!6a RENAISSANCES

incompatible ideal embodied in the Parthenon at Athens. In the West
a school of music that had discarded all but two of the numerous Hel-
lenic 'modes', and, out of these two, had concentrated its efforts on one,
was never disturbed by any resurgence of the Hellenic Babel that it had
repressed. On the other hand a renaissance was, as we have seen, the
dominating event in the histories of a Chinese Far Bastern and a Greek
Orthodox Christian literature, as well as in the history of a Western
architecture; and it was assuredly no accident that these activities that
had been potently haunted by reanimated ghosts were all convicted of
having been dismal failures by confrontation with the brilliant success of
contemporary activities in which a living society's native genius had not
been blighted by the malign influence of a rev&iant.

The mercifulness of mortality, when the dead have been ill-advisedly
brought back to life, is illustrated in the history of a Western Civilization
that repeatedly escaped the due penalties for its own perverse feats of
necromancy thanks to the premature dissipation of the haunting spectre
either by the necromancer's own ruthless hand or by the indulgence of
Fate. The Western Civilization earned by its own efforts the relief from
an incubus that it won for itself by sending back to limbo, in a seven-
teenth-century victory of 'the Moderns' over 'the Ancients', the ghost
of the Hellenic classics that had been raised in a fifteenth-century Italian
renaissance, and by shattering, in the thirteenth-century victory of a
Hildebrandine Respublica Christiana over a Fredencian Holy Roman
Empire, the simulacrum of an Hellenic universal state that hud been
imposed on Western Christendom for the second time at the hands of
Otto I. On the other hand the West owed to Fate rather than to any
Western foresight or forcefulness the fortunate premature collapse of the
Holy Roman Empire after its original installation by Charlemagne, and
likewise the fortunate premature expiry of the Carolingian renaissance
of an Hellenic literature in its Latin version. Fate was equally kind to
Western Christendom in making a fiasco of the Crusades and thereby
liberating Western energies from an atavistic adventure in the blind
alley of the Mediterranean Basin in order to set them free for encircling
the Globe by mastering the Ocean. How much the Western Civilisation
did gain by the timely reinternment of these inopportune rtwenants in the
Sheol from which they had been evoked can be measured by the extent
of the damage which the same civilization suffered from a resuscitated
Hellenic art and architecture that inopportunely escaped the guillotine,
and from a resuscitated Hellenic parochial state that seemed to have an
inexhaustible reserve of hydra-heads.1

At the time of writing in the first century of a post-Modern Age of
Western history, the Western Society's continuing failure to exorcize a
demon that was as assiduous as it was insidious presented the most
formidable of all the pending threats to the Western Civilization's future.
Yet, even in this field of Politics, in which it had thus paid so heavy a
penalty for having revived an Hellenic parochialism, the Western Society
had at least been more fortunate than a sister Orthodox Christian Society
in being saved by the successive collapses of the Carolingian and Otto-

1 See VII. vii. S4a~3.