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Saturday, November 20, 1993

DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS

by Arnold J. Toynbee

Issued under the auspices of
the Royal Institute of International Affairs;
published by Oxford University Press, London, 1939



CONTENTS

V. THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS

A. THE PROBLEM OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS .........1
B. THE NATURE OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS ..........11
C. THE PROCESS OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS ......15

I. THE CRITERION OF DISINTEGRATION. . . 15
(a) A Line of Approach ........ 15
(b) The Movement of Schism-and-Palingenesia...23
(c) Schism in the Body Social...35

1. Dominant Minorities...35

2. Internal Proletariats...58
A Hellenic Prototype ........ 58
A Minoan Lacuna and some Hittite Vestiges . . . 82
Changes of Masters ........ 88
The Japanese Internal Proletariat ...... 95
The Russian and the Arabic Internal Proletariat . . 103
Internal Proletariats under Alien Universal States . .. 105
The Babylonic and the Syriac Internal Proletariat … 117
The Indic and the Sinic Internal Proletariat . . .. 131
The Legacy of the Sumeric Internal Proletariat . . 147
The Symptoms in the Western World...152

3. External Proletariats . . . 194
The Estrangement of the Proselyte . . 194
A Hellenic Instance . . . . 210
The Minoan External Proletariat . . 235
The Syriac External Proletariat … 238
The Sumeric External Proletariat . . . 261
The Egypttac External Proletariat ...... 266
The Sinic External Proletariat ...... 370
The Indic External Proletariat ...... 374
Evidence from the New World ...... 379
Evidence from the Eurasian Steppe … 281
The External Proletariat of the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom… 289
The Hindu External Proletariat … 303
The External Proletariat of the Main Body of the Far Eastern Society… 308
The Iranic External Proletariat . . . 310
The Russian External Proletariat . . 311
Vestiges and Rudiments in the Western World . . . 319

4. Alien and Indigenous Inspirations...338
( d ) Schism in the Soul ...... 376
1. Alternative Ways of Behaviour, Feeling, and Life … 376
2. 'Abandon' and Self-Control ...... 399
3. Truancy and Martyrdom ....... 404
4. The Sense of Drift … 412
5. The Sense of Sin....432
6. The Sense of Promiscuity...439
(α) Pammixia and Proletarianization… 439
The Receptivity of Empire-Builder … 439
The Vulgarization of the Dominant Minority...445
The Barbarization of the Dominant Minority...459
(β) Vulgarity and Barbarism in Art … 480
(γ) Lingue Franche … 481
(δ) Syncretism in Religion … 527

V. C I (c) 1 Annex: Roman Policy towards Primitive Peoples...569

2 Annex I: The Role of Manichaeism in the Encounter between
the Syriac Internal Proletariat and Hellenism ..... 575
Annex II : Marxism, Socialism, and Christianity...581
Annex III: The Ambiguity of Gentleness… 588

3 Annex I: The Rhine-Danube Frontier of the Roman Empire… 591
Annex II: The Volkerwanderung: of the Aryas and the Sanskrit Epic...596
Annex III: Historical Fact and 'Heroic’ Tradition… 607

( d )4 Annex: Fatalism an a Spiritual Tonic .. . 615

6 (γ) Annex I: The Napoleonic Empire as a Universal State… 619
Annex II: Edward Gibbon’s Choice of Linguistic Vehicle… 643

(δ) Annex: Cujus Regio, Ejus Religio? ... 646


V
THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF
CIVILIZATIONS


A. THE PROBLEM OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS

B. THE NATURE OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS

C. THE PROCESS OF THE DISINTEGRATIONSS OF CIVILIZATIONS

I. THE CRITERION OF DISINTEGRATION


(b) The Movement of Schism-and-Palingenesia

{V.C.I.(b), p. 23} In an anticipatory attempt3 to picture to ourselves the progressive estrangement of the Proletariat from the Dominant Minority in the Hellenic World, in the course of the decline of the Hellenic Civilization, we helped ourselves out by quoting a brilliant and penetrating passage from a famous work of a nineteenth-century French philosopher, de Gobineau.4 We may fitly cap this quotation now by another from the Summa Philosophiae

3 In I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 54, above.
4 De Gobineau, le Comte J. A.: Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humanes, vol i, pp. 93-4.

{p.24} of de Gobineau's countryman of an older generation, Saint-Simon,1 for in this passage the social schism that follows the transition from an 'organic period' (i.e. an age of growth) to a 'critical period' (i.e. and age of disintegration)2 is delineated in general terms and not merely with reference to the Hellenic instance.

‘Aux époques organiques le but de l’activité sociale est nettement défini; tous les efforts . . . sont consacrés à l’accomplissement de ce but, vers lequel les hommes sont continuellement dirigés, dans le cours entier de leur vie, par l’éducation et la législation. Les relations générales étant fixées, les relations individuelles, modelées sur elles, le sont également; l’objet que la société se propose d’atteindre est révélé à tou les cœurs, à toutes les intelligences; il devient facile d’apprécier les capacités les plus propres à favoriser sa tendance, et les véritables supériorités se trouvent naturellement alors en possession du pouvoir; il y a légitimité, souveraineté, autorité, dans l’acception réelle de ces mots. L’harmonie règne dans les rapports sociaux. . . .
‘Les époques critiques offrent un spectacle diamétralement opposé. On aperçoit, il est vrai, à leur début, un concert d’activité, déterminé par le besoin généralement éprouvé de détruire; mais la divergence ne tarde pas à éclater et à devenir complète, de toutes parts l’anarchie se manifeste, et bientôt chacun n’est plus occupé qu’à s’approprier quelques débris de l’édifice qui s’écroule et se disperse, jusqu’à it ce qu il soit réduit en poussière. Alors le but de l’activité sociale est complètement ignoré, l’incertitude des relations générales passe dans les relations privées; les véritables capacités ne sont plus et ne peuvent plus être appréciées; la légitimité du pouvoir est contestée à ceux qui l’exercent; les gouvernants et les gouvernés sont en guerre; une guerre semblable s’établit entre les intérêts particuliers, qui ont acquis chaque jour une prédominance plus marquée sur l’intérêt général.’ 3

This Saint-Simonian sketch of the social strife that accompanies the disintegration of any civilization has been almost effaced in the minds of Posterity by that tremendous picture of the class-war which has been painted—in colours borrowed from apocalyptic visions of a repudiated religious tradition—by another Western philosopher of a later generation: the German Jew Karl Marx (vivebat A.D. 1818-83). The extraordinary impression which Marxian materialist apocalypse has made upon so many millions of minds—and this often at second or third hand, and at levels of intellectual culture at which the Master's ipsissima verba would be unintelligible—is, of course, due in part to the political militancy, as well as to the philosophical impressiveness, of the Marxian

1 De Gobineau vivebat A.D. 1816-1882; Saint-Simon vivebat A.D. 1760-1825.
2 For these two technical terms of Saint-Simon's philosophy see I. C (iii) (b), vol. I, p. 154, footnote 4, and Part II. B, vol. I, pp. 199-200, above.
3 Bazard, 'Exposition de la Doctrine Saint-Simonienne' in Œuvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, vol. xli (Paris 1877, Leroux), pp. 171-4.

{p.25} diagram; for while this 'blue-print' is the kernel of a general philosophy of history, it is also a revolutionary call to arms in which the industrial proletariat of our latter-day Western World is incited to secede from a 'capitalist' dominant minority and is invited to carry this act of odious and intolerable yoke against which it is assumed already to have risen in spiritual revolt. Whether the invention and the vogue of the Marxian formula of the class-war are to be taken as signs that the civilization of our Western World, in which the path of disintegration, is a question which will occupy us in a later part of this Study 1 when we come to look at the prospects of this Western Civilization of ours. In this place we have cited Marx for other reasons: first, because he is the classic exponent of the doctrine of the class-war for our world in our age; and, second, because his formula conforms to the traditional Zoroastrian and Jewish and Christian apocalyptic pattern in unveiling, beyond a violent climax, the vision of a gentle finale.

According to the Communist prophet's intuition of the operations of his familiar goddess Historical Materialism or Determinism or Necessity, the class-war is bound to issue in a victorious proletarian revolution; but this bloody culmination of the struggle will also be the end of it; for the victory of the Proletariat will be decisive and definitive and 'the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', by which the fruits of the victory are to be safeguarded and harvested during the post-revolutionary period, is not to be a permanent institution. A time is to come when a new society that has been classless from birth will be old enough and strong enough to dispense with 'the Dictatorship of the Proletariat'—as, in the Gospel story, the paralytic who has been miraculously healed by Jesus demonstrates the reality of the cure by obeying the Master's command to take up his bed and walk.2 Indeed, in its final—and permanent—acme of well-being the New Society of the Marxian Millennium will be able to cast away no only 'the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' but also every other institutional crutch, including the State itself; for in that Marxian earthly paradise to come 'they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels which are in Heaven’.3

The interest of the Marxian eschatology for our present inquiry lies in the surprising yet unquestionable fact that this lingering political shadow of a vanished religious belief does acutely

1 In Part XII, below.
2 Matt. ix. 1-8 = Mark ii. 1-12 = Luke v. 18-26 = John v. 1-16.
3 Mark xii. 25.

{p.26} plot out the actual course which the class-war, or 'horizontal' schism, in a broken-down society is apt to follow as a matter of historical fact that can be ascertained from an empirical survey of the histories of societies in disintegration. History duly reveals to us in the phenomenon of disintegration a movement that runs through War to Peace; through Yang to Yin;1 and through an apparently wanton and savage destruction of precious things, created in the Past by Time and Toil and Love, to fresh worlds of creation that seen to owe their special quality to the devouring glow of the flame in which they have been forged.

The schism is itself a product of two negative movements, each of which is inspired by an evil passion. First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold force—against all right and reason—a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation—and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands.

These three achievements are, no doubt, extremely unequal in the respective degrees of the creativity that they manifest. We have noticed at an earlier point2 that the universal church, alone of the three, has a prospect in the Future as well as a footing in the Past, while the universal state and the war-bands belong to the Past exclusively. And it hardly needs to be pointed out that, of the two-backward-looking institutions, the barbarian war-bands are poor affairs indeed compared with the universal state. By creating a universal state the Dominant Minority performs the worthy feat of checking, for a time, the process of social disintegration which its own past action has precipitated, and thus enabling the temporarily reprieved society to enjoy a brief 'Indian Summer'.3 In creating barbarian war-bands the External Proletariat has merely sharpened its predatory beak and claws in preparation for a carrion-crow's feast upon a dead civilization's carcass. Nevertheless there is a gleam of creativeness to be discerned, even here, in the contrast that strikes our eye if we compare the war-bands that were led by Theodoric the Ostrogoth to Rome, or by Mu`āwīyah the Umayyad to Damascus, with the hordes of Cimbri and

1 For the alternating forces or phases in the rythym of the Universe which Sinic philosophers have called Yin and yang, see Part II. B, vol, i. pp. 201-4, above.
2In I.C.(i)(a), vol.i, pp. 56-62, above

3 For the phenomenon of 'Indian Summer' in the penultimate stage of the disintegrations of civilizations see IV.C(ii)(b)I, vol. iv, pp. 56-76, above.

{p.27} Teutones that had flooded across the Alps at the turn of the second and the last century B.C., or with the hordes of Ituraeans that had silted up, at about the same date, out of the North Arabian Desert against the eastern flanks of the Hermon and Antilibanus.1

Thus the social schism that is the outward criterion of the disintegration of a broken-down society is not just a schism and nothing more. When we grasp the movement as a whole, from beginning to end, we find that we have to describe it as Schism-and-Palingenesia2 if we wish to give it a title that does it justice. And, considering that a secession is manifestly a particular manner of withdrawal, we may classify the specific double movement of

1 For the differance in degree of barbarity between representatives of the Hellenic external proletariat see further V. C (i) (c) 3, pp. 223-7, below.
2 'Palingenesia' is a Greek word (παλιγγενεσία) which occurs twice in the New Testament—in Matt. xix.28 and in Titus iii.5—and which in both these passages is translated by the English word 'regeneration' in the Authorized Version. This compound abstract substantive noun is derived from the verbal phrase πάλιν γίγνεσθαι, which is used by Plato, in a passage (Timœus, 23 в) that has been quoted in IV.C(i), vol. iv, pp. 24-5, above, to describe the fresh start which has to be made periodically by Human Society in Hellas and elsewhere, in contrast to an allegedly unbroken continuity of Civilization in the Eygptiac World. The substantive was perhaps coined out of the verbal phrase in order to serve as a technical term in the vocabulary of the Stoic philosophy (see Dey, J.: Παλιγγενεσία (Munster i. W. 1937, Aschendorff), pp. 6-13 and 25), which needed a special word to describe the opening of each round of an endlessly and unvaryingly repeated cyclic movement of the Universe. (For this theory of cycles, which is not peculiar to Stoicism, see IV.C(i), vol. iv, pp. 23-38, above.) There is a clear case of this Stoic usage of the word from a Stoic hand in Marcus Aurelius Antonius: Meditations, Book XI, chap. I, and there are nine examples of it in the Anti-Stoic treatise De Aeternitate Mundi which is traditionally attributed to the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (Dey, op. cit. pp. 8-11). Somewhat later the word seems to have been either borrowed of independently invented for the description of the transmigration of souls in those schools of Hellenic thought into which this doctrine spread (Dey, op. cit., pp. 13-24, 25, and 32). Thereafter the currency of the word spread from the metaphysical to the mundane sphere on the one hand and to the religious sphere on the other. In the mundane sphere πάλιγγενεσία had made its way, by the last century B.C., into the non-technical vocabulary of cultivated circles, and in this environment at this time it was used in a variety of contexts which provide us with our earliest extant historical evidence for its employment (see Dey, op. cit,. pp. 25-30 and 32-3). For example, Josephus uses it (in The Antiquities of the Jewish People, Book XI, sec. 3, chap. 9, § 66) in the sense of a political risorgimento (the return to Judea from Babylonish Captivity), and Cicero (Ad Atticum, vi. 6) in the sense of a personal reinstatement into a temporarily forfeited political position (Cicero's amnesty and return from banishment). In the religious sphere, outside the Christian field, the only worships in which the presence of the concept of παλιγγενεσία can be traced with any certainty are the Hermetic variety of Gnosticism, the so-called 'Mithras Liturgy', and the personal religion of Philo of Alexandria, in so far as this can be reconstructed from his surviving literary works (Dey, op. cit., pp. 36-128 and 132). In the Epistle of Titus the word (παλιγγενεσία) is used to describe the spiritual effect, upon the Soul, of the Christian rite of Baptism; in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew it is used to describe the social effect of the inauguration of the Kingdom of the Messiah.

The literal meaning of 'palingenesia' is 'a recurrence of birth' or, more vaguely, 'a recurrence of coming into existence' (Dey, op. cit., pp. 23 and 33); and in either variant of this meaning there is an element of ambiguity; for the recurrence might refer exclusively to the event of birth (or of coming into existence) or alternatively its reference might extend to the nature of the thing being born (or brought into existence); and while in the latter use of the word 'palingenesia' would mean a repetitive re-birth of something that has been born before, in the former use it would mean an unprecedented new birth of something that is now being born the first time. The Stoic and Orphico-Pythagorean origins of the term indicate (see Dey, op. cit., pp. 7, 23-24, 33, and 125) that, as a matter of history, the use of the word in the sense of 'repetitive re-birth' was the original one. For an application of it in the other possible use, in which it figures in the New Testament, see V.C.(i)(e), vol. vi pp. 160-75, below.

{p.28} Schism-and-Palingenesia as one version of the generic double movement of Withdrawal-and return.1

Schism-and-Palingenesia certainly runs true to the type of Withdrawal-and-Return in so far as the second of beat the movement is the significant feature in it. The happiness of the palingenesia is not only a reparation for the foregoing agony of the schism; it is also the point of the schism, or, in frankly teleological language, its purpose. And in fact we find that, when once the schism has occurred, nothing but frustration results from a closing of the breach before the due palingenesia has been accomplished. A case in point is the 'union sacrée' between the dominant minority of the Eygptiac Society and its internal proletariat against the external proletariat as represented by the Hyksos;2 for it was this reconciliation at the eleventh hour that prolonged the existence of the Eygptiac Society——in a petrified state of life-in-death3—for two thousand years beyond the date when the process of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term of dissolution. And this life-in-death was not merely an unprofitable burden to the moribund Eygptiac Society itself: it was also a fatal blight upon the growth of the living Osirian Church4 which had been created by the Eygptiac internal proletariat; for the 'union sacrée' between internal proletariat and dominant minority took the form of an amalgamation of the living worship of Osiris with the dead worship of the official Eygptiac Pantheon; and this artificial act of syncretism killed the religion of the internal

1 For this movement of Withdrawal-and-Return see III. C (ii) (b), in vol. iii, above.
2 For this Eygyptiac 'union sacrée' and its historical consequences see I, C (ii), vol. i, pp. 144-6, and Part V. A, pp. 2-3, with the references on p. 2, footnaote 1, above,
3 For this phenomenon of petrifaction see Part V. A, above.
4 The word 'church' is used here, and throughout this Study, to mean no more than the collectivity of the devotees of a certain worship. A collectivity of this kind may be united solely by the inward-spiritual bond of their common worship of the same divinity, or alternatively the inward unity may find an outward expression in some kind of social organization. The classic example of an organised church is, of coarse, the Primitive Christian Church; and this feature of the life of the original Christian community has been preserved no only in the Western Catholic Church but also, on a smaller scale and on a looser rein, in many of the other branches into which the Christian Church has ramified in the course of its history. Another example of a highly organized church is the Eygptiac Church which was established under the presidency of the Chief Priest of Amon-Re of Thebes, by the Pharaoh Thothmes III in the restoration period of Eygptiac history, after the expulsion of the Hyksos (see I.C(iii), vol. ii, p. 145, footnote 5, and IV. C(iii)(c)2(β), vol. iv, p. 421, above, and V.C(ii)(d)6(δ), in the present volume, p. 530, and V.C(ii)(d)6(δ), Annex, pp. 653-4 and 695, below). On the other hand the Osirian Church (see V.C(i))(c)2, pp. 150-2, below), its offshoot the Isiac Church in the post-Alexandrine Hellenic World (see V.C(i)(c)2, pp. 81, and V.C(i)(c)2, the present volume, pp. 84-87, below, are examples of churches of the unorganized kind. For the distinction between these two types of church see further, for the Isiac Church, Nock, A.D.: Conversion (Oxford 1933, Clarendon Press), pp. 135-6 and 147; for the Orphic Church, Boulanger, A.: Orphée Paris 1925, Rieder), p. 50 and Fracassini, U.: Il Misticismo Greco e il Christianesimo (Città di Castello 1922, 'Il Solco'), pp. 83-5. The structure of the Orphic and Isiac churches was 'congregational' rather than 'hierarchical'.

{p.29} proletariat without availing to bring the religion of the dominant minority back to life.

The unfortunate outcome of this Eygptiac 'union sacrée' suggests that this exceptional sequel to a social schism is one of those exceptions to a proven rule; and we may take the broken rule to be that a new birth, rather than a healing of the breach, is the one possible happy ending of a schism, besides being the normal ending of this particular variation on the movement of Withdrawal-and-Return.

We shall hardly be permitted, however, to take our interpretation of Schism-and-Palingenesia in terms of Withdrawal-and-Return for granted without being challenged to account for one feature in Schism-and-Palingenesia which, at first sight, might look as though it were quite incompatible with the nature of Withdrawal-and-Return as this is displayed in the process of growth. We have seen that civilizations owe their growth to the withdrawal and return of a minority—the Creative Minority which withdraws in order to find a response to some challenge that is confronting the whole society, and then returns in order to persuade an uncreative majority to follow it along the path which it has opened up. On the other hand, in the movement of Schism-and-Palingenesia that manifests itself in the process of disintegration, it would seem, at first sight. To be a majority that withdraws in the Secession of the Proletariat, while a minority—'the Dominant Minority'—now remains stolidly stationary. Is not this an exact inversion of the minority's and the majority's respective roles? And does not this mean that, after all, the movement of Schism-and-Palingenesia is of a different order from the movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, instead of being—as we had thought—a variation upon a theme with which we are already familiar?

Our best approach to this question will be to consider one difference, of which we have not yet taken note, between the Dominant Minority in a disintegrating civilization and the Creative Minority to which a growing civilization owes its growth.

In the succession of victorious responses to challenges in which the process of growth consists, the Creative Minority to whose enterprise and energy and resoluteness the victory is due is apt to be recruited from different individuals, with different social heritages and different ideas and ideals, at each successive performance of the drama.1 This is the rule in a growing society even where the powers of government, in the widest sense of the word,

1 This point has been touched upon in anticipation, in III. C (ii) (b), vol. Iii, p. 375, footnote 1, above.

{p.30} are the hereditary monopoly of a close aristocracy of birth;1 for in such circumstances the rule operates within these social limits no less surely than it operates throughout the society in cases where the whole of the society is enfranchised. In an aristocratically governed society that is in process of growth, we find on group of aristocratic families playing the part of Creative Minority in response to one challenge, and a different group in response to the next; and, if eventually the society is confronted with some challenge which is not successfully met by any group at all within the closed aristocratic circle, the aristocracy's failure does not necessarily bring the society's growth to an end; for the new challenge may still evoke a victoriously creative response from some minority in a stratum of the society that has hitherto been given no opportunity of playing a leading part in the society's affairs; and thus the series of challenges and responses, as it lengthens, may give occasion the enfranchisement of one social stratum after another. In the history of the Hellenic Society, for example, we have seen how the old agrarian aristocracy was eventually worsted by the Malthusian problem when this was presented in a new form in the sixth century B.C. owing to the success of hostile neighbours in bring the sheer extensive expansion of the Hellenic Society to a halt; and in the case of Attica (for which our historical record of this age happens to be less meagre than it is for other parts of Hellas) we have observed how the problem was solved nevertheless by the new-fangled class of merchants which made its appearance at Athens in the person of Solon, and how the consequences of the Solonian 'bourgeois' revolution led on in time to the enfranchisement of a new urban working class, side by side with the new urban bourgeoisie.2 In the history of our own Western Society, in the so-called 'medieval' chapter of its growth, we can see another instance of the rise of successive creative minorities, outside the circle of a hereditary aristocracy, in the enfranchisement first of a bourgeoisie, and then of an urban working class, in the bodies politic of the North Italian city-states.

This tendency in a growing society for the Creative Minority to be recruited on each successive occasion from a new source can be accounted for by the combined operation of two distinct causes, one positive and the other negative. The positive cause is to be found in a fact which has already come to our notice.3 A con-

1
2
3

{p.31} tinuance of growth implies that, in each successive round of Challenge-and-Response, the challenge which is presented is a new one (since ex hypothesi, if growth is still being maintained, the last challenge has been victoriously met and, in being met, has been disposed of). But if the challenge, each time, is new, it is only to be expected that this new challenge will be met, each time, by a newly recruited minority which can bring some hitherto unutilized talent into play in wrestling with a hitherto unfamiliar problem. The tendency for a new creative minority to be called up, in each successive emergency, by the operation of this positive factor will be accentuated by the effect of a negative factor which we have found to be a potent cause of the breakdown of civilizations. We have seen in that context1 that the gift of creativity is subject to its own peculiar nemesis; and that a minority which has demonstrated its creative power by responding to one challenge victoriously is likely to inhibit itself from repeating its exploit—that is to say, from responding, later on, to a different challenge with equal success—by succumbing to one or other of the two diverse temptations with which a very successful creative minority of individual is beset: the temptation to rest on one's oares and the antithetical temptation to kick over the traces and run amok.

For this combination of reasons the Creative Minority in a growing society is apt to be perpetually changing—and this not simply in its personnel, but more profoundly, by fat, in its ideas and its ideals. By contrast, the Dominant Minority in a disintegrating society tends to degenerate into a close corporation whose ideas and ideals have the legendary rigidity of the unchanging 'laws of the Medes and Persians'—and this even when its personnel is radically re-cast through the admission of novi homines to some share in the corporation's jealously guarded privileges.2

1 In IV.C(iii)(c), vol. iv, above.
2 The personnel of the Dominant Minority does frequently change almost completely in its physical composition in the course of the Dominant Minority's career between the original breakdown and the final dissolution of the disintegrating society; for the Dominant Minority is violently self-destructive, and it would be likely to annihilate itself long before it had come to the end of its brief turn on the stage if its strength were not perpetually recruited by infusions of fresh blood. The Dominant Minority does its best—or worst—to destroy itself by indulging in dissensions in its own ranks ion the midst of its truceless warfare with the Proletariat. Its members exterminate one another in civil wars within the bosom of a single commonwealth as well as in wars between state and state; and at the same time they sap their own vitality by running to extremes of luxuriousness and vice and of sluggishness and frenzy. The new blood—'viscera magnarum domuum dominique futuri' (Juvenal: Satires, III, I. 72; quoted again in V.C(i)(c)2, p, 67, below)——which keeps the Dominant Minority alive is drawn in ever larger draughts from ever more alien sources. Foe example, the Roman senatorial class which represented the dominant minority of the Hellenic Society in the penultimate phase of its disintegration——between the convulsions in the third century of the Christian Era and the death-throes of the fifth and sixth centuries—would perhaps not have been able to trace more than a tincture in its blood back to the veins of the Roman senatorial class of the Republican Era, with which it was officially identical. The families which were representatives at the turn of the fourth centuries of the Christian Era were probably descended in the physical sense almost entirely from ci-devant members of the internal and external proletariats; from Orientals and barbarians who had acquired the Roman citizenship, or even from slaves who had purchased their freedom. Indeed, in terms of 'Race' there was almost certainly a much greater infusion of new blood into the Roman senatorial class in its decadence as a dominant minority than the aristocracies of the Roman Republic or the Macedonian Kingdom of the Athenian City-State had ever received in their prime when they were still furnishing creative minorities for a growing civilization. In physical race it is the Creative Minority of the springtime, rather than the Dominant Minority of the decadence, that is able to boast of its 'purity'. At first sight this will seem paradoxical; but on a closer view it will be seen to confirm our previous conclusion (reached in II.C(ii)(a)I, vol. i, above) that Race counts for very little in human affairs. The telling factors are the ideas and the ideals. The Dominant Minority remains, from first to last, the rigid and static corporation that we have described, because the novi homines who change its racial composition are only allowed to bring their new blood on condition of accepting the old tradition of the body into which they are being initiated. Conversely, an aristocracy in a society in the growth-stage may keep itself racially 'pure' without ceasing to throw up one creative minority after another so long as its members forbear to steel their souls against the influence of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth.

{p.32} The social and mental and spiritual fixity that is characteristic of dominant minorities, in contrast to creative minorities, and that persist through one round after another of the series of unsuccessful responses that constitutes the disintegration of a civilization, in contrast to its growth, the challenge that is presented in each successive bout of Challenge-and-Response is always, now, the same.1 The unanswered challenge recurs again and again, and the discomfited minority keeps the field in order to invite and incur as many successive defeats at the hands of an adversary whom it can neither overcome nor elude. The discomfiture, each time, is a foregone conclusion, ex hypothesi, to be creative. The defensive posture which it substitutes for a creative activity may be either indolent or recalcitrant; but, whether it is insanely defying the lightning of inertly resting on its oars, in either posture the Dominant minority is refusing to hand over to the other aspirants the protagonist's role which it has already proved itself incompetent to play.

These postures that remain rigidly the same, through one bout after another of a losing battle, are the marks of the Dominant Minority in a disintegrating civilization. The contrast to the fluidity and versatility of the successive creative minorities in a growing civilization is extreme. The creative minorities are in perpetual flux because they are successive incarnations of the diverse forms in which the creative spirit manifests itself in response to challenges which are never the same twice running. The Dominant Minority stands stiff, like a pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was transformed as the penalty for looking back upon the abandoned Cities of the Plain instead of turning her face
{p.33} resolutely towards the mountain in which she might have found a happier habitation.

In so far as it takes this stand, the Dominant Minority condemns itself, in advance, to have no further part or lot in the work of creation; but in making its 'great refusal' it impoverishes no one but itself. By disqualifying itself from serving as an instrument, it does not bring the work to an end; for, while this civilization is falling and that civilization is rising, the work of creation still goes on. It not only goes on; it also continues to be performed through that action of Challenge-and-Response and Withdrawal-and-Return with which we have become familiar in our analysis of the process of growth. When the growth of a civilization is cut short by a breakdown, and the would-be creative minority that has stiffened into a dominant minority begins to repeat an ineffective gesture which never varies at each onset of an unanswered challenge which never ceases to recur, this monotonous celebration of the tragedy of defeat is not the only drama that is played upon the broken-down civilization's social stage. During the disintegration of a civilization two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side. While an unchanging dominant minority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking fresh creative responses from newly recruited minorities which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time, to the occasion.

These ever-changing new creative minorities stand in no fixed relation to the Dominant Minority which persists in holding the floor side by side with them for as long as it retains the strength to remain upon its feet. They are not bound a priori to be recruited entirely outside its ranks,1 any more than they are bound to coincide with the Dominant Minority in their membership, either wholly of in part. Manifestly the chances are in favour of their being recruited from among outsiders, since ex hypothesi the Dominant Minority has placed itself in a rigid posture which is inimical to creativity; yet the creative spirit does not wholly depart from the souls of the Dominant Minority before it has performed through them at least two mighty works: the creation of a school of philosophy, which prepares the way for a universal church—filling some of the valleys and bringing some of the mountains low2 in the spiritual wilderness of a society in disintegration—and the creation of a universal state as a material framework within which a universal church can flower in its tender infancy. Both these

1 For the recruitment of leaders of the Internal Proletariat from the ranks of the Dominant Minority see V.C(ii)(a), vol.vi, pp. 236-41, below.
2 Luke iii. 4-5

{p.34} things are the work of creative minorities and creative individuals who arise among the members of the Dominant Minority; but at the same time they are only a part of the work of creation that is being accomplished during the age of disintegration in the disintegrating society's ambit; for at the same time another creative minority's handiwork can be discerned in the creation of a universal church, and another's, again, in the creation of a bevy of barbarian war-bands.

We have now found our answer to the question whether the movement of Schism-and-Palingenesia, as we see it in the process of disintegration, does not differ from the movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, as we have seen this in the process of growth, in the point that in Schism-and-Palingenesia it is a majority that withdraws from a minority. We can see now that the answer to our question is, after all, in the negative. In Schism-and-Palingenesia it is still a minority that withdraws—and this, as before for the purpose of finding a creative response to a challenge. But in a disintegrating civilization the uncreative mass, from which the Creative minority distinguishes itself, is differently constituted from the uncreative mass of a civilization that is still in growth. Instead of consisting wholly of an impressionable rank-and-file whom the Creative Minority, when it returns, can induce to follow its lead by playing upon the faculty of mimesis, the uncreative mass now also consists in part of a Dominant Minority which is almost entirely intractable to the new creative minority's influence. What we are watching in the Secession of the Proletariat is thus not really the withdrawal of a majority from a minority. It is the performance of the Creative Minority's familiar work in the familiar way, but in the teeth of another minority of a different order—a recalcitrant minority which is persisting in a hopeless attempt to dominate a situation in which it does not any longer command the initiative. The secession which is thus accomplished by a creative minority under these special difficulties only appears to be the work of a majority because the Creative Minority attracts to itself, as usual, the mimesis of the uncreative mass apart from the fraction of the mass which is now stubbornly resisting this attraction because it has cast itself for the Dominant Minority's role. As usual, 'the floating vote' is given to the Creative minority every time, while the Dominant Minority attracts no mimesis to itself and can do no more than withhold its own support from its creative rival. It is only this negative power of making 'the great refusal' that distinguishes the Dominant Minority from the rest of the uncreative mass;1 and this distinction is not fundamental. The

1 A classic illustration of this is afforded by the contrast between the status and the state of mind of the French noblesse on the eve of the Revolution (see the quotation from de Tocqueville in IV. C(iii)(c)2(γ), Annex, vol. iv, p. 638, footnote 6, above). In the France of that generation the aristocracy had stamped itself unmistakably as a dominant minority, whereas in the England of the same generation the aristocracy had not yet ceased to be creative.

{p.35} most significant, though not the most conspicuous, line of division is still that which divides the whole of the uncreative mass from the Creative Minority in each successive round of Challenge-and-Response.

That the Secession of the Proletariat should thus prove, after all, to be the work of a minority and not of a majority is only what we might have expected. For an act of secession is manifestly an act that requires the exercise of initiative and courage and imagination in a high degree; and these are not the virtues of sheep without a shepard. This point is illustrated by the historic 'Secessions of the Plebs' in the history of the Roman Republic—in allusion to which our own term "Secession of the Proletariat' has been coined. It is notorious that in the earlier bouts of the conflict between Plebeians and Patricians the Plebs strove in vain to break its economic and political chains. It was only gradually that the challenge of oppression evoked the latent powers of leadership in a minority of the Plebeian mass; and it was this creative minority—an inchoate 'Plebeian aristocracy', to describe it through a contradiction in terms—that conceived and executed the plan of secession as a stratagem fro bringing the oppressive Patricians to their knees. If this minority had not taken the lead, the rank-and-file of the Plebeians would assuredly never struck out for themselves the master-stroke of first escaping from the pen in which their oppressors fancied that they held them corralled, and then turning at bay in the security of the open wilderness.


(c) SCHISM IN THE BODY SOCIAL

(1) Dominant Minorities

{V.C.I.(c),p. 40} If we look for wastrels to match the Roman plunderers of a conquered Hellenic World in the age preceding the establishment of the Pax Augusta, we shall find them in the war-lords, lay and ecclesiastic, who ground the faces of the Japanese peasantry in the age preceding the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. We shall find their like again, in the Arabic World, in the Mamlūks who ground the faces of the Egyptian peasantry more outrageously in their military decadence than in an earlier age when they were performing a certain public service in return for their feudal dues.2 And our own Western history in its latter days furnishes a long gallery of portraits which are unmistakable examples of the same type: from the flauntingly predatory princes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a Rudolfo Gonzaga of Castiglione and a Henry VIII of England and a Louis XIV of France—who had shaken off the moral discipline of the medieval Church,3 to the more discreetly predatory plutocrats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who have put the princes in irons in order to usurp for their own bourgeois profit the adventurer's self-conferred privilege of playing the game of Raubwirtschaft with the whole World for their oyster.

Similarly, if we look for the hangmen to match a Crassus and Titus, we shall find them in the Assyrian war-lords, from Tiglath-Pileser III and Asshurbanipal, as they wrestle ever more savagely with their self-imposed tour de force of holding down a conquered

1 Thucydides, Book I, chap. 22.
2 For the Eygptian Mamlūks see Part III, A, vol. iii, pp. 30-1; and IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (α), vol. iv, pp. 447-61, above.
3 For the revolt of the local secular princes against the moral authority of the Catholic Church in the Western World at the beginning of the Modern Age, and for the princes' seizure and exploitation of the instruments and methods of public administration which the Papal Curia had invented, see IV. C. (iii) (c) 3 (β), vol. iv, pp. 534-5 and 539-40, above.

{p.41} Syria with one hand and a conquered Babylonia with the other, with no hand left free for retaining their hold upon Egypt.1 We shall find other representatives of the hangman type in the Tsars—an Ivan the Terrible and a Peter the Great and a Nicholas I—who have had recourse to all the weapons in the armoury of political repression in order to keep the yoke of a universal state upon the shoulders of a restive nobility and a ground-down peasantry and a thwarted intelligentsia. And the hangman type, like the wastrel type, presents itself in our own Western World as well. It is unmistakably represented by the sinister figures of sixteenth-century German princes hanging and burning alive their religious Anabaptist peasants3 (with the approbation of a Martin Luther!). And the same type reappears as plainly in the figures of these princes' latter-day National-Socialist supplanters, who, at the moment of these words were being written, were attempting to break the spirit of Jews, Marxians, Liberals, Pacificists, Christians, and Prussian officers by employing our twentieth-century methods of barbarism in pursuit of a sixteenth-century aim. Nor is this savagery a mere local German departure from a milder Western norm; for the English observer, writing smugly in his study, will find his pen refusing to obey his fingers if he begins to thank God that he and his kinsfolk are not as men are on the Continent. If he is tempted to offer the Pharisee's thanksgiving, his conscience will rise up to remind him of the English-speaking peoples' responsibility for the crime of Negro Slavery,3 and of those English penal laws4—repealed scarcely a century ago—under which an English labourer convicted of a petty theft might be sentenced by an English magistrate to deportation for life in he were lucky enough to escape the gallows.

If we want an example of the wastrel and the hangman combined in one person, we shall find it in the Eygptiac World in the Pyramid-Builder5 whose hold over his subject peasantry was so complete that he could wear them out for the gratification of his own megalomania without having to fear that his victims would rebel under the lash.

We can also add portraits from the histories of other disintegrating civilizations to our gallery of Hellenic conquerors.

The fratricidal warfare within the bosom of the dominant minority of the Hellenic Society which ended the delivery of

1 For this phase of Assyrian history see IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (α), vol. iv, pp. 476-84, above.
2 For the Anabaptists see V. C. (i) (c) 2, pp. 167-72, below.
3 See IV. C. (iii) (b) 2, vol. iv, above.
4 See IV. C. (iii) (c) 2 (γ), Annex, vol. iv, p. 638, above.
5 See III. C (i) (d), vol. iii, pp.212-15, and IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (β), vol. iv, pp. 408-10, above.

{p.42} a Roman ' knock-out blow' has its analogue in the Sinic World in the struggle between the contending states which ended in the triumph of Ts’in,1 and in the Far Eastern Society in Japan in that Ishmaelitish warfare of all against all which the required three successive Caesars—a Nobunaga and a Hideyoshi and an Ieyasu—to bring it to a close.2 The disintegration of the Babylonic and Iranic civilizations was carried to its consummation by a duel between two sister Powers: Assyria and Babylonia in the one case, and the ‛Osmanlis and the Safawis in the other.4 In Orthodox Christendom the duel between the East Roman Empire and Bulgaria in the tenth century of the Christian Era opened the way for the Frankish and Turkish inroads of the century following.5 And in the Syriac and Hindu worlds a similar orgy of fratricidal warfare likewise opened the way for the Assyrian inroads into Syria6 and for the Turkish inroads into Hindustan.7 In Central America the forcible incorporation of the Yucatec Society into the Mexic Society seems to have been one of the penalties of the fratricidal 'War of Mayapan' in which a Yucatec dominant minority had enlisted Mexic mercenaries to help it in the suicidal work of tearing itself to pieces;8 and it is certain that it was the war between the Aztecs and the Tlaxcalecs that afterwards condemned the Mexic Society to become the prey of the Spanish conquistadores.9

In the abortive cosmos of city-states which tried and failed, in the second chapter of our Western history, to convert a feudal society, within which had arisen, to its own way of life, this failure can be traced everywhere—in Italy and in Flanders, in Swabia and in the Rhineland—to the internecine strife between the patriciates of one city-state and another.10 In consequence of this failure our Western Society discarded the city-state and fell back, as we have seen, upon the old-fashioned kingdom-state, with its feudal heritage, when it was groping after a new standard unit of parochial civic organization at the beginning of the third chapter of our Western history. And, when we remind ourselves of that curious check and throwback with which the political history of this third chapter began, we are led to ask ourselves whether by making this fresh start the princes and oligarchies and

1 I. C. (i) (b) vol. i, p. 89; IV. C. (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, pp. 65-6, above.
2 IV. C. (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 94, above, and V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, pp. 186, 188, and 191, below.
3 IV. C. (iii) (c) 3 (α), vol. iv, pp. 476-84, above.
4 I. C. (i) (b), Annex I, vol. i, pp. 377-400, above.
5 IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (β), vol. iv, pp. 384-404, above.
6 IV. C (ii) (b) 1 vol. iv, pp. 67-8, above.
7 IV. C (ii) (b) 2 vol. iv, pp. 99-100, above.
8 I. C (i) (b) vol. i, pp. 123-4; IV. C. (ii) (b) 2, vol iv, pp. 105-6, above. above.
9 I. C (i) (b) vol. i, pp. 120, and IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 105, above.
10 See III. C (ii) (b) vol. iii, pp. 341-50, especially pp. 348-9, above.

{p.43} democracies of our latter-day Western kingdom-states and national states have succeeded—while this third chapter in our Western history had been running its course and finally passing into a fourth,1—in avoiding the fratricidal warfare through which the fair promise of the medieval Western city-states was blighted, in an earlier chapter of the same story, by the perverse pugnacity of the city-state patriciates. Unhappily the answer to this fateful question is emphatically in the negative.2

As soon as the modern political map of our Western World began to take shape, the masters of the new-model states made haste to engage in fratricidal warfare on the scale which their ampler resources made possible for them. the contest for hegemony between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, which inaugurated the Modern Age of our Western history, has been followed by the wars of Philip II and the wars of Louis XIV and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of A.D. 1792-1815; our own 'Post-modern' Age has been inaugurated by the General War of 1914-18; and every one of these major conflicts has brought with it a crop of minor wars—some preceding it as its overture, and others following it as its sequel.3 The life of our Western Society had been as grievously infested by the plague of War during these last four centuries as in any earlier age; and we have already observed4 how this social evil, in persisting, has been keyed up to an unprecedented intensity by a new 'drive' that had been put into it since the invention of Democracy and Industrialism, until the former 'sport of kings' has become the absorbing business of whole nations la Guerre Totale. If a furore of fratricidal warfare within the bosom of a society is presumptive evidence that a dominant minority has come on to the scene, we must confess that, to judge by the recent course of our Western history, our Western Society, in its present fourth chapter, has arrived at the stage upon which the Hellenic Society entered after the opening of the third chapter of Hellenic history post Alexandrum

Nor has the dominant minority of the disintegrating Hellenic Civilization been unique in begetting conquerors who turn their arms against aliens.

For example, there are other disintegrating civilizations, besides the Hellenic, that can show their Alexanders (though these non-

1 For the transition from the third to the fourth chapter of our Western history in the last quarter of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era see Part I. A, vol. i, ad init.
2 See IV. C (iii) (b) 3, vol. iv, pp. 141-55, above, and V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, pp. 312-21, below.
3 For the rhythm that can be discerned in the recurrences of wars in the histories of civilizations see V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, and part XI, below.
4 In IV. C (iii) (b) 3, vol. iv, above.

{p.44} Hellenic Alexanders are apt to be mere men of blood unredeemed by the spiritual vision of Alexander the Great). The Sumeric Society can display a string of them: Lugalzaggisi, Sargon, Naramsin.1 The Eygptiac Society can show the militarists of 'the New Empire'—a Thothmes I and a Thothmes III and a Ramses II—who conquered and re-conquered the domain of an abortive Syriac Civilization2 from Gaza to the Euphrates. In the disintegration of the main body of the Orthodox Christian Society the ‛Osmanlis had no sooner completed their work of establishing a universal state in which a Pax Ottomanica was imposed upon the whole of Orthodox Christendom apart from Russia3 than they sought new worlds to conquer, both east and west. Selīm I was consciously following in the footsteps of Alexander when he marched against the Persians; and, though his Janissaries insisted on turning back at Tabrīz instead of allowing themselves to be led, like Alexander's Macedonians, to the banks of the Beas,4 Selīm did successfully repeat Alexander's exploit of conquering Eygpt;5 and his successor Suleymān the Magnificent attempted the superhuman feat of mastering the Safawī empire with one hand and Western Christendom with the other. The disintegration of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan produced a counterpart of Suleymān in Hideyoshi, who had scarcely completed Nobunaga's work in the Japanese Isles before he recklessly diverted an exhausted society's last energies to grandiose schemes of conquest on the Continent—only to be foiled in Korea without ever coming within range of China. The same megalomania was displayed by the Muscovite makers of the Orthodox Chrisitian universal state in Russia when they attempted to expand their dominions simultaneously at the expense of Western Christendom in the Balticum and Finland and Poland and at the expense of the Iranic World in the Caucusus and Central Asia. This insatiable appetite for territory in potentates who are already gorged, and who cannot digest the resources of the vast tracts which they have inherited, is an example of that mania for sheer magnitude which we have already recognized6 as a pathological effort to find some alternative means of self-expression in lieu of a lost creative power. Again, the Iranic Society threw up, in the course of the its disintegration, a Nādir Shāh7 (dominabatur A.D. 1936-47) whose career looks like nothing

1 See I. C (i) (b), vol i, p. 109; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 64, above.
2 For this abortive Syriac Civilization see II. D. (vii), vol. ii, pp. 388-91, above.
3 For this Pax Ottomanica see Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 26-7, above.
4 See I. C (i) (b), Annex I, in vol. i, pp. 385-6, above.
5 I. C (i) (b), Annex I, in vol. i, pp. 388; IV C (iii) (c) 2 (γ), vol. iv, pp. 450-2, above.
6 In I. C (i) (a), vol. iii, pp. 153-4, above,
7 See I. C (i) (b), Annex I, vol. i, p. 399, above, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, vol. v, pp. 679-80, below.

{p.45} so much as a caricature of Alexander's as we watch this parvenu Avshār soldier of fortune ramping up and down the famous Macedonian’s historic South West Asian stage—now showing his flag for a moment in Baghdad, and now rushing off to plunder Delhi—until suddenly we see him, to our astonishment, being enlightened by a gleam of the genuine Alexandrine vision of reconciliation and unity, and courting—in his daring effort to bring back the Shī‛ah to the Sunnah—the assassination that swiftly overtakes him.1

These non-Hellenic counterparts of Alexander the great can be matched by corresponding counterparts of the Roman conquerors of the West European and North-West African barbarians. There is a Roman touch in the conquest of Nubia by the Caesars of the Eygptiac universal state—an Amenemhat I (imperabat circa 2000-1971 B.C.) and a Senwosret III (imperabat circa 1887-1850 B.C.)2—and likewise in the conquest of Yunnan by the Mongol makers of Far Eastern Society on the Asiatic Continent, while in the insular offshoot of the Far Eastern Society of Japan the subjugation of the primitive Ainu in an age when the Japanese war-lords were strenuously engaged in rending one another3 is as astonishing a feat as the Roman subjugation of Gaul and Numidia in the age of the Roman civil wars.


{p. 47} It is now manifest that our own Western Society, as well as the other non-Hellenic societies, can furnish us with examples of three social types—the conqueror, the wastrel, and the hangman—of which we identified our first specimens among the members of the dominant minority of the Hellenic Society in its disintegration. Happily, however, the comparison works out for the good as well as for evil; for we have also seen that the Hellenic dominant minority displays a wide range of spiritual variety beyond the narrow limits of these three repulsive types; and the figures that are blazoned on the brighter side of a Hellenic shield can likewise be matched by examples from the membership of the other civilizations.


{p. 52} We have now managed to marshal a considerable array of evidence for the capacity of dominant minorities to produce an admirable governing class; and this evidence is borne out by the catalogue of the universal states that have been created by the dominant minorities of disintegrating civilizations; for the establishment and maintenance of a universal state presupposes the existence of a governing class with a high standard of conduct, a strong esprit de corp, and a persistent tradition.


In the course of previous inquiries2 we have found incidentally that, out of twenty-one civilizations which have unquestionably broken down, 3 no less than fifteen have passed through a universal state on their road from breakdown towards dissolution. We have identified a Hellenic universal state in the Roman Empire;4 an Andean in the Empire of the Incas;5 a Sinic in the Empire of the Ts’in and Han dynasties;6 a Minoan in 'the thalassocracy of Minos';7 a Sumeric on the Empire of the Sumer and Akkad;8 a Babylonic in the Neo-Babylonic Empire of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar;9 a Mayan in 'the Old Empire' of the Mayas;10 an Eygptiac in 'the Middle Empire' of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties;11 a Syriac in the Achaemenian Empire;12 an Indic in

1 For the effect of Alexander's discovery of the Persians' true character in lauding the Macedonian man of genius to his greater discovery of the unity of Mankind see V. C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. 9, below.
2 In I. C (i) (b), vol. i, and IV. C (ii), vol. iv, above.
3 These twenty include all those, with the single uncertain exception of our own Western Civilization, that have not either miscarried before birth or become arrested immediately after it.
4 I. C (i) (a), vol. i, pp. 52-3; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 61, above.
5 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 120-2; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 103, above.
6 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 89; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 65, above.
7 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 93-4; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 64, above.
8 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 106; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 63-4, above.
9 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 119; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 100, above.
10 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 125-7; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 108, above.
11 I. C (ii), vol. i, p. 137; IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 85, above.
12 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 75-6; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 67, above.

{p.53} the Empire of the Mauryas;1 a Hindu in the Timurid Empire of the Akbar and Awrangzīb.2 We have distinguished a Russian Orthodox Christian universal state in the Muscovite 'Empire of All the Russias',3 and another Orthodix Chrisitan universal state, embracing the main body of Orthodox Christendom, in the Ottoman Empire;4 and in the Far Eastern World we have met with a corresponding pair: the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan5 and the Mongol Empire in China.6

We have also observed that a number of these universal states have been prolonged (to their natural term) or restored (after a lapse) or reintegrated (after an interval of alien intrusion) by other hands than those which originally created them. The Empire of the Incas was taken over forcibly by the Spaniards and prolonged in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru.7 The Empire of Sumer and Akkad was restored by the First Dynasty of Babylon in the reign of Hammurabi.8 The Neo-Babylonian Empire was engulfed in the Achaemenian Empire9 and this in its turn was taken over forcibly by Alexander, and was prolonged by Alexander's Seleucid successors, before it was eventually broken up by Roman and Parthian hammer-strokes and was subsequently reintegrated by the labours of the Umayyads and 'Abbasids after the complete and final expulsion of the Hellenic intruders from the Syriac Society's domain,10 The Eyptiac ‘Middle Empire’ of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties was re-established, after a very much shorter breach of continuity, in 'the New Empire’ of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.11 The Empire of the Mauryas was partially taken over and prolonged by Hellenic conquerors from Bactria, and by these Greek empire-builders' Kushan successors’ and was eventually reintegrated by the Guptas, who stand to the Mauryas as the ‛Abbasids stand to the Achaemenidae12 The Timurid Empire of Akbar and Awrangzīb was restored—in more solid masonry and also, perhaps, on a sounder architectural plan—in the British Rāj,13 The Mongol Umpire over China was re-established, to all

1 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 86; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 66, above.
2 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 97, above.
3 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 88, above.
4 Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 26-7; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 70, above.
5 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 88, above.
6 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 87, above.
7 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 80 and 103, above.
8 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 106; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 63-4, above.
9 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 119, above.
10 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 72-7; It is noteworthy that this final reversal of Alexander's feat of imposing Hellenism upon the Syriac World by force of arms was followed by voluntary reception of Hellenic culture on the part of the Syriac Society in the ‛Abbasid Age. This cultural contact, between the Syriac and Hellenic societies at this stage of their intercourse is examined in Part IX, below.
11 I. C (ii), vol. i, p. 138-9, above.
12 I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 84-6; IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, p. 66, above.
13 IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, pp. 96-7, above.

{p.54} Chinese intents and purposes, in the Manchu Empire,1 which stands to it as the Egyptiac 'New Empire' stands to the Egyptiac ‘Middle Empire'.

It will be observed that—as might have been expected a priori—these works of rehabilitation have been performed, more often than not, by new arrivals on the scene who have been culturally alien from the original builders. The Spaniards, for example, were wholly alien from the Incas; the Achaemenidae from the Babylonians; the Macedonians from the Achaemenidae; the Greek and Kushan invaders of India from the Mauryas; and the British from the Timurids (as well as from the Hindus). Even the Amorite Hammurabi, though he was the sixth of his line to reign in Babylon, was probably looked askance at, as a not yet completely reclaimed barbarian, by his Akkadian subjects and a fortiori by their Sumerian fellow citizens of that 'Empire of the Four Quarters’ which actually owed its restoration to Hammurabi's prowess and statesmanship. And this was certainly the attitude of the Chinese to the Manchus from beginning to end of the Manchu régime, in spite of the Manchus' almost complete freedom from that tincture of an alien civilization which had evoked in Chinese hearts a fanatical hatred against the Manchus1 predecessors, the Mongols.2

We shall even find several further examples of alien handiwork among those universal states which were ‘original work' and were not restorations of some older building. For example, the Timurid Turks, who made the first essay in providing the disintegrating Hindu Society with a universal state, were children of the Iranic Society and, by this token, were just as alien from the Hindu World as are their British successors. The 'Osmanlis, who gave the main body of Orthodox Christendom the only universal state that it has ever known, were the Timurids’ cultural as well as racial brethren. The Mongols, who gave the main body of the Far Eastern Society its first universal state, were decidedly more alien in culture from their Chinese subjects than were the Manchus who afterwards repeated the Mongols' feat.3 Of the other original creators of universal states, a majority—which includes the Romans, the Incas, the Achaemenidae, the Ts'in, the Theban Dynasties, the Muscovites, and the Tokugawas—were Powers which had qualified for the role of empire-builders

1 IV. C (ii) 2, vol. iv, p. 87, above.
2 For the cultural relation of the Manchus to the Chinese and to the Mongols respectively see Part III. A., vol. iii, pp. 16, 19, and 31, footnote 1, above, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 309-10, and V. C (i) (c) 4, pp. 348-51, below.
3 For the tinge of Far Eastern Christian culture in the social 'make-up' of the Mongols see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 237-8, and ii. D (vii), Annex VIII, vol. ii, above, and V. C (i) (c) 4, in the present volume, p. 348, below.

{p.55} by serving an apprenticeship as wardens of the marches;1 and these frontiersmen on an imperial throne have often been viewed by their more cultivated but less capable subjects in the interior with the eyes of a Sumerian litteratus looking down his nose at a Hammurabi. This, as we know from their own written testimony, was the attitude of Greek men-of-letters towards Roman statesmen and administrators as late as the Age of the Antonines, when these Romans were actually practising, with an effectiveness that no Greek had ever approached, that benevolent 'Hellenic superintendence' (‛Ελληνική έπιέλεια) which, five hundred years before, had been so earnestly commended to King Philip by Isocrates.2

In so far as the universal states of which we have made this summary surveys prove to have been the work of alien hands, they cannot, of course, be taken as evidence of creative power in any fraction of the disintegrating society on whose ground they have been set up. It would, however, be hypercritical to stigmatize the frontiersmen empire-builders as aliens simply because the people of the interior have affected to regard them as such. If we examine more closely the Hellenic case in point, we shall probably come to the conclusion that the Greek rhetor's sensitiveness to the barbarism of the Roman official was not an entirely genuine feeling, but was partly the expression of a self- defensive mental attitude—a refusal to face the humiliating fact that the converted barbarian had proved himself, by Isocrates' own test, to be a better Hellene than the Greek himself.4 It would, indeed, be a paradox to maintain that the Romans were no true representatives of the Hellenic

1 For 'the stimulus of pressures’ which has so often given ‘marches’ an ascendancy over ‘interiors’ see II. D (v), vol. ii, above.
2 Isocrates : Philippus.
3 A complete table of the universal states that come within the purview of the present Study will be found at the end of V. C (iii), in vol. vi, p. 327, below.
4 In an earlier chapter of the story of the Greeks' encounter with the Romans—at a stage in which the Romans were still engaged in wrecking the Hellenic Society that they were afterwards to reconstruct—the Greek pretence that the Romans were barbarians had proved impossible to keep up:
‘lt is said that when Pyrrhus caught his first bird's eye view, from an observation post, of the Roman army in formation, he remarked that he could see nothing barbarous about the barbarians’ order of battle; and similar confessions were extorted from Greeks who were making their first acquaintance with Titus [Quinctius Flamininus]. They had had it from the Macedonians that a fellow in command of a barbarian host was on the war-path, conquering and enslaving as he came; and now they found themselves in the presence of a young man of gracious mien who was a Greek in speech and accent and was ambitious to deserve true honour. Of course they were extraordinarily charmed, and, when they left his presence to go off to their respective homes, they turned the tide of public feeling in Titus's favour—bringing tidings of him as a leader who had come to conduct the Greeks into the promised land of freedom’—Plutarch: Life of Titus Quinctius Flamininus, chap. 5. The fourth-century Greek scholar Heracleides Ponticus hit the mark when, in the earliest mention of Rome in extant Greek literature he described her as 'a Hellenic city’ (see V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 212, footnote 3, below.

{p.56} dominant minority, or the Thebans of the Egyptiac. And, even if we leave the borderline cases on one side, there are a number of instances still left in which there can be no dispute over the claim of the creators of a universal state to be representatives of the dominant minority of the society in whose domain the state has been established. Among these unquestionable exponents of a dominant minority's political creative power we may cite the Han Dynasty and 'Minos', the dynasty of Ur and the Neo-Babylonians, the Mauryas and the Guptas.

Is this political capacity the only kind of creative power that is a common attribute of dominant minorities? The question presents itself because in our analysis of the various types of character and activity in the Hellenic dominant minority we found that the creative type was not, in this case, confined to the political field. It was represented not only by the Roman public servant but also by the Greek philosopher;1 and, if we now repeat the procedure, which we have been following so far, of surveying the lives of the other civilizations in their disintegration in order to learn whether the Hellenic phenomena reappear in them, we shall see that the Greek philosopher, as well as the Roman public servant, has his non-Hellenic counterparts. While we have found about ten disintegrating civilizations, besides the Hellenic, in which the Dominant Minority can be credited with the creative achievement of having established a universal state, we can find at least three, besides the Hellenic, in which the Dominant Minority has also thought out a philosophy.

In the history of the Babylonic Society, for example, the terrible eighth century B.C., which saw the beginning of the Hundred Years' War between Babylonia and Assyria,2 seems also to have seen a sudden great advance in astronomical knowledge.3 In this age Babylonic men of science discovered that the rhythm of cyclic recurrence, which had been patent, from time immemorial, in the alternations of Night and Day and in the waxing and waning of the Moon and in the Solar Cycle of the Year, was also discernible on a vaster scale in the secular motions of a heavenly host which included the planets. These stars which were traditionally named ‘the wanderers’ par excellence, in allusion to their apparently erratic courses, now proved to be bound by as strict a discipline as the Sun or the Moon or ‘the fixed stars’ of the Firmament in the Cosmic Cycle of a Magnus Annus;4 and this exciting Babylonic discovery

1 See pp. 31-40, above.
2 See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (α), vol. iv, pp, 476-80, above.
3 See Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (ii), third edition (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta), pp. 591-5; vol. iii, first edition (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), pp. 132-4.
4 See IV. C (i) vol. iv, pp. 23-4 and 37, above.

{p.57} of a hitherto unsuspected application of a familiar law of Physical Nature had much the same effect as our recent Western scientific discoveries have had upon the discoverers' conception of the Universe.

The never broken and never varying order that had thus been found to reign in all the known movements of the stellar cosmos was now assumed to govern the Universe as a whole: material and spiritual, inanimate and animate.1 If an eclipse of the Sun or a transit of Venus could be dated with certainty to some precise moment hundreds of years back in the past, or predicted with equal certainty as bound to occur at some precise moment in an equally remote future, then was it not reasonable to suppose that human affairs were just as rigidly fixed and just as accurately calculable? And since the cosmic discipline implied that all these members of the Universe that moved in so perfect a unison were ‘in sympathy'—en rapport—with each other, was it unreasonable to assume that the newly revealed pattern of the movements of the stars was a key to the riddle of human fortunes, so that the observer who held this astronomical clue in his hands would be able to forecast his neighbour's destinies if once he knew the date and moment of his birth? Reasonable or not, these assumptions were eagerly made; and thus a sensational scientific discovery gave birth to a fallacious philosophy of Determinism which has captivated the intellect of one civilization after another and is not quite discredited yet after a run of nearly 2,700 years.

The seductiveness of Astrology lies in its pretension to combine a theory which explains the whole machina mundi with a practice that will enable Tom, Dick, and Harry to spot the Derby Winner here and now. Thanks to this twofold attraction the Babylonic philosophy was able to survive the extinction of the Babylonic Civilization in the last century B.C. ;2 and the Chaldean mathematictus who imposed upon a prostrate Hellenic Society3 was represented until yesterday by the Court Astrologer at Peking and the Munejjim Bāshy at Istanbol.

We have dwelt on this Babylonic philosophy of Determinism because it has a greater affinity than any of the Hellenic philosophies

1 For the belief in a rule of Fate, which is one of the intellectual expressions of a sense of drift that is itself one of the symptoms of a schism in the Soul, see V, C (i) (d) 4, pp. 412—31, below.
2 For the incorporation of Astrology into Mithraism see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), p. 540, below.
3 See Wendland, P.: Die Hellenistisch~Römische Kultur, 2nd and 3rd editions (Tübingen 1912, Mohr), pp. 132-3, and Tarn, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press), pp. 59—60. In taking over Astrology from its Babylonic fathers in and after the 2nd century B.C. the Hellenes put their own imprint upon it, as is witnessed by the fact that, in India at the present day, some of the current technical terms of the practitioners of this pseudo-science are etymologically of Greek origin.

{p.58} have with the still perhaps rather callow philosophical speculations of our own Western World in its present Cartesian Age. On the other hand there are counterparts of almost all the Hellenic schools of thought in the philosophies of the Indie and the Sinic World. The dominant minority of a disintegrating Indie Civilization brought forth the Jainism of Mahavira, the Primitive Buddhism of Siddhartha Gautama,1 the transfigured Buddhism of the Mahayana2 (which differs from its acknowledged original at least as profoundly as Neoplatonism differs from the philosophy of Socrates), and the diverse Buddhistic philosophies that are part of the mental apparatus of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism. The dominant minority of a disintegrating Sinic Civilization brought forth the moralized ritualism and ritualized morality of Confucius and the paradoxical wisdom of the Tao which is ascribed to the legendary genius of Lao-tse.3

1 See I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 87, above, and V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 131—35, below.
2 See I. B (iii), vol. i, p. 35; II. D (vi), Annex, vol. ii, p. 405, footnote 1; IV. C (ii)(b) 1, vol. iv, p. 65, above; and V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 133-46, below.
3 See I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 89, and III. C (i) (c), vol. iii, pp. 187-9, above, and V. C (i) (c) at, in the present volume, pp. 146—7, below.






(2) Internal Proletariats



The Russian and the Arabic Internal Proletariat

{V.C.I.(c) 2, p.103} In the disintegration of the Orthodox Christian Society in Russia we can watch the recruitment of an internal proletariat from three different sources. One contingent was furnished by the children of the household in the persons of those Russian religious sectaries and political recalcitrants who were expelled or deported to the fringes of an expanding Russian Orthodox Christendom.7 A second constituent element was provided by the children of alien civilizations—Western Christians in the Balticum

7 See II. D (vi), vol. ii, p. 222, above.

{p.104} and Lithuania and Poland and Finland; Iranic Muslims in the Caucasus and Transoxania—who were incorporated by conquest. If our analogy is to hold, the third ingredient in the Russian internal proletariat should consist of broken-in barbarians; and this ingredient was in fact supplied by the primitive peoples of the Arctic zone Samoyeds and Lapps and Uralian Finns; 'Fungus and Yakuts and Palaearctics—and by the corralled Nomads of the Great Eurasian Steppe.1 Thus the three elements with which we have become familiar in the Hellenic case all duly contributed to the formation of the Russian internal proletariat; and we can watch this proletariat making its first essays in the two alternative reactions to oppression. The violent way is exemplified in the peasant revolts under the Cossack leadership of Stenka Razin (A.D. 1667-71) and Pugachev (A.D. 1773-4); the gentle way in an accentuation, among certain Russian sects, of the vein of quietism that runs through Orthodox Christianity. That, however, is as far as we can follow the spontaneous development of an internal proletariat in the disintegration of the Russian Orthodox Christendom; for at that point in her history Russia sought and obtained admission to membership in the Western Society, and the remaining acts of the Russian tragedy have been played out, to order, on a wider stage, as incidents in a Western drama.

This same process of Westernization has overtaken the formation of an internal proletariat of the Arabic Society out of the primitive societies of Tropical Africa—and this at a still earlier stage. We catch a glimpse of Moroccan matchlock men anticipating in the last decade of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era the nineteenth-century French and English conquest of the Sudan.2 And we catch another glimpse of ‛Umanīand Zanzibarese Arabs emulating in East Africa in the nineteenth century the atrocities which were practised in West Africa during the three preceding centuries by European slave-traders. But these Arabic exploits were a mere prelude to the great African tragedy which is being played in our day; and although, as we watch the present first act of this tremendous drama, we cannot yet guess how the fifth act will turn out, we do already know who are the principal dramatis personae, and we can certify that the Arabic stage-villain of the curtain-raiser is now no longer on the boards. The African play, like the Russian play, has been worked into our Western plot; and it is as a member of our all-embracing Western internal proletariat

1 For this Russian feat of corralling the Eurasian Nomads see Part III, A, vol. iii, pp. 18-19, above, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 313-15, below.
2 Using the term 'Sudan’ in its proper comprehensive sense to include the whole borderland between Tropical Africa and the Afrasian Steppe in all its breadth, from the western escarpment of the Abyssinian Plateau to the debouchure of the Senegal River into the Atlantic.

{p.105} that the African Negro will have to say his lines and to do his business in his native continent as well as in North America.1

1 For the religious response of the African Negro to the challenge of being conscripted into the internal proletariat of the Western Civilization through being enslaved and transported to the American side of the Atlantic see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 218-30, above.


The Symptoms in the Western World

{V.C.I.(c)(2), p. 154} There is another contingent of conscripted aliens in our Western internal proletariat who have been uprooted and disoriented spiritually without having been physically evicted from their ancestral homes. In any community that is attempting to solve the problem of adapting its life to the rhythm of an exotic civilization to which it has been either forcibly annexed or freely converted, there is need of a special social class to serve as a human counterpart of the 'transformer' which changes an electric current from one voltage to another; and the class which is called into existence—often quite abruptly and artificially—in response to this demand has come to be known generically, from the special Russian name for it, as the intelligentsia (a word whose meaning is expressed in its very formation, in which a Latin root and a Western idea are acclimatized in Russian by being given a Slavonic termination). The intelligentsia is a class of liaison-officers who have learnt the tricks of an intrusive civilization's trade so far as may be necessary to enable their own community, through their agency, just to hold its own in a social environment in which life is ceasing to be lived in accordance with the local tradition and is coming more and more to be lived in the style that is imposed by the intrusive civilization upon the aliens who fall under its dominion.

The first recruits to this intelligentsia are military and naval officers who learn as much of the domineering society's art of war as may be necessary in order to save the Russia of Peter the Great from being conquered by a Western Sweden, or the Turkey and Japan of a later age from being conquered by a Russia who by this time has herself become sufficiently Westernized in the sphere of military technique to be able to launch out upon a career of aggression on her own account against her still un-Westernized neighbours. Then comes the diplomatist who learns how to conduct with Western governments the negotiations that are forced upon his community by its failure to hold its own in battle against Western armies and navies. We have seen the "Osmanlis enlisting their ra‛īyeh for this diplomatic work—and grudgingly allowing them the licence and influence and affluence which are the necessary reward of their services—until a further turn of the Western screw compels the 'Osmanlis at last to master for themselves this despised and distasteful trade.2 Next come the merchants—the

1 For the transplantation of Chinese coolies see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 217-18, and II. D (vii), vol. ii, p. 315; for the transplantation of Negro slaves see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 218—20, above.
2 See II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 224-8, and Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 47-50.


{p.155} Hong Merchants at Canton ;1 the compradores of a later generation at Shanghai; the Levantine,2 Sephardi,3 Greek,4 and Armenian5 subjects of the Ottoman Pādishāh in the Échelies du Levant—who manage to hold the long spoons with which any self-respecting non-Western society prefers at first to sup when it is shamefacedly doing commercial business with the Western devils. And finally, as the leaven—or virus—of Western Civilization works deeper into the social life of the society which is in process of being penetrated and assimilated, the intelligentsia develops its most characteristic types: the schoolmaster who has learnt the trick of teaching Western subjects; the civil servant who has picked up the practice of conducting the public administration according to Western forms; the lawyer who has acquired the knack of applying a version of the Code-Napoleon in accordance with ,a nineteenth-century French judicial procedure.

This spectacle of the creation of an intelligentsia will occupy our attention again at a later stage when we are studying,6 for its own sake, the phenomenon of the contacts between civilizations. In this place we merely have to observe that, wherever we find an intelligentsia in existence, we may infer, not only that two civilizations have been in contact, but that one of the two is now in process of being absorbed into the other's internal proletariat. We can also observe another fact in the life of an intelligentsia which is written large upon its countenance for all to read: an intelligentsia is born to be unhappy.

This liaison-class suffers from the congenital unhappiness of the bastard and the hybrid, who is an outcast from both the families—or a sport in both the races—that have guiltily combined to beget him. An intelligentsia is hated and despised by its own people because its very existence is. a reproach to them. Through its awkward presence in their midst it is a living reminder of the hateful but inescapable alien civilization which cannot be kept at bay and which therefore has to be humoured. The Pharisee is reminded of this each time when he meets the Publican, and the Zealot when he meets the Herodian. The intelligentsia's unpardonable offence in the eyes of its own kith and kin is the very indispensability of the social services which the intelligentsia performs—a hard fact which the Pharisees never overtly acknowledge yet perpetually recognize and resent in their hearts. And, while the intelligentsia thus has no love lost upon it at home, it also has no honour

1 See II. D. (vi), vol. ii, p. 232, above.
2 See II. D. (vi), vol. ii, pp. 230-2, above.
3 See II. D. (vi), vol. ii, pp. 243-7, above.
4 See II. D. (vi), vol. ii, pp. 223-4, above.
5 See II. D. (vi), vol. ii, p. 236, above.
6 In Part IX, below.

{p.156} paid to it in the country whose manners and customs and tricks and turns it has so laboriously and ingeniously mastered. In the earlier days of the historic association between India and England a Hindu intelligentsia which the British Rāj had fostered for its own administrative convenience was sometimes ridiculed by English philistines who dishonoured their own nation in insulting their Indian fellow subjects.. The more facile ‘the babu’s’command of English, the more sardonically 'the sahib’ would laugh at the subtle incongruity of those minute errors that still inevitably crept in.1 The philistine perhaps seldom paused to reflect that his own knowledge of Hindustani was far too imperfect to expose him to the same kind of ridicule vice versa, and he did not ask himself whether his depreciation might not be a left-handed kind of praise and his scorn a mask for an unconfessed envy of a virtuosity which the dominant alien was perhaps affecting to despise because he himself lacked either the skill or the application to attain to it. The philistine simply gave rein to his feelings; and, however captious his criticism might be, the shaft of malice would only too often strike home.

The intelligentsia is at the philistine's mercy because the essence of the intelligentsia's profession is, after all, mimesis; its art consists in a tour de force; and in other contexts we have already probed the weak points of mimesis and assessed the penalty that has to be paid for making the audacious attempt to add a cubit to one's stature. The insipid mechanicalness of mimesis,2 and the pathological distortion and abandoned vulgarity that are apt to result from the division of labour and the practice of mimesis in a society in process of civilization,3 are vices which find a uniquely congenial soil to grow in on the border-line of contact and fusion between one disintegrating civilization and another; and this means that the intelligentsia is exposed to the danger of being infected with these moral maladies ex officio. In these circumstances the taunts with which the intelligentsia is assailed by its critics are likely to hit the mark—even though the missile may recoil, like a boomerang, upon the heads of the critics themselves when they do not hesitate to make use, for their own profit, of those valuable social services through the faithful performance of which the intelligentsia acquires its characteristic faults.

It will be seen that the intelligentsia complies in double measure

1 The present writer can enter personally into the feelings of the Anglophone Hindu through having been brought up to express his own feelings in Greek elegiac verse. He can imagine what game would be made of the verses printed at the beginning of volume i of this Study if an Antipater of Sidon or a Meleager of Gadara were to cast his eye over them in a malicious mood.
2 See IV. C (iii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 119-33, above.
3 See IV. C (iii) (b) 14 and 15, vol. iv, pp. 232-45, above.


{p.157} with our fundamental definition of a proletariat1 by being ‘in' but not ‘of ‘ societies and not merely one;2 and while it may console itself in the first chapter of its history with the ironical reflection that it is an indispensable organ of both these bodies social, and that this very indispensability is the head and front of its offending, it is robbed of even this consolation as time goes on. For the adjustment of supply to demand is almost beyond the wit of Man when 'man-power' itself is the commodity; and, just because an intelligentsia is an emergency-product which has to be called into existence rather suddenly and artificially ex nihilo in the first instance, the measures taken to stimulate production are apt to lead to over-production in the end.

A Peter the Great wants so many Russian chinovniks or an East India Company so many Bengali clerks or a Mehmed ‛Alī so many Egyptian mill-hands and shipwrights: incontinently they set to work to perform their conjuring-trick of creating something out of nothing with all the vigour and resourcefulness of the consummate man of action which the successful Westernizer has to be; and then, in the next chapter of the story, they find themselves in the quandary of the hero in the fairy-tale who has learnt the magic formula for making the mill grind salt but has forgotten to acquaint himself with the complementary formula for stopping the machinery when the mill has ground out all the salt that the magician; requires. The process of manufacturing an intelligentsia is still more difficult to stop than it is to start; for the contempt in which the liaison-class is apt to be held by those who profit by its services is more than offset by its prestige in the eyes of those who are eligible for enrolment in it; and the competition becomes so keen that the number of the candidates rapidly increases out of all proportion to the number of opportunities for employing them. When this stage is reached, the original nucleus of an intelligentsia which is consoled by being employed becomes swamped by the adventitious mass of an 'intellectual proletariat’ which is idle and destitute as well as outcast. The handful of chinovniks is reinforced by a legion of 'Nihilists', the handful of babus who thankfully drive their quills, or resignedly tap their typewriters, by a legion of 'failed B.A.s'. And the bitterness of the intelligentsia is incomparably greater in this latter state than it is in the former.
1 In I. B (iv), vol. i, p. 41, footnote 3, above.
2 This painful insulation is particularly in evidence in the history of the Russian intelligentsia during the century ending in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917: 'From the first, the revolution, whether theoretical or political, had no base of support among tne masses. . . . The revolutionary circle had a world of its own, and formed a state within the state.'—Masaryk, T. G.: The Spirit of Russia (English translation: London 1919, Allen & Unwin, 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 106. The whole chapter (pp. 105-14) from which this quotation is taken is illuminating.


{p.158} Indeed, we might almost formulate a social 'law' to the effect that an intelligentsia's congenital unhappiness regularly increases in acuteness in geometrical ratio with the arithmetical progress of time. The Russian intelligentsia, which dates from the close of the seventeenth century, has already discharged its accumulated spite in the shattering Bolshevik Revolution of A.D. 1917. The Bengali intelligentsia, which dates from the latter part of the eighteenth century, is displaying to-day a vein of revolutionary violence which is not yet to be seen in other parts of British India,1 where the local intelligentsia did not come into existence till fifty or a hundred years later. In Egypt and Java and China and Japan, where the intelligentsia is of about the same age as it is in Gujerat or in the Panjab, it is also in about the same mild state of exasperation to-day; but in Java and Japan, at any rate, the latest symptoms seem to portend the approach of paroxysms of a Russian or Bengali fury.2

Nor is the rank growth of this social weed confined to the soil in which it is a native plant. While, in our latter-day Westernized World, the intelligentsia has made its first appearance on non-

1 For this contrast see the present chapter, p. 106, above.
2 The symptoms of unrest in the 'intellectual proletariat' of Japan thrust themselves upon the attention of the writer of this Study during a visit to the Far East in the autumn of 1929. The Japanese Government's extreme nervousness about 'dangerous thought’ was exhibited to the traveller when, upon landing in Japan, he was required, as part of the regular passport and customs procedure, to make a complete return of any books and pamphlets that might be included in his luggage. Evidently the Japanese authorities believed that some important element in the population was particularly prone to catch the mental infection of foreign subversive ideas; and, equally evidently, they were terrified about the possible consequences of the disease if once it did gain a hold upon, the Japanese body social. Some of the grounds for this anxiety on the Japanese dominant minority's part were soon revealed to the writer when, in the university town of Kyoto, he was informed that, out of the last graduation-class of students, only 20 per cent, of the young men and women had succeeded in finding employment. Since a majority of the students were the children of poor parents—mostly workers on the land—and had been given their university education (which incidentally unfitted them for pursuing their ancestral calling) at the cost of heavy sacrifices and privations on their family's part, the failure of their education to bring in any economic return was nothing less than a social disaster. The unemployed ex-student -was thrown back, without prospects, to live upon his family in an over-populated and insolvent country-side, and he was embittered by a humiliating sense of failure and frustration, while his relatives were equally embittered by a feeling that all their sacrifices had been in vain. Here indeed was food for 'dangerous thought’ to feed on! Finally, on his way home to Europe from the Far East via Siberia, the writer was taught to admire the enterprise and courage of this Japanese 'intellectual proletariat’, in its desperate straits, by hearing the personal story of a Japanese girl who was travelling in the same train. Having studied and qualified for being a school-mistress, and having then realized how poor her prospects were in a profession that was already so terribly overcrowded, she was pending her small savings on the venture of taking a year's course in dressmaking at Paris, on the calculation that within the next few years there would be a demand in Japan for modistes à l'occidentale owing to the growing tendency for Japanese women to follow the men's example in adopting Western dress. It seemed only too likely that if this admirable Japanese initiative and fortitude in the face of adversity were cheated, by circumstances beyond its control, of its morally due reward, it would find vent sooner or later in a violent explosion. These trivial experiences of the writer in the autumn of 1929 cast a flood of light, for him, upon the Japanese outbreak which duly occurred, two years later, in the autumn of 1931. In the militant policy which the Japanese Empire has been pursuing since then, the driving force has been the revolutionary passion of the young naval and military officers and the rejected cadets; and these are typical members of the Japanese intelligentsia.

{p.159} Western ground that has been in process of being annexed to the domain of an expanding Western Civilization, it has latterly begun to spread to the homelands of the aggressive society. A lower middle class which has received a secondary and even a university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities is the backbone of the post-war Fascist Party in Italy and National-Socialist Party in Germany; and the demoniac 'driving-force' which has carried a Mussolini and a Hitler to the pinnacle of power has been generated out of this 'intellectual proletariat's’ exasperation at finding that its painful efforts at self-improvement are not sufficient in themselves to save it from being crushed between the upper millstone of a politically organized Capital and the lower millstone of a politically organized Labour. In Fascist Italy and National-Socialist Germany we can thus identify some of the symptoms that have notoriously accompanied the production of an 'intellectual proletariat' in a half-Westernized Japan or Java or Bengal or Russia. But Italy and Germany are no alien appendages to the Western body social; they are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; and it follows that the social revolution which has taken place yesterday in Italy and Germany under our eyes may overtake us in France or England or the Netherlands or Scandinavia to-morrow.

As a matter of fact, we do not have to await our present Post-War Age in order to see a Western internal proletariat being recruited from the native tissues of the Western body social; for in the Western, as in the Hellenic, World it is not only the subjugated primitive and alien populations that have been torn up by the roots. In Western Christendom, as in Hellas, the original nucleus of an ever growing internal proletariat has been formed out of déracinés who were born and bred in the bosom of the disintegrating society before they were disinherited and driven into exile by the winnowing fan of civil strife which so perversely scatters the grain and leaves the chaff lying on the threshing-floor.1 As early as the second chapter of our Western history—in the so-called 'Medieval’ Age which runs from the last quarter of the eleventh to the last quarter of the fifteenth century of our era—we can see this scourge afflicting the Italian cosmos of city-states; and the figure of Dante stands at the head of the long line of Western exiles, as Thucydides heads the parallel line

1 For the inverse social selection which is one of the penalties of stasis see Seeck, O.: Die Ausrottung der Besten’, in his Geschichte des Unterganges der Antiken Welt, 4th edition (Stuttgart 1921, Metzler, 6 vols., with supplements), vol. i, part (2), chap. 2,. (This chapter of Seecks’ work has been cited already in IV. C (ii) (b) i, vol. iv, p. 63, footnote 1, above.)

{p.160} in the history of the decline and fall of Hellas.1 In our Western history, however, this social malady of exile, as the penalty for being left upon the losing side in civil dissensions, did not become rife throughout the Western World until after the Italianization of the Transalpine and Transmarine countries of Western Christendom at the opening of the 'Modern' Age;2 and in the West in this age a personal and political hatred of the kind that animated the Florentine and Roman and Athenian faction-feuds has been envenomed with an odium theologicum.

The sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Wars of Religion3 brought in their train the penalization or eviction of the discomfited Catholic faction in every country where the sovereign power fell into Protestant hands, and of the discomfited Protestant faction in every country where a Catholic Government succeeded in maintaining itself; and the odious rule 'Cuius Regio eius Religio’4 which was accepted by Catholics and Protestants alike in their common idolization of the fetish of absolute sovereignty in a parochial state, has left its mark down to this day—on a world which has long since forgotten the Catholic-Protestant quarrel—in the dispersion of the descendants of French Protestant exiles who are scattered over the face, of the Earth from Prussia to South Africa and the descendants of Irish Catholic exiles who are scattered, even more widely, from Chile to Austria and from the United States to Australia. Nor has the plague been stayed by the peace of lassitude and cynicism in which our Western Wars of Religion tardily came to their close.5 For the fanaticism which seemed to have burnt itself out before the opening of the eighteenth century had lighted up again, before that century came to an end, in a new and larger and still more inflammable pile of fuel. In another context we have observed how the Wars of Religion have been followed, after the briefest respite, by the Wars of Nationality;6 and in our modern Western World the spirit of religious fanaticism and the spirit of national fanaticism are manifestly one and the same evil passion masquerading under a superficial diversity of interest and objective.

Our modern Western nationalism has an ecclesiastical tinge; for, while in one aspect it is a reversion to the idolatrous self-

1 For the effect of exile upon the careers of Thucydides and Dante see III, C (ii)(b), vol. iii, pp. 291-2 and 331-2, above.
2 For this process of Italianization see III. C (ii) (b), vol. iii, pp. 299-306 and 357-63, above.
3 For the part played by the Wars of religion in Western history see further V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 668-72, and V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, pp. 315-19, below.
4 See IV. C (iii) (b) 11, vol. iv, pp. 221-2, above.
5 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 668-72, below.
6 See IV. C (iii) (b) 3 and 4, vol. iv, pp. 150-67, above, and also V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, pp. 319-20, below.

{p.161} worship of the tribe 1 which was the only religion known to Man before the first of the ‘higher religions' was discovered by an oppressed internal proletariat,2 this Western neo-tribalism is a tribalism with a difference. The primitive religion has been deformed into an enormity through being power-driven with a misapplied Christian driving-force. The Golden Calf—or Lion or Bear or Eagle, or whatever the tribal totem may happen to be—is being worshipped in our world to-day with an intensity of feeling and a singleness of mind-which ought not to be directed by human souls towards any god but God Himself.3 And it is not surprising to find that we have been propitiating these blasphemously idolized tribal deities with the human sacrifices which they relish and exact. How should we do otherwise when our Protestant and Catholic forefathers have set us the example by making the same impious oblations to a God whose delight is in mercy and not in Man's cruelty to Man? Thus we see the eviction of the Protestants from France in A.D. 1685 and from Salzburg in A.D. 1731-2 being followed in A.D. 1755 by the eviction of the Acadians from Nova Scotia (a name which tells its own tale of national rivalry) and in A.D. 1783 by the eviction of 'the United Empire Loyalists' from the new-born United States;4 and these are the vanguard of a fresh host of exiles — the French aristocratic émigrés of 1789; the European liberal émigrés of 1848 ; the Russian 'White’ émigrés of 1917; the Italian and German democratic émigrés of 1922 and 1933; the Austrian Catholic and Jewish émigrés of 1938 — who have been uprooted in the effort to impose a spiritual uniformity by force: an ideal which loses none of its perversity — though assuredly most of its excuse — for being transferred to the national from the ecclesiastical arena.

To these victims of a politico-religious fanaticism we have to add the tale of exiles who have been carried into captivity from the centre to the fringes of an expanding Western World as a punishment for crimes (some serious, some trivial; some real, some imaginary), and, in particular, the convicts who have been transported from the British Isles to North America before, and to Australia since, the establishment of the independence of the United States. These British convict-exiles to the New World overseas are the counterparts of the criminals whom the Sinic Emperor Ts'in She Hwang-ti planted in the newly conquered barbarian territories of the south,5 and of the déracinés whom

1> See IV. C (iii) (c) 2(β), vol. iv, p. 351, above, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 230-1, below.
2 See the present chapter and volume, p. 79, with footnotes 2 and 3, above.
3 See Part I. A, vol. i, p. 9, footnote 3, and IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (β), vol. iv, pp. 581-2, above.
4 See IV. C (ii) (b) 4, vol. iv, p. 165, above.
5 See the present chapter, p. 141, above.

{p.162} the Achaemenidae marooned on the islands of the Red Sea.1 There are also counterparts, in our modern Western internal proletariat, of that floating urban population—irretrievably divorced from the country-side yet never properly acclimatized to the life of the city—which we see silting up in Rome and in the smaller towns of Sicily and Italy in the last two centuries B.C. Indeed, in our own world this element in the proletariat has come to occupy so prominent a place, and to weigh so heavily upon the consciences of statesmen as well as philanthropists, that when we pronounce the word 'proletariat' it is this element, to the exclusion of all the rest, that is apt to present itself to our minds.

We have seen how in Sicily and Italy, during the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles', the free population was uprooted from the country-side and driven into the towns by an economic revolution in the conduct of the rural industries of agriculture and stock-breeding. The new rural economy was the offspring of War, which presented the entrepreneurwith the tabula rasa of a devastated area and with the edged tool of the cheap labour-force which the enslavement of the prisoners-of-war had thrown upon the market. By placing these two instruments simultaneously in the entrepreneur's hands, War taught him the secret of drawing an unprecedented and almost fabulous profit from the land by a new-fangled process of mass-production for export.2 The up-rooting and eviction of the free peasant proprietor who had formerly supported himself by subsistence farming on the site of the new plantations and ranches was an incidental consequence of the rural economic revolution which War and the entrepreneur had brought about between them. And, when the disinherited peasant was first reduced to the status of a seasonal wage-labourer on the land and was eventually shouldered off the land altogether and penned up in a slum inside the walls of the city, nobody imagined or pretended that there was anything but unmitigated evil in this degradation of a self-supporting peasant into an unemployed town-dweller whose life was just kept in his body by the grudging distribution of a public dole. The capitalist who was making his fortune out of a slave-tilled country-side displayed as ugly a countenance as his patron-god Mars himself; and, for any disinterested spectator of the joint work of this grim pair of partners, it was not surprising to find wickedness producing results which were morally repugnant and socially disastrous.

1 See the present chapter, p. 124, footnote as, above.
2 For this rural economic revolution in the western parts of the Hellenic World in and after the fifth century B.C. see III. C (i) (b), vol. iii, pp. 168-71, and IV, C (ii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 48-9, above.

{p.163} In our modern Western history we have seen an almost exact repetition of this Hellenic social disaster in the rural economic revolution which made it irresistibly profitable to substitute cotton plantations worked with Negro slaves for the mixed farming of White freemen in ‘the Cotton Belt' of the Southern States of the American Union in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century.1 The 'White trash' which was thus degraded to the ranks of the Proletariat in this Transatlantic annex of the modern Western World was of the same quality as the dispossessed and pauperized 'free trash’ of Roman Italy who were c called the lords of the World' without having 'a single clod of earth to call their own ;’2 and this rural economic revolution in North America which produced these two cancerous social growths of White pauperdom and Black slave-labour was only a logically ruthless application, in an overseas environment, of a similar rural economic revolution in England which had been taking place more gradually in the course of the preceding three centuries. The English entrepreneurs of the early Modern Age had not followed the bad example of the Portuguese in introducing African slave-labour into a European country-side, but they had imitated the Roman and anticipated the American planters and stockbreeders in uprooting a free peasantry for the sake of economic profit, by turning ploughland into pasture and common-land into enclosures. This modern Western rural economic revolution has not, however, either in Europe or overseas, been the principal cause of the flow of population from the country-side into the towns in the Modern Age of our Western history. The motive-force that has been mainly operative in bringing about this movement on a material scale which dwarfs the Hellenic counterpart of it has been not a push but a pull. While the ci-devant self-supporting rural population of the Western World has partly been driven into the towns by a rural agricultural revolution which has deprived it of its former livelihood on the land, it has mostly been drawn into the towns by an urban industrial revolution which has inveigled it into tearing up its own roots by dangling before its dazzled eyes the lure of abundant urban employment at lucrative wages.

1 See III. C (iii) (b), vol. iii, pp. 171-2, and IV. C (iii) (b) 2, vol.i v, pp, 139—40, above.
2 Tiberius Gracchus, quoted in the present chapter on p. 70, above (see also IV. C(iii) (c) 3 (β), vol. iv, p. 508, above, and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, p. 381, with Table VIII, logion (α), p. 414, below).

{p. 177} If Karl Marx had been challenged by some Victorian censor morum to give his spiritual name and address, no doubt he would have described himself, in all good faith, as a disciple of the great modern Western philosopher Hegel, and would have added that he had made it his own personal philosophic task to apply the Hegelian dialectic to the economic and political phenomena of modern Western social life. In the same Hegelian tradition Lenin, the Russian disciple of Marx, and perhaps—who knows?—even Stalin, the Caucasian disciple of Lenin, would have thought and spoken of himself as a philosopher first and foremost,2 and would

2 ‘Whereas in France, England, Germany, and everywhere throughout the West, Socialism first manifested itself as Christian or religious socialism, Russian socialism was from the outset a philosophic movement, influenced by Western philosophic doctrines’—Masajryk, T, G.: The Spirit of Russia (English translation: London 1919,Allen and Unwin, 2 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 356-7.

{p. 178} have taken an even greater pride in his mastery of the dialectic method than in his power of controlling economic forces and ruling the hearts of men. Yet all the time it is patent to the judicious observer that the picture which paints Communism as a kind of applied philosophy is ludicrously inadequate and misleading; for even in the original Marxian ideology, not to speak of its Leninian and Stalinian application to life, the Hegelian dialectic is only one of the ingredients—and not the dynamic one at that! The elements which have made Marx's version of Hegelianism an even more explosive mixture than Chang Ling's version of Taoism1 are not derived either from Hegel or from any other modern Western philosopher: they most of them bear on their face their certificate of origin from the ancestral religious faith of Western Christendom—a Christianity which in the nineteenth century, three hundred years after the delivery of the modern Western philosophic challenge by Descartes, was still being drunk in by every Western child with its mother's milk and inhaled by every Western man and woman with the air which the creature breathed. And such of the dynamic elements in Marxism as cannot be traced to Christianity can be traced to Judaism—the ‘fossilized’ parent of Christianity which had been preserved by a Jewish Diaspora in the Western World and had been volatilized through the opening of the Ghetto and the emancipation of the Western Jewry in the generation of Marx's grandparents.

The distinctively Jewish (or perhaps originally Zoroastrian) element in the traditional religious inspiration of Marxism is the apocalyptic vision of a violent revolution which is inevitable because it is the decree, and irresistible because it is the work, of God himself, and which is to invert the present roles of Proletariat and Dominant Minority in a tremendous peripeteia—reversal of roles which is to carry the Chosen People, at one bound, from the lowest to the highest place in the Kingdom of This World.2 Marx has taken the Goddess 'Historical Necessity' in place of Yahweh for his omnipotent deity,3 and the internal proletariat of the

1 For the (perhaps partly legendary) story of Chang; Ling, the Taoist philosopher-alchemist who received a. supernatural command from his (perhaps quite legendary) master, Lao-tse himself, to give happiness to Mankind, and who fulfilled this behest by founding, on the borders of the present Chinese provinces of Shensi and Szechwan, a model community which, in the reign of the founder's grandson, played it militant part in the proletarian insurrections against the expiring Han regime in the last quarter of the second century of the Christian Era, see Cordier, H.: Histoire Générale de la Chine (Paris 1920-1, Geuthner, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 189-90; Hackmann, H.: Chinesische Philosophie (Munich 1927, Reinhardt), p. 228; Franke, O.: Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches Vol. i (Berlin and Leipzig 1930, de Gruyter), pp. 419-21. This latter-day aberration of Taoism has been mentioned already in the present chapter, pp. 146-7, above.
2 For the originally mundane emplacement of the messianic Kingdom in the futuristic expectations of the Jews see V. C (i) (d) 9 (γ), vol. vi, pp. 120-3, below.
3 This Marxian Jewish Goddess 'Historical Necessity' has a sister in the Falasha Jewish Goddess Sanbat (see II. D (vi), Annex, in vol. ii, p 406, above) and in the Elaphatinian Jewish (or Judeao-Samaritan) Goddesses ‛Anath-Yahū and ‛Anath-Bethel (see V. C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. 46, footnote 1, below).




{p.179} modern Western World in place of Jewry;1 and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.2 But the salient features of the traditional Jewish apocalypse protrude through this threadbare disguise, and it is actually the pre-Rabbinical Maccabaean Judaism that our philosopher-impresario is presenting in modern Western costume; for it is of the essence of the Marxian apocalyptic doctrine that the Messianic Kingdom is not only to be a material kingdom in This World but is also to be won by a victorious stroke of violence. If this archaic Futurism is the distinctive Jewish element in the Marxian faith, the distinctively Christian element is an Oecumenicalism which is positively antipathetic, and not merely foreign, to the Jewish tradition. 'Go ye into all the World and preach the Gospel to every creture' 3 is an injunction which Marx feels to be laid upon himself, and which he lays in turn upon his followers, as imperiously as the duty of establishing the kingdom of righteousness by force. It is not merely a revolution but a world revolution that the good Marxian is in duty bound to strive for.4

It is a far cry from the Hegelian dialectic to the embattled church militant of a Soviet Union Communist Party5 which with one hand is defending and organizing, through the Government of the Soviet Union, the ground which the Marxian Faith has now already won by the sword, while with the other hand it is working for the completion of the World Revolution through the agency of the Third International. The Marx who has conjured this matter out of that spirit by blending Syriac religion with Western philosophy is a mighty magician. He has performed as extraordinary a feat of 'materialization' 6 as his Hellenic prototype Blossius of Cumae:7 the Stoic prophet of revolution8 who was not

1 Compare the substitution of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic World for Jewry by the Christian Church under the influence of the Apostle to the Gentiles.
2 In the Marxian eschatology the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is represented as a transient regime which is ddestined to give place to a stateless form of society as soon as Socialism has become ingrained into the fabric of human life sufficiently to work by itself without any further need of organized force back it. A similat transitoriness is, of course, one of the traditional features of the Jecish Messiah's millennial reign on Earth.
3 Mark xvi. 15
4 For the socialist element in Marxism and its relation to Christianity
see V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex II, below.
5 The Bolshevik or majoritarian wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Party renamed itself 'the Russian Communist Party' (in homage to the Paris Commune of 1871) in march 1918 and 'the Soviet Union Communist party' in May 1924 (in consonance with the by then accomplished fact of the reorganization of the former Russian Empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in which the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was only one (albeit the largest and strongest) of the half-dozen original states members of the Union).
6 Or of 'counter-etherialization' in the language of the terminology which we have coined in this Study (see V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, p. 249, below.
7See further V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, p. 249, below.
8 The question whether it was because of, or in spite of, his Stoicism that Blossius became a revolutionary and went into practical politics on the forlorn hope of attempting to translate his dream into reality is a matter of controversy among modern Western scholars. According to one view, ‘pour tirer les onprimés de leur inertie apathique, il fallut un grand élan de mysticisme dont les missionaires stolcïena se firent lea propagateurs’ (Bidez, J.: La Cité du Monde et la Cité du Soleil chez les Stoteïtm (Paris 1933, Belles Lettres), p. 50). According to another view, 'the slavery question shows that Aristonicus’s inspiration was not Stoicism, i.e. Blossius (as Bidez thinks)….What moved Blossius was doubtless sympathy with the under-dog and perhaps a family tradition of hostility to the Roman Optimates' (Tarn, W. W.: Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind (London 1933 Mitford), p. 34, footnote 54).

{p.180} only Zeno's disciple but was also the master of Tiberius Gracchus and Aristonicus. And, if it had pleased the Goddess fortune to crown Aristonicus's proletarian insurrection with success, then no doubt the names of the Italiot Greek prophet and his Pergamene khalifah would be resounding down to this day as loudly as the names of Marx and Lenin do ring in the ears of a generation which has witnessed the triumphant establishment, on Russian ground, of a Marxian counterpart of that Blossian 'City of the Sun' 2 which Aristonicus tried and failed to establish in Asia Minor in the second century B.C.

Fortune decided otherwise; and the god Helios, to whom Aristonicus's commonwealth was dedicated, no more availed to save his Asiatic Heliopolis than the goddess Atargatis availed to save the contemporary Sicilian freedmen's state that was placed under her auspices by the Syrian slave-prophet Eunus.3 These attempts in a disintegrating Hellenic World to convert a proletarian religion and a proletarianized philosophy into political coin by force of arms were both promptly crushed by Roman military intervention, and they simply served to prove in action a truth which was put into words more than a century later by another leader of the Hellenic internal proletariat when he refused, in the crisis of his earthly career, to follow in Eunus's and Aristonicus's footsteps: 'for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' 4 The historical verdict which was pronounced in the Roman military victory over Eunus and Aristonicus was not shaken by the desperate attempts to reverse it which were made in succession by the authors of the Second Sicilian Slave-Revolt and by Spartacus and by Catiline; and some time before the tormented Hellenic World obtained the respite of the Pax Augusta it had already become clear that its destiny, whatever it was to be, was at any rate not foreshadowed in the apocalyptic vision of an internal proletariat which had gone, in desperation, upon the war-path.

1 For Aristonicus see the present chapter, pp. 69-70, above, with the references there given.
2 For the worship of the Sun as the divinity who takes up the cause of the Internal Proletariat, see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, p. 692, footnote 2, below.
3 For Eunus see further V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, passim; for the First Sicilian Slave-Revolt, of which Eunus was the leader, see the present chapter, pp. 60-70, above.
4 Matt. xxvi, 52,

{p.181} In our Western World in our generation the Leninian attempt to fulfil the scripture of the Marxian apocalypse has been treated more kindly by Fortune, at least in the first chapter; for Lenin's proletarian commonwealth on Russian soil has successfully repulsed the first attempt of the Western dominant minority (or 'the Capitalist Society' as it is called in the monomaniacally economic language of the Marxian Sociology) to overthrow the new regime in its puny infancy. More fortunate than his counterparts in the second century B.C. who had to face a dominant minority whose forces were then united under the single command of the omnipotent and ubiquitous power of Rome, Lenin made his coup in a world in which the dominant minority was still profoundly divided against itself and was engaged at that very moment in an internecine world-war; and the contending 'Capitalist' states all played their unwilling part in working for the cause of their common arch-enemy. The German Reich gave Lenin his first opening by battering the Russian Tsardom to pieces; and the German authorities actually conveyed the formidable exile himself from Switzerland to Russia across German territory in order that he might complete—to their profit, as they fondly imagined—the task of destruction in which the donkey-work had already been done by German arms. Then, when Lenin succeeded in his enterprise too brilliantly for the Germans' liking, the victorious Allies unintentionally came to Lenin's rescue and saved his work in Russia from being hacked to pieces by the German sword when, for their own purposes, they compelled their defeated German adversaries to evacuate all the occupied Russian territories which Lenin, with his tongue in his cheek, had just ceded to the Central Powers in the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. And after that the nascent military strength of the rising Bolshevik state proved just sufficient for fending off the half-hearted attacks which the war-weary Allies proceeded to make upon the fringes of the Bolshevik domain in the futile hope of dispatching with their own blunted swords the monster whom they had not permitted their German opponents to slay.

In this world of mutually hostile 'Capitalist Powers' which were more concerned to thwart one another than to crush their common proletarian enemy, Lenin's infant Communist Commonwealth in Russia survived the ordeal to which Eunus's Sicilian freedmen's state and Aristonicus's Asiatic Heliopolis both alike succumbed. In the fourth year after Lenin's seizure of power at Petrograd in 1917 it was already clear that the Bolshevik regime was going to maintain itself in all but the outskirts of the derelict domain of the fallen Russian Empire; and eighteen years later
{p.182} again, in the year 1938, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was still 'a going concern', instead of having faded into the mere 'curiosity of history' which was all that was left, within a year or two of Aristonicus's coup, of the Blossian militant revolutionary's pathetic attempt to establish a Hellenic Utopia 'in real life'. This striking difference, up to date, between the respective fortunes of our modern Western Hegelian philosophy militant and of its Zenonian counterpart in Hellenic history raises a question in our case which hardly arose in the other. We are driven to ask ourselves whether it may perhaps be the destiny of our Western Society to be taken captive by this militant movement - as formidable as it is bizarre - which claims intellectual descent from a modern Western philosophy, has caught its spirit of violence from an archaic strain in Judaism, has commandeered an ample base of operations in the vast Russian province of a Westernized World, and has been inspired by an echo of the Christian tradition to attempt the conversion of the whole of Mankind.

Ever since Lenin's advent to power at Petrograd in A.D. 1917 this question has been exercising the minds of men and women all over the World and has been arousing their hopes or their fears in accordance with their diverse outlooks and situations. The established Communist masters of the Soviet Union have hoped that they will not taste of death till they have beheld the world-wide triumph of the Marxian creed and regime which their own hands have already carried to victory in Russia. The non-Russian Communist 'Diasporà' in partibus infidelium—or in Dār-al-Harb, to use the corresponding Islamic term which seems more appropriate to the militancy of the Marxian êthos—has hoped that it may live to see for itself the coming of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat which in Russia is already an accomplished fact; and this hope has perhaps been shared to some extent by some of the non-Communist elements in the Western internal proletariat—for instance, among the avowedly subject or nominally independent peoples of alien culture to whom the propaganda of the Third International has been assiduously addressed in the hope of persuading them to join in building up a common 'anti-Capitalist' and 'anti-Imperialist' front. On the other hand the Western dominant minority beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, which has been the principal target of the Third International's attack, has hoped to see the march of Communism towards the World Revolution arrested at least at the present frontiers of the U.S.S.R.; and the ci-devant dominant minority in Russia, in so far as it still survives either at liberty in exile or in its homeland under the Bolshevik yoke, has ventured to hope—unfeignedly or in
{p.183} secret, according to its place of domicile—that a successful repulse of the Communist offensive abroad may some day be followed up by a counter-attack upon the Communist stronghold in Russia, and that this may eventually result in the repatriation of the émigrés and the liberation of those who, under the Bolshevik regime to-day, are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Officially, the opponents of Communism have been expecting daily—every day since the 8th November, 1917—that the Bolshevik régime will collapse to-morrow, while the Latter-Day Saints of the Communist Church Militant have been awaiting, with the same official certitude, a denouement in the opposite sense on the lines laid down in the militant Jewish apocalyptic tradition. According to the orthodox Communist apocalypse, the heathen Capitalist Powers are sooner or later to join forces in a supreme effort to take the Soviet Socialist Jerusalem by storm and to overwhelm the Communist Chosen People; and on that day, when—on the plains of a Manchurian or Ukrainian Armageddon—the Communist Church Militant is standing at bay against a world of aggressors and is apparently facing hopeless odds, her patron goddess Historical Necessity will manifest her power by putting all the hosts of Midian out of action once for all at a single miraculous stroke. Such are the official expectations on either side; but they give little light to any one who is genuinely seeking to forecast the outcome of the conflict; for it has been evident for some time that both parties have ceased to believe in the respective apocalypses to which they are officially committed. For light we have to look, not to dogmas, but to acts; and, when we examine the recent internal political struggles and external political relations of the Soviet Union, we may feel inclined to predict that neither the Communist nor the anti-Communist apocalypse is likely to come true.

The domestic political life of the U.S.S.R. has been dominated since Lenin's death in 1924 by a schism1 in the ranks of his companions—not on any point of theoretical Marxian or Leninian doctrine or 'ideology', in which they all subscribe to an identical orthodoxy, but on the practical question of how these sacrosanct principles are to be translated into action here and now. One faction among the Union Communist Party leaders have taken the line that their immediate and paramount task is to bring about the world-wide triumph of the Communist Revolution, and that,

1 For this schism and its effects upon the domestic politics and foreign policy of the Soviet Union see Florinsky, M.: World Revolution and the U.S.S.R. (London 1933, Macmillan), pp. 125-68; Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1927 (London 1929, Milford), pp. 255—6; Survey, 1934 (London 1935, Milford), pp. 362-8.

{p.184} for this purpose, the economic and political and military resources of the U.S.S.R. must be placed unreservedly at the disposal of the Third International. But this Trotskian policy of 'continuous revolution' has been challenged by an opposing Stalinian policy of 'Socialism in a single country'—a policy which does not question the orthodox Communist doctrine that the Communist Revolution ultimately must be, and will be, world-wide, but does contest the Trotskian contention that the furtherance of the World Revolution ought to be a first charge upon the assets of the Soviet Union. The first thing to be done, in Stalin's view, is to make Socialism a going concern and a practical success in the one great country in which a Communist regime is already in power; and Stalin contends that this first objective can be attained within the frontiers of the U.S.S.R. independently of what may be happening—or not happening—at the moment in the rest of the World, while admitting that 'Socialism in one country’ is only a means to the end of ‘Socialism throughout the World', and that, until this consummation is reached, even the most brilliant and imposing achievements in a single country must still be regarded as provisional and precarious. In the year 1938, when the schism was fourteen years old, it was possible to pronounce with some assurance that the Stalinian policy had won. While Stalin was sitting in the Kremlin, Trotsky was vegetating in exile and Zinoviev was rotting in a grave to which he had been sent by the bullets of a firing-squad; and, while the socialization of the Soviet Union was by then an accomplished fact, the Communist World Revolution seemed to be farther off than it had ever been in a world in which Germany had turned National-Socialist. In fact, 'Socialism in a single country' had driven 'continuous revolution' off the field in the arena of Soviet Union domestic politics; and it was noteworthy that the definitive victory of Stalin over Trotsky in Moscow had been quickly followed by an almost sensational change in the relations between the Soviet Union and the states of 'the Capitalist World'.

Since Japan ran amok in the Far East in 1931, and Herr Hitler came into power in Germany in 1933, the Soviet Government has ceased in practice to act upon its official theory of knowing no distinctions between one Capitalist Power and another, and of expecting to see the world-wide triumph of Communism precipitated by a combined attack of all the Capitalist Powers upon the U.S.S.R. Instead, it has begun to show a lively fear lest a concerted attack upon the Soviet Union on the part of two aggressive Capitalist Powers alone may be sufficient to bring about, not the triumph of Communism throughout the World, but its overthrow in its present Russian citadel; and Soviet statesmanship has sought
{p.185} to parry this threat by making friends among the Mammon of Unrighteousness. As early as 1932 the Soviet Union entered into a political entente with France; in 1934 she became a member of the League of Nations; in 1935 she signed treaties of mutual assistance with both France and Czechoslovakia.

These positive acts are proof that Soviet statesmanship no longer expects to see the downfall of Capitalism abroad within any measurable time; for they imply a belief in the reality of the menace to the Soviet Union from the side of Germany and Japan, as well as a belief in the efficacy of an alliance with France and an adherence to the League as expedients for warding the danger off, whereas the peril and the safeguard alike would have to be dismissed in the same breath as sheer illusions by any one who was sincerely convinced that Germany and Japan and France and all the states members of the League were vessels of destruction ipso factobecause they were products and expressions of an officially doomed Capitalist order of society. Thus the Soviet Government's foreign policy since 1932 presupposes, on the Communist side, a renunciation of the hope of seeing the world-wide triumph of the Communist regime brought to pass within the lifetime of the present generation; and conversely we may infer, on the Capitalist side, a corresponding renunciation of the last lingering hope of living to see the collapse of the Communist regime within the borders of the Soviet Union; for French statesmanship was quite as active as Soviet statesmanship in negotiating the Franco-Soviet entente of 1932 and in 1934 most of the existing states members of the League were quite as eager to secure the Soviet Union's adherence as the Soviet Union was to win their consent to its admission; and this attitude implies a belief, in the minds of the statesmen of the Capitalist countries, that the Soviet Union is a valuable associate and not a ramshackle empire that is on the point of falling to pieces. On this showing, it might be said, in the year 1938 that the Soviet Union and a majority, at any rate, of its Capitalist neighbours1 had reciprocally and simultaneously come to the conclusion that the Communist and the Capitalist régimes were likely to go on existing side by side in the same world for as long a time to come as it was possible for statesmanship to take into account.

1 Germany, Japan, and Italy are perhaps to be excluded from the list in view of the conclusion of a German-Japanese ‘anti-Comintern Pact’ on the 25th November, 1936 (see Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs 1936 (London 1937, Milford), pp. 925—9), and the adhesion of Italy to this pact, with the status of an original party to it, on the 6th November, 1937 (Survey, 1937, vol. i, pp. 43—4). On the other hand, some belief in the stability of the Communist régime in the U.S.S.R.was presumably implied in the diplomatic recognition which was belatedly accorded to the Soviet Union by the Government of the United States in 1933.

{p. 186} We may remind ourselves of the similar conclusion which was arrived at—likewise reciprocally and simultaneously—by the Protestant and the Catholic commonwealths of Western Christendom in the last quarter of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era; and the parallel is illuminating. In that earlier case, as we can now see in the retrospect of the intervening two hundred and fifty years, the mutual decision to live and let live has been followed by a steady convergence, towards a single standard type, between two groups of states whose citizens had previously felt themselves to be divided by so great a gulf that, for the first hundred and fifty years after the outbreak of the Reformation, they had assumed with one accord that Christendom was too small to hold them both. Can we see any symptoms of an analogous approximation to-day between the Communism of the Soviet Union and the Capitalism of the rest of the World? We have only to put the question for it to answer itself decidedly in the affirmative.

We can already discern a pronounced tendency towards convergence in this case likewise, and we can observe that this converging movement is proceeding simultaneously from both sides. The 'Socialism in one country' which is the watchword of the Stalinian regime is manifestly generating a new Soviet Socialist nationalism which is finding its basis not in an old-fashioned uniformity of language but in a new-fangled uniformity of institutions which has its counterparts in the Fascist nationalism of post-war Italy and the National-Socialist nationalism of post-war Germany. Conversely, not only these two dictatorially governed communities but also all the other post-war Capitalist national states in their degree are becoming more and more socialist in their constitution as their nationalism becomes more intense. The convergence between the nationalistic socialism of the Soviet Union and the socialistic nationalism of her neighbours is unmistakable; and we can already make out the lineaments of the new common standard type of community towards which our post-war Capitalist and Communist states are thus all tending. The common goal towards which they are headed is a 'totalitarian' regime in a parochial socialist national state which commands the religious as well as the political allegiance of its subjects and imposes itself upon their souls as their supreme and indeed exclusive object of worship.1

If we are right in this forecast, it is the destiny of the would-be world-wide movement of Communism to be frustrated thrice over:

1 For the idolatrous self-worship of the primitive tribe see IV. C (iii) (c) a, (β), vol, iv, p. 351, above, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 230-1, below. For the relapse of societies in process of civilization into this primitive form of idolatry see the same section of Part IV, passim.

{p. 187} first by being imprisoned within the frontiers of a single parochial state; next by being degraded into a local variety of Nationalism after having started its career as a social panacea for all Mankind; and finally by seeing the particular state that has enslaved it gradually assimilate itself to the other sixty or seventy states of the contemporary world by approximating to a common standard type.

This is just the fate by which we should expect to see Communism overtaken on the analogy of the history of other religious or philosophico-religious movements that have similarly turned militant. For example, the militant anti-Hellenic Judaism and Zoroastrianism of the Syriac World in the post-Alexandrine age became imprisoned respectively in the Maccabaean Kingdom1 and in the Sasanian Empire;2 the militant Imāmī Shī‛ism of the Iranic World became imprisoned in the Safawī Empire;3 the militant Muslim-Hindu syncretistic religion of Sikhism became imprisoned in the principality of Ranjit Singh;4 and all the four imprisoning states showed the same tendency to approximate in type to their neighbours. The Sikh State became one of those ephemeral 'successor-states' of the Mughal Rāj in India—the Oudes and Rohilcunds—which made their appearance for a moment on the troubled surface of Indian political life before the broken Pax Mogulica was re-established as a Pax Britannica. The Maccabaean Kingdom played a corresponding role - until, under the Herodian usurpers, it became scarcely distinguishable in type from the Cappadocias and the Commagenes—as a 'successor-state' of the Seleucid Empire during the brief interval of anarchy which supervened before all these peritura regnawere expunged by the Pax Romana.5 The Sasanian Empire both influenced and was influenced by its sole neighbour and rival, the Roman Empire, during the four centuries of their existence in the same world side by side until, on the eve of the Primitive Arab Muslim assault upon them both, it might have needed a practised eye to distinguish the court of Chosroes from the court of Caesar. And South West Asian history repeated itself when a Safawī counterpart of Chosroes prostituted his hereditary head-

1 For this spiritual imprisonment of Judaism see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 657—9, below.
2 2 For this spiritual imprisonment of Zoroastrianism see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 659—61, below.
3 See I. C (i) (b), Annex I, vol. i, pp. 366-93, above, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 661—5, below. In this connexion we may recall the fact—already mentioned in the present chapter, p. 175, footnote 2, above—that the latter-day emanation from the Imāmī Shī‛ism which is known as Babism has been blighted on its native Persian ground as a penalty for its lapse unto militancy. It is not in Iran but in the Ottoman Empire and the Western World, and not in its primitive form but in the new guise of Bahaism, that the seed sown by the Bāb has eventually fallen into good ground and brought forth fruit.
4 See V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ ), Annex, pp. 665-8, below.
5 On this point see Tacitus: Histories, Book V, chap. 8.

{p.188} ship of a religious order to the mundane political ambition of becoming the Gegenkaiser to the Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rūm. The same historic penalty for the sin of militancy is apparently being exacted from Communism in our world to-day; and we can now almost foresee the time when Communism and Capitalism will be interchangeable names for a uniform idolatrous worship of the community in a standardized parochial 'totalitarian' state. On this showing, we shall be looking in vain if we look to Communism to provide the internal proletariat of a disintegrating Western Society with the makings of a universal church.

The upshot of our present inquiry seems to be that, while the evidence for the recruitment of an internal proletariat is at least as abundant in the recent history of our Western World as it is in the history of any other civilization, there is singularly little evidence in our Western history so far for the laying of any foundations of a proletarian universal church or even for the emergence of any strong-winged proletarian-born 'higher religions'. Communism seems not to 'fill the bill' any better than Anabaptism or Quakerism or Bahaism or Ahmadism; and these five movements, which make so oddly assorted a company, are a small catch to take in a net which we have thrown so wide.

How is this apparent spiritual barrenness of our Western internal proletariat to be interpreted?

On first thoughts we might perhaps be tempted to draw an encouraging conclusion. We might account for this dearth of creative achievement by the fact, which we have already observed,1 that some of the finest of the plants that have been uprooted in our Western garden have managed hitherto to strike root again on virgin soil. In other words, some of the most promising of the recruits to our Western internal proletariat have been prevented from making any appreciable contribution to a new proletarian culture by the fact that they have been successfully reabsorbed into an unruptured Western body social; and this is a fact on which we may surely congratulate ourselves; since it may be taken to mean that, in our Western Society, the schism between Proletariat and Dominant Minority has been partially repaired, and that the breakdown of our civilization (if it has broken down) has been to that extent retrieved. The talents of these rehabilitated proletarians may have been lost to the proletariat, but they have certainly not been lost to our society as a whole. So far from that, these déracinés descendants—Non-conformist English, French Protestant South Africans, United Empire Loyalist Canadians, and Irish and German Americans—

1 See the present chapter, pp. 168-73, above.

{p.189} are reckoned to-day among the most valuable members of the communities on to which they have been grafted or re-attached. On this line of reasoning the spiritual barrenness of the Western proletariat, so far from being a cause for shame or regret, is actually to be taken as presumptive evidence that the condition of our Western body social as a whole, though it may be serious, is not by any means beyond hope. And if, in our own day, our system shows signs of being able still to conquer and transmute so strong a virus as Communism, we may surely flatter ourselves that there is life and health in our Western Society yet.

These may be our first thoughts; but our optimism will be damped when we look narrowly at the price at which our boasted conquest of Communism is being purchased; for the all-absorbing Western institution to which the Marxian Church Militant shows signs of succumbing turns out, as we have seen, to be the pagan parochial 'totalitarian' state; and, if we remind ourselves of the fate of other civilizations that have come to be articulated into states of this kind, we shall find reason to fear that the future history of our own civilization may be 'nasty, brutish, and short'. 1 An unceasing round of internecine warfare of ever increasing intensity between deified parochial states has been the principal cause of the breakdown and disintegration of some, and perhaps most, of the civilizations that have already gone the way of all flesh. The bones of the Hellenic and Sinic societies—to pick out two conspicuous skeletons—lie whitening ominously on fratricidal battlefields. If our own Western Society in its turn is now assuming this fatal posture and falling into this deadly rhythm, then its prospects, so far from being encouraging, are about as bad as they can be;2 for the 'drive' of Democracy and Industrialism, which are the two master-forces in our Western World in this latest age, has already entered into both our parochialism and our warfare; and this terrific head of steam seems likely to carry us at an unprecedented speed to an unparalleled disaster.3 On these second thoughts we may be inclined to look for some alternative solution of our puzzle which will not involve the assumption that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, our Western Civilization is really still flourishing like a green bay tree.

1 Hobbes, T.: Leviathan, Part i, chap. 13.
2 See V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, pp. 313-31, below.
3 See IV. C (iii) (b 3 and 4, vol. iv, pp. 141-85, above.



3. External Proletariats

Vestiges and Rudiments in the Western World

The Bosniaks were a rear-guard of the Continental European barbarians who had previously had to endure the unusual—and usually painful—experience of being taken between the fires of two aggressive civilizations, those of Western and of Orthodox Christendom. The radiation of the Orthodox Christian Civilization, which had been the first to reach the Bosniaks, had been rejected by them in its Orthodox form, and had only been able to inundate itself in the schismatic guise of Bogomilism. This heresy had drawn upon them in the hostile attentions of both Christian civilizations, and in the circumstances they had welcomed the arrival of the Muslim ‛Osmanlis, abandoned their Bogomilism and 'turned Turk' so far as religion was concerned. Thereafter, under Ottoman protection, the Jugoslav converts to Islam took to playing, on the Ottoman side of the Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier, the same part as was played on the Hapsburg side by Jugoslav Christian refugees from the territories which had fallen under Ottoman rule. The two opposing sets of Jugoslavs found an ideological occupation in raiding, on the one side the Ottoman empire and on the other side the Hapsburg monarchy; and on the same fertile soil of the border warfare two independent schools of 'heroic' poetry, both using the Serbo-Croat language, grew up and flourished side by side, apparently without exercising and influence on one another.

In North-Eastern Iran it seems possible that the North-West Frontier problem of India may finally be solved, not by any drastic action against the untamed barbarians on the Indian side of the Indo-Afghan frontier, but rather by the voluntary Westernization of Afghanistan itself. For if this Afghan endeavour were to achieve success, one of its effects would be to place the war-bands on the Indian side between two fires and thereby make their position ultimately untenable. The Westernizing movement in Afghanistan was launched by King Amānallāh (A.D. 1919-29) with a radical excess of zeal which cost the royal revolutionary his throne; but Amānallāh's personal fiasco is less significant that the fact that this check has not proved fatal to the movement. By 1929 the process of Westernization had gone too fat for the people of Afghanistan to put up with unmitigated barbarian reaction of the brigand rebel Bacha-i-Sakkā; and under the régime of King Nādir and his successor the Westernizing process has been unobtrusively resumed.

But the outstanding Westernizer of a beleaguered barbarian fastness is ‛Abd-al-‛Aziz Āl Sa‛ūd, the King of the Najd and the Hijāz: a soldier and statesman who, since 1901, has raised himself out of the political exile into which he was born until he has made himself master of all Arabia west of the Rub’-al-Khāli and north of the Yamanī kingdom of San‛ā. As a barbarian war lord Ibn Saū‛d may be compared in point of enlightenment with the Visigoth Atawulf. He has apprehended the potency of modern western scientific technique and has shown a discerning eye for those applications of it—artesian wells and motor-cars and aeroplanes—that are particularly effective in the Central Arabian Steppe. But above all he has seen that the indispensable foundation for a Western way of life is law and order.

When the last obstinate enclave has been eliminated, in one way or another, from the cultural map of a Westernized world, shall we be able to congratulate ourselves on having seen the last of barbarism itself? A complete elimination of the barbarism of the external proletariat would warrant no more than a mild elation, since we have convinced ourselves (if there is any virtue in this Study) that the destruction which has overtaken a number of civilizations in the past has never been the work of any external agency, but has always been in the nature of an act of suicide.

4. Alien and Indigenous Inspirations

(d) Schism in the Soul

1. Alternative Ways of Behaviour, Feeling, and Life

2. ‘Abandon’ and Self-Control

3. Truancy and Martyrdom

4. The Sense of Drift

5. The Sense of Sin

{V.C. (i) (d) 5, p. 432} While the sense of drift is a passive feeling1—even when it finds expression in the seemingly dynamic activities of a militant pre-destinarianism2—it has an active counterpart and antithesis in the sense of sin which is an alternative reaction to an identical consciousness of moral defeat.

In essence and in spirit the sense of sin and the sense of drift present the sharpest contrast to one another; for, while the sense of drift has the effect of an opiate in instilling into the soul an insidious acquiescence in an evil that is assumed to reside in external circumstances beyond the victim's control, the sense of sin has the effect of a stimulus because it tells the sinner that the evil is not external after all, but is within him3 and is therefore subject to his will—if only he wills to carry out God's purpose and so to render himself accessible to God's grace. There is here the whole difference between the Slough of Despond and the Faith that moves mountains; yet at the same time we can see that there may be a margin of common ground between the mountains and the slough in practical life—an intermediate zone of feeling and conduct across which a soul in travail with the spiritual pangs of an age of social disintegration may make an arduous passage from the passive to the active mood.

The existence of this no-man's-land in which the two moods overlap is implicitly assumed in the Indic conception of Karma;4 for, although on the one hand Karma, like 'Original Sin', is conceived of as a spiritual heritage with which the Soul or the continuum of psychological states is saddled without the option of repudiating it, the accumulation of Karma, as it stands at a given moment, is also the net result of a number of acts which—good and evil acts alike—have all been deliberate acts of will; and at any moment it is possible, through other such acts of will, either to increase the weight of the inherited burden or to diminish it. Thus, while Karma can be regarded in one aspect as a burden forcibly imposed by the inexorable working of the law of causation, there is an alternative light in which it can be viewed as a burden that is deliberately increased or diminished, assumed or thrown off, by acts which are all within the scope of the agent's own volition.5

1 See V. C (i) (d) 1, p. 380, and V. C (i) (d) 4, pp. 412-31, above.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 4, Annex, pp. 615-18, below.
3 See IV. C (iii) (a), vol. iv, pp. 120—2, above.
4 See V. C (i) (d) 4, pp. 427—9, above.
5 These two at first sight irreconcilable aspects of Karma can perhaps be brought into harmony by the consideration that, while the chain of acts that generates Karma is a chain of cause and effect, the acts themselves are all of them deliberate acts of volition.

When viewed under this aspect, Karma presents itself as the work of the soul (or bundle of psychoses) that is its subject, and no longer as the work of a Destiny that is external to the subject and unamenable to his (or its) control; and under this aspect Karma resolves itself into Sin instead of Fate. It turns out, that is, to be an evil of which the subject is himself the author, but which, by the same token, he has the power to diminish and perhaps even in the end to extinguish.

The same passage to a conquerable Sin from an unconquerable Fate can be made along a Christian road; for the Christian soul is offered a possibility of purifying itself from the taint of 'Original Sin', which is its heritage from Adam, by seeking and finding God's grace; and this divine grace does not operate as a sheerly transcendent spiritual force that scours off from the Soul an impurity which is likewise external to it. Grace comes as a divine response to a human effort; and, in order to merit this aid, the effort has to be directed towards overcoming—not, of course, the infectious primal sin which was committed by Adam and which must therefore ex hypothesi be impervious to the human action of any human being except Adam himself—but the personal sin of the particular soul that is now striving to win release. This personal sin may be traceable, sub specie theologiae, to an innate predisposition towards concupiscence which is Adam's untoward legacy to every one of his descendants; but a predisposition is not tantamount to a predetermination nor a temptation to a fall. And a sinner cannot find excuse for his sin by pleading that, in committing it, he has been yielding to a congenital frailty. For Adam's offspring, as for their progenitor, the responsibility for the sinner's own personal sin rests on the sinner himself. But, on that hypothesis, this personal sin is an evil which the Soul is capable of resisting and overcoming with the help of God's grace.

An awakening to the sense of sin can be detected in the development of the Egyptiac conception of the Life after Death in the course of the Egyptiac 'Time of Troubles’;1 but the classical case is the spiritual experience of the Prophets of Israel and Judah in the Syriac 'Time of Troubles'. When these prophets were

1 In the time of 'the Old Kingdom’ the attainment of bliss in the After Life was held to depend upon the fulfilment, in This World, of ritual requirements involving a material outlay. By the time of the establishment of 'the Middle Empire’ the attainment of bliss in the After Life had come to be held to depend upon the living, in This World, of a righteous life. The aspirant to happiness after death no longer expected to be able to extort the prize from the Gods by the exercise of magic: he expected to stand a trial in which the Gods would be the judges, the Soul’s moral conduct on Earth would be the subject of the divine scrutiny, and the alternatives of happiness and torment would be respectively the reward and the punishment that awaited the Dead alternatively according to whether the verdict were favourable or adverse (see I. C (ii), vol. i, p. 143, above, and also Meyer, E,: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (2), third edition (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta), p. 242).

{p.434} discovering their truths and delivering their message, the society out of whose bosom they had arisen, and to whose members they were addressing themselves, was lying in helpless agony in the grip of the Assyrian tiger, with the monster's claw's lacerating the prostrate victim's flesh and its teeth splintering his bones like matchwood.1 For souls whose body social was in this fearful plight, it was a heroic spiritual feat to reject the obvious and specious explanation of their misery as the work of an irresistible external force of a material kind, and to divine that, in spite of all outward appearances, it was their own sin that was the true cause of their tribulations2 and that it therefore lay in their own hands to win their true release.

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

This native awakening to a sense of sin can be traced in the spiritual history of Hellenism many centuries before a Hellenic trickle mingled with a Syriac stream in the river of Christianity.3 If we have been right in our interpretation of the origin, nature, and intention of Orphism,4 there is evidence that, even before the Hellenic Civilization broke down, at least a few Hellenic souls had become so painfully conscious of a spiritual void in their native cultural heritage that they had resorted to the tour de force of artificially inventing the 'higher religion’ with which the apparented Minoan Civilization had failed to endow them. It is at any rate certain that, in the very first generation after the breakdown of 431 B.C., the apparatus of Orphism was being used—and abused—for the purpose of providing satisfaction for souls that were already convicted of sin and were groping, however blindly, for release from it. For this we have the testimony of a passage of Plato which might almost have flowed from the pen of Luther.

1 See V. C (i) (c) 2, pp. 117-19, above.
2 Reasons for pronouncing a verdict of suicide, and not one of murder, upon the death of the Syriac Society have been suggested in IV. C (ii) (b) 1, vol. iv, pp. 67-8, above.
3 See V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, p. 537, below.
4 See V. C (i) (c) 2, pp. 84-7, above.

{p.435} 'There are the quacks and diviners who peddle their wares to the rich and make them believe that these cheapjacks possess powers, procured from the Gods by sacrifices and incantations, for healing with diversions and festivities any sin that has been committed either by oneself or by one's forebears. Conversely—supposing that one wants to plague an enemy—they pretend to the command of corresponding powers for inflicting injury (upon the just and the unjust indifferently) by charms and spells at a modest price. This they claim to do by inducing the Gods to minister to their purposes; and as their authorities for all this rigmarole they cite the poets... and produce a host of books purporting to have been written by Musaeus and Orpheus, whom they palm off as the offspring of the Moon and the Muses. They follow these books in their hocus-pocus; and they persuade even Governments, as well as private people, that a release and purification from sin can be obtained by means of sacrifices and agreeable child's-play! They further maintain that these “rites” (as they call them in this connexion) are as efficacious for the dead as they are for the living. "Rites" liberate us from the torments of the world beyond the grave, while a dreadful fate awaits us if we neglect here and now to make sacrifices.'5

This first glimpse that is given to us of a native sense of sin in the souls of the Hellenic dominant minority in its Time of Troubles’ looks as unpromising as it is repulsive. Yet two and three and four centuries later, in the tender consciences of an Agis and a Cleomenes and a Tiberius and a Gaius Gracchus2 and in the tardy yet sincere repentance of Augustus,3 we see a native Hellenic sense of sin which has been purified, out of. all recognition, in the fires of suffering; and there is almost a Christian note in the voice of the Hellenic dominant minority in the Augustan Age as this makes itself heard in the poetry of Virgil:

Ergo inter sese paribus concurrere telis
Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi;
nee fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro
Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos. . . .
Di Patrii, Indigetes, et Romule Vestaque mater,
quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas,
hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo
ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro
Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae. . . .
quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas; tot bella per orbem;
tam multae scelerum facies; non ullus aratro
dignus honos: squalent abductis arva colonis
et curvae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem.

1 Plato: Respublica, 3643-365A
2 For these four archaistic-minded social reformers see the references in V. C (i) (d) 1, p. 388, footnote 1, above.
3 See V. C (i) (c) 2, p. 78, above, and V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, p. 648, and V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, p. 187, below.


{p.436}

hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum;
vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe;
ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
addunt in spatio, et frustra retinacula tendens
fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.1

This is a prayer for delivery from a torturing sense of drift which is conveyed in the last three lines by one of the most vivid strokes of Virgil's art. The prayer takes the form of a confession of sin; and, though the sin from which the poet implores Heaven for release is nominally an 'original sin' inherited from Laomedon—a minor character in the Greek Epic Cycle of Troy who by Virgil's time had come to be adopted as a legendary Trojan progenitor for an authentic Roman dominant minority—the tremendous ergo which is the first word of the first line and the key word of the whole passage tells the reader that the sin which the Romans were expiating in Virgil's day was really the sin which they themselves had been committing during the two-centuries-long rake's progress upon which they had entered when they plunged into the Hannibalic War2—a sin that, in its fearful climax, had driven the Sun himself to veil his countenance,

cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit,
impiaque aeternam timuerunt saecula noctem.3

Within a century of the year in which Virgil's poem was written, the spirit that breathes through these passages had become predominant in a stratum of the Hellenic Society which had hardly yet come within range of the radiation of Christianity.

'From whatever quarter, a new spiritual vision had opened, strange to the Ancient World. It is not merely that the conception of God has become more pure and lofty: the whole attitude of the higher minds to the eternal had altered. A great spiritual revolution had concurred with a great political revolution. The vision of the Divine World which satisfied men in the Age of Pericles or in the Punic Wars, when Religion, Politics, and Morality were linked in unbroken harmony4—when, if spiritual vision was bounded, spiritual needs were less clamorous, and the moral life less troubled and self-conscious—could no longer appease

1 Virgil: Georg. I, 11. 489-92, 498-502, 505-14. Some of these lines have been quoted already in IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (β), vol. iv, p. 509, above.
2 See IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (β), vol. iv, pp. 505-8, above.
3 Virgil: Georg. I, 11. 467-8. The crime which, according to Virgil, had been signalized by this portent of diurnal darkness was, of course, the assassination of Caesar and not the crucifixion of Christ. This traditional association of an eclipse of the Sun with the death of a hero who is being cut off in his prime by-a heinous piece of foul play can be traced back to the legend of Hêraklês (see V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, p. 473, below).
4 For the diffraction, during the process of social disintegration, of the rays of social radiation which are blended into a single clear beam during the process of social growth, see I. B (iii), vol. i, pp. 26-33, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 199-203.

{p.437} the yearnings of the higher minds. Both Morality and Religion had become less formal and external, more penetrating and exigent. Prayer was no longer a formal litany for worldly blessings or sinful indulgence, but a colloquy with God in a moment of spiritual exaltation. The true sacrifice was no longer "the blood of bulls" but a quiet spirit. Along with a sense of frailty and bewilderment men felt the need of purification and spiritual support. The old mysteries and the new cults from the East had fostered a longing for sacramental peace and assurance of an Other Life, in which the crooked should be made straight and the perverted be restored.' 1

This picture of the spiritual state of the Hellenic dominant minority about a hundred years later than the generation of Augustus has been painted by a modern Western scholar with authentic colours that have been preserved in the literature of the age; and it is a different picture indeed from the sketch drawn by Plato some five hundred years earlier. In retrospect it is plain that the generations of Seneca and Plutarch and Epictetus and Marcus were unwittingly preparing their hearts for an approaching enlightenment from a proletarian source out of which these sophisticated Hellenic 'intellectuals' would never have augured the coming of any good thing.2

The Hellenic and Syriac societies are assuredly not the only civilizations in which there has been an awakening to the sense of sin through the shock of seeing an ancient social structure collapse in ruin. We may tentatively interpret the penitential self-mortifications of the Mayas3 in their age of social decadence as an outward visible sign of an inward spiritual state; and we may draw the same inference in the same tentative fashion from certain relics of the Sumeric religion: the Penitential Psalms and the worship of Tammuz and Ishtar.4 In the Sumeric and in the Mayan field the historian is working almost entirely in the dark, with only a rare glimmer of uncertain light to guide him. It is strange to find ourselves equally at a loss to answer the question whether a native sense of sin can be detected in the present state

1 Dill, S.: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (London 1905, Macmillan), pp. 420-1. Compare the passages quoted in
V. C (i).(d) 6 (δ), pp. 550-1, below.
2 John i. 46. On this point see further V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), pp. 550-68, below.
3 See V. C (i) (d) 2, p. 403, above. This vein in the religion of the Mayas in the time of the Mayan universal state duly reappears in the Mayan religious heritage of the Mexic Society (for this heritage see I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 127, and V. C (i) (c) 4, in the present volume, p. 357, above). Dirges on the themes of mutability and death are a prominent feature in the literature of the interloping barbarian Aztec empire-builders who embraced the religion of the Mexic World (see V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 357, above) and came within an ace of anticipating the Spaniards in establishing a Central American universal state (see Spinden, H. J.: Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America (New York 1922, American Museum of Natural History, Handbook No. 3), pp. 213-13).
4 For the difficulty of replacing these relics of the Sumeric religion in their historical setting so long as we are handicapped by our present dearth of historical evidence see, I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 115, footnote 1, and V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 148-9, above.

{p.438} of mind of the society in which we ourselves actually live and move and have our being.

The sense of sin is, no doubt, a feeling with which our modern Western homunculus is quite familiar. A familiarity with it is, indeed, almost forced upon him; for the sense of sin is a cardinal feature of the 'higher religion’which we have inherited from the dead civilization to which ours is affiliated. In this case, however, familiarity seems latterly to have been breeding—not so much contempt as the more violent reactions of aversion and hostility. And the contrast between this temper of the modern Western World and the contrary temper of the Hellenic World in the sixth century B.C. shows up the vein of perversity in human nature. Though our historical evidence for the early age of Hellenic history is too scanty to be conclusive, it indicates, as we have seen,1 that the Hellenic Society, starting life with the jejune and unsatisfying religious heritage of a barbarian pantheon, became conscious of its spiritual poverty and exerted itself to fill the void by inventing, in Orphism, a 'higher religion' of the kind that some other, perhaps more fortunate, civilizations have inherited from their predecessors; and the character of the Orphic ritual and doctrine makes it clear that the sense of sin was the pent-up religious feeling for which the Hellenes of the sixth century B.C. were eager, above all, to find a normal outlet. In contrast to the Hellenic Society our Western Society is one of those more generously endowed civilizations that have grown up under the aegis of a 'higher religion’ and within the chrysalis of a universal church; and it is perhaps just because Western Man has always been able to take his Christian birth-right for granted that he has persistently depreciated and finally repudiated it.

The history of this graceless Homo Occidentals who has turned against the Christianity that found him a barbarian and has promoted him to the lordship of creation is a tale of ύβρις which has been told in the parable of Jeshurun.

‘He found him in a desert land and in the waste howling wilderness;
He led him about, He instructed him,
He kept him as the apple of His Eye....
‘He made him ride on the high places of the Earth
that he might eat the increase of the fields, and
He made him to suck honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty rock. . . .
‘But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked . . . then he forsook God which
made him, and lightly esteemed the-rock of his salvation.' 2

Of all the gifts of Christianity against which our modern Western Jeshurun has been kicking in these latter days, the sense of sin

1 In V, C (i) (c) 2, pp. 84-7, above.
2 Deut. xxxii. 10, 13, and 15.

{p.439} is perhaps the one which has moved him to the direst fury of rebellion. You have only to mention the sense of sin in order to be sure of making the modern-minded Westerner 'see red’. The degree to which he flatters himself that he has succeeded in plucking this sense out and casting it from him is for him almost the measure of his success in his struggle to emancipate himself from the bondage of that Christian tradition in which he has been bred. And the cult of Hellenism, which has been so potent, and in many ways so fruitful, an ingredient in our secular Western culture during the last four centuries, has been partly fostered and kept alive by a conventional conception of Hellenism as a way of life which gloriously combines with all our own modem Western virtues and attainments an innate and effortless freedom from that hateful sense of sin which Western Man is now industriously purging out of his ci-devant Christian spiritual heritage.1

Will modern Western Man repent of, and recoil from, his υ β ρ ι ς before it finds its nemesis in α τ η ? If this is the riddle of the destiny of our Western Civilization, the answer cannot yet be forecast in a generation which has been born into the critical act of the tragic drama. But we may anxiously scan the landscape of our contemporary spiritual life for any symptoms that may give us ground for hope that we are regaining the use of a spiritual faculty which we have been doing our worst to sear and sterilize. Dare we allow ourselves to see at any rate a favourable omen in the emphasis that is laid upon a conviction of sin in the 'revivalist' version of Protestantism which has been rife on the English-speaking fringe of the Western World during the last two hundred years and which—winning its first foothold in a nascent industrial proletariat, and spreading thence to a rising lower-middle class—has lately been carried into the citadel of a paganized dominant minority by the shock-tactics of the so-called 'Oxford Groups' ?

1 For the element of truth in this picture of Hellenism as an historic example of the blessedness of being spiritually ‘once-born’ see II. D (vii), vol. ii, pp. 355-7, above.



6. The Sense of Promiscuity

(α) Pammixia and Proletarianization

The Vulgarization of the Dominant Minority.

{V.C.I.(c) 6 (α), p. 445} While the intercourse of the Dominant Minority with the Internal Proletariat is pacific in the sense that the proletarians of this class have already become physically subject to the Dominant Minority ex hypothesi, nevertheless it often happens that the first social contact between subjects and rulers—and even between slaves and masters, where the gulf is of that width—takes the form of an introduction of proletarian recruits into the empire-builders' permanent garrisons or standing armies which have been originally established as instruments of domination and have therefore, at the outset, been recruited, with a jealous exclusiveness, from members of the Dominant Minority only.

The classic example of this dilution of military labour is the recruitment of the Slave-Household of the Ottoman Pādishāh from renegades, prisoners-of-war, and child-conscripts supplied by the Pādishāh's own Orthodox Christian ra‛īyeh;2 for this dilution of the Ottoman standing army and administrative service set in at an early stage of the 'Osmanlis' history as empire-builders; it was the principal cause of their marvellous military and political triumphs; and it was carried to such extremes that in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire the Imperial slave's career was the sole avenue to power, and yet at the same time every free-born Muslim subject of the Pādishāh was debarred from following this career by the stigma of a birth which in almost every other society would have given him a paramount or exclusive title to bear rule. In a rather cruder form this apparent contradiction-in-terms—a proletarian dominant minority—re-appears in, the Mumlūk régime in Egypt,3 and we have found traces of it in the substructure of the

2 An account of the recruitrrient, training, organization, and employment of the Ottoman qullar has been given, in a oUfferent context, in Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 22-44, above.
3 See Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 30-1, above.


{p.446} Mughal Rāj in Hindustan and in the superstructure of the régime under which Hindustan was ruled by the Mughals’ forerunners in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era.1

This tour de force of attaching disabilities instead of privileges to noble birth is the peculiarity of empires built in partibus agricolctrum by ci-devant Nomads whose line of least resistance, in seeking to adapt themselves to their new circumstances, lies in applying to an internal proletariat of human stock the technique that their own ancestors have worked out, on their native steppes, for the domestication of animals.2 But at the same time this is only an extreme example of a tendency which is more widely prevalent; for the same process of dilution can be seen at work likewise in the standing armies of dominant minorities of non-Nomadic antecedents.

The history of the standing army of the Roman Empire, for example, is the story of a progressive dilution which began almost on the morrow of the Roman army's transformation from an ad hoc and amateur conscript force to a permanent and professional volunteer force by the act of Augustus. From the beginning the Augustan Imperial army included units of auxilia, recruited from subjects or semi-subjects of the Empire who were not Roman citizens,3 besides the legions which still at first continued to be composed of citizens exclusively; the auxilia perhaps at no time accounted for less than half the total strength of the regular establishment;4 and the differentiation between the ‘auxiliary’ and the 'legionary' branch of the service steadily diminished in significance as the privilege of Roman citizenship came to be extended to an ever widening circle, until the old distinction vanished altogether when Caracalla (imperabat A.D. 211—17) completed the process of enfranchisement by conferring Roman citizenship ex officio upon every free adult male inhabitant of the Empire who was either a citizen or a subject of any one of the hundreds of local city-

1 See Part III. A, vol. iii, p. 31, footnote 1, above.
2 This point has been made in Part III. A, vol. iii, p. 28, above.
3 These auxilia were, indeed, already a well-established arm of the Roman Army by the date of the Augustan reorganization; for they were the successors of, and substitutes for, an older non-citizen force in the shape of the cohorts furnished by the Italian communities that had formerly been socii and not citizens of the Roman state. When these Italian socii of Rome had at last extorted, by the ultima ratio of armed insurrection, an enfranchisement that had long been overdue, the Roman Government had found itself constrained to look elsewhere for non-citizen troops to brigade with the legions. ‘By the enfranchising laws of 90—89 B.C. the recruiting area for legionary troops was extended to all Italy south of the Po. The socii disappeared, and the, Roman Army was now composed of legions of citizen-soldiers and auxilia or detachments of foreign troops serving either as volunteers or as mercenaries’ (Parker, H. M. D.: The Roman Legions; (Oxford 1928, Clarendon Press), p. 46).
4 See The Cambridge Ancient History, vol, x, pp. 228—9, for the numerical ratio between auxilia and legions in the Roman Army as reorganized by Augustus. For the recruitment, character, and history of the auxilia see Cheesman, G. L.: The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army (Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press).

{p.447} tates that were the cells of the Imperial body politic.1 There-fter (until the radical reorganization of the Imperial army by) Diocletian and Constantine) the legions, which had long since truck local roots in their respective cantonments in the provinces, were each recruited almost entirely from the surrounding population within their local radius, and the only surviving units in which the troops were Roman soldiers without being Roman citizens were now those raised, (it is true, in growing numbers) from barbarian sources of man-power outside the Imperial frontiers.2

The history of the Roman standing army in a Roman Empire which was the Hellenic Society's universal state is reproduced in the history of the standing army in the Far Eastern universal states this was reconstructed in the seventeenth century of the Christian Era by Manchu empire-builders;3 and the same tendencies are illustrated by the history of the Arab standing army in the dominions of the Umayyad and the 'Abbasid Caliphate. In its inclusion of Chinese as well as Manchu banners'4 the Manchu military establishment is an exact counterpart of the Roman with its units of auxilia brigaded with the legions.5 And the Manchu-Chinese comradeship-in-arms which grew up in the South Manchurian march of the Far Eastern World has a parallel in the Arab-Iranian comradeship-in-arms which grew up in the Syriac World's border-province (as it was in that age) of Khuraāsān.6 We may also take note of the far-going dilution of the Mongol standing Army, within less than a hundred years of the beginning of Chingis Khan's military career, which is illustrated by the episode of the annihilation of the Alan unit in a force which was being employed by Chingis' grandson Qubilay for the conquest of

1 For this view of the scope of the Caracallan enfranchisement see Jones, A. H. M.: Another Interpretation of the Constitutto Antommana' in The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. xxvi, part 2 (1936).
2 Unlike the auxilia of the first and second centuries of the Christian Era, these fourth-century and fifth-century foederati served in their own native equipment and formations and even under their own native commanders; and this difference was inimical to assimilation.
3 See IV. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. iv, p. 87, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 53-4, above.
4 For the Manchu Imperial military organization see V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 315, footnote 3, and V. C (i) (d) 3, p. 410, above.
5 The analogy goes still farther; for, if the Chinese 'banners' of the Manchu establishment are strictly comparable with the units of auxillia which were recruited from the non-citizen subjects of the Roman Empire, the Mongol 'banners’ correspond, with the same exactness, to those units of foederati that were recruited from the transfrontier barbarians.
6 Khurasan was the border-province of the Syriac World over against the Eurasian Nomads during the period of little less than nine hundred years (from the latter part of the second century B.C. to the earlier part of the eighth century of the Christian Era) during which the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was under Nomad occupation. For this episode of Syriac frontier-history and for the historical connexion between the fraternization of Arabs and Iranians in Khurasan and the replacement of the Umayyad by the 'Abbasid dynasty in the Caliphate see II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 141, above.

{p.448} Southern China.1 The dilution of the standing army of the Achaemenian Empire must have been at least as thorough and at least as rapid, if we may draw any general inference from a glimpse of the organization and personnel of a single unit—the garrison of Elephantinê, on the Nubian frontier of Egypt—which has been given to us by our modern Western archaeologists through their discovery of some local records written on papyrus2 in the Aramaic lingua franca to which the Achaemenidae had given an official currency in all their western provinces.3 A modern Western scholar need not, however, look so far afield as the Nile Valley in the fifth century B.C. in order to observe, in the life, how a military machine may serve as an instrument of vulgarization. He can watch the process at work under his eyes in his own world in his own day. For, though the Western Society has not yet entered into a universal state, the parochial states into which it is still articulated have been driven, by the twofold driving-force of Democracy and Industrialism, into following, one after another, the sinister lead given by France when she raised her levée en masse in A.D. 1793.4 Since that date we have witnessed, in a Western World that has in the meantime been expanding to a literally world-wide range, a transformation of the eighteenth-century professional standing armies—numerically insignificant forces which were segregated from the civilian population and were stamped, by a Draconian discipline, with the Dominant Minority's mark—into national short-service armies through which the entire able-bodied male population is passed, generation by generation, and in which the conscripts drawn from the Dominant Minority are outnumbered to an extent at which they are, not merely diluted, but swamped by the masses of the Internal Proletariat.

If we now try to estimate the importance of the part which has been played by comradeship-in-arms in the breaking down of the barrier between the Dominant Minority and the Internal Proletariat, we shall find, as we might expect a priori that this factor has been of the greatest account in those cases in which the Dominant Minority has been represented by empire-builders who have been not merely frontiersmen but also men from the wrong side of the frontier—empire-builders, that is, of barbarian origin.5 For

1 See V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 350, above.
2 See Meyer, E.: Der Papyrusfund von Elephantine, 2nd edition (Leipzig 1912, Hoonacker, A. van: Une Communaute Judeo-Arameenne a Elephantine, en Eygpte, aux ve Siecles av. J.-C. (London 1915, Milford).
3 For the currency of Aramaic as a lingua franca in tne Achaemenian Empire see V. C (i) (d) 6 (γ), pp. 487-91 and 499-501, below.
4 For this impact of Democracy and Industrialism upon War in the modern Western World see IV. C (iii) (b) 3, vol. iv, pp. 141-55, above.
5 For the several alternative provenances of empire-builders of universal states see V. C (i) (c) i, pp. 52-6, above.

{p.449} the barbarian conqueror is likely to be still more receptive than the marchman to amenities of life which he finds in use among the epigoni of peoples whom he has reduced by his own prowess to the status of a subject population.

Such, at any rate, was the sequel to the comradeship-in-arms between the Manchus and their Chinese neighbours in the deniable territory in South Manchuria outside the Great Wall, but aside the Willow Palisade:

'The Manchus were, from the beginning, without either the strong tribal consciousness or the strong historical traditions of the Mongols.1. . This very immaturity facilitated their extraordinarily rapid and thorough assumption of Chinese characteristics. Indeed, nothing could be more evident. . . than that the Manchus, from a very early period, lot only looked on China as a country to conquer, but on Chinese civilization as something to aspire to. ... The Manchus . .. had taken on a thoroughly Chinese colour. Their two emperors who ruled from Mukden before the entry into China were emperors in the Chinese manner.... It cannot be doubted that the racial character of certain laws of privilege passed by the Manchus has been greatly overemphasized. There was a residuum of racial feeling in some of these laws; but all of them, in .operation, had an almost purely social function; and in any case their nominal racial character is vitiated by the fact that, from the beginning, Chinese 'bannermen’ were counted as Manchus. The 'banners' themselves were purely a military, never a racial, formation. . . . There was no restriction on marriage between Manchus and Chinese 'bannermen', and ... at an early period Manchus began to marry non-'banner’ Chinese girls, although not giving their own daughters in marriage to non-'banner' Chinese men.’2

The same tendency to abandon a de jure segregation in favour of a de facto symbiosis can be traced, as we have already noted, in the history of another body of barbarian empire-builders: the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of South-Western Asia, who were unintentionally and unconsciously restoring a Syriac universal state which had first taken shape in tie prematurely shattered empire of the Achaemenidae.3

In Syria, under the regime of the Caliph Mu'awiyah (in Syria

1 The Mongols in the Far Eastern World, like the Hyksos in the Egyptiac World, paid the penalty of eviction for their unreadiness to soak themselves through and through in the culture of the sophisticated people whom they had conquered. The happier fortune which was common to the Mongols' Manchu successors and the Hyksos’ Libyan successors is an indication that, for a barbarian empire-builder, a cultural self-surrender is an indispensable act of atonement and that, if he cannot bring himself to this, he can never hope to win forgiveness for his political presumptuousness, (On this point see V. C (i) (c) 4, pp. 348-53, above.) —A.J.T.
2 Lattimore, O.: Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 44-7.
3 For this vierw of the Primitive Muslim Arab empire-builders’ work see vol. i, pp. 75-7, above. For the comparison drawn by Eduard Meyer between the receptivity of the Arab builders of the Caliphate and that of the Persian builders of the Achaemenian Empire see the present chapter, p. 443, footnote 3, above.

{p.450} procurabat circa A.D. 640-61; per Orbem Terrarum imperabat A.B. 66l-80),

'The distinction between masters and subjects appears not to have been so sharp as it was, to begin with, in 'Iraq. In Syria the Muslims did not live segregated in cantonments specially laid out for them: they lived at close quarters with the natives of the country in the old cities—Damascus, Emesa, Qinnasrin, etc.—and sometimes they actually went shares with the natives in the use of a place of public worship, which then became half church and half mosque.'1

In Khurasan, under the last of Mu'awiyah's Umayyad successors, on the eve of the transference of the Caliphate in A.D. 750 from the Umayyads to the 'Abbasids,

'Arabs and Iranians were not separated from each other by any segregation of domiciles. In the Arab garrison towns—Naysabur (Bivard, Sarakhs, Nasa), Marv, Marvrud and Herat—the indigenous population lived on, though the citadels were naturally occupied by the conquerors. Moreover the Arabs did not keep together in compact settlements at just a few points, and did not confine themselves to the towns which they had selected as sites for military colonies. They had properties, with serfs, in the country-side, and they spent part of their time there as well—especially in the oasis of Marv, where the town constituted the centre for a host of villages in a unitary system of irrigation. They kept Iranian retainers and married Iranian "women; and this influence was bound to make itself strongly felt already in the second generation. . . .The Arabs acclimatized themselves; they felt themselves at one with the natives of the country as inhabitants of the province which was their common home. They, too, were now Khurasanis; and they wore trousers like the Iranians, drank wine, and celebrated the festivals of Nawruz and Mihrigan. The Arab notable adopted the style of the Marzbans. The daily round and common task brought in their train the need for an understanding with the Iranians; and even in Kufah and Basrah Persian was at least as much in use as Arabic as the language of business.’2

When we turn to the histories of dominant minorities which have arisen—as dominant minorities normally do arise—from within and not from beyond the disintegrating society's pale, we shall not be able to leave the military factor out of account; for the proletarianization of the Manchu barbarian empire-builders of a Far Eastern, and of the Arab barbarian empire-builders of a Syriac, universal state through a comradeship-in-arms with recruits from the Internal Proletariat is a social phenomenon which is reproduced, as we have already seen, in the histories of the

1 Wellfaausen, J.: Das Arabische Reich und sein Sturz (Berlin 1902, Reimer), p. 84.
2 Ibid., p. 307.

{p.451} Roman army in the Imperial Age and of the conscript armies of the national states of the modern Western World.1 At the same me we shall find that, in a disintegrating society in which the Dominant Minority is indigenous, a comradeship-in-arms is apt to be replaced by a partnership-in-business as the form of intercourse that is the most effectively instrumental in breaking down the social barrier and achieving the passage from segregation to symbiosis.

This comes out clearly in an account—by a contemporary observer whom we have quoted already—of a change in the social Nations between masters and slaves at Athens that resulted from the Athenians' premature and abortive attempt to establish a Hellenic universal state in the fifth century B.C.

'Slaves... and permanently domiciled aliens enjoy an extreme degree of licence at Athens, where it is illegal" to assault them and where the slave will not make way for you [in the street]. The reason why this is the local custom shall be explained. If it were legal for the slave—or the alien or the freedman—to be struck by the free citizen, your Athetian citizen himself would always have been getting hit through being mistaken for a slave. The free proletariat at Athens are no better dressed than the slaves and aliens, and no more respectable in appearance. If any reader is surprised at the further fact that at Athens they allow the slaves to live in luxury and in some instances to keep up an imposing establishment, it would not be difficult to demonstrate the good sense of their policy in this point as well. The fact is that, in any country that maintains a naval establishment, it is essential for slaves to bring in money by their services, in order that I [the master] may receive at least the royalties on the profits of my slave's labour;2 and his involves [eventual] manumission.3 In a country, however, in which wealthy slaves exist, it is no longer desirable that my slave should be afraid of you—as he is, for example, in Lacedaemon. If your slave is afraid of me, that fact will keep him under a perpetual threat of having to stand and deliver his own money [to me as blackmail]. This is the reason why we have put our slaves on a social equality (ίσηγορίαν) with our freemen; and we have placed our permanently domiciled aliens on the same-footing vis-à-vis our citizens because our country needs these aliens' services on account of the multiplicity of our industries, as well

1 See pp. 446-7 and 448, above.
2 The logical connexion between sea-power and making slavery pay is not here explicitly stated by the writer because, in his time andplace, it was so notorious that he could count upon his readers' taking it for granted. The connexion is, of course, that, in a Hellenic city-state that maintained a navy, this expensive public luxury had to be paid for by the well-to-do slave-owning class in a burden of taxation which was so heavy as to make it impossible for slave-owners to keep their slaves employed on such occupations as domestic service, in which the capital sunk in the purchase-price of-the slave would be, from the financial point of view, an unproductive investment.—A. J.T.
2 In the Hellenic World it was a psychological and economic commonplace that the only way of inducing a slave to work 'on his own' in a competitive trade with the zest if a freeman was by allowing him to put by a proportion of his earnings in order to save up for his eventual purchase of his own freedom.—A.J.T.

{p.452} as on account of the navy. These are our reasons—and they are good ones—for giving social equality to the aliens as -well.’1

When we find that the Gleichschaltung of citizens with aliens and of freemen with slaves in the Hellenic Society had been carried as far as this at Athens in the first generation after the breakdown of 431 B.C., it is not surprising to find further that four hundred years later, when the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' had burnt itself out and when the Hellenic universal state, which the Athenians had tried and failed to establish, had come into being at last in the shape of the Roman Empire, the elements in the proletarian underworld which were the fittest to survive in the vicious social environment of a disillusioned and demoralized age had not only maintained the favourable social position which they had reached at Athens before the end of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, but had gone on steadily climbing from one rung of the social ladder to the next till they had attained to dizzy heights of wealth and influence.2 In the latter days of the Roman Republic the management of the Roman aristocrats’ households, with their huge personnel and their elaborate organization, had already become a perquisite of the ablest of the freedmen of the nominal master; and, when Caesar's household, outgrowing and overtopping all its rivals, actually went into partnership with the Senate and People in the management of a Roman commonwealth which had become responsible for the government of the entire Hellenic World, then Caesar's freedmen became the cabinet ministers of a Hellenic universal state. Nor was theirs a hidden hand, like the authority that is exercised with such a discreet self- effacement by the permanent civil servants in the parochial states of our latter-day Western World. So far from that, the three principal portfolios held by freedmen in the Imperial Cabinet—the ministries ab epistulis, a libelis, and a rationibus—came to be part of the recognized insignia of the Imperial office—so much so, that, imperante Nerone in A.D. 64, a member of the Roman aristocracy

1 Auctor Atheniensis Anonymus: Institutions of Athens (edited by Kalinka, E.: Berlin and Leipzig 1913, Teubner), chap. I, §§ 10—12, quoted in IV. C (iii) (b) 4, vol. iv, p. 156, footnote 3, above.
2 Such careers as these were not, of course, typical of the contemporary experience of the whole class to which these self-made men belonged; for one of the effects of the four-centuries-long ordeal which the Hellenic 'Time of Troubles' imposed upon the Hellenic internal proletariat was to produce an extreme differentiation of fortunes between different elements in the proletarian mass. While some proletarians, who had the ability and the desire to adapt themselves to the spirit of the age, were able to rise to in Johanan ben Zakkai's Judaism and in Christianity. (For this process of differentiation, in the Hellenic internal proletariat see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp. 213-16, as well as V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 72-8, and V. C (i) (a) 1 passim, above, and V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex III, pp. 588-90, and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, pp. 376-8 and 504-8, below,)

{p.453} as hounded to death on a charge of treasonable designs against thereigning emperor because, in a fit of childish ostentation, he had rashly taken in vain the titles of the three secretaryships of state by conferring them on three freedmen of his own who, in the management of his private estate, were charged with the corresponding duties.1

It will be seen that the Imperial freedmen in the early years of the Roman Empire enjoyed a plenitude of power which was comparable to that of those members of the Ottoman Sultan's Slave-household who attained to the equally powerful—and equally precarious—office of Grand Vizier.2 And we shall be reminded gain of the rise of the Hellenic internal proletariat to the top of the social tree in the household of Caesar if we turn to the history of the Arab Caliphate and watch clients and patrons slowly but surely changing places with one another in the vast households which the Primitive Arab Muslim conquerors of the first few generations gathered round themselves by throwing the mantle of their protection over men of parts who were members of the non-Muslim subject communities.

In all cases of symbiosis between the Dominant Minority and the Internal Proletariat in which the relation attains to a certain degree of intimacy, both parties are affected by it, and the effect on each of them is to set them in motion on a course which leads towards in assimilation to the other class. On the superficial plane of ‘manners’ the Internal Proletariat moves towards enfranchisement, and the Dominant Minority towards vulgarization. The two movements are complementary, and both are taking place all the time; but, while it is the enfranchisement of the Proletariat is the more conspicuous of the two in the first chapter of the story, in the last chapter it is the vulgarization of the Dominant Minority that forces itself upon our attention.

The classic example is the vulgarization, in 'the Silver Age', of the Roman governing class: a sordid tragedy which has been inimitably recorded—or caricatured—in a Latin literature which still preserved its old genius, or at least its old vigour, in the satirical vein long after it had lost its last breath of inspiration in every other genre.

This Roman rake's progress can be followed in a series of Hogarthian pictures in each of which the central figure is not merely an aristocrat but an emperor.

’ Caligula . . . gave an immense impetus to the rage for singing,

1 The victim's name was D. Iunius Torquatus Silanus. He was accused inter libertos et rationibus habere quos ab epistulis et libellis be et rationibus appellet—nomina summae curae et meditamenta. He anticipated a death-sentence by committing suicide (Tacitus: Annals, Book XV, chap. 35.
2 For instances see Part III. A p. 40, footnote 1, above.

{p.454} dancing, and acting, for chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before, which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts. Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius to act in his own play. But a decree of the Senate, not long -afterwards, had place_d a ban on these exhibitions by men of noble rank. Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of the order. But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles had un-
doubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper class. And Caligula and Nero found, only too easily, youths of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to exhibit themselves for a welcome douceur, or to gain the favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus. . . .

'Amid all this elaborate luxury and splendour of indulgence there was a strange return to the naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews. Bohemianism for a time became the fashion. . . . The distinguished dinner party, with the Emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how the people were living in the slums. .. . In the fierce faction fights of the theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor had once the distinction of breaking a praetor's head.'1

While Nero was content to emulate the proletarian music hall artiste (‘Qualis artifex pereo!' 2), Commodus, a century later, could not satisfy his craving for proletarianization by any milder feat of exhibitionism than a public appearance in the gladiatorial arena.

'The influence of a polite age and the labour of an attentive education ad never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding. Nero himself excelled, or affected to excel, in the elegant arts of music and poetry....But Commodus, from his earliest infancy, discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace—the sports of the circus and amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts. . . . The servile crowd, whose fortune depended on their master's vices, applauded these ignoble pursuits . . . [and], elated with these praises, which gradually extinguished the innate sense of shame, Commodus resolved to exhibit, before the eyes of the Roman people, those exercises which till then he had decently confined within die walls of his palace and to the presence of a few favourites. On the appointed day the various motives of flattery, fear and curiosity attracted to the amphitheatre an innumerable multitude of spectators; and some degree of applause was de-

1 Dai, S.: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (London 1905, Macmillan), pp. 73-6.
2 Suetonius: Nero, chap. 49.

{p.455} servedly bestowed on the uncommon skill of the Imperial performer. Whether he aimed at the head or heart of the animal, the wound was alike certain and mortal. . . . But the meanest of the populace were affected with shame and indignation when they beheld their sovereign enter the lists as a gladiator and glory in a profession which the laws and manners of the Romans had branded with the justest note of infamy. . . . He now disdained the appellation of Hercules. The name of Paulus, a celebrated secutor, was the only one which delighted his ear. It was inscribed on his colossal statues, and repeated in the redoubled acclamations of the mournful and applauding Senate.’1

The last stage in the process of vulgarization is displayed in the portrait of an emperor of the next generation.

‘The demeanour of Caracalla was haughty and full of pride; but with the troops he forgot even the proper dignity of his rank, encouraged their insolent familiarity, and, neglecting the essential duties of a general, affected to imitate the dress2 and manners of a common soldier.’3

Caracalla's way of 'going proletarian’ was neither so sensational nor so pathological as Commodus's way or Nero's, but, just on that account, it is perhaps of greater significance as a sociological symptom. A Hellenic dominant minority which had reached the last stage in the repudiation of its social heritage was fitly represented by the figure of an emperor who took refuge in the proletarian freedom of the barrack-room from a freedom of the Academy and the Stoa which he found intolerable just because he knew that it was his birth-right. Indeed, by this date, on the eve of the next relapse of the Hellenic Society into its downward course after the respite of the Augustan rally,4 the relative volumes and momenta and speeds of the two mutually contrary streams of influence that flowed respectively from the Dominant Minority and from the Internal Proletariat had changed, in the proletarian stream's favour, to a degree at which the latter-day observer may find himself wondering whether, after all, he has not been

1 Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. iv.
2 'Dressing the part’ is one of the ways in "which the social turncoat advertises his intention to declass himself; and the proneness of the Roman governing class, in its decadence, to this crude form of exhibitionism is commemorated in the nicknames ‘Caracalla’ and 'Caligula', under which two apaches who were raised by Fortune to the Roman Imperial Throne have succeeded in making themselves remembered by Posterity. The sovereign who wears his own livery may of course be moved by motives of petty policy as well as by a taste for low life; for this is one of the easiest and cheapest ways at his command for currying favour with his lackeys. Suleyman the Magnificent sought to propitiate the Janissaries, who were already beginning to get out of hand before the end of his reign, by enrolling himself in one of their units and drawing a private's pay. Is this trick of Ottoman statecraft the origin of the custom, -which is now de rigueur for the heads of our Western states, of wearing their own uniforms and holding honorary rank in their own service ? (See Part III. A, vol. iii, p. 38, footnote 2, § 3, above.)—A.J.T.
3 3 Gibbon, op. cit., chap, vi.
4 For this relapse see IV. C (i), vol. iv, p. 8, and V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume,p. 219, above, and V. C (i) (d) 6, Annex, p. 649, V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, p. 307, and V, C (ii) (b, vol, vi, p. 284, below.

{p.456} watching the movement of a single current which now, at a certain moment, has simply reversed its direction. Though this is an illusion, it is true that in the earlier stages of disintegration our attention is more apt to be caught by the downward percolation of emotions and ideas from the Dominant Minority to the Internal Proletariat,1 while in the later stages we become more and more clearly aware that the Dominant Minority is taking its colour from the Internal Proletariat instead of continuing to exercise that function of leadership which is the Dominant Minority's sole raison d’être (and that a doubtful one!).

This increasing moral subservience of a sinking Dominant Minority to a rising Internal Proletariat is illustrated in the history of the Hellenic dominant minority's orientation towards Christianity;2 for, in each successive phase, the dominant minority can be convicted of having adopted towards Christianity, tardily and reluctantly, the attitude, whatever it might be, that had shown itself to be prevalent among the internal proletariat of the day. In an age in which a majority of the internal proletariat was still both non-Christian and anti-Christian, the Roman authorities bowed to popular feeling in the last resort by stooping from time to time to a half-hearted official persecution of the unpopular faith. On the other hand, when the Christian Church eventually succeeded—whether in spite of persecution or because of it—in overcoming the proletarian opposition and establishing its own ascendancy over the internal proletariat's life, the dominant minority signified its unenthusiastic acceptance of the proletariat's revised verdict by a wry-faced announcement of its own conversion to a religion which had now decisively proved its title by its sensational victory in the proletarian arena. Nor is this the whole of the story; for, in so far as the dominant minority played its successive proletarian parts of persecutor and convert with a certain scepticism and cold-bloodedness, it was still betraying, under its proletarian shirt, the sophisticated temper of a Gallio. We shall not have taken the full measure of the dominant minority's repudiation of its own traditional êthos until we have watched it exchanging this traditional Gallionic indifference for a savagery which, in Gallio's day, would have branded any one who exhibited it as the classmate of a Theudas and Judas of Galilee and a John of Gischala.

'In accordance "with the law that governs the religious development of the Imperial Age throughout, the religious zeal which inspired the

1 This percolation from above downwards is discussed, d propos of a concrete case, in V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, in vol. vi, below. See, in particular, the passage quoted on pp.456-7 from Seeck, O.: Geshichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, vol. Iii, 2nd edition (Stuttgart 1921, Metzler), pp. 203-4.
2 On this see also V. C (i) (c) 2, pp. 76-8-, and V. C (i) (d) 3, pp. 408-9. above, and V. C (ii) (a), vol. Vi, pp. 201-2, below.

{p.457} populace to its deeds [of violence] mounted slowly from below upwards. As the new faith gradually penetrated the ruling strata of Society, the hatred with which Christianity was regarded by its adversaries made its way among the rulers pari passu We see here two currents beating against one another which are both of the same nature.’1

In concrete terms, we see the pagan levity of a Gallienus giving place to the pagan grimness of a Galerius; the lukewarm Christianity of a Philip changing into the fervent Christianity of a Constantine; and the Hadrianic tolerance, which Constantine' never sacrificed to the fervour of his own less philosophic age, being thrown to the winds by the pagan fanaticism of a Julian and by the Christian fanaticism of a Theodosius with an equal recklessness.2

If we now turn our eyes from the Hellenic to the Far Eastern World, we shall see the first chapter in our story of the proletarianization of the Roman governing class in the act of reproducing itself in the history of the Manchus at the present moment. And here we are in a position to observe the process at first hand by doing sociological field-work of the kind that is exemplified in the following record from the pen of a living Western scholar, who shows us the struggle for enfranchisement giving way to the drift towards proletarianization within the compass of the single generation that separates a Manchuized Chinese father, from his own proletarianized son:

’It was . . . possible, in Manchuria, for a Chinese from China Proper to become, in his own lifetime, an out-and-out "Manchu". An instance of this phenomenon came within my own experience when I formed an acquaintance with a Chinese military officer and his old father. The father, born in Honan, had gone to Manchuria as a young man, had travelled over the most remote parts of the three provinces, and had finally settled at Tsitsihar. One day I said to the young man: "Why is it that you, who were born in Tsitsihar, speak just like the generality of Manchurian Chinese, while your father, who was born in Honan, has not only the speech, but exactly the manner and even gestures, of the old-fashioned Manchus of Manchuria" [which differ somewhat from those of Peking Manchus] ? He laughed, and said: "When my father was a young man, it was difficult for a min-jen [non-‘banner’ Chinese, ‘a civilian', ‘one of the people’] to get on in the world up in the northern regions. The Manchus dominated everything, and they harassed the min Chinese. In Tsitsihar, where he settled down, they- had a custom of ‘chasing out the min’ twice a year. All the Chinese who had filtered in were liable to be driven out, and often beaten and robbed. Of course many of them came back; but the only way to

1 Seeck, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 301.
2 For the eventual victory of fanaticism over tolerance in the Hellenic World in the
course of the fourth century of the Christian Era see IV. C (iii) (b) 12, vol. iv, pp. 226-7, above.

{p.458} become secure was to 'follow' [as the phrase went] the Manchus and become so like them as to be undetectable. So my father, when he had learnt their ways, 'entered the banners’ and married a Manchu [which, of course, was against the strict law] and has always remained like them. But when I was growing up it was no longer any use to be a 'bannerman', and therefore I became like all the other young men of my generation." This is a story which illustrates the processes of the present as well as of the past; for the young Manchus of Manchuria are becoming rapidly indistinguishable from Manchuria-born Chinese.’1

In this record of the social history of a Chinese father and son we see the stream of vulgarization in the life of a Manchu dominant minority encountering and overwhelming the stream of snobbery in the life of a Chinese internal proletariat. While in the father's generation the proletarian who meant to rise was still compelled to resort to a servile mimicry of his masters, in the son's generation the children of a ci-devant proletariat and a ci-devant dominant minority were already meeting and mingling on the common level of a proletarian vulgarity.

An Englishman who was moved at this time to do some -work of his own in this field of sociological research on living subjects had no need to put himself to the expense of booking a berth on the Trans-Siberian express; for the social changes that were witnessed by our twentieth-century American observer on the banks of the Nonni River could be seen and studied quite as well on the banks of the Thames by his stay-at-home English contemporaries. The proletarianization of a dominant minority could be watched in the London metropolitan area in the year 1938 by any one who entered the doors of either a cinema or a club; for in the cinema he would see people of all classes taking an equal pleasure in films that had been artfully designed to cater for the taste of the proletarian majority of the audience, while in the club he would find that the black ball did not exclude the yellow press. Indeed, if our latter-day British Juvenal was a family man, he could stay indoors and still find his copy. He had merely to open his ears (which was perhaps easier than to close them) to the jazz-music which his children were conjuring out of the wireless set. And then, when, at the end of the holidays, he saw his boys off to school, let him not forget to ask them to point out to him ‘the bloods' among their schoolfellows assembling on the platform of the London railway terminus. As, at this passing show, our quizzical paterfamilias discreetly took smart young Commodus's measure, he would notice the rakish proletarian angle at which 'the public schoolboy's' trilby hat was cocked, and would observe

1 Lattimore, O,: Manchuria Cradle of Conflict (New York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 62-3.

{p.459} that the apache scarf, with its convincing air of negligence, had really been carefully arranged so as not to reveal the obligatory white collar. Here was proof ocular and positive that in twentieth-century London, as in second-century Rome, the proletarian style was a la mode. And, since a straw really does show which way the wind is blowing, the satirist's trivialities may be grist for the more ponderous mill of the historian.


The Barbarizatian of the Dominant Minority.

{V.C.I. (c) 6 (α), p. 459} When we pass from the vulgarization of the Dominant Minority through their pacific intercourse with the Internal Proletariat to examine the parallel process of their barbarization—a social change which arises out of their warlike intercourse with the External Proletariat beyond the pale—we find that the plot of both plays is the same in its general structure. In this case, as in that, either party exercises an assimilative influence on the other; and in both cases alike it is the influence of the Dominant Minority upon its proletarian servitor or antagonist that claims our attention in the first act. This time once again, however, there is a second act in which the two actors exchange their roles; and the curtain does not fall until the Dominant Minority has been barbarized in this encounter as decisively and irretrievably as we have already seen it vulgarized in the companion play.

In our present play the mise-en-scene is an artificial military frontier—the limes of a universal state—across which the Dominant Minority and the External Proletariat are seen confronting each other, when the curtain rises, in a posture which, on both sides alike, is one of aloofness and hostility. As the play proceeds, the aloofness turns into an intimacy which does not, however, bring peace; and, as the warfare goes on, Time tells progressively in the barbarian's favour, until at last he succeeds in breaking through the limes and overrunning the vast domain—a whole world in itself—of the universal state which the Dominant Minority's garrison has hitherto successfully protected, The causes and consequences of this denouement of the play on its military side are discussed in a later part of this Study;1 and in the present place we shall concern ourselves exclusively with the social side: that is to say, with the social assimilation of the two adversaries to one another—an assimilation which is partly the effect, but also partly the cause, of their growing intimacy, and which ends in their fusion into a social amalgam in which the dominant element is the barbarian one.

In the first act the barbarian appears in the successive roles of

1 See Part VIII, passim, below.

{p.460} hostage and mercenary, and in both these roles he conies on to the Dominant Minority's ground in a figurative as well as in a literal sense; for, in both, he comes over as a more or less docile apprentice. In the second act he still crosses the line, but now only in a sense which is literal with a vengeance; for he now comes neither by command nor by invitation but unbidden and unwanted as a raider who eventually settles down to stay as a colonist or a conqueror. Thus, between the first act and the second, the military ascendancy passes out of the Dominant Minority's hands into the barbarian's; and, although the change is not always easily perceptible while it is in the act of taking place—since the barbarian conqueror, may be a time-expired mercenary, and his seizure of the land may be legalized ex post facto, by a Dominant Minority eager to save its face, as a payment in kind for military services rendered—all the same, in the end, the reversal of fortune is sensational; for, while at the opening of the play the barbarian is well content if he can hold his own and prevent the frontier of Civilization from being pushed still farther forward at his expense, the close of the play sees the ci-devant Dominant Minority resigning itself to the permanent establishment of a barbarian invader, on the wrong side of the old front line as the new lord and master, de facto, of a ravished world. This sensational transfer of the kingdom, the power, and the glory from the Dominant Minority's to the barbarian's banners has a profound effect upon the Dominant Minority's outlook; and, long before the military and political process is complete, the revolutionary inversion of prestige is proclaimed by the discomfited party itself in deeds that are more eloquent than words. It is now the Dominant Minority that comes on to the barbarian's ground—not, indeed, in the literal sense, for the time has now long since gone by when the garrison of the limes could show its mettle by making punitive expeditions into no-man's-land. In the literal sense the Dominant Minority is now yielding ground to the barbarian in an unbroken retreat that is threatening to turn into a rout. But, just for the reason that the barbarian is now manifestly gaining the upper hand, the Dominant Minority seeks to retrieve its rapidly deteriorating military and political position by taking one leaf after another out of the barbarian's book; and imitation is assuredly the sincerest form of flattery.

Having now sketched out the plot of the play, we may pause to survey the scene more closely as it displays itself in the several acts. We may watch the barbarian make his first appearance on the stage as the Dominant Minority's apprentice; see the Dominant Minority begin to 'go native’; catch a glimpse of the two
{p.461} adversaries at a fleeting moment at which, in their rival masquerades in one another's borrowed plumage, they assume the grotesque generic resemblance of the griffin to the chimaera; and finally watch the ci-devant Dominant Minority lose the last traces of its original form by sinking to meet the triumphant barbarian at a common level of barbarism that is quite unmitigated.

Our list of barbarian war-lords who have made their début as hostages in the hands of a 'civilized Power’ includes some famous names. Theodoric served his apprenticeship as a hostage at the Roman Court of Constantinople,1 and Scanderbeg2 his at the Ottoman Court of Adrianople, where he received the education of an ich-oghlan.3 We may perhaps hesitate to number among the barbarians the hostage-son of Amyntas who learnt at Thebes from Epaminondas and Pelopidas the arts of war and peace which he afterwards practised to such brilliant effect when he had mounted his father's throne as King Philip II of Macedon. But we may mention a living example of the type in the person of Muhammad
‛Abd-al-Karīm al-Khattābī: a chief of the tribe of the Banu Wuryāghal in the Moroccan Rīf who annihilated a Spanish expeditionary force at Anwaāl in 1931 and in 1935 performed the greater feat of momentarily shaking the French power in Morocco to its foundations. For ‛Abd-al-Karīm’s apprenticeship was served in an eleven-months-long sojourn in a Spanish prison at Melilla.4

The treatment that the Rīfī war-lord received at his Frankish gaolers’ hands turned him immediately and inevitably into their implacable enemy; but ‛Abd-al-Karīm’s experience was the exception and not the rule; for common sense usually moves a dominant minority which is anxious to hold its barbarian frontier with the minimum of trouble and expense to bind its barbarian hostages in chains that are so pleasantly gilded that the captive will be tempted to hug them. Through such tactful handling the young barbarian who comes as a hostage may be induced to stay on as a mercenary; and Theodoric and Scanderbeg both completed their apprenticeship in this fashion by serving for a time, on a more or less voluntary footing, in the army of the empire which they afterwards made it their life-work to combat.5

1 For Theodoric see further pp. 472-3, below.
2 For Scanderbeg see Pisko, J.: Skanderbeg (Vienna 1894, Frick).
3 For the system of education which was the making of the Ottoman Pādishāh's Slave-Household in 'the Golden Age' of Ottoman history see Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 28-44, above.
4 See Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), p. 111.
5 If it is so manifestly politic for the Dominant Minority to slur over the distinction between mercenary and hostage, it is not surprising that the historian should sometimes find himself at a loss to know whether this or that barbarian warrior ought to be assigned to this or that category. For example, was it as a hostage in Roman hands or as a mercenary in the Roman service that the Cheruscan war-lord Hermann-Arminius earned his title to be described by a contemporary Roman man-of-letters as adsiduus nulittae nostrae prioris comes, iure etiam civitatis Romanae decus eguestris consecutus gradus (Velleius Paterculus, C.: Historia Romana, Book II, chap. 118)? It is perhaps significant that Hermann is remembered by Posterity under the Latinized form of his native barbarian name, and 'Scanderbeg [i.e. Iskender Bey] under his Ottoman nom de guerre and not under his Christian name George Castriota. Again, the hero and champion (el Comprador) of the Western Christian barbarians beyond the pale of the Andalusian Umayyad Caliphate has been made famous—and this by his own people—under his Arabic title of the Cid and not under his Christian name of Rodrigo Diez de Bivar. We may also notice that a Latin name was borne by one, and a Greek name by another, of the seven kinglets of the Teutonic barbarian Alemanni whose war-bands were caught on the wrong side of the Rhine and roughly handled by the Caesar Julian in A.D. 357; and the Latin historian—who was himself 'miles quondam et Graecus'—has considerately gratified our curiosity by telling us how the Alemannian prince who bore the Greek name had come to be called by it:
'Latus vero dextrum Serapio agebat: etiam turn adultae lanuginis iuvenis, efficacia praecurrens aetatem, Mederichi fratris Chnodomarii nlius, hominis quoad vixerat perfidissimi, ideo sic appellatus quod pater eius diu obsidatus pignore tentus in Galliis, dpctusque Graeca quaedam arcana, hunc filium suum, Agenarichum genital! vocabulo dictitatum, ad Serapionis transrulit nomen' (Ammianus Marcellinus: Res Gestae a Principatu Caesaris Nervae, Book XVI, chap. 12 § 25).
These tell-tale names bear witness that, while the barbarian who has once been domesticated may break loose again and turn all the more savage for having at one time worn chains, the most truculent defiance in after-life can still never quite efface the marks that have been made upon him by an education to which he has been subjected at the impressionable age of youth or early manhood. Even when he is ranging at large again in no-man's-land as the notorious captain of a barbarian war-band, his transmogrified name commemorates his earlier experience of domestication as surely as the 'little bald spot' which Mowgli's finger was able to feel under the fur of Bagheera's throat betrayed the fact that the panther who was now enjoying the freedom of the Jungle had at one time languished in a cage (Kipling, Rudyard: The Jungle Book, 'Mowgli's Brothers').

{p.462} The list of barbarians who have 'come’ and 'seen’ as mercenaries, before imposing themselves as conquerors, is a long one. The Teutonic and Arab barbarian conquerors of Roman provinces in the fifth and in the seventh century of the Christian Era were respectively the descendants of many generations of Teutons and Arabs who had done their military service in the Roman forces;1 and the careers of a Theodoric and a Mu‛āwīyah are foreshadowed by those of a Maximinus Thrax and a Philippus Arabs—a pair of third-century barbarians who rose in the Roman service from the ranks to the purple. Again, the Turkish bodyguard of the ‛Abbasid Caliphs in the ninth century of the Christian Era prepared the way for the Turkish buccaneers who carved the Caliphate up into its eleventh-century 'successor-states'. And the present Kingdom of Jugoslavia, which is a barbarian 'successor-state’ of the Ottoman Empire on the one hand and of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy on the other, perhaps ultimately owes its existence to past generations of Serbs who served an Ottoman military apprenticeship as hirelings of the Pādishāh,2 and later on as qullar in the Slave-Household, and a Western military ap-

1 For the mercenary service, in the Roman forces, of the Teutonic-speaking barbarians on the European Continent and in Scandinavia, and also of the Celtic-speaking barbarians in the British Isles, see Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 445-7.
2 This is the true history of Marko Kxaljevid, who has been transfigured into a hero by the genius of Serbian minstrelsy (see V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex III, p. 609* below).

{p.463} prenticeship as gramchari in the border regiments1 with which the Hapsburg Government garrisoned the frontiers of the territories that it wrested out of the 'Osmanlis’ grasp at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 As for the Libyan interlopers who eventually usurped the derelict heritage of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt, they reversed the usual order of proceedings; for, after a series of premature attempts (which all ended disastrously for the presumptuous barbarian aggressors) to exchange the mercenary's role for the conqueror's at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., the Libyans put their pride in their pocket and reverted to their mercenary calling; and they were rewarded for their humility by being permitted to win after all, through a process of peaceful penetration, the prize that had been brusquely denied to them when they had tried to snatch it by main force.3 Finally, if we may venture to treat the Greeks as the barbarians that they appeared to be in Egyptiac and Syriac eyes, we may find the precursors of Alexander's world-conquering army in those 'Brazen Men’ of Carian and Ionian provenance who had risen so obligingly from the sea to take mercenary service with the first Psammetichus and with the Pharaohs who followed after him during the next three centuries;4 or, more pertinently still, in those fourth-century mercenaries drawn from almost every city-state of a distracted Hellas who fought with the same professional loyalty and political insouciance at Cunaxa for Cyrus the Younger against his Achaemenid brother Artaxerxes and at Gaugamela for the last Darius against Alexander himself.

Our list might be longer still if the historical records of the last agonies of civilizations were not so fragmentary as they are apt to be. But we may at least conjecture that the sea-roving barbarians who hovered round the fringes of the Minoan thalassocracy and sacked Cnossos itself circa 1400 B.C., had served their apprenticeship as the hirelings of Minos before they aspired to supplant him; for the contemporary Egyptiac records tell us that 'the Peoples of the Sea’ competed with the Libyans in the lucrative business of soldiering for 'the New Empire’ of Egypt, and went into partnership

1 In addition to these regiments of Jugoslav regulars whose task was to guard the frontiers that marched with the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Government, under the stress of its struggle with Frederick the Great, also enlisted Jugoslav irregulars who made themselves a scourge under the name of Pandours. These Pandours are presumably homonyms of -die Pindaris who so obstinately resisted the establishment of the Pax Britannica in Central India.
2 For the previous stages in the history of the Serbs and Bosniaks see IV. C (ii) ( 6 ) i, vol. iv, pp. 68 and 69; IV. C. (ii) ( 6 ) a, vol. iv, p. 76; and V, C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 292-7, 301-2, and 327-8, above.
3 See IV. C ( Hi ) fc ) a ( fl ), vol. iv, p. 422; V. C (i) (c) 3* in the present volume, pp. 269-70, and V. C (i) (c) 4, pp. 35*-3, above.
4 The most distinguished name on the roll of Greek mercenaries in the .Egyptiac service is that of King Agesilaus of Sparta (regnabat 400-361 B.C.).

{p.464} with the Libyans in the confederated barbarians' unsuccessful attempt to deal with Egypt as they had dealt with Crete. Can we likewise infer from the semi-legendary figure of Ogier the Dane, who makes his appearance among Charlemagne's paladins in the French Epic, that the Vikings who were already raiding the coasts of the Carolingian Empire before Charlemagne was in his grave were preceded by Scandinavian mercenaries in the Austrasian service?1 And did the Han dynasty enlist the Eurasian Nomads from beyond the Great Wall—whose descendants were ultimately to reign on Sinic soil as the Han's eventual successors—for patrolling the frontiers of the Sinic universal state?

'The policy for the Middle Kingdom is to employ the barbarians for knocking the barbarians on the head’ is a maxim which is to be found in an essay from the brush of Kia Yi, a Sinic political philosopher of the second century B.C.;2 but in practice we hear less of Nomad soldiers in the Sinic Imperial service than, of Nomad settlers planted, on the Imperial Government's initiative, on Intramural territory; and these settlers evidently correspond not so much to the units of barbarian foederati in the Roman Imperial army as to the barbarian agricultural colonists known as laeti3 who were recruited from time-expired mercenaries or from prisoners-of-war or even from raiders whom the Government was too lazy to drive out, and who were planted for the purpose of recultivating and repeopling the provinces which these settlers' own kinsmen, or perhaps even the settlers themselves, had previously devastated and depopulated.4 It was perhaps in this more peaceful fashion, rather than with weapon in hand, that the Northern Barbarians gained their footing on Sinic soil; and this surmise would appear to be borne out by the notorious fact that the Sinic universal state was not supplanted immediately by 'successor-states' of barbarian origin even in the northern marches. 'The Three Kingdoms',

1 This conjecture is favoured by the fact—which is known for certain—that the Vikings who embarked on the waters of the Baltic and not on those of the North Sea, and who made their fortunes at the expense of the Khazar Empire in the Russian forests (see V. C (i) (c) 3, pp. 286-8, above), instead of making them at the expense of the Carolingian Empire in North-Western Europe, gained entrance as mercenaries before they rose to be masters. ‘In the commercial centres, into which the warlike foreign elements were particularly active in pushing their way, their status changed without difficulty. From trading partners or salaried wardens of the trade-routes they easily turned into rulers.’—Kliutschewskij, W. [== Kluchevski, V.]: Geschichte Russlands, vol. i (Berlin 1925, Obelisk Verlag), pp. 133-7.
2 The general tenor of this essay is reproduced by Franke, O.: Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches, vol. i (Berlin 1930, de Gruyter), pp. 332—3.
3 For a list of instances of the settlement of barbarian colonists on the land, in districts inside the Roman Imperial frontiers, by the Roman authorities from the reign of Augustus (imperabat 31 B.C.-A.D. 14) to the reign of Valens (imperabat A.D. 364-78) inclusive, see Dill, S,: Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, 2nd edition (London 1905, Macmillan), pp. 292-5. See also Seeck, O.: Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt vol. i, 4th edition (Stuttgart 1921, Metzler). Book II, chap. 6.
4 The comparison is drawn by Franke in op. cit., vol. xi (Berlin 1936, de Gruyter), pp. 30-6.

{p.465} which were the direct heirs of the Posterior Han, were all indigenous; and, between them, they covered the whole domain of the universal state which they replaced. It was not till about a hundred years after the break-up of the Han Power (which occurred de facto in the last quarter of the second century of the Christian Era, though officially the dynasty lingered on till A.D. 221) that the descendants of the Nomad settlers in the northern marches openly took the sceptre into their own hands.1

We can also espy several instances in which the barbarian mercenary has missed his 'manifest destiny'. For example, the East Roman Empire might have-fallen a prey to the Varangian Guard if it had not been ravished by the Normans and the Saljūqs, carved up by the French and the Venetians, and finally swallowed whole by the 'Osmanlis. And the Ottoman Empire, in its turn, would assuredly have been partitioned among the Bosniak and Albanian mercenaries who were fast asserting their mastery over the provincial pashas and even over the Sublime Porte itself at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era if the Frankish man-of-business had not come treading on the heels of the Albanian man-at-arms to give the last chapter of Ottoman history an unexpected turn by flooding the Levant with Western political ideas as well as with Manchester goods.2 The Oscan mercenaries, again, who found a market for their services in the Greek city-states of Campania and Magna Graecia and Sicily made a practice of ejecting or exterminating their Greek employers whenever they gained the opportunity, and there is little doubt that they would have carried on this game—in which the Greeks themselves never ceased to play into their hands—until there would not have been one single Greek community left on the western side of the Straits of Otranto, if the Romans had not taken the Oscan homelands in the rear at the critical moment.3 Finally, we may venture to prophesy that, if these Roman tamers of the Oscans had succumbed in then- turn to Hannibal, the profits of that great Punic soldier's success would not have long remained in the pockets of the petty-minded Carthaginian oligarchy whom he was attempting (as it turned out, vainly) to save in spite of themselves. For some three hundred years before Hannibal's time Carthage had been fighting her battles with the arms of barbarian mercenaries whom she recruited from all the hinterlands of the Western Mediterranean; and, after she had escaped destruction at Roman hands in the First Punic War, she had courted it

1 See IV. C (ii) (b) i, vol. iv, p. 65; V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 272-3 and V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 356, above, and the present chapter, pp. 477-8, below.
2 See IV. C (ii) ( 6 ) a , vol. iv, pp. 76-8, above.
3 For this Roman intervention see V, C (i) (c) 3,-pp. 213-4, above.

{p.466} at the hands of her own hirelings, whom she exasperated into mutiny by her close-fistedness in the settlement of their pecuniary claims upon her. The four years of this war at her own gates with the mercenaries (240-237 B.C.) were perhaps as terrible for Carthage as the twenty-four years of the antecedent war with Rome, which had been fought entirely on or over the sea (except for the African expedition of Regulus, which had ended disastrously for the Roman invader). If, in the second trial of strength between Carthage and Rome, the genius of Hannibal had availed to give Carthage the immediate victory, the ultimate victors would assuredly have been Hannibal's native troops: his Libyan and Spanish infantry and his Numidian horse.

This Carthaginian case may remind us of a living instance in which we cannot yet read the riddle of Destiny. At the time of writing the military strength of the French Republic resided—not indeed to a Carthaginian degree, but nevertheless in a formidable measure—in White African man-power drawn from the Carthaginian recruiting-grounds in the Maghrib and Black African man-power drawn from trans-Saharan sources which Carthage never tapped (though her maritime explorers may have rounded Cape Verde). Was it France's destiny, under the increasing strain of an effort to maintain her weakening position in Europe, to serve as the military vehicle through which the valley of the Rhine was to fall under the dominion of barbarians from the Senegal? To an Englishman in his armchair this suggestion might appear to be nothing more serious than a rhetorical question that had been drafted in a German National-Socialist Ministry of Propaganda. On the other hand, to any native of the Rhineland who had not been living abroad between the autumn of 1918 and the 30th June, 1930, the picture of a Europe cowed by African bayonets would suggest, not a piece of fantastic Zukunftsmusik but a grim reality with which he was already acquainted through his personal experience.

In the same sober spirit an Indian of the same generation might speculate on the future role, in India's destinies, of those barbarians—entrenched in a warlike independence in their fastnesses beyond the limits of the Government of India's administration or control—from among whom no less than one-seventh of the Indian Regular Army was recruited in A.D. I930.1 Were the Gurkha mercenaries and the Pathan raiders of that day marked out to be remembered in history as the fathers or grandfathers of barbarian conquerors who were to carve out on the plains of Hindustan the Successor-states' of the British Rāj?2

1 For these figures see II. D ( v ), vol. ii, p. 138, footnote 1, above.
2 For the British Indian Government's local practice and experience in employing a Wazīrī militia to guard the North-West Frontier of India in the Waziristan sector see de Watteville, H.: Waziristan, 1919-1920 (London 1925, Constable), especially pp'. 8-9 and 13-14.

{p.467} Whether Englishmen and Afridis or Frenchmen and Kabyles were likely, in course of time, to exchange their respective roles was a question which still lay on the knees of the Gods at the time when this volume was published. In cases such as these, in which we find ourselves in the middle of the story, we can only say that such a denouement appears not impossible in the light of the clear evidence that the like has actually occurred in other cases in which the whole of the drama has already been played out. One such case, in which we are acquainted in some detail with the second act of the play as well as with the first, is the story of the relations between the Hellenic Society in its universal state and the European barbarians beyond the northern times of the Roman Empire. On this historic stage we can watch from beginning to end the parallel processes by which the Dominant Minority sinks into barbarism while the barbarians are making their fortune at the Dominant Minority's expense.

In this performance the play opens in a liberal atmosphere of free contract and enlightened self-interest.

‘The Empire was not an object of hatred to the barbarians. Indeed, they were often eager to be taken into its service; and many of their chiefs, like Alaric or Ataulphus, had no higher ambition than to be appointed to, high military command. On the other hand there was a corresponding readiness on the Roman side to employ barbarian forces in war. From the earliest days of the Empire these auxiliaries appear on the army lists. Germans are found in the bodyguard of Augustus. They fought under Vitellius in the foremost ranks at the battle of Cremona. Vespasian had special confidence in the loyalty of the Sueves, and had two of their chiefs in his service. Marcus Aurelius formed some corps of Germans for his -war with their countrymen on the Danube. In the third century the tendency becomes even more marked. Valerian, in a despatch to Aurelian, describes an army which included troops from Ituraea, Arabia and Mesopotamia, and officers bearing such unmistakable German names as Hariomundus, Hildomundus and Haldagates. Claudius II, after the great defeat which he inflicted on the Goths, enrolled a large number of them under his standards. Probus recruited the frontier garrisons with 16,000 from the wreck of the great host "which had devastated Gaul- The army, of Constantine, in the battle of the Milvian Bridge, was chiefly composed of Germans and Celts and Britons. Of similar composition was the army with which Theodosius defeated Eugenius on the Frigidus.’1

The scholar from whose work this passage is quoted goes on in the same context2 to trace the individual careers of a number of

1 Dill, S.: Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, 2nd edition (London 1905, Macmillan), pp. 291-2.
3 Ibid., pp. 295-6.

{p.468} barbarian military officers who made their mark in the Roman service in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian Era: the Idetus Magnentius; the Franks Arbogastes and Merobaudes and Richomer and Bauto; the Goths Munderich and Gainas and Fravitta; and the Vandal Stilicho. The 'Scythian' Modares, likewise, is proclaimed a barbarian by his name, while his generic epithet tells us that he was a child of the Eurasian Steppe; and 'how many more may have disguised their nationality under Roman names no one can tell'.1 It appears, however, that, about the middle of the fourth century, the Germans in the Roman service started a new practice of retaining their native names;2 and this change of etiquette, which seems to have been abrupt, points to a .sudden access of self-consciousness and self-assurance in the souls of a barbarian personnel which had previously been content to 'go Roman’ without any reservations in favour of its own 'native' past.

It is all the more significant that this new insistence on the barbarians’ side upon a cultural individuality of their own, which they were now asking their Roman employers to accept as something distinctive and inalienable, did not evoke on the Romans' part any counter-demonstration of an anti-barbarian exclusiveness. So far from that, the barbarians in the Roman service began, at this very time, to obtain admission into an inner sanctum of Roman public life which had never been thrown open to them in earlier centuries when their own attitude had been less aggressively self-assertive.

'German chiefs [now] not only obtained the great military commands; they also rose to the consulship, the highest civil honour which the Emperor had to bestow. Dagelaephus and Merobaudes were colleagues of Gratian in this great office. In the reign of Theodosius, Merobaudes, Richomer and Bauto were consuls in successive years, and at least five more German names appear in the reigns of the last emperors of the West, When an office which the Emperor himself was proud to hold was given so freely to men of barbarian origin, it is plain that the old exclusiveness had disappeared and that the Germans had stolen their way into the very citadel of the Empire long before its distant outworks were stormed.' 3

This social triumph of the fifth-century barbarian novi hominess attained its culmination when the Emperor Theodosius's son and successor Arcadius (imperabat A.D. 395-408) deigned to take in marriage the barbarian Bauto's daughter Eudoxia—without scrup-

1 Dill, op. cit., loc. cat.
2 Lot, F.: Les Inversions Germaniques (Paris 1935, Payot). p. 230.
3 Dill, S.: Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire and edition London 1905, Macmillan), pp. 296-7.

{p.469} ling to raise the child of a Prankish soldier-of-fortune to the rank of Augusta, the highest honour open to a woman in the Imperial society of the age.

While the barbarians were thus setting their feet upon the top-most rungs of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were beginning to move in just the opposite direction; for, in the generation before that in which the Teutonic mercenary Bauto achieved the double feat of winning the consular laticlavium for himself and the Imperial purple for his daughter, the Roman Emperor Gratian (imperabat A.D. 375-83) had succumbed to a new-fangled form of inverted snobbery, a mania, not for vulgarity, but for barbarism.

’The most skilful masters of every science and of every art had laboured to form the mind and body of the young prince. . . . But the influence of this elaborate instruction did not penetrate beyond the surface; and,... as soon as time and accident had removed those faithful counsellors from the throne, the emperor of the West insensibly descended to the level of his natural genius; abandoned the reins of government to the ambitious hands which -were stretched forwards to grasp them; and amused his leisure with the most frivolous gratifications. . . . Among the various arts which had exercised the youth of Gratian, he had applied himself with singular inclination and success to manage the horse, to draw the bow, and to dart the javelin; and these qualifications, which might be useful to a soldier, were prostituted to the viler purposes of hunting. Large parks were enclosed for the Imperial pleasures, and plentifully stocked with every species of wild beasts; and Gratian neglected the duties, and even the dignity, of his rank to consume whole days in the vain display of his dexterity and boldness in the chase. The pride and wish of the Roman emperor to excel in an art in which he might be surpassed by the meanest of his slaves reminded the numerous spectators of the examples of Nero and Commodus; but the chaste and temperate Gratian was a stranger to their monstrous vices; and his hands were stained only with the blood of animals.

’The behaviour of Gratian, which degraded his character in the eyes of Mankind, could not have disturbed the security of his reign if the Army had not been provoked to resent their peculiar injuries. As long as the young emperor was guided by the instructions of his masters, he professed himself the friend and pupil of the soldiers; many of his hours were spent in the familiar conversation of the camp;1 and the health, the comforts, the rewards, the honours of his faithful troops appeared to be the object of his attentive concern. But, after Gratian

1 It will be noticed that the respectable Cratian begins his rake’s progress at the point which had been the ruffianly Caracalla's limit (see p. 455, above). The inverse contrasts between the two careers and the two characters give the measure of the distance along the road towards proletarianization that had been travelled by the Hellenic dominant minority in the Roman Empire between the first quarter of the third century and the last quarter of the fourth.—A.J.T.

{p.470} more freely indulged his prevailing taste for hunting and shooting, he naturally connected himself with the most dexterous ministers of his favourite amusement. A body of the Alani was received into the military and domestic service of the palace; and the admirable skill which they were accustomed to display in the unbounded plains of Scythia was exercised, on a more narrow theatre, in the parks and enclosures of Gaul. Gratian admired the talents and customs of these favourite guards, to whom alone he entrusted the defence of his person; and, as if he meant to insult the public opinion, he frequently showed himself to the soldiers and people with the dress and arms, the long bow, the sounding quiver, and the fur garments of a Scythian warrior. The unworthy spectacle of a Roman prince who had renounced the dress and manners of his country filled the minds of the legions with grief and indignation.1 Even the Germans, so strong and formidable in the armies of the Empire, affected to disdain the strange and horrid appearance of the savages of the North, who, in the space of a few years, had wandered from the banks of the Volga to those of the Seine.’2

This craze for barbarian dress and manners eventually cost Gratian his life; but the poor young prince's grisly end did not choke off the rising generation of his class from following the fashion which Gratian had inaugurated.

'There are signs that even in smaller things, such as toilet and dress, Germans, at the beginning of the fifth century, were setting the fashion. Three edicts of Honorius, between 397 and 416, forbid the wearing of trousers,3 long hair and fur coats of the barbarian style within the precincts of the city. The tone of the law of 416 leaves no doubt that the

1 Yet poor Gratian was only doing what was done with impunity in the eighteenth century by the enlightened monarchs of a modern Western World when they dressed up their troopers (and on occasions their own selves) in the outlandish ‘Scythian’ kit of a Hungarian ‘hussar’ or a Polish ‘uhlan’ (Thuricé ‘oghlan’, i.e. one of ‘the boys’ in the American sense).—A.J.T.
2 Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxvii.
3 The hesitating steps by which the Hellenic dominant minority gradually took to trousers are significant marks of the successive stages in its descent down the slippery slope of barbarization, because trousers were the common badge of the barbarians beyond two frontiers: on the one hand, of the Germans and Dacians beyond Rhine and Danube, and, on the other hand, of the Parthians beyond Euphrates. (The trousers of Iran and those of Northern Europe were, of course, alike derived from the Eurasian Steppe, "whence they had been introduced by Nomad invaders: the common descent of the Parthians and the Dacians from the same Eurasian Nomad horde has been mentioned already in II. D (vii), Annex V, vol. ii, p. 435, footnote 1, above.) On this account, trousers were originally regarded as the very insignia of barbarism by the polite society of the Roman Empire, which was at bay on two frontiers against a threat of invasion by war-bands clad in these ‘inexpressibles’. When Virgil has to refer to trousers, he resorts to the decent periphrasis ‘barbara tegmina crurum’ (Aeneid, Book XI, 1. 777); and in the revolutionary year A.D. 69 the commander of the force that marched on Rome from the Rhine in order to secure the Imperial throne for Vitellius did perceptible damage to his cause by imprudently continuing to wear, on the Italian side of the Alps, a garment to which he had become addicted in the harsher climate of a Rhenish garrison-town. ‘Caecina, velut relicta post Alpis saevrtia ac licentia, modeato agmine per Italiarn incessit. ornatum ipsius municipia et coloniae in superbiam trahebant, quod versicolori sagulo, bracas [breeches] indutus, togatos adtoqueretur* (Tacitus: Histories, Book II, chap. 20). As late as A.D. 274 it was the trousers on the legs of the captive Gallic pretender Tetricus that caught the eye of the crowd which watched the Emperor Aurelian's triumphal procession (see V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 219, above) traversing the streets of Rome. “The use of braccae, breeches or trowsers was still considered in Italy as a Gallic and Barbarian fashion”, is Gibbon's observation (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xi, footnote 86). ‘The Romans, however,’ Gibbon adds, ‘had made great advances towards it.’ And Gibbon himself was destined soon to see the polite society of his own world do likewise. There is extant a letter dated the 21st June—7th July, 1778, which was written to the Countess of Carlisle by her husband the Fifth Earl when that nobleman was on a diplomatic mission in America (as one of the Royal Commissioners who had been appointed on the 12th April, 1778, in the forlorn hope of persuading the now indomitable insurgent colonists to accept, at the thirteenth hour, some accommodation which would avert a complete severance of the revolted colonies’ political connexion with the British Crown); and in this letter the following passage occurs:
‘The gnats in this part of the River [Delaware] are as large as sparrows; I have armed myself against them by wearing trousers, which is the constant dress of this country.’ (Historical Manuscripts Commission: Fifteenth Report, Appendix, Part VI: The Manuscripts of the Earl of Carlisle, preserved at Castle Howard (London 1897, Eyre & Spottiswoode), p. 345.)
It was only a few years after this, again, that the French disciples of the American revolutionaries earned the nickname of sons-culottes for appearing in public, not in nothing but their shirts, but shockingly clad in liberal trousers instead of conservative knee-breeches. A superstitious antiquary might be tempted to infer that the act of going into trousers was an infallible outward visible sign of the demoralization of a ci-devant dominant minority.—A.J.T.

{p.471} rage for German fashions was wide-spread and that the previous edicts had been disregarded.’1

The fifth century was the age in which the Romans who were 'going barbarian' and the barbarians who were ‘going Roman’ met one another, in their respective courses, mid-way, and lingered for a moment abreast—until the Romans drifted on again along their downward road towards barbarization and now carried the half-Romanized barbarians backwards with them This brief phase of social parity in an unstable compromise between Barbarism and Civilization may be illustrated by bringing together the portraits of two men both of whom may claim to rank among the outstanding figures of that world in that penultimate phase of its history. Aetius, who was the older man of the two, was officially a Roman, while Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was a child of the succeeding generation, was officially a barbarian. Both alike, however, were born frontiersmen; and the birth-place of both was the same sector of the limes. It was that Lower Danubian sector where the pressure was always particularly high because at this point the north-eastern corner of the Roman Empire touched the head of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe (a funnel up which the flood of Nomadism was apt to surge with the speed and force of the tide in an estuary).2 While their identity of birth-place thus constituted an initial bond between these two distinguished sons of Moesia Secunda, their respective upbringing happened in either case to be such as to bring them still nearer together by counteracting their diversity of social heritage; for, while Aetius

1 Dill, S.: Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, and edition (London 1905, Macmillan), p. 297.
2 See Part III. A, Annex II, vol. iii, pp. 401 and 426-8, above.

{472} was brought up as a hostage among the Goths and Huns, Theodoric was brought up as a hostage at the Roman Imperial Court of Constantinople. The two sketches that here follow both come from the deft pen of the same modern Western scholar;

‘Aetius . . . était Romain. Il était né. . . à Durostorum (aujourd'hul Silistrie).1 Son pére . . . avait fait une carrière brillante. . . . C'est évidemment parce qu'il appartenait à une famille militaire distinguee qu'Aetius, jeune garçon, fut donné comme otage à Alaric. Le chef des Visigoths distingua l'enfant romain, l’instruisit dans métier des armes. Puis Aetius passa, toujours comme otage, chez les Huns, sur lesquels régnait le roi Rougila. ... Il connut à sa cour le neveu du Khan, Attila, et se lia avec lui. Ainsi les deux faineux adversaires de la célèbre bataille du Campus Mauriacus, où devaient s'affronter d'un côté la Romania et les fédérés deres germains, de l’autre la Barbaric tatare avec ses sujets germains, alains, etc., se sont connus dès leur prime jeunesse,2
‘Ce séjour chez les Huns eut des conséquences importantes. Aetius conserva des intelligences chez ce peuple. C'est chez lui qu'il aimait à puiser les mercenaires dont il cornposera les armées dites “romaines” pendant une quinzaine d'années. En 424, alors qu'il favorisait l'usurpation de Johannès centre Valentinien III, Aetius avait été chercher une armée hunnique. En 432, lorsqu'il dut prendre la fuite, vaincu sous Rimini par son rival Boniface, Aetius se réfugia chez les Huns et revint, l'année suivante, avec une armée que lui fournit le roi Rougila. Par la terreur, il se fait alors octroyer le titre de généralissime (magister utriusque millitiae) et la dignité de “Patrice”: c’est-à-dire, de père adoptif de l’empereur. Le remain Aetius n'agit pas autrement que le Visigoth Alaric ou, plus tard en Orient, l’alain Aspar, l’ostrogoth Théodoric. Il est plus barbare d’éducation et de tempérament que le vandale Stilichon.
‘Aetius nous est connu surtout par les panégyriques de Mérobaude et un fragment de la chronique de Renatus Profiiturus Frigeridus. Ces deux écrivains latins du ve siécle sont, comme l’indiquent leurs noms, d’origine germanique: signe des temps.
‘Il faut reconnaître que, si l’Empire a pu tenir trente ans encore en Occident, de 424 à 454, c'est [dû] à la connaissance approfondie que le patrice Aetius avait des hommes et des choses du monde barbare, tant tatare que germanique, non moins que du monde romain.'3

It is instructive to examine this portrait of Aetius in the same synoptic view as the following portrait of Theodoric from the hand of the same artist:

‘Nul barbare ne fut plus comblé de faveur que Théodoric. L'empereur Zénon le nomma patrice, l'adopta même comme fils d'armes

1 Durostorum was one of the fortresses that guarded the Roman military frontier alone the south bank of the Lower Danube.—A.J.T.
2 It is for this reason that another modern Western scholar (quoted in I. C (i) (a), vol. i, p. 60, footnote 1, above) describes the conflict between Aetius and Attila as presenting ‘the image of a civil war’.—AJ.T.
3 Lot, F.: Les Invasions Germaniques (Paris 1935, Payot), pp. 89-90.

(476). Plus tard il sera fait magister militum, désigné pour le consulat. Théodoric n'etait pas étranger au monde gréco-latin. Donné comme otage par son pére en 465, il avait passé à Constantinople dix années, de 8 à 18 ans, les années decisives de rhomme, celles de sa formation. S'il avait ete seul, il aurait fait sa fortune au service de TEmpire d'Orient, comme tant d'autres chefs barbares, comme son rival et homonyme Theodoric le Louche. Mais Theodoric appartenait a la race illustre des “Amales”. Le peuple ostrogothique, qui le reconnaissait pour son chef, avait mis en lui toute sa confiance. Ce sont les revendications incessantes de ses compatriotes qui expliquent son attitude ambigue vis-a-vis de l'Empire, tantdt deferente et soumise, tantot subitement agressive. En 488 enfin, Zenon trouva Foccasion de se debarrasser de ce sujet indocile. Il lui conceda le pays d' “Hesperie” (L’Italie), a charge de s'en render maitre aux depens d'Odoacre.'1

If, having examined and compared this pair of fifth-century portraits, we were now to break off our survey and shut our eyes, we might flatter ourselves that we had already witnessed the closing scene in the play, and that the spectacle on which the curtain was falling was a stable amalgam of Roman and barbarian manners on a level which must be at any rate as high as Theodoric's, though it might also be as low as Aetius's. There is, however, still another scene to come; and this further scene—which is really and truly the final one—has met our eyes already in our portrait-gallery of truants.2 We have there taken notice of a picture of a ci-devant Roman citizen which was drawn from the life in A.D. 448 by a Greek man-of-letters who paid a visit in that year to Attila's camp in the Hungarian Alföld on a diplomatic mission from the Roman Imperial Court at Constantinople. This contemporary of Aetius who is portrayed for us by Priscus had the same taste as Aetius himself—and Aetius's forerunner Gratian—for a barbarian way of life; but the canny Greek (for such he was by birth, like the historian who has immortalized him) had managed to indulge in Gratian's craze without incurring Gratian’s fate; for Fortune had enabled him to carry his barbarization to a length from which even Gratian would probably have recoiled. The story is best told in the words of Priscus the Roman envoy and Greek historian.

‘While I was waiting’ [Priscus tells us, for an audience with Attila’s minister Onegesius,] ‘and was pacing up and down in front of the enclosure surrounding the establishment, I was approached by an individual whom I presumed, from his Nomad dress, to be a native, but who addressed me in Greek with the words “Good morning” (χαîρε)!—a greeting which intrigued me, for here was good Greek issuing from the lips of a Nomad. The Nomads, being the sweepings of the

1 Lot, F., op. cit., p. 135.
2 See V. C (i) (d) 3, pp. 409-10, above.

{p.474} Earth, supplement their diverse vernaculars by some study of either Hunnish or Gothic or Latin (in so far as they have intercourse with the Romans),1 while none of them readily speak Greek except the prisoners carried off from Thrace or from the Adriatic sea-board. These unfortunates, however, were recognizable at sight. Their tattered clothing and unkempt heads marked them out as people who had come down in the world, whereas my friend had all the appearance of a prosperous Nomad, with his clothes so smart and his hair so neatly bobbed.

‘After returning his greeting, I inquired who he was and where he had lived before he had crossed into No-Man’s-Land and adopted the Nomadic Life. He retorted by asking the motive of my eagerness to learn these details. I told him that the cause of my curiosity was his knowledge of Greek. Thereupon he laughed and told me that he was a Greek (Γραικός) by race who had come on Business to the Moesian town of Viminacium on the Danube. He had stayed there a long time, married a local heiress, and enjoyed a spell of prosperity; but he had been stripped of all this -when the town fell into the hands of the barbarians—on which occasion his former wealth had caused him to be reserved for Onegesius himself in the division of the spoils. The well-to-do captives, he mentioned, were the special perquisite (after Attila had taken his choice) of the elite in the Nomadic World, because they fetched the highest price when disposed of. However, he continued, he had distinguished himself in the subsequent actions against the Romans and against the [?Khazar] horde; had made over his winnings on active service to his native master, according to the Nomad etiquette; and had thus obtained his freedom. He had married a native wife; he was the father of children;2 he was an honoured guest at Onegesius's table; and he considered his present life preferable to his past.’ 3

1 Latin was at this time the, language of all the Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, while Greek was hardly spoken any longer anywhere to the north of the Balkan Range (see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 ( p ), vol. iv, p. 326, footnote 2, above).—A.J.T.
2 In due course Priscus's renegade might have become the progenitor of a new Nomad tribe or horde, if the dominion of the Huns on Roman ground had not collapsed at Attila's death but had lasted on for nine or ten generations, like the dominion of the Manchus in the Far East. In the territory of the Jasakto Khan ‘Banner’ of Mongols, in the southern division of the Hsingan Province of ‘Manchukuo’ there was in 1935 an enclave which was at that date still occupied by a tiny autonomous community of prosperous Nomadic stock-breeders who were known as the Manchu-Mongols. The story of this little horde is told as follows by a modern Western scholar who has obtained his knowledge at first hand (Lattimore, O.: The Mongols of Manchuria (London 1935, Allen & Unwin), pp. 228-32):
‘In the reign of Ch'ien Lung (imperabat A.D. 1736-96) a Manchu Imperial princess was given in marriage to the ruling prince this of [the Jasakto Khan] "banner". In her following were seven "slaves" who were later given Mongol wives. On the death of the princess the then prince established them in their present territory. At the same tune he gave them a kind of charter, exempting them from taxes and service, except for the expenses of the annual sacrifices at the tomb of the princess. . . . They have increased to over a hundred families, numbering about a thousand people. . . . The fact that this group is called “Manchu-Mongol” is, in my opinion, misleading. The original seven men were undoubtedly Chinese, and were called Manchu simply because they came as the servants of a Manchu princess. There is a tradition that their were artisans—a carpenter, a mason, and so on—and artisans coming from Peking in the eighteenth century were not likely to be Manchus. The Peking Manchus of that time, being at the height of their prestige, were a leisured class who did not have to work as artisans. Furthermore the surnames Wang and Li, given for three of the families, were not Chinese names that were commonly taken by Manchus during the period when they were at pains to distinguish themselves socially from the Chinese. This group offers, therefore, a well established and clearly dated example of Chinese “turning Mongol”. The numbers are not important; the amount of Chinese blood in a hundred families descended from seven men of the eighteenth century must be very small indeed. It is the process that is important. It undoubtedly was common in the past; for something of the same sort can still be seen in regions where the Chinese penetrate among the Mongols in small numbers.’
This testimony of Lattimore’s from the opposite extremity of Eurasia affords an interesting corroboration of Priscrus's story.—A.J.T.

{p.475} This ci-devant Greek renegade who was encountered by the historian Priscus in Attiia's ordu in A.D. 448 was a portent of things to come; for he stands at the head of a line of truants from an expiring Hellenic dominant minority who managed to make themselves at home in a barbarian environment and who took to this adoptive barbarism so whole-heartedly that they began to lend a hand in fighting the battles of Hun or Teuton war-lords whose ancestors had been employed by their own ancestors as mercenaries. In a different context1 we have already noted how at Vouillé in A.D. 507, when the Visigoths and the Franks were fighting out by the ordeal of battle the question which of two barbarian war-bands was to become the permanent possessor of the derelict Roman Imperial heritage in Gaul, there fought and died at the side of the Visigoth war-lord Alaric a grandson of the Latin man-of-letters Sidonius Apollinaris. The grandfather had been a mild and cultivated Gallo-Roman country-gentleman who could have comfortably worn the shoes of Jane Austen's Mr. Woodhouse, but who would have rubbed his eyes at the spectacle of his little grandson breaking Sarmatian lances instead of turning Latin verses as a gentleman should. Yet young Sidonius was acting no differently from other Gallo-Romans of his generation. At Vouillé there were Gallo-Roman forces engaged on the Prankish as well as on the Gothic side; it was the man-power of the Gallo-Roman population of the Seine Basin, whose allegiance Clovis had previously captured from their native leader Syagrius, that furnished the Frankish adventurer with the means of overthrowing all the rival barbarian war-lords within his reach;2 the survivors among young Sidonius’s Arvernian contemporaries who lived to fight another day had in their turn to exchange an Amalung for a Merowing heretoga and in the sixth century it was the habit of the Frankish kings of Gaul to fight their wars, both civil and foreign, with an unwieldy levée en masse in which their Latin and Teutonic subjects were

1 In II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 166, above.
2 See Taylor, H. O.: The Medieval Mind (London 1911, Macmillan, 2 vols.), vol i, p. 120.
3 Priscus of Panium: History of His Own Times, in Historici Graeci Minores, edited by Dindorf, L., vol i (Berlin and Leipzig 1870, Teubner), pp. 305-9.

{p.476} conscripted promiscuously.1 There is no evidence that in this age the descendants of the Roman provincials showed any less alacrity in following a Führer on the war-path than was shown by the contemporary descendants of barbarians to whom, for centuries past, the war-game had been the breath of life.

‘Ces populations gallo-romaines desarmdes par la mefiance de 'Empire romain reprirent le gout de la guerre avec une rapidit^ incroyable. On les voit, d&s le vie siecle, se battre avec rage centre elles-memes pour soutenir les querelles insensfes d*un Chilperic, d'un Sigebert, d'un Gontran. I/armement, I'instruction militaire, la tactique furent copies sur ceux des Francs. Meme en temps de paix, le Gallo-Romain prit l‘habitude de porter l^p^e au c6te et de se vetir d'habillements serres au corps, k la fagon des Barbaras. A sa mort, il voulut etre enseveli avec ses armes, comrne le guerrier franc. De la, Taspect tout b&rbare des n^cropoles de ce temps. Les pr^tendus "cimeti&res francs" sont en
lit£, pour la plupart, des cimeti&res gallo-romains.’2

In the rare intervals when there was no dynastic bickering among their Prankish war-lords to give these sixth-century Gallo-Romans an excuse for indulging in their new-found barbarian sport the Gallo- Roman cities—reviving the pugnacious tradition of international relations between the city-states of the Hellenic World before the establishment of the Roman Peace—now indulged, in flat defiance of the peace of a barbarian 'successor-state’ in private wars against one another.3 And the local history of the progress of this cult of Barbarism among the epigoni of a Roman governing class can also be traced, and this perhaps most clearly of all, in a change of fashion in names. We have noticed above4 that, about half-way through the fourth century, the barbarians in the Roman Imperial service had dropped the practice—handed down by previous generations, of barbarian hostages and mercenaries —of Latinizing their barbarian names or even giving them up in order to take good Latin names in place of them. The following century saw, in Gaul, the earliest examples of an inverse move, on the part of true-born Romans, to assume German names instead of imposing them; 5 in the last third of the sixth century this late-fifth-century fashion abruptly gained the upper hand; and before the end of the eighth century it had become universal.6

1 For instances see Dill, S. : Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), pp. 119—20 and 274.
2 Lot, F. : Les Invasions Germaniques (Paris 1935, Payot), p. 210.
3 Dill, S., op. cit., p. 265.
4 On p. 468.
5 The process of fusion must have been expedited by the legalization, in A.D. 497, of marriages between Romans and Franks in the Frankish dominions (see Taylor, op. cit., vol. i, p. 120). The Franks do not seem to have thought of treating their Roman fellow subjects as members of a separate and inferior race (Taylor, op. cit., vol. i, p. 123).
6 These socially significant changes of nomenclature are recorded by Lot in op. cit., pp. 229-34. In the Visigothic ‘successor-state’ of the Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula the fusion between Romans and Goths seems to have been completed by the middle of the seventh century of the Christian Era (Taylor, op. cit., vol. i, p. 118).

{p.477} By Charlemagne's time every inhabitant of Gaul was sporting a German name, regardless of whether his or her ancestry was actually Frankish or provincial.

This trivial point of manners tells us how unsubstantial was the ghost of the Roman Empire that was officially evoked in Western Christendom in Charlemagne's reign and person;1 and this Gallic testimony is confirmed by the history of a parallel cult of barbarism in the decline and fall of the Sinic World; for this Sinic story has a singularly different ending from that of our tale of Gaul.

If we make a chronological equation between the break-up of the Roman Empire in the West at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries and the break-up of the Sinic Empire of the Han at the turn of the second and third centuries of the Christian Era, and if we concentrate our attention, in both cases, upon those ex-Imperial territories that were carved up into barbarian ‘successor-states’, then the century in the post-Sinic interregnum in Northern China that will correspond to the eighth century of the Christian Era in the post-Hellenic interregnum in Western Europe will be the sixth century or thereabouts. When we examine, however, what was happening by that time in those northern inarches of the defunct Empire of the Han which had been carved up, at the close of the third century, into barbarian 'successor-states’ under the dominion of ci-devant Eurasian Nomads,2 we behold a revolution of manners which is the exact inverse of the revolution which was consummated hi the eighth century in Gaul.

The respective Sien Pi and Hiongnu and To, Pa founders of the three earliest barbarian 'successor-states’ of the Sinic universal state had already taken care to drape the nakedness of their barbarism under a veil of decency by archaistically bestowing upon their new political creations the polite Sinic names of ‘Pe Yen’ and ‘Pe Han’ and ‘Wei’;3 and some two hundred years later, after the To Pa principality of ‘Wei’ had annexed both of its two neighbours and rivals,4 the cue of ‘de-barbarization’ was taken up and followed out to its logical consequences by one of the princes of ‘Wei’ Hiao-wên ti (regnabat A.D. 4905-499).6 In A,D. 494 this Sinomane

1 The hollowness of ‘the Holy Roman Empire’ has already struck us by contrast with the solidity of the rival structure which was erected in the same century in Orthodox Christendom. For this contrast between ‘the Holy Roman Empire’ of Charlemagne and the East Roman Empire of Leo Syrus see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 ( S ), vol. iv, pp. 322-3, above.
2 See IV. C (ii) ( A ) i, vol. iv, p. 65; V. C (i) (c) 3, in the present volume, pp. 272-3; V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 356; and the present chapter, p. 465, above.
3 See V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 273, above.
4 See V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 356, footnote 6, above.
5 This was the date of Hiao-wên ti’s effective accession. He had been on the throne as a minor, under a regency, since his father’s abdication in A.D. 471.
6 For Hiao-wên ti’s reign and policy see Franke, O.: Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches vol. ii (Berlin 1936, de Gruyter), pp. 208-15.

{p.478} prince of To Pa barbarian origin transferred the seat of his government from his forefathers' camping-ground at P’ing-ch’êng, in the barbarized marches, to the derelict site of the ancient Imperial capital of Loyang; in the same year he prohibited the wearing of barbarian dress by any of his subjects; in 495 he banned the use of the barbarian vernaculars at Court and compelled the barbarian-descended families in the population to exchange their barbarian names for Sinic substitutes; and finally, in 496, he changed the name of his own dynasty from the tell-tale barbarism of ‘To Pa’ to the respectable Sinism of ‘Yuan’. If the Sinic tradition could cast so strong a spell as this over the native prince of a barbarian 'successor-state' some three hundred years after the break-up of the Sinic universal state, it is not surprising to find the universal state itself being resuscitated, after the passage of another hundred years, by the Sui and the T’ang1 with an effectiveness that is likewise characteristic of the corresponding work of an Anatolian Leo Syrus, but which is conspicuously lacking in the work of an Austrasian Charlemagne.2

Before closing our inquiry into the barbarization of dominant minorities, we may pause to ask ourselves whether any of the symptoms of this social phenomenon are discernible in our own world of the modern West. On first thoughts we shall perhaps be inclined to think that our question has received a conclusive answer in the recent conquest of one of the strongest of the surviving fastnesses of Barbarism by one of the weakest of the Western Great Powers of our day. Even if there be a dominant minority in our twentieth-century Western World which may find itself constrained to plead guilty to a charge of vulgarization, can this other danger of barbarization be taken very seriously in a world where the last of the transfrontier barbarians are being subjugated or exterminated under our eyes? The spectacle of Ethiopia may impel us to dismiss our question with a curt answer in the negative; yet, before we finally condemn it as inane, we may do well to look farther afield and remind ourselves of the rather disconcerting fact that, in the present heart of our Western Society's ‘New World’ of North America, there is to-day a large and wide-spread population of European blood and Western Christian social heritage which has been unmistakably and profoundly barbarized by being marooned in the Appalachian backwoods after serving a preliminary term of exile on ‘the Celtic Fringe’.3

1 See V. C (i) (c) 4, p. 356, footnote 6, above, for the historical development, through a number of intervening stages, of the imperium redivivum of the Sui and the T’ang out of the Han Empire's To Pa barbarian ‘successor-state’ in Shansi.
2 This likeness of the Sinic imperium redivivum of the Sui and the T’ang to the East Roman Empire, in a common contrast to ‘the Holy Roman Empire’, is examined further in Part X, below.
3 See II. D (vii), vol. ii, pp. 311-12, above.

{p.479} The barbarizing effect of the American frontier has been described with equal eloquence and insight by an American historian who is a master of the subject.

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

The thesis is that, although the Indian frontier of the United States has ceased to exist as a physical fact with a precise geographical locus, it has succeeded nevertheless in immortalizing itself by setting a permanent spiritual impress upon the national life of a new nation of European origin which, as the frontier travelled westward across the Continent,3 was steadily growing in stature on American ground. If this thesis is correct, then we are bound to declare that, in North America at any rate, a social pull of prodigious force has been exerted upon one section of the dominant minority of our modern Western World by one section of the external proletariat. For, on this showing, the influence of the now physically obsolete Indian frontier is visible not only in the ‘living museum' of barbarized frontiersmen who have been left stranded in an Appalachian fastness by the westward-rolling tide of American 'nation-building’: the frontier has also carved for itself a vaster monument in a more lasting medium by introducing a vein which is certainly distinctive, and possibly predominant, into the new-made American national character. When we remind ourselves of the initial disparity—and this in spiritual culture as well as in corporate physical strength—between the incomers from Europe who have built this new nation up and the American aborigines whom they have swept out of their path, and when

1 Turner, F. J.: The Frontier in American History (New York 1921, Holt), pp. 3-4. Part of this passage has been quoted already in II. D (vii), vol. ii, p. 313, footnote i, above.
2 See V, C (i) ( r ) 3, pp, 207 and 338-32, above.

{p.480} we further recall that the Indian frontier of the European colonies in North America was in physical existence for barely two centuries and a half, reckoning from the landing of the first settlers on the Atlantic coast down to the time when their descendants reached and occupied their natural frontier on the Pacific sea-board of the North American Continent, we shall be more astonished than ever at the strength of the influence exerted by a barbarism which was continually ‘on the run' upon an invading civilization which hardly paused in its march across the American Continent and which was animated by the ‘driving-power’, and backed by the weight, of the whole body social of Western Christendom in its European homeland. In the light of this American portent it would be rash to assume that the spiritual malady of barbarization is a peril which our modern Western dominant minority can afford to disregard. On our American precedent an Ethiopian barbarism that has been crushed by methods more barbarous than its own may perhaps be expected to revenge itself by transferring its habitation from Abyssinian to Italian souls and perpetuating itself, no longer innocuously in a primitive Africa, but lethally in a decadent Europe.


(β) Vulgarity and Barbarism in Art.

{V.C.I. ( d ) 6 (β), p. 480} If we pass next from the general field of 'Manners and Customs' to the special field of Art, we shall find the sense of promiscuity betraying itself, here again, in the two alternative forms of vulgarity and barbarism with which we have now made ourselves familiar. In one or other of these forms the Art of a disintegrating civilization is apt to pay for an abnormally wide and rapid geographical diffusion by forfeiting that distinctiveness of style which is the sign manual of well-being in Art perhaps even more conspicuously than it is in any of the other activities of a civilization that is still in its growth.

Two classic examples of vulgarity in Art are the fashions in which a disintegrating Minoan and a disintegrating Syriac Society, successively radiated their aesthetic influence round the shores of the Mediterranean. The interregnum (circa 1425-1125 B.C.) which followed the overthrow of the Minoan ‘Thalassocracy’ is marked—in the ‘artifacts’, disinterred by our modern Western archaeologists, which are our sole evidence for the course of Minoan history—by the vulgar fashion, labelled ‘Late Minoan III’, which outranges in its diffusion all the earlier and finer Minoan styles;1 and similarly

1 For its range see Glotz, G.: La Civilisation Égéenne (Paris 1923, Renaissance du Livre), pp. 64 and 348—50. In this age when it was in articulo mortis, the Minoan culture spread from the Aegean to Macedonia in one direction and to Cyprus in another, and Syrian princesses took to dressing à la crétoise.

{p.481} the ‘Time of Troubles’ (circa 925-525 B.C.) which followed the breakdown of the Syriac Civilization is marked by the equally vulgar and equally widespread mechanical combination of motifs drawn promiscuously from Egyptiac and from Babylonic sources which was diffused from Tyrian and Sidonian workshops into the sister Hellenic World in the Aegean, as well as into the barbarian hinterlands of Carthage and of Gades.

In the history of Hellenic art a corresponding vulgarity found expression in the excessively rich decoration which came into vogue with the Corinthian order of architecture—an extravagance which is the very antithesis of the distinctive note of the Hellenic genius; and, when we look for outstanding examples of this fashion, which reached its climax in the Imperial Age of Hellenic history (circa 25 B.C.—A.D. 375), we shall not find them at the geographical heart of the Hellenic World. As illustrations of this florid display of aesthetic decadence, the surviving columns of the Olympieum at Athens are not so characteristic as the remains of the temple of a non-Hellenic divinity at Ba‛lbak, or as the sarcophagi that were manufactured by Hellenic 'monumental masons’ to harbour the mortal remains of Philhellene barbarian war-lords on the far eastern rim of the Iranian Plateau.1

If we turn from the archaeological to the literary record of the disintegration of the Hellenic Civilization, we find that the ‘high-brows’ of the first few generations after the breakdown of 431 B.C. bewailed the vulgarization of Hellenic music and the deplorable effect upon the Hellenic êthos of a change for the worse in an art to which Hellenic souls were particularly sensitive. And we have already noticed in another context2 the vulgarization of the Attic drama at the hands of Δινύσουυ Τεχνίτι (‘United Artists, Ltd.’) who tore it up from its roots in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens in order to hawk it up and down the world from Parthia to Spain. In the modern Western World we may observe that it is the floridly decadent and not the severely classical style of Hellenic architecture that has inspired our Western Hellenizing fashions of Baroque and Rococo. And in the so-called 'chocolate-box style’ of our Victorian and Edwardian 'commercial art3 we can discern an analogue of ‘Late Minoan III’ that bids fair to conquer, not merely the Mediterranean Basin, but the whole face of the planet in the service of a peculiarly Western commercial technique of visually advertising the tradesman's wares.

1 See III. C (i) (a), vol. iii, p. 131; III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, p. 247, footnote 2; V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 134—5; and V. C (i) (a) 3, p. 196, above.
2 In IV. C (iii) (b) 14, vol. iv, p. 243, above.
3 For the corresponding modern Western monstrosity of ‘commercial architecture’ see the passage quoted from Frobenius in V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 301, footnote 1, above.

{p.482}The fatuousness of ‘the chocolate-box style’is so desolating that it has provoked even a generation as aesthetically obtuse as ours1 into attempting desperate remedies. Our archaistic flight from vulgarity into a pre-‘ Pre-Raphaelite’ Byzantinism is discussed in a later chapter;2 but in this place we have to take note of the contemporary and alternative flight from vulgarity into Barbarism. Self-respecting Western sculptors of the present day who have not found a congenial asylum in Byzantium have turned their eyes towards Benin; and it is not only in the glyptic branch of art that a Western World whose own sources of creativeness have apparently run dry has been seeking fresh aesthetic inspiration from the barbarians of West Africa. West African music and dancing, as well as West African sculpture, have been imported into the heart of the Western World on the lips and in the limbs of African conscript-immigrants; Congolese slaves have carried them into America, and Senegalese mercenaries into Europe; and the effect upon the êthos of our Western dominant minority has been so swiftly and so deeply demoralizing that, if Plato could have witnessed it, he would assuredly have lifted up his hands and given thanks to Apollo for Timotheus.

This triumph of a Negro art in the northern states of America and in the western countries of Europe represents a much more signal victory for Barbarism than the progressive barbarization of the Hellenic image and superscription on the staters of King Philip’s mintage in the course of the long and slow journey of this Hellenic coin-type from the banks of the Strymon to the banks of the Thames in Ultima Thule.3

To a layman’s eye the flight to Benin and the flight to Byzantium seem equally unlikely to lead the latter-day Western artist to the recovery of his lost soul.

Hoc se quisque modo fugitat, quern scilicet, ut fit,
effugere haud potis est.4

And yet, even if he cannot save himself, it is still not impossible that he may be a means of salvation for others. ‘A mediocre teacher, giving mechanical instruction in a science that has been created by men of genius, may awake in some one of his pupils the vocation which he has never felt in himself ;’ 5 and, if the ‘commercial art’ of a disintegrating Hellenic World performed the astonishing feat of evoking the supremely creative art of Mahayanian

1 On the aesthetic obtuseness of modern Western Man see the acute observations of Dean Inge that have been quoted in III. C (iii), vol. iii, p. 387, above.
2 See V. C. (i) (d) 8 (β), vol. iv, p. 243, above.
3 See V. C. (i) (c) 3, p. 198, above.
4 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 1068-9, quoted already in I. C (i) (a), vol. I, p. 55, above.
4 Bergson, quoted already in III. C (ii) (a), vol. iii, p. 247, above.

{p.483} Buddhism through its encounter with the religious experience of another disintegrating world on Indic ground,1 we cannot venture to pronounce a priori that the modern Western ‘chocolate-box style’ is incapable of working similar miracles as it is flaunted round the globe on the advertiser's hoardings and sky-signs.

1 See III. C (i) (a), vol. iii, p. 131; III. C (u) (a) vol. iii, p. 247, footnote 2; V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 134-5; and V. C (i) (c) 3, p. 196, above.



(δ) Syncretism in Religion

{V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ) p. 565} …Zeno confessed the inadequacy of their own great masters and ensamples by abandoning themselves to an imitation of the Internal Proletariat which was in very truth the sincerest flattery of this profanum vulgus. Nor was their imitation directed solely towards the inward êthos of the rising religions that had made their first epiphany in a proletarian environment: it was also extended, with an undiscriminating zeal, to the details and even the trivialities of these religions’ external rites and organization.

‘In Iamblichus—as contrasted with Plotinus and also still with Porphyry—the individual religious experience, with the whole of its inspiration, is eliminated. Its place is taken by a mystical church with sacraments, a scrupulous exactness in carrying out the forms of worship, a ritual that is closely akin to magic, and a clergy. To give all this its finishing touch Iamblichus introduces a fanaticism which in the Ancient World is something quite new. Porphyry, for example, is vehemently attacked—without regard to any merit that he may have acquired as an opponent of Christianity—because he does not seem to stand on entirely positive ground. This attitude in itself proclaims the advent of a new age. Julian's attempt to found a pagan state church has hitherto been written off as a completely isolated enterprise of the Ancient Civilization in its last phase; but this view, thus expressed, is not correct. In this field, likewise, the Roman emperor has merely executed the Syrian philosopher's design. To adapt a well-known phrase from Modern History, Julian is an Iamblichus on horseback. ‘Julian’s ideas about the elevation of the priesthood reproduce . . . exactly the standpoint of Iamblichus, whose zeal for the priests, for the details of the forms of worship, and for a systematic orthodox doctrine had prepared the ground for the construction of a pagan church. Julian’s role is simply to develop this conception further. The project of establishing a church of this kind is thus one piece of that organic development in 'which the rising fervour of pagan piety expressed itself.’1

The accident of Julian’s birth and office made it possible for the emperor-archaist momentarily to shore up the shaky structure of this would-be Neoplatonic universal church by buttressing it with the massive masonry of a not yet fallen Hellenic universal state. Yet Julian’s impetuous dedication of these vast political means to that bizarre religious purpose merely served to make it plain that

All the King's horses and all the King's men Could not set up Humpty-Dumpty again.2

1 Geffken, J.: Der Ausgang des griechisch-rdmischen Heidentums (Heidelberg 1920, Winter), pp. 113 and 131. See also the present Study, V. C (i) (c) 2, p. 147, above; and V. C (i) (c) 2, Annex II, p. 584; V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 680-3; and V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, pp. 222-3, below.
2 For a more general examination of the relations between churches and governments see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, below.

{p. 566} Julian's state-supported pagan ecclesiastical establishment collapsed in a trice at the news of the death of its Imperial architect and patron; and thereafter nothing remained of Iamblichus's grandiose dream save a pathetically futile coterie of cranks.

‘The sketches of the anti-Christian Eunapius give a picture, which is as remarkable as it is vivid, of the inner life of Hellenes—both men and women—in the fourth century. The picture reveals a society of passionately religious philosophers rapt in contemplation and ecstatically absorbed in the Divine. The spirit of the age breaks out in them, almost morbidly, when they are still in their tender years. This amazing state of things seems hardly capable of being keyed up to any higher pitch; and yet it is not till the fifth century that it attains the acme of its eccentricity. No doubt the contemporary Christian Church likewise displays similar features and produces a fair number of very queer saints; but among the Christians we never find, on quite this scale, any community of people who are completely extravagant, and almost entirely engrossed in unprofitable thoughts and actions, such as we find among these late pagan philosophers who drift like sleep-walkers through a Utopian world of' their own.
‘The special characteristic of these representatives of Paganism is a mutual resemblance which is so close that their common psychic condition absolutely hits the observer in the eye. . . . What is the goal at which these latter-day Hellenes are aiming? It is holiness, purity, the mortification of the flesh, a union with the World of the Gods. This holiness becomes a fixed programme which is followed out with complete singleness of mind. The means employed to this end are an asceticism, an observance of special fast days, and an anchorite's existence which is filled with a constant intentness upon heavenly things….
‘As a genuine regard for science diminishes . . . theurgy—and the magic that is directly bound up with it—gain proportionately in prestige. . . . As the lord of Physical Nature, the philosopher makes rain like a primitive warlock, and knows how to ban an earthquake. He drives out devils through the sheer force of his personality . . . though it is true that there is a painful consciousness that this holy lore is beginning to be lost—a consciousness which inspires enthusiasm for such isolated depositories of the ancient theurgy as still survive.
‘So their life is lived in a world of miracles and legends—and also of inept and undesignedly ludicrous old-wives'-tales. ... A mystical catalepsy and a religious transport strip away all that is natural in the life of body and soul. . . . And the disappearance of all simple and natural feeling finds compensation in an accentuation of supernatural powers. . . .
‘Pythagoreanism has bequeathed a legacy to this age in the participation—which becomes more and more vigorous—of female adepts in the philosophers' spiritual life. Sosipatra is followed by Hypatia, Asclepigenea, Aedesia. The mystical eccentricity of the men commn-

{p. 567} nicates itself to the women as a matter of course; and then the women in their turn win the men's unstinted admiration if they prove themselves receptive pupils of the theurgi and perhaps go on to practice rain-making under the cloak of “Nephelomancy”, like Anthusa of Cilicia.
‘The studies of these sages are naturally confined, in essentials, to Religion—apart from the acquisition of the formal sophistic accomplishments. They plunge deep into the hieratic lore of the Egyptians and tread in the footsteps of innumerable predecessors in their interpretations of the animal-worship of the Holy People; and all other known religions are laid under contribution with equal enthusiasm. Proclus, for instance, as his biographer boasts of him, was acquainted with the whole corpus of Theology, Greek and Barbarian. He addressed his prayers to Marnas of Gaza, to Aesculapius Leontuchus of Ascalon, to Theandrites the god of the Arabs, and to Isis of Philae. He kept the religious festivals of all nations. In his eyes the philosopher was the whole World's hierophant.’1

A fitting epitaph for Proclus—and not for this last of the Neoplatonists alone, but also for his Buddhist and Taoist and Confucian counterparts—is offered us in the following passage from the pen of an eminent living Western psychologist who is manifestly thinking, as he writes, of a world that is neither Julian's nor Skandagupta’s2 nor Hsuanti’s,3 but is the writer's very own:

‘Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth, however true it is that their seeds have fallen from above. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful; and, while Man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, Democracy and Dictatorship, Capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just people of the lower social levels who follow the unconscious forces of the Psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land4— those who are less infected with academic prejudices than

1 Geffken, J.: Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums (Heidelberg 1920, Winter), pp. 190-200. This picture of the last phase of Hellenism is curiously reminiscent of a description of the last phase of the abortive Scandinavian Civilizalion in Iceland which has been quoted in II. D (vii), vol. ii, p. 358, above.
2 In the generation of Skandagupta (imperabat circa A.D. 455—80), on the eve of the break-up of an Indic universal state that had been re-established by the Gupta Dynasty after the intrusion of Hellenism upon the Indie World (see I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 85—6, above), Hinduism was gaining ground, under Imperial patronage, at the expense of a Buddhism that was at the same time rapidly ceasing to be distinguishable from the rising religion that was supplanting it (see Smith, V. A.: The Early History of India, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), p. 303).
3 For the credulity of the Han Emperor Hsuanti (imperabat 73-49 B.C.) see the passage quoted on p. 555, above, from a paper by Dr. Hu Shih.
4 The same phrase is used by Meyer in the passage quoted on p. 543, above,—AJ.T.



ANNEX II TO V. C (i) (c) 2

MARXISM, SOCIALISM, AND CHRISTIANITY

{p. 581} THE advocates of Marxism will perhaps protest that in a rather summary account of the Marxian Philosophy or Faith1 we have made a show of analysing this into a Hegelian and a Jewish and a Christian constituent element without having said a word about the most characteristic and most celebrated part of Marx's message to his fellow men. In the mind of 'the man in the street', the Marxian apologist will point out, Marxism means Socialism; and he will add that 'the man in the street' is substantially right in making this popular equation. Socialism, the Marxian will tell us, is the essence of the Marxian way of life; it is an original element in the Marxian system which cannot be traced to a Hegelian or a Christian or a Jewish or any other pre-Marxian source; and it is a supremely philanthropic ideal—so much so that, when we place it in its proper position at the heart of the Marxian dispensation, the whole of this dispensation will appear in an utterly different light from the lurid colour in which it is maliciously painted by its enemies. As soon as we view it thus in its true proportion and perspective, we shall perceive (we shall be told) that Marxism is eminently humane and constructive in its ulterior aims and in its ultimate effects, and that the destructive violence upon which its enemies have seized as a pretext for discrediting it is no more than an incidental and transitory means to an end which is purely beneficent. Our champion of Marxism will probably follow up this vigorous defence by passing over to the offensive. He will accuse the opponents of his Faith of giving a false pretext for their hostility because they are ashamed of confessing the true reasons. What they really hate and fear in Marxism (he will suggest) is not its revolutionary violence but the fact that its programme of Socialism is a threat to existing anti-social vested interests and an exposure of the inadequacy of pre-Marxian philosophies and religions. The sages and prophets who have left it to Karl Marx to proclaim what is Man's elementary social duty to his neighbour must have been either hypocrites or imbeciles.

In attempting to reply to a Marxian protest on such lines as these we shall readily admit the humaneness and the constructiveness of the ideal for which Socialism stands, as well as the importance of the part which this ideal plays in the Marxian 'ideology'; but we shall find ourselves unable to accept the Marxian contention

1 This account will be found in V. C (i) (c) 2, pp. 177-87, above.

{p. 582} that Socialism is Marx's own original discovery. We shall have to point out, on our part, that there is a Christian Socialism which was practised as well as preached before the Marxian Socialism was ever heard of; and, when our turn comes for taking the offensive, we shall venture to make two assertions. We shall maintain that the Marxian Socialism is derived from the Christian tradition as unmistakably as is the Marxian concern to convert the World. We shall also maintain that the Marxian version of the Christian ideal of philanthropy is an excerpt which has omitted the one thing needful—and indeed indispensable—for making any form of Socialism work.

The social arrangements of the primitive Christian community are only referred to incidentally in the books of the New Testament, because the authors' minds are pre-occupied with other aspects of the life of the Founder and his companions; but these incidental allusions give us glimpses of a picture of a common way of life which is undoubtedly Socialism and indeed Communism in the economic sense1 of a community of goods and services.

In the story of the Passion as told in the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus and his companions are represented as having a common purse which is in Judas Iscariot's keeping.2 And in the preface to the story of Ananias and Sapphira, as told in the Acts of the Apostles, the economic regime of the infant Church on the morrow of the Ascension is depicted as being that of a miniature and rudimentary yet authentic Communist commonwealth.

'The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the Apostles' feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.'3

The complete community of goods that is described in this passage did not, of course, become one of the permanent institu-

1 For the political meaning of Communism as a revival of the Paris Commune of A.D. 1871 see V. C (i) (c) 2, p. 179, footnote 5, above. It was this sense of the word that Lenin had in mind when he re-named the Russian Social-Democratic Party ‘the Russian Communist Party’ in A.D. 1918. The Paris Commune of A.D. 1871 was itself called after the communes of medieval Western Christendom; and these were self-governing commonwealths in which the thing that was shared in common was not property but sovereignty. This medieval usage of the Latin word commune in the sense of a self-governing body politic is a perfectly correct piece of Latinity for which classical authority can be found in the works of Cicero and in the C.I.L.
2 John xii. 6, and xiii. 29.
3 Acts iv. 32-5.

{p. 583} tions of the Christian Church (as, for that matter, it is not being insisted upon to-day in the Soviet Union either); nor can the testimony of the Acts be taken as conclusive evidence that the picture here presented was ever strictly true to the life of the Church even in the Apostolic Age (any more than the first written constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics can be taken as conclusive evidence for the social condition of Russia even in the lifetime of Lenin). What the passage does attest is the social ideal of the early Christian milieu in which the Acts was conceived and written. And, even if this contemporary testimony were lacking, the Christian social ideal of the Apostolic Age could still be reconstructed by inference from the testimony of succeeding centuries, in which the Church was famous for a sensitiveness - that declared itself in material as well as in spiritual good works - to the emotional attitudes and moral responsibilities implied in being one's brother's keeper. This ingrained philanthropic vein in the post-Apostolic Christian tradition comes out in the legend of how St. Lawrence replied to the Roman Government's summons to

1 As evidence for social facts (though not, of course, as evidence for social ideals) the passage just quoted from the Acts of the Apostles is suspect on account of certain coincidences of content, and even of words, which seem too numerous and too close to be dismissed as fortuitous, with other works of literature, both Syriac and Hellenic. For instance, the first sentence in Acts iv, 34 sounds like an echo of the first sentence in Deuteronomy xv. 4; and the whole passage here quoted corresponds in so many points, both of content and of language, with a description of the life of the primitive Pythagorean community at Croton in Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras, §§ 167—9, that it is hardly possible to account for these correspondences on any hypothesis except that of there being some literary relationship between the two passages. (Their literary affinity positively leaps to the eye when they are set out in parallel columns, as they are in Schubert, H. von: Der Kommunismus der Wiedertäufer in Münster und seine Quellen (Heidelberg 1919, Winter), p. 36.) A priori there are two alternative possible relationships. Since Iamblichus lived and wrote no earlier than round about the turn of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian Era, it is chronologically possible that his picture of an early Pythagorean Communism may be a copy of the picture of an early Christian Communism in the Acts; or, alternatively, it is possible that the points of likeness in the two passages may have been inherited independently from some common literary ancestry. Of these two alternative possibilities the former may be ruled out; for, while it is true that by Iamblichus's time the Christian Scriptures were not only accessible but also notorious in pagan circles, it is at the same time almost inconceivable that the spiritual father of a Neoplatonic Antichurch
(see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), p. 565, above) should have brought himself to borrow any of the properties of a Christian Church which he so passionately hated and despised. We are left with the possibility of a common literary ancestry; and von Schubert (op. cit., p. 37, footnote 1) traces both passages back to a passage of Plato, namely Respublica, Book V, 462 c. Presumably there are missing intermediate links in both chains of literary ascent. According to Bertermann, W.: De Iamblichi Vitae Pythagorae Fontibus (Konigsberg 1913 [dissertation], p. 74, as cited by von Schubert in op. cit., p. 36, Iamblichus’s immediate source was the work of the Siceliot Greek historian Timaeus of Tauromenium (vivebat circa 352-256 B.C.). As for the immediate inspiration of the author of the Acts, von Schubert conjectures (op. cit., p. 38) that he may have been emulating Josephus’s description (in The Romano-Jewish War, Book II, chap. 8) of the social life of the contemporary Jewish ascetic confraternity of the Essenes, who practised Comunism, were regarded, by Hellenic and Hellenized Jewish observers, as Jewish counterparts of the Pythagoreans, and may in truth have borrowed some of their beliefs and institutions from a Pythagorean source. The general question of correspondences between passages of the New Testament and passages of pagan Hellenic literature is discussed in V. C (i) (d) 11, Annex I, passim, in vol. vi, and in V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, passim, in vol. vi, below.

{p. 584} deliver up the Church's treasures by collecting a crowd of the poor and needy from the slums of Rome and presenting himself, at their head, to the public authorities. But we need not appeal to an unverifiable Christian legend when we can cite the unimpeachable testimony of Julian the Apostate. The virtual monopoly of social-welfare work by the Christian Church in the Hellenic World of the fourth century of the Christian Era is sorrowfully confessed by Julian in a pastoral letterl to one of the pagan prelates of his Neoplatonic Antichurch:2

‘If Hellenism [i.e. Neoplatonism] is not yet making the progress which we have a right to expect, it is we, its devotees, who are to blame. ... Are we refusing to face the fact that Atheism [i.e. Christianity]3 owes its success above all to its philanthropy towards strangers and to its provision for funerals and to its parade of a high puritanical morality ? These are all, surely, virtues which we ourselves ought to put into practice bona fide. ... You must establish in every city [in your see] an ample number of hospices, in order that strangers may have the benefit of a philanthropy which will be recognized as ours; and this service must not be confined to strangers of our own persuasion; it must be at the disposal of anybody whatsoever who is in need. I have already provided for the allocation to you of the necessary funds. ... A fifth of this grant should be spent on the poor who are in the clientele of the [pagan] clergy; the balance should be distributed to strangers and beggars. It is a disgrace to us that our own people should be notoriously going short of assistance from us when in the Jewish community there is not a single beggar, while the impious Galilaeans are supporting not only their own poor but ours as well. You should instruct the votaries of Hellenism to make voluntary contributions towards these charitable services, and the Hellenic [i.e. pagan] parishes [in your see] to dedicate their first fruits [for this purpose]. You must get our Hellenic community into the habit of doing good works of this kind by instructing them that this is one of our most ancient traditional activities - as is testified by Homer. ... Do not let us allow hostile competitors to outdo us in our own strong points while we give way to a slackness and indifference which are not merely a disgrace to our religion but a downright betrayal of it.’

These passages from the correspondence of the Emperor Julian and from the Acts of the Apostles and from the Gospel according to Saint John will perhaps suffice to demonstrate our three propositions. In the first place they make it clear that Socialism—and

1 Letter from the Emperor Julian to Arsaces, the Chief Priest of Galatia (= Letter No. 84 in Bidez, J.: L’Empéreur Julien: Œuvres Completès: Tome i, 2e Partie: ‘Lettres et Fragments’ (Paris 1924, Les Belles Lettres)).
2 For this abortive Neoplatonic Antichurch see II. D (vii), vol. ii, p. 378; V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, p. 147; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), p. 565-7, above; and V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), Annex, pp. 680-3, and V C (ii) (a), vol. vi, pp. 222-3, below.
3 For this Hellenic name for Christianity see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 ( δ), vol. iv, p. 348, above, and V. C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. 40, footnote 2, and V. C (ii) (a), Annex II, vol. vi, p. 536, below.—AJ.T.

{p. 585} this in the strict formal sense of a community of goods—is one of the principles of the primitive Christian Weltanschauung. In the second place they establish a very strong presumption that the Socialism, as well as the Oecumenicalism, of the Marxian scheme is derived from the Christian tradition. In the third place they reveal the element in the Christian Socialism which the Marxian Socialism has left—or cut—out.

The passage in the Acts represents the philanthropy of the primitive Christian Society as flowing from a God-given grace which was the fruit of a belief in the divinity of Jesus. In other words, the charity which is here depicted as moving the primitive Christians to go—in their mutual concern for one another's welfare—to the extreme length of sharing all their worldly goods is not a mere love of Man for Man (which is the limited literal meaning of the word ‘philanthropy’), but is a spiritual relation to which God is a party as well as His human creatures. In fact, this Christian Socialism is a practical application, on the economic surface of life, of the fundamental religious truth that the brotherhood of Man is a consequence of the fatherhood of God - a truth which is driven home with special force by a religion which teaches that God is not only the father and creator of Man, but also his saviour who has been incarnate in human shape and has suffered, and triumphed over, Death. Christians believe—and a study of History assuredly proves them right - that (beyond the narrow circle of the tribe, in which a parochial ‘honour among thieves’ is maintained at the prohibitive moral price of an Ishmaelitish warfare against a world of foreign enemies) the brotherhood of Man is impossible for Man to achieve in any other way than by enrolling himself as a citizen of a Civitas Dei which transcends the human world and has God himself for its king. And any one who holds this belief will feel certain, a priori, that the Marxian excerpt from a Christian Socialism is an experiment which is doomed to failure because it has denied itself the aid of the spiritual power which

1 And perhaps, through this Christian tradition, from a Hellenic tributary of the river of Christian faith and works (see p. 583, footnote 1, above). ‘A tenuous thread of historical continuity on the plane of ideas (eine feine ideengeschichtiliche Linie) runs from the man of action John of Leyden to the theorist Plato across an interval of 2,000 years
… In motives and in mental scope the Marxian Communism of the present day is something rather different from the Communism of the sixteenth century. Yet now, as then, the idea fills its devotees with an enthusiasm of a religious fervour, and now, as then, again the intolerable tension between the shining ideal and the commonplace realities of life sets in motion the same sodo-psychological forces and produces the same chaotic mixture of the most exalted love with the most savage hatred in the heart of Man toward his fellow men—just as the time of the outbreak of Münster’ (Schubert, op. cit., pp. 56-7). For the vein of Communism in the Anabaptist movement see V. C (i) (c) 2, pp. 169-72, above.
2 For the distinctiveness of this feature in Christianity see furthere V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, pp. 275-8, below.
3 On this point see Bergson, H.:Let Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion (Paris 1932, Alcan), passim.

{p. 586} alone is capable of making Socialism a success. The Christian critic will have no quarrel with the Marxian Socialism for going as far as it does: he will criticize it for not going far enough. Its fatal flaw in his eyes will be a sin of omission and not a sin of commission.

Thus, from the Christian standpoint, the Marxian experiment in Socialism is a tragedy; but this cannot be the Christian observer’s last word; for the responsibility for this tragedy is manifestly shared by the Christian Church itself.

How, in face of such evidence as we have cited, are we to explain the Marxian attitude towards Christianity? The Marxians not only maintain that there is no trace of Socialism in the Christian tradition and that their own prophet has been the first to awaken Man's social conscience: they actually declare that Christianity is one of the most formidable obstacles in the way of their own effort to apply Socialism in practice. ‘Christianity’, they say, ‘is the opiate of the People’; and, in the Soviet Union at any rate, this supposed antithesis and incompatibility between Socialism and Christianity has been so sincerely believed in, and so strongly felt, that the votaries of Christianity or of any other theistic religion have been debarred, ex oficio religionis, from admission to membership of the All-Union Communist Party. In fact, Communism has been definitely and militantly anti-Christian. And, when we ask how this has come to be when Socialism and philanthropy loom as large as they do in the Christian tradition, the answer is, of course, that the Christianity against which the Communists have declared war is neither the first-century Christianity of Jerusalem nor the fourth-century Christianity of the Roman Empire but the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Christianity of the Western World and Russia. It is our modern Western and modern Russian practice of Christianity that has given this occasion for an enemy to blaspheme; and a practice that has aroused a hatred and contempt which are plainly as sincere as they are vehement must have fallen far indeed below the Christian practice of the first four centuries.

Thus the campaign against Christianity which is to-day an integral part of the propaganda of Marxian Socialism is a challenge to the living generation of Christians to examine their consciences and to throw themselves, once more, into an essential Christian activity which they have neglected, or even abandoned, in modern times; and we may aptly begin by addressing the Apostate's searching questions to ourselves:

‘Are we refusing to face the fact that Atheism owes its success above all to its philanthropy? . . . These are virtues which we ourselves ought
{p. 587} to put into practice bona fide.... Do not let us allow hostile competitors to outdo us in our own strong points while we give way to a slackness and indifference which are not merely a disgrace to our religion but a downright betrayal of it.’

Fas est et ab hoste doceri;1 and, if we do take to heart the self-reproachful words of a noble adversary, we latter-day Christians may still turn a Marxian attack upon Christianity to good account as, seven centuries ago, a Paulician attack was turned to account, in comparable circumstances, under the inspired leadership of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic.2 In that event the verdict of History may turn out to be that a re-awakening of the Christian social conscience has been the one great positive practical achievement of Karl Marx; and, in bringing Marx's endeavours to this unexpected issue, the irony of History would not be so cruel as might at first appear; for, if we are right in our thesis that the Marxian Socialism is doomed, a priori, to be a Socialism Manqué, then we must believe that Marx's sole chance of realizing his ideal of a socialized world lies in awaking from its inopportune slumber, and speeding upon its abandoned path, that primitive Christian charity which does know the secret of making Socialism work as one of the terrestrial institutions of a supra-mundane Civitas Dei.

1 Ovid: Metamorphoses, Book IV, 1. 428.
2 See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (β), vol. iv, pp. 370-1, and IV. C (iii) (c) 3 (β), Annex, vol. iv, pp. 652-6, above.

ANNEX TO V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ)

CUJUS REGIO, EJUS RELIGIO ?

{p. 646} IN the chapter to which this Annex refers we have found reason for believing that, when the philosophies thought out by the Dominant Minority and the religions discovered by the Internal Proletariat encounter one another in a competition for the conversion of souls, the outcome of the contest between them is apt to bear out the dictum of a modern Western psychologist that ‘great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below’.1 On this spiritual plane it is, indeed, the Internal Proletariat, and not the Dominant Minority, that proves to be the victor as a rule, on the showing of an empirical survey of a number of cases in point. But we are still left with the question whether the Dominant Minority has it in its power to make up for its spiritual weakness by bringing its physical strength into play and forcing a philosophy or a religion upon its subjects, from above downwards, by means of a political pressure which might be none the less effective for being illegitimate.

If we now examine the historical evidence on this head, we shall find that in general the Dominant Minority's efforts to impose a philosophy or a religion upon the Internal Proletariat by political means are apt to be as unsuccessful—at any rate in the long run—as its analogous efforts to hold the External Proletariat at bay by military force along an artificial stationary frontier.2

This finding contradicts outright one of the sociological theories of the Enlightenment during the Hellenic ‘Time of Troubles’; for, according to this theory, the deliberate imposition of religious practices and beliefs from above downwards, so far from being impossible or even unusual, has actually been the normal origin of religious institutions in societies in process of civilization. This theory has been applied to the religious life of Rome in the following celebrated passage in the work of the historian Polybius (vivebat circa 206-128 B.C.):
‘The point in which the Roman constitution excels others most conspicuously is to be found, in my opinion, in its handling of Religion. In my opinion the Romans have managed to forge the main bond of their social order out of something which the rest of the world execrates: I mean, out of Superstition. In dramatizing their Superstition theatrically and introducing it into private as well as into public life, the

1 C. O. Jung, quoted in V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), on pp. 567-8, above.
2 For the usual outcome of such relations between the Dominant Minority and the
Barbarians see Part VIII, below.

{p. 647} Romans have gone to the most extreme lengths conceivable; and to many observers this will appear extraordinary. In my opinion, however, the Romans have done it with an eye to the masses.1 If it were possible to have an electorate that was composed exclusively of sages, this chicanery might perhaps be unnecessary; but, as a matter of fact, the masses are always unstable and always full of lawless passions, irrational temper and violent rage; and so there is nothing for it but to control them by "the fear of the unknown" and play-acting of that sort, I fancy that this was the reason why our forefathers introduced among the masses those theological beliefs and those notions about Hell that have now become traditional; and I also fancy that, in doing this, our ancestors were not working at random but knew just what they were about. It might be more pertinent to charge our contemporaries with lack of sense and lapse from responsibility for trying to eradicate Religion, as we actually see them doing.’2

This late Hellenic utilitarian theory of the origins of Religion in societies in process of civilization is about as remote from the truth as the modern Western social-contract theory of the origins of states. If we now proceed to examine the evidence, we shall find that, while political power is perhaps not completely impotent to produce effects upon spiritual life, its ability to act in this field is dependent on the presence of certain special combinations of circumstances; and we shall also find that, even then, its range of action is very narrowly circumscribed. In fact, in the history of the occasional endeavours of political potentates to make their wills prevail in the religious sphere by bringing into play the political means at their command, successes are exceptional and failures are the rule.

To take the exceptions first, we may observe that political potentates do sometimes succeed in establishing a cult when this cult is an expression, not of any genuine religious feeling, but merely of some political sentiment that is masquerading in a religious disguise; and in such a case the feat is perhaps not even very difficult to achieve if the political sentiment which the ruler selects for embodiment in a pseudo-religious ritual is one that is already strongly flowing as a spontaneous popular current—such as, for example, the thirst for political unity in a society that has drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of a ‘Time of Troubles’. In these particular circumstances a ruler who has already won a hold over his subjects’ hearts as their human saviour33 may sometimes even

1 In this sentence and -what follows, Polybius credits the dominant minority in the
Roman Commonwealth -with having deliberately and successfuHy put into practice a.
precept that is cold-bloodedly commended by Strabo in a passage that has been quoted
in V. C (i) (jd) 6 (S), p. 561, above.-—AJ.T.
2 Polybius: Historiae, Book VI, chap. 56.
3 For the figure of 'the saviour with the sword* see V. C (u) (a), vol. vi, pp. 178-213, below.

{p. 648} succeed in establishing a cult in which his own office and person and dynasty are the objects of worship.1

The classic example of this tour de force is the deification of human rulers in a disintegrating Hellenic World. The practice began, in the first generation after the breakdown, with the payment of divine honours in Samos to Lysander—the Lacedaemonian commander who had delivered the ‘knock-out blow’ in the Atheno-Peloponnesian War2—and it continued in the deification of Alexander the Great and his successors, until it reached its climax in the deification of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus and the subsequent Roman Emperors for the next two and a half centuries. For that length of time this worship of the Roman Emperors was a success, because it provided an appropriate means of expressing a sense of devout gratitude towards the Principate which was deeply and widely felt. Throughout that age a majority of the inhabitants of the Hellenic universal state which the Caesars had established were devoutly and sincerely grateful for the priceless gift of unity and peace which the Principate had conferred upon the Hellenic World at the end of four centuries of storm and stress; and, as they also appreciated the supreme difficulty of the achievement, as well as its supreme value for themselves, they were ready to acquiesce without much heart-searching (until the advent of Christianity) in the idea that the authors of such acts as this must be beings of a superhuman order.3

Hie vir, hie est, tibi quern promitti saepius audis,
Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet
saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva
Saturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indos
proferet imperiiim.4


And this Virgilian acclamation of Augustus as a living god has an equally famous Horatian parallel:

Caelo tonantem credidimus lovem
regnare; praesens divus habebitur
Augustus adiectis Brit arm is
imperio gravibusque Persis.5

To evoke such strong feelings as these for a worldly saviour and for a political institution is an impressive achievement. Yet the

1 See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (β), vol. iv, p. 408, footnote 3, above.

2 Plutarch: Life of Lysender, chap. 18 (citing Duris).

3 For the sense of the unity of Mankind that is awakened during, and in consequence of the disintegration of a civilization, see V, C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. 1—49, below. For the gratitude that is evoked by the founders and upholders of universal states, see also V. C (ii) (a). vol. vi, p. 181, below. For the penitence of Augustus see V. C (i) (c) 2, p. 78, and V. C (i) (d) 5, p. 435, above, and V. C (ii) (d) 5, p. 435, above, and V. C (ii) (a), vol. Vi, p. 187, below.

4Virgil: Aeneid, Book VI, II. 791-5. The same semi-religious note of veneration for Augustus is also struck by the same poet in Aeneid, Book VIII, II. 678-81; in Georgics, No. 1, II. 500-1; and in Eclogues, No. I, passim

5Horace: Carmina, Book III, Ode v, II. 1-4.

{p. 649} spontaneous emotional attitude on which the Imperial Cult in the Hellenic universal state depended for its vitality1 did not survive the first collapse of the Roman Empire at the turn of the second and third centuries of the Christian Era. As soon as the storm rose again and the stress once more made itself felt, the Emperors themselves became conscious that their now fast wilting official divinity was incapable of standing the strain unaided; and those of them who were blessed with foresight and initiative began to cast about for some supernatural sanction behind and beyond their own tarnished and discredited Imperial Genius.2 While there may have been nothing but the whim of a spoilt and childish pervert behind the religious revolution which was attempted by Elagabalus (imperabat A.D. 218—22,) when this changeling-Caesar presented himself in Rome as the servant of the local Sun-God of the Syrian city of Emesa whose hereditary high priest he happened to be,33 we may confidently attribute a higher motive and a more serious purpose to Aurelian (imperabat A.D. 270-5)4 and to Constantius

1 For the gratitude of the subjects—even more than the citizens—of the Roman Empire to Augustus and his successors in the Principate for the next two centuries see in particular two Greek inscriptions in honour of Augustus that are quoted in Gall, A. von: Βασιλεία τοΰ Θεοΰ (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), p. 453, and in general Charlesworth, M. P.: ‛Providentia and Aeternitas’ in The Harvard Theological Review vol. xxix, No. 2, April 1936; and the same scholars Raleigh Lecture on The Virtues of a Roman Emperor (London 1937, Milford). For the corresponding transfiguration of Augustus, in his grateful subjects' minds, from an unscrupulous and ruthless dictator into a superhuman Saviour of Society see Wendland, P.: Die Hellenistisch-Römiscke Kultur, 2nd and 3rd ed. (Tubingen 1912, Mohr), pp. 143—4. Augustus was not, of course, the first Roman saviour to evoke this sense of gratitude in the hearts of the Greek and Oriental subjects of Rome and to have divine honours paid to him in consequence. In the preceding generation the same subjects had shown the same feelings in the same way towards Augustus's adoptive father Divus Julius and towards Julius's rival Pompey. It was Pompey who took the first steps on the Roman Government's behalf to restore order in regions which the Senate had been content to leave derelict during the hundred years (167—67 B.C.) that had elapsed since the end of the Third Romano-Macedonian War; and the impression that his work made on the beneficiaries was deep and lasting. Cicero testified that ‘omnes nunc in iis locis Gnaeum Pompeium sicut aliquem non ex hac urbe missurn sed de caelo delapsum intuentur’ (De Imperio Gnaei Pompeii (chap. 41). And, nearly two centuries later, the Emperor Hadrian declared that, as he travelled over the World, he found it full of temples dedicated to Pompey (Gall, A. von, op. cit., p. 452).

2 Even at the zenith of the Pose Augusta Divus Caesar bad perhaps, after all, been an idol with feet of clay. Though he was acclaimed as a saviour, ‘This salvation was merely on the material plane and was limited to life on Earth; and, though it may have brought relief and prosperity to the well-to-do and to the cultivated, it offered little or nothing to the masses, who still, as before, felt the heavy pressure of daily life, and who were incapable of improving their position by their own efforts. Caesar-worship gave just as little satisfaction to those who felt in their hearts the longing for something higher than earthly goods, and to whom the uncertain enjoyment of life on this Earth seemed as hollow and as nugatory as the wisdom of Philosophy and of the Enlightenment with their interminable discussions which left the imagination and the spirit cold.’—Meyer, E.: Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, vol. iii (Stuttgart and Berlin 1923, Cotta), p. 381.
s For Elagabalus’s abortive attempt to establish his own divine namesake as the high god of the Roman Pantheon see the present Annex, pp. 685-8, below.

‛Aurelian . . . used to say that the soldiers deceived themselves in supposing that the destinies of the Emperors lay in their hands. For he used to aver that it was God who had bestowed the purple and . . . had decided the period of his reign.’—Auctar Anonymus post Dionem, Dindorf's edition, p. 229, quoted by Cumont, F.: ‘L’Eternité des Empereurs Remains' in Revue d’Histoire et de Literature Religieuses, vol. i (Paris 1896, Macon Protat), p. 447. Compare Timoleon’s saying that ‛he gave thanks to God for having inscribed Timoleon’s name upon His divine decision to save Sicily’.—Plutarch: Life of Timoleon chap. 36.


{p. 650} Chlorus (imperabat A.D. 292-306) when these Illyrian Emperors enlisted under the standard of an abstract and oecumenical Sol Invictus;1 and we shall also notice that Constantine the Great (imperabat A.D. 306-37) took service in his turn, for a season, with his father's Solar tutelary god2 before he transferred his allegiance, once for all, to one of the gods of the internal proletariat who, by Constantino's day, had proved Himself more potent than either Sol or Caesar. The pitched battle between Caesar-worship and Christianity which had opened with Decius's challenge in A.D. 249 and had closed with Galerius's capitulation in A.D. 311 had been deliberately provoked by a school of blind-eyed and high-handed occupants of the Imperial Throne who rejected the far-sighted policy of fortifying the Imperial Cult with the patron- age of some higher divinity in favour of the foolhardy policy of attempting to impose upon all comers, human and divine, by sheer pressure of physical force, a political rite which could now manifestly no longer depend on its old inward spiritual sanction in the hearts of the worshippers.3 The failure of a Decius and a Galerius to maintain the Imperial Cult by persecution had the same significance as the failure of an Aurelian and a Constantius Chlorus to fortify it by subordinating it to a worship of the Unconquered Sun, Between them, the two failures proved conclusively that Caesar-worship, impressive though it might be, was nevertheless no more than a fair-weather cult which was incapable of riding a storm.

If we turn from the Hellenic to the Sumeric World, we shall observe that there is an analogue of Caesar-worship here in the cult of his own human person which was instituted—not by the founder of the Sumeric universal state, Ur-Engur (imperabat circa2298—2281 B.C.),4 but by Ur-Engur's successor Dungi (imperabat circa2280-2223 B.C.).5 We shall also infer—from the fact that

1 See V, C (i) (c) 2, p. 82, footnote 4, above, for these two forms of Sun-worship and for the contrast that they present to one another. For the work of the Illyrian Emperors see V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi. p. 207, below.


2 See Baynes, N. H.: Constantine the Great and the Christian Church (London 1929, J. Milford), pp. 8 and 95—103, as well as the present Annex, pp. 603—4, below.

3 For the victory of the Christian Martyrs over the Roman Imperial Government see IV. C (iii) (b) 12, vol. iv, p. 227, and V. C (i) (d) 3, in the present volume, pp. 407-9, above. By Galerius's day the Caesar-worship that was then delivering the last desperate counter-attack upon an all but triumphant Christian Church was enlisting allies from every quarter to reinforce its anti-Christian front. It was promoting an archaistic revival of historic pagan worships (see Geffken, J.: (Heidelberg 1920, Winter), pp. 28—30); it was fostering the worship of Sol Invictus; and it was patronizing Iamblichus’s Neoplatonic Antichurch (see V. C (i) (d) 6 (δ), pp. 565-6, above, and V. C (i) (d) 8 (δ), vol. vi, p. 88, footnote 3, below).

For Ur-Engur and his work see I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 1o6 and 109, above.

See Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, part (2), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1913, Cotta), pp. 557—8, and Fish, T.: The Cult of King Dungi during the Third Dynasty of Ur (Manchester 1927, University Press, reprinted from The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. xi, No. 2, July 1927). The evidence marshalled by Fish shows that Dungi was worshipped as a god at Lagash, Umma, Drehem, and Ur, and possibly also at Nippur; that a temple (locality uncertain) had already been dedicated to him in his lifetime; and that offerings were made to him as a god (though the dated evidence for these offerings is all posterior to Dungi’s death).

{p. 651} Dungi changed the Imperial style and title from Ur-Engur’s comparatively modest formula King of Sumer and Akkad* to the more pretentious formula ‛King of the Four Quarters’1—that, in calling upon his subjects to worship him as a god, this Sumeric emperor was appealing, as the Roman Caesars appealed, to the gratitude of Mankind towards a being from whose hands they were obtaining the boon of oecumenical unity and peace.2 At the same time the records of Sumeric history that have been unearthed by the spade of the modern Western archaeologist inform us, fragmentary though they are, that the Sumeric Imperial Cult also resembled its Hellenic parallel in the further point of being a short-lived fair-weather contrivance. Dungi's three direct successors on the throne of ‛the Empire of the Four Quarters’ at Ur (imperabant circa 2222-2280 B.C.) duly claimed and received divine honours in their turns, and Ur-Engur, as the founder of the dynasty, appears to have been given a posthumous apotheosis.3 But after the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur there is only one pretender to dominion over ‛the Four Quarters'—Libit-Ishtar of Isin (imperabat circa 2096-2086 B.C.)—who is known to have pretended to divinity as well.4 And, when the equivalent of Diocletian's and Constantine's work was performed for the Sumeric universal state by Hammerabi (imperabat circa1947-1905 B.C.), after the bout "of anarchy which had followed the collapse of the Dynasty of Ur and had continued under the ineffective rule of the Dynasty of Isin,5 we find that this Amorite counterpart of the great Illyrian soldiers

1 Meyer, E., op. cit., vol. i, part (2), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta),
p. 557. See also the present Study, V. C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. 2, below.

2 On this point see V. C (i) df) 7, vol. vi, pp. i—6, below. The conscious association of emperor-worship with the idea of oecumenical unity is clearly attested in the Sumeric World by the fact that the title 'King of the Four Quarters1, which was assumed by Dungi concurrently with his abrogation of divine honours to himself, was not Dungi’s own invention but was a revival of the style and title of the Akkadian militarist Naramsin.
For Naramsin had also anticipated Dungi in laying claim to divinity, as is indicated by the regular prefixing of the god-determinative to Naramsin's name in his official documents and by the affixing of the visual symbol of divinity—a pair of horns—to the conqueror's helmet on his victory stele (Meyer, pp. cat., voL cit., pp. 516 and 528—9). On the other hand, in the interval between Naramsin's generation and Dungi's, a pretension to divinity was not only asserted but was successfully established by Gudea of Ltagash, who was no more than the parochial ruler of a single city-state (ibid., p. 542)- I» claiming divinity without possessing oecumenical sovereignty Gudea could plead that his reign— coinciding, as it happened to do, with a lull in the Sumeric *Time of Troubles' between the subsidence of Akkadian militarism and the onset of the Gutaean Volkerwanderung— was at any rate a time of local peace and prosperity. - .
3 Ibid., pp. 5S&-9; Jeremias, C. t Die VergottUchung der Bttbylmsch-Assynschfn Komge (Leipzig 1919, Hinrichs), pp. 17-18.
4 Ibid., pp. 18-21.
5 See V. C (ii) (<b), vol. vi, pp. 297-8, below.

{p. 652}
who came to the rescue of the Roman Empire adopted, on the religious issue, a policy which we have seen to have been likewise the policy of Aurelian and of Constantius Chlorus. Though in general Hammurabi was deliberately and avowedly restoring the universal state of Ur-Engur and Dungi,1 there was one point in which he broke sharply with Dungi's practice. Instead of ruling as a god incarnate, like Dungi or Augustus, Hammurabi preferred, like Constantius or Constantine, to reign as the human servant of a transcendental divinity who, for this Amorite statesman, took the shape of the Babylonian double of Enlil: the high god Marcfuk-Bel.2 It will be seen that, in the history of the disintegration of the Sumeric Society, the deification of human potentates was the exception, not the rule; and indeed the notion of treating a prince as a god incarnate seems to have been something distinctly foreign to the Sumeric temper and outlook.3
The Sumeric Emperor Dungi is not the only ruler of a universal state who has deified himself as the god incarnate of a 'Kingdom of the Four Quarters'. The self-same title was hit upon—in the opposite hemisphere and in an age that was divided from Dungi's by the lapse of more than three millennia—to designate the universal state of the Andean World;4 and the Sapa Inca ('Unique Inca')* who was the sovereign of this American oecumenical empire was also worshipped, like Dungi, as a god incarnate.6 How this Incaic Imperial Cult would have fared if it had been granted the time to work itself out is a question that can never be answered; for the Andean universal state had been established for barely a century when it was overtaken by the Spanish conquest; and this

1 For this see 1. C (i) (&), vol. i, p. ro6? footnote 2, above.

2 Meyer, op. cit., p. 663. For the identification of Marduk of Babylon with Enlil of
Nippur at this stage of Sumeric history see V. C (i) (oT) 6 (8), pp. 520—30, above. In the Babylonia Society, which was affiliated to the Sumeric, Hammurabi's practice appears to have prevailed over IDungi's. It is true that the god-determinative was sometimes prefixed to the names of the barbarian Kaasite kings of Karduniash (Meyer, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 633; Jerernias, op. cit., pp. 31-2); but this usage was intermittent and apparently capricious; and there is no reason to suppose that it was intended to be taken any more seriously than the caliphial style and title which was usurped, after the downfall of the 'Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, by its Iranic 'successor-states* (see Arnold, Sir T. W-: 3Tfce Calipfiate (Oxford 1934, Clarendon Press), chaps. 97x4). Pace Jeremias, in op. cit., there appears to be no serious evidence for any assumption of divinity by the kings of Assyria. In the Htttite Society—which, like the Babylonic, was affiliated to the Sumeric—*le roi n*est pas divinis6 de son vivant . . . mais il Test apres sa mort: on ne
dit pas de lui *'il est mort**, mais bien "il est devenu dieu" [compare the Roman Emperor Vespasian's expiring sally "puto deus fip"—A.J.T.]. Cette forrnule, fr<£quente dans les tcxtes en langue hittite, n'e&t pas traduite Htt Sralement dans les teattes en akkadien, 06 Ton emploie les expressions en usage a Baby lone. '-—Delaporte, L..: Les Hittites (Paris 1936, Renaissance du Livre), p. 173.

3 See Meyer, op, cit., vol. ii, part (x), 2nd ed. (Berlin and Stuttgart 1928, Cotta), p. 5x2, footnote x.
4 See V. C (i) (d) 7, vol. vi, p. zr below. and Cunow, H.: Geschichte und Kt*Ltw da Inkaretches (Amsterdam 1937, Elsevier), pp. 75—6.

5 See ibid., p. 74.
6 See Joyce, T. A.: South American Archaeology (London 1912, Lee Warner), p. no.

{p. 653} was a storm of such violence that it swept away not only the worship^ of the Inca Emperor but the Incaic Empire itself, and the •whole Andean culture with it, in one all-engulfing cataclysm*
There are strong grounds, however, for believing that even the Inca Pachacutec (imperabat circaA.D, 1400-48), who may be regarded as the founder of the Andean universal state,1 did "not look upon the official worship of his own person and office as a cult which was capable of standing by itself; for it was Pachacutec who organized a Pan-Andean Pantheon in which the high god was not the Inca himself but his progenitor and protector the Sun-God of Corichanca.3

In another context3 we have already noticed the closeness of the resemblance which the Inca Pachacutec*s work of theological and ecclesiastical organization bears to that of the Pharaoh Thothmes III; and indeed the divinity of the Pharaohs in its decline, though npt^at its apogee in the time of 'the Old Kingdom*, seems, like the divinity of the Incas, to have been regarded and represented as derivative from that of the human ruler's celestial parent and patron. If the latter-day Pharaoh was 'the Good God*, he enjoyed this divine status in virtue of being the adoptive son of the Sun-God Re.* Moreover, we have observed that, throughout the long course of the disintegration of the Egyptiac Civilization from the time of the Pyramid-Builders onwards, the figure of the Pharaoh was progressively humanized through being gradually divested of its divine attributes.5 And Thothmes7 decision to organize an Egyptiac Pantheon with Amon-Re at its head may perhaps

1 See II. I> (iv), vol. ii, p. 103, footnote 2, above.

2 See V, C (i) (d) 6 (8), p. 532, above, and the present Annex, p. 694,
below.

3 In the first of the two places cited in the preceding footnote.

4 The Pharaonic title *Son of Re1 is rare in the inscriptions of the Fourth Dynasty
and not much more frequent in those of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. It did not
become part of -che regular style and title of every Pharaoh until the time of the Heracleo-polite princes and their successors of the Eleventh Dynasty (Meyer, op. cir., voL i, part (2) 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin 1913, Cotta), p. 204).

5 In becoming the son of the Ruler of the Universe the Pharaoh rises in status in one sense, but in another sense he sinks, through being subordinated to a higher re-

"the Good God'* * (ibid., p. 208). .
For 'Adoptionism* in general see further V. C (u) (a), vol. vi, pp. 2.71-5, below.
While the living Pharaoh came to'be adopted ex ojjidQ as a son of Re, the living monarchs of the Hindu overseas dominions of Camboja, Champa, and Java seem to have been identified with the gods worshipped in temples which these monarcbs had founded.
*Thus, when Bhadravarman dedicated a temple to Shiva, the god was styled Bhadres-
vara. More that* this, when a king or any distinguished person died, he was commemorated by a statue which reproduced his features but represented him with the attributes of his favourite god____Another form of apotheosis was to describe a king by a ppstfiumous title indicating that he had gone to the heaven of his divine patron (Eliot, Sir Ch.: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold, 3 vols.), vol. iii, p. US)-

s See IV. C (iii) (<:) 2, (£), vol. iv, pp. 408-14* above.

{p. 654} be interpreted as a tacitly yet eloquently conclusive confession, on the Pharaoh's own part, that he himself was not, after all* an incarnation of the high god. Nor, perhaps, would it have lain in Thothmes' power to impose on his subjects any religious system at all—not even this one in which the Pharaoh's person was not the supreme object of worship—if the losing battle which the religion of the Egyptiac dominant minority had been fighting in the preceding age against the rising proletarian-born worship of Osiris had not been unexpectedly suspended to give place to an union sacr£e against the alien worship of the god of the Hyksos.1
Finally, we shall observe that in the Sinic World, as in the Egyptiac and Andean worlds, the human ruler of the universal state exercised his divine authority as a mandatory rather than in his own right. He was merely the Son of Heaven, and not a very god himself ;z and even for this modest executory role, on which the Emperor's hold upon the loyalty of his subjects mainly depended, he was indebted to the Confucian school of philosophers, who invested the Imperial office with this halo of divinity at second hand as a quid pro quo when the Imperial Crown at length came to terms with Confucianism and established it as a philosophy of state. Even in the days of their adversity, before the capitulation of the Han Emperor Wuti,3 the Confucian scholars had known how to make a hostile empire-builder realize the potential value of their support.

'When the scholar Liu Chia quoted Confucian classics.in the presence of the first emperor [of the Han Dynasty], he was cut short by this scolding: "You fool, I have conquered the empire on horseback; what use have I for your classics?" To this, Liu Chia retorted: "Yes, Sire, you have conquered the empire on horseback; but can you govern it on horseback?"4 The Emperor thought that there was something in that, and told him to write a book on why the Ts'ins [had] lost their empire to him* The book was duly written and read to the Emperor chapter by chapter. He was pleased, and gave it the title "The New Book'*, which is preserved to this day.*5

1 See I. C (ii), vol. i, pp. 143—4, above.
2 See Fitzgerald, C. P.: Gmna, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press), pp. 314—15.
3 For yVuti's conversion to Confucianism, -which was one of the momentous events
in Sinic history, see Hackmann, H.: Chinesische Philosophic (Munich 1027, Reinhardt),
&. 173; Forke, A.: Ztie Gedankenvoelt desi Ghinesischen Kulturkreises (Munich and Berlin 1937, Oldenbourg) p. 6; and the present Study, V. C (i) (d) 4, pp. 418—9, above, as well as the present Annex, pp. 707—8, below.
* This is an exact Sinic equivalent of the modern Western mot: *The one thing that
you cannot do with bayonets is to eit on tKem.*—A.J.T.
5 Hu Shin: The Establishment of Confucianism as & State Religion during the Han Dynaaty in The Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. be, 1929, p. 34.

{p. 655} Thereafter Liu Pang's successors on the throne of the Sinlc universal state were wise enough to avoid their Ts'in predecessors' fate by coming to terms with the scholars who had inherited—or usurped—Confucius's academic chair;1 and, as part of this politic Ausgleich between the sword and the pen, they were content to accept a status which might fall short of full divinity, but which had the substantial advantage of resting, not upon the arbitrary fiat of the emperors themselves, but upon the moral authoiitv of a school of litterati whose prestige in the sight of the proletariat was rising at this time pari passu with the descent of their philosophy towards the proletarian level.2 It will be seen that the Sinic Son of Heaven stood nearer to Aurelian the servant of Sol Invictus and to Hammurabi the servant of Marduk than he stood to any Divus Julius or Divus Augustus or deified Naramsin or Dungi. And this less than fully divine status into which the emperors of the Sinic universal state settled down in and after the reign of Han Wuti was taken over by the affiliated Far Eastern Civilization when a ghost of the Empire of the Han was conjured up by the Sui and the T'ang and the Sung,3 and again when, in the course of its disintegration, the main body of the Far Eastern Society was provided with a universal state of its own by the barbarian hands of Mongols and Manchus.4 It was only in the Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization that an effective apotheosis -was conferred upon two of the three great militarists through whose cumulative labours a Japanese 'Time of Troubles' was brought to an end by the establishment of a Japanese universal state at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era.5

1 *The Han Emperors entered into the closest possible association with Confucianism;
they made its teachings into the foundation of their whole theory of state or (it would hardly be an exaggeration to say) into a hallowed state philosophy/—Hackmann, H.: Chinesische Philosophie (Munich 1927, Reinhardt), pp. 172—3.

2 For the proletarianization of the Confucian philosophy in the Age of the Han see the passages quoted from Or. Hu Shih in V. C (i) (d) 6 (§), pp. 549 and 555-6, above.

3 This evocation of a ghost of the Sinic universal state in the main body of the affiliated Far Eastern Society has been touched upon in V, C (i) (d) 6 («)* p. 478, above, and is examined further in Part X, below.

4 See IV. C (ii) (<b) 2, vol. iv, p. 87; V. C (i) (*) i, in the present volume, pp. 53-4; and V. C (i) (c) 4, pp. 348—51, above.

5 The three founders of the Japanese universal state were, of course, Nobunaga
(dominabatur A.D. 1568-82), Hideyoshi (dominabatur A.D. 1582-98), and leyasu (dominabatur A.D. 1598-1603; imperabat A.D. 1603-16 as a Shogun officially recognized by the Mikado), These three Japanese *saviours with the sword* are touched upon further in V. C (ii) (a), vol. vi, pp. 186, 188-9, and 191, below. 'AU three are now equal in the eyes of the [Japanese] Qovernment, since they are listed as deities of First Class Government Shrines of Special Rank dedicated to those great ones, not of the Imperial House, who have rendered special service to the country' (Professor A. L. Sadler in a letter to the writer of this Study). Whether the posthumous honours originally conferred upon them were likewise equal seems to be a debatable question. According to the same scholar in the same letter, 'the honours received by Hideyoshi and leyasu were practically the same when conferred [cf, eundem: The Maker of Modem Japan:

{p. 655} The foregoing survey will perhaps have sufficed to demonstrate the congenital feebleness of cults that are propagated by political

The Life of Tokugawa leyasu (London i937> Allen & Unwin), pp. 17, 2O, 35 and 327—31]; but the cult of the first was stifled and kept under a bushel very completely all through the Tokugawa Era, whereas that of leyasu was naturally elaborated. Nobunaga also received an equivalent deification; but, as his comparatively early death vented him from becoming master of the whole Empire, as did the other two he

-------------- ------- . . . eyasu's posthumous honours

were greater. leyasu is, or was, spoken ot as Oongen bama, the divine manifestation
par excellence. Nobunaga received only the posthumous name Sogen-in, a Buddhist title which is not a sign of deification. AH Buddhists are Riven such a posthumous name.*
~l~"~ ..... ' * *U * L ^ " '

WliJllCU, *.\J , » - itiiliiHl \J1. i^wVfWAiAW *» W*VI>~IA,IU »«rsv- cukAjrvriiu i^iov, vvAiiAC J. CHK3I , Who WaS

an adept in Shinto, 'quoted his interview of a later date at which he had intimated his intention of becoming a divinity like the late Hideyoshi* (Sadler, The Maker of Modem Japan* p. 326). Tenkai's will prevailed; the apotheosis of leyasu under a ayncretistic Shinto-Mahayanian title was carried out in due form at Nikko in A.D. 1617; and Tenkai devoted the rest of his life to the establishment of the new worship. 'For two hundred and sixty years To-sho-dai-Gongen remained the tutelary deity of the ruling powers,

The second and third Shoguns had splendid shrines built for them, but did not receive such high posthumous titles as leyasu' (Sir George Sansom, in the letter quoted above). Under the present regime in Japan Tokugawa Mitaukuni is, however, included, like the three founders of the Japanese universal state, among the deities of First Class Government Shrines of Special Rank.

The status of the Mikado seems to be ambiguous. Sir George Sansom observes, in the letter quoted above, that 'the reigning members of the Imperial House are not, in my opinion, regarded as living gods, though there is, I believe, a school of thought which endeavours to inculcate this conception. In the earliest Imperial rescripts the reigning emperor describes himself as Aki-tsu-Kami, "a Manifest God", but I do not think that this persisted.' Sir George Sansorn's opinion on this point is supported by the fact that, under the present regime in Japan, the authorities aver, when dealing with foreign mission schools, that bowing to a Shinto shrine or to the portrait of the Emperor is not an act of worship (on this point see Holtom; The National Faith of Japan: A Study in Modern Shinto (London 1938, Kegan Paul), pp. 68-70). On the other hand, Professor Sadler, in the letter quoted above, expresses the opinion that *the Emperor would seem to be a "kami" while living: e.g. the primary school text books published by the Government say: *'Wc love him as a father and we reverence him as a deity" [see the verse quoted in Holtom, p. 79, from one of the national readers for primary schools published by the ^Department of Education at Tokyo.—A.J.T.
The word used is had shrines dedicated to him while living/ Sir George Sansom adds that *the emperors are certainly regarded as of divine descent, and the ritual in the Imperial Palace [see Holtom, p. 173.—A. J.T.] includes worship by the Emperor of his divine ancestors, i.e. the Sun-Goddess, the first Emperor, and the Imperial line in general', 'But this collective worship of the Imperial House may be correctly regarded as an aspect of the family worahip of the Imperial Household* (Holtom, p. 173); and a dead emperor apparently does not, as an individual, become a recipient of divine honours automatically ax officio. Out of all the emperors and empresses of the past, historical or mythical, not more than twelve emperors and three empresses are to-day in receipt of public worship at Government shrines (Hal torn > pp. 172—3).
The root cause of this ambiguity in the status of both the living and the dead is
pointed out by Sir George Sanoom in an illuminating caveat* *In a country where
ancestor worship is important, it is difficult to draw a line between the worship of a departed great man as a god, his worship as a hero, and his worship as a personal or

{p. 657}potentates from above downwards through the instrumentality of the propagators* political power. Even when such cults are political in essence, and religious only in form, and even when they correspond to a popular sentiment that is genuine and spontaneous, they seem to show little capacity for surviving storms; and they are at their weakest when they take the shape of a deification of their human authors. Caesar-worship is apt in course of time either to be abandoned altogether or else to be bolstered up by being placed under the aegis of some higher divinity who is not himself just Caesar masquerading as a god incarnate.

There is another class of cases in which a political potentate attempts to impose a cult which is not a mere political institution in a religious guise but is of a genuinely religious character; and in this field, too, we can point to instances in which the experiment has been a success. It appears, however, to be a condition of success in such cases that the religion which is being imposed in this fashion should already be *a going concern* — at any rate in the souls of a minority of its political patron's subjects — and, even when this condition is fulfilled and when success is attained> the price that has to be paid turns out to be a prohibitive one; for a religion which, by an exertion of political authority, is successfully imposed upon all the souls whose bodies are subject to the ruler who is imposing it, is apt to gain this fraction of the world at the price of forfeiting any prospects that it may once have had of becoming — or remaining — a universal church.

For example, when the Maccabees changed, before the close of the second century B.C., from being militant champions of the Jewish religion against a forcible Hellenization1 into being the founders and rulers of one of the 'successor-states* of a Seleucid Empire whose cultural policy they had succeeded in frustrating by force of arms within their own parochial radius, these violent-handed opponents of a persecuting Power immediately became persecutors in their turn. They turned the swords that had first been drawn in self-defence, in order to save the Jewish religion from extinction, to the new and sinister use of imposing this self- same Judaism upon the neighbouring non-Jewish populations — once subject, like the Jews, to the Seleucidae — whom the Maccabees now succeeded in bringing under their own rule. And this

national ancestor. The act of worship performed by a visitor to, say, the shrine of
leyasu does not differ from the act of worship that he woxild perform before the tablets of his own ancestors or before the tomb of the Etnperor Meiji.' f

. , . . ,
Ciii) (&) is, vol. iv, pp. 324-5 ; fV\ C (iii) (c) z (cc), vol iv, p. ^SJand V. C Mfcr) 2, in the present volume, pp. 68-9 and 125-6. above; and V. C (i) (d) 9 (y), vol. vi, pp. 120-3, below.

{p. 658} Maccabaean policy of religious conversion by political force did avail to extend the domain of the Jewish religion from its native Judaea over Idumaea and over 'Galilee of the Gentiles'1 and over a narrow Transjordanian Peraea. Even so, however, this triumph of force was narrowly circumscribed; for it failed to overcome either the religious particularism of the Samaritans or the civic pride of the two rows of Hellenic or Hellenized city-states which flanked the Maccabees' dominions on both sides—one row along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine in Philistia and the other along its desert border in the Decapolis. In fact, the extension of the domain of the Jewish religion through the force of Maccabaean arms was inconsiderable; and even the trivial gain of an expansion through persecution within these close-set limits was to cost the Jewish religion the whole of its spiritual future.

It is the supreme irony of Jewish history that the new ground captured for Judaism by the spear of Alexander Jannaeus (regnabat 102-76 B.C.) did bring to birth, within a hundred years, a Galilaean Jewish prophet whose message to his fellow men was the consummation of all previous Jewish religious experience, and that this inspired Jewish scion of forcibly converted Galilaean Gentiles was then rejected and done to death by the Judaean leaders of the Jewry of his age,2 In thus deliberately refusing the opportunity that was offered to it of realizing its manifest destiny of flowering into Christianity by opening its heart to the gospel of its Galilaean step-child, Judaism not only stultified its spiritual past but forfeited its material future into the bargain. In declining to recognize its expected Messiah in Jesus, Judaism was renouncing its birthright in two great enterprises which eventually made the respective fortunes of two different daughters of Judaism by whom these enterprises were duly carried out in the fullness of time. In the first place Judaism was abandoning the fallow and fertile mission-field of the Hellenic universal state to a Christian Church that was to be driven into independence by its eviction from the Jewish fold; and in the second place Judaism was leaving to an Islam whose founder was to be rebuffed by the Jewish Diaspora in his native Hijaz the subsequent political task of reuniting a Syriac World which had been divided against itself as one consequence of the forcible intrusion of Hellenism upon Syriac

* Matt, iv, 15. For the unexpected and unintended effect of this Maccabaean conquest of Galilee upon th<: history of Jewry and of the World see II. D (iii), vol. ii, pp. 73-4, above, and V. C (ii) tat), Annex II, vol. vi, pp. 477-8 and 499, below.

a On this point see II. D (iii), vol. ii, pp. 73-4, above.

3 The Prophet Muhammad's decision to found a new religion instead of finding his mission in the conversion of hia pagan fellow countrymen to Judaism was expressed symbolically in his substitution of Mecca for Jerusalem as the qiblah towards which his followers were to face when they were performing their prayer-drill.

{p. 659} ground,1 Instead of embracing either of these alternative opportunities for a great career when it had the refusal of both of them, Judaism preferred to fling itself into the forlorn hope of Zealotism — in order to be retrieved as a mere fossil,* by the tardy wisdom of Johanan ben Zakkai, from the wantonly incurred cataclysm of A.D. yo.3

The same .policy of imposing a religious allegiance by the use of political force was adopted, with similar consequences, by the Sasanidae, another dynasty of Syriac anti-Hellenists who 'succeeded in Iran and 'Iraq in accomplishing once for all that patriotic task of eradicating Hellenism in which the Maccabees were only momentarily successful in their own more exposed position west of the Euphrates.4 In the much larger domain over which the Sasanidae succeeded in effectively asserting their political authority, they pursued the Maccabaean policy of using their political power as an instrument for imposing their own religious practices and beliefs upon their subjects.* In this forcible conversion of the eastern half of the Syriac World to Zoroastrianism the Sasanidae obtained, scale for scale, about the same measure of success as had rewarded the corresponding endeavours of the Maccabees in their miniature Machtgeblet in Palestine. The Sasanidae were successful in making Zoroastrianism the prevalent religion within the frontiers of their own empire; but even within these limits they never succeeded in getting rid of every remnant of obstinately non-Zoroastrian religious allegiance ; and they were never able to make their forcibly established church secure against raids on the part of Nestorian Christianity and other non-Zoroastrian faiths from beyond the frontiers, or even against outbreaks of heresy — Manichaean, Mazdakite, and so on — within the bosom of the Zoroastrian Church itself. On the other hand, as the price of this partial success in imposing itself, with the aid of the secular arm, upon the subjects of the Sasanian Crown, Zoroastrianism had to make sacrifices which were as heavy as those which were exacted from Judaism by the religious policy of the Maccabees.

* For this non-religious function of Islam see I. C (i) (<b), vol. i, pp. 73~7» and V. C (i) (c) 2, in the present volume, pp. 127-8, above; and the present Annex, pp. 672-

* * For*Judaism as a fossil see I. 9 (iii), vol. i, p. 355 I- C (i) (<b), vol. i, pp. *•-----

II. D (vi), vol. ii, p. 235; and II. D (vii), vol. n, p. 286, above.

, . , . , .
For the humiliating debt of the Maccabees, for their brief political floruit, to the pUy of the Balance of Power between the rival Seleucid and Roman representatives of a Hellenic dominant minority see the observation quoted from Tacitus {Histomes, Book V, chap. 8) in V, C (i) (d) x, p. 39O, footnote 3, above. .

3 See Pettazzone, R.: La Religions di Zarathttstra (Bologna 1920, Zamchelli), pp. 184-7.

{p. 660} In the first place a politically regimented Zoroastrian Church had to abandon the mission-fields at its gates to rival churches which had refrained from selling their birthright of freedom.1 The Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, with its vast hinterlands in the Eurasian Steppe and on the Steppe's Far Eastern coasts, became a debatable ground between a heretical Manichaean version of Zoroastrianism2 and a Mahayanian version of Buddhism3 and a Nestorian version of Christianity,4 while the orthodox Zoroastrian Church stood aside without taking a hand in the competition for so great a prize.5 At the same time the militantly Zoroastrian Empire of the Sasanidae failed as signally as the Jewish Zealots had failed in an earlier age to complete by force of arms the achievement of expelling an intrusive Hellenism from the holdings that it still retained on Syriac ground. The official Sasanian dynastic programme of reconstituting the Achaemenian Empire of Darius remained unfulfilled from first to last, notwithstanding the perpetual wars of aggression, with a view to its accomplishment, which were waged against the Roman Empire by the Sasanian Power over a period of four centuries ;6 and the demonic ejffort of the Sasanian Padishah Khusru Parwiz in the last and most devastating of these Romano-Persian wars (gerebatur A.D. 603—28) proved as fatal to the Zoroastrian cause as the forlorn hope of the Jewish Zealots in the greatest of the Romano-Jewish wars (gerebatur A.D. 66—70) had proved, in its time, to the cause of Judaism. The duel between Khusru Parwiz and his Roman antagonist Heraclius ended in a reversion to the status quo ante bellum which left the Zoroastrian aggressor still more seriously enfeebled than his Christian victim. And all that Khusru achieved was to prepare the way for the swift accomplishment, by an Islam-under-arms, of a war-aim which had never been attained by a Zoroastrianism-under-arms from beginning to end of the Sasanian regime down to Khusru's own day. On the morrow of Khusru's deposition from the throne by his own war-weary subjects the Primitive Muslim Arabs duly completed the political reunion of the Syriac World by biting off the Syriac provinces of the Roman Empire and ]

1 The lifelessness of JJSoroastrianisrn under the Sasanian regime is pointed out by
Ameer AK: The Spirit of Islam (revised edition, JLondon 1923, Christophers), pp. xxxv—vl.
2 For the relation of Manichaeism to Zoroastrian ism see V. C (i) (c) 3, Annex I, above. For the spread of Manichacism across Central Asia see II. D (vii), vol. ii, P- 375; n» E> (vii),, Annex VIII, vol. ii, p. 450; and Fart III. A, Annex II, vol. iii, pp. 415 and 451, above.
3 For the journey of the Mahayfina from India to the Far East see II. D (vi), Annex,
vol. ii, p. 405, footnote i, and V. C (i) (c) a, in the present volume, pp. 133—46, above.
4 For the spread of Nestorianism across Central Asia see II. D (vi), vol. ii, pp.
*36—8, above.
5 See V. C (i) (c) 3, pp. 340-50, and V, C (i) (c) z> Annex I, pp. 578-9, above.
6 See V. C (i) fc) 3, p. ax6, above.


{p. 66l} at the same bite swallowing the Sasanian Empire whole; and this preliminary and superficial act of political union was followed UD by the gradual spread of Islam, under the aegis of the Arab Caliphate, until it became the uniform faith of a dissolving Syriac Society.* By the same token the destiny which was seized upon by Islam was forfeited by Zoroastrianism; and at the end of the story the religion which had allowed itself to be enticed into the false position of depending for its own advancement upon the political power of the Sasanidae had to pay the penalty of being reduced to a fossilized state and being driven forth from its native ground to live a lingering life-in-death as a mere 'Diaspora* among the Gentiles in the alien environment of the western seaboard of India *
The present plight of the Zoroastrian Church would have been inconceivable to the predecessors of our latter-day Parsees in the age when Zoroastrianism—in virtue of having been established as the official religion of the Sasanian Empire, with the whole strength of the Sasanian Government's right arm behind it__was being professed with at any rate an outward show of devotion by all but a small minority of the inhabitants of a vast tract of Asia extending from the Euphrates on the south-west to the Murghab on the north-east. And the extremeness of the change in the for- tunes of this once established church of Iran and 'Iraq in the course of the last thirteen centuries raises the question whether another faith—namely, the Imaml form of Shi'ism—which is prevalent to-day over an area almost co-extensive with the domain of Zoroastrianism in the Sasanian Age,3 may not perhaps be destined in some future chapter of its history to suifer an equally sensational eclipse, considering that the latest chapter in the history of the Imaml sect of ShTism has borne a singularly close resemblance to the Sasanian chapter in the history of the Zoroastrianism which once enjoyed the same status as the ShTah in the same region. As the now long since ruined material fortunes of Zoroastrianism were made—for a spell of four centuries—at a single stroke w&en Ardashir, the Sasanian prince of Fars, overthrew his Arsacid overlord and established Zoroastrianism as the official religion of his own new empire early in the third century of the Christian Era, so the present material fortunes of the Imaml sect of ShTism have been made by the career and policy of Shah Isma'fl Safawf ,4 -who,

1 The reason why Islam escaped the usual nemesis of chigher religions' that take to
politics is discussed on pp. 672-8, below.
.
2 For Zoroastrianism as a fossil see I. B (iii), vol. i, p. 35; I. C (i) (b), vol. i, pp. 90-2; and II. ID (vi), vol. ii, p. 236, above.

3 For the present extension of the domain of Imam! Shi ism in Iran and Iraq see
II. L> (vi), vol. ii, p. 255, with footnote 3, above.

4 For Shah Ismail's momentous career see I. C (i) (&), Annex I, vol. i, pp. 366-88, above.






VOLUME VI

V. THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS (cont.)

C. THE PROCESS OF THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS (cont.).....1

I. THE CRITERION OF DISINTEGRATION (cont.)....1

(d) Schism in the Soul (cont.)....1

7. The Sense of Unity.....1

8. Archaism ... 48

(α) Archaism in Institutions and Ideas... 49

(β) Archaism in Art .... 50

(γ) Archaism in Language and Literature. .. 62

(δ) Archaism in Religion. . .83

(ε) The Self-Defeat of Archaism....94

9. Futurism ... 97

(α) The Relation between Futurism and Archaism. . . 97

(β) The Breach with the Present. .. 101

The Breach in Manners . ..101

The Breach in Institutions . . . .107

The Breach in Secular Culture and in Religion ... 111

(γ) The Self-Transcendence of Futurism. .. 118

10. Detachment . ..132

11. Transfiguration ... 149

(e) Palingenesia ...... l69

II. AN ANALYSIS OF DISINTEGRATION . . . I75

(a) Relation between Disintegrating Civilizations and Individuals... 175

The Creative Genius as a Saviour . ..175

The Saviour with the Sword ... 178

The Saviour with the'Time-Machine'... 213

The Philosopher masked by a King ... 242

The God Incarnate in a Man ... 259

(b) The Interaction between Individuals in Disintegrating Civilizations...278

The Rhythm of Disintegration ..... 278

The Rhythm in Hellenic History ..... 387

The Rhythm in Sinic History ...291

The Rhythm in Sumeric History ..... 296

The Rhythm in the History of the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom ........ 298

The Rhythm in Hindu History ..... 300

The Rhythm in Syriac History ...301

The Rhythm in the History of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan ...303

The Rhythm in the History of the Main Body of the Far Eastern Civilization ...305

The Rhythm in Babylonic History .... 308

The Rhythm in the History of Orthodox Christendom in Russia ... 308

Vestiges in Minoan History ...312

Symptoms in Western History ...312

III. STANDARDIZATION THROUGH DISINTEGRATION . .. 321

Table I: Universal States ..... 327

Table II: Philosophies ...... 328

Table III: Higher Religions ..... 329

Table IV: Barbarian War-Bands ..... 330

V. C I (d) 7 Annex: The Hellenic Conception of the ‘Cosmopolis’...332

9 (β) Annex: New Eras ..... 339

II Annex I: Aristophanes' Fantasy of 'Cloudcuckooland’ .. . 346

Annex II: Saint Augustine's Conception of the Relations
between the Mundane and the Supra-Mundane Commonwealth...365

II (a) Annex I: The Hellenic Portrait of the Saviour with the Sword...370

Annex II: Christus Patiens ...376

The Problem ..... 376

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 Pagan Heroes .... 409

Table III: Analysis of Correspondences between the
Stories of the Spartan Archaists and those of the Other Heroes .. . 409

Table IV: Common Characters . . .410

Table V: Common Scenes . . .411

Table VI: Analysis of Visual Correspondences
between the Gospels and the Stories of Pagan Heroes . . .412

Table VII: Common Properties . . . 413

Table VIII: Common Words . . . 414

Table IX: Analysis of Verbal Correspondences
between the Gospels and the Stories of Pagan Heroes . . .417

Alternative Possible Explanations . . . 418

Dichtung und Wahrheit . . . 438

The Legend of Hêraklês . . . 465

Table X: Concordance of Correspondences between the Legend
of Hêraklês and the Stories of Jesus and the Pagan Historical Heroes...476

The Ritual Murder of an Incarnate God .... 476

(α) 'The Ride of the Beardless One' .... 481

(β)'The Reign of the Mock King' . .. .481

The Life and Death of Socrates .. . . 486

An Egyptian Bridge between Laconia and Galilee... 496

A Verbal Means of Conveyance . . .500

A Visual Means of Conveyance . . . 508

The Economy of Truth . . . 534

INDEX TO VOLUMES IV-VI ....54I