i48 RENAISSANCES

than a neutral event in the issue between Life and Death, should have so
incongruously acquired a connotation that associated it with a spring-
like outburst of fresh vitality. In the history of a fifteenth-century Italian
renaissance of the Hellenic culture, which had been canonized as 'the
Renaissance' sans phrase in a subsequent Modern Western tradition,1
the repetitive rebirth of something that had been born before was fol-
lowed, resiliente Antaeo, by the unprecedented new birth of something
that was now being born for the first time. These two events were so far
from being identical that the second of them had to fight for its life—in
a strenuous 'Battle of the Books'2—in order to make good its debatable
birthright. In the sequel to this fifteenth-century renaissance in the
Western World there were unmistakably Atlantean tendencies warring
against those that were manifestly Antaean; but, by dint of ignoring these
Atlantean symptoms, having no eye for any except the Antaean, and
identifying these with the foregoing renaissance3 of Hellenism that had
provided the occasion of this mighty Antaean rebound in Modern
Western history, Western minds had contrived to invCvSt 'the Renais-
sance', and therefore the generic term 'renaissance* as well, with an aura
of vitality and creativity strangely out of keeping with a Cimmerian fog
that is the genuine atmosphere of the Odyssean and all other 'neeyia'.

(6) A SURVEY OF ANTAEAN AND ATLANTEAN REACTIONS4

If we now take a survey of responses to the challenge presented by
renaissances, we shall find the examples of Atlantean stances preponder-
ating over those of Antaean rebounds in the ubiquity of their distribu-
tion among the divers provinces of social life> if not in the sheer weight
of their numbers. Whereas the unequivocal examples of the Antaean re-
bound seern to be confined to the two fields of Religion and Literature,
we find the Atlantean stance not only likewise strongly represented in
both these fields, but also presenting itself in the fields of Politics, the
Visual Arts, and Pilgrimages, in which no examples of the Antaean re-
bound are forthcoming. In surveying the Soul's reactions to renaissances,
we shall also find, as we have already found in surveying its reactions to
encounters between contemporaries, that there are instances—and these
perhaps not the least interesting and important of those on our muster-
roll—which cannot be classified exclusively under either of two anti-
thetical heads, but have to be pronounced ambivalent. In the array of
reactions to renaissances, cases of ambivalency present themselves in the
fields of Religion, Politics, the Visual Arts, Philosophy, and Law; and in
Philosophy and Law they seem to have the field to themselves.

The supreme example of an Antaean rebound is the sequel, in the soul

i See pp. 1-5, above. a See pp. 68-69, above,

3 In thus identifying a birth of something new with a new birth of something old, the
Modern Western literary purveyors of the French word renaissance were doing whftt had
been done with the Greek woxdpalzngenesia in a post-Alexandrine chapter of Hellenic
history (see V. v. 27, n. 2, and V. vi. 173-3). They were taking liberties with the literal
meaning—a new birth of something old—which had been the original usage of the word*
in order to invest it with a new significance that was hardly legitimate.
. 4 In order to avoid an unnecessary multiplication of footnotes, th« writer has refrained,
in this chapter, from giving references to the survey of renaissances in X, B (ti)a above.