8 RENAISSANCES

of a Late Medieval Italian sub-culture into the Transalpine and Tnm«-
marine provinces of Western Christendom, to make a corresponding im-
pact on the peoples of the feudal monarchies which this walking jjhost of
Hellenism encountered there.

In both its earlier and narrower and its later and wider field the in-
fluence of this Hellenic revcnant on Western polities was the same. The
superficial effect was to propagate a cult of constitutional self-govern-
ment which was eventually to confer upon itself the flattering At tie title
of 'Democracy'1 after demonstrating its potency by precipitating suc-
cessively an English, an American, and a French Revolution. Uv the-
year A.D. 1871 this 'Democracy' seemed to have won a conclusive
victory over a post-Alexandrine Hellenic Absolute Monarchy which had
been evoked by Late Medieval Italian and Karly Modem Transalpine
and Transmarine Western despots as an instrument for transposing A
resuscitated Hellenic style of polity from a city-state to a nation-state
scale.2 But a lip-service to a Humanitariunism professedly dedicated to
the welfare of individual human beings globed over a demonic idnlixn-
tion of a tribal Collective Humanity whose juggernaut car was to ride
roughshod over the rights of children, women, and men1 when these
rights were divested of their religious sanction. In a Christian society
this sanction had been the sacrosanctity of each single soul in the eyes of
a God who had revealed Himself to be the Father ami Redeemer nf
every creature. In a post-Christian twentieth-century Western World
a blasphemously idolatrous revival of the worship of an Athene Polmehuu
masquerading as the Goddess France and of an AthimA < 'halcioenw
masquerading as the Goddess Prussia4 was threatening to bring down
upon the heads of ci-devant Christian Western idolatorn the nemcsiM
that had once overtaken those pre-Christian Hellenic idolatorn whotse
abomination of desolation these Jldlenixing Western neo^pagutw had
re-erected in order to fill a desolatingly vacant place on their own s\vrpt
and garnished altars.

This ghost of an idolatrous Hellenic worship of a Collective 1 lumanity
embodied in a parochial state was thus evoked in Medieval Italy wmie
three or four hundred years earlier than the ghosts of an 1 fellenie litera-
ture and visual art that, in their authentic original epiphanies in the iihh
and fourth centuries u,c,, hud been raised to their highest level of
achievement by Attic worshippers of a parochial Athene i'olitVhus.
This Italian renaissance of Hellenic political parochialism wan not, how-
ever, either the only or the earliest political renaissance of 1 Iclletwm in
Western history. In the course of Hellenic history itself a religion nf
state-worship that had begun to be known by its fruits* had temporarily
salvaged its credit in the eyes of partially disillusioned worshippers by
passing over from a pristine parochial to a latter-day oecumenical form;
Athene" Poliuchus, Athaml Chalcioccua, Tych6 AmioeheAn, Kortttua
Praenestina, and the other deiHed combatants in a meltfe til' conflicting

* See TV. iv. 140. a &•*!!!, |ji, ggQ fn.

3 This deplorable effect of the impact of Democracy upon Purwlmtl Suvt*irimtiy \\m
been noticed m IV. xv, 161-7. *

*• See I. i. 443-4 and IV. iv. 317-20 nnd 405-8.
s Matt. vii. ao and xii. 33; Lulw vi. 44.