x64 RENAISSANCES

a Modern Western World to the idolatrous worship of a ghost of an

Hellenic parochial state.

In the field of political ideas and institutions we can see that the
fortunate successive Western fiascos of a Carolingian resuscitation of the
Hellenic universal state which collapsed in the ninth century, and of an
Ottoman resuscitation of it which collapsed in the thirteenth century,
gave the Western Christian Civilization at any rate a longer lease of life
than was enjoyed by an Orthodox Christendom which had succumbed
to the suicidal sin of state-worship in the eighth century when it had
deified the East Roman Empire. The similarly suicidal self-commitment
of the Western World to a state-worship in which the idol was a paro-
chial one and in which the idolatry was polytheistic had not captivated
the Western World as a whole until the turn of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, when this brand of idolatry, with which the Italians
had marked their foreheads1 as early as the eleventh century of the
Christian Era, was painstakingly reproduced by all the other peoples of
a ci-devant Christian Western World.

If we now go on to ask ourselves why the most prudent counsels for
any living soul that is playing with the Black Art should be—as History
shows them to be—'That thou docst, do slowly [*«:]'* and 'Better late,
best never', we may find an answer to our question in the principle 'One
man's meat is another man's poison' which our foregoing study of en-
counters between contemporaries3 has brought to light; for this 'law* is
also operative in encounters in which the parties are a necromancer and
a ghost.

In an encounter of any kind, an invasion of the life of one of the
dramatis personae by some element in the life of another of them which
has been torn out of its original context and has been introduced in
isolation into an alien social milieu can, indeed, hardly fail to be u highly
disturbing event in the history of the invaded party. The effect of a
twelfth-century Western renaissance of Aristotelinnism in suspending
the creative activity of Western Christian thought has been noticed by
a distinguished Modern Western student of the Medieval Western
Mind;4 and the consequences of a renaissance may be still more baneful
when its influence is stimulating than when it is repressive. Great, for
example, as was the havoc wrought in Hellenic history by the Hellenes'
sin of idolizing their parochial states, the havoc was still greater5 when
this particular form of Hellenic idolatry was resuscitated in a Western
Christendom where the vein of Judaic fanaticism inherent in Christianity
was lying in wait, ready to inspire an Hellenic parochial state-worship
imported from the shadow-realm of Hades with a demonic intensity
which it had never attained in even the deadliest of its pristine mani-
festations on its native heath in a heathen Hellenic World whose life it
had brought to a premature bad end,

The extent, however, of the ravages which a renaissance will thus, in

1 Rev. xiii. 16: xlv, 9; xix. 20; xx. 4,

3 Cp. John xiix. 27, 3 See IX. viii, 530-43.

* Taylor, H. O.: The Mediaeval Mind (London 1911, Macmilltm, 2 vol*.), vol. £, p. 17.
s See the passage on p. 194 of Guglielmo Ferrero'a Peace and Wtirt Engluifx translation,
London 1933, Macmillan), that has been quoted in VU. vii, 544-3.