Chapter VIII: Problems of the Arabian Culture (2)

Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the “Synagogue”) with Aramaic as its written language. Against these great and firm foundations Jewish-Christians (such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandæans, and likewise Chaldeans (unless we regard Manichæism as a reconstruction of that religion) were unable to hold their own. Breaking down into numberless sects, they either faded out in the shadow of the great Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the last Marcionites and Montanists were absorbed into Manichæism. By about 300, outside the Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichæan Churches no important Magian religions remained in being.

VI

Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 200, the effort to identify the _visible_ community, as its organization became ever stricter, with the organism of the State. This followed of necessity from the world-feeling of Magian man, and in turn it led to the transformation of the rulers into caliphs--lords of a creed-society far more than of domains--to the idea of orthodoxy as the premiss of real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions (the “Holy War” of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first centuries were full of it); and to a special régime within the State of unbelievers--just tolerated and under laws and governance of their own[444] (for the law God had given was not for heretics)--and, with it, the ghetto manner of living.

First, Osrhoene, in the centre of the Aramæan landscape, adopted Christianity as the State religion about 200. Then Mazdaism assumed the same position in the Sassanid Empire (226) while under Aurelian (d. 275) and above all Diocletian (295) Syncretism as a compound of the Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults became the state religion of the Roman Imperium. Constantine in 312, King Trdat of Armenia about 321, and King Mirian of Georgia a few years later, went over to Christianity. In the far South, Saba must already have become Christian in the third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simultaneously with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one more effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.

In opposition to this--likewise in all the religions of this Culture--we find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion from State, history, and actuality in general. For after all the conflict of being and waking-being--that is, of politics and religion, of history and nature--could not be completely mastered by the form of the Magian Church and its identification with State and nation. Race breaks forth into life in these mind-creations and overpowers the divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the Gothic age, and consequently the split in the nation was between the worldly-pious and the ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively to the divine spark, the Pneuma, in the man, that which he shares with the invisible community of the faithful and blessed spirits. The rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in the man it is the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying the other. In this Culture the askete is not only the veritable priest--the secular priest, as to-day in Russia, is never really respected, and mostly he is allowed to marry--but, what is more, he is the true man of piety. Outside monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfil the demands of religion, and consequently communities of repentance, monasteries, and convents assume quite early a position that, for metaphysical reasons, they could never have had in India or China--let alone in the West, where the Orders were working and fighting--that is, dynamic--units.[445] Consequently, we must not regard the people of the Magian world as divided into the “world” and the “cloister” as two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of fulfilling all the demands of religion. Every pious person _was_ a monk in some sort.[446] Between world and cloister there was no opposition, but only a difference of _degree_. Magian churches and orders are homogeneous communities which are only to be distinguished from one another by extent. The community of Peter was an Order, that of Paul a Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost too wide for the one designation and too narrow for the other.

_Every Magian Church is itself an Order_ and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichæans (_electi, auditores_). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, _the order of all the orders_, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions--out of which, and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like communities--the two cult-Churches of the West produced unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously to Cybele.[447] The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of Matthew and almost all “Acts of the Apostles” testify to rigorously ascetic sentiment.[448] The Persian and Nestorian Churches developed the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the full. To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and Brotherhoods. And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the Karæi[449] (Qaraites) of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of the eighteenth.[450]

Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion to the number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year 250. This is the epochal moment in which the last city-cults of the Classical effaced themselves before, _not Christianity, but the new-born Pagan Church_. The records of the Fratres Arvales in Rome break off in 241, and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia are of 265. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly characters in one man became customary,[451] implying that these usages were felt no longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion. And this religion set out to _convert_, spreading itself far and wide over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman stock. The Christian religion, on the other hand, was alone in spreading (_c._ 300) over the great Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable that inner contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spiritual dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular landscapes, these contradictions led to the break-up of Christianity into several religions--and for ever.

The _controversy concerning the nature of Christ_ was the issue on which this conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was just those problems of substance which in the same form and with the same tendency fill the thoughts of all other Magian theologies. Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of thought closely akin to Philo’s and even to Paul’s. The relation between the Primary One, Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with reference to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a Monad? In the East a different constitution of the problem is evidenced already in the premisses of the John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis: the relation of Ahuramazda to the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of occupation to the Avestan “fathers”; and it was just at the time of the decisive Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of Zrvanism (438-457), with its primacy of the divine world-course (Zrvan as historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic battle. Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to solve it in relation to the nature (_Wesenheit_) of Mohammed and the Koran. The problem had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come into being--very much as the specifically Western will-problem, our counterpart to the substance-problem, was posed in the beginnings of Faustian thought. There is no need to look for these problems; they are there as soon as the Culture thinks, they are the fundamental form of its thought, and come to the front, uncalled-for and sometimes not even perceived, in all its studies.

But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes of East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit already in the main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by the names of Bardesanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting-point was Edessa, where the streets rang with the battle-cries of the Nestorians against the victors of Ephesus and, anon, with the εἷς θεός shout of the Monophysites, demanding that Bishop Ibas should be thrown to the wild beasts of the circus.

The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual origins lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with his Pagan contemporary Iamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ a demigod, merely _like_ in substance to the Father, he maintained that Father and Son were of _the same_ substance (θεότης) which in Christ had assumed a human σῶμα. “The Word became Flesh”--this formula of the West depends upon visible facts of the cult-Churches, and the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times Iamblichus wrote his book concerning God-statues in which the divine was substantially present and worked miracles,[452] the abstraction of the Triunity was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous-human relation of Mother and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible to eliminate from the thought-processes of Athanasius.

With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real problem was for the first time posed--namely, the attitude of the Magian dualism to the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the world-cavern there was divine and human substance, in man a part in divine Pneuma and the individual soul somehow related to the “flesh.” But what of Christ?

It was a decisive factor--one of the results of Actium--that the contest was fought out in the Greek tongue and in the territory of the Pseudomorphosis--that is, under the full influence of the “Caliph” of the Western Church. Constantine had even been the convener and president of the Council of Nicæa, where the doctrine of Athanasius carried the day. In the East, with its Aramaic speech and thought, these doings were (as we know from the letters of Aphrahat) hardly followed at all; there men saw no cause to quarrel about what, so far as they were concerned, had long ago been settled. The breach between East and West, a consequence of the Council of Ephesus (431) separated two Christian _nations_, that of the “Persian Church” and that of the Greek Church, but this was no more than the manifestation of a difference, inherent from the first, between _modes of thought_ proper to the two different landscapes. Nestorius and the whole East saw in Christ the Second Adam, the Divine Envoy of the last æon. Mary had borne a _man_-child in whose human and created substance (_physis_) the godly, uncreated element _dwelt_. The West, on the contrary, saw in Mary the Mother of a _God_: the divine and the human substance formed in his body (_persona_, in the Classical idiom[453]) a unity, named by Cyril ἕνωσις.[454] When the Council of Ephesus had recognized the mother of God, her who gave birth to God, the city of Diana’s old renown burst into a truly Classical orgy of celebration.[455]

But long ere this the Syrian Apollinaris[456] had heralded the “Southern” idea of the matter--that in the living Christ there was not merely a substance, but a single substance. The divine had transmuted itself into, not mingled itself with, a human substance (no κρᾶσις, as Gregory Nazianzen maintained in opposition; significantly enough, the best way of expressing the Monophysite idea is through concepts of Spinoza--the _one_ substance in another mode). The Monophysites called the Christ of the Council of Chalcedon (451, where the West once more prevailed) “the idol with the two faces.” They not only fell away from the Church, they broke out in fierce risings in Palestine and Egypt; and when in Justinian’s time the troops of Persia--that is, of Mazdaism--penetrated to the Nile, they were hailed by the Monophysites as liberators.

The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged for a century--not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of a landscape that sought to be set free _in its people_--was the _reversal of the work of Paul_. If we can transport ourselves into the inmost soul of the two new-born nations, making no reservations and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual affinity with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the Ruler of the West was the Head of Christianity in general. In the mind of Constantine it was self-evident that the Pauline foundation _within_ the Pseudomorphosis was synonymous with Christianity. The Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency were to him a heretical sect, and the Eastern Christians of “Johannine” type he never even noticed. When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the three determining councils of Nicæa, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put _its_ seal upon dogma, once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian Springtime, Christianity fell apart for good into three religions, which can be symbolized by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of which none can henceforth claim to be regarded by the historically and doctrinally unprejudiced eye as _the_ true and proper Christianity. These three religions are at the same time three nations, living in the old race-areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the tongues that they used were the Church-languages borrowed from them--namely, Greek, Aramaic, and Pehlevi.

VII

The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old battle-cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the starting-point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”). The Western Church continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire--that is, the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself--for Islam almost annihilated it--but in the accident that it was _from it_ that the young peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,[457] receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West--which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and Gaul.

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that fits in with their “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” schema, and even within these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.

But even before Christianity--and this is a fact of which the immense significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly interpreted as _mission_ effort--the Pagan Church had won for the Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the Druidism that Cæsar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult-Church (and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later emperor-worship.[458] The missionary efforts of Christianity here would have been less successful than they were if the other cult-Church--its near relative--had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from Christianity to Paganism.

The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm of the Khazars[459] and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in A.D. 1000) for safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.

From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichæans penetrated the empires on either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian, as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichæism had by 400 become a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichæan sects in southern France as late as the Crusades[460]; but the two religions drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of the Manichæan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.

The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails. When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496, the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians, Mazdaists, and Manichæans as adherents of a single “Persian” religion,[461] just as the population of the Western Roman provinces were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.

Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although on political grounds it practised an astounding toleration--John Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph--Judaism, Mazdaism, and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa--the home of Augustine--the entire population fell away to Islam at once. Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 628 a relative of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in Java.

For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of _outward_ religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows “_the_” Christian religion as having had _two ages of grand thought-movements_--0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.[462] _But these are two springtimes of two Cultures_, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy--there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and--as the historians forget to add--_to end the Christian theology also_ by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished--just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroës Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak--which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility--Avestan dogma similarly passed into fixity.