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<h2> CHAPTER X. — THE ENDLESS EMPIRE </h2>
<p>One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding that
popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say. We cannot
appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have seen the fact. We
make a picture of the things we do not know out of the things we know; and
suppose the traveller's tale to mean no more abroad than it would at home.
If a man acquainted only with English churches is told about certain
French churches that they are much frequented, he makes an English
picture. He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best
clothes going all together at eleven o'clock, and all coming back together
to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impression he would gain on the
spot; of chance people going in and out of the church all day, sometimes
for quite short periods, as if it were a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a
man knowing only English beer-shops hears for the first time of a German
beer-garden, he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place. He
does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the top of his
beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture, beer will go on
flowing into it as from a natural fountain; the drinking of beer being
regarded as the normal state of man, and the cessation of it a decisive
and even dramatic departure. I do not give this example in contempt;
heaven forbid. I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of
Prussianised Germany that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to
those more generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make
Germany once more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instance
of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going or
beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something much more
special, than we should infer from our own land. Now this is true of a
phrase we have all heard of deserted cities or temples in the Near East:
"The Bedouins camp in the ruins." When I have read a hundred times that
Arabs camp in some deserted town or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates,
I always thought of gipsies near some place like Stonehenge. They would
make their own rude shelter near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind
them to light a fire; and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp
there without making much difference. The thing I saw more than once in
Egypt and Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies set to
work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence. It was as
if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle of stones, and
elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to turn the old Druid temple
into a sort of patchwork pavilion. In one sense there is much more
vandalism, and in another sense much more practicality; but it is a
practicality that always stops short of the true creative independence of
going off and building a house of their own. That is the attitude of the
Arab; and it runs through all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of
the Mosque of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork
pavilion. It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments, it
was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions or even
shams.</p>
<p>I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls
of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making an
exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour. He needs
the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does he mind the fact
that somebody else has done the solid part and he has only done the
ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly superior to jealousy, or
that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to
mind living half in somebody else's house and half in his own. The real
quality is probably too subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only
say that there is in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common
sense; which might even be called a short-sighted common sense. But
however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arab
conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency. That is
the note of these nomads in all the things in which they have succeeded
and failed. In that sense they are constructive and in that sense
unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that sense inartistic; in
that sense practical and in that sense unpractical; in that sense cunning
and in that sense innocent. The curtains they would hang round Stonehenge
might be of beautifully selected colours. The banners they waved from
Stonehenge might be defended with glorious courage and enthusiasm. The
prayers they recited in Stonehenge might be essentially worthy of human
dignity, and certainly a great improvement on its older associations of
human sacrifice. All this is true of Islam and the idolatries and
negations are often replaced. But they would not have built Stonehenge;
they would scarcely, so to speak, have troubled to lift a stone of
Stonehenge. They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisbury
or Glastonbury or Lincoln.</p>
<p>That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it, after its
ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in a subtle manner
superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts, he sees this
influence as I first described it, very present and powerful, almost
omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me and to others it is
partly striking only because it is strange. Islam is so different to
Christendom that to see it at all is at first like entering a new world.
But, in my own case at any rate, as the strange colours became more
customary, and especially as I saw more of the established seats of
history, the cities and the framework of the different states, I became
conscious of something else. It was something underneath, undestroyed and
even in a sense unaltered. It was something neither Moslem nor modern; not
merely oriental and yet very different from the new occidental nations
from which I came. For a long time I could not put a name to this
historical atmosphere. Then one day, standing in one of the Greek
churches, one of those houses of gold full of hard highly coloured
pictures, I fancied it came to me. It was the Empire. And certainly not
the raid of Asiatic bandits we call the Turkish Empire. The thing which
had caught my eye in that coloured interior was the carving of a
two-headed eagle in such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a
cross. Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might
well suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of
an Established Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ.
But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire; it
would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle. The
double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Rome and of
Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to the east, as
if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset. Unless I am
mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late as Peter the Great,
though it had been the badge of Austria as the representative of the Holy
Roman Empire. And what I felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape
was something older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria
itself. I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over
Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such as are said to
give a dignity to the civilisation of China. I even understood a sort of
sleepiness about the splendid and handsome Orthodox priests moving fully
robed about the streets. They were not aristocrats but officials; still
moving with the mighty routine of some far-off official system. In so far
as the eagle was an emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant
imperial wars, it was of wars that we in the West have hardly heard of; it
was the emblem of official ovations.</p>
<p>When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With the captives
dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.</p>
<p>That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery of the
Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion, when he
grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls of stone. This
also was far too great a thing for facile praise or blame, a vast
bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified, the most civilised thing
ruling many other civilisations. It was an endless end of the world; for
ever repeating its rich finality. And I myself was still walking in that
long evening of the earth; and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium.</p>
<p>But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was not always at
its evening. Byzantium was not always Byzantine. Nor was the seat of that
power always in the city of Constantine, which was primarily a mere
outpost of the city of Caesar. We must remember Rome as well as Byzantium;
as indeed nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome. The
more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved round that
original idea which may be called the Mediterranean; and the fact that it
became two empires, but remained one civilisation, just as it has become
two churches, but remained one religion.</p>
<p>In this little world there is a story attached to every word; and never
more than when it is the wrong word. For instance, we may say that in
certain cases the word Roman actually means Greek. The Greek Patriarch is
sometimes called the Roman Patriarch; while the real Roman Patriarch, who
actually comes from Rome, is only called the Latin Patriarch, as if he
came from any little town in Latium. The truth behind this confusion is
the truth about five hundred very vital years, which are concealed even
from cultivated Englishmen by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the
Roman Empire was merely decadent and the notion that the Middle Ages were
merely dark. As a fact, even the Dark Ages were not merely dark. And even
the Byzantine Empire was not merely Byzantine. It seems a little unfair
that we should take the very title of decay from that Christian city, for
surely it was yet more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city.
I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as
"Constantinopolitan." But it would surely be a better word for stiffness
and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems and other men of
the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that it still inherited the
huge weight of the name of Rome. Rome had come east and reared against
them this Roman city, and though and priest or soldier who came out of it
might be speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics in
these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation. But its
enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation. Saladin,
the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops degenerate
dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a sounder historical
instinct, "The monks of the imperial race." The survival of the word
merely means that even when the imperial city fell behind them, they did
not surrender their claim to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian
Emperor. That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this
distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see of
Rome sometimes bear the strange name of "The Romans."</p>
<p>Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other. We
have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture; not
half so much. The people who say that parliaments or pictures or gardens
or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic race from the north can
be disposed of by the simple question: why did not the Teutonic race make
them in the north? Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the
neighbourhood of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the
birthplace of Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local
illusion is no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the
roads of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons; and
that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came from Germany. If
I looked about in these parts for a local emblem like that of the eagle, I
might very well find it in the lion. The lion is common enough, of course,
in Christian art both hagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of
Bethlehem of which I shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome,
where he lived with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the
delicate humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters. That
it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should appear in
Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems are in theory
forbidden so to carve images of living things. Some say the Persian
Moslems are less particular; but whatever the explanation, two lions of
highly heraldic appearance are carved over that Saracen gate which
Christians call the gate of St. Stephen; and the best judges seem to agree
that, like so much of the Saracenic shell of Zion, they were partly at
least copied from the shields and crests of the Crusaders.</p>
<p>And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well be the text
for a whole book on the subject. For if they indicate, however indirectly,
the presence of the Latins of the twelfth century, they also indicate the
earlier sources from which the Latin life had itself been drawn. The two
lions are pacing, passant as the heralds would say, in two opposite
directions almost as if prowling to and fro. And this also might well be
symbolic as well as heraldic. For if the Crusaders brought the lion
southward in spite of the conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was
only because the Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the
cold seas and the savage forests. The image of the lion came from north to
south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come from south to
north. The Christian had a symbolic lion he had never seen, and the Moslem
had a real lion that he refused to draw. For we could deduce from the case
of this single creature the fact that all our civilisation came from the
Mediterranean, and the folly of pretending that it came from the North
Sea. Those two heraldic shapes over the gate may be borrowed from the
Norman or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England. They
may have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King
of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion. They may
have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast or jest of our
own comic papers when they talk about the British Lion. But why are there
lions, though of French or feudal origin, on the flag of England? There
might as well be camels or crocodiles, for all the apparent connection
with England or with France. Why was an English king described as having
the heart of a lion, any more than of a tiger? Why do your patriotic
cartoons threaten the world with the wrath of the British Lion; it is
really as strange as if they warned it against stimulating the rage of the
British rhinoceros. Why did not the French and English princes find in the
wild boars, that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their
heraldry? If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of
Scandinavian piracy, why did they not display three wolves on their
shields? Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull, or the
English bull-dog?</p>
<p>The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name of
John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome; and the
Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If there had really been
any justification for the Teutonic generalisation, we should expect the
surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we should expect the hero standing
as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not the prophet who lived on
locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the mystic who mused with his
burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos. If our national hero is John
Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately because that blue sea has run
like a blue thread through all the tapestries of our traditions; or in
other words because our culture, like that of France or Flanders, came
originally from the Mediterranean. And if this is true of our use of the
word "bull," it is obviously even truer of our use of the word "lion." The
later emblem is enough to show that the culture came, not only from the
Mediterranean, but from the southern as well as the northern side of the
Mediterranean. In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great
inland sea; the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle
of the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands
that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one that in the
long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.</p>
<p>In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard the Lion
Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers in Palestine who
have been quite as lion-hearted as he. His superiority was not moral but
intellectual; it consisted in knowing where he was and why he was there.
It arose from the fact that in his time there remained a sort of memory of
the Roman Empire, which some would have re-established as a Holy Roman
Empire. Christendom was still almost one commonwealth; and it seemed to
Richard quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called
England to the opposite edge of it that happened to be called Palestine.
We may think him right or wrong in the particular quarrel, we may think
him innocent or unscrupulous in his incidental methods; but there is next
to no doubt whatever that he did regard himself not merely as conquering
but as re-conquering a realm. He was not like a man attacking total
strangers on a hitherto undiscovered island. He was not opening up a new
country, or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast none of
those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the more enlightened
pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguish republics for the sake of a
gold-mine or an oil-field. Some day, if our modern educational system is
further expanded and enforced, the whole of the past of Palestine may be
entirely forgotten; and a traveller in happier days may have all the
fresher sentiments of one stepping on a new and nameless soil.
Disregarding any dim and lingering legends among the natives, he may then
have the honour of calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking
on a new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville. But King
Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the full freshness of
this sort of adventure. He was not riding into Asia thus romantically and
at random; indeed he was not riding into Asia at all. He was riding into
Europa Irredenta.</p>
<p>But that is to anticipate what happened later and must be considered
later. I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan and political
matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of the Crusade on the
merely pagan and political side. In one sentence, it meant that Rome had
to recover what Byzantium could not keep. But something further had
happened as affecting Rome than anything that could be understood by a man
standing as I have imagined myself standing, in the official area of
Byzantium. When I have said that the Byzantian civilisation seemed still
to be reigning, I meant a curious impression that, in these Eastern
provinces, though the Empire had been more defeated it has been less
disturbed. There is a greater clarity in that ancient air; and fewer
clouds of real revolution and novelty have come between them and their
ancient sun. This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a
foreign religion has successfully fought and ruled. But indeed the enigma
is also the explanation. In the East the continuity of culture has only
been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done. In the West it
has been interrupted by positive things that Christendom itself has done.
In the West the past of Christendom has its perspective blocked up by its
own creations; in the East it is a true perspective of interminable
corridors, with round Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That,
I incline to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west
of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void. It is the
absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence of the experiments
of parliament and popular representation, the absence of medieval
chivalry, the absence of modern nationality. In the East the civilisation
lived on, or if you will, lingered on; in the West it died and was reborn.
But for a long time, it should be remembered, it must have seemed to the
East merely that it died. The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of
barbaric war, while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous
in the sun. The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was
stiffening and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may
not have revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle.
It was something else that was destined to reveal it. The Crusades meant
many things; but in this matter they meant one thing, which was like a
word carried to them on the great west wind. And the word was like that in
an old Irish song: "The west is awake." They heard in the distance the
cries of unknown crowds and felt the earth shaking with the march of mobs;
and behind them came the trampling of horses and the noise of harness and
of horns of war; new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men
full of hope crying out in the old Roman tongue "Id Deus vult," Rome was
risen from the dead.</p>
<p>Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things that he has
looked at the few things that he has seen. I mean the things that come to
him with a curious clearness; so that he actually sees them to be what he
knows them to be. I might almost say that he can believe in them although
he has seen them. There can be no rule about this realisation; it seems to
come in the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only
speak for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with
others. In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at
Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving me beyond
expression to a desperate attempt at description. The church is entered
through a door so small that it it might fairly be called a hole, in which
many have seen, and I think truly, a symbol of some idea of humility. It
is also said that the wall was pierced in this way to prevent the
appearance of a camel during divine service, but even that explanation
would only repeat the same suggestion through the parable of the needle's
eye. Personally I should guess that, in so far as the purpose was
practical, it was meant to keep out much more dangerous animals than
camels, as, for instance, Turks. For the whole church has clearly been
turned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickened in some
or all of its thousand years of religious war. In the blank spaces above
the little doorway hung in old times that strange mosaic of the Magi which
once saved the holy place from destruction, in the strange interlude
between the decline of Rome and the rise of Mahomet. For when the Persians
who had destroyed Jerusalem rode out in triumph to the village of
Bethlehem, they looked up and saw above the door a picture in coloured
stone, a picture of themselves. They were following a strange star and
worshipping an unknown child. For a Christian artist, following some
ancient Eastern tradition containing an eternal truth, had drawn the three
wise men with the long robes and high head-dresses of Persia. The
worshippers of the sun had come westward for the worship of the star. But
whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it is now or
coloured with the gold and purple images of the Persians, the inside of
the church would always be by comparison abruptly dark. As familiarity
turns the darkness to twilight, and the twilight to a grey daylight, the
first impression is that of two rows of towering pillars. They are of a
dark red stone having much of the appearance of a dark red marble; and
they are crowned with the acanthus in the manner of the Corinthian school.
They were carved and set up at the command of Constantine; and beyond
them, at the other end of the church beside the attar, is the dark
stairway that descends under the canopies of rock to the stable where
Christ was born.</p>
<p>Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it were
crushing, were these red columns of Constantine. In explanation of the
sentiment there are a thousand things that want saying and cannot be said.
Never have I felt so vividly the great fact of our history; that the
Christian religion is like a huge bridge across a boundless sea, which
alone connects us with the men who made the world, and yet have utterly
vanished from the world. To put it curtly and very crudely on this point
alone it was possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire
him. All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know
the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple to
Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what
he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian
Virgin, or something profoundly different? Was he quite serious about
Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a
Christian? If the spirit was different from ours we cannot hope to
understand it, and if the spirit was like ours, the spirit was expressed
in images that no longer express it. But it is here that he and I meet;
and salute the same images in the end.</p>
<p>In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of sympathy with
strange things that went through me in that twilight of the tall pillars,
like giants robed in purple, standing still and looking down into that
dark hole in the ground. Here halted that imperial civilisation, when it
had marched in triumph through the whole world; here in the evening of its
days it came trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three
kings. For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one
that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave. And the lord
of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down into that
darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars in his own sky
were dead. They were deities no longer but only a brilliant dust,
scattered down the vain void of Lucretius. The stars were as stale as they
were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were
cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of
mortality; they were chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable
as the dead. There are not many men in the modern world who do not know
that mood, though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final
and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black
hole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark; and it
had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do. It had
disappeared.</p>
<p>There are some who resent the presence of such purple beside the plain
stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that they always rebuke it as
if it were a blind vulgarity like the red plush of a parvenu; a mere
insensibility to a mere incongruity. For in fact the insensibility is in
the critics and not the artists. It is an insensibility not to an
accidental incongruity but to an artistic contrast. Indeed it is an
insensibility of a somewhat tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in
those sceptics who make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that
they fail to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale,
even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors and
designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of the holy poor
to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting on the sumptuousness
of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not
entirely improbable that they may have been conscious of the contrast
themselves. I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in
the sceptics and simplifiers, which I find very fatiguing. I do not mind a
man not believing a story, but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be
allowed the expression) by a man who can tell a story without seeing the
point of the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie. And
a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy inconsistency is
merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design. He is like a man who
should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar maid and say
doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really <i>a mariage de
convenance</i>; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but not
without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience," any
more than <i>hors d'oeuvre</i> is the French for "out of work"; but may be
more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match." But nobody thought
the match of the king and the beggar maid conventionally a suitable match;
and nobody would ever have thought the story worth telling if it had been.
It is like saying that Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of
Alexander, must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek
architecture; or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly
inconsistent with court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable
cookery book. I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a
lie; but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might even
say the joke of it. I do not object to his rejecting the story as a tall
story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see the point or end or
upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle or spire of that sublime
tower.</p>
<p>This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many sacred things as
it does that of the shrine of Bethlehem. It is applied to the divine
reality of Bethlehem itself, as when sceptics still sneer at the
littleness, the localism, the provincial particularity and obscurity of
that divine origin; as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a
contrast which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have
incessantly shouted and proclaimed. In this capital case, of course, the
same principle holds. A man may think the tale is incredible; but it would
never have been told at all if it had not been incongruous. But this
particular case of the lesser contrast, that between the imperial pomp and
the rustic poverty of the carpenter and the shepherds, is alone enough to
illustrate the strange artistic fallacy involved. If it be the point that
an emperor came to worship a carpenter, it is as artistically necessary to
make the emperor imperial as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to
make plain to plain people that before this shrine kings are no better
than shepherds, it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as
that the shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectuals do not
know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough even to try to
make modern intellectualism popular. Now this conception of pomp as a
popular thing, this conception of a concession to common human nature in
colour and symbol, has a considerable bearing on many misunderstandings
about the original enthusiasm that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over
the whole Roman Empire. It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly
rebuked historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad.
They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of all
nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds, because it
did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic as their idols, or did
prove itself to patriots something as lovable as their native land. In
many other matters indeed, besides this popular art, we may find examples
of the same illogical prejudice. Nothing betrays more curiously the bias
of historians against the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in
Christians the very human indulgences that they have praised in heathens.
The same arts and allegories, the same phraseologies and philosophies,
which appear first as proofs of heathen health turn up later as proofs of
Christian corruption. It was noble of pagans to be pagan, but it was
unpardonable of Christians to be paganised. They never tire of telling us
of the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, but the Church
was infamous because it satisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the
Roman power.</p>
<p>Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meet the claims of
philosophy I will not here dwell at length. I will only remark in passing
that it is an utter fallacy to suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests
in his fascinating <i>Outline of History</i>, that the subtleties of
theology were a mere falling away from the simplicities of religion.
Religion may be better simple for those who find it simple; but there are
bound to be many who in any case find it subtle, among those who think
about it and especially those who doubt about it. To take an example,
there is no saying which the humanitarians of a broad religion more
commonly offer as a model of simplicity than that most mystical
affirmation "God is Love." And there is no theological quarrel of the
Councils of the Church which they, especially Mr. Wells, more commonly
deride as bitter and barren than that at the Council of Nicea about the
Co-eternity of the Divine Son. Yet the subtle statement is simply a
metaphysical explanation of the simple statement; and it would be quite
possible even to make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could
not love when there was nothing to be loved. Now the Church Councils were
originally very popular, not to say riotous assemblies. So far from being
undemocratic, they were rather too democratic; the real case against them
was that they passed by uproarious votes, and not without violence, things
that had ultimately to be considered more calmly by experts. But it may
reasonably be suggested, I think, that the concentration of the Greek
intellect on these things did gradually pass from a popular to a more
professional or official thing; and that the traces of it have finally
tended to fade from the official religion of the East. It was far
otherwise with the more poetical and therefore more practical religion of
the West. It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and
affection in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King. In
the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered its youth.
That is the meaning of the movement I have described as the awakening of
the West and the resurrection of Rome. And the whole point of that
movement, as I propose to suggest, was that it was a popular movement. It
had returned with exactly that strange and simple energy that belongs to
the story of Bethlehem. Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to
look down into that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him
when it seemed to end in the entrails of the earth. The men who followed
him passed on, as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark
Ages; but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that world of
death, and their journey ended in the land of the living. They came out
into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men have looked on before or
after; they heard the hammers of hundreds of happy craftsmen working for
once according to their own will, and saw St. Francis walking with his
halo a cloud of birds.</p>
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