CLASSICAL LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 713
milieu a superficial antagonism masking a covert co-operation between
two ostensibly conflicting cultural forces.
This possibility is indicated by a difference, which we have already
noticed in passing,1 between the respective fortunes of resuscitated clas-
sical languages and literatures in the Far Eastern and Western worlds on
the one hand and in Orthodox Christendom on the other. We have
observed that, when a visually standardized Ancient Chinese classical
language and literature were resuscitated in the Far East, and when an
Ancient Greek and a Latin classical language and literature were simi-
larly resuscitated in the West, the cultural coin that had thus been brought
back into currency came into general circulation in all the linguistic pro-
vinces of a Western and a Far Eastern World; but we have also observed
that in Orthodox Christendom the circulation of a resuscitated Ancient
Greek classical language and literature never spread proprio motu beyond
the Modern-Greek-speaking province of a polyglot Orthodox Christian
World. The Georgian-speaking, Slavonic-speaking, and Rumanian-
speaking Orthodox Christians never attempted to appropriate the secular
cultural heritage of Hellenism except in so far as they may eventually
have taken up the study of the Ancient Greek and Latin languages and
literatures as a consequence of their eventual reception of a Modern
Western culture on to which those classical Hellenic studies had been
grafted by that time as a result of a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance.
This difference in the respective ranges of the circulation of resusci-
tated classical languages and literatures within the ambits of the worlds in
which they have been conjured back to life becomes intelligible on the
hypothesis that a resuscitated classical language or literature finds diffi-
culty in striking root on any ground that has not been prepared for its
reception by the survival there of a religious liturgy and literature em-
bodied in the same language. At any rate, it is a matter of historical fact
that a Mahayanian Buddhist liturgy and literature conveyed in Sinic
characters had already become current in the non-Chinese-speaking as
well as in the Chinese-speaking provinces of a Far Eastern World before
the reception there of a classical Sinic secular literature conveyed in the
same visual medium, and that a Christian liturgy and literature con-
veyed in the Latin script and language had already become current in the
non-Romance-speaking as well as in the Romance-speaking provinces
of a Western World before the reception there of a classical Hellenic
literature that was likewise conveyed in Latin before the West's reception
of Ancient Greek, whereas in the Orthodox Christian World the use of
Ancient Greek as a vehicle for a Christian liturgy and literature had been
confined to the province in which Modern Greek was the local current
vernacular. This conterminousness of the range of circulation of a resus-
citated classical language and literature with the range of the same lan-
guage in its surviving use for ecclesiastical purposes is so regular an
occurrence that it cannot be explained away as a fortuitous coincidence;
platonism were in a nascent Western Christendom in Bede's day; 'it was merely quiescent'
(Goodrich, ibid. Co. the passage quoted in VI. vii. 372 from Fitzgerald, C, P.:
A Short Cultural History (London 1935. Cresset Press), p. 286).
1 On p. 705, above.