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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 



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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 



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STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION 331 



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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.