THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION 133

If this were the whole story, we might imagine that we had now fully
explained the contrast between the imperviousness of Medieval Western
Christian minds to the classical works of Hellenic literature which lay
at their disposal in the original Greek at Constantinople and other points
in Greek Orthodox Christendom, that were conquered by Western
Christian arms in and after A.D. 1204, and the eagerness with which the
same Medieval Western Christian minds seized upon and mastered the
philosophical and scientific works of Aristotle which were accessible to
them, in Arabic translations, at Palermo and Toledo. We might jump to
the conclusion that this contrast was simply the corollary of a difference
in degree of intimacy and cordiality between the respective relations in
which the Medieval Western Christians stood to their Arab Muslim and
to their Greek Orthodox Christian contemporaries. We might not sus-
pect that a Medieval Western mind's selection of the works of Aristotle,
and rejection of the works of Plato, the Attic dramatists, Pindar, and the
authors of the Homeric Epic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of
the Christian Era had anything to do with any differences in degree of
psychological affinity between the respective relations in which a Medi-
eval Western culture stood to divers successive phases of the Hellenic
culture itself, as these were represented by the various works of an
Hellenic intellect and imagination that have just been mentioned. There
would, however, be two palpable flaws in any answer to our question
which ignored the play of Wahlverwandtschaften in the contact in the
Time-dimension between an affiliated Western Christian Hellenistic
Civilization and its Hellenic predecessor, in order to offer an explanation
solely in terms of the contacts in the Space-dimension between a Medi-
eval Western Christendom and its Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian
contemporaries that were the dead Hellenic culture's two living 'carriers'.
Any answer that was confined within these limits would have failed to
take account of two intractable historical facts. One of these facts is that
in the fifteenth century, when Italian Humanists were eagerly acquiring
from refugee Byzantine Greek 'carriers' their knowledge of the Ancient
Greek language and literature, the religious and cultural animosity be-
tween Western and Orthodox Christians was even more violent than it
had been in the thirteenth century,1 when Medieval Western Christian
scholars were showing themselves insensible to the attractions of Ancient
Greek poetry. The other relevant fact is that in the thirteenth century
the Western Christian enthusiasts for the study of Aristotle's philosophy,
who were malting such good use of the opportunities offered at Toledo
for studying it through an Arabic medium, did not, as a matter of fact,
neglect the simultaneous opportunities offered at Constantinople and
elsewhere in the Frankish principalities on Greek Orthodox Christian
soil for gaining access to texts of Aristotle's works in the Hellenic philo-
sopher's own original Ancient Greek. Though the Frankish conquerors
of Romania, including the clerks as well as the fighting-men, would
appear to have been barbarously indifferent to the Hellenic cultural
treasures of all kinds—philosophical as well as poetic and plastic—
that they held in their insensitive hands,a the contemporary Frankish
* See IX, viii. 151-2. a See p. no, above,