THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION 125

antecedent civilization, have come and gone in succession to one another,
without ever having appeared on the stage simultaneously, are apt like-
wise to be resuscitated successively, and not simultaneously, in the his-
tory of an affiliated society. When this happens, the chronological order
in which these ghosts are evoked is neither the original order nor a
haphazard one bearing no relation to it; it is the original order in
reverse.1

In the political field, for example, a Roman Empire which had been
the last political institution to be thrown up in the course of Hellenic
history was the first to be resuscitated in the history of a Hellenistic
Western Christendom. 'The Holy Roman Empire* was inaugurated at
Rome a week before the eighth century of the Christian Era ran out,
and in Charlemagne's life-time its writ ran in all provinces of the
Western World of the day except Britain and Asturia. On the other
hand the sovereign city-state whose emergence in Hellenic history had
been almost coeval with the birth of the Hellenic Civilization itself was
not resuscitated in the Western World until after the beginning of the
eleventh century, and even then its first effective reappearance was
confined to a Northern and Central Italian province of the Western
World.3 Two or three hundred years had to pass, after that, to give an
expanding Medieval Western cosmos of city-states time to establish
secondary strongholds in Flanders and in Germany,3 and some two
hundred years more to give the resuscitated Hellenic ideal of parochial
sovereignty time to translate itself from the city-state to the nation-state
scale by captivating the feudal monarchies of Transalpine and Trans-
marine Western Europe;4 and it was not till after the outbreak and
exacerbation of the French Revolution in Paris, little less than a thou-
sand years after the date of the coronation of Charlemagne at Rome on
Christmas Day A.D. 800, that the Hellenomane nations of a Late
Modern Western World finally capitulated to the Periclean Attic
political ideals of absolute sovereignty for each parochial state, vis-&-vis
the rest of the body social, and absolute democracy for the citizens of
each parochial state in the management of their own parochial domestic
affairs.5

In this instance the reason why the original chronological order was
reversed in the evolution of a renaissance is perhaps not difficult to
descry. The explanation is to be found in the utilitarian considerations
which are the motive of every renaissance, as we have already noticed.
In Charlemagne's generation throughout Western Christendom, a
nascent civilization's most urgent political need was to extricate itself
from the anarchy of a Dark Age; and the obvious institutional instru-
ment for the purpose was a universal state which had been instituted
originally by a disintegrating antecedent civilization as. a means of

1 This phenomenon has been touched upon already in IX. viii. 98-101.

* 'The State in the Classical and Modern sense of the word first re-emerged in the
Italian city-state with its intensive political life, its strong civic consciousness, and its
complex and artificial constitutional systems' (Dawson, Chr.: Religion and the Rise of
Western Culture (London 1950, Sheed & Ward), p. 214).

3 See III. iii. 299—300 ana 344-7.

4 See III. iii. 360-3. * See pp. T-XS, above.