because it arises out of topics that have just been
examined in the present context; and this final question may be
put in the following way. One of the most prominent of the motifs
that are common to the Birds and the Gospels is a claim to divinity
that is made either by or on behalf of beings who are not gods
at any rate not according to the current convention of the time and
place at which the claim has been put forward. Whether this
claim is treated as a joke (as it is by Aristophanes) or as a supremely
serious and momentous revelation of ultimate truth (as it is in the
Gospels), there is one common feature in the treatment of it in
both contexts: in both it is treated as something unexpected to the
point of being startling. Now the beings who are not gods in the
ordinarily accepted sense, but in respect of whom this claim to
divinity is nevertheless made, are beings of two different kinds.
Some of them are men; some of them are bird?. And our question
is this: To Hellenic minds in 414 B.C., which claim to divinity
would seem the more preposterous ? A bird's claim or a man's ?
There is reason to believe that, in the mind of a Hellene of Aristo-
phanes' day, it required a greater effort of imagination to deify
a man than to deify a bird.
The ground for this opinion lies in the probability that, even off
the comic stage, the birds of the air were invested with a certain
aura of divinity in the eyes of the generation of Hellenes who were
Aristophanes' contemporaries. Aristophanes himself has devoted
an appreciable part of his play (e.g. 11. 467-538 and 685-736) to
a presentation of the thesis that the Birds were the original and
legitimate lords of the Universe; that the present lordship of the
Gods is a usurpation at the Birds' expense; and that even now
there are tell-tale traces of the Birds' lost status which the Gods
have either neglected or failed to efface. There are two particular
traces that the playwright calls in evidence. One is that some
of the reigning gods who are represented by statues in human
form are also regularly accompanied in Hellenic works of art by
1 i.e. -with Ptdfcrai echoing eaptd&rai.
360 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n
representations of birds that are regarded as being their res-
pective familiars or emblems. Zeus, for example, has his eagle,
Athena her owl, 1 Apollo his hawk (Birds, 11. 514-16). The second
piece of evidence that Aristophanes cites is the role still played by
birds in the magic arts of omen-taking and fortune-telling (Birds y
11. 716-22). This thesis that the Birds are ci-devant gods 2 is pre-
sented by Aristophanes in the tone of mock-earnestness that is
proper to the Old Comedy; and, if the evidence that Aristophanes
offers us were all that we had at our command, we might be at
a loss to know whether it was to be taken at all seriously or whether
it was to be written off, from alpha to omega, as a sheer prank of
the poet's riotous imagination. Fortunately, however, we have, as
it happens, a good deal of independent evidence; and the conclu-
sion to which this leads us is that Aristophanes* thesis was not
really such arrant nonsense as the author himself would ostensibly
have us believe.
On the one hand we find the Birds figuring as quasi-super-
natural beings and this particularly in virtue of a supposed fore-
knowledge of impending events in Modern Greek folklore; and
on the other hand it seems (though here the evidence is scantier)
that the Birds were objects of religious veneration in the Minoan
World. 3 If the birds of the air have had this divine, or at any rate
semi-divine, status in the eyes of both the pre-Hellenic and the
post-Hellenic inhabitants of the region which was Hellas in an
intervening age, there would be a presumption in favour of the
hypothesis of there being an historical connexion between two cults
of birds which are so similar in character and which have been
practised in one and the same area, albeit in two different ages that
are separated from each other by a chronological gap. On this
hypothesis we should expect to find our bird-cult in existence
under the surface during the intervening reign of Hellenism even
though, in that age, the dominant religion were anthropomorphic
and not theriomorphic. And this is, of course, what we do find;
for Aristophanes' thesis that the Birds had a touch of divinity
1 The owl was Athena's bird in the city that bore her name (or rather the plural name
of the multitude of images of her that were to be found there). In the Odyssey, however,
which was not written on Attic soil, there are two passages in which Athena is depicted,
not as being merely accompanied by a bird, but as herself assuming the form of one;
and this Homeric bird-shape of Athena is not an owl*s in either case. In one passage
(Odyssey, Book XXII, I. 240) the bird whose form Athena assumes is a swallow; in the
other passage (Odyssey, Book I, I. 320) it is a sea-eagle, if that is really the meaning of
the mysterious word
.
This notion of ci-devant gods who have been deposed and suppressed was of course
familiar to the Hellenic minds of Aristophanes' age in the legend of the Titans. The
complementary conception of the reigning Olympians as usurpers who have won and
kept their dominion by force is inherent in the picture of Zeus and his fellow divinities
as a war-lord and his war-band (for this picture see I. C (i) (&), vol. i, pp. 96-7, and V. C
(i) (c) 3, vol. v, pp. 231-3, above).
3 On this point see Murray, op. cit., pp. 147-8.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (<*) n 361
about them in the eyes of the Hellenes of his own day is borne
out by a wealth of other evidence that comes not only from literary
but also from archaeological sources.
On this showing, Aristophanes has exercised the professional
skill that we should have expected of him in taking the thesis of
the Birds being gods as a theme for one of his dramatic jeux
d'esprit. He has here put his hand upon a joke which, for an
audience accustomed to the Hellenic Weltanschauung of the day,
was preposterous enough to be amusing without being quite so
preposterous as to defeat itself by altogether passing the bounds
of imagination. The fantasy was not unimaginably fantastic and
the blasphemy not scandalously blasphemous because the foolery
had in it an ingredient which 'unto the Greeks' was not sheer
'foolishness', but was something that most of the people who were
assembled in the theatre at Athens for the Great Dionysia of
414 B.C. would unconsciously take for granted and might even,
if pressed, acknowledge to be truth 1 however difficult it might be
to reconcile a traditional belief in the semi-divinity of birds with
the 'wisdom' after which the Greeks were by this time already
beginning to seek along the paths of Reason. 2
In Aristophanes' catalogue of Olympian Gods who had birds
for their familiars or their emblems 3 there is one name which is
conspicuous by its absence, and that is Aphrodite's; for the Olym-
pian Goddess of Love was popularly associated with birds, and
these of many kinds : the iynx, the swan, the swallow, the sparrow,
the dove. None of these bird-familiars of Aphrodite is mentioned
by Aristophanes in the play. 4 The playwright himself, however,
figures as a participant in one of Plato's imaginary dialogues the
m * For the alloy of 'fact' (whether actual or merely reputed) which is an indispensable
ingredient in so-called 'works of fiction', see I. C (Hi) (e) t Annex, vol. i, pp. 449-50, above.
2 Has the poet likewise tempered, by another touch of the same deft art, his salutation
of his human hero as 'God of Gods' (1. 1765, cited in this Annex on pp. 349, 352,
and 35^, above)? We have suggested (on pp. 352 and 359) that, in a generation of
Hellenic rationalists who had not yet lived to see divine honours conferred upon Lysan-
? r> t^e deification of a man might appear even more preposterous than the deification
of a bird to the minds of an Attic playwright's audience. In the growth-stage of the
Hellenic Civilization the distinction between human and superhuman beings was clearly
maintained as a rule. There was, however, one exception; for a human being who had
successfully performed the supremely creative social act of founding a new city-state
was customarily worshipped not indeed as a god, but as a hero by the community
of which he had made himself the historical apxyyerys. Now Aristophanes, in the
middle act of the Birds, almost goes out of his way to show us Peithetaerus painstakingly
performing the ritual which would be incumbent upon a founder. He sets to work to
inaugurate his aviary by solemnly giving it a name and then clinching the ceremony by
offering sacrifice (II. 809-11), and, in spite of successive interruptions, he succeeds in
accomplishing both these duties (11. 1 1 1 8-20) before a messenger arrives to announce
that the city has been constructed de facto (11. 1122-67) besides having been inaugurated
de jure. In the minds of Aristophanes' audience, would these transactions imply that
Peithetaerus had now qualified himself to rank as an ap^yenjy? And would this perhaps
that this was not a bird that was popularly associated with this goddess in current folklore.
362 ANNEX I TO V. C (i) <tf)
Symposium in which the topic of discussion is that faculty of
Love which was recognized as being Aphrodite's province before
it was revealed in a new light as the heart of Christianity; and in
the Symposium itself a first step is taken on the long journey to-
wards the Christian view of Love from the traditional Hellenic
attitude towards it when one of the speakers declares that there is
not one Aphrodite but two Aphrodites and therefore not one kind
of Love but two likewise. 1 Besides Aphrodite the Vulgar (Pan-
demus) there is an Aphrodite the Heavenly (Urania), says Plato's
Pausanias. 2 And this Platonic clue may encourage us to look for
traces of the passage of the Heavenly Love, of which this Heavenly
Aphrodite was the Hellenic image, from the bleak spiritual clime
of the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' to a Christian haven. In the
story told in the Gospels 3 the supernatural designation of Jesus as
the Son of God is not only proclaimed orally by a voice from
Heaven but is also visually revealed by an opening of the Heavens
and a descent of the Spirit upon Jesus in the shape of a dove ; and
on the strength of this incident in the New Testament the dove
has become the emblem of the Holy Ghost in Christian art; but
this is not the first case in which the dove has figured as an emblem
of divinity; for in Hellenic art, as we have already noticed, the dove
is an emblem of Aphrodite. May we venture to infer that the
visual image in which the Spirit of God is depicted in the Gospels
has been derived from a Hellenic source ? Such imagery cannot
be of native Jewish origin; for the second of the ten Command-
ments forbids the visual representation of any object whatsoever,
and to portray God Himself in the shape of a living creature that
was not even human would be the most shocking violation of the
Second Commandment that a Jewish mind could conceive. Biit
if it is thus evident that the image of a dove, even if it should
prove to have been inherited by Christianity from Judaism, must
previously have made its way into Judaea from elsewhere, then we
must look for the nearest possible antecedent provenance; and, as
soon as we look, we cannot fail to observe how short a flight it is
to the banks of Jordan from the coasts of Paphos.
To return for the last time to the Birds, we may notice, in the
present connexion, that the descent of a winged harbinger of peace
is also one of the incidents in Aristophanes' play, 4 and that the
1 The distinction between the two kinds of Love which was thus drawn by Plato was
afterwards emphasized, in the Greek vocabulary of the New Testament, by a difference
of name. The new word ayarnj was coined to denote the etherial Love that, in Plato's
terms, was the spirit of the Heavenly Aphrodite, in contrast to the grosser Love, patron-
ized by Aphrodite PandSmus, with which the word Er6s was too deeply compromised
to be acceptable to a Christian ear.
2 Pausanias in Plato's Symposium, 180 D-E.
3 Matt. iii. 16; Mark i. 10; Luke iii. 22; John i. 32-3.
* Aristophanes: Birds , 11. 1196-1261.
ANNEX I TO V. C (i) (d) n 363
Olympian goddess Iris, whom the Athenian playwright casts for
this part, is described by him in an earlier passage 1 in language
borrowed from a Homeric simile as 'like unto a gentle dove'. 2
This brings us to the end of an argument which points to a para-
doxical conclusion. If our argument has any force, the conclusion
can only be that Aristophanes 1 lightly uttered foolishness is some-
how less remote than Zeno's scrupulously pondered wisdom from
a Gospel that, in Christian belief, is God's revelation of His Truth.
This verdict would no doubt have astonished the Athenian play-
wright as greatly as it would have incensed the Cypriot sage ; and,
if the English reader is inclined, in his turn, to exclaim, with
Horatio, that 'this is wondrous strange', the writer must answer,
with Hamlet, that
'There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'
In the comedy which the Muses moved Aristophanes to write for
performance in the holy place of Dionysus on the flank of the
Acropolis of Athens in the year 414 B.C., the goddesses seem to
have been doing their best to exercise the second of two powers
of which they had boasted, centuries before, to shepherds 'abiding
in the field' 3 on the flank of holy Helicon:
tBfjiev favSea iroXXa Aeyeiv zrvfioiaw o/xoz,
iS/u-cv 8', eiSr' cWAcoju-ev, aXyOea yqpvcrao'flai. 4
The monument of the Muses' other boasted power to wit, the
knack of telling specious lies 5 is presumably the theogony which
they recited to one of those shepherds of Ascra whom they had
greeted with such an insulting form of address; 6 but, when the
time was to come for another theogony, which might prove to be
the truth, to be announced to other shepherds,? the scene of the
1 The simile is applied to Iris and Eileithyia in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 1. 114,
and to Hera and Athena in Iliad. Book V, 1-778- , * .
3 The word used by Hesiod of himself and his fellow shepherds in Theogony, 1, 26, is
aypavXoii the word used of the shepherds in Luke ii. 8, is avpavXotivres. (This assonance
was pointed out to the writer of this Study by Professor H. T. Wade-Gery.)
4 Hesiod: Theogony , 11. 27-8.
3 This knack is commended by Aristotle as one of the, important weapons in a poet s
armoury (see I. C (iii) (<?), Annex, vol. i, p. 450, footnote i, above). B .
6 KO.K cAeygea, yaorcpes olov (Hesiod : Theogony, 1. 26). It is curious to find a variation
on this form of insult turning up in the Cretan prophet Epimenides poem Minos and
being quoted with approbation by a missidhary of Christianity (Titus i. iz^iorjne
recipients of theogonies ? This trait is not only common to the Hellenic and the Chris-
tian Mytholpgy: it is also one of the more striking of the details in which these two
mythologies agree in painting the same mysterious picture. Some light is perhaps
thrown on this particular point of agreement by a passage in the mythical colloquy
between Solon and the Saite priest in Plato's Timaeus. The gist of the passage (which
has been quoted above in IV. C (i), vol. iv, pp. 24-5) is that Egypt has been exempted
364 ANNEX I TO V, C (i) (d) n
revelation was to be the countryside of Judaea and not of Boeotia,
and the glad tidings were to be delivered by the tongues, not of
Muses, but of Angels. It would almost seem as though all that
the Muses themselves were able to do by way of demonstrating
their power to tell the truth when they chose, as well as to counter-
feit it as a rule, was to instil here and there a darkly anticipatory
meaning into some of the winged words of an insouciant Athenian
poet on the brink of a Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' that was to
close, after unspeakable tribulations, in the Angels' proclamation
of 'glory to God in the highest and peace on Earth to men of good
will'. 1
by Nature from the incidence of recurrent physical catastrophes which visit the rest of
the Earth, including Hellas, and which account for the frequent breaches of continuity
everywhere save in Egypt in the transmission of culture. When the oecumenical
catastrophe takes the form of a deluge, 'the shepherds and herdsmen on the mountains
survive, while the inhabitants of your towns in 'Hellas are swept away by the rivers'
and with them perishes, each time, their barely achieved sophistication. 'When the
waters that are above the firmament descend upon you like a recurrent malady* they
'only permit the illiterate and uncultivated members of your society to survive, with
the result that you become as little children and start again from the beginning with no
knowledge whatever of Ancient History.' This drastic destruction of a cultural heritage
is assumed by the Saite priest to be a grievous loss; but the contrast between the respec-
tive states of the Egyptiac and Hellenic worlds in either Solon's day or Plato's suggests
that there may be another side to the story. The possession of old knowledge may be
an impediment to the acquisition of new knowledge; and, if so, the heritage may be a
burden from which it is a blessing to be even forcibly relieved. 'Except ye be converted
and become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven* (Matt.
xviii. 3). The guileless shepherds who have survived the flood have hearts that are
ready, to receive a new revelation.
1 Lukeii. 14.
ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (d) n
SAINT AUGUSTINE'S CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN THE MUNDANE AND THE SUPRA-MUNDANE
COMMONWEALTH
THE problem of the relations between the Kingdom of God and
the Society of This World a society which, for Saint Augustine,
is embodied in the oecumenical empire of Rome is a thread that
runs right through the texture of the De Civitate Dei] and it would
be impossible even to attempt to follow out consecutively the
course of Saint Augustine's thought on this question without being
drawn into making a systematic analysis of his magnum opus. In
this place we cannot do more than quote a few passages that
illustrate certain crucial points.
One crucial point with which Saint Augustine deals is the ques-
tion of what is the essential difference between the two common-
wealths; and in making this spiritual assay Saint Augustine takes
Love as his touchstone.
'The great distinction which differentiates the two commonwealths
the society of the religious and the society of the irreligious is this : in the
one the love of God comes first, in the other the love of Self. . . . Indeed,
the two commonwealths have been created by the two loves the
earthly commonwealth by a love of Self that goes to the length of con-
temning God ; the heavenly commonwealth by a love of God that goes
to the length of contemning Self. The one glories in itself, the other
in the Lord. The one seeks glory from men ; the other finds its greatest
glory in God as the witness to its own good conscience. The one lifts
up its head in its own glory ; the other says to its God : My glory and the
lifter up of mine head. 1 The one is dominated by a thirst for domination
in its princes and in the nations which it subdues; in the other those in
authority and those under authority serve one another mutually and
lovingly by taking counsel and by following it. The earthly common-
wealth loves its own strength as displayed in its own mighty men; the
heavenly commonwealth says to its God: / will love thee, O Lord my
strength. 2 And so in the earthly commonwealth its wise men, living on
the human level, pursued the interests of the body or the mind or both,
while those among them who succeeded in knowing God glorified Him
not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and
their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise (that is,
extolling themselves for their own wisdom under the dominion of pride),
they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an
image made like to corruptible Man and to birds and four-footed beasts and
creeping things (for the leaders of the peoples, or their followers, were
given over to the adoration of images of this kind) and worshipped and
served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. 3 On the
f * Ps, iii. 3. a Ps. xviii. i. 3 Rom. i. 21-3 and 25.
366 ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (d) 11
other hand, in the heavenly commonwealth there is no wisdom of Man
save the devotion with which the True God is properly worshipped a
devotion which He expects to receive as His guerdon in a society of saints
(not only human beings, but also angels), that God may be all in all 1 ' 2
It may be noted that in this passage Saint Augustine starts
from a premiss which is common to him and to the philosophers,
but that he arrives at a conclusion which is the opposite of theirs.
The philosophers, too, condemn and reject the love of mundane
things; but they infer, from their unfavourable experience of Love
when it is directed towards one particular kind of object, that
Love itself is a spiritual infirmity which the sage must make up
his mind to pluck out and cast from him on the reckoning that
it is profitable for him to be without the faculty of Love rather
than to renounce the possibility of attaining that absolute Detach-
ment which, in the judgement of a philosophically enlightened
understanding, is the only complete cure for a spiritual malady
that consists in the very fact of being alive. The philosopher
arrives at this radical conclusion because he does not take the
precaution, which Saint Augustine does take, of looking into his
premiss before proceeding to argue from it; and the philosopher
therefore overlooks the capital point that Love in vacuo is a logical
abstraction which is morally neutral (dSia<opov in the Stoic termi-
nology), while the moral character of real Love in action is deter-
mined by the nature of the object towards which it is directed.
On this criterion the condemnation of the love of the creature is
a right moral judgement; but the correct inference from it is not
that Love itself is bad, but that the proper object of Love is not
the creature but the Creator.
Another crucial point that is discussed in the De Civitate Dei is
the question of the attitude which the citizen of the supra-mundane
commonwealth ought to take up, in his pilgrimage through This
World, towards the institutions of the mundane commonwealth
which he will find in force around him.
*It is written of Cain that he founded a commonwealth; but Abel
true to the type of the pilgrim and sojourner that he was did not do
the like. For the commonwealth of the Saints is not of This World,
though it does give birth to citizens here in whose persons it performs
its pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom shall come the time when
it will gather them all together. . . . And then the promised kingdom
will be given to them, and they will reign there with their prince, the
King of the Ages, world without end. . . .
'The household of those who do not live by faith seeks to win an
earthly peace out of the properties and amenities of this temporal life ;
1 iCor.rv.a8. * Saint Augustine, De CivitateDei, Book XIV, chaps. 13 and 28.
ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (<*) n 3^'
but the household of those who do live by faith awaits the blessing
which are promised for an eternal future; and so it makes use of earthl]
and temporal things as a pilgrim would use them as things which musi
not be allowed to captivate it and deflect it from its goal (which is God)
but on which it may perhaps lean in order to ease and reduce to
minimum the burdens of a corruptible body that weighs upon the Soul
Accordingly, things necessary for this mortal life are made use of by
both kinds of person and by both households alike ; but, in using them,
each has his own distinctive purpose, and these purposes differ pro-
foundly. Even the earthly commonwealth, which does not live by faith,
ensues an earthly peace and bases the social harmony of its citizens, in
their relations as rulers and ruled, upon some kind of mutual adjust-
ment of human wills in regard to the things that pertain to this mortal
life. At the same time the heavenly commonwealth or, rather, that
part of it which is making its pilgrimage in this state of mortality, and
which lives by faith must perforce make use of that earthly peace until
the state of mortality, for which that kind of peace is a necessity, has
passed away; and on this account, so long as it is leading its pilgrim's
life in this earthly commonwealth and leading it in a virtual captivity,
though it has already received the promise of redemption and the gift
of the spirit as a pledge [of ultimate release] it does not hesitate to
submit to the laws of the earthly commonwealth by which this mortal
life is regulated in the ways most conducive to its maintenance. Mor-
tality itself being common to both commonwealths [in this temporal
environment], it is desirable that, in things pertaining to this mortal
state, a harmony should be preserved between the two. . . .
'While the heavenly commonwealth is making its pilgrimage on
Earth it recruits citizens from all the tribes of Man and gathers its
society of pilgrims from people of every tongue not minding the
diversity of manners, laws', and institutions (the instruments by which
the earthly peace is earned and secured), and not rescinding or destroy-
ing any of these institutions, but on the contrary preserving them and
falling in with them, because, underlying this diversity of institutions in
different nations, there is the single identic purpose of earthly peace.
The sole limiting condition of this conformity is that it must not inter-
fere with Religion in the sense of the inculcation of the worship of the
One Supreme True God. So the heavenly commonwealth too, in its
pilgrimage here, makes use of the earthly peace; and (as far as may be
possible without conflicting with the duties of Religion) it cherishes and
ensues that mutual adjustment of human wills in regard to things per-
taining to Man's mortal nature; but it orients this earthly peace towards
the heavenly peace which really is peace the only peace worthy of
being regarded as such, and of being called by the name, for creatures
endowed with Reason. This heavenly peace is a perfectly organized and
perfectly harmonious common participation in the enjoyment of God
and of one another in God, 1 And, when we reach that state, our life
ti\ Tllis d ^^ nit j on is also given, in the same words, in the passage quoted in V. C (i)
W ri > P- 100, above. A.J.T,
3 68 ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (d) n
will not be mortal, but will be unmistakably vital ; and our body will not
be an animal body that weighs down the soul as it decays, but will be
a spiritual body that has no wants and that is wholly subject to the will.
The earthly peace is possessed by the heavenly commonwealth while it
is making its pilgrimage in faith ; and by this faith it genuinely lives when
it orients towards the winning of the heavenly peace whatever good
actions it performs in relation to God and also in relation to human neigh-
bours the life of a commonwealth being a social life ex hypothesi. . . .
'Thus the highest good of God's commonwealth is a peace which is
eternal and perfect not just a peace for mortals to travel through
between birth and death, but a peace for immortals to abide in without
any shadow of adversity. If this be granted, who can deny that that life
is blessedly happy, and who refuse to pronounce that, by comparison,
this life which we lead here is wretchedly miserable filled though it
may be, to overflowing, with amenities mental, bodily, and external?
Any one, however, who lives this earthly life in such a way as to orient
his use of it towards an end which is the end of the heavenly life loving
the heavenly life ardently, and loyally hoping for it any one who lives
like that can without absurdity be called blessedly happy even now:
happy in the heavenly hope rather than in the earthly reality. On the
other hand this earthly reality, divorced from the heavenly hope, is a
false happiness which is nothing but the deepest misery. It is false
because it does not command the true treasures of the spirit. For
wisdom is no true wisdom when it exercises its virtues of discernment,
resoluteness, restraint, and justice without directing its intention, in all
that it does, to that end where God will be all in all in an eternity that is
sure and in a peace that is perfect.' 1
It will be seen that, in Saint Augustine's view, the duty and
it is, of course, an obvious one of avoiding the snares of This
World can be conscientiously and effectively carried out by the
pilgrim-citizen of the supra-mundane commonwealth without his
being required to adopt the radical precautionary policy of non-
co-operation and non-intercourse. There is a legitimate use which
the pilgrim can make of the institutions of the mundane common-
wealth as a matter of practical convenience. But Saint Augustine
goes farther than that. He tells the pilgrim that he will find that
the pagan heroes of the mundane commonwealth have moral
lessons to teach which the pilgrim may profitably learn and take
to heart for their bearing upon his own duty as a citizen of the
Cwitas Dei.
The [Christian] martyrs . . . outdid the Scaevolae and Curtii and
Decii in bearing ordeals inflicted upon them, instead of inflicting ordeals
upon themselves; and they also outdid them in that true religion which
is true virtue not to speak of their immense superiority in numbers.
But the Roman heroes were citizens of the earthly commonwealth
1 Saint Augustine, De CivitaU Dei, Book XV, chap, i , and Book XIX, chaps. 1 7 and 20.
ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (d) n 369
(terrenae civitatis) ; and the object set before them in all the duties which
they performed on their commonwealth's behalf was the security of that
commonwealth and a dominion that was not in Heaven but on Earth
not in a life eternal, but in a perpetual decease of the dying and succes-
sion of generations born to die in their turn and so what else was there
for these Roman heroes to love except a glory through which they hoped
to live, even after death, a life of sorts in the mouth of an applauding
Posterity?
To these Roman heroes God was not going to give eternal life with
his holy angels in his heavenly commonwealth (caelesti civitate) for
that is a society to which the only entrance lies in the true religion which
does not pay worship to any but the One True God and so, if God had
not granted to those Romans this eartfyly glory either (the glory of a
magnificent empire), they would have been cheated of the reward that
was due to their good qualities, or in other words to the virtues by which
they were striving to attain this pinnacle of glory. For God himself has
something to say of heroes such as these who perform fine actions with
the evident motive of gaining glory among men. Verily / say unto you,
He says, They have their reward. 1 And in fact those Romans spumed
their own private interests for the sake of the common that is to say,
the public good. ... As eagerly as though they had been on the true
road, they strove, with every faculty that they possessed, to win honours,
power and glory ; and they did win an honour which was almost world-
wide, they succeeded in imposing upon many peoples the laws in which
their empire expressed itself, and to-day they enjoy a literary and his-
torical fame that is almost universal. Thus they have no case for im-
pugning the justice of the Supreme and True God: They have their
reward.
'Vastly different, even in This World, is the reward of the Saints who
have to endure contumely for the sake of the truth of God a truth
which is hateful to those for whom This World is all in all. The Saints'
commonwealth is everlasting: there, none comes into existence, because
none dies ; there we find that true and full felicity which is hot a goddess
but is a gift of God ; from there we have received the pledge of faith for
the duration of our pilgrimage, while we are longing for that heavenly
commonwealth's beauty; there the Sun does not rise on the evil and on
the good y 2 but the Sun of Justice protects the good alone. . . . And so
God's purpose, in allowing the Roman Empire to expand to the extreme
of human glory, has not been solely to render to earthly heroes their
due reward; God has also meant to afford an example to the citizens of
that eternal commonwealth during their pilgrimage, here an example
to which He wills them to pay close and careful heed, in order that they
may realize the greatness of the love which they manifestly owe to their
heavenly country for the sake of the life eternal, if an earthly country
has been so greatly loved by its citizens for the sake of glory among
men.' 3
i Matt, vi, 2. 2 Matt. v. 45.
3 Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book V, chaps. 14, 15, and ID.
ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a)
THE HELLENIC PORTRAIT OF THE SAVIOUR WITH THE
SWORD
OUR presentment of the Saviour with the Sword in the diverse
postures of a Hrakles and a Zeus is one of the political common-
places of the Imperial Age of the Hellenic Society from whose
mythology these two types are taken; and the surviving records of
that age of HeUenic history provide a wealth of illustrations of this
piece of political imagery. The monuments that are instructive for
our purpose, are of several kinds. There are the unofficial and
semi-official literary works of philosophers and publicists; and
there are the official inscriptions on public buildings and legends
on coins. The,pair of types was given an explicitly official currency
when the Emperor Diocletian proclaimed the fulfilment of his
task of salvaging the Empire from the bout of anarchy that had
preceded his own advent to power by taking the title 'Jovius' for
himself and conferring the title 'Herculius' upon his comrade and
colleague Maximian. But this was merely the last step in a gradual
process of crystallizing the portrait of the Saviour with the Sword
in this dual form. It may be convenient to take a glance at this
process in the literary medium first, and then to scan the corre-
sponding series of titles on coins and in inscriptions.
In the early days of 'the Indian Summer' of Hellenic history,
which began with the accession of the Emperor Nerva in A.D. 96
and ended with the death of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in A.D.
180,1 we forf the attributes of /Herakles and Zeus in turn being
ascribed to the Emperor Trajan, who had to complete the task of
slaying the hydra of tyranny before he could inaugurate the new
era of philanthropic government. Trajan was hailed as Herakles
by the Greek publicist Dio Chiysostom (vivebat circa A.D. 45-1 15),^
and as both Hercules and Juppiter in successive passages of a single
laudatory address from the mouth of the Roman Senator Gaius
Plinius the Younger (vivebat circa A.D. 6o-uo).3 And the activi-
ties of the Emperor which entitled him in Pliny's opinion to be
regarded as Juppiter's vicegerent on Earth are described by the
panegyrist in the following terms:
'These are cares worthy of a prince, and even of a god to reconcile
t ^ S ep A 0ch , of HeUenic history is to be regarded as an 'Indian Summer*
8 been P utforward in IV - C (") 0) i vol. iv, pp. 58-61,
' C (ii) <
S c 5i J liny * Pme jy* T W,n is praised in the similitude of Hercules in chaps. 14,
5 and 15, 4, and in the similitude of Juppiter in chap. 80.
ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a) 37*
rival cities and to restrain arrogant peoples by reason as much as by
authority; to prevent unfairness on the part of magistrates; to reverse
anything done amiss ; and lastly like some swift star to visit all places,
to hear all things, and wheresoever your aid is invoked to appear and
stand by like a god.' 1
This passage could be matched by many others in the same vein,
but we must content ourselves here with a single quotation from
a laudatory address to Rome which was delivered by another
Greek publicist, Aelius Aristeides (vivebat circa A.D. 120-80), at a
time when the Hellenic 'Indian Summer' was verging towards its
close. In reviewing Rome's gifts to the Hellenic World, Aristeides
extols, as one of the most signal of them, the institution of the
Principate :
'In the last instance there is a supreme judge of appeal, whose eye for
Justice nothing ever escapes ; and at the bar of his tribunal there is the
most complete and magnificent equality between the small and the
great, the obscure and the distinguished, the poor and the rich, the low-
born and the high-born. This emperor-judge is one who, in the words
of Hesiod, hath but to stretch forth his hand, and, lo y the weak receiveth
strength and the strong man chastisement. 2 He is a judge who suffers
Justice to direct him like the wind in the sails of a ship the wind which
shows no favour to the rich man over the poor man in wafting him on
his course, but bestows its beneficent service impartially on every man
who comes in its way.' 3
These words were written in a generation when they still rang
true; but the term of this Tndian Summer', during which a
Serene Majesty could rule the Hellenic World 'by reason as much
as by authority', and could maintain the balance of justice by the
touch of an outstretched finger, was shorter than a century. The
sword that had been auspiciously returned to its sheath had to be
ominously drawn again. While Trajan had been able to exchange
the role of Hercules for that of Juppiter, Marcus found himself
compelled to descend from his happier predecessors' Olympian
throne in order to enter again upon the temporarily suspended
round of Hercules' labours:* and, in the age of anarchy that
followed, this treadmill had to be trodden by a succession of
1 Pliny: Panegyricus, chap. 80, translated by Charlesworth, M. P., in The Virtues of
a Roman Emperor (London 1937, Milford), p. 15. The writer of this Study is also in-
debted to this lecture of Mr. Charlesworth s for the references in the two preceding
footnotes.
2 'Pea pkv yap fipidei, pea Se ppidovra ^aAeWc. Hesiod : Works and Days, 1, 5. In
its original context the line refers to Zeus. A.J.T.
3 Aristeides, P. Aelius: In Romam, p. 363.
* There is a bitter irony in the fact that this role of Hercules, which was reluctantly
assumed by Marcus as a grievously burdensome duty, was lightly fancied as a frivolous
pose by Marcus's son Commodus, who did his worst to undo his fether's work and to
provide urgent labours for a long series of Herculean emperors after him (for Commo-
dus's pose as Hercules see V. C (i) (d) 6 (a), vol. v, pp. 454-5, above).
37 2 ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a)
soldier-emperors a Decius and a Claudius and an Aurelian and
a Probus and a Cams before it became possible for a Diocletian
to slough off the role of Hercules on to a Maximian's uncouth
shoulders and to reassume for himself the role of Jove.
If we now pass from the literary to the epigraphical and numis-
matical evidence 1 we shall find that the official titles and mottoes
of the rulers of the Hellenic World in the Imperial Age are apt to
strike an attitude which reproduces one or other of our two pos-
tures in some epigrammatic phrase though the posture that an
emperor elects to assume by no means necessarily corresponds to,
and may even be deliberately intended to dissimulate, the part that
has been forced upon him in fact by an inexorable march of events.
This last point is illustrated by the formulae that date from the
recurrent 'Time of Troubles' through which the Hellenic World
passed between the death of Marcus in A.D. 180 and the accession
of Diocletian in A.D. 284.2 There are some formulae of this, age
that breathe the authentic spirit of it. For example, the Vota
Orbis on coins of Valerian and Gallienus vividly express the
agonized suspense of a world that is hanging breathlessly on the
issue of the struggle between a single-handed Herakles and a hydra
1 The specimens, here cited, of titles and mottoes in inscriptions and on coins of the
Hellenic World in the Imperial Age are taken from Vogt, J. : Orbis Romanus (Tubingen
1929, Mohr), pp. 18-22; from Hahn, L.: Rom und Romanismus im Griechisch-Romischen
Osten (Leipzig 1906, Dieterich), p. 140, footnote 4; and from Homo, L.: Essai sur le
Rdgne de VEmpereur Aurllien (270-275) (Paris 1904, Fontemoing), pp. 362-4.
* The cause of this terrible relapse into anarchy was analysed long beforehand, with
a prophetic insight, by the Stoic sage and Roman statesman Seneca (vivebat circa 5 B.C.-
A.D. 65) hi a passage of his De Clementia (Book I, chap. 4, 1-2) in which the author
gives his view of the social function of a prince.
'He is the bond that holds the Commonwealth together; he is the breath of life that
is breathed by subjects, in their thousands, who in themselves would be nothing but
a burden and a prey if they were left to their own devices through the removal of a
presence which is the soul of the Empire.
Their king is safe? One mind informs them all;
Lost? They break troth straightway.
'If this calamity [which Virgil (Georgia, IV, 11. 212-13) imagines as overtaking the bees]
were to overtake us, it would be the destruction of the Pax'Romana and the ruin of a
great people. This people will be safe from that particular danger for just so long as it
has the sense to put up with the curb ; but, if ever it snaps the reins or refuses to allow
itself to be bridled again if the bridle has been accidentally shaken off then the texture
of this mighty empire will be rent, and its present unity will fly apart into a hundred
shreds. Rome will cease to bear rule at the moment at which she ceases to render
obedience.'
A foretaste of the fulfilment of this prophecy that had been made in a treatise addressed
to the Emperor Nero was inflicted upon the Hellenic World in A.D. 69 as an immediate
consequence of Nero's tyranny; but this touch of calamity acted as a stimulus. *The
Year of the Four Emperors' was followed by the principate of Vespasian; and, when
the Neronian reign of ^ terror was reinaugurated by the son of an emperor who had
earned the title of * Saviour and Benefactor of All M en", this tyranny of Domitian in its
turn was followed by the philanthropic regime of a series of philosopher- emperors who
succeeded one another without a break from Nerva to Marcus. It was only after the
death of Marcus that &e new 'Time of Troubles' set in; and even then the tyranny of
Commodus was followed by the principate of Septimius Severus, who repeated Vespa-
sian's work albeit with a rougher hand. It was not till after the death of Alexander
Severus that the storm broke with an uncontrollable and shattering violence.
ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a) 373
with a hundred heads. 1 And there are other contemporary for-
mulae which implicitly confess that the Roman Peace has been
broken and the structure of the Hellenic universal state been
destroyed or at any rate gravely damaged. These unwelcome
truths are admitted in the title Pacator Orbis which is taken by
Septimius Severus and Caracalla and Valerian and Gallienus and
Postumus and Aurelian and Tacitus and Florian and Probus and
Numerian. 2 And the same admission is made in the title Reparator
Orbis or Restitutor Orbis 3 or Restitutor Generis tiumarti or Restitutor
Saeculi which is taken by Gordianus III and the two Philips, by
Otacilia Severa (the wife of the first Philip and the mother of the
second), by Valerian, by Gallienus, by Postumus, by Claudius, by
Aurelian, by Tacitus, by Probus, by Cams, by Carinus, and there-
after by Constantius II and by Julian. The common characteristic
of these titles is their note of frankness. On the other hand it is
the wish, and not the fact, that is father to the thought in the
motto Securitas Orbis which is displayed on the coins, not of any
emperor whose reign falls within the Hadrianic and Antonine
'Indian Summer', but of a series which begins with Commodus
and continues through Caracalla and Geta and the first Philip and
Philip's wife Otacilia Severa and Decius's wife Etruscilla and
Gallienus and Probus until it closes in the generation of Diocletian
with the great man himself and with his lieutenants Maximian and
Galerius and with his opponent Carausius. This catalogue sug-
gests that the men who were responsible for the welfare of the
Empire did not find it necessary to boast of the performance of
their elementary duty of keeping order except in times when the
boast was unwarrantable.
There is another group of formulae which proclaim the meta-
morphosis of a Hercules into a Juppiter: for example, the specious
Pax Orbis Terrarum which was a false claim on coins of Otho but
a true one on coins of the Flavians; the well-earned Fortuna
1 The Vota Orbis et Urbis on coins of Constantino the Great and Licinius perhaps
express the recurrence of this anxious atmosphere during the further bout of anarchy
between ,the abdication of Diocletian in A.D. 305 and the overthrow of Licinius by
Constantino in A.D. 323.
2 There is evidence in the legends on coins for the assumption of this title by all
these ten emperors except Tacitus. In Tacitus's case the evidence is epigraphical and
there is also epigraphical as well as numismatical evidence in the case of Caracalla.
3 The evidence for Restitutor Orbis is both numismatical and epigraphical, while that
for Reparator Orbis appears to be epigraphical only. It is noteworthy that the title
Restitutor Orbis Terrarum appears to have been invented by Hadrian an emperor who
was able to sheatEe the sword which Trajan had drawn and to rule thereafter without
drawing it again (save for the suppression of Bar Kokaba). Hadrian was not constrained
to emulate HeYaklfis in his labours, though he chose to emulate him in his travels. The
work which Hadrian made his special business was more aptly described in hia other
title of Locupletator Orbis Terrarum; for Hadrian was able to devote more of hia energy
to improving and completing what his predecessors had left unfinished than to merely
repairing what they had wrecked or had allowed to fall into ruin.
374 ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a)
Redux on coins of Aurelian 1 and Gloria Orbis on coins of Probus ;
the controversial Liberator Orbis on inscriptions of Constantine,
Magnentius, and Julian; and the audacious Toto Orbe Victor which
may pass muster in the inscriptions of a Constantius II and a
Valentinian and a Theodosius, but which takes our breath away
when we find the self-same title in the inscriptions of a Valens or
an Arcadius.
Finally we may glance at the group of formulae in which the
Saviour of Society displays himself now serenely at rest, with
sword no longer naked but in scabbard in the posture of a
Zeus with Olympus for his throne and with the prostrate Titans
for his footstool. There are inscriptions in which Divus Julius is
hailed as Za>rr)p TOV Koapov and as Eu>rr]p rrjs OlKovfjLvr)$ ; 2 Augus-
tus as Custos Imperi Romani Totiusque Orbis Terrarum\ Tiberius as
Kowos rfjs OiKovfjievT]? Evepyerrjs ; Claudius as Sa^T^p rfjs OiKovp,vr}$ ;
Nero (!) as '0 'Ayados Aai^v rrjs OiKou^eVqs ; Vespasian as <0
Udvra)v 'AvBpayrrcjv ZcjTrjp KOI fijepyerqs; Trajan as JEourqp rijs
OiKovp^s and as Conservator Generis Humani. 3 There are coins of
i Aurelian's Fortune Redux may pass, but his Felicitas Saeculi and Felidtas Temporum
must have drawn wry smiles from the faces of his subjects as they fingered the coins on
which these two mottoes were displayed.
* Pauly-Wissowa: Real-Encyclopddie der Klassischen Altertumszoissenschaft, 2nd ed.,
2nd ser., Halbband v, col. 1214. The former of these two variants of a single title was
affected by a number of Caesar's successors, especially by Hadrian; the latter was affected
(see below) by Claudius and by Trajan. This title for a ruler of the Hellenic universal
state has a remarkably close Andean parallel in the title 'Pachacutec' which was borne
by the Inca who has the best claim to be regarded as the founder of the Andean uni-
" " "~ 103, above). According
t d'Ethnologie), p. 114,
meaning 'World', with
a past participle passive 'cutec', meaning 'changed' i.e., in this context, 'changed for
the better*. The grammatical equivalent of 'Pachacutec' would thus be a motto which
might appear on a Roman Imperial coin in some such Latin legend as Orbis [in Statum
Meliorem] Conversus. If this Latin sentence had to be transposed into a Greek epithet,
Stirrup rns OiKovpevys would provide as good a translation as could be wished for; and,
conversely, the statement, in a Greek inscription of 9-8 B.C. (O.G.I. 458, quoted in Gall,
A. von: BaaiAciarou Oeov (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), p. 453) that Augustus eVepav e8co*e
Travrl rw KOVUW oi/tiv could be rendered as 'pacha cutec' in Quichuan.
3 For this Latin version of Trajan's title see Pauly-Wissowa, op. cit., col. 1219.
Aurelian rings changes on it Conservator Orbis and Conservator Semper Vitae but
it reappears in its original form in Arnobius: Adversus Nationes, Book II, chap. 64,
where it is applied, not, of course, to Trajan, but to Christ. Conservator had come to
be accepted as the regular Latin rendering of the Greek word aurnqp in the pagan Latin
usage of the Imperial Age (though Cicero had resorted to the periphrasis 'Is est . . .
oarrijp qui salutem dedit', on the plea that the Greek title meant something 'ita magnum
ut Latine uno verbo eacprimi non possit' (In Verrem, Actio II, Book II, chap, 63, 154)).
The Christian Latin rendering Sahator originated in a solecism, since it is based on a
non-classical verb salvare which was coined in a Christian mint from the classical adjec-
tive salvus (Pauly-Wissowa, vol. cit., col. 1220). This solecism makes its first appearance
in Latin literaturejn the works of the African Tertullian; and nearly two hundred years
later a greater African father and man-of-letters still shows some discomfort in making
use of it. 'Christus inquit, lesus, idest Christus Salvator,[Matt. i. 21] ... nee quaerant
grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed christiani quam verum . . . "salvare" et "salvator"
non fuerunt haec Latina antequam veniret Salvator ; quando ad Latinos venit, et haec
Latina fecit* (Saint Augustine : Sermo CCXCIX, chap. 6). 'Verbum ['salvator'] Latina
lingua antequam non habebat, sed habere poterat, sicut potuit, quando voluit' (idem;
De Trinitate, Book XIII, chap. [10] 14).
by the Inca who has the best claim to be regarded as the rounder ot the Andean i
versal state (see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 121, and II. D (iv), vol. ii, p. 103, above). Accorc
to Baudin, L.: L' Empire Socialiste des Inka (Paris 1928, Institut d'Ethnologie), p. :
'Pachacutec' is a compound of the Quichuan substantive 'Pacha', meaning 'World', \
ANNEX I TO V. C (ii) (a) 375
Galba, Trajan, Commodus, and Caracalla which bear the motto
Salus Generis Humani\ and others on which Didius Julianas (!)
aftd Septimius Severus and Caracalla and Constantine are depicted,
holding the globe, with the legend Rector Orbis. And there are
inscriptions, again, in which the title Dominus Orbis is given to
Florian (!) and Diocletian and Julian.
In this array of Hellenic Imperial titles the truth is evidently
blended with an alloy of make-believe. The debasement was not
so gross as to prevent the coin from being accepted at its face value
by contemporaries who managed to live through the collapse of
the Empire without ever being aware of the tremendous event
which they were witnessing and were perhaps even helping to
bring to pass. But for our eyes, which can see it in perspective,
this Hellenic portrait of the Saviour with the Sword brings out,
with all the force of dramatic irony, the truth that mundane
weapons, whether naked or sheathed, cannot be converted into
effective instruments of even a mundane salvation.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
CHRISTUS PATIENS
The Problem
IN the chapter to which this annex attaches we have found that
in a disintegrating society the creative genius assumes the role of
a saviour; and an empirical survey of would-be saviours has led
us to distinguish four types: the saviour with the sword, the
saviour with 'the Time-Machine', the philosopher masked by a
king, and the god incarnate in a man. Our purpose in making this
tentative classification was to discover which; of the alternative
ways of seeking salvation is the true road and which are the aber-
rations ; and accordingly, in following out the main thread of our
argument, we have paid more attention to points of difference and
contrast between our four types of saviour than to points of resem-
blance and connexion. 1 Yet, ex hypothesi, these different types
have something in common, or it would have been impossible to
apply the same name 'saviour' to all of them. What is this
common element? How far does it extend? And what is its
significance ?
Perhaps the most promising approach to these questions will be
to look for the answer in a concrete case. If we concentrate upon
the history of the Hellenic Society in the age of its disintegration,
we shall become aware of certain correspondences between the
accounts that have come down to us of divers saviours who arose
in the Hellenic World in this chapter of its story; and we shall find
that these correspondences override our classification of types; for
the subjects of them are on the one hand Jesus the saviour who
made has epiphany as God incarnate in a man and on the other
hand a number of the pagan Hellenic saviours with the 'time-
machine'. These partial counterparts of Jesus fall, for their part,
into two sub-groups. Some of them i.e. Aristonicus, Eunus,
Salvius, Catiline are leaders of the Hellenic internal proletariat
who either were born into it, as Jesus was, or w6re adopted into
it as deserters from the ranks of the Hellenic dominant minority.
The saviours in this sub-group, both born proletarians and rene-
gades, differ from Jesus in being futurists. The other sub-group
which includes the two Heracleidae, Agis and Cleomenes; the
two Gracchi, Tiberius and Gaius; a companion of the Gracchi,
1 One point of resemblance has, however, been touched upon in V. C (i) (d) 11,
Annex I, p. 346, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 3 77
Marcus Fulvius Flaccus; and also Cato Minor consists entirely
of members of the dominant minority who lived and died as
archaists (though some of them came to be adopted, in the teeth
of their own aims and desires, as heroes of an internal proletariat
that was marching militantly along a futuristic war-path). 1 It will
be evident at once that there is one fundamental difference in aim
and outlook between Jesus and all these other saviours. The
futurists and the archaists alike were seeking to establish a king-
dom in This World, and their quest of Utopia was foredoomed to
take to violence and to end in failure, whereas Jesus was seeking
to establish a kingdom which was not of This World, he refused
to take the sword, and in submitting, without resistance, to an un-
just judgement and a painful death he accepted a material defeat
which was in itself a supreme spiritual victory. This difference be-
tween Jesus and the pagan saviours who are his partial counterparts
involves and expresses an element in Christianity which is of its
essence, and, by comparison with this deep diversity, the correspon-
dences with which we are now concerned are obviously superficial
and trivial. Nevertheless they may still be worth examining for
the light which they throw in the first place upon the passage
of ideas and feelings across the gulf between the Hellenic domi-
nant minority and the Hellenic internal proletariat, and in the
second place upon the scope, and the limits, of the possibility of
using old bottles to hold new wine. 2 If we keep our present caveat
in mind throughout the following inquiry, we may perhaps be able
to reap some of the fruits of what is called 'the Higher Criticism'
without losing our sense of spiritual proportion. With this proviso
let us now set out the correspondences between the accounts of
these saviours of different kinds, and then see whether we can
explain them. 3
Correspondences between the story of Jesus and the Stones of certain
Hellenic Saviours with the ' Time-Machine*
Since the story of Jesus enters into all the Correspondences in
question, it will be best to tabulate the points in the order in which
they occur in the 1 Gospels, after noticing several correspondences
of a general nature which have no exact place in a chronological
series.
1 On this point see V. C (i) (a), pp. 236-41, above.
2 Matt. ix. 17 Mark ii. 22, quoted in IV. C (iii) (b) i, vol. iv, p. 133, above.
* The writer's purpose is, not to make a case for or against this or that explanation, but
to put before his readers all the materials within the writer's knowledge that are relevant
to a study of the problem. In the following survey he has therefore included many
correspondences which, in his opinion, are certainly slight and almost certainly for-
tuitous, and has omitted only auch as are demonstrably fortuitous (e.g. the example
examined on pp. 418-19, below).
3?8 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
1 . There is a pair of heroes who are distinguished from one another
by the double difference of age and of ethos between a gentle pre-
decessor and a violent successor.
Since Gentleness and Futurism are incompatible, 1 this corre-
spondence is limited a priori to Jesus and the archaists. The
double difference comes out most clearly in the contrast between
Agis and Cleomenes, and it also appears in the relation between
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. But in the Gracchan story Gains
does not play the role of the violent hero consistently. At the
crisis when the Government are trying to provoke him into
resorting to force he changes over from the violent to the gentle
hero's part, while the part that he discards is taken on by Marcus
Fulvius Flaccus, who in this last act of the tragedy plays Cleomenes
to Gaius's Agis (see Plutarch: Lives of the Gracchi, chaps. 34~8). 2
At the corresponding crisis in the career of Jesus, Jesus himself
reacts with the gentleness of Gaius, and Peter with the violence of
Fulvius. But there are also traces in the Gospels (e.g. the descrip-
tion of Jesus's mission that is given in Matt, x, 34-9 = Luke xii.
49-53 ; the description of the nature of the contrast between the
new and the old dispensation that is given in Matt. xi. 11-12 =
Luke xvi. 16; the incident of the cleansing of the Temple (Matt,
xxi. 12-13 =Markxi. 15-17 = Luke xix. 45-6 = JohniL 13-17);
and the hint, in Luke xxii. 35-8, of at least an impulse in Jesus's
mind, on the eve of the Passion, to take to the sword) of a different
distribution of roles in which Jesus plays the violent hero's part; 3
and if, in the light of this, we ask ourselves who it is that plays
Tiberius Gracchus to Jesus's Gaius, the answer will be: John the
Baptist*
2. The hero is of royal lineage.
Jesus is a son of David according to the Synoptic Gospels (e.g.
Matt. ix. 27; xv. 22; xx. 30-1; Mark x. 47-8; Luke xviii. 38-9) ; 5
Agis and Cleomenes are Heracleidae; Aristonicus is an Attalid.
The Gracchi are not themselves of royal birth, though they are
i See V. C (i) (df) i, vol. v, pp. 385-7, above.
a Plutarch's Lives of the Gracchi and Lives of Agis and Cleomenes are cited and quoted
here from K. Ziegler's edition (Leipzig 1915, Teubner).
3 This vein of Violence also shows itself here and there in other parts of the New
Testament: e.g. in James v. 1-6 (though a violent preamble is here followed by a gentle
sequel) and, above all, in the Book of Revelation. See V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex III, vol. v,
pp. 589-90, aboVe.
+ The writer is indebted to Dr. Martin Braun for having pointed out to him that both
Gaius Gracchus and Jesus appear in both the two roles, and that in both cases the violent
role is played first, while the change over from Violence to Gentleness is made in the last
act, in which the tragedy reaches its crisis. He also owes to the same scholar the equation
Tiberius : Gaius = John the Baptist : Jesus.
5 On the other hand, John i. 43-51, and vii. 40-53, might be read as implicit rejec-
tions of a story that Jesua was of Davidic lineage.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 379
aristocrats; but their mother moves in royal society (Plut., chap. 40)
and has, in King Ptolemy, a royal wooer (Plut., chap, i) who is a
counterpart of Jesus's mother's royal husband; 1 and Tiberius is
eventually assassinated by his enemies on the ground that he is
asking for a crown (Plut., chap. 19).
3. The hero's genealogy is recited.
Jesus's genealogy in Matthew i. 1-17, and in Luke iii. 23-38 ; 2
Agis' genealogy in Plutarch, chap. 3.
4. The hero's genealogy has a flaw in it.
According to the 'conceptionist' (though not according to the
'adoptionist') version of Christianity, Jesus's claim to be a son of
David is disputable, inasmuch as it is derived from a descendant
of David who is the husband of Jesus's mother but who in this
version of the story is not, himself, Jesus's father. 3 There is a
comparable doubt about Aristonicus's claim to be an Attalid
(SoK&v rov yevovs elvat, TOV T&V f$aai.\ajv KO! Siavoou/^evo? cis cavrov
TToicluBcu, rfjv ap%ijv Strabo: Geographica, Book XIV, chap. 38 =
Kramer, p. 646); and, evenif he is acknowledged to beKingEumenes 9
son, the legitimacy of his birth is contested ( Erat ex Eumene Ari-
stonicus, non iusto matrimonio, sed ex paelice Ephesia, citharistae
cuiusdam filia, genitus qui post mortem Attali velut paternum
regnum Asiam invasit.' Justin, Book XXXVI, chap. 4, 6).
5. The hero's mother believes in him and encourages him.
This is the attitude of Jesus's mother towards Jesus in the
Gospel according to Saint John (e.g. in John ii. 3-5 and 12;
xix- 2 5~7) J an d it is also the attitude of Cleomenes' mother towards
Cleomenes (Plutarch: Lives of Agis and Cleomenes, chap. 27) and
of the mother of the Gracchi towards both Tiberius (Plutarch:
Lives of the Gracchi, chap. 8) and Gaius (chap. 34). Again, it is
the eventual attitude of the mother of Agis towards her son (Plut.,
chap. 7).
N.B. On this point the Gospel according to Saint John is in
? This equation Joseph : Mary : Jesus = Ptolemy : Cornelia : the Gracchi holds good
f^y. 5F t 5 e conceptiomst' Christianity according to which Jesus's claim to be a son of
c a u " _ derived from a, husband of the hero's mother who is not, himself, the hero's
tather. If we assume the, perhaps older, 'adoptionist' position, according to which Jesus
is really Josephs son, the analogy breaks down; for in the Roman story there is no
possibility of a version in which the Gracchi turn out to have been really the sons of
t'tolemy. Cornelia is not wooed by Ptolemy till after her children are born and the
husband to whom she has borne them is dead; and then she does not accept Ptolemy,
but rejects him! For the distinction between 'conceptionist' and 'adoptionist' Chris-
tianity see IV. C (iii) 3 (0), Annex III, vol. iv, and V. C (ii) (*), in the present volume,
pp. 27i~5 above.
2 See ibid., p. 273, footnote 4, above.
See the passage of Eduard Meyer that is quoted ibid., pp. 268-9, *nd also the same
chapter, p. 267, footnote 5, above. y
3 8o ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
apparently deliberate contradiction with the Synoptic Gospels.
In all three of these it would appear to be implied that Jesus and
his mother are out of sympathy with each other (Matt. xii. 46-50
= Mark iii. 31-5 = Luke viii. 19-21); and his mother is not men-
tioned among the women who are present at the Crucifixion (see
Point 80, below). The two apparently contradictory accounts of the
attitude of the hero's mother which are given in this apparently
irreconcilable form in two different versions of the story of Jesus
are reconciled in the story of Agis, in which the hero's mother
starts as a sceptic but ends as a convert (Plut., chap. 7).
6. The hero is recognized and accepted by a forerunner as the
latter' s successor and superior.
Jesus by John the Baptist (Matt. iii. 11-17; Mark i. 7-11 ; Luke
iii. 15-22; John i. 15-17 and 25-37, anc * iii- 22-36); Eunus by
Cleon (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-XXXV, chap. 2, 17); Salvius
by Athenio (Diodorus, Book XXXVI, chap. 7, 2).
7. The hero inveighs against the powers that be, on the ground that
they are usurpers who have driven out or slain without trial the
legitimate authorities and have perverted the ancient law.
Jesus's denunciations of the Scribes and Pharisees (e.g. Matt,
xxiii, passim; Mark xii. 38-40; Luke xx. 45-7); Cleomenes' de-
nunciation of the Ephors (Plut., chap. 31).
8. The hero proclaims that the right of membership in the society
that is the field of his mission is not a privilege of birth, but is a reward
of merit. 1
This is one of the principal motifs in the Gospels: 2 'Many that
are first shall be last, and the last shall be first' (Matt. xix. 30, and
xx. 1 6 = Mark x. 31 = Luke xiii. 30); it is expressed in the
miracle of the healing of the centurion's servant (Matt. viii. 5-13
= Luke vii. i-io) and in the parables of the Wicked Husband-
men (Matt. xxi. 33-44 = Mark xii. i-n = Luke xx. 9-18), the
Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt. xx. 1-16), the Father and his
Two Sons (Matt. xxi. 28-32), the King's Son's Marriage (Matt,
xxii. 1-14 = Luke xiv. 15-24), the Good Samaritan (Luke x.
25-37), Dives and Lazarus (Luke xvi. 19-31), the Pharisee and the
Publican (Luke xviii. 9-14). Publicans and harlots who believe are
1 This truth is, of course, one of the facts that account for the phenomenon of Peri-
peteia (see IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol. iv, pp. 245-^61, above).
a The clearest enunciation of it is : 'Think not to say within yourselves : "We have
Abraham to our father"; for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham* (Matt. iii. 9% But this saying is attributed, not to Jesus hitnr
self, but to his forerunner John the Baptist. It is only in the Gospel according to Saint
John (viii. 31-59) that it is put in an elaborated version into Jesus* s mouth.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 3**
preferred to Scribes and Pharisees who do not repeat (Matt. xxi.
31-2). Similarly, the enfranchisement of non-citizens who are
worthy of the franchise is of the essence of the programme of the
Spartan and Roman archaists; Agis and Cleomenes enfranchise
not only select perioeci but also select aliens (Plut., chaps. 8-10
and 31-2).
9. The hero denounces a state of affairs in which there are human
beings who are so utterly destitute of any part or lot in the inheritance
of the Earth that in this respect 9 at any rate, they are worse off than
mid animals.
Jesus makes this invidious comparison apropos of himself and
his followers (Matt. viii. 19-20 = Luke ix. 57-8); Tiberius Grac-
chus makes it apropos of a ci-devant peasantry that has been turned
into a landless proletariat (Plut., chap. 9); 1 Aristonicus makes it
apropos of his followers implicitly in calling them 'Heliopolitae'
(i.e. human beings who, if they can be held to possess civic rights
in any commonwealth at all, are certainly not in enjoyment of these
in any commonwealth that is to be found on the face of the Earth) 2
(Strabo: Geographica, Book XIV, chap. 38 = Kramer, p. 646).
10. The hero calls on all who are within hearing to win the reward
of merit for themselves by following him through an or deal.
Jesus calls to the Cross (Matt. x. 16-42, and xvi. 24-8 = Mark
viii. 34-8== Luke ix. 23-7, and xiv. 25-33); Cleomenes (Plut.,
chap. 58) and Aristonicus (Strabo: Geographica, Book XVI, chap.
38 = Kramer, p. 646) call to liberty. Cleomenes calls upon the
people of Alexandria to take up arms and risk their lives under his
leadership for the sake of winning their political liberty by over-
throwing the autocratic government of the Ptolemies ; 3 Aristonicus
calls upon the proletarian freemen and the slaves in Asia Minor
to join his standard for the sake of winning their economic and
social liberty by making 'Heliopolis', instead of Rome, into the heir
of the Kingdom of the Attalids.
1 1 . The crowds that flock round the hero are so great that any one
who is determined to approach him y or even to see or hear him, has to
take extraordinary steps.
In the picture given in the Gospels the multitude tread on one
another as they surge round Jesus (Luke xii. i); the four men
1 This correspondence between a saying attributed to Tiberius Gracchus and a saying
attributed to Jesus has been touched upon, by anticipation, in IV. C (iii) (c) 3 Q9),
vol. iv, pp. 508 and 510 ; in V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 70-1 ; and in V. C (i) (c) i, Annex,
vol. v, p. 574, above.
2 For the implications of the term 'Heliopolitae* see V. C (iii) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 69,
70, 82, footnote 4, and 180- V. C (i) (<f) i, vol. v, p. 384; V. C (i) (dj 6 (5), Annex, voL v,
p. 692, footnote 2; and V. C (i) (d) n, Annex I, in the present volume, p. 351, above.
3 See V. C (ii) (a), p. 217, above.
382 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
bearing the man sick of the palsy have to take the tiles off the roof
of the house where Jesus is and then let the bed down through the
hole, because it is impossible to get in by the door (Mark ii. 1-4) ;
Zacchaeus has to climb a tree if he is to gain even a sight of Jesus
(Luke xix. 1-6). When Gaius Gracchus is standing for election
to the Tribunate of the Plebs, the crowd that flocks to Rome to
vote is so great that many fail to find lodgings, and on polling day
they have to climb on to the roofs because the campus will not
hold them all (Plut., chap. 24).
12. The hero's programme obtains an extraordinary publicity.
That which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be pro-
claimed upon the house-tops' (Luke xii. 3). 1 The acclamations
with which Gaius Gracchus was hailed on the campus 'were
echoed from the roofs and the tiles' (Plut., chap. 24),
13. In his domestic life the hero avoids ostentation by deliberately
taking a middle course between asceticism and luxuriousness.
Jesus's attitude towards the Sabbath (Matt. xii. 1-8 = Mark ii.
23-8 = Luke vi. 1-5) ; Cleomenes' attitude towards the 'Lycurgean'
agogS (Plut., chap. 34).*
14. By his refusal to go to extremes of asceticism which he com-
bines with a readiness to keep company with people of all sorts and
conditions the hero causes scandal.
Jesus's avoidance of an extreme asceticism scandalizes the dis-
ciples of John the Baptist (Matt. ix. 14-15 = Mark ii. 18-20 =
Luke v. 33-5, and vii. 31-5) ; his keeping company with publicans
and sinners scandalizes the Pharisees (Matt. ix. 10-13 = Mark ii.
14-17 = Luke v. 27-32; vii. 36-50; and xv 1-2). Tiberius
Gracchus was censured by Quintus Metellus for allowing himself
to be lighted home at night by 'the most offensive and most
poverty-stricken people in Rome' in contrast to the behaviour
of Tiberius's father, who had made his countrymen live in such
awe of him that during his censorship, whenever he went home
after dining out, the householders used to put out their lights for
fear that he might think them immoderately addicted to parties
and to drink (Plut., chap. 14).
N.B. Cleomenes, too, made himself accessible; but in his case
this affability, so far from causing scandal, was decidedly popular
(Plut., chap. 34).
* Cf. Luke iv. 14-15, quoted in this connexion on p. 471, below.
2 This passage of Plutarch is evidently derived from Phylarchus apud Athenaeum:
Deipnosophistae, Book IV, pp. 141 p-142 F (see the present Annex, p. 436, below).
ANNEX If TO V. C (ii) (a) 383
15. The hero makes a sensational claim to kingship, which he
supports- by the further claim that he has been commissioned by God
(by a god or by certain gods or by the Gods).
Jesus claims to be the Messiah: i.e. the saviour-king, anointed
(i.e. commissioned) by God, whose advent is expected by Jewry
(Matt. xvi. 13-20 = Mark viii. 27-30 = Luke ix. 18-21); corre-
spondingly, three leaders of slave-insurrections in Sicily claim, on
divine authority, that they are destined to win a victory which will
be rewarded with a royal crown. Eunus declares, before he rises
in insurrection, that the Dea Syra has appeared to him and has
told him that he is to become a king (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-
XXXV, chap. 2, 5-7). * Salvius, who is elected king by the
insurgents in the second Sicilian slave-insurrection, is an expert in
divination by interpreting the meaning of the entrails of sacrificial
victims, and he is also a. devotee of 'the feminine gods' (Diodorus,
Book XXXVI, chap. 4, 4); Athenio is an expert in astromancy,
and he maintains that the Gods have signified to him through the
stars that he is destined to become king of the whole of Sicily
(Diodorus, Book XXXVI, chap. 5, i and 3).
N.B. According to the traditional Jewish conception of the
Messiah's mission, the Messiah was to do for Jewry exactly what
the Sicilian slave-kings did momentarily succeed in doing for their
insurgent followers. By an act of human physical force which was
to acquire an irresistible impetus from the divine auspices under
which it was being put into action, the Messiah was to achieve,
on the mundane plane of life, a reversal of political roles. The
subject people of to-day was to be the imperial people of to-mor-
row; the Messiah was to transfer the sceptre to Jerusalem from
Susa or Antioch or Rome, and, as a result of his victory, the Jews
were to step into the shoes of the Persians or the Macedonians or
the Romans. 2 In the Gospels, however, the accounts of Jesus's
claim to be the Messiah are associated with a departure, in two
important respects, from the traditional Jewish conception of the
Messiah's mission and nature; and, on both counts, this departure
diminishes the closeness of the correspondence between the claims
to kingship that are made respectively by Jesus and by the Sicilian
slave-leaders. In the first place Jesus perplexes his disciples'
minds and devastates their hopes by telling them at once that his
Messiahship spells, not military victory and political triumph, but
being put to death (Matt. xvi. 21-3 = Mark viii. 31-3 = Luke
1 See V. C (i) (d) 7, p. 34, footnote 5, and V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), pp. 124-5, above.
a See IV. C fei) (b) 12, T vol. iv, pp. 224-5; V. c'(i) (c) a, vol. v, pp. 68-9; V. C (i)
(d) 6 (8), Annex, vol. v, pp. 657-9; and V. C (i) (d) g (y), in the present volume,
pp. iao-3, above.
384 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
ix. 22) ; x in the second place, according to Matthew (xvi. i6) 2
though not according to Mark (viii. 29) or to Luke (ix. 20) Peter
hails Jesus as the Son of God as a corollary of his acknowledge-
ment of Jesus's Messiahship in contradiction with the traditional
Jewish view, which expected the Messiah to be, not the divine Son
of God, but a human son of David. 3
N.B. In the Gospel according to Saint John the incident is
transformed to a degree which makes its correspondence with the
analogous Sicilian incidents barely recognizable. In this Gospel
Peter's declaration We believe and are sure that thou art Christ,
the Son of the living God' (John vi. 69) is overshadowed by a
preamble (John vi. 22-68) in which Jesus, instead of evoking an
acknowledgement of his Messiahship by asking a question, pro-
pounds in his own words a claim to have been sent down from
Heaven by God to perform, for all men who accept his claim, a
service that is analogous to, though infinitely more valuable and
more wonderful than, the service that is performed for Mankind
by the Spirit of the Vegetation.* The Vegetation Spirit provides
material bread for a single year; Jesus is spiritual bread that con-
fers eternal life.
1 6. A tableau of a rider riding through the streets of a capital city
on a mount which has been commandeered for him by his companions
on the spur of the moment without opposition from the owner.
Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an ass, accompanied by his
followers on foot (Matt. xxi. 1-7 = Mark xi. 1-7 = Luke xix.
29-35 = John xii. 14-15); Hippitas, a lame companion of Cleo-
menes, riding through the streets of Alexandria on a horse that
has been commandeered from a passer-by in company with
Cleomenes himself and with the rest of the king's companions,
who are all on foot (Plut., chap. 58).
17. The hero in person forcibly clears a public place from tres*
passers who have unlawfully encroached upon it for their private
profit.
Jesus overthrows the tables of the money-changers and the
seats of the poulterers^who are selling doves for sacrifice) in the
precincts of the Temple at Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 12-13 = Mark
1 This new association of ideas has been touched upon in V. C (i) (d) i , voU v, pp. 392-
3, above.
2 Matt. xvi. 16 ia echoetf in John vi. 69, and xi. 27.
3 See V. C (i) (rf) u, p. 163, footnote i, above. For the association between Jesus'*
claim to divinity and his premonition of his death see V. C (i) (c) a, vol. v, p. 74;
V. C (S) (d) i, vol. v, pp. 392-3; and V. C (i) (d) n, in the present volume, p. 165,
above.
* For the myth of the eviavros So^ion/see III. C (iii) (6), vol. iii, pp. 256-9, and V. C
(ii) (a), in the present volume, pp. 276-7, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 385
xi. 15-17 = Luke xix. 45-6 == John ii. 13-17); Gaius Gracchus
pulls down the seats which his fellow magistrates, by an abuse of
privilege, have erected round the Forum at Rome in order to let
them, for money, to sightseers on the day of a show (Plut,
chap. 33).
1 8. The authorities want to compass the hero's ruin, but are at
a loss how to proceed against him because of his popularity.
Jesus at Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 46, and xxvi. 3-5 = Mark xi, 18,
and xiv. 1-2, = Luke xxii. 2); Cleomenes at Alexandria (Plut,,
chap. 54 = Polybius, Book V, chap. 35); Tiberius Gracchus at
Rome (Plut., chap, 10).
19. The authorities try to catch the hero out by asking him awk-
ward questions, but his answers recoil upon the questioners.
The Pharisees and Herodians ask Jesus whether it is lawful to
pay tribute to Caesar; the Sadducees set him a trap over the
doctrine of the Resurrection; and a doctor of the Law asks him
which is the greatest of the Commandments (Matt, xxii. 15-40 =
Mark xii. 13-34 ^ Luke xx. 20-40); but Jesus silences them all
Similarly, Agis silences Leonidas when he asks him whether
Lycurgus had cancelled debts or enfranchised aliens, as Agis was
proposing to do (Plut., chap 10),
N.B. On the other hand Tiberius Gracchus is put out of
countenance by a question from Titus Annius (Plut,, chap. 14),
20. At a meal the hero is offered a special luxury by an admirer
(by admirers) from outside his most intimate circle.
The alabaster box of precious ointment that is offered by a
woman to Jesus in the house of Simon at Bethany (Matt. xxvi.
6-13 = Mark xiv. 3-9 = Luke viL 37-50* = John xi. 2, 2 and xii.
1-8); the dinner and gifts that are sent in to Cleorneaes, in the
prison at Alexandria, by his friends outside (Plut., chap* 58).
21. The authorities are at a toss how to proceed against the hero
because he has a safe retreat.
Jesus at Jerusalem spends only the daytime in the city and
sleeps at night outside the walls at Bethany; 3 Agis at Sparta takes
sanctuary in the temple of Athena Chalcioecus (Plut, chap 16);
* In this Gospel the incident is placed in a different context*
3 In this verse the woman who in the Synoptic Gospels is anonymous is identified
with Mary the sister of Lazarus.
3 This is recounted in all four Gospels, but in the Gospel according to Saint John the
retreat at Bethany has a doublet in a retreat in Ephraim Gohn xi, 53-4!.
386 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
Gaius Gracchus at Rome moves house from a fashionable quarter
on the Palatine to a working-class quarter in the neighbourhood
of the Forum (Plut., chap. 33).
22. One of the herd's companions undertakes to betray him to the
authorities by giving them an opportunity to arrest him at a moment
when he is out of shelter.
Judas undertakes to betray Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 14-16 = Mark
xiv. ic-ii = Luke xxii. 3-6); Amphares undertakes to betray
Agis (Plut, chap. 18).
23 . The traitor perpetrates his treachery for a trifling consideration.
Judas for thirty pieces of silver (Matt. xxvi. 15); Amphares in
the hope of being able to retain possession pf some clothes and
plate that he has recently borrowed from Agis' mother Agesistrata
(Plut., chap. 18).
24. The herd's Last Supper.
Jesus's (Matt. xxvi. 17-29 = Mark xiv. 12-25 = Luke xxii. 7-38
= John xiii-xvii); Cleomenes' (Plut., chap. 58); Fulvius's (Plut,
chap. 35); Cato Minors (Plutarch: Life of Cato Minor, chap. 67).
N.B. The atmosphere at Fulvius's Last Supper is at the oppo-
site extreme from the atmosphere at Cato's or Jesus's. In the
stories of Jesus's and Cato's Passions the supper is eaten in a mood
of sublime tension and with a sense of tragic foreboding, whereas
Fulvius and his companions seek to drown care and banish any
thought of the morrow by turning the meal into a drunken orgy.
This scene of sordid debauchery serves as a foil to an agonizing
vigil which, in the Roman story, is not subsequent to the supper
but is contemporaneous with it and, by the same token, has a
different protagonist. Fulvius and his companions carouse while
Gaius Gracchus and his companions watch and pray (for Fulvius's
role as the violent foil to Gaius Gracchus when Gaius himself is
playing the gentle instead of the violent hero's part, see p, 378,
above). Yet, although Fulvius's Last Supper may seem to present
as great a contrast to Jesus's and Cato's Last Suppers as it does
present, and is intended, to present, to Gaius Gracchus's vigil,
there is nevertheless a link between these two antithetical presen-
tations of the Last Supper, and this is to be found in tjie account
of Cleomenes' Last Supper. In this scene (Plut., chap. 58) the
hero and his companions at table are really in the mood of Jesus
and his disciples and of Cato and his circle; but they pretend to
be in the mood of Fulvius and his companions in order to deceive
the warders. In the scene in Cleomenes' prison, as in the scene in
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 387
Fulvius's house, there is a tableau of one (or some) of the carousers
lying in a drunken sleep after the carouse is over (see Point 38,
below); but, whereas in the Roman scene the drunken sleeper is
the hero (in this case Fulvius) himself, in the Alexandrian scene
it is the prison warders who are lying drunk and asleep ; Cleomenes
has deliberately reduced them to this condition in order to be able
to effect his escape ; and it has been in order to lure the warders
into getting drunk that Cleomenes and his companions have
pretended to be carousing, when really they have been steeling
themselves for facing the ordeal of a forlorn hope.
25. There are thirteen at table.
At Jesus's last supper (Matt. xxvi. 20 = Mark xiv. 17 = Luke
xxii. 14); at Cleomenes' Last Supper (Plut, chap. 58).
26. The traitor is denounced (is suspected) at the supper.
The denunciation of Judas (Matt. xxvi. 21-5 = Mark xiv. 18-21
= Luke xxii. 21-3 = John xiii. 18-22); the suspicion falling on
Cleomenes' slave (Plut., chap. 58).
27. The traitor goes (has gone) out.
Judas (John xiii. 27-30); Cleomenes' slave (Plut., chap. 58).
28. A tableau of a favourite companion lying on the hero's breast.
John on Jesus's breast (John xiii. 23-6) ; Panteus on Cleomenes'
breast (Plut., chap. 58); Philocrates on Gaius Gracchus's breast
(Pint., chap. 38).
29. A religious rite at which the hero gives the participants to eat
of the flesh and drink of the blood of a human sacrificial victim. 1
Jesus at his Last Supper institutes the Communion-Rite of the
Christian Church by giving his companions bread to eat and wine
to drink as symbols of a metaphorical eating of his own flesh and
drinking of his own blood (Matt. xxvi. 26-9 = Mark xiv. 22-5 =
Luke xxii. 1520); Catiline, at the secret meeting which he has
convened in order to broach his conspiracy] sacrificially kills a
slave and gives this human victim's flesh to eat (Plutarch: Life of
Cicero y chap. 10; Dio Cassius: History of Rome, Book XXXVII,
chap. 30) and his blood mixed with wine to drink (Sallust: De
Coniuratione Catilinae, chap. 22) to those present before taking
them into his confidence.
N,B. Cleomenes and his companions in prison at Alexandria
1 The writer owes this point to Dr. Martin Braun,
3 88 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
revolt at the idea of waiting while they are fattened for slaughter
'like sacrificial victims' (Plut., chap. 57).'
30. The hero declares to his companions at table his conviction that
the death which now stares him in the face mil prove a triumph.
Jesus (John xiii. 31-2, and xvii); Cato Minor (Plutarch: Life of
Goto Minor, chap. 67).
31. The hero assures those at table who are his friends that in the
hour of his triumph he will reward them for their friendship towards
him.
Jesus at his Last Supper (Luke xxii. 28-30; John xiv-xvi);
Eunus at the supper-parties of his master Antigenes (Diodorus,
Books XXXIV-XXXV, chap. 2, 8).
32. When the Last Supper is over, the hero calls for swords (for
his sword).
Jesus (Luke xxii. 35-8); Cato Minor (Plutarch: Life of Cato
Minor, chap. 68). Fulvius and his companions equip themselves
with arms that are hanging in Fulvius's house as spoils of war
(Plut., chap. 36).
N.B. Tiberius Gracchus takes to wearing a dagger under his
clothes when he finds, in the middle of his conflict with Octavius,
that the Senatorial dominant minority are plotting to kill him
(Plut., chap 10); Gaius Gracchus orders all his companions to
carry swotds under their togas (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-XXXV,
chap. 28 a ).
33. A tableau of the hero and his party going out into the open.
Jesus and his companions going out on to the Mount of Olives
(Matt. xxvi. 30 = Mark xiv. 26 = Luke xxii. 39 = John xviil i);
Fulvius and his companion^going out on to the Aventine (Plut.,
chap. 36); Cleomenes and his companions going out into the
streets of Alexandria (Plut., chap. 58).
N.B. There is, however, a sharp discrepancy in respect of the
time of day: Jesus and his companions go out at night (Matt,
xxvi. 31 = Mark xiv. 27), Fulvius and his companions at dawn
(Plut., chap. 36), Cleomenes and his companions at midday (Plut.,
chap. 58).
1 Dr. Martin Braun brings into comparison the cock-and-bull -story of the alleged
Jewish practice of ritual murder, as recounted by Apion and quoted from this source
by Josephus: Contra Apionem, Book II, 91-6: 'The practice was repeated annually
at a fixed season. They would kidnap a Greek foreigner, fatten him up for a year, and
then convey him to a wood, where they slew him, sacrificed his body with their cus-
tomary ritual, partook of his flesh, and, while immolating -the Greek, swore an oath of
hostility to the Greeks' ( 95).
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 389
34. An enthusiastic companion of the hero boasts that he mil never
desert his leader; but the hero disapproves of the boast and prophesies
that it will not be lived up to when it comes to the point.
Peter and Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 31-5 = Mark xiv. 27-31 = Luke
xxii. 31-4 = Johnxiii. 36-8) ; J Statilius and Cato Minor (Plutarch:
Life of Cato Minor, chaps. 55-6).
N.B. In the corresponding scene 'between Therycion and Cleo-
menes (Plut, chap. 52) Cleomenes disapproves of Therycion's
proposal that the party of fugitives should commit suicide instead
of leaving Laconian ground as refugees and seeking asylum in the
dominions of Ptolemy; but in the sequel the parts are reversed.
Therycion lives up to his proposal by duly committing suicide on
the beach of Aegialia; Cleomenes does not follow his example on
the spot, but does follow it at Alexandria after his disillusionment
with his experience of exile (see further Points 54 and 84, below).
35. The hero singles out three companions (one companion) for a
task that demands special endurance.
Jesus singles out Peter, James, and John to keep watch during
his agony (Matt. xxvi. 37 = Mark xiv. 33) ; Cleomenes having
decided that he aiwi his companions shall die by their own hands
singles out Panteus to wait till the last and make sure that all
the rest-are dead before putting an end to himself (Plut., chap. 58).
36. A tableau of the hero in spiritual agony during the night before
his dying day. 2
Jesus's agony of prayer to his Father at Gethsemane (Matt. xxvi.
36-46 = Mark xiv. 32-42 = Luke xxii. 40-6) ; Gaius Gracchus's
agony of silent contemplation of his father's statue (Plut., chap. 35 ;
cf. Diodorus, Books XXXIV 7 XXXV, chap. a8*).a
N.B. In the picture of Jesus's agony in the Gospel according
to Saint Luke the visual correspondence with the picture of Gaius
Gracchus's agony is accentuated by the introduction of a feature
that does not appear in the other two Synoptic Gospels: according
to Saint Luke, Jesus's prayer is answered by the vision of an angel.
It may be noted, as a curious though perhaps trivial detail, that,
in Mantegna's picture of the agony of Jesus, which follows Luke
on this point, the figures of the angels are distinctly statuesque.
1 In the Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint Mark this incident is placed
after the exit, on the road to the Mount of Olives ; in the Gospels according to Saint Luke
and Saint John it is placed before the exit, as a sequel to the denunciation of Judas.
2 The correspondence between Jesus's and Gams Gracchus's foreboding of his fate
is noticed by Meyer, E. : Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christentums, vol. i (Stuttgart and
Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 166.
3 In Diodorus's narrative Gaius's agony is placed immediately before the murder, of
Antullus, and not in the night after it.
390 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
37. Tableaux of a bodyguard (a) keeping watch (ft) asleep.
Jesus takes three of the eleven Peter, James, and John and
asks them to keep watch while he prays, but three times over they
fall asleep (Matt. xxvi. 37-46 = Mark xiv. 33-42 = Luke xxii.
45-6) j 1 a number of Gaius Gracchus's supporters, seeing him in
agony at his father's statue, accompany him home and spend
the night at the door, where they organize themselves into watches
which are on and off duty by turns (Plut., chap. 35). Similarly,
on the night before the death of Tiberius Gracchus, a number of
his supporters camp round Tiberius's house ancl keep watch
(Plut., chap. 1 6).
38. A tableau of watchers caught asleep at the moment of crisis.
In Jesus's Passion Peter, James, and John are caught asleep at
the moment when the officers of the Sanhedrin, guided by Judas,
take them by surprise (Matt. xxvi. 45-6 = Mark xiv. 412); in
Cleomenes' Passion the prison warders are caught asleep at the
moment when Cleomenes and his companions break out (Plut.,
chap. 58); in Gaius Gracchus's Passion Fulvius is caught asleep
when the return of daylight exposes the Gracchans to the danger
of being attacked at any moment by the Government forces (Plut.,
chap. 36).
39. The traitor fulfils his undertaking to give the authorities an
opportunity of arresting the hero when he is out of shelter.
Judas guides the officers of the Sanhedrin to the spot where
Jesus is praying in Gethsemane (Matt. xxvi. 47 = Mark xiv. 43 =
Luke xxii. 47 = John xviii. 2-3) ; Amphares (aided by Damo-
chares and Arcesilaus) kidnaps Agis on the road back from a bath-
house, outside the precincts of Athena Chalcioecus, which Agis
has been visiting according to his practice, and drags him off,
with the help of accomplices, to a prison which Leonidas then
surrounds with a cordon of foreign professional soldiers (Plut.,
chap. 19).
40. The traitor tries to put the hero off his guard by a heartlessly
deceitful show of affection.
Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss (Matt. xxvi. 48-9 = Mark xiv.
44-5 = Luke xxii. 47-8); Amphares and his two confederates
waylay Agis [on his way back from the bath-house], give him a
cordial greeting, and then go along with him keeping up all the
1 The Gospel according to Saint Luke does not record that three out of the eleven
were picked out to keep watch, and does not represent the disciples as having fallen asleep
more than once.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 39 r
time a patter of talk and chaff, as one would with a young fellow
with whom one was on terms of familiarity (Plut., chap. 19).
41. A tableau of a crowd in a hubbub, with lights.
In the Passion of Jesus at the moment of the arrest (John xviii.
3); in the Passion of Agis between the passing of the death-
sentence and its execution (Plut., chap. 19).
N.B. Whereas in the story of Jesus the crowd is hostile to the
hero and intends to arrest him, in the story of Agis it is friendly
to the hero and intends to rescue him.
42. The men who take violent action against the hero and his
companions are armed with staves.
The officers of the Sanhedrin who arrest Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 47
= Mark xiv. 43); the Senators who assault Tiberius Gracchus
(Plut., chap. 19).
N.B. In the Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint
Mark the phrase is /xera juaxcupaiv KOL gvXcov (which is telescoped
into jLtera . . . oTrXaiv in John xviii. 3) ; in Plutarch it runs TT<=/H avrov?
poTTaXa Kol oKvrdXas eKo^ov. In the story of the killing of Tiberius
Gracchus the point is made that, while there were more than 300
fatal casualties, not one of the victims was killed with cold steel.
The casualties were all inflicted with sticks and stones. Gracchus
himself was killed by being hit over the head with the leg of a
broken chair.
43. The officers of the law are overcome by a momentary psycho-
logical inhibition.
The officers of the Sanhedrin flinch from arresting Jesus (John
xviii. 6); the officers of the Ephors flinch from carrying out the
order to put Agis to death and so do Leonidas' foreign profes-
sional soldiers (Plut., chap. 19).
44. The hero's party sheds blood.
One of Jesus's disciples draws his sword and strikes off the ear
of a servant of the High Priest (Matt. xxvi. 51 = Mark xiv. 47 ==
Luke xxii. 50 = John xviii. ic); 1 Cleomenes and his companions
draw their swords, as they spring from table and rush into the
street, and cut down King Ptolemy's minister Ptolemy son of
Chrysermus and also another Ptolemy who is Chief of Police in
Alexandria (Plut., chap. 58); Tiberius Gracchus's partisans blind
1 In the three Synoptic Gospels both the swordsman and his victim are anonymous.
It is only in the Gospel according to Saint John that the swordsman is identified with
Peter, and the victim s name is given as Malchus.
39* ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
a slave of Octavius (Plut., chap. 12); Fulvius's companions stab to
death with stilettos an officer of the Consuls called Quintus
Antullus (Plut., chap. 34).
45. The hero commands his followers to cease fighting.
Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 52 = Luke xxii. 51 = John xviii. n); Cleo-
menes (Plut., chap. 58); Tiberius Gracchus (Plut., chap. 12);
Gaius Gracchus (Plut., Gracchi, chap. 34, and Comparison of Agis
and Cleomenes with the Gracchi, chap. 5).
46. The hero himself refrains on principle from resorting to force.
Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 52-4, and John xviii. 36); Agis, of whom his
mother Agesistrata testifies, as she embraces his corpse : 'My child,
it is your immense moderation and gentleness and humanity that
have been your ruin and ours' (Plut., chap. 20) ; x Tiberius
Gracchus (Plut., Gracchi, chap. 19, and Comparison^ chap. 4);
Gaius Gracchus (Plut., Gracchi, chaps. 33, 34, and 36-8, and
\Comparison, chaps. 4 and 5). 2
N.B. This gentleness of Jesus, Agis, and both the Gracchi is
in contradiction with the violence that is exhibited by Cleomenes,
by all the futurist heroes, and also by Jesus and Gaius Gracchus
themselves in certain passages of their careers, before they arrive
at the crisis (see Point i,, above). Plutarch (Agis and Cleomenes,
chap. 22, and Comparison, chaps. 4-5) regretfully stigmatizes
Cleomenes in contrast to Agis and the two Gracchi as a man
of blood. .
47. The hero's companions take to flight and leave him to his fate.
Jesus's (Matt xxvi. 56 = Mark xiv. 50); Tiberius Gracchus's
(Plut., chap. 19).
48. A tableau of a young man inflight leaving a wrap, which is
a badge of rank, in the clutches of (one of) his pursuers.
In the flight of Jesus's companions an anonymous young man
leaves in the hands of the officers of the Sanhedrin a wrap of fine
linen (owScov) and continues his flight naked (Mark xiv. 51-2); in
the flight of Tiberius Gracchus's partisans Tiberius himself leaves
' Compare the same author: Comparison of Agis and Cleomenes tcitH the GraccU
* According to Diodprus, Books XXXIV-XXXV, chap. 28*, Gaius himself knocked
Antullus down and told his followers to kill him; but this story is rejected by Plutarch
(Comparison, chap. 5). According to Plutarch (Gracchi, chap. 34), the crime was com-
mitted by Fulvms s men, and Gracchus, so far from wanting it, was deeply upset by it
and indignantly upbraided the perpetrators. Plutarch's version of the incident is sup-
ported by Appian (Studies in Roman History: The Civil Wars, Book I, chap 25)
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 393
his toga in the hands of one of the assailants and continues his
flight in his shirt (Plut., chap. 19).
49. The hero is arrested and is then immediately brought to an
impromptu trial during the night.
Jesus is brought to trial in the High Priest's palace before the
Chief Priests and the Sanhedrin (Matt. xxvi. 57 = Mark xiv. 53
= Luke xxii. 54 = John xviii. 13 and 24) ; J Agis is brought to
trial in the prison before the Ephors and some members of the
Gerusia (Plut., chap. 19).
50. A true saying of the hero's is dishonestly twisted by his enemies
into a misrepresentation which is extremely damaging to him.
Jesus has said that the Temple at Jerusalem is going to be
destroyed (Matt. xxiv. 1-2 = Mark xiii. 1-2 = Luke xxi. 5-6) ; 2
on an earlier occasion he has also said that he himself is greater
than the Temple (Matt. xii. 6); at his trial the false witnesses
represent him as having said that he is able to destroy (or will
destroy) the Temple and is able to build (or will build) another
in three days (without having to use the ordinary physical means
of construction) (Matt. xxvi. 60-1 = Mark xiv. 57~8). 3
Similarly Tiberius Gracchus, in a public apologia for his high-
handed and unconstitutional act of deposing his colleague Octa-
vius, argues that a Tribune of the Plebs is sacrosanct only in virtue
of having been consecrated to the service of the Plebs, and that he
therefore automatically deposes himself from office if he misuses
his power in order to do the opposite of what is his proper function.
'A Tribune of the Plebs who demolished the Capitol and set fire
to the naval dockyard would have to be left in office; for if he
committed these crimes he would still be a Tribune of the Plebs,
however bad a one; but, if he set out to bring the Plebs to ruin,
then he would no longer be a Tribune. . . . Again, nothing can be
so sacrosanct as votive offerings (avaOijfjiaraY to the Gods; yet
nobody has ever thought of estopping the Plebs from using and
moving and transferring such offerings as it thinks fit. On this
x In the Gospel according to Saint John the impromptu trial is resolved into two
Hearings in different places and before different judges the first before Annas and the
second before Caiaphas.
? Si k^ 6 *** 44 the same Phrase is applied to the whole city of Jerusalem.
a 1 his alleged saying of Jesus that is placed in the mouths of the false witnesses at the
trial in the Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint Mark is placed in Jesus's own
mouth, in quite a different context, in the Gospel according to Saint John (ii. 18-22),
where it is accepted as being authentic and is then interpreted as being metaphorical
(i.e. as an enigmatic prophecy of the Resurrection).
u Luke xxi. 5-6, cit. supra: 'And as some spate of the Temple, how it was adorned
with goodly stones and gifts (dvaOijuaoi), he said: "As for these things which ye behold,
the days will comt in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another that shall
not be thrown down." '
394 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
showing, the Plebs is entitled to transfer the Tribunate of the
Plebs which is a votive offering to the Plebs itself from one
incumbent to another' (Plut., chap. 15). On the strength of this
speech of Tiberius's, his companion Blossius, in a judicial exami-
nation before the Consuls to which he is subjected after Tiberius's
death, is asked by Nasica: 'What would you have done if Tiberius
had ordered you to set fire to the Capitol?'
Again, when Cleomenes' enemy Nicagoras of Messene wants to
compromise Cleomenes in the eyes s of King Ptolemy Philopator,
he first reports to Ptolemy's minister Sosibius a satirical remark
about the King which Cleomenes has really made to Nicagoras.
Since, however, the genuine saying of Cleomenes is just personally
offensive without being also politically treasonable, Sosibius per-
suades Nicagoras to write him a letter alleging what is a sheer
fabrication that Cleomenes has made up his mind to seize
Cyrene if Nicagoras will find him the necessary ships and men
(Plut., chap. 56).
51. The hero on trial is reproved by the authorities for contempt
of court.
Jesus is reproved by the High Priest for making no answer to
the witnesses' charges against him (Matt. xxvi. 62-3 = Mark xiv.
60-1). Alternatively, he is struck by one of the officers of the
court for replying to a question from Annas not Caiaphas about
his disciples and his doctrine with the answer that all this is a
matter of public knowledge (John xviii. 19-23). * Similarly Agis at
his trial is reproved by Amphares for having burst out laughing
at his judges' hypocrisy (Plut., chap. 19).
52. When a question is put to the hero which offers him a possible
line of retreat, the hero does not take the opening, but gives, instead,
an answer that is calculated to exasperate the Court more than any-
thing else that he could conceivably have said.
When the High Priest asks Jesus whether he is (a) the Messiah
(/}) the Son of God, Jesus, instead of recanting, answers both
questions in the affirmative in the most emphatic terms possible
(Matt. xxvi. 63-4 = Mark xiv. 61-2 = Luke xxii. 66-7o). 2 Simi-
1 The saying that is presented in the Gospel according to Saint John as JesuVs answer
to Annas is presented in the Synoptic Gospels (NJatt. xxvi. 55 = Mark xiv, 48-9
Luke xxii. 52-3) as being said at Gethsemane to the officers of the Sanhedrin between
the moment when, at Jesus's command, the disciples cease fighting, and the moment when
the officers place Jesus under arrest.
2 In the Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint Mark the two questions are
telescoped into one and the two claims are treated as though they were synonymous.
On the other hand in the Gospel according to Saint Luke the Court first asks Jesus
whether he is the Messiah, and it is the terms of his answer to this question an answer
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 395
larly, when one of the Ephors (not Amphares) asks Agis (a)
whether he has been acting under pressure from Lysander and
Agesilaus and (/?) whether he repents of what he has done, Agis
replies to the first question that he has been acting as an entirely
free agent and that his source of inspiration has been Lycurgus,
while to the second question he replies that he does not repent of
what he has done because his policy has been the best that could
be conceived (Plut., chap. 19).
53. On the strength of the hero's answers to the two test questions
the Court immediately passes sentence of death upon him.
Upon Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 65-6 = Mark xiv. 63-4 = Luke xxii.
71) j 1 upon Agis (Plut., chap. 19).
54. The hero's prophecy regarding his enthusiastic companion's
boast [see Point 34, above} is fulfilled by the failure of the boaster to
live up to it when it comes to the point.
Peter does not live up to his resolution never to desert Jesus
(Matt. xxvi. 69-75 = Mark xiv. 66-72 == Luke xxii. 54-62 =
John xviii. 15-18 and 25-7); Statilius does not live up to his
resolution of following suit to Cato Minor in committing suicide
(Plutarch: Life of Cato Minor, chap. 73). (See further Point 84,
below.)
55. The authorities seek to enlist the aid of a foreign potentate for
the accomplishment of their purpose of bringing the hero to destruction.
The Jews bring their fellow countryman Jesus before the
Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, because the power of life and
death is in his hands and not in theirs, so that the sentence of
death which they have passed on Jesus cannot be executed unless
Pilate endorses it (Matt, xxvii. 1-2 = Mark xv, i = Luke xxiii. i
= John xviii. 28 and 31). The Achaeans make a military alliance
against their fellow Peloponnesian, Cleomenes, with the Mace-
donian King Antigonus Doson, because they realize that, without
the support of Macedon, they will be unable to crush a Sparta which
enjoys the support of Egypt.
in which Jesus claims to be the Son of Man (see V. C (i) (d) 1 1, vol. v, p, 163, footnote i,
above) that then move the Court to ask, in horror and indignation, *Art thou then the
Son of God?* Of these two versions of the incident the Lucan account alone is in con-
sonance with Jewish beliefs; for according to Jewish doctrine the Messiah is to be, not
a son of God, but a son of David (see V. C (i) (d) u, vol. v, p. 163, footnote i, and
V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, o. 268, footnote 5, above); and the suggestion that
God has any son at all and a fortiori a son incarnate in a man is the greatest conceiv-
able blasphemy against God's unity and majesty. It is attributing to the One True God
a bassesse that is attributed to the false gods of Olympus by the Hellenes.
1 Cf. John xix. 7.
396 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
56. The animus of the hero's enemies in his own household is so
intense that they are willing to purchase the foreign potentate's aid
at the price of sacrificing one of their own most cherished principles.
In order to force Pilate to put Jesus to death, the Jews accuse
Jesus of having committed high treason against the Roman Im-
perial Government by declaring himself to be a king though this
indictment involves the Jews themselves in an admission of the
legality of the Roman jurisdiction (Luke xxiii. 2, and John xix.
12-15). In order to induce Antigonus to throw his weight into the
scales against Cleomenes, the Achaeans submit again to the hege-
mony of Macedon which they have made it their mission to
throw off and re-admit a Macedonian garrison into the Aero-
corinthus, though this fortress is the strategic key to the military
command of the Peloponnese, and the greatest achievement in the
past career of the Achaeans' leader Aratus has been his feat of
wresting the Acrocorinthus out of Macedonian clutches some
twenty years back.
57. The hero maintains his claim to kingship before the face of a
foreign potentate in whose power he finds himself.
Jesus before Pilate (Matt, xxvii. 11-14 = Mark xv. 2-5 = Luke
xxiii. 3 = John xviii. 33-8) j 1 Cleomenes before Ptolemy Euergetes
(Plut., chap. 53); the Syrian slave Eunus before his Sicilian master
Antigenes (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-XXXV, chap. 2, 8).
58. The hero will not accept the good offices of the representative
of a potentate who is all-powerful
Jesus will not accept Pilate's invitation to reply to the charges
against him which the Jewish authorities have repeated in Pilate's
presence (Matt, xxvii. 12-14 = Mark xv. 3-5); Cato Minor will
not accept Lucius Caesar's offer to intercede on his behalf with
Lucius's victorious kinsman Gaius (Plutarch: Life of Cato Minor,
chap. 66).
59. The impression which the hero makes on a foreign potentate
is 'a favourable one.
Pilate is favourably impressed by Jesus (Matt, xxvii. 23 = Mark
xv. 14 = Luke xxiii. 22; Luke xxiii. 4 and 14-15 = John xviii. 38,
1 The maintenance of the claim to kingship is implied in all four Gospels alike, but
they differ from one another in their account of the way in which Jesus conveys his
meaning. According to Saint Matthew and Saint Mark he conveys it by a bare assent
to Pilate's proposition, followed by silence in face of the charges that are repeated against
him, in Pilate's presence, by the Jewish authorities; according to Saint Luke by a bare
assent to Pilate's proposition; according to Saint John by an exposition of the 'Other-
worldly* nature of his kingdom.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 397
and xix. 4 and 6) ; Ptolemy Euergetes is favourably impressed by
Cleomenes (Plut, chap. 53). 1
60. The hero's fate is affected by an official custom relating to the
release of a prisoner.
At Jerusalem there is a custom that, at the Feast of the Passover,
the Roman procurator releases one prisoner, at the people's choice;
but, when Pilate offers them the choice between Jesus and Barab-
bas, they choose Barabbas (Matt, xxvii. 15-26 = Mark xv. 6-15 =
Luke xxiii. 16-25 = John xviii. 39-40). At Alexandria there is a
custom that a dinner and gifts are sent on the King's behalf to
a prisoner who is going to be released ; and Cleomenes takes advan-
tage of this custom in order to make his warders believe that his
own release has been decreed (Plut., chap. 58).
6 1. A potentate who has the herd's fate in his hands allows himself,
out of cowardice^ in consideration of an embarrassing incidental con-
sequence of the heroes claim to kingship^ to be persuaded, against
his own conscience, into condemning the hero to an undeserved
penalty.
Pilate condemns Jesus to be crucified for fear that, if he acquits
him, his claim to kingship even though Pilate himself may be
aware that the kingship claimed by Jesus is not of the literal mun-
dane kind may be represented by the Jews to the Emperor as a
treasonable pretension which Pilate has culpably neglected to
repress (John xviii, 28-40, and xix. 1-16; a hint of the considera-
tion which has prevailed with Pilate is also given in Luke xxiii. 23,
when this is read together with Luke xxiii. 2). Ptolemy Philopator
condemns Cleomenes to be interned 2 because he fears that, if he
lets him go, he may become a public danger to the Ptolemaic state
owing to his popularity with the Peloponnesian mercenaries in the
Ptolemaic service and his first-hand acquaintance with the weak-
ness of the Ptolemaic regime (Plut., chaps. 54-6).
i Euergetes gave his admiration for Cleomenes the g A History of Egypt under the
erecting a statue of Cleomenea at Olympia (see Bevan, E.:
Ptolemaic Dynasty (London 1927, Methuen), p. 221).
* If internment be thought too mild a penalty to be compared with crucifixion, it may
be recalled that, whereas Pilate had no obligation,towards Jesus except that (on which he,
hke Philopator, defaulted) of doing justice, Cleomenes was Philopator's guest; that
Cleomenes was, moreover, a political refugee towards whom the Ptolemaic Government
had obligations of honour; that no formal charges had been brought against him; that,
while the penalty of internment may have been mild in itself, its infliction did in fact
bring about Cleomenes' death ; and, last but notleast, that Philopator's ministers had never
1 2 ten( J e j to aUow Cleomenes to c n} e out of prison alive (see Plut., chap. 57), though
they had not calculated upon getting rid of Cleomenes by way of the heroic and
spectacular death which their prisoner succeeded in winning for himself in despite of
their cat-and-mouse tactics.
398 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
62. The potentate is subject to a feminine influence which inclines
him to be superstitious.
Pilate under the influence of his wife (Matt, xxvii. 19); Ptolemy
Philopator under the influence of his mistress Agathoclea and her
mother Oenanthe (Plut, chaps. 54 and 60).
63. After having, out of cowardice, sent the hero to an undeserved
death, the potentate attempts to salve the pricks of conscience by
performing a ritual of purification.
Pilate (Matt, xxvii. 24-5); Ptolemy Philopator (Plut., chap. 60).
64. A tableau of a Roman ostentatiously washing his hands in
public (immediately after he has been instrumental in bringing upon
a fellow human being a death by protracted torture). 1
Pilate washing his hands, in front of his own tribunal, after
having sentenced Jesus to crucifixion (Matt, xxvii. 24); Catiline
washing his hands, in front of Sulla's tribunal, in the holy water
basin at the door of a temple of Apollo, after having brought to
Sulla the head of Marcus Marius (Plutarch: Life of Sulla, chap.
32), upon whom Catiline has just inflicted the death of a thousand
cuts' (Seneca: De Ira, Book III, chap. 18).
65. The hero's claim to kingship is callously turned to ridicule.
Jesus J s claim is ridiculed, after Pilate has condemned him to
death, by Pilate's soldiers (Matt, xxvii. 27-31 = Markxv. 16-20),
or, alternatively, 2 by Herod's soldiers before Pilate has condemned
him to death (Luke xxiii. n); Eunus's claim is ridiculed by the
guests of his master Antigenes : 'The thing [i.e. the slave Eunus's
prophecy that one day he would be a king] was taken as a joke;
and Antigenes, who was entertained by the hocus-pocus, took to
producing Euhus at his dinner-parties and cross-questioning him
about his kingship. 5 Eunus's answers used to cause merriment
among the guests (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-XXXV, chap. 2, 8),
N.B. The Lucan story of the mocking of Jesus before the
Crucifixion corresponds more closely than the alternative story
with the episode in the history of Eunus: in the first place Herod,
as tetrarch of Galilee, is in the political sense Jesus's master, and
it is expressly on this account that Pilate remits Jesus to him (Luke
xxiii. 5-7); in the second place Jesus is an object of curiosity as
well as of amusement (Luke xxiii. 8) ; in the third place the way
1 The writer owes this point to Dr. Martin Braun.
a The version according to Saint John (xix. 2-3) stands midway between the two
main variants of the story. According to Saint John the mocking is done by Pilate's
soldiers and not by Herod's, but this before, and not after, Pilate has passed the sentence
of crucifixion.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 399
in which Herod and his soldiers turn Jesus's claim to ridicule is
heartless without being physically cruel (as the Roman soldiers'
mockery is cruel in the alternative version of the story).
66. A tableau of the hero being invested in private with a royal
crown (diadem) and robe to which he is not entitled.
Jesus (Matt, xxvii. 28-9 = Mark xv. 17-18 = Luke xxii. n =
John xix. 2-3) j 1 Tiberius Gracchus: Tompeius rose in the Senate
in order to depose that he was a neighbour of Tiberius's and that
in this way it had come to his knowledge that Tiberius had been
presented with a diadem and a purple robe, belonging to the
Pergamene regalia, by the Pergamene envoy EudSmus, in antici-
pation of Tiberius's becoming King in Rome* (Plut, chap. 14).
67. A tableau of the hero being exhibited in public as a claimant
to kingship.
Tilate therefore went forth again and saith unto them: "Behold,
I bring him forth to you that ye may know that I find no fault
in him." Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and
the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them: "Behold the man!" *
(John xix. 4-5). 'The people who were farther off were puzzled
about what was going on and were trying to find out; so Tiberius
touched his head with his hand as a visual signal for the benefit
of those to whom his voice did not carry of the danger in which
he found himself. When his enemies saw him do this they ran
to the Senate to report that Tiberius was asking for a diadem and
that this was the significance of his gesture of touching his head*
(Plut., chap. 19).
68. On the hero's way to his execution, people (a person) accom-
panying him are (is) in tears, whereupon the hero declares that, not-
withstanding his present plight, his own lot is nevertheless relatively
enviable.
*And there followed him a great company of people and of
women, which also bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus, turning
unto them, said: "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but
weep for yourselves and for your children" ' (Luke xxiii. 27-8).
'On his way to the gallows Agis saw one of the officers of the law
> i In the Lucan story of the mockery of Jesus by Herod and his men, only the robe
is mentioned, and not the crown. (N.B. This follows from the omission of the element
ol physical cruelty, since the crown in the alternative story is a crown of thorns.) In the
Johanmne version of the story of the mockery of Jesus by Pilate's soldiers the crown is
mentioned as well as the robe, but there is no mention of the reed which figures in the
Marcan and Matthaean versions of the same story. According to Mark (xv. IQ> thev
smote him on the head with a reed; according to Matthew (xxvii. 29-30) they first put
hfo^foth ' h "d t0 Simulate a ^Pt"! according to John (xix. 3) they smote
400 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
crying and showing other signs of deep distress, whereupon he
said to him: "My friend, stop weeping for me. When I am being
put to death as illegally and unjustly as I am, I have the moral
advantage over my murderers'* ' (Plut., chap. 20).
69. The hero ir crucified.
Jesus (Matt, xxvii. 35 = Mark xv. 24 = Luke xxiii. 33 = John
xix. 18); Cleomenes (Plut., chaps. 59 and 60).
N.B. Whereas Jesus is put to death by crucifixion, Cleomenes
dies by his own hand (Plut., chap. 58), and it is only his corpse
that is crucified. Agis who, like Jesus, is put to death, instead
of committing suicide like Cleomenes 1 is not crucified but is
hanged (Plut., chaps. 19 and 20).
70. Two other persons are put to death at the same time as the hero
and in the same fashion.
The two thieves are crucified with Jesus (Matt, xxvii. 38 =
Mark xv. 27 = Luke xxiii. 32-3 = John xix. 18); Agis's grand-
mother Archidamia and his mother Agesistrata are hanged with
Agis (Plut., chap. 20).
N.B. In the Spartan story the three victims are hanged, not on
separate gallows side by side, but on the same gallows one after
another; but the three corpses are brought out together (Plut.,
chap. 21).
71. The shirt (x^oiv) in which the hero has gone to his death is
made of a single piece of stuff without a seam.
Jesus's shirt (John xix. 23); Cleomenes' shirt (Plut., chap. 58).
N.B. The two shirts are, however, seamless for different reasons:
Jesus's because it^ias been originally so woven; Cleomenes' be-
cause, at the moment before he rushes out into the street, he rips
open the original seam down the right sleeve in order to give free
play to his sword-arm.
72. On an occasion on which the herd's claim to kingship is being
turned to ridicule by most of those present, one person (some people)
accords (accord) recognition to his claim and asks (ask) to be remem-
bered by him when he enters into his kingdom. The hero grants his
(their) petition by giving him (them) a dazzling reward for his (their)
act of homage.
While Jesus on the Cross is being mocked by the people, by the
rulers, by the soldiers, and by the Impenitent Thief, the Penitent
1 The suicide of Cleomenes and his companions in the streets of Alexandria has a
correspondence in the suicide of the Sicilian insurgent-slave-leader Satyrus and his
companions on the public altars in the amphitheatre at Rome (Diodorus, Book XXXVI,
chap. 10, 2-3).
ANNEX 'II TO V. C (ii) (a) 401
Thief 'said unto Jesus: "Lord, remember me when thou comest
into thy kingdom." And Jesus said unto him: "Verily I say unto
thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" ' (Luke xxiii.
35-43). 1 When Eunus's master, at his dinner-parties, used to
cross-question Eunus about his kingdom [see Point 65, above],
one of the questions that he used to ask was 'how he would behave,
when king, to each member of the present company. Eunus used
to go through his story without turning a hair, explain how kind
he would be to the masters, and in fact perform his hocus-pocus
so extravagantly as to move the guests to laughter. Some of the
guests used to take handsome portions from the table and present
them to him with the request that he would remember the favour
when he came into his kingdom and actually, as it turned out,
the hocus-pocus ended in Eunus's becoming king in truth and
deed, and in his recompensing in sober earnest the favours that
had been shown him by those who, at the dinner-parties, had paid
him a mock-deference. . . . After his proclamation as king,
Eunus put all [the slave-owners] to death with the sole exception
of those who, under the anden rdgime, had welcomed him at
dinner-parties or at his spiritualist stances when he went out into
society with his master, and who had shown their good will in
presenting him with portions from the table. These old friends
he now surreptitiously set at liberty' (Diodorus, Books XXXIV-
XXXV, chap. 2, 8-9 and 41).
73. The hero's mother is supported in her ordeal by the hero's
favourite companion (by the favourite companion's wife).
Jesus's mother by John (John xix. 25-7); Cleomenes* mother by
Panteus' wife (Plut., chap, 59).
74. The end of an ordeal.
'He said: "It is finished"; and he bowed his head and gave up
the ghost* (John xix. 30). 'When it [i.e. Cleomenes' death-agony]
was finished, he [Panteus] . . . slew himself' (Plut., chap. 58).
75. The hero, hanging dead on the Cross, is hailed as the Son of
God (a child of the Gods) under the impression of a portent that is wit-
nessed by the soldiers on duty at the foot of the Cross.
'Now when the centurion and they that were with him, watching
Jesus, saw the earthquake and those things that were done, they
feared greatly, saying: "Truly this was the Son of God" \ (Matt.
1 The mocking of Jesus on the Cross is narrated also in the two other Synoptic
Gospels (though not in the Gospel according to Saint John); but according to both
Saint Matthew (xxvii. 39-^44) and Saint Mark (xv. 29-32) both the thieves that are
being crucified with Jesus join in abusing hifti. i
402 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
xxvii. 54). 1 'The soldiers who were on guard by Cleomenes'
crucified corpse saw a large snake wound round the head and
covering the face, 2 with the result that no carrion-eating bird
alighted on it. This portent threw the King into a state of super-
stitious fear which gave his women an excuse for starting a fresh
bout of purifications in case the man whom he had put to death
might have been peculiarly dear to God and' not of any common
clay. The populace of Alexandria went farther. They showed
their respect by making pilgrimages to the spot and hailing Cleo-
menes as a hero 3 and a child of the Gods' (Plut, chap. 60).
76. After the hero's death there is a revulsion of public feeling in
his favour.
While Jesus was still hanging alive on the Cross, 'the people
stood beholding, and the rulers also with them derided him 1 (Luke
xxiii. 35); but, as soon as he had expired, 'all the people that came
together to that sight, beholding the things that were done, smote
their breasts and returned' (Luke xxiii. 48). Similarly the Alexan-
drians, who had not moved a foot to follow Cleomenes, or lifted
a finger to help him, when he was calling to them, in their streets,
to join him in a fight for freedom (Plut., chap. 58), afterwards paid
his crucified corpse a semi-religious veneration (Plut., chap. 60,
quoted under Point 75, above). And the Roman Plebs, after
allowing the Gracchi to be done to death by the Senatorial domi-
nant minority, afterwards demonstrated their love and their sorrow
for them by paying them religious honours (Plut., chap. 39). 4
1 According to Saint Mark (xv. 39) the centurion utters the words attributed to him
according to Saint Matthew, but here it is not stated that he is speaking under the
impression of the experience of a miracle. According to Saint Luke the centurion is
neither speaking under the impression of a miracle, nor does he hail Jesus as the Son
of God ('Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying: "Cer-
tainly this was a righteous man" * (Luke xxiii. 47)).
2 The same portent was related of Spartacus not, however, after death, but in sleep,
when his career still lay, unsuspected, before him and his wife, who was a fortune-
teller, interpreted the portent (as Ptolemy Philopator did when it happened to Cleo-
menes' corpse) as a sign of greatness ('It is said that, when he was first brought to Rome
to be sold, a snake was seen wound round his face as he slept. His wife, who was of the
same tribe and who had the gift of divination, besides being a Bacchanal, interpreted the
portent as a sign that he was going to rise to something very great and formidable, but
with an unlucky ending' (Plutarch: Life of Crassus, chap. 8, adopting Reiske*s conjecture
d-ntycs for eum^cs). A similar portent was related of Bar Kokaba. His corpse, in co
A similar portent was related of Bar Kokaba. His corpse, in contrast
to that of Jesus and that of Cleomenes, was not preserved intact (see Point 78, below),
but was mutilated; and thereafter a snake was found coiled, not round his head, but
round his severed privy parts (see Lagrange, M.-J. : Le Messianisme chez lesjtafs (Paris
1909, Gabalda), p. 320). Again, Tiberius Gracchus took it as a bad omen when snakes
hatched out their eggs in his helmet (Plutarch: Gracchi, chap. 17). AJ.T.
3 In its original, and technical, Hellenic sense the word hero has a connotation which
is a cross between those of our two Western words 'demigod* and 'saint*. A J.T.
4 The judicial murders of Agis and his mother and his grandmother likewise aroused
indignation among the public at Sparta (Plut., chap. 21); but here the correspondence is
imperfect, because in this case the public, so far from having been hostile or even in-
different, had made a move to rescue the hero, and this move had only been foiled by
a fait accompli (Plut., chap. 19).
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 403
77. The two other persons who are put to death at the same time
as the hero do not die till after he is dead,
The two thieves not till after Jesus (John xix. 32-3) ; Archidamia
and Agesistrata not till after Agis (Plut,, chap. 20).
78. Contrary to what usually happens to a crucified corpse* the
hero's corpse remains physically intact.
Jesus dies so unexpectedly soon (Mark xv. 44-5) that, when the
soldiers come with the intention of breaking the legs of the bodies
on the crosses in order to hasten their deaths, they find it un-
necessary to break Jesus's legs, because he is already dead, so they
only break the legs of the two thieves (John xix. 31-3). Cleo
menes* corpse is protected from being eaten by carrion-birds
through the portent of the snake that winds itself round the head
and covers the face (see Point 75, above).
79. When a soldier pricks the hero's body with the point of a
weapon, in order to te$t whether life is completely extinct, the body
gives an unexpected sign of life.
When a Roman soldier pierces Jesus's side with a speiar, blood
flows (John xix. 34) ; when Panteus pricks Cleomenes' ankle with
a dagger, Cleomenes* face twitches (Plut., chap. 58).
80. While the hero is being put to death, some women, with whom
he is in an intimate relation, are in the vicinity \ though not actually
on the spot.
The Crucifixion of Jesus is witnessed from a distance by Gali-
laean women whose link with Jesus is not one of kinship but one
of personal devotion, and who have shown this devotion by coming
to Jerusalem in his entourage; among them are Mary Magdalene,
Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee's
children or (? alias) Salome .(Matt, xxvii. 55-6 = Mark xv. 40-1
= Luke xxiii. 49).* While Agis is being hanged inside the building
1 When Polycrates the despot of Samos received a tempting invitation from Oroetes
the Achaemenian satrap of Sardis, he suspected a trap but felt inclined to take the risk.
While he was still in two minds whether to accept or to refuse, his daughter had a. dream
in which she saw her father aloft in the air, being washed by Zeus and anointed by the
Sun. In consideration of this dream, she begged her father -not to go; and, when he did
go all the same, her worst forebodings were fulfilled; for the invitation was a trap, and
Oroetes, after putting Polycrates to death by tortures too horrible to describe, inflicted
on his victim the last indignity of crucifying his corpse. 'So, hanging on the cross, Poly-
crates fulfilled every particular of his daughter's vision. He was washed by Zeus when
it rained, and he was anointed by the Sun when the corpse itself exuded liquid matter*
(Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 132-5, already quoted in IV. C (iii) (c) i, vol. iv, pp. 252-
3, above).
* Though the Gospel according to Saint Luke mentions no names, it agrees with
the other two Synoptic Gospels in describing the women as Galilaeans and stating that
they witnessed the Crucifixion from a distance. On the other hand the Gospel according
to Saint John (xix. 25), which does mention names, is in implicit, and perhaps deliberate,
. 4 o 4 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
called the Dechas, his mother Agesistrata and his grandmother
Archidamia are outside, making an outcry (Plut., chap. 1920).
81. A tableau of the descent from the Cross (or gallows).
The dead body of Jesus being lowered from the Cross by men
who are being assisted by the women of Jesus's entourage (there
is no text in die Gospels describing this event; 1 yet, all the same,
the scene is one of the favourite subjects of the traditional icono-
graphy of the Christian Church); the dead body of Agis* grand-
mother, Archidamia, being lowered from the gallows by officers
of the law who are being assisted by Agis' mother who is Archi-
damia's daughter Agesistrata (Plut., chap. 20).
82. A tableau of the Pietd.
The dead body of Jesus at the foot of the Crdss being tended by
Joseph of Arimathaea (with the women's assistance) 2 (Matt, xxvii.
59 = Mark xv. 46 = Luke xxiii. 53 = John xix. 39-40) ; the dead
bodies of Agis and Archidamia, at the foot of the gallows, being
tended by Agesistrata (Plut., chap. 20).
N.B. The dead body of Tiberius Gracchus is refused to the
dead man's brother by the Government, even when he offers to
bury it unobtrusively by night (Plut., chap. 20).
83. The hero y after his death, comes to receive religious worship.
Jesus from the Christian Church; the Gracchi from the Roman
Plebs: 'They dedicated to them statues, which they erected in
public places; they consecrated the spots that had been the scenes
of their deaths; and they offered there the first-fruits of all the
produce of the seasons, while many people actually made it a daily
contradiction with the Synoptic Gospels on two points. In the first place it names, as
having been present, Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Cleophas (? alias Mary the
mother of James and Joses) and in place of the mother' of Zebedee's children. ( ? alias
Salome) Mary the mother of Jesus, whose name does not occur in the other Oospels
in this context. In the second place the women are standing, according to Saint John,
not at a distance, but close to uie Cross (xix. 25), within speaking distance (xix. 26-7).
In this second feature the version of the incident according to Saint John has a corre-
spondence in the epilogue to the Passion of Cleomenes, in which (not the hero but) the
hero's children are put to death in the immediate presence of the hero's mother (Plut.,
chap. 59).
1 The only hint of it is to be found in the adverbial prefix 'down', which is attached
to the verb 'take* in Luke Trxiii. 53 ; but the Lucan word KafikK&v is manifestly an un-
warrantable amplification of the Marthaean word Aaj3o6v. What is being recorded here is
not the physical descent of the body from the Cross, but the legal delivery of it to Joseph
of Arimathaea by Pilate.
3 The participation of the women, which is given such prominence in the traditional
treatment of the subject in the iconography of the Christian Church, is not mentioned
in the Gospels. In the Gospel according to Saint John (xix. 39-40), which is the only
Gospel in which Joseph of Arimathaea is represented as having assistance, he is assisted,
not by the women, but by Nicodemus. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matt, xxyii. 61 =
Mark xv. 47 = Luke xxiii. 55) the women are represented as following at a distance in
order to mark the place where the body is being ouried.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 405
practice to visit these spots in order to offer sacrifice and to pay
their devotions just as if they were visiting temples of gods'
(Plut., chap. 39).
84. The hero's enthusiastic companion makes good, after the hero's
death, the boast to which he has failed to live up during the hero's
Passion [see Points 34 and 54, above].
Peter in the Acts; Statilius at Philippi (Plutarch: Life of Cato
Minor, chap. 73).
N.B. *As between Therycion and Cleomenes, the parts are
reversed (see Point 34, above). Therycion Hves up to Spartan
ideals by practising at once the suicide that he preaches, while it
is Cleomenes who does belatedly at Alexandria what Therycion
had done betimes at Aegialia.
85. The villain perishes miserably.
Judas commits suicide (Matt, xxvii. 3-10, and Acts i. 16-20);
Nasica has to flee the country, and he dies a premature death
abroad after roaming disconsolately (like Cain or the Wandering
Jew) (Plut., chap. 21); Opimiuk is convicted of having taken
bribes from Jugurtha, and he dies in disgrace (Plut., chap. 39).
86. The most effective executor of the hero's purpose, after the
hero's death, is a convert of a younger generation who has never been
in personal relations with the hero, has been brought up as a fanatical
opponent of his cause, and is indirectly tainted with the blood-guilti-
ness for the hero's death.
Jesus's executor Paul; Agis' executor Cleomenes, who is the son
of Agis' deadly enemy King Leonidas.
87. The executor's conversion is partly due to the twofold influence
of a martyr who is devoted to the dead hero's person and of a sage who
is sympathetic to the dead hero's ideas.
Paul is influenced by (a) his victim Stephen (Acts vii. 58-60, and
viii. i) and (/3) his mentor Gamaliel (Paul's early studies under
Gamaliel are mentioned in Acts xxii. 3, and Gamaliel's plea, in the
Sanhedrin, for toleration of the Apostles is recorded in Acts v.
33-40). Cleomenes is influenced by (a) Agis' widow Agiatis, who
has been forcibly married to the young Cleomei^es through the
tyranny of Cleomenes' father King Leonidas (Plut., chap. 22) and
(/}) his mentor Sphaerus of Borysthenes, under whom he has
studied as a child (Plut., chap. 23). 1
1 For the question whether Sphaerus had been Agis' mentor as well see V. C (ii) (a),
p. 249, footnote 2, above.
4 o6 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
A Synopsis of Results
Our survey of correspondences between the Gospels and the
stories of certain pagan heroes of the Hellenic internal proletariat
and dominant minority has now yielded us a considerable harvest;
but in order to make some effective use of these abundant materials
for study we must first sift them out and arrange them in order.
Our first need is to make a concordance of the literary authorities
from which our evidence has been drawn (Table I). This will
give us a basis for submitting the correspondences to a numerical
analysis (Tables II and III), and after that we shall find ourselves
able to pass from a purely quantitative to a partly qualitative treat-
ment of our materials by singling out, for separate study, several
different kinds of common features which our set of correspon-
dences will be found to display. The correspondences work them-
selves out into an identical drama which appears, at least in essence
and outline, to underly the whole of this group of hero-stories,
pagan and Christian alike. And this drama has certain common
characters (Table IV) common scenes (Tables V and VI), common
properties (Table VII), and even common words (Tables VIII
and IX).
The synopsis has been reduced as far as possible to tabular
form in order to enable the reader to take in at a glance its bearing
upon what follows.
[Tdbks I~IX, pp. 407-17.]
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
407
TABLE L Concordance of the Literary Authorities
Jesus
The Spartan
Archaists
The Roman
Archaists
The Futuris
ts 5
fc
1
fc -1^2
"^ 2? -a,
^
5
1
? 3
a
1
3
1 1
f *
%
I
c
f^
Sf **
1,-s
1
Point ^
1 2
1
1
I
Is
$
I
1 * i
1 cS
| Jj i
^ f C ^
8 I "H
if 3 - l
3 1 a
i* fx"
X
X
X X
I
X-
x i
'~T
1A t x
x
x
X X
I X X
i
2
2 X
X X
x
X
2
X
I 3
3 X
X
X
I
x
4 X
x
X
I I
S o
o o
X
x
x
X
2 X
2
6 x
x x
x
X X
4
2 Z
7 X
x x
X
I
j
8 x
X X
X
X
X
2 X
X
2
4
9 X
10 x
x x
X
1 x
I
[x]
x
I 2
I 2
II
X X
X
I
j
12
X
x
I
J
13 x
X X
X
J
14 *
X X
x
I
X
15 x
16 x
x x
x x
[x]
X
X
r
XXX
3 3
17 x
X X
X
V
I
18 x
X X
X
I X
j
I
IQ X
X X
X
I O
2
20 X
X X
X
X
1
I
21 X
x x
X
x
X
I
I
23 X
x x
X
2
23 x
X
','.
'
X
24 x
X X
X
X
X X Z
I
25 X
X X
x
,
3
26 x
X X
X
X
i
27
X
x
J
i
28
X
X
I
x
J
i
2 9 X
x x
o
2
30
X
X I
X
I I
31
X
x
I
32
X
X X 2
x
I I
33 X
x x
x
X
I
X I
2
34 X
X X
X
o
X I
2
35 X
X
x
J
I
36 x
x x
X
j
, I
37 X
x x
x
X
38 x
X
X
I
I
X i
I
39 X
x x
X
X
z
40 x
x x
X
I
4i
X
X
42 X
X
x
I
X
43
X
X
44 X
X X
X
X 2
X
45 X
x
X
X
2
3
3
Note; X means a correspondence, o means a contradiction.
Jesus as the gentle predecessor and Peter as the violent successor.
T John the Baptist as the gentle predecessor and Jesus as the violent successor
48 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
TABLE I. Concordance of the Literary Authorities continued.
The Spartan
The Roman
Jesus
Archaists
Archaists
The Futurists
1 '
Point
| Matthew
i
\ Luke and Acts
t
1
,
1
\
Gaius Gracchus
Fulvius
Cato Minor
Romans taken together
j
,
Salvius \
|
1
Futurists taken together \
Total of pagan correspond
to points in the Gospels
46
X
X
x
I
X
X
z
3
47
X
X
X
i
48
X
x
i
49
X
X
X
X
x
I
50
X
X
X
X
I
x
i
51
X
X
X
X
I
52
x
X
X
X
I
53
X
X
X
X
I
54
X
X
X
X
X
i
55
X
X
X
X
X
I
56
x
X
X
I
57
X
x
X
X
x
I
X
i
58
X
X
X
z
59
X
X
x
X
x
X
60
X
X
X
X
X
I
6z
[x]
x
X
I
62
X
X
X
63
x
X
I
64
65
X
X
X
X
X
X
i
66
X
X
X
X
X
j
i
67
X
X
68
X
X
69
X
X
X
x
x
70
X
X
X
X
X
71
X
X
72
x
X
i
73
X
X
74
x
X
75
X
[x]
X
76
X
X
X
x
2
77
x
X
78
[x]
X
X
79
X
X
80*
x
X
X
X
8oAf
X
X
81
[x]
X
82
X
X
X
X
X
o
83
X
X
2
84
X
o
x
85
X
X
X
X
z
I
86
x
X
87
X
X
i
j
60
53
61
45
26J
351
64
J7t
16
St
7
t
4
6
2
I
2
n
i4t
* The women are not akin to the hero, and they remain at a distance.
T One of the women is the hero's mother, and she witnesses, from close at hand, the execution
of the hero (of the hero's children),
t Reckoning the 'pairs' in Points i and IA as one and not two correspondences each.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
409
TABLE II. Analysis of Correspondences between the Gospels and the
Stories of Pagan Heroes
^*
*J
411
*
1
V|
Xs"
'1
*&
fe'-g
.
S
*g
g
y
t
l||
s<3
i
J*5
f?
II
1
lie
|"||
4
-C
si
5
s-Sii
^41
^
^4
Total number of points in the Gospels
43
13
33
75
45
88
Correspondences in the story of Agis
13
4
9
22
13
26
Cleomenes
13
8
17
30
25
38
at least one Spartan archaist
25
ii
5
36
61
,, Tiberius Gracchus
9
2
5
14
7
16
Gaius Gracchus
6
2
7
13
9
Fulvius
2
3
s
3
5
Cato Minor
3
I
3
6
4
7
at least one Roman archaist
17
4
13
30
17
34
,, Aristonicus
4
o
4
4
>, Eunus
2
4
6
4
6
> i, Salvius
o
2
2
2
2
,, M n Athenio
,, Catiline
2
O
2
2
> at least one futurist
8
4
12
4
12
Total number of individual pagan correspondences
54
17
SI
105
68
122
* Omitting Point 83, but reckoning Points IA and 8oA as separate points.
TABLE III. Analysts of Correspondences between the Stories of the
Spartan Archaists and those of the Other Heroes
1
t
If
1
i
Jl
i f
|
1
**
ii
p
Is
i
it
111
^1
II
%
11
3|J
s
S 5
**
& i
SI
SI
Si
Correspondences in the story of Jesus
,, Tiberius Gracchus
33
2
35
5
3
2
26
4*
38
7
61
,, Gaius Gracchus
3
4
2
5
6
tf Fulvius
5
O
o
<
>. Cato Minor
o
I
O
o
p at least one Roman archaist
3
10
2
5
ii
> >, Aristonicus
o
i
X
2
^
> ,, Eunus
o
i
O
o
I
> Salvius
o
o
o
o
Q
, Athenio
o
o
c*
O
Q
, Saryrus
o
I*
o
J
> Catiline
o
o
o
Q
> at least one futurist
3
I
I
4
4
Total number of individual correspondences
28
53
8
36
61
89
* See p. 400, footnote i, above, referring to Point 69.
4io
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) ( a )
TABLE IV. Common Characters
Jesus
The
Sparian
Archaists
The Roman
Archaists
The Futurists
S
1
1
a
1
153
1
II
s
'w
I
*
1
1
1
s
p
1
<*)
1
1
1
1
1
g
1
1-5
1
1
1
.3
5
.3
a
g
|
3
'1
c
1
ts
Jij
1
3
1
1
J
"1
a
1
a
i
1
1
ig
i
II
Characters
Point(s)
^
^
o
fri
e>
&H
5
K
^
c
to
^
CJ
fc<
The pair of heroes^
(a gentle prede-l
i*
X
X
X X
X
X X
I
2
cessor and a vio- 1
lAJ*
X
X
X X
X
X X
I
2
lent successor) J
The hero's mother
5+73 +
X
X
X
2
X
X
2
4
SOA
The forerunner ,
6
X
X
X
X
2
The traitor
22 + 23 +
X
X
X
X
X
39+40
The hero's twelve
companions
25
X
X
X
I
The bosom friend
28
X
X
X
X
I
Z
The boaster
34+54+48
X
X
X
i:
X
I
2
The chosen com-
panion(s)
35
X
X
X
X
The enemy vic-
tim(s)
44
X
X
X
I
X
X
2
3
The false wit-
nesa(ea) .
50
X
X
I
X
X
2
The foreign po-
tentate .
55-63
X
X
X
X
X
The mockers
X
X
X
X
The hero's two
fellow victims .
70
X
X
X
X
X
The convert-exe-
cutor
86
X
X
X
' I
The convert's
martyr
, 87
X
X
X
X
The convert's
mentor
87
X
X
X
X
Jesus as the gentle predecessor and Peter as the violent successor.
t John the Baptist as the gentle predecessor and Jesus as the violent successor.
J Theiycion was *a man who was high-souled in deed and high-falutin and boastful in word*
(Plutarch: Lives of Agis and Cleomenes, chap. 52).
Statilius was 'a young man who affected a resoluteness beyond his years and who studied in
all respects to appear to be, like Cato, the master of his feelings' (Plutarch: Life of Gate Minor >
chap. 65).
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
S]9<ISO) 9lfl Vt
411
snung
Th
A
tatfDi siwtuog
X X X X
U9tfVJ SUOJMNfg
o
>
I
ytrfoutg
X X X XX
XX XX
X X XX X X
X XXX
XX X X XXX
XXX XX XXX X XX X X X X
X XXX XXXX X XXXX XX X X XX
+ *
viCKJ 5 ** *
i>t^*SoStcco
*
3
.1
I I' la" 'I
I* 8 f J ^
yiF-"
412
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
TABLE VI. Analysis of Visual Correspondences between the Gospels
and the Stones of Pagan Heroes
it
it
?!
|
>
!|
I
ill
M
1
If
i$
"I
IJJe
1^'J
S
^
*&
s
4S#
$18
^
^^
Total number of points in the Gospels
IO
6
9
19
IS
25
Correspondences in the story of Agw
3
2
2
5.
4
7
,, Cleomenes
2
3
5
7
8
xo
at least one Spartan archaist
5
5
7
12
1Z
17
Tiberius Gracchus
I
i
2
3
3
4
Gaiua Gracchus
3
i
X
4
2
5
, Fulvius
I
o
3
4
3
4
, Cato Minor
I -
X
I
X
,, at least one Roman archaist
Aristonicus
5
2
5
IO
7
12
Eunus
Salvius
t i.__'
o
O
o
o
,, at least one futurist
i
X
2
i
2
Total number of individual pagan correspondences
XI
7
is
26
22
33
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
413
TABLE VII. Common Properties
The
Spartan
The Roman
/
Jesus
Archaists
Archaists
The Futurists
1
I
1
1
1
^O
1
1
\
I
.
1
1
II
-
1
i
1
$
g
1
1
i
.0
g
1
^1
Property
Points)
5
J
i
1
I
1
1.
i
1
I
i
i
I
1
1
i
fit
A genealogy
3
X
X
I
i
A tiled roof (roofs).
II + IZ
X
X
i
A commandeered
mount . .
16
X
X
X
X
i
A precious gift (gifts)
20
X
X
X
I
i
A traitor's trifling
reward
23
X
X
I
i
Sacramental flesh
and blood .
29
X
X
I
i
Swords (a sword) .
X
X
X
I
X
X
X
X
4
s
Staves .
42
X
X
I
An official custom
relating to the re-
lease of a prisoner
60
X
X
X
I
I
A basin of water
64
X
X
I
1
A royal crown (dia
dem) and robe
66 + 67
X
X
X
I
A cross (gallows)
69
X
X
X
X
2
2
A seamless shirt
71
X
X
I
I
A stabbing weapon
A consecrated site of
79
(Ci
X
al-
X
I
I
a martyrdom
83
vary)
X
X
*
414
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
TABLE VIII. Common Words
The
Spartan
The Roman
8 e
fe
>5US
Archaists
Archaists
The Futurists
1
te
;!
||
, V
<2 _
1
3
a
i
ig
11
tft
1
1
1
1
1
1
i "g
ll
Words*
Point
Matthew
1
1
R
1
1
1
I
i
Gains G;
Fulvius
1
o
3
J
1
1
1
.0
jg i |
s
()t
9
X
X
X
X
[x]
I
2
O)t
X
X
X
I
X
(y)t
-
x
x
X
r
(S)t
12.
x
x
x
()
36
X
X
x
x
I
(Ot
37
x
X
X
X
!
50
x
X
x
<3>t
68
X
X
X
(0
71
X
x
I
( K )t
72
X
X
I
(A)i
74
X
X
1
(^)t
75
x
X
o
x
I
wt
x
X
I
.......
-._
-.
* The letters of the Greek Alphabet in this column refer to the passages quoted at the foot of
the present table.
t In the correspondences marked thus the corresponding words in both the New Testament
and the ppgan text occur, not in the narrative, but in the mouth of one or more of the characters,
as a quotation either from a speech (, j9, y ]) or from a dialogue (9, *, J>).
t In the correspondences marked thus the corresponding words are placed in JeauR'a mouth
(d, C, A) and in a centurion's mouth (M) in the New Testament, but occur in the narrative m the
pagan text. ^ T
In the correspondences (, t) marked thus the corresponding words in both the Iscw Testa-
ment and the pagan text occur in the narrative only, and not in the mouth of any of the characters,
(a) The foxes have holes (<o>Aeou's) and the birds of the air have
nests (KaraaKqvwcreis), but the Son of Man hath not where to lay
his head* (Matt. viii. 20 == Luke ix. 58). The wild animals that
range over Italy have a hole (<coAoy), and each of them has its lair
(KOLTOLOV) and nest (/caraSucns), but the men who fight and die for
Italy have no part or lot in anything but the air and the sunlight. 1
Without home or domicile, they wander over the face of the Earth
with their children and their wives; and the generals are cheating
thenqi when they exhort them, in action, to fight for the sake of
their cemeteries and sanctuaries. Of all these thousands of Romans
not one has either an ancestral altar or a family tomb. It is for the
sake of other men's wealth and luxury that these go to the wars
and give their lives. They are called the lords of the World, and
they have not a single clod of earth to call their own* (Plutarch:
Gracchi, chap. 9).*
1 In this passage of his speech Tiberius Gracchus is making the same point as Arii-
tonicus makes by calling his followers 'Citizens of the City of the Sun*(* e<5 < "< 5 reference*
on p. 381, footnote i, above). A.J.T. a Quoting from a speech by Tiberius Gracchus.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 4x5
(/?) 'The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent
take it by force* (77 /JacriJWa rwv ovpavatv ^la^rou, Kal fiiavral
apTTd&vaw avTijv) (Matt. xi. 12); 'The Kingdom of God is preached,
and every man presseth into it* (17 /?a<nAt'a rov tov cuayycAt^rat,
Kal irds el$ avrriv jSta^rat) (Luke xvi, 16). *To change a political
regime without violence and intimidation is not easy* (noXtreiav
(jLGTaftaXew ai/ei jS/a? Kal <f>6pov ^aAeTrov tm*>) (Plutarch; ^/i and
Cleomenes, chap. 31).*
(y) 'Some of them ye shall kill and crucify' (c avroiv a?ro-
KTevelre Kal aravpd)aT<i) (Matt, xxiii. 34); 'Some of them they shall
slay and persecute' (eg avr&v ajroKrevovat Kal /cSuioi;<w) (Lake
xi. 49). 4 To the point of persecuting some of them and slaying
others' (oSare . . . rous j&ev z&Xavveiv, TOU? S* aTTo/crtwtJctv) (Plutarch ;
Agis and Cleomenes, chap, 31).*
(S) 'That which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be
proclaimed upon the housetops' (o TT/W TO o$$ ^AoA^arc cV rot^
ra/xetW, KTjpvxOtf&zrat, em rcDv Sto/Ltarcov) (Luke Xli* 3), \ . * that
many failed to find lodgings, and the acclamations were echoed
from the roofs and the tiles because the campus could not contain
the multitude' (c&s* TroAAoty ptv ot/aja<ts <VtAc7rcrv, rov
Se^ajuevou ro irXfjGos OLTTO r<Di^ reyw rai r<3^ /cc/>a/xa>^ rd?
avvr]x ty (Plutarch ; Gracchi, chap* 24).
(e) 'He . . , began to be sorrowful and very heavy*
Xv7Tia9ai Kal d&r]fj.ovLv) (Matt. xxvi. 37); "He . . * began to be $ore
amazed and to be very heavy' (rjp^aro &0aj4$<to0at Kai aS^o^t^)
(Mark xiv. 33); 'Being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and
his sweat was as it were great drops of Wood falling down to the
ground* (y^vo^vo^ *V dy&vla cVrcwre/w Tr/xwjv^iro- ^ytfwro SI o
t$pw$ avrov o>at QpQpfhi af/xarosr /cara^atWi^rc^ rl rrj# y?jv) (Luke
xxii* 44). *Gaiu$ Gracchus became more and more depressed and
unaccountably upset until it ended in his falling into a sort of
frenzy in which he was virtually out of his mind , . . He went
off ... very heavy, like a man who is fey. In this state of mental
excruciation. , . .* (dW Kal /xoAAoy ratrivoufti>os' #<u napa
aTromTTTtJov t$ Avrrav rtva Kal ^uai/uiST} Sta^caa' Mmirr*,
prjatv . . . aSrffu>j/a>J/ KCU 7ro^AaToi/ftyo^ ourta S* auroO
crr/^/caro? , . .) (Diodoras, Books KXXiv-xxxv, chap, 28*); *0i*
his way back from the Forum, Gaius stopped in front of the statue
of his father, gazed at it in silence a long while, and finally went off
after bursting into tears and lamentations* (o Si rd*&$ fa t% ayopar
dirtpxopevos c<m? /cara rov rov Trar/w ii^^rm^ ural TroAfo ^M$VOV
* Quoting from a *p*ch &y Claomcntt, In tnothtr context <V. C <i) (^) 1 1 Anm^x I,
P. 3S, above) jt hw tlreftdy bsim no^iccdi tht therft i* *lo corrcfpomlnc
Matt, xi, i a indi Anitophnuet; Bird*, 1, 31.
* Quoting from * tpcecb by Clcomene*.
416 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
eppXafias els avrov ovScv e<0yaro, Sa/cputfas 1 Se Kal arwdg
(Plutarch: Gracchi, chap. 35).
() 'Sleep on now and take your rest' (/cafleuSerc TO Aowrov icat
avairava6) (Matt. xxvi. 45 = Mark xiv. 41). 'They passed the
time watching and taking their rest by turns' (ei> ^tepei <f>v\drrovrs
KOL draTraud/zevot Swjyov) (Plutarch: Gracchi, chap. 35).
(77) 'And as some spake of the Temple, how it was adorned
with goodly stones and gifts (ava^jiwicrt), he said: "As for these
things which ye behold, the days will come in the which, there
shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown
down (KaraAi^aercu)" '* (Luke xxi. 5-6). 'Nothing can be so
sacrosanct as votive offerings (dvaff^ara) to the Gods; yet no-
body has ever thought of estopping the Plebs from using and
moving (KWGW) and transferring (/j-ero^epeiv) such offerings as it
thinks fit' (Plutarch: Gracchi, chap. i5). a
(0) 'Weep not for me' (^ KXaitre iv ipe) (Luke xxiii. 28).
'Stop weeping for me' (rravaai fit /cAauov) (Plutarch: Agis and
Cleomenes, chap. 20).
(t) 'The coat (shirt) was without seam* (fjv Se o x^cov opposes)
(John xix. 23). 'He put on his coat (shirt) and ripped open the
seam across the right shoulder' (evSuo-a^cvos- rov x</ra>va Kal rrjv
pacfyrjv K Top Seto? TrapaXvudfjievos d>fJLov) (Plutarch: Agis and
Cleomenes, chap. 58).
(K) 'Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom*
(fivijaOrp-i [JLOV, Kvpic, orav \0r)$ ev TYJ /JacrtAcia aov) (Luke xxiii.
42). 'With the request that he would remember the favour when
he came into his kingdom' (eTnAe'yovrcs OTTCOS, orav yevrjTcu, jSacrtAeus 1 ,
ri}? xapvros p>r)povvoi) (Diodorus, Books xxxrv-xxxv, chap. 2, 8).
(A) 'It is finished* (rcTeAeorac) (John xix. 30). 'When it was
finished at last' (rcAos fyovros 1787]) (Plutarch: Agis aridCkomenes,
chap. 58).
(ju,) 'Tnily this was the Son of God' (d\rj0&$ 0eov Tasty o$ro$)
(Matt, xxvii. 54 = Mark xv. 39). '. . . hailing Cleomenes as a
hero and a child of the Gods' (ifpcoa rov XAcojaei^ Kal &ea>v TratSa
Trpoaayopeuovrc?) (Plutarch: Agis and Cleomenes, chap. 60).
(v) 'For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him-
self' (ouSeis yap ^/xcDv eavrw Qfj, KOL ouSets 1 ecumS aTroflvTjcr/cec) (Saint
Paul: Epistle to the Romans, xiv. 7). 'It is base for people to live
to themselves, and base for them to die to themselves' (alaxpov yap
(KOI) i)v pawl? eWrofe /cal aTroBv^aKeiv) (Plutarch: Agis and
Cleomenes, chap. 52). 3
1 In the corresponding passage, quoted below, from a speech by Tiberius Gracchus,
this same verb (KareXvdij) occurs, a few sentences earlier, with reference to the fall of the
monarchy at Rome. a Quoting from a speech by Tiberius Gracchus.
a Quoting from a dialogue between Cleomenes and Therycion.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
4*7
TABLE IX. Analysts of Verbal Correspondences between the Gospels
and the Stones of Pagan Heroes
1
1
p
i
if
u
1
I
11
IC5
I
if
1
1
jT
si
3$
3
*SI
^S
Total number of points in the Gospels
10
2
X
o
10
2
13
Correspondences in the story of Agis
X
O
o
o
x'
O
X
,, Cleomenea
3
2
I
o
3
2
6
at least one Spartan
archaist
4
2
X
>o
4
a
7
,, Tiberius Gracchus
2
o
o
o
a
Gaius Gracchus
3
O
o
3
3
Fulvius'
O
o
o
o
Cato Minor
o
o
o
o
at least one Roman
archaist
5
o
5
5
Aristonicus
X
o
o
X
X
Eunus
X
X
X
Salvius
o
o
o
Athenio
o
o
o
o
, at least one futurist
2
o
2
a
Total number of individual pagan correspondences
XI
2
X
IX
2
14
4i8 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
Alternative Possible Explanations
How are our eighty-nine correspondences to be accounted for?
Evidently there will be a number of alternative possible explana-
tions ; but it is equally evident that the first of these that should
be taken into consideration is the play of chance. It is safe to
assume a priori that at any rate some of these correspondences
it is idle to guess how many are fortuitous; and there is at least
one clear case (which, for this reason, has been excluded from our
collection) in which the fortuitousness of the correspondence is
demonstrable.
In all four Gospels (Matt. iii. 3 == Mark i. 3 = Luke iii. 4-5 =
John i. 23) John the Baptist is quoted as saying, when he starts
to preach:
'The voice of one crying in the wilderness: "Prepare ye the way of
the Lord; make his paths straight (euflcW). Every valley shall be
filled (-Trao-a <<l>dpa.y TrXypwdTJaeTai), and every mountain and hill shall
be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough
ways shall be made smooth (Aeta?)." )J
This passage in the Gospels has a correspondence which is par-
ticularly striking because it extends here and there to an actual
identity of words in the following passage in Plutarch's Lives of
the Gracchi (chap. 28):
'[Gaius Gracchus] was especially keen on road-building, and in this
work he had an eye for elegance and beauty as well as for sheer utility.
His roads were carried through the countryside dead straight (evBelai . . .
arpfjLLs) The hollows were filled (m^TrAafteVcov) with embankments;
the clefts carved by torrents or ravines (<a/oayyes) were spanned with
bridges ; the road was graded to the same level on both sides ; and as a
result of all this care the work displayed a beautiful symmetry (o/toA^v
KCLI KaXrjv o\l*w efx<r) throughout its length.'
The closeness of this correspondence might seem at first sight
to rule the hypothesis of accident out; and it might appear prob-
able that in this case the Gospels (or their source) were drawing
upon Plutarch (or his source), either directly or indirectly, rather
than .vice versa. We might conjecture that the Roman art and
practice of road-building had made a profound impression on the
minds of the Romans' Oriental subjects; that these Oriental ad-
mirers of a Roman achievement had concentrated their admiration
upon the figure of one of the first great road-builders in Roman
history; and that the record of this Roman hero's road-building
J This is according to Saint Luke. The Gospels according to Saint Matthew and
Saint Mark give the first sentence only, without the second* The Gospel according to
Saint John gives the first sentence only, and that in a paraphrase.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 419
feats had been turned to allegorical account by a Jewish prophet
who had grown up under the Roman regime without losing hold
upon the Jewish tradition of seeing life in terms of the spirit rather
than in terms of matter. Such a theory of the origin of this passage
in the New Testament would be as pretty as the Ptolemaic theory
of the movements of the heavenly bodies ; but it would suffer from
the same single but fatal defect t>f being demonstrably untrue. Its
falsity can be verified at a glance; for in each of the four Gospels
the passage is ascribed to the Prophet Isaiah; and the ascription
is correct. If the Greek text of Luke iii. 4-5 is compared with the
Septuagint Greek version of Isa. xl. 3-4, the quotation will be
found to reproduce the original with only trifling inaccuracies
which do not affect either the general sense of the passage or any
of the verbal coincidences with the corresponding passage of
Plutarch. The proof of the fortuitousness of the correspondence
is decisive; for the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament
into Greek was made circa 170-132 B.C. ; r and that is not only long
before the earliest possible date of the writing of Plutarch's Lives
of the Gracchi or the composition of Plutarch's sources; it is, at
latest, at least nine years before the earliest possible date at which
Plutarch's hero Gaius Gracchus himself can have begun to build
his roads after entering upon his first term of office as Tribune of
the Plebs in 123 B.C.
On this showing, are we to dismiss as fortuitous every corres-
pondence between the New Testament and pagan Greek literature
in which the New Testament passage contains either a quotation
(express or tacit) from the Old Testament or a reminiscence of it?
It might be rash to accept so sweeping a generalization as that
without examining on their merits the actual cases in point.
One instance of a feature in the New Testament which can be
traced back to the Old Testament with almost as great a certainty
as the passage quoted by John the Baptist from Isaiah is the figure
given in Matt. xxvi. 15 for the price paid by the Chief Priests to
Judas (Point 23). Matthew's 'thirty pieces of silver' can hardly be
explained except as an echo of Zechariah's (xi. 12). In this case
sheer accident is clearly a less probable explanation than plagiar-
ism; and, while Matthew makes no express reference to Zechariah
in this place, he does refer to the Old Testament though he
names the prophet incorrectly and misquotes the words 2 when
he gives the sequel to the story of the betrayal (in xxvii. 9-10).
This instance, however, is hardly revelant, because the exact figure
of the price of the betrayal is not the feature in our Point 23 in
1 See Tarn, W. W. : Hellenistic Civilization (London 1927, Arnold), p. 178.
z On this aee further the present Annex, p. 424, below.
4ao ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
which we have detected a correspondence between the respective
stories of the betrayal of Jesus and the betrayal of Agis.
We may notice next a pair of cases in which a narrative that has
been incorporated into the New Testament seems to have been
cut to fit a passage from the Old Testament that is quoted with
reference to it.
In the tableau of the rider riding through the streets of a city
(Point 16), Mark (xi. 1-7) and Luke (xix. 29-35) mention one riding
animal only 'a colt' and make no reference to the Old Testa-
ment in connexion with it. John,, again, mentions (xii. 12-15) one
ridiijig animal only, and quotes, in connexion with it, a passage
from Zechariah introduced anonymously as 'the prophet' in a
shortened form in which there can be no question of more than
one animal being intended. The briginal (Zech. ix. 9) runs :
'Behold, thy king cometh unto thee . . . lowly and riding upon an ass,
and upon a colt the foal of an ass.'
in the version of the incident -in Matthew, Zechariah intro-
duced anonymously as 'the' prophet* here too is quoted in this
fuller form (Matt. xxi. 5). In the ]Vlatthaean version of the incident
in the story of Jesus on which the quotation from JZechariah bears,
there are also two animals 'an ass, and a colt with her' (Matt.
xxi. 2) and both of these are brought by the disciples to Jesus and
are saddled for his use. Now, since a rider cannot bestride two
mounts at once, Matthew's divergence from the other three Gos-
pels in the matter of the number of the animals introduces an
anomaly into his account of the incident from which the other
versions are free. And this may prompt us to conjecture that
Matthew has altered the narrative in defiance of the probabilities
in order to bring it into line with the full text of Zechariah,
which Matthew appears to have read is referring to two animals,
though it seems much more likely that only one animal is really
intended, and that Zechariah is merely indulging in the conceit
which is one of the characteristic ornaments of Hebrew poetry
of saying the same thing twice over in different words.
In the second case (Point 71) in which a narrative incorporated into
the New Testament seems to have been cut to fit a quotation froni
the Old Testament the probable explanation is the same: the literary]
artifice of repetition in periphrasis has been mistaken for a pair of
references to two separate things. Ps. xxii. 18 They part my gar-
ments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture' is quoted in
Matt, xxvii. 35, and in John xix. 24 (with respective references to 'the
prophet' and to 'the scripture 1 ) in connexion with a statement
that is also made (though here without any reference to the Old
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 421
Testament) in Mark xv. 24, and in Luke xxiii. 34 that the soldiers
'parted his garments, casting lots'. In the Synoptic Gospels,
Matthew included, it is assumed that there was a single procedure
in which lots were cast in order to determine how the clothes were
to he distributed among the claimants. According to John (xix,
23-4), however, all the clothes except a seamless 'coat* or shirt
(xiT&v appa<f>o$) are parted without any casting of lots presumably
in the literal sense of pulling them to pieces at the seams and the
casting of the lots is a special device for dealing with the seamless
coat, which the soldiers are loath to spoil by tearing it. We may
conjecture that the writer of the Gospel according to Saint John
has altered the narrative in order to bring it into line with the text
of Ps. xxii. 1 8, and that he has been moved to make this alteration
because he has interpreted the Psalm as describing, not one act,
but two acts.
Again, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas with a kiss (Point 40) may
be thought to have been suggested by the incident, narrated in
2 Sam. xx. 8-1 o, of Joab taking Amasa by the beard with his right
hand to kiss him, in order to put him off his guard while he
treacherously smites him in the fifth rib with his sword. And, if
the incident, as it appears in the New Testament, is really a literary
echo of this corresponding incident in the Old Testament (to which
it does not make any reference), then we might have to dismiss as
a mere effect of chance the correspondence which we have descried,
in this point, between the betrayal of Jesus and the betrayal of Agis.
There are two other cases in .which it is possible, though not
convincingly probable, that a feature in the New Testament has
been derived from a feature in the Old Testament to which the
relevant passages of the New Testament make no reference. The
silence of Jesus, first before the Sanhedrin (Point 51) and then
before Pilate (Point 58), may have been derived from Isa. liii. 7.
Similarly, the picture, in the Synoptic Gospels of the women
standing afar off to watch the Crucifixion (Point 80) may have been
derived from Ps. xxxviii. u.
There is an unmistakable, though again unacknowledged, quo-
tation from Ps. xxii in the Matthaean and Marcan versions of the
mocking of Jesus on the Cross (Point 72). Matt, xxvii. 39 and
Mark xv. 29 both reproduce Ps. xxii. 7, and Matt, xxvii. 43 goes
on to reproduce Ps. xxii. 8. Moreover in Matt, xxvii. 40 (= Mark
xv. 29-30) and 43 there are almost certainly reminiscences of a
passage in the Book of Wisdom. 1 Since it is hardly credible that
* Wisd. of Sol. ii. 12-20, quoted in this Annex on pp. 494~S below. In this passage'the
ungodly* are represented as plotting tc inflict a horrible death upon a righteous man
who claims to be the Son of God, in order to see whether his Divine Father will deliver
him in his extremity.
422 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
'in real life* the Jews would have chosen to quote or paraphrase,
in mockery, passages of Scripture in which the sympathy is (as it
is in both these contexts) on the side, not of the mockers, but of
their victim, we may conjecture that these particular taunts in
Matthew and Mark are merely echoes, in the evangelist's own mind,
of the corresponding verses of the Book of Wisdom and the Twenty-
second Psalm, and we might even go so far as to dismiss the whole
of this incident in the New Testament as unhistorical on the same
ground if it did not include other taunts e.g. 'he saved others;
himself he cannot save* (Matt, xxvii. 42 = Mark xv. 31 ; cf. Luke
xxiii. 35) 1 which do not appear to be reminiscences of anything
either in Ps. xxii or in the Book of Wisdom or in any other piece
of the Old Testament.
Are we then to explain away, as a mere effect of chance, every
correspondence between a point in the Gospels and a point in the
story of some pagan Hellenic hero wherever the passage in the
New Testament can be shown to contain some reminiscence of
a passage in the Old Testament ? Such a procedure can best be
tested by observing how it works in another set of circumstances.
The writer of this Study had an uncle, the late Dr. Paget Toynbee,
who in the course of his life contributed a considerable number
of letters to The Times quoting either Dante or else Horace Walpole
with reference to some current piece of news in that newspaper.
The subjects were extremely diverse and the quotations were
usually apt; and, if one were to slip a file of these fetters of Dr.
Paget Toynbee' s into the hands of a New Testament scholar when
he was in an unguardedly 'higher critical' mood, one can imagine
the unhappy victim of our practical joke being inveigled into
fathering the theory that the passages from two ancient authors
which Dr. Toynbee was in the habit of quoting were manifestly the
sources of the old-wives' tales about current events which the
Editor of The Times had palmed off upon his readers as authentic
news. The theory is plausible because news is notoriously expen-
sive. It means paying toll to telegraph companies and salaries to
correspondents. A frugal editor might surely yield to the tempta-
tion to save his purse by coining counterfeit news out of passages
of ancient authors with which an assiduous scholar was kind
* There are other taunts, again, which are manifestly not derived from the Old
lestarnent, since they are echoes of statements or avowals which are attributed to Jesua.
in the New Testament itself in the preceding chapter of the story of the Passion: e.g.
Thou that destroyest the Temple and buildest it in three days, save thyself' (Matt,
xrvu. 40 = Mark xv. 29-30, echoing Matt. xxvi. 61 = Mark xiv. 58). Similarly, 'if he
be trie Kin$ of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him'
(Matt. xxvii. 42 = Mark xv. 32) may be an echo of Matt. xxvi. 63-4 = Mark xiv.
01-2 = Luke xxu. 67-9. On this showing, the reminiscences of the Book of Wisdom in
Matt xxvu 40 (== Mark xv. 29-30) and 43, may be at second hand, through Matt. xxvi.
63-4 ( ~ Mark xiv. 61-2).
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 423
enough to supply him. The theory is so attractive that its present
inventor could hardly have resisted adopting it himself if there
were not one flaw in it that is fatal to it. This flaw is a chronological
one for investigation will show that Dr. Toynbee's letters con-
taining the quotations from Dante and Horace Walpole never
appeared in The Times in advance of the news with reference to
which they purported to be written: they always appeared after an
interval of at least twenty-four hours!
This imaginary parallel reveals the weak point in the argument
with which we have been playing. The fact of an ancient work of
literature being quoted, either expressly or tacitly, with reference
to an alleged current event is, of course, no proof whatever that
the alleged event is a piece of fiction which has been fabricated out
of the quotation. The event need not be fictitious just because the
quotation is apt. For, if the work that is quoted is of a certain size
and has a certain variety of content, and if the scholar who quotes
it has a retentive memory, then an appropriate quotation may
spring to the scholar's mind in almost any conceivable circum-
stances. And, if our scholar is a hafiz whose study is the Holy Writ
of Islam or Jewry and who has learnt his Qur'an or his Law and
Prophets by heart, then the fact that his narrative of current events
contains telling quotations from Scripture will throw little or no
light upon the question whether the incidents to which these
quotations refer are fictitious or authentic.
In the set of passages from the New Testament with which we
are at present concerned there is at least one clear case of a quota-
tion from the Old Testament which certainly cannot be the origin
of the incident in the Gospels with reference to which it is quoted.
This case occurs in the account of Judas' miserable end (Point 85).
We may begin by taking note of a correspondence between the
Gospels and the story of Cleomenes which we have not included
in ^ our list. In both stories the question of the payment of the
price of a field is introduced in connexion with the machinations
of the villain who brings the hero to ruin. In Plutarch's Lives of
Agis and Cleomenes, chap, 56, Nicagoras' animosity against Cleo-
menes is put down to his resentment at not having received pay-
ment for a field which Cleomenes has bought from him. In the
story of Judas a field is bought according to the Matthaean
version (Matt, xxvii. 7) by the chief priests when the thirty pieces
of silver have been flung back'- by Judas in their faces, and according
to the Lucan version (Acts i. 18) by Judas himself out of the
blood-money. This particular- correspondence is so tenuous that
it would be prudent to ignore it in any case as, in fact, we have
ignored it in this Studybut in the present context we may take note
424 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
of it to the extent of observing that the question of its significance
is not affected one way or the other by the fact that Matthew (xxvii.
9-10) hails the miserable end of Judas as the fulfilment of an Qld
Testament prophecy.
'Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet,
saying: "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that
was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value, and gave
them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me."'
This alleged fulfilment of scripture proves nothing, because in this
case the hafiz's memory has played its owner false. The prophet
in question is really not Jeremiah but Zechariah, and the passage
(Zech. xi. 13) is misquoted. According to the Septuagint it ought
to run:
'And the Lord said unto me: "Drop them into the smelting-furnace
(xtweurqptov) and see if it is genuine, in the manner in which my genuine-
ness was tested on their behalf." And I took the thirty pieces of silver
and cast them into the house of the Lord into the smelting-furnace.'
How has the memory of the writer of the Gospel come to play "
on its owner the trick of substituting a 'potter's field' for the
'smelting-furnace' of the passage in the Old Testament which this
Afl/fo-caught-napping is trying to recall ? The explanation is given,
not by anything in Zechariah, but by the context in the New
Testament. To the knowledge of the writer of the Gospel accord-
ing to Saint Matthew there was, on the outskirts of Jerusalem,
a burial-ground for strangers which went by the name of 'the
Field of Blood' in the writer's (or his source's) own day, and which
was remembered to have been a potter's field before it had been
acquired for this other use by the Jewish public authorities. The
context in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew informs us that,
in the tradition of the Christian community at Jerusalem, the
current name of 'the Field of Blood' had come to be associated
with the last chapter in the story of the treachery of Judas; and
for our present purpose we need not raise the question whether
that story was an authentic piece of history of which the name of
the field was a monument or whether the story was a legend that
had arisen as an explanation of a name of which the true origin
had been forgotten. 1 Whatever may lie behind the traditional
association of the name of the field with Judas' end, it is apparent
1 The hypothesis that the story of Judas' miserable end is an aition (in the technical
sense in -which that Greek word is used by Hellenic antiquaries) is perhaps favoured by
the fact that the person from whose blood the field is alleged to have taken its name is
not the same person in the Matthaean as in the Lucan version of the story. According
to Matthew (xxvii. 3-8) the field has acquired its name because it has been bought by
the chief priests with the blood-money paid to Judas for the betrayal of Jesus. According
to the Lucan version (Acts i. 18-19) the blood is not Jesus's but Judas' own the field
having been the scene of Judas' miraculously horrible death.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 425
that the subsidiary tradition of the field having been originally a
potter's field has suggested, in the mind of the evangelist or his
source, an echo of something in the Old Testament, and that in
this case the hafiz's memory has been at fault. This rules out all
possibility of the story of Judas' end being derived from the mis-
quoted text of Zechariah; and our conclusion will be confirmed if
we go on to compare the Matthaean version of the story of Judas*
end with the Lucan; for in the Lucan version (Acts i. 18-19) there
is no mention of 'the Field of Blood' having been originally a
potter's field ; and while, here too, the story is capped by a quota-
tion from the Old Testament, the texts cited in this Lucan variant
of the story (Acts i. 20) are not Zech. xi. 12-13; but Ps. Ixix. 25
and cix. 8, which have nothing in common with the passage from
the prophet either in its authentic original form or in Matthew's
misquotation of it. It is evident that the story associating *the
Field of Blood' with Judas' end cannot have arisen either out of
the verses from Zechariah or out of the verses from the Book of
Psalms which are respectively quoted in connexion with the story
in Matthew and in the Acts, but which have no other connexion
whatsoever with one another.
Even if there had not been the alternative and incorrect
quotation frcfm Zechariah in Matthew, the two verses quoted from
the Psalms in the Acts could not in any case have been seriously
supposed to be the origin of the story that has evoked the memory
of them in the author's mind and this for the simple reason that,
though they are apposite as far as they go, their appositeness is
only of the vaguest and most general order. There are at least
three other reminiscences of the Old Testament in our present
collection of passages from the New Testament which are in the
same case.
One such reminiscence is the combination of a passage of Trito-
Isaiah 'Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all
people' (Isa. Ivi. 7) with a passage of Jeremiah Ts this house,
which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your
eyes?' (Jer. vii. n) which is cited in all three Synoptic Gospels
(Matt. xxi. 13 = Mark xi. 17 == Luke xix. 46) with reference to
the incident of the cleansing of the Temple (Point 17). This
combination of two passages from the Old Testament cannot have
generated the incident with which it is associated in the New
Testament; for the text of Isaiah, though not inapposite, is exceed-
ingly vague in its application, while the text of Jeremiah refers, not
to people who have had the effrontery to do unlawful business in
the Temple, but to people who have had the effrontery to come
and worship in the Temple after having done unlawful business
426 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
outside its precincts. We shall conclude that these two quotations
from the Prophets have not generated, but have been evoked by,
the incident in the story of Jesus to which they are attached in the
Synoptic Gospels; and this conclusion will be confirmed when we
observe that, in the Gospel according to Saint John (ii. 17), the
same incident is capped by quite a different quotation 'The zeal
of thine house hath eaten me up' which comes from Ps. Ixix. 9.
The record of Jesus being crucified with a malefactor on either
side of him is followed in the Gospel according to Saint Mark (xv.
28) alone of the four by the quotation of a verse from Deutero-
Isaiah (referred to as 'the scripture'): 'And he was numbered with
the transgressors' (Isa. liii. 12). This verse from the Old Testa-
ment can hardly be the origin of the incident in the New Testa-
ment with which it is associated in one Gospel out of four, since
it does not itself comprise any of this incident's distinctive features.
There is no mention in it of the transgressors being Wo in number ;
no hint of the 'numbering' taking the tragically practical form of
being put to death together; and a fortiori no inkling of the three
victims' simultaneous and identical death being a death by cruci-
fixion. In fact, the bearing of the quotation upon the incident
with which it is associated is so vague that we shall be inclined to
dismiss it as a reminiscence which throws no light whatever on the
incident's origin; and our last hesitation will disappear when we
find the same verse of Isaiah being quoted in the Lucan account
of the Passion (Luke xxii. 37) in quite a different place, namely in
the story of the hero sending, after the Last Supper, for swords
(i.e. in connexion with our Point 32 instead of with our Point 70).
Similarly, the text of Zechariah (xii. 10) 'and they shall look
upon me whom they have pierced' cannot seriously be supposed
to be the origin of the incident of the piercing of Jesus's side with
a spear (Point 79), in reference to which it is quoted (as 'another
scripture') in John xix. 37.
The piercing of Jesus's side is related in the Gospel according
to Saint John in connexion with the story (xix. 32-3) that the
soldiers, after they had broken the legs of the two malefactors,
refrained from breaking Jesus's legs because they saw that he was
dead already; and with reference to this (Point 78) the evangelist
(John xix. 36) quotes, or rather paraphrases, a pair of texts from the
Old Testament Exodus xii. 46 and Numbers ix. 12 in the form:
'A bone of him shall not be broken.' Now, in the two passages
thus cited, the prescription refers to the paschal lamb; and the
Crucifixion of Jesus was identified with the sacrifice of the paschal
lamb at an early stage in the Christian tradition. In Saint Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians, v. 7, for example, the identifica-
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (<z)
tion is made explicitly; and it is made tacitly in the Synoptic
Gospels, inasmuch as they identify the Last Supper with the
Passover meal. Are we to conclude that the same identification of
Jesus with the paschal lamb has generated, in the Gospel according
to Saint John, the story of Jesus's bones being preserved unbroken
on the Cross ? -
The Fourth Gospel, in contradiction with all the other three,
places the Crucifixion and not the Last Supper on the day of
the preparation of the Passover (John xviii. 28 and xix. 14 and 31 ;
cf. Matt, xxvii. 62);' and this was the day on which the Passover
lamb was slain and eaten. But this difference of dating, which
might seem at first sight to support the hypothesis of the story in
John being derived from the identification of Jesus with the paschal
lamb, in point of fact rules that hypothesis out of court; for in the
Christian tradition the identification is proclaimed in the symbolic
act of the consecration by Jesus, at the Passover meal, of bread anci
wine as his own body and blood; and the author of the Gospel
according to Saint John has found himself unable to reconcile this
vitally important point in the tradition with his own chronology
according to which, Jesus was already dead, and perhaps already
in the tomb, by the hour on the day of preparation at which the
Passover meal would have been eaten. Accordingly the author of
the Fourth Gospel of necessity refrains from identifying the Last
Supper with the Passover meal, and, consistently with this, ^hc
omits to mention the institution of the Holy Communion which
is recorded in this context in all the Synoptic Gospels, On this
showing, it is evidently improbable that the author of the Fourth
Gospel will have been so eager, after all, to identify Jestis with the
paschal lamb that he will have invented for this purpose an epi-
logue of his own to the story of the Crucifixion. Whatever may
be the origin of the incident of the soldiers refraining from break-
ing Jesus's legs, it seems probable that the reference to the ritual
prescription concerning the paschal lamb has not generated the
incident but has merely been evoked by it.
We shall arrive at a similar conclusion with regard to the relation
between Matt, xxvii. 24 (Point 64) and Deut, xxi 6-7* The corre-
spondence which we have noted between Pilate's hand-washing
and Catiline's may seem at first sight to be proved fortuitous when
we observe, first, that the outwardly identical act is not inspired
by an identical motive, and, secondly, that Pilate's motive has no
known ground in Roman, while it has a cfear ground in Jewish*
religious custom and belief. Catiline washes his hands in order to
1 For this question of dates see Meyer, E.: Ursprung und An/fage 4#*
vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), pp. 167-72*
4*8 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
cleanse them literally from the physical blood of a victim whom
Catiline has just killed with his own hand; Pilate washes his in
order to cleanse them ritually from blood-guiltiness for the death
of a victim whom he has condemned to death but whose blood has
not yet been shed. And in this procedure Pilate, as Origen points
out, 1 'ludaico usus est more . . . faciens non secundum aliquam
consuetudinem Romanorum*. 2 Though the relevant passage in
Deuteronomy is not expressly cited in Matthew, there can be no
doubt that it was in the evangelist's mind. Are we then to conclude
that the incident of Pilate's hand-washing has been generated, not
by the visually corresponding incident in the story of Catiline, but
by a ritually corresponding prescription of the Jewish Law ? This
hypothesis may be attractive at first sight, but its probability
dwindles as soon as we examine the relevant passage in the Book
of Deuteronomy (xxi. 1-9). No doubt this passage has suggested
both the explanation that is given of the act and the words that
Pilate utters while he is performing it; but the differences between
the two contexts are not less striking than the resemblances. In
Deuteronomy the ritual of hand-washing is prescribed as an expia-
tion for the death of a victim who, ilistead of being about to be
slain, has been slain already, and the case envisaged is that of a
person who, instead of having been publicly condemned to death,
has been found slain without its being known who is the slayer.
These circumstances are so different, and the differences touch the
essence of the situation so closely, that we are led to the conclusion
that the passage in Deuteronomy has merely coloured the incident
in Matthew but has not generated it.
Finally we may ask whether the tableau of the fugitive leaving his
wrap in the hands of his pursuers (Point 48) may have been
derived from an at first sight analogous incident in the Old Testa-
ment story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife (Gen. xxxix, 12), and
may therefore, after all, bear no more than a fortuitous resem-
blance to the last scene in the Passion of Tiberius Gracchus. Here
again we shall find that the superficial resemblance between the
respective incidents in the New Testament and in the Old Testa-
ment will not stand the test of closer examination. The wrap
which, in both the story of Jesus and the story of Tiberius Grac-
chus, is left in the hands of an unknown male pursuer, is left, in
the story of Joseph, in the hands of a woman who is the villainess
of the piece in which the fugitive is the hero. Moreover in the
story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife the incident of the seizure
* Origen: In Matthaeum Commentariorum Series, Veins Interpretation cap. 124, in
Migne, J.-P.: Patrologia Graeca, vol. xiii, col. 1774.
2 The -writer's attention has been drawn to this passage of Origen by Dr. Martin
Braun.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 429
of the wrap is not isolated, as it is in both the other two contexts,
but is merely the prelude to a more important incident in which
the abandoned wrap is put by its captor to a fraudulent use as a
piece of material evidence for lending apparent credibility to a false
accusation of which the owner of the wrap is the victim. On this
showing, we may hesitate to pronounce that Gen. xxxix. 12 has
even coloured Mark xiv. 51-2.
The results of the foregoing examination of quotations from,
and allusions to, and reminiscences of, the Old Testament in the
collection of passages from the New Testament with which we are
here concerned seem to indicate that while the play of chance may,
and indeed must, be taken into consideration as one possible
explanation of our correspondences between the Gospels and the
stories of certain pagan Hellenic heroes, this explanation cannot
be pressed to extremes and will not offer us a complete solution
of our problem.
An alternative possible explanation is the production of identical
results by identical causes.
One obvious general identical cause is the element of uniformity
in human nature. Since every human being is brought into the
World by a physical process of conception and birth, every hero,
like every one else, is bound to have had a mother, andthe hero's
mother is as likely as anybody else's mother to play an important
part in the life of her son. This would dispose of our Point 5.
Again, every human being is eventually removed from the World
by death; and therefore any .enterprise which cannot be accom-
plished by a single hero in a single lifetime is bound if it does
not die prematurely by dying with its originator to be handed on
from a predecessor to a successor. This would dispose of one of
the elements in our Points i and i A and 86 and 87. In the third
place we may observe that, yrithout possessing the intrinsic univer-
sality of the figures of a mother or a predecessor or a successor,
the figures of a traitor 1 and a bosom friend and a boaster and a
mocker and perhaps even those of a false witness and a convert
are all of them stock characters in the tragi-comedy of human
life. It will be seen that the principle of the uniformity of human
nature suffices to account for a majority of the common characters
set out above in Table IV.
A more precise identical cause which is likewise capable of pro-
ducing identical results is to be found in a social environment
which is the common setting of all the stories of all the heroes
1 In the story of Dio, for instance (see V. C (ii) (a), pp. 248 and 253, above),
Callippus plays Judas to Dio's Jesus, as is pointed out by Eduard Meyer: Ursprung und
Anf#nge des Christentums, vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), p. 173.
430 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
whom we have brought into comparison with one another in our
present inquiry. Their lives are all lived in a society that is in
course of disintegration; disintegration, as we have seen, 1 brings
standardization in its train; and, if the disintegration-process pro-
duces a certain measure of uniformity as between the histories of
different disintegrating civilizations, it may be expected to produce
the same effect in a still higher degree as between the lives of
individuals who are all of them children of one and the same
disintegrating civilization. The naturalness of this expectation
is pertinent to our present subject, since Jesus and the pagan
herpes with whom we are bringing him into comparison are,
all alike, children of the Hellenic Society in an age begin-
ning in the latter part of the Hellenic Time of Troubles' and
running over into the early days of the Hellenic universal state
which is all comprised within a span of not more than three
centuries from first to last. This identity of social environment
would account, in Points i and i A, for the change from the pre-
decessor's gentleness to the successor's violence, since we have
seen 2 that both Archaism and Futurism that is, two out of four
alternative ways of life that are followed by would-be saviours in
times of social disintegration are doomed a priori to explode into
violence sooner or later. The same cause would also account for
the hero's addressing himself to the Proletariat and denouncing
the Dominant Minority (Points 7-10), and likewise for his preten-
sion to kingship (Point 15). In this connexion we may remind
ourselves 3 that, in this group of points, the superficial likeness is
trivial by comparison with the profound dissimilarity between the
respective attitudes and actions of our pagan heroes and of Jesus.
While the people to whom they appeal and the people whom they
denounce are respectively much the same, there is an extreme
difference between the heroes' own respective responses to an
identical challenge. The pagan heroes even those who set out
with the gentlest intentions all end sooner or later by meeting
force with force and by attempting to substitute a new mundane
regime of their own for the existing mundane regime against which
they are up in arms, whereas Jesus not only parts company with
all his pagan counterparts but actually breaks right away from the
Jewish tradition in which he has been brought up when he persists
in retorting to violence with gentleness; in accepting death with
resignation instead of with defiance; and in proclaiming that his
kingdom is not of This World (Points 45 and 46).
It now looks as though the operation of identical causes and the
* In V. C (iii), above. a In V. C (i) (d) 8 and 9, passim, above,
3 See V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), pp, 128-32, and V. C (i) (d) n, pp. 155-6, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 43*
play of chance were capable of accounting between them for a
majority of our points of correspondence in those chapters of the
story that precede the hero's Passion; but this conclusion does not
take us very far on our road in search of explanations ; for a glance
at Table I will show that the points which fall within these earlier
chapters amount to no more than i6 r out of a total of 89,* so that
the last chapter, of which the Passion is the theme, accounts for
nearly five-sixths of the total number (i.e. for 73 points out of 89).
No doubt, in this last chapter too the two causes which we have
taken into consideration so far will account for an appreciable
number of our correspondences ; but in this chapter these corre-
spondences come thronging in such numbers and are also in many
cases so remarkably close that we cannot reasonably attribute them
all either to the play of chance or to the operation of some identical
cause. We must seek farther before we can conscientiously declare
ourselves quit of the investigation that we have undertaken. We
have still to examine a third possible alternative explanation; and
that is the possibility of mimesis.
If mimesis has in fact played a part in producing the correspon-
dences that we are seeking to explain, it is evident that this faculty
may have been brought into play in either or both of two quite
distinct sets of relations. On the one hand there is the possibility
that some of the characters on our historical stage who have made
their appearance there at a relatively early date have been taken
as objects of mimesis by other characters who have made their
appearance later. On the other hand there is the possibility that
the mimesis may have been the work, not of our characters them-
selves, but of the authors who have recorded and who, in record-
ing, may perhaps have taken liberties with the heroes 1 histories.
Is it likely that any of the later characters have modelled their
lives and actions to any appreciable extent upon those of other
characters that have anticipated them in making their appearance
upon the stage of Hellenic history ? There is certainly a strong
a priori probability that the two Gracchi may have consciously and
deliberately taken the two Heracleidae as their pattern. In the
first place the Roman aristocracy as a whole had already, in the
Post-Hannibalic Age, become so deeply imbued with Hellenic cul-
ture that the entire Hellenic heritage of memories and ideals had
by tiiis time come to be virtually an integral part of the Roman
tradition. In the second place we know that the mother of the
Gracchi, Cornelia who was solely responsible for the upbringing
of the two heroes, since their father died while they were both
1 Reckoning i A as a separate point.
a Reckoning i A and 80 A as separate points.
432 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
still quite young 1 moved, with a markedly greater intimacy than
most Roman aristocrats of her generation, in the Greek-speaking
circles of Hellenic Society. Cornelia was intimate alike with
Macedonian Greek royalties! and with men-of-letters and philo-
sophers of all Greek nationalities. 2
'Gracchus's mother Cornelia saw to it that her son should receive
a liberal Hellenic education, and should be thoroughly grounded in
Greek literature, from boyhood (Fuit Gracchus diligentia Corneliae
matris a puero doctus et Graecis litteris eruditus). He always had tutors
from Greece who were picked men ; and one of these who had the
teaching of Gracchus when he was on the verge of manhood was Dio-
phanes of Mitylene, who was the greatest master of language in his day
in all Greece.' 3
This Mitylenaean rhetor Diophanes, as well as the Cumaean
philosopher Blossius, 4 is said still to have been Tiberius Gracchus's
mentot at the moment when he entered upon his term of office as
Tribune of the Plebs and launched his social reforms. 5 Blossius
himself may be reckoned as a semi-Greek in nationality, since
Cumae was an Italian city-state of Greek origin which had ob-
tained its charter of Latinization from the Roman Government as
recently as the year 180 B.C. 6 To both Blossius and Diophanes,
Agis and Cleornenes would be familiar figures; and their story
would be bound to make a deep impression on Tiberius Gracchus
as soon as his attention was drawn to it. As aristocrats, as archaists,
and as reformers who had made it their first business to grapple
with an acute agrarian problem, these two Spartan Heracleidae
could hardly fail to suggest themselves to the young Roman states-
man as patterns for him to follow.
There is also a certain a priori probability that the examples of
the Heracleidae or of the Gracchi or of both the Spartan and the
Roman pair of heroes may have influenced tie leaders of the
Hellenic internal proletariat whose stories we haVe embraced in
our comparative view. We have seen 7 that, in being driven willy-
nilly out of the path of gentleness into the path of violence, the
would-be archaist reformer is often driven into becoming, in spite
of his original intentions, a champion of the Proletariat, and
further that, if and when his almost inevitable quarrel with his
own kin and kind comes to a climax at which they positively dis-
1 Plutarch: Gracchi^ chap. i. * Plutarch: Gracchi, chaps. I and 40.
s Cicero : Brutus, chap. 27, 104.
* For Bloaaius of Cumae and his relation to Tiberius Gracchus and to Aristonicus
see V. C (i) (c) a, vol. v, p. 179, and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume, p. *49 above.
s Plutarch: Ghraccfn, chap. 8.
6 'Cumanis eo anno .petentibus permissum ut publice Latine loquerentur et prae-
conibus vendendi Latine ius esset.' Livy, Book XL, chap. 43.
7 In V. C (ii) (a), pp. 236-41, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 433
own him, he sometimes seeks and finds a new social habitation and
a new political career by turning from an archaist into a futurist
and putting himself at the Proletariat's head. One such social
migrant is included among our present group of pagan heroes in
the person of Catiline. It is evident that a Catiline might bring
with him an admiration for a Gaius Gracchus which he might then
transmit to the proletarian-born leaders of the Proletariat with
whom he had now thrown in his lot.
On this showing, it seems reasonable to make a considerable
allowance for the possibility of the direct imitation of one character
by another in attempting to account for the correspondences be-
tween the stories of our pagan heroes; but this explanation does
not carry us very much farther, as will be shown by a glance at
Table III above; for, out of 89 instances of correspondences be-
tween the stories of one or other of the two Heracleidae and those
of the rest of the heroes in our group, only 28 instances are con-
tributed by the stories of other pagan heroes, while no less than
61 are contributed by the story of Jesus. It is these 61 instances
from the story of Jesus, and not the 23 from -the stories of the
Gracchi or the one from the story of Cato Minor or the 4 from
the stories of the futurists, that cry out for explanation; and the
suggestion that Jesus may have been consciously following in the
footsteps of the Heracleidae has only to be formulated in order to
refute itself. The Gospels and Josephus alike make it clear that
in the first century of the Christian Era the Jews and Hellenes who
in that age were living cheek-by-jowl in Palestine lived lives as
separate as the Arabs and the Jews are living in the same country
to-day. It is improbable that Jesus of Nas^reth bad ever heard
even of his fellow proletarian and fellow Syrian Bumis of Apamea,
or of the two Cilician slave-kings, Cleon and Athemo; for, though
Coele Syria, and even Cilicia, was not very far from Galilee, these
three Oriental futurists only rose to fame in their distant place of
exile overseas in Sicily. A fortiori it is improbable that Jesus had
ever heard of the Gracchi or of Agis and[ Cleomenes, Accordingly,
if we are to believe that the faculty of mimesis has played a part
in producing any of the 89 correspondences between the story of
Jesus and the stories of our eleven pagan Hellenic heroes, and if
we want to discover the field in which mimesis has operated in
this case, we must concentrate our attention, not upon the relations
between the heroes themselves, but upon the relations between
the literary authorities in whose works the heroes* respective
stories have been recorded.
In setting out to discover, if we can, whether some of these
literary authorities have been influenced by others, our first step
434 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
must be to ascertain, as nearly as possible, their respective dates;
and our first findings will be in chronological order as follows:
Diodorus (vivebat circa 70-1 B.C.).
The Gospel according to Saint Mark (scriptum circa A.D, 65). x
Plutarch (vivebat circa A.D. 45-120).
The Gospels according to Saint Matthew and Saint Luke (scripta
inter A.D. 70 et 95).*
The Gospel according to Saint John (scriptum circa A.D. ioo). 3
It will be seen that, while Diodorus's Library of Universal
History was written at least sixty-five years earlier than any of
the other works here in question, the chronological relation of
Plutarch's Lives to the Gospels cannot be ascertained precisely.
We can only say that probably the Lives were published later than
the Gospel according to Saint Mark, at about the same time as
the other two Synoptic Gospels, and earlier than the Gospel
according to Saint John.
These results, however, even as far as they go, still leave us on
the threshold of our chronological problem; for these works of
literature which we have just tentatively arranged in a chronolo-
gical order all have pedigrees; and, if we now try to grope our way
back from the works themselves to their sources, we shall arrive
at a different chronological sequence.
To take the Gospels first: Matthew and Luke have one common
source in the collection of sayings of Jesus which New Testament
scholars call *Q', 4 and another common source in Mark; and, while
the relative dates of Mark and 'Q' are matters of controversy
between scholars, it seems to be generally agreed that both works
must have been written before A.D. 70.* The date of Mark is of
particular importance for the purpose of our present inquiry,
because Matthew, at any rate, is almost entirely dependent on
Mark for his account of the Passion. 6 And, if we proceed to an
Jerusalem) according to Streeter, B. H.; The Four Gospels (London 1924, Mac
P. 495-
2 Meyer, op. cit., vol. i, p. 239. Streeter dates Luke circa A.D. 80 (op. cit., p. 540)
and Matthew circa A.D. 85 (op. cit., p. 524).
? 9} r % A ' D - j oo-2o according to Meyer, E.t Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christentums,
vol. 111 (Stuttgart and Berlin 1923, Cotta), p. 647. Streeter, 'on the other hand, dates
John circa A.D. 90-5 (op. cit., pp. 456-7).
* For a tentative reconstruction, of 'Q* see Streeter, op. cit., p. 291.
s Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christentums, vol. i, pp. 234-6, dates 'Q', on
internal evidence, between A.D. 67 and A.D. 70, and therefore slightly later than Mark,
which the same scholar, as we have seen (footnote i, above), dates circa A.D. 65.
Streeter, on the other hand, who dates Mark between A.D. 64 and A.D. 70, inclines
(op. cit., pp. 150 and 191) to date 'Q' earlier than Mark perhaps as early as A'.D. 50.
6 Meyer, op. cit., vol. i, p. 212, holds that Luke's, as well as Matthew's, account of
the Passion is mainly based on Mark. Streeter, on the other hand, op. cit., p.- 202, holds
'that Luke is in the main reproducing an account of the Passion parallel to, but indepen-
dent of, Mark, and enriching it with occasional insertions from Mark*.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 435
analysis of Mark, we can distinguish one source 'the Twelve-
source* which must have been written later than the martyrdom
of the son of Zebedee in A.D. 44, and another, embodying the
.recollections of Peter, which appears to be of an earlier date than
'the Twelve-source'. 1 Ex hypothesi, however, the very earliest
sources of the Gospels cannot be anterior in date to the fourth
decade of the first century of the Christian Era, and the sources
of our pagan authorities for the stories of our pagan heroes can all
be traced back to earlier dates than that. For example, the books
of Diodorus's work that deal with the history of the Hellenic
World during the half century beginning, where Polybius left off,
in 146 B.C. are believed to reproduce a continuation of Polybius's
history from the hand of Poseidonius (wvebat circa 135-51 B.C.). 2
Plutarch's Lives of the Gracchi appears to be derived immediately
from a Greek source 3 written from the point of view of the philo-
sophic and aristocratic school of Roman republicans whose proto-
martyr and fount of inspiration was Cato Minor. 4 But this
immediate source of Plutarch's work appears in turn to have been
derived in large measure from Latin biographies of the Gracchi*
which were themselves derived from the Annals of Gaius Fannius
a statesman-historian who was approximately Tiberius Grac-
chus's contemporary. 6 Fannius scaled the walls of Carthage at
Gracchus's heels in 146 B.C.,? and he was consul in 122 B.C., which
was the year of Gaius Gracchus's second tribunate. We may take
it that Fannius's life falls within the dates 166-96 B.C. In the
third place Plutarch's Lives of Agis and Cleomenes appears to have
been derived again not immediately, but ultimately in part
from the history of Polybius (vivebat circa 206-128 B.C.); who must
have been born rather less than half a century after Cleomenes
himself, and in part from the works of two of Cleomenes' senior
contemporaries: his political opponent Aratus of Sicyon (vivebat
271-213 B.C.) and his panegyrist Phylarchus (vivebat circa 270-210
B.C.).
For the sources of Mark see Meyer, op. cit., vol. i, pp.
o f A ^ 1U ? ^ht perhaps fcave been inclined, for his own p*S,?o iS
^^3s^i&^^r G ><-- o-www Unter .
wv^&&^^^2g>r-' v ' c (i) <rf) 3l vo1 - v -
* Kornemann, op. cit., p. 42.
US r * d He see Kornemann, op. cit., pp. 20-37
e authority or this arTecdoteiSPlutarch : Groo^crmp. 4.
436 ANNEX ILTO V. C (ii) (a)
What is Plutarch's relation to these literary authorities whose
works were written perhaps 250 or even 300 years before Plutarch's
own? So far from drawing directly upon these original sources,
Plutarch seems to have been content to take over his stories in
the shape which they had assumed as the result of a long and
complicated literary history.
'The foundation of the narrative, which comes from the historians,
the piecing together of this with the biographical matter which had to
be imported from elsewhere, the arrangement of the whole round the
person of the hero all this was found by Plutarch ready made. . . . His
authorities come from here, there, and everywhere. . . . This variegated
tissue is part and parcel of the genre of literature of which Plutarch is for
us the representative. . . . Plutarch does not dream of claiming to have
woven it himself; his achievement is simply to have produced a work
that has on it a sheen of newness. . . . Plutarch's Lives constitute, through
iteir existence, a proof that, before Plutarch's day, there was a bio-
graphical literature of the Plutarchan kind with a history extending over
many generations.' 1
If Plutarch's work is so remote from the original sources as this,
it would seem at first sight improbable that his text would repro-
duce the original texts at all closely; yet, surprising though this
may be, we have evidence that, at least in one passage, Plutarch's
Lives ofAgis and Cleomenes does reproduce Phylarchus's Histories' 1
with a closeness that here and there approximates to identity.
This may be verified by comparing Plutarch's chap. 34 (our Point
13) with the passage that is expressly quoted from Phylarchus by
Athenaeus in Deipnosophistae y Book IV, pp. 141 F-I42 F. 3 And the
equally close verbal correspondence between a passage of Plutarch's
chapter 50 and a passage of Book XXVIII, chap. 4, of Justin's
epitome of Pompeius Trogus's Historiae Philippicae is probably
to be explained likewise as an effect of the preservation, in both,
of Phylarchus's ipsissima verba. When we further consider that the
style, tone, and colour of these two passages in the Lives of Agis
and Cleomenes also prevail through the greater part of this piece
of Plutarch's work, and that they exactly tally 4 with the account of
Phylarchus's work that is given by Polybius, 5 we may feel war-
ranted in concluding that a substantial ,portion, and perhaps even
the greater part, of Plutarch's text consists of r&imts of the text
1 Leo, F.: Die GrieeHsch-R&mische Biographic nach ihrer Uterarischen Form (Leipzig
1901, Teubner), p. 135. The whole of chapter 8, 'Plutarch', and chapter 9, 'Die Form
der plutarchischen Biographic', is pertinent to our present inquiry.
a According to Suidas, Phylarchus's work covered the history of the Hellenic World
from the death of Pyrrhus in 271 B.C. to the death of .Cleomenea in **Q B.C.
3 See Bux, E.: 'Zwei sozialistische Novellen bet Plutarch* in K*it>, voL xix (1925),
pp. 426-9. It is the latter part of this passage quoted in Athenaeus, i.e, 144 0-142 p, that
actually overlaps with the chapter of Plutarch.
* This point is made by Bux, op. cit., p. 428. ,See pp. 457-9, below.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 437
of Phylarchus 1 which survived, with remarkably little defacement,
all their temporary lifts in the successive literary conveyaaces in
which they made their long and broken journey from Phylarchus J s
manuscript to Plutarch's.
This excursion into the realm of Quellenkritik gives us the follow-
ing chronological sequence for our original authorities, 2 in so far
as we can identify these with any certainty:
Aratus (vivebat 271-213 B.C.).
Phylarchus (vivebat drca 270-210 B.C.).
Polybius (vivebat circa 206-128 B.C.).
Fannius (vivebat circa 166-96 B.C.).
Poseidonius (vivebat circa 135-51 B.C.).
Peter (testimonium prompsit post A.D. 30).
'The Twelve-source' (scriptum post A.D. 44).
A source peculiar to the Gospel according to S^int Luke 3 (scriptum
prae *Q', if Meyer is right in dating 'Q' post A.D. 67).
*Q' (scriptum inter A.D. 67 et A.D. 70).
A source peculiar to the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (scriptum
'
The Gospel according to Saint John (scriptum post A jx 100).
No\v that we have arrived at this sequence of the earliest authori-
ties which we are able to identify in each case, what are we to make
of it? How do our findings bear upon our problem of literary
apparentation-and-affiliation? If we are to believe that soflqe, at
least, of our correspondences are to be credited to the account
of a practice of literary mimesis, then the most obvious conclu-
sion to draw would be that, wherever we have detected a point of
* Leo observes in op. cit, p. 175, that Plutarch's 'Livet of Agu and CUomene* are
reminiscent of his Life of Aratus, except that the Aratus has been constructed by working
the Historians into Aratus's Memoirs, while the Agis and Cltomenc* has been constructed
by working Aratus and Polybius into the narrative of Phylarchus*. This high estimate
ri^J? pl d f bt i p ky I*"* not impugned by the fact that in the Lwt* ofA&vut
^leonumes Phylarchus is cited by name only three times (in chaps, o, a6, and 4.0). It is
more pertinent to observe that Phylarchus is not cited as Plutarch's authority brother of
the two^assagesjin chaps. 34 and 50) which are known, almost for certain, to be of Phy-
iarcnan ongin. There is a far greater number of other passages in this particular piece of
v* that <*?***** bact *rfth certainty fo Pofybius, an<f yet PlutsSere
bius as an authority not even three times but only once (in chap. 48). It will
W"*^ number of express reference, to aTauSbSrity^ givcVZ
6XtCnt t0 Which aut bority has actually been drawn upon
vol. ?pp 8 236^ Ce herC fiiVWl f r the 80urccfl of thc Gospels follows Meyer, op. eat,
/' pp> ai6 - 2 4- Streeter, op. cit., p. 218, suggests that this
^ W rk ^ Lukc ^niself, and was w^tten by him
.
at '' vol PEi??3-i6, and Streeter, op. cit, p. MI.
S*-**'?*' 2*** would makc 'M> aS weU as *L\ toterioVtoCr if
On ^ Othcr hand ' '& " "** ^ bS 'M'^ad X'
'Q' perhaps as early as A.D. 50 (see p. 4 34, footnote 5, above).
438 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
correspondence between one literary authority and another, the
incident as recorded by the earlier or the earliest of two or more
authorities is an authentic matter of fact, but that, when the same
incident reappears in some later authority or authorities, it is in
this context a piece of fiction which has been fraudulently fabricated
out of the genuine fact which the earlier authority has honestly
put on record. This conclusion may be obvious, but it involves
at least three assumptions : first that the earlier 'authority in each
case is reporting, if not the whole truth, at any rate nothing but
the truth; second that the later authority has been guilty of a de-
liberate act of fabrication; and third that the point in common
between the twa or more authorities that are in question in any
given case has ultimately been derived by the later authority or
authorities from the earlier or the earliest, even if only at second
or at tenth hand to the exclusion of the alternative possible hypo-
thesis that all the authorities in question, the earlier and the
later alike, have derived the point which is common to them from
some source that is not identical with any of them and that is earlier
than them all. Not one of these three assumptions can properly
be taken for granted ; and to look into all three of them closely may
be the most profitable step for us to take next.
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Is the apparent case of literary mimesis with which we are now
concerned a clear case of plagiarism ? The concept of plagiarism
pre-supposes the existence of a series of works of literature which
have been successively published at definite dates in a chronologi-
cal sequence and which, each and all, can be attributed respectively
to the pens of particular individual authors. In any sophisticated
social milieu authorship is the normal way of literary creation, and
in such milieux it eclipses every alternative way so completely that
it becomes easy to forget that works of literature can be brought
into existence in any other way than through being deliberately
planned in the mind, and as deliberately written by the pen, of
somebody who in consequence will be recognized on all hands as
the sole and unquestionable author of 'his' book. Nevertheless
this sophisticated way of literary creation ought not to be taken
for granted, without inquiry, in any and every case; for, while
every act of creation is, no doubt, the travail of some individual
soul, 1 it does not follow that every creator will think of setting his
stamp upon his handiwork in order to apprise the World that it
has come from his workshop. This assertion of authorship implies
1 On this point see III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, pp. 230-1, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 439
some touch of a self-consciousness and egotism which are in-
grained on the seamy side of Civilization but which are conspicu-
ous by their absence on the primitive level of human life; and in
human history hitherto Civilization has been the exception and
primitiveness the rule. In other contexts we have not only ob-
served that the number of human societies of the primitive species
that have come into existence up to date is vastly greater than the
present muster-roll of civilizations: 1 we have also observed that
within the bosom of any civilization of which we know and this
at any stage of its history in regard to which we have at our com-
mand the necessary evidence for making the observation the
individual 'members' of the society who still remain at or near the
primitive level will always be found to outnumber, and this over-
whelmingly, the handful of higher personalities who create and
sustain the civilization by projecting a shadow of their own inner
life int<^ social institutions which govern the outward lives of the
primitive majority of their fellows. 2 On this showing, it is evident
that the primitive Sthos does not cease to count just because it may
have been pushed momentarily into the background ; it has to be
reckoned with always and everywhere; and this consideration
applies to the study of literature no less than to that of any other
human activity.
What, then, is the normal means of literary creation and trans-
mission in a primitive social milieu? The question can be
answered in negative terms which may have a bearing upon our
present inquiry. On the primitive level there is no consciousness
of authorship, no desire to claim copyright, and consequently no
such thing as plagiarism. There is also, in such milieux, no sense
of a distinction between 'fact* and 'fiction'. In a primitive social
circle the tale of life is taken, by teller and listener alike, in the
way in which a child takes a fairy story. 3 And in the telling of a
fairy story everybody and everything is anonymous *the author*
as well as his audience, and the heroes and heroines as well as the
author. Fairy-tales are, in fact, 'folk-tales* which have lingered on
in the nursery after they have been swept out of the parlour; for
the anonymity of the characters is the hall-mark which distin-
guishes 'folk-tales' from other forms of literature, 4
Such anonymous 'folk-tales' are the native voice of a 'folk-
memory' which is at work all the time behind the scenes even in
those sophisticated theatres of life in which audience and actors
,N s v~ YF -- 7 JT-" 4 ~a ^ TT*
ui) (*), Annex, vol. i, p 442, ..._ . ..
4 See Chadwidc, H. M.: The Hentc Age (Cambridge 1913, Urtivcnhy
pp. IXO-HX.
440 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
virtually conspire to draw a veil over this telltale relic of a simpler
past; and in primitive milieux this ancient way of distilling the
quintessence of experience and transmitting the elixir from one
generation to another holds the field without a rival. 'Folk-memory 1
performs, for people who are still content to rely on it, substan-
tially the same service as is performed for the sophisticated by the
writing and reading of books. It serves as a channel for the passage
of 'a mental current from mind to mind in saecula saeculorum\ but
the waters that flow along this primitive bed have quite a different
effect upon the mental works of Man according to whether these
works themselves happen to be primitive or sophisticated. For
the works of primitive minds the waters of this subterranean
mental stream serve as waters of Memory; but on the works of
sophisticated minds they act as waters of Lethe. It seems that this
current cannot carry along with it the experiences that fall into its
stream without reducing them, all alike, to an anonymity which is
native to the works of primitive minds, but which for the works
of sophisticated minds is tantamount to a loss of identity. As a
literal torrent of water tools the rocks and pulps the tree-trunks
that cross its path until at length it casts them up again, far down
stream, high and dry in the unrecognizable shape of smooth-faced
boulders and water-logged driftwood, so the mighty current of
'folk-memory* is perpetually engulfing foreign objects fragments
of historical events, glimpses of historical personages, and some-
times even scraps of sophisticated literature (where a primitive
social milieu is in contact with a sophisticated one) and the
flotsam fares as hardly in the mental as in the physical stream.
, Here too it is battered out of all recognition before it is cast up
again as jetsam on a distant strand. 1
In other contexts we have already watched the waters of Lethe
at their work of weathering away the authentic original features of
historical events and historical personages which have fallen into
their bed. We have seen how some barbarian war-lord, whose
historical career can be traced, and his historical importance
assessed, from the archives of the civilization on which he has
preyed, qiay, as a hero of epiq assume an importance and acquire
a career in the realm of poetic imagination which bear little or no
relation to hi$ authentic standing in the realm of prosaic fact. 2
Nor is it only the External Proletariat that displays this imagina-
1 For example, in the Ahiqar Romance the characters of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon
have been transformed to a degree at which they no longer betray any recognizable
affinity with their historical originals (Meyer, E.: Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine,
and ed. (Leipzig 1012, Hinrichs), pp. 120-1).
* See V. C (i) (c) 3, Anner III, 'Historical Fact and Heroic Tradition', in vol. v,
pp. 607-14, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 441
tive power of transmuting 'fact' into 'fiction' by an alchemy which
is at once destructive and creative. We have also watched the
history of Alexander the Great being transmuted into the Alexan-
der Romance at the very time when an authentic record was being
made, out of an ample dossier, by conscientious and scientific-
minded Hellenic historians. 1 How came the figure of the Mace-
donian war-lord to be kidnapped and carried off bodily into
Fairyland 2 in the broad daylight of Hellenic rationalism? And
whose were the impudent hands that stole the body ? The answer
is that Alexander's body was snatched by Orientals whom the
conqueror himself, in his historical career, had forcibly conscripted
into the ranks of the Hellenic internal proletariat. 3 And this
sensational capture, which was effected almost on the morrow of
Alexander's death, was the first successful stroke in an Oriental
counter-attack which was to culminate, more than nine centuries
later, in the eviction of Alexander's Roman successors from their
last foothold on Oriental ground by the prowess of the Primitive
Muslim Arabs. A millennial war of revanche which was carried
to its conclusion on the military plane in the days of the Caliph
'Umar had been opened on the literary plane as early as the days
of Alexander's own diadochi.
Why was it that the Orientals, in their long-drawn-out encounter
with Hellenism, were able to score this precocious and premoni-
tory success in the field of literature so long before they were able
to follow it up in the fields of war and politics ? The answer seems
to be that, at the time when Alexander suddenly annexed the
domain of the Achaemenian Empire to the Hellenic World by the
superficial method of military conquest, the ground or, rather,
the river-bed was already prepared for a rapid transmutation of
an episode of Hellenic history into a theme of Oriental romance*
Pseudo-Callisthenes should be regarded as the narrator and formulator of an hmorieaj
myth* . . . That he used historical sources is no argument against this* for in th em of
Alexandrian scholarship even myths were built upon a foundation of scholarship. s$
the Myth of the Twentieth Century" is based upon an interpretation of anthropology
and history. It is from the dre$s and lower strata of historiography that the Alexander
Romance has drawn its ''erudition" > (Braun, M.; History &n4 Romance in Gr&sw-
OrtentaL Literature (Oxford 1038, Blackwell), p, 33).
* '9 n 1 m . av be 8Ure that ** c <"ttmon P^opte, to whom it belon&ed spiritually and
socially, believed in the trutn of the account as implicitly at a child btlteve* t fairy-
tale The Alexander Romance belongs spiritually and socially tn the common popi4
who cannot dearly and consciously differentiate between truth {&X #*#). lies ($&<?} and
literary fiction (7rA<o>a) and therefore willingly accept the myth, *pdiiily the written
myth, above all when this myth appeals to their wishes and idkals, a* member* of
particular social group. In the Alexander Romance truth and fiction ar maetrkftbly
interwoven. The categories */>ri$o$ and 7rA<o>ia cannot be applied it H to the mat* of
unteue and fantastic statements. To apply them would be unjust to the anonymoui
author and his readers, because the standards and categories of the hiitoritn ar not
applicable to their intellectual capacities* (ibid,, pp. 33-4).
3 For this social effect of Alexander's conquest* s* III. C <i) (a), vol ui. op, xio nd
140-51; HI. C (i) (J), vol. iii, pp. 197-9; and V, C (i) <) a, vol v, pp. 64-5 iov*
44.2 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
The * sea-change' which the historical Hellenic figure of Alex-
ander was now to undergo in the imagination of the Oriental sub-
jects of the Achaemenian Empire's Macedonian 'successor-states'
had already been undergone by other historical figures who once
upon a time had played an authentic part in the histories of two
non- Hellenic civilizations the Babylonic and the Egyptiac. By
the time when Hellenism imposed itself, by force of Macedonian
arms, upon the Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, and Indie worlds, the
Babylonic and Egyptiac worlds had already been subjugated, by
force of Achaemenian arms, to the Syriac. In other contexts we
have noticed how vehemently and persistently these two subju-
gated societies kicked against the pricks, and how warmly they
welcomed Alexander as a deliverer from the Syriac yoke. 1 But,
while they had been fighting a losing battle against the aggression
which the Syriac Society was committing against them on the
military and political plane in the shape of an Achaemenian
imperialism, the Egyptiac and Babylonic societies had all the time
been taMng their Syriac conquerors capiive on the plane of 'folk-
lore*. They had both of them succeeded in instilling a memorial
of their own past greatness into the 'folk-memory' of their latter-
day masters. And this memorial had taken the form of 'folk-tales'
in which certain authentic characters and events of Egyptiac and
Babylonic history had been transmuted into subjects of romance.
The past greatness of the Babylonic World had been embalmed
in the romance of 'Ninus and Semiramis' ; the past greatness of
the Egyptiac World in the romances of 'Sesostris* and 'Nectanebos'.
And the historical materials out of which these three romances are
woven can be identified. The name of the legendary Queen
* Seiniramis of Babylon* is taken from that of an historical queen of
Assyria, Sammu-ramat, who was the wife of King Shamshiadad V
(regnabat 824-810 B.C.) and the mother of King Adadnirari III
(regnabat 809-782 B.C.). 2 'Ninus', who plays the hero to Semi-
ramis' heroine, is an abstraction that stands for the prowess of all
the kings that ever went forth to war from Nineveh. 3 In a similar
way 'Sesostris' seems to stand for the prowess of all the, emperors
of the Twelfth Egyptiac Dynasty who were the life and soul of the
Egyptiac universal state, 4 while Nectanebos stands for the prowess
of all the patriot-kings who ever led Egyptiac forlorn hopes against
any of the Asiatic oppressors of the Egyptiac World from the days
of Esarhaddon to the days of Artaxerxes Ochus. 5
1 See IV. C (ii) (6) 2, vol. iv, p. rob, footnote 4; V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, pp. 94 and 123,
with footnote a; V. C (i) (c) 4, vol. v, pp. 347-8; and V. C (ii) (a), in the present
volume, p, zoi, above. .
a Braun, Martin: History and Romance in Graeco-Oriental Literature (Oxford 1938,
Blackwell), p. 7. 3 Ibid., p. 8. * Ibid., p. 13.
s In these romances the Babylonic and Egyptiac imagination found 'compensation'
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 443
Thus, by the time when the Hellenes broke in upon the Oriental
scene, the Egyptiac and Babylonic 'folk-tales' had already travelled
far from the historical facts which had been their starting-point;
and in this situation the Egyptiac and Babylonic civilizations pre-
sented themselves for inspection by Hellenic eyes in two distinct
guises. 1 In both societies there was a sophisticated upper stratum
which wanted, and tried, to set before its Hellenic liberators the
authentic history of the venerable civilization for which the con-
stituents of this still surviving upper social stratum felt themselves
to be trustees. The monuments of this effort are the learned works
of the Egyptiac scholar Manetho and the Babylonic scholar Beros-
sus ; and the fragments of the two works that have come down to
us are enough to show that both these scholars were at pains to
exclude all 'folk-lore' from treatises that were intended to be
scientific. Manetho boycotts the legend of 'Sesostris\ Berossus
the legend of 'Semiramis'. 2 This scholarly conscientiousness, how-
ever, was ultimately of no avail; for the sophisticated Hellenic
public to which these treatises were intended to appeal was inevit-
ably a small one; and the picture of the Egyptiac and Babylonic
civilizations that eventually impressed itself on Hellenic minds
was not the authentic portrait which the two scholars had pre-
sented : it was a fancy picture in the gorgeous colours of the legends
which Manetho and Berossus had sought, without success, to
suppress. In the matter of Nectanebos the extant literature enables
us to catch a glimpse of the stages by which 'fiction' gained the
upper hand over 'fact',3 The historical tradition, in which the
motives, as well as the actions, that are attributed to Nectanebos are
soberly realistic, has been preserved in Diodorus's Library of
Universal History* In the next stage which appears to be repre-
sented by a story, preserved by Josephus, in which the hero's
name has been changed from Nectanebos to Amenophis* the
actions are still historical, but the motives are already fictitious.*
In the third and last stage, which is represented by the Nectanehos
Prologue to the Alexander Romance, 7 the actions as well as the
motives have passed out of the realm of History into that of
Legend.
It will be seen that, by the time when Alexander burst into view
(in the psycho-analyst's technical sense of the term) for the brute fact of Aehemenin
supremacy The apocrypha conquests of the legendary 'Seaostm' are carefully msdt
to surpass those of the historical Achaememdae : e,g. Scsostria succeeds where C*mbyt
fSi JjJlh u n con< * u rs * h * Arat and Ethiopians, and where Darius the Great h*<i
tailed when he conquers the Scyths (ibid., pp. 15-17),
bld ' 3 ~ 5 ' *
3 Q*' '
3 See ibid., pp. 10-25.
s SSir 18 ' r X ^'. chap. 48, 6; chgp. sx, 3 (see Braun, op. cit., PP , *,-
1 J ^ phus: Contra ^y. Book I, 243-77* citing Manetho e Br*un op.
Cl Clt>)< 6 It**-. p. . ? Ibid., pp. ax-a.
444 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
over the horizon of the Oriental World, the flood of Lethe was
already flowing strong and the waters were waiting to swallow the
audacious intruder up. Patet immane et vasto respectat hiatu! 1 The
alchemy which had done such wonders with the historical Sammu-
ramat and with the historical Nectanebos and with all the Senwos-
rets was promptly applied to Alexander in his turn. On the magic
soil of Egypt the son of Philip became a son of Amon; his Hellenic
human head sprouted his Egyptiac father's ram's-horns; 2 and, in
this shape of Dhul-Qarnayn, Alexander soon wenf the way of
Nectanebos. 3 The Alexander Romance is presented from an
Egyptiac standpoint. 4 It pictures the Egyptiac and Hellenic
worlds as in league with one another against the Syriac World. 5
We may infer that the Alexander Romance was conceived in the
womb of a Graeco-Egyptian underworld in the purlieus of the
City of Alexandria; 6 for this Alexandrian fraction of a now vastly
expanded Hellenic internal proletariat was the sole remaining
beneficiary of Alexander's vision of a universal human fellowship 7
in an Egyptiac World in which Alexander's Lagid successors had
elsewhere substituted a cold-blooded policy of exploitation 8 for
Alexander's own generous dream of fraternization. 9
Here we see Hellenic history* being transmuted into Oriental
'folk-lore' ; but this process of transmutation was not a 'one-way'
movement. We can also see Oriental 'folk-tales' being transmuted
not, of course, into authentic history but into the sophisticated,
instead of the primitive, kind of literature, through being suffused
with Hellenic motifs that are palpably alien from the native Orien-
tal ethos. For example, the Hellenic motif of eroticism has made
its way into a piece of Jewish literature The Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs which appears to have been written towards
the end of the second century B.C. ; 10 for in The Testament of Joseph
the Old Testament story of Potiphar's Wife has demonstrably been
recast under the influence of the Hellenic story of Phaedra. 11 There
1 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book V, 1. 375. .
2 These horns f ound their way on to Alexander's head even on the otherwise Hellenic
coins that were designed by Greek artists for the mints of Alexander's Greek successors.
3 For the relation of the Alexander Romance to the Nectanebos Romance see Braun,
op. cit., pp. 33-4. 4 Ibid., pp. 32 and 36-43.
s Ibid., pp. 38-9.
6 Ibid., pp. 32 and 36-7.
? For this vision of Alexander's see V. C (i) (d) 7, pp. 6-10, and V. C (ii) (a),
pp. 246-7, above.
8 For this aspect of the Lagid regime see V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 65, above.
o For this local Alexandrian realization of Alexander's oecumenical ideal see Braun,
op. cit., pp. 37-8 and 40-1. I0 Ibid., p. 46.
11 For the influence of the Hellenic story of Phaedra and Hippolytus upon the Jewish
story of Potiphar's Wife and Joseph see ibid., pp. 46-95, and eundem: Griechischer
Roman und Hellemstische Gesckichtschreibung (Frankfurt am Main 1934, Klostermann),
pp. 23-117. Dr. Braun's thesis is summed up in the last paragraph on p. 114 of the
latter monograph. For what follows on this subject in the present Study the writer
is wholly indebted to the results of Dr. Braun's researches.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 445
is even a verbal correspondence between The Testament of 'Joseph,
v, 2, and Euripides' Hippolytus, 11. 656-8. 1 And we can observe
how the cumulative effect of the Hellenic influence upon Jewish
literature told during the two hundred years or so that elapsed
between the lifetime of the author of The Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs and the lifetime of Josephus (vivebat circa A.D. 38-108).
The Testament of Joseph has adopted the motif of the Hellenic
story of Phaedra without abandoning the native Jewish style,
spirit, or ethical standards; and 'the Haggadoth narrator judaizes
alien elements' in the same fashion. On the other hand 'Josephus
hellenizes Biblical and Haggadic tales, so that they become some-
thing completely new and different'. 2
In Josephus's sophisticated pages the Hebrew patriarch Joseph
has been disguised out of all recognition by being dressed -up in
the Hellenic habiliments of an invulnerable Stoic sage who is
TVXO Souls', (f>vaL eXevdepos.* In this Josephan Hellenized version
of the story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife there are a number of
points of correspondence not only with the story of Hippolytus
and Phaedra, but also with the story of Lucretia, as these two
Hellenic stories are recounted in the works of five different Greek
and Latin authors; 4 and some of the correspondences between
Josephus's Antiquities and Seneca's Phaedra extend to an identity
of words. 5 How are these correspondences to be explained ? It
seems unlikely that Josephus has been borrowing directly from the
Hellenic authors in whose works the points of correspondence are
to be found. Three out of the five Livy, Ovid, and Seneca
write in Latin; and it seems most improba'ble that Latin literature
was an open book to Josephus, considering the imperfectness of
his masteiy even of Greek. Of the two Greek authors Dionysius
of Halicarnassus and Heliodorus of Emesa Dionysius, again,
seems unlikely to have been studied by Josephus, while Heliodorus
is ruled out of account by the fact that he was Josephus's junior
by perhaps not less than 200 years. We are left with the alterna-
tive of explaining the correspondences between Josephus and
the five pagan Hellenic authors here in question on the hypo-
thesis that they have all of them been borrowing though not
necessarily any of them at first hand from some common source;
1 Braun, History and Romance, p. 57.
2 Ibid., p. 93. Compare Roman und Geschichtschreibung, pp. 41 and 113.
3 Ibid., pp. 30-4.
+ See the table of nine correspondences between Josephus, on the one hand, and
Dionysius, Heliodorus, Livy, Ovid, and Seneca, on the other hand, ibid., p. 96.
5 e.g. Josephus: Antiquities, Book II, 43 (Joseph's first speech) H Seneca: Phaedra,
11. 131-5 (Braun: Roman und Geschichtschreibung, pp. 41-2); Josejphus: Antiquities t
Book II, 51-2 (Joseph's second speech) || Seneca: Phaedra, 11. 145-64 (Braun, op. cit.,
pp. 82-7). The second of these two verbal correspondences also extends to a passage
of Philo (ibid., pp. 82-4).
446 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (<z)
and the scholar who has brought this set of correspondences to
light has p.ut his finger on a possible common source for them
all in the shape of a no longer extant first version of Euripides*
Hippolytus. 1
Thus, by the time of Josephus, who was an approximate con-
temporary of Plutarch's, the volatile waters of Lethe had made
considerable play with the Hellenic and Oriental flotsam that had
been jostling in the current since the time, by then some four
hundred years back, when Alexander had troubled the waters in
his momentous act of crossing the Hellespont. On the one hand
the historical figure of the Hellenic conqueror had been transmuted
into the legendary figure of a hero of Egyptiac romance; and on
the other hand the mythical figure of the Syriac patriarch Joseph
who was the eponym of a pair of Israelitish tribes had been
dressed up in an outfit of Hellenic stage properties borrowed
partly from Euripides and partly from Zeno.
These proven facts of Hellenico- Oriental literary history during
the first four centuries post Alexandrum throw at least three beams
of light on the problem which we are studying in this Annex. In
the first place these facts make it clear that 'folk-memory* is a
highly conductive medium within the limits of its operation. We
have observed above that these limits are narrowly drawn. A large
part perhaps the greater part of the conventional furniture of
sophisticated minds will not float in these waters at all ; and a piece
of this precious furniture that falls into the river is apt to sink like
a stone to the bottom of the river-bed, where it may remain stuck
in the mud for good and all, without any prospect of being rolled
along with the current and so eventually being cast up again on
shore. On the other hand we can see now that any foreign bodies
that the current of 'folk-memory* is capable of carrying along with
it have a prospect of travelling far and fast; and in the second place
we can read the secret of this mobility. The characters and events
that travel in Lethe's stream become mobile thanks to becoming
anonymous. In reducing them to anonymity the alchemy of these
waters fines them down to a degree of tenuity at which they are
almost capable of passing through a needle's eye. 2 In this medium
.
version outbids the first, but here the first goes beyond the second, and the second has
more sophrosyne. I think the explanation is that Euripides was putting on the stage
a story, an Egyptian 'novelle', and first made the mistake of putting the incidents of the
story straight on to the stage: e.g. Phaedra's appeal to Hippolytus. Afterwards he made
the technical improvements 'required for the stage.'
., z e.g., 'concepts and figures belonging to the religion of Zarathustra found their way
[into Judaism] above all in the lower strata of the [Jewish] people even though those
concerned were perhaps entirely unaware that these elements were of foreign origin*
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 447
of 'folk-memory' 'what is associated with the story of one figure
is soon attributed to another'. 1 In the third place and this point
is of particular importance for our main inquiry we can see that,
in the shape of 'folk-lore', elements native to one culture can make
their way into the life of another culture even at times when, on
the sophisticated surface of life, the two cultures which are thus
in effective communication with one another at a lower level are
consciously antipathetic and are even each doing their utmost to
hold the other at arm's length. The 'folk-tales' of 'Ninus and
Semiramis' and 'Sesostris' and 'Nectanebos* made their way into
the Syriac culture out of the Babylonic and Egyptiac cultures at
a time when the upper social stratum of the two transmitting
societies was in revolt against the recipient society. The motif of
the Hellenic story of Hippolytus and Phaedra began to make its
way into the Jewish story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife after the
breach between Jewry and Hellenism in the second quarter of
the second century B.C. ; 2 and this literary commerce reached its
climax, about two hundred years later, in a generation which also
saw the climax of the conflict between Jewry and Hellenism on
every plane of conscious life. It looks as though the stream of
'folk-memory' flows at some level in the psyche at which the con-
sciousness of cultural and national differences does not interfere
with the primitive sense of a common humanity. And here we
have an underground channel of intercourse between one culture
and another which cannot easily be blocked by conscious and
deliberate mental inhibitions. When once a piece of mental furni-
ture that is the product of one culture has succeeded at what-
ever price in the way of transmutation and attenuation in keeping
afloat in the stream of 'folk-memory', it will have acquired at
this price a prospect of being carried past obstacles, and under
barriers, which would almost certainly have availed to prevent its
passage from one culture to another if it had been travelling in
its original form on the sophisticated surface of life instead of
having sunk to the primitive depths and there changed almost out
of recognition.
These lights from other examples of literary intercourse across,
or underneath, the superficial barriers between mutually hostile
cultures prompt us to ask whether 'folk-memory' may be per-
chance the medium through which the story of Jesus and those
(Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anf tinge des Christentums, vol. ii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921,
Cotta), p. 95). If for 'even though' (auch wenri) we were to substitute 'just because*
(gerade zveil~), we might be approaching nearer to the truth.
1 Braun: History and Romance, p. 4.
2 $ee V. C (i) (c) 2, vol. v, p. 68, and V. C (i) (d) 9 (jS), in the present volume, pp. 103-
5, above.
448 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
stories of pagan Hellenic heroes with which it displays our 89
points of correspondence have come into contact with one another.
If the answer to this question is found to be in the affirmative, we
shall still have to inquire whether this contact has been direct or
whether as seems the more probable explanation of the corre-
spondences between the story of Joseph and the story of Hippolytus
the two stories, or sets of stories, have acquired their common
features through having respectively and independently come into
contact with some older piece of jetsam which has been travelling
in the stream of Lethe side by side with both of them. It is idle,
however, to enter upon these other inquiries uAtil we have
answered the prior question whether the story of Jesus on the one
hand, and the stories of our eleven pagan Hellenic heroes on the
other hand, do contain any elements of 'folk-lore'. A physio-
grapher can tell, by the evidence of shape and patina, that a boulder
or a log has at some stage of its history been water-borne. It may
perhaps be practicable for a student of history to tell by analogous
signs that a character or event which lies embedded to-day in some
work of sophisticated or semi-sophisticated literature has travelled
in the stream of 'folk-memory* once upon a time.
In the Gospels to take them first we shall not be surprised
to find elements of this sort; for the Gospels can be properly
described as the epic cycle of the Hellenic internal proletariat j 1 and
epic poetry is a kind of Zwischenreich between the two mental
realms of 'folk-lore' and history.
We have already taken note* of one piece of 'folk-lore' which the
Gospel according to Saint Luke has in common with a work of
the pagan Hellenic poet Hesiod. Shepherds abiding in the field
are startled by an epiphany of the Heavenly Host, who have singled
them out to be the recipients of the announcement of a theogony.
We may now observe that not only the song of the Heavenly Host
(Luke ii. 8-14) but also the song of the seer Simeon, which comes
in the same chapter of Luke (ii. 25-35), has a counterpart in one
of the Pali scriptures of the Hinayanian Buddhist school of philo-
sophy (Suttanipata III, ii, 679-700) in the vision and the song of
the seer Asita. This Indie seer has a vision of the Gods singing
and dancing for joy, and is told that they are rejoicing over the
birth of the Buddha in the form of a man child in the village of the
Sakyas. Thereupon Asita goes to Kapilavastu, takes the infant
Gautama in his arms, and prophesies his future greatness, with
the further prophecy that the seer himself will not live to witness
it. On this last point Asita' s feeling is different from Simeon's;
1 For this description of them flee I. C (Hi) (e\ Annex, vol. i, p. 449, above.
2 In V. C (i) (), pp. 174-5, ^d in V. C (i) (d) n, Annex I, pp. 363-4, above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 449
instead of being content to depart in peace after one glimpse of the
saviour in his infancy, he regrets that he will not live long enough
to hear the doctrine that the saviour will preach when he has grown
to manhood; but this single point of difference is outweighed by
the several points of similarity between the respective passages of
the Suttanipata and the Gospel according to Saint Luke; and
these resemblances are cumulatively too close to be dismissed as
fortuitous. 1
i This correspondence between a point in the Gospels and a point in. the legend of
the Buddha is taken as are also all the other correspondences between the Gospels and
the legend of the Buddha that are cited in the following pages from Aufhauaer, J, B,:
Buddha und Jesus in ihren Paralleltexten (Bonn 1926, Weber),
How are we to account for the presence of these common elements, which all bear
the marks of having either originated in, or travelled down, the stream of 'folk-lore', in
the stories of an Indie saviour who lived in Bihar and a Syriac saviour who lived in
Palestine ? The common source may, of course, be some stratum of 'folk-lore* that was
so ancient and widespread that it was inherited by both the Indie and the Syriac culture,
independently of one another, from the cultural common stock of Primitive Mankind.
This explanation is simple, but it is not very convincing, considering that neither the
Indie nor the Syriac Society was one of those primary civilizations tnat arose directly
out of primitive life, and also considering the closeness of the correspondence* evrn in
points of detail. It seems unlikely that these correspondences would have remained as
close as this if the legends had been travelling down two separate atrearoa of 'folk*
memory' since, at latest, the fourth millennium B,C* It seems more probable that these
common elements in the stories of Jesus and Gautama have originated either in a
specifically Syriac or in a specifically Indie cycle of 'folk-lore* and that they have
travelled from the Syriac to the Indie World, or alternatively from the Indie World to
the Syriac, at some date not long anterior to that of the latest, and perhaps considerably
posterior to that of the earliest, of the Christian and Buddhist scriptures m which they
are now embedded.
While the Gospels all appear to date from the second half of the first century
of the Christian Era, the Buddhist scriptures here in question have a much wider
chronological range. The Suttanipata appears to have been written cirta 300 B,C. while
the date of the PadhSnasutta and Samyutta-NikSya, appears to be At any rite anterior to
the beginning of the Christian Era (ibid.* p. 7); but on the Buddhist ticfc the corre*f>or>
dences are not confined to these relatively early PHI scriptures of the Hinayanttn
Buddhist philosophy. Some of them occur in the acripturea of the Mahayanisr* Buddhist
Church which are younger and this in some cases perhaps by several centurief-^than
the Christian Gospels, though their sources may be almost as old a the PSU icriptwre*
of the Hinayana (ibid,, loc. cit.). The correspondences between the Gtofpelt and
these Mahayanian scriptures may, of course, be due to element* in the latter which
only found their way into them in the latest phase of their literary history; and in
that case these particular correspondences might be explicable at the result of mri in-
filtration of Syriac 'folk-tales', which had already made their way into the G0*els, into
the Mahayanian legend of the Buddha in an age (circa A.D. 7$-xa3 m the rei^n of the
Kushan King Kanishka) when the Mahlyfina was the prevailing rfrligion m t Kuihtn
Empire which bestrode the Hindu Kush tnd embraced the nonh-cattern comer of the
Synac World as well as the north-western comer of the Indie World (tee II. I> (v)
vol. ii, pp. 372-3, and V. C (i) (<r) 2, vol. v pp. 133-6 and 130-40, above), This exptana*
tion, however, would not in any case cover the correspondence* between the Ootpel*
and the Pali scriptures which are anterior to the Christian Era ; and the* will hive la b
accounted for in one or other of two possible ways. If the common elemental are of Svrime
origin, we must suppose that they found their way out of the Syriac into the Indie World
during the period beginning before the close of the sixth century *>.<: ar*d ending lit
some date unknown before the invasion of India by Alexander the Great when th
Indus Valley was politically united with the Syriac world under the at$t* f a common
Pax Achaemenia. On the other hand, if the common elements are of Indie origin, we
must suppose that they found their way from India to Palestine, at orne date between
Alexander's incursion into Northern India and the middle of the first century of th*
Christian Era, either by the overland route from Pat&Iiputra via Scleucis-on-Ttgrit and
Antioch-on-Orontes or by the maritime route from the South Indian port! to Kgypv,
The overland route seems to have been opened after the apwoacirnatew i
establishment of the Mauryan Empire in India and the Seleucia Empire in South- Western
Asia; the trade along this route received a great stimulus from the conquest of the now
450 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
We have also already come across another unmistakable deposit
of 'folk-lore' in the Matthaean and Lucan prologues to the Gospel
story of Jesus's life and preaching; and this tale of the conception
and birth of a child who is not the son of his mother's husband is
told, as we have seen, not only of Jesus but also of several pagan
Hellenic men of mark Plato, Alexander, Scipio Africanus Major,
Augustus who all of them likewise in some sense played the part
of saviours, besides being told of several pagan Hellenic demigods
or heroes: Ion, Perseus, Herakles. 1 Another story which hangs
together with the miraculous-birth story, and which is found in
the Gospels in the same context, is that of the miraculous or, at
any rate, extraordinary escape of the child from a mortal danger
which threatens him in his infancy. In another context 2 we have
already noticed one widespread version of this story in which the
babe is a foundling ; and in this connexion we have observed that
the Lucan account of the infancy of Jesus preserves at least one
vestige of the foundling motif in representing the new-born babe
as being laid in a manger. We may now observe that the Matthaean
account preserves a variation on this theme which is also included
in the legend of one of those pagan men of mark who are credited
with a divine paternity. In the legend of the infancy of Augustus, 3
as in the prologue to the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, the
villain does not confine his villainy as he does in the more usual
derelict domain of the Mauryan Empire by the Euthydemid Bactrian Greek prince
Demetrius in the second decade of the second century B.C. ; it survived the collapse of
the Euthydemid and Seleucid Empires; and it revived in the last century B.C., when
Pompey imposed a Pax Romana upon Syria and when the Palmyrenes (see II. D (i),
vol. ii, p. n, above) opened up a short cut from Dura to Damascus across the northern
jcorner of the North Arabian Desert (see Tarn, W. W. : The Greeks in Bactria and India
(Cambridge 1938, University Press), pp. 61-2, 260-1, 361-3, 3.66-7). As for the mari-
time route, the trade along it was commanded by South Arabian middlemen until the
first through- voyage from Egypt to India was made by Eudoxus of Cyzicus circa 120 B.C.
Eudoxus's Greek successors gradually shortened the voyage which in Eudoxus's day
was still made coastwise all the way by cutting more and more adventurously across
the open sea with the aid of the monsoons; and this process of shortening, which began
circa 100-80 B.C., was completed circa A.D. 4050 (i.e. on the eve of the precipitation of
the story of Jesus in the Gospels), when the Greek navigators of the Indian Ocean
ventured at last to sail straight across the open sea from the Somali coast to the southern
tip of India, without approaching Arabia at all. As a result of this Greek conquest of the
Indian Ocean, pepper was obtainable in abundance at Athens in 88 B.C., and a Buddhist
gravestone, erected before the end of the Ptolemaic Age, has been discovered by
Sir Flinders Petrie at Alexandria (Tarn, op. cit., pp. 367-75, superseding eundem:
Hellenistic Civilization (London 1927, Arnold), pp. 196-9). It will be seen that the
means of communication between India and the Levant steadily improved in the course
of the three and a half centuries between the writing of the Suttanipata in India circa
300 B.C. and the writing of the Gospels in the Levant in the second half of the first
century of the Christian Era.
1 See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (a), vol. iv, p. 263, and V. C (ii) (a), in the present volume,
pp. 266-9, above. 2 In III. C (ii) (&), vol. iii, pp. 259-61, above.
3 Recounted, on the authority of one of Augustus's freedmen, Julius Marathus, by
Suetonius : Life of Augustus, chap. 94 (see Meyer, E. : Ur sprung und Anfdnge des Christen-
tums, vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), pp. 57-8). A massacre of innocents, as an
expiation for the appearance of a comet, is also ascribed to Nero (Suetonius : Life of Nero,
chap. 36), but in this case it is not suggested that the villain's motive is a fear that one of
his victims may be destined to supplant him on his throne.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 451
version of the tale 1 to an attempt upon the life of a single babe
who (he fears) may be destined to supplant him ; in order to make
sure that his destined supplanter shall not survive, he gives orders
for the destruction of all the infant life of an entire community.
Herod, made aware by the Magi that a Messiah has been born in
Jewry, and informed by the doctors of the Jewish Law that the
Messiah's birth-place is to be Bethlehem, decrees the slaughter
of all children in Bethlehem from two years old and under. 2 The
Senate, being warned by a prodigy that Nature is pregnant with
the future King of the Roman People, decrees that no child born
in that year is to be reared. 3
If we pass from the Matthaean and Lucan accounts of Jesus's
birth and infancy and childhood to the episode of the Baptism in
Jordan by John and the simultaneous Designation of Jesus as the
Son of God, we may remind ourselves that, in another context, 4 we
have found Hellenic affinities for the figure of a dove as an emblem
and emissary of a godhead. And if we pass on from the Designation
to the, Temptation, which is placed immediately after it in all three
Synoptic Gospels 5 and is recounted in detail in both Matthew and
Luke, we shall observe that the Tempter's invitation to Jesus to
cast himself down from a pinnacle of the Temple 6 is one version
of a 'folk-tale 1 which makes its appearance in pagan Hellenic
literature in the forms of the challenge to Theseus to cast himself
overboard into 'his father's house' in the depths of the sea, 7 and
the invitation to Psyche to cast herself down from the brow of a
crag into the arms of Zephyr. 8
An analogous Temptation of Gautama by Mara (the Indie
1 e.g. in the legends of Oedipus, Perseus, Jason, Orestes, Zeus, Horus, Cyrus (a single
babe), and in the legend of Romulus and Remus (twins), 2 Matt. ii. 1-18.
3 The tale, in Exod. i-ii, of Pharaoh's instruction to the midwives to kill all the male
children borne by the Hebrew women agrees with the Matthaean and Marathan tale in
representing the villain as making an attempt upon the lives of all the (male) children of
a community, and not merely upon the life of a single child; but the motive ascribed to
Pharaoh is not the same as that ascribed to Herod and to the Senate. In the Matthaean
and Marathan tale the villain's reason for deciding to massacre the children wholesale
is not because he wishes to exterminate an entire generation, but simply to make sure
that a single child, whom he cannot identify, shall not escape. On the other hand
Pharaoh's design against the lives of all the (male) children of the Hebrews is not inci-
dental to another aim, but is an end in itself. What Pharaoh fears is not that some parti-
cular Hebrew child is going to usurp Pharaoh's throne, but that the Hebrew community
as a whole is going to become more than a match for the Egyptiac Society as a whole. In
this matter of motive the Matthaean and Marathan tale follows, not the tale of Pharaoh's
atrocity in Exodus, but the myths of Uranus's and Cronos* atrocities in the Theogony of
Hesiod. Uranus buries all (his own) children alive (11. 154-60) and Cronos swallows all
(his own) children (11. 459-67), for fear (implicitly in the case of Uranus and explicitly in
the case of Cronos} of being supplanted one day by one of them. x
+ In V. C (i) (a) n, Annex I, pp. 361-2, above.
s Matt. iv. i-n; Marki. 12-13; Luke iv. 1-13.
6 Matt. iv. <-6 = Luke iv. 9-11.
7 This parallel in Bacchylides, Dithyramb xvi [xvii] (F. Blass* edition (Leipzig 1898,
Teubner), pp. 12133), has been pointed out to the writer of this Study by Professor
Gilbert Murray.
8 This parallel has been pointed out by Braun, History and Romance, pp. 66-70. The
452 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
counterpart of Ahriman and Satan) is a theme which occurs in
several passages in the Pali scriptures of the Hinayanian Buddhist
school of Indie philosophy. In a passage of the Padhanasutta
Mara exhorts Gautama not to push his self-mortification to the
point of severing the last thread that still binds the philosopher-
ascetic to physical life on Earth; in a passage of the Samyutta-
Nikaya Mara exhorts Gautama to assume the sovereignty of a
mundane kingdom; and these two incidents look like counterparts
in the one case of the Devil's suggestion to Jesus to turn stones
into bread and in the other case of his suggestion to him to accept
a mundane oecumenical sovereignty. The hypothesis of a fortui-
tous coincidence between these respective legends of the Tempta-
tion of Gautama and the Temptation of Jesus would appear to be
ruled out by the fact that, in each of the two correspondences here
cited, certain details that are to be found in the Gospels are like-
wise to be found in the Pali scriptures, though this not in exactly
the same relation to the incident as a whole. For instance, the
conceit of a superficial resemblance between a stone and a piece
of food, which in the Gospels is crystallized into a suggestion for
turning a stone into a loaf of bread, turns up in the corresponding
passage of the Padhanasutta as a simile of Gautama's impregna-
bility to Mara's assaults. 'A crow/ says Mara, 'was once dis-
appointed at finding that an object which looked lil^e a lump of fat
was only a stone after all. The crow had to fly away hungry; and
now I, Mara, have to give up Gautama as a bad job as the crow
gave up the stone!' Similarly, in the Samyutta-Nikaya, Mara
exhorts Gautama to turn, not a stone into bread, but a mountain
into gold as a sequel to his exhortation to him to assume sovereignty
over a mundane kingdom. The mountain which Mara names is the
Himalaya and we are left wondering whether, in sortie common
source of the Buddhist and the Christian Temptation-story, this
may not have been the 'exceeding high mountain* from the summit
of which the Devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the World. 1
We may next notice two miracles the Walking on the Water
(Matt. xiv. 22-33 = Mark vi- 45-51 = John vi. 15-21) and the
Feeding of the Multitudes (Matt. xiv. 15-21 = Mark vi. 35-44 =
Luke ix. 12-17 = J olin vi - 5~*3> and Matt. xv. 32-8 = Mark viii.
1-9) which are embedded not only in the Gospels but also in
challenge which in the Gospels is represented as a temptation that Jesus resists is repre-
sented in the stories -of Theseus and Psyche as a test of faith from which the hero
(heroine) does not flinch. But the ordeal (and also the tableau hi which it is visualized)
is the same in all three stories; and in all three, again, the hero (heroine) responds to this
identical challenge victoriously, though in the one case the victory is won by a refusal
and in the other two cases by an acceptance.
1 Matt. iv. 8 = Luke iv. 5. Compare the setting of Lucian's dialogue between
Hermes and Charon, from which a passage has been quoted in V. C (i) (d) 10, pp. 133-4,
above.
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 453
Mahayanian Buddhist scriptures (the Jataka and the still younger
Vimalakirtinirdesasutra) 1 which, at least in their present form, are
all of them considerably later than the Gospels in date. Again,
there is a tale 'the Widow's Mite* which is found not only in
the Gospels according to Saint Mark (xii. 41-4) and Saint Luke
(xxi. 1-4) but also in the Sutralamkara, IV, 22, which is a work
from the pen of one of the early fathers of the Mahayanian Bud-
dhist Church, A&va.gho$a( floruit circa A.D. ioo). 2 And there are two
similes 'the Birds of the Air' and 'Dogs and Crumbs' which,
as we have already observed in another context, 3 are each of them
to be found on the one hand in the Gospels and on the other hand,
in two pieces of pagan Hellenic literature, one of which appears
to be approximately contemporary with the Gospels, while the
other is at least five hundred years older. There is another simile
of two roads representing respectively the ways of Vice and
Virtue which is to be found not only in the Gospel according to
Saint Matthew (vii. 13-14) but also in Xenophon's Memorabilia
(Book II, chap, i, 2i) 4 and in Hesiod's Works and Days (11. 287-
92). There is also a 'folk-tale' recounting the disappointment that
is the inevitable consequence of looking for figs out of season
which can be detected as the common source of the incident of
the Cursing of the Barren Fig Tree (Matt. xxi. 18-19 = Mark xi.
12-14) and of a passage in one of the lectures of the Stoic philo-
sopher Epictetus (Dissertationes, Book III, chap. 24, 85-8)
which we have quoted already 5 in another connexion. We may
also here recall two apparently proverbial sayings 'I cannot dig'
and 'the city is being taken by storm* which are to be found on
the one hand in the Gospels and on the other hand in Aristophanes'
Birds, 6 and add another saying of the same character 'Many are
called, but few are chosen' which is to be found on the one hand
in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew 7 and on the other hand
in the scriptures of the Orphic Church. 8
1 The Walking on the Water is to be found in the introduction to Jataka 190; the
Feeding of the Multitudes in the introduction to Jataka 78, and in VimalaklrtinirdeSa-
sutra, chap, ip (a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit scripture of the Mahayanian Church).
It will be noticed that in the Mahayanian Buddhist scriptures the two miracles occur in
quite different contexts, whereas they are placed in immediate juxtaposition with one
another in the Gospels.
* ASyaghosa appears to have been a contemporary of the Kushan King Kanishka,
who reigned circa A.D. 78-123 (see Smith, V. A.: The Early History of India, 3rd ed.
(Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), pp. 260-1; Eliot, Sir Ch.: Hinduism and Buddhism
(London 1921, Arnold, 3 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 82-4).
3 In V. C (i) (d) ii, Annex I, pp. 3S4~7 and 357, footnote i, above.
4 See p. 470, below. * In V. C (i) (d) 10, p. 147, footnote i, above.
6 See V. C (i) (d) ii, Annex I, p. 358, above.
? JToAAolyap eiat K\fjroi t dA/yot Of e*AeKToi (Matt. xxii. 14).
8 TToAAot pfr vapfrnKoAopoi, iravpoi B4 re jSaic^ot (Orphicorum Fragmenta, Collegit Otto
Kem (Berlin 1922, Weidmann), fragments 5 and 235, preserved by Plato in Phaedo
690).
454 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
Most of the topics that we have cited up to this point as examples
of what appears to be the jetsam of 'folk-lore 1 which has been
washed up on to the shores of the river of 'folk-memory' and has
there come to be imbedded in more or less sophisticated works of
literature are topics which not only bear marks of having
drifted, at some stage of their literary history, in the current of
Lethe's stream, but which, to all appearance, are native to these
waters and display no trace of ever having known any other mental
environment than this before they finally came to rest in their
present literary context. Miracles and parables and similes and
proverbs are the very stuff of which 'folk-lore' consists; and if,
when we find specimens of any of these primitive genres incon-
gruously embedded in sophisticated works of literature, we can
legitimately account for them as being the jetsam of 'folk-lore', we
need seek no farther than that for an explanation of their origin.
There is, however, one set of verbal correspondences 1 between an
incident in the Gospels and a cento of passages from the Birds
which may be explicable on the hypothesis of a subterranean con-
tact on the level of psychic life at which the waters of 'folk-memory 1
flow, but which at the same time cannot be interpreted as a seep-
age, into the Birds on the one hand and into the Gospels on the
other, of an element which has not merely travelled for a season
in the current of 'folk-memory' but has also actually originated at
this primitive level of psychic life. The Aristophanic phrases here
in question bear no obvious marks of an extraneous origin in 'folk-
lore' ; there is no reason to doubt that they are the original work of
the Attic playwright himself; and, if so, then in this case we are con-
fronted with a process that is different from, and more complex than,
the process that we have been studying so far. We are here apparent-
ly in the presence of a group of mental images or ideas which have
started life on the plane of sophisticated literature ; have percolated
down from this starting place to the level of 'folk-lore'; have
travelled at this level from Attica to Palestine in the subterranean
stream of 'folk-memory' ; and, after having eventually been washed
ashore in a barely recognizable shape, have become embedded in
a semi-sophisticated work of literature, the Gospels. 2 This recon-
struction of the literary history of these Aristophanic phrases is
supported by the unquestionable occurrence of Menandrean
phrases in the New Testament; for we need have no hesitation in
accepting as the original work of Aristophanes' fellow countryman
and successor Menander one fragment from this later Attic play-
wright's lost plays which recurs verbatim in one of Saint Paul's
1 See V. C (i) (d) n, Annex I, pp. 353-4, above.
2 This is perhaps also the history of the proverbial saying about 'the city being taken
by storm* (see V. C (i) (d) u, Annex I, pp. 358-9, above).
ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a) 455
Epistles, 1 and another fragment which juxtaposes two motifs that
both recur in the Gospels, though here in different contexts, 2 The
common source of the manifestly kindred pictures of the Primitive
Christian and the Primitive Pythagorean communal life, in the
Acts of the Apostles and in lamblichus's Life of Pythagoras^ can
also hardly have been other than a sophisticated piece of literature ;
and there are two passages in the New Testament one in the
Epistle to Titus 4 and the other in the speech on the Areopagus
which is placed in the mouth of Saint Paul by the author of the
Acts 5 in which a tag of Greek poetry not only reappears verbatim
but is quoted by the Christian writer with an express acknowledge-
ment of the pagan Hellenic literary source.
We have, indeed, already had occasion to observe that the
jetsam on the strand of the stream of 'folk-memory' by no means
exclusively consists of matter that has originated in those waters,
and that some of the objects which the current deposits high and
dry are flotsam which has stood on dry land already once before,
at an earlier stage of its existence, before ever it was engulfed by
the stream which has now disgorged it. We have noticed, for
example, a number of heroes and heroines of romance 'Ninus'
and 'Semiramis' and 'Sesostris', 'Nectanebos' and 'Dhu'1-Qar-
nayn' whose 'fictitious' shapes have been fashioned out of the
authentic portraits of historical personages. And this phenomenon
can perhaps also be illustrated from the Gospels. Is it conceivable,
for instance, that the parable of the husbandmen who did the
dastardly deed of putting to death the son of the owner of tha
vineyard when his father had sent him to them as his emissary
(Matt. xxi. 33-41 = Mark xii. 1-9 = Luke xx. 9-16) is an echo
of the historic crime of Opimius, who arrested and executed Ful-
vius's son when the boy was sent across no-man's-land, under flag
of truce, to parley with his father's adversaries (Plutarch: Gracchi^
chaps. 37-8) ? And is it conceivable, again, that the episode of the
1 QBeipovaiv 'fjOfj XP*I O & <fyAiai jcaieat : *Evil communications corrupt good manners/
Menander, T. Kock's edition, vol. iii, p. 62, No. 218 = i Cor. xv. 33.
lpaKlQV^ OVJLOl KGLTQVOe.lv QKl$ OTt
rfjs iSias Kacra KdKias oiJTrerot,
irS.v TO Au^iacvo/icvov <rnv cvSoBev.
olov^o^fJLtjV ids, ov aKOirfis, TO a&rjpiov,
TO oj I/AO.TIOV ot acres', o f 8^ 8pu/f TOV vXov.
o 8e TO KaKiarov T&V KO.K&V irdvrcav, t/>96vo$
<f>dicnKov ireireyKe ACCU irorfaet /cat TTOCI,
fams Trovrjpas Sucrcre/Jifc irapaaraois.
Of this fragment of Menander (Kock, vol. iii, p. i6z, No. 540) the first three lines are
fSj ^ m Matt - xv - I0 - 20 (the two passages have already been quoted together in IV C
( m i W' v ol -A v ' P. 120, above), while the rest are echoed in Matt. vi. 19 (oVou <rh$ Kal
ppwms adavi&ti Luke xii. 33. '
3 See V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex II, vol. v, p. 583, footnote i, above.
* 4 ^v 8 ^ ft < otin * E P^. d s' Pn Minos (see I. C (i) (&), vol. i, p. $9, footnote
', c V v C $.Wji x Anncac J ' m **** Present volume, p. 363, footnote 6, above),
5 See V. C (i) (d) 7, p. n, footnote 2, above.
456 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
pilgrimage of the Magi, which is recounted in the Matthaean pro-
logue (chap, ii) to the Gospels, has been precipitated by an impact
which may have been made on the imagination of the internal
proletariat of the Hellenic World by an historic visit of a party of
Magi, not to the infant Jesus at Bethlehem, but to the adult
Emperor Nero at Rome, in the suite of Tiridates, when the Arsacid
King of Armenia came to pay his respects to his Roman suzerain ,
in A.D. 66 (Pliny: Historia Naturalis, Book XXX, chap. 2; cf.
Suetonius: Life of Nero, chap. 13)?
Whatever judgement we may pass on these two last-suggested
possibilities, 1 we shall probably agree that historical events and
literary phrases are not the only kinds of foreign matter that can
find their way into the stream of 'folk-memory'. How, for example,
are we to account for a striking correspondence between two
passages in the exordium of the Gospel according to Saint John
(i. 1 6 and 18) 'And of his fullness have we all received' (/cat IK
rov TrXrjpcofjLaros avrov rjfjieis irdvrcs eAajScyiev) ; and 'No man
hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the
bosom of the Father, he hath declared him' (ov ovSet? cwpaKe
TroJTrore- 6 povoyevris vt6$, 6 a>v ets" rov KO\ITOV rov irarpos, eKtivos
e^y^aaro) and the last words of Plato's Timaeus (92 c) : 'Having
thus received, and been filled full with, living creatures, mortal and
immortal, the Cosmos a living creature that contains the things
that are seeri, being such a thing itself, a god that is a sensible
image of the intelligible [godhead] has become superlatively
great and good and beautiful and perfect, being this unique and
only begotten Heaven' (vqra yap K<LL aBdvara o>a Xaficbv /cat
wn'rrXrjp&Ocis oSc 6 Koa^s ovno, a)oi> oparov ra opara 7Tpi4xw>
LKO}V rov vorjrov debs atcr^Tos-, plytaros KOLL apurros /caAAioroV re
/cat reAeciraros yeyovev e Is ovpavos oSe /Liovoycvifc a>v) ? Does it not
seem probable that the stream of 'folk-memory' has provided a
channel along which the imagery, and even the vocabulary, of the
Timaeus has flowed into a semi-philosophical work of Christian
literature which, in all probability, was composed not much less
than five hundred years after the last sentence of the Timaeus had
taken shape in Plato's mind ?
'In Christianity there are echoes of Stoic or Platonic ideas; but in
saying this we do not mean to imply that the Apostles, and certainly not
that Jesus Himself, had frequented the schools of the philosophers or
had read their books. It is true that the Logos in the opening sentences
of the Gospel According to Saint John can be traced back with certainty
1 Eduard Meyer (Urspntng und Anfdnge des Christentums, vol. i (Stuttgart and Berlin
1921, Cotta), p. 59, footnote i) rejects, as unconvincing, this explanation of the appear-
ance of the Magi in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. For another possible source
ot the episode of the Magi see p. 524, footnote 2, below.
ANNEX II TO V. C (iij (a) 457
to Philo; and nothing stands in the way of the supposition that the
author of the Gospel may have been acquainted with some of Philo 's
writings or even have been in personal contact with Philo himself.
These, however, are isolated exceptions; and in general the New Testa-
ment is very remote from the cultivated life, and, by the same token,
from the philosophy, of the age. Yet in similar conditions to-day one
often hears people in a humble walk of life reproducing ideas originally
put into currency by Schopenhauer or Darwin, although the plagiarist
has never read one word of these thinkers' works. The fact is that ideas
which suit the times spread rapidly from mouth to mouth, and some-
times turn up in different places simultaneously, without their ex-
ponents being necessarily dependent on one another. Whether Chris-
tianity is really indebted for its Platonic or Stoic content to the disciples
of Plato and Zeno, or whether it is merely a case of the same ideas being
evoked in Christianity too by the same Zeitgeist, is thus a question which
cannot be answered with certainty in any particular instance. The one
point that is impregnably established is that the teachings of Christianity
are not entirely new and original, but are for the most part rooted in the
spiritual life of the age.' 1
From the foregoing survey it would appear that the Gospels
contain, embedded in them, a considerable number and variety of
elements which have been conveyed to them by the stream of *f oik-
memory', and which have originated partly in these waters but
partly also on stretches of once dry ground which the shifting
subterranean currents of a perennially flowing primitive psychic
life have subsequently undermined and swept away. On this
showing, it would seem that the Gospels contain elements which
are not historical' in the conventional usage of that word. We
shall find, however, if we carry our inquiry farther, that in this
respect the Gospels are not unique among the works of literature
which are our sources for the hero-stories of which we are here
trying to make a comparative study. For example, if we now apply
to the work of the pagan Hellenic historian Phylarchus the ana-
lytical treatment that we have just been applying to the Gospels,
we shall see the 'historicity' of this sophisticated Hellenic author's
narrative dissolve, almost melodramatically, before our eyes. We
have only to turn to the masterly and devastating analysis that has
already been made by a genuinely scientific Hellenic historian of
the post-Phylarchan generation: to wit, Polybius (Book II, chap.
56, 1-6 and 7-12):
'Among the historians who are Aratus's contemporaries, Phylarchus
is one who enjoys a high reputation in some circles; and, as Phylarchus
is perpetually breaking out into polemics against Aratus and into con-
1 Seeck, O.: Gesclnchte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, vol. iii, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart
1921, Metzler), pp. 203-4, referred to, by anticipation, in V. C (i) (d) 6 (a), vol. v,
p. 456, footnote i, above.
458 ANNEX II TO V. C (ii) (a)
tradictions of what Aratus says, it would seem useful, or rather unavoid-
able, for the present writer, who has deliberately elected^ to follow
Aratus in his account of Cleomenes and all that pertains to him, to take
up this issue. If we were to pass it over without looking into it, we might
be exposing ourselves to the reproach of leaving Falsehood to take her
stand in the field of historiography on a footing of equality with Truth.
'We may begin with the general criticism that the whole of this his-
torian's treatment of his subject bristles with examples of carelessness
and slovenliness. In the present place, however, we may perhaps^allow
ourselves to confine our censure on points of detail to that portion of
Phylarchus's work that overlaps with our own: that is to say, the part
that deals with the Cleomenic War. This much of his work we cannot
avoid subjecting to the lens of criticism. And that will certainly be
sufficient to bring to light the penchant and the/or^ that Phylarchus
displays in his treatment of the whole of his subject.
'In his eagerness to move his readers to pity and to win their sym-
pathy for his story he introduces scenes of women locked in one
anothers' arms, with hair dishevelled and breasts exposed, and throws
in, as further ingredients, the tears and lamentations of persons of both
sexes, all cluttered up with aged parents and tiny children, on their way
to the gallows. He plays this game all through his history, and his per-
petual aim in every episode is always to give a visual impression of the
horrors. His vein is an ignoble and effeminate one ; but we may let that
pass and may proceed to examine his work from the standpoint of what
is strictly relevant and useful for the professional historian. From this
standpoint we may lay it down that the business of a writer of history
is not to use his subject as an instrument for making a shattering im-
pression on his public by hocus-pocus (Ttparevopevov), 1 and not to
invent oratory that may be appropriate to the occasion or to elaborate the
subsidiary details that may be implicit in the facts. 2 These are the tricks
of the playwrights. 3 The historian's business is to give ari exact record of
1 N.B. This is the word that is used of the conjuring tricks that were performed by
Eumis (Points 65 and 72). -AJ.T.
2 Polybius lives up to these principles when his own turn comes for recording
Cleomenes' end. Phylarchus's excruciatingly circumstantial account of the suicide of the
hero and his twelve companions (if we may take this to be substantially reproduced in
Plutarch, chap. 58, 13-16) is replaced in Polybius's narrative (Book V, chap. 39, 5)
by the unadorned statement: 'They took their own lives with a characteristically Spartan
fortitude* (ircocnjveyKav avroTs ras vetpa? $i{ivxo)$ TTO.VV teal AaKcvviK&s). AJ.T.
3 While Polybius has manifestly kept his own work free from Phylarchus's vice of
draping his narrative of historical events in the trappings of melodrama, he has been
accused of, no doubt unintentionally, falsifying the true history of at least one episode by
mistakenly dramatizing, not the details of the story, but the plot itself. The episode in
question is that of the unhappy last phase of the life and reign of King Philip V of
Macedon. According to Walbank, F. W. : 'QiXimros TpaytySovpcvos : A Polybian Experi-
ment' in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. Iviii, 1938, part I, pp. 55-68, 'The tragic
version in Polybius is of his own construction and does not spring from the uncritical
use of tragedies or historical novels (if indeed such a thing as an historical novel existed
in the Greek literature of Polybius's time). Polybius's strictures on Phylarchus make it
at least extremely unlikely that he could have fallen into such a crude error in a matter of
source-selection. . . . Polybius's mistake either his -own or perhaps one prompted by his
Macedonian informant, who may have retailed popular gossip and superstition then current
in Macedon was to interpret Philip's last years as a career of infatuation induced by
Tyche and showing itself in an unreasoned programme of planned aggression against
Rome* (p. 67).- AJ.T.
