Chapter VII: Problems of the Arabian Culture (1)

(A)

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

I

In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon _Pseudomorphosis_.

By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.

This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization,[277] which for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its “Merovingian period” is marked by the dictatorship of a small[278] Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking[279] peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of man to God, a wholly new world-feeling, penetrated all the current religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh, impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. But precisely at this juncture there came the Macedonians--so appositely that some inner connexion is not altogether impossible, for the Persian power had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of Classical Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India. The kingdoms of the Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly, states of pre-Arabian spirit--the Seleucid Empire, which actually coincided geographically with the region of Aramaic speech, was in fact such a state by 200 B.C. But from the battle of Pydna[280] onwards it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the Classical Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which had its centre of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared the Pseudomorphosis.

The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost of the group of higher Cultures--the only one which, in point both of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the outer moulds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which has unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate branches--each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking--and so prevented the big problems from being even seen. In this instance the consequences of specialization have been graver perhaps than in any other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of Classical philology and made the Classical language-frontier their eastern horizon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of development on both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no existence. The result is a perspective of “Ancient,” “Mediæval,” and “Modern” history, ordered and defined by the use of the Greek and Latin languages. For the experts of the old languages, with their “texts,” Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids were unattackable, and the consequence is that in “history” these scarcely exist at all. The literature-researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit of the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramæan region, if they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved in Greek, he embodies in his “Late Greek literature” and proceeds to classify as a special period of that literature. The cognate texts in other languages are outside his department and have been brought into other groups of literature in the same artificial way. And yet here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature never coincides with the history of a language.[281] Here, in reality, was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single in spirit, but written in several languages--the Classical amongst others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongue. There are Talmudic, Manichæan, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national literatures, but _not_ Hellenistic or Hebrew.

Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into subdivisions according to the different West-European confessions, and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect, their immense problem[282] came to be regarded as a minor branch of the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but has been _completely forgotten_ by all the major histories of religions with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian sect (since folk-lore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the greatest task that historical research has to face to-day.

II

The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own state. The later writers are full of complaints concerning the depopulation and spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above all, the mother countries Italy and Greece. But those provinces which belong to the Magian world are consistently excepted in these mournful surveys. Syria in particular is densely peopled and, like Parthian Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit.

The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner or later to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from this standpoint, we see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and Sulla, Cæsar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian, this East striving ever more intensely to free itself from the historically dying West, the fellah-world waking up. The transfer of the capital to Byzantium was a great symbol. Diocletian had selected Nicodemia; Cesar had had thoughts of Alexandria or Troy. A better choice than any would have been Antioch. But the act came too late by three centuries, and these had been the decisive period of the Magian Springtime.

The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there _it should have been Antony who won_. It was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came there to an issue--that struggle had been fought out at Cannæ and Zama, where it was the tragic fate of Hannibal to stand as champion not for his own land, but for Hellenism. At Actium it was the unborn Arabian Culture that was opposed to iron-grey Classical Civilization; the issue lay between Principate and Caliphate. Antony’s victory would have freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of Roman _Imperium_. A comparable event in the history of the West is the battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and made “Frankistan” into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic speech, religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes, giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find expression in the long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism. That the equivalent of these things actually happened to the Arabian world was due to the fact that the Syro-Persian peoples produced no Charles Martel to battle along with Mithradates or Brutus and Cassius or Antony (or for that matter without them) against Rome.

A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (_c._ A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya Muromyets.[283] The whole immense difference between the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast of these with the “contemporary” Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen sagas of the Migration-period in the form of the _Hildebrandslied_ and the _Waltharilied_.[284] The Russian “Merovingian” period begins with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-1725). It corresponds exactly to the period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687), which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591) in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin’s patriarchal narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.[285] There could hardly be a closer parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of Seleucid--that is, of choosing between Old Russian and “Western” ways, and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes and not Aramæans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South--of Byzantium and Jerusalem--strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabæan hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers--false, unnatural, unconvincing. “Petersburg,” says Dostoyevski, “is the most abstract and artificial city in the world.” Born in it though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic artifact-cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on Imperial Rome.

After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and “Europe” was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome, just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had been antique, pagan, devilish. “The first condition of emancipation for the Russian soul,” wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, “is that it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul.” Moscow is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabæan times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem, against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon, against the cities of the West with their refinement and their splendour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme--the one kind is hatred of the alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the other a surfeited disgust of one’s own proper overgrowths. Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: “Everyone in street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith.” So might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians of the days before 1914--dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or women’s education--are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie and, in general, no true class-system, but merely, as in the Frankish dominions, lord and peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a fortified residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market. The imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on the soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities of the Court, the administration, the traders, but that which lives in it is, on the top, an embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own Dostoyevski, perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating the stony grey world into which Antichrist has tempted them. Moscow had no proper soul. The spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between the two worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the pseudomorphosis, it is enough that Dostoyevski is the peasant, and Tolstoi the man of Western society. The one could never in his soul get away from the land; the other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could never get near it.

_Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia._ The inner Tolstoi is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of Petrinism even when he is denying it. The West is never without a negative--the guillotine, too, was a true daughter of Versailles--and rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoi could never shake it off. Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the father of Bolshevism. The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and “its” 1917 revolution, stands confessed in his posthumously published _A Light Shines in the Darkness_. This hatred Dostoyevski does not know. His passionate power of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well--“I have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe.” He has passed beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from _his_ future he looks back over them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of this future _certain_. “I will go to Europe,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Alyosha; “I know well enough that I shall be going only to a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know--even now I know--I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over them.” Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding, “enlightened” and “socially minded.” All that he sees about him takes the Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a _problem_, whereas Dostoyevski does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to get within sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears, recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoi’s hatred of property is an economist’s, his hatred of society a social reformer’s, his hatred of the State a political theorist’s. Hence his immense effect upon the West--he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.

Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His “Dæmons” were denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts--“conservative” and “revolutionary” were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevski, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism, even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it--as he always intended to do--would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and Jewish literary forms. Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the Western novel--_Anna Karenina_ distances every rival--and even in his peasant’s garb remains a man of polite society.

Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of the metaphysical by the social, and _ipso facto_ a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and “Civilized”--the social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps _because_ he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia’s hatred. It was the people itself, which, _without hatred_, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease, destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi’s Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevski’s Christianity the next thousand years will belong.

III

Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion as the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring up all the forms of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism, feudal fealty, minstrelsy, the crusade spirit, all existed in the first centuries of the Arabian Culture and will be found in it as soon as we know how to look for them. The legion existed in name even after Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for all the world like ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination amounts to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in the West the Cæsar-title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East transformed itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal state of mature Gothic. In the Sassanid Empire,[286] in Hauran,[287] in southern Arabia, there dawned a pure feudal period. The exploits of a king of Saba,[288] Shamir Juharish, are immortalized like those of a Roland or an Arthur, in the Arabic saga which tells of his advance through Persia as far as China.[289] The Kingdom of Ma’in[290] existed side by side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before Christ, and its remains (which suggest comparisons with Mycenæ and Tiryns) extend deeply into Africa.[291] But now the feudal age flowered throughout Arabia and even in the mountains of Abyssinia.[292] In Axum there arose during early Christian times mighty castles and kings’ tombs with the largest monoliths in the world.[293] Behind the kings stands a feudal nobility of counts (_kail_) and wardens (_kabir_), vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more and more narrowed the power of the king and his household. The endless Christian-Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom of Axum[294] have essentially the character of chivalry-warfare, frequently degenerating into baronial feuds based on the castles. In Saba ruled the Hamdanids--who later became Christian. Behind them stood the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with Rome, which about A.D. 300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali coast and the Persian Gulf, and in 525 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites.[295] In 542 there was a diet of princes at Marib[296] to which both the Roman and the Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even to-day the country is full of innumerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were popularly attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan is a work of twenty tiers.[297]

In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the brilliant court of these early-Eastern “Hohenstaufen” was in every respect a model for that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian. Even much later the Abbassids in their new capital of Baghdad could think of nothing better than to imitate, on a grand scale, the Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia, at the courts of the Ghassanids[298] and at those of the Lakhmids,[299] there sprang up a genuine troubadour and _Minne_ poetry; and knightly poets, in the days of the Early Fathers, fought out their duels with “word, lance, and sword.” One of them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al Alblaq, who stood a famous siege by the King of Hira for the sake of five precious suits of armour.[300] In relation to this lyric poetry, the Late-Arabic which flourished, especially in Spain, from 800 stands as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der Vogelweide.

For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis. The spirit was there--Tertullian spoke of the “_militia Christi_,” and the sacrament was the soldier’s oath of fidelity.[301] But it was only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates; not the castle, but the _castra_; not tournaments, but executions. Yet in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem that the whole infidel (“Greek”) population of Cyprus--traditionally 240,000 souls--was massacred.[302] Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in the front line.

Byzantium, even, was not able entirely to evade the influence of the Arabian feudal age, and, under a crust of Late Classical administrative forms, the fief system (especially in the interior of Asia Minor) came into existence. There there were powerful families whose loyalty was doubtful and whose ambition was to possess the Imperial throne. “Originally tied to the capital, which they were not allowed to leave without the Emperor’s permission, this nobility settled down later on its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth century onwards this provincial nobility was _de facto_ an ‘Estate of the realm,’ and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial control.”[303]

The “Roman Army” in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order. The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of Severus,[304] about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine, if belated, knighthood--a fact that Mommsen long ago pointed out, without, however, seeing the significance of it.[305] The young noble received a thorough education in single combat, horsemanship, use of bow and lance. About A.D. 260 the Emperor Gallienus--the friend of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the soldier-emperors--formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted force, the personal military suite.[306] A significant light is thrown upon the changes by the fact that the old city-gods give way, in the religion of the army, to the German gods of personal heroism, under the labels of Mars and Hercules.[307] Diocletian’s _palatini_ are not a substitute for the prætorians abolished by Septimius Severus, but a small, well-disciplined knight-army, while the _comitatenses_, the general levy, are organized in “_numeri_” or companies. The tactics are those of every Early period, with its pride of personal courage. The attack takes the Germanic form of the so-called “boar’s head”--the deep mass technically called the _Gevierthaufe_.[308] Under Justinian we find, fully developed, a system corresponding precisely to the _Landsknecht_ system of Charles V, in which condottieri[309] of the Frundsberg type[310] raise professional forces on a territorial basis. The expedition of Narses is described by Procopius[311] just as one might describe the great recruiting-operations of Wallenstein.

But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant Scholasticism and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the renowned schools of the Aramæan region--the Persian schools of Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora, the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea, Kinnesrin.[312] These are flourishing headquarters of astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these grand manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at Alexandria the forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of Roman jurisprudence; they are committed to writing in the Classical languages, squeezed into alien and long-petrified literary forms, and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of quite other structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been put in Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an inkling either of the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the real pivots of its researches and ideas, there arose the preposterous notion that the Arabs were spiritual epigoni of the Classical. In reality, practically everything that was produced on the “other” side--from Edessa’s point of view--of the philologist’s frontier, though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a “Late Classical” spirit, is nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And so we come to consider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian religion.

IV

The Classical religion lived in its vast number of _separate cults_, which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living. The divinity is always _bound to and bounded by one locality_, in conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which the significances lie in the _form_ of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered geographically in innumerable _points_, so spiritually its religion was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely independent of the rest. _Only their number, and not their scope, was capable of increase._ Within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practise these cults without _belonging_ to them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation--that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion--the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, “when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false.[313] The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church--in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in _the creed_.

As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued. This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as the cults of the star-gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh-cult (for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the Ptolemaic period[314]), and primitive Early-Christianity too--as the Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show--took substance as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions (which from about Hadrian’s time drove the genuine old Classical deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as the revelation of the one true faith--Isis styled herself _deorum dearumque facies uniformis_--in reality they carry, one and all, marks of the Classical separatism--that is, they multiply to infinity; every community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs, Mithræa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in feeling, even though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be attached.[315] Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this piety. Classical cults are _practised_, and one may practise as many of them as one pleases, but of these newer, _a man belongs to one and one alone_. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and more to the doctrinal side.

From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, _but it is now cults of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East_--that is, from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those who believe in these gods and their rituals--and so there arises, by processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now represent each other, and men no longer practise or perform them in the old way, but become “adherents” of them. And the little god _of_ the place becomes--without the gravity of the change being noticed by anyone--the great God really present in the place.

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its development--the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern Churches--has been missed.[316] Yet without this key it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men’s souls. The formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as _a powerful new Church_ and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same divine principle.

Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions that they were numerous, and another that they were religions of pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration, as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for the cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical _cults_ would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own number. But the _cult-Church_ was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. All the great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to the later persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the “Roman” State, but from this cult-Church, and they were only political inasmuch as the cult-Church was both nation and fatherland. It will be observed that the mask of Cæsar-worship covered _two_ religious usages. In the Classical cities of the West, Rome above all, the special cult of the _Divus_ arose as a last expression of that Euclidean feeling which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means of communication between the body-unit man and the body-unit God. In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Cæsar as Saviour, God-man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for the Emperor was the most important _sacrament_ of the Church--exactly corresponding to the baptism of the Christians--and it is easy, therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. _All_ these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking of the Persians,[317] the Passover of the Jews, the Lord’s Supper of the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal ceremonies amongst the Mandæans, the Christians, and the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might be regarded almost as sects and orders--a view which would lead to a much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda.

All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those founded by the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500 B.C., had been place-bound,[318] and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”; it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and revelations.[319] In the significance of images there came about a very remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all eternity.[320] He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and Julian is his Prophet.”[321] Ten years more, and this Church would have become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but also in important details its very form and content were inherited by Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period when the two were in touch--Constantine the Great acted simultaneously as convener of the Council of Nicæa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him _Divus_ and paid to him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of the Classical.[322]

V

For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological and theological _parti pris_, it refuses to admit as factors in its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a _consensus_, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre, but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people. Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so long as we insist on treating them as such.

It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to the pre-exilic Israelites are--as Hugo Winckler was the first to recognize--a people of quite new type. But they are not the only representatives of the type. The Aramæan world began in those days to arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians and Chaldeans,[323] all living in the same district, yet in stringent aloofness from each other, and even then practising the truly Arabian way of life that we call the ghetto.

The first heralds of the new soul were the _prophetic religions_, with their magnificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700 B.C. and challenged the primeval practices of the people and their rulers. They, too, are an essentially Aramæan phenomenon. The more I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the one hand, Zarathustra on the other, the more closely related they appear to me to be. What seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects of their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion, which in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements[324]--belief in holy stones and trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, Beersheba, Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name covers a multitude of most heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and human sacrifices, dervish-dancing and sacral prostitution--intermixed with indistinct traditions of Moses and Abraham and many customs and sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after long establishment in Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms. The second combated the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly coarsened, no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time and again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care thereof. Zarathustra lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted and misunderstood, and met his end as an old man in war against the unbelievers[325]--a worthy contemporary of the unfortunate Jeremiah, who for his prophesying was hated by his countrymen, imprisoned by his king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugitives to Egypt and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.

This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing inwardness, was, I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by creative personalities of the Isaiah stature from relics of the old Babylonian religion.[326] About 1000, the Chaldeans were a group of Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south of Sinear--the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean. In Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious community, and especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was an astral religion, which before Hammurabi the Babylonian was _not_. It is the deepest of all interpretations of the Magian universe, the World-Cavern[327] and Kismet working therein, and consequently it remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation to their very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture, that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy to be called an exact science--that is, a priestly technique of observation of marvellous acuteness.[328] It replaced the Babylonian moon-week by the planet-week. Ishtar, the most popular figure of the old religion, the goddess of life and fruitfulness, now became a planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived god of vegetation, a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced itself; for Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk[329] was the one true god, the god of mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to mankind. For a century (625-539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers, but they were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were being built, they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer of Nebuchadnezzar, the contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still extant, and in depth and purity it is in nowise surpassed by the finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chaldean penitential psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those of the Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust in the mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in the inscriptions of the Bel temple of Palmyra.[330]

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is _one_ god--be he called Yahweh, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal--who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees, and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people _ipso facto_ vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and boundaries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged.[331] But it is easy to understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout old tribal faiths. According to Cumont’s researches the religion of the Persian kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament--that is, it was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel, and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus), whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men’s inward attitude to these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who _were permitted_ to go home and the adherents of Ahuramazda who _allowed_ them to do so. Of two small tribes that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting men, the one had taken possession of a world--while Darius crossed the Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast[332]--and the other had become an entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription[333] of Darius--what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god! And how despairing are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact the image of their god. Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into _Apocalypse_ (Deutero-Isaiah,[334] Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan, of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are _Persian presentations of the common world-feeling_. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.

We must not, however, forget to look at the “return from captivity” also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings _under a prince of their own_, the Resh Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea.[335] Those who returned “home” were the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny with Jewry as a whole[336] must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all following events. The _little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life_, and the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job--a work in character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish[337]--while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,[338] are spread as motives over all the literatures of the “Arabian” world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 the Tannaim (“Teachers”) expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer a Mecca, and his Koran was a Code of laws to which was gradually added a whole primitive history compounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives reset according to Pharisaic ideas.[339] But in this atmosphere there was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning. All that the Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin.[340] It is probable, too, that it was in Mesopotamia, and _before_ the end of the Captivity, that there began that Chaldean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed into the formation of great religions at the beginning of the Magian Culture, and reached its climax in the teaching of Mani. “The Law and the Prophets”--_these two nouns practically define the difference between Judea and Mesopotamia_. In the late Persian and in every other Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case here considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of Jerusalem were recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely they were obeyed. Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object of suspicion, while in Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the great Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings were followed by the Jews “even abroad.” How independent was the life of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the recently discovered documents of Elephantine and Assuan.[341] About 170, Onias asked the King for permission to build a temple “according to the measurements of the Temple in Jerusalem,” on the ground that the numerous non-conforming temples that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the communities.

One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan-limits; this was owing to conversions and secessions--_the only form of conquest open to a landless nation and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian religions_. In the north it very early drove, through the Jew State of Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south (probably along the Persian Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dominant in Alexandria, Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and the policy of the Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.