166 RENAISSANCES

institution of a demagogic Democracy that was apt—first in city-states
in Italy after A.D. 1254 and then in a nation-state in France after A,D.
Zyg9—to turn, as fast as milk turns in thundery weather, into the sour
brew of a plebiscitary dictatorship. In the field of Law the genius of an
Orthodox Christian Civilization revealed itself, not in a Macedonian
Dynasty's revival of a dead Justinianean Hellenic law, but in an antece-
dent Syrian Dynasty's new creation of an East Roman law inspired by
Christian principles. In the field of Philosophy, likewise, the genius of a
Far Eastern Civilization revealed itself, not in the revival of a dead
Confucianism, but in the foregoing new creation of indigenous Far
Eastern philosophies inspired by Mahayanian Buddhist thought, while,
in the intellectual history of a Medieval Western Christendom, the
genius of Saint Thomas Aquinas revealed itself, in his Summa Theolo*
gica, not in the resuscitation of Aristotelian theses but in the construction
of a system that was the Angelic Doctor's own.1 In the field of Physical
Science the Medieval Western Schoolmen's revival of the intellectually
vicious Hellenic practice of arguing about the phenomena of Physical
Nature in vacua, as if Logic could do duty for verification, threatened
to sterilize, and succeeded in retarding, the harvest that was to be
garnered from the application of an experimental method of research
in accordance with the Western Civilization's native bent.2 In the field
of Language and Literature the all but flawlessly Ciceronian Latinity
of an Erasmus, who had taught himself to speak with the tongues of men
and of angels, was become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal3
in a Modern Western house of many mansions4 that had been filled
with a sound as of a rushing mighty wind5 by a vernacular poetry in a
chorus of divers living Western languages, while, in a contemporary Far
Eastern World, a creative art of the Drama and the Novel, conveyed in a
living 'mandarin* lingua franca, had likewise eventually taken the light
out of a pedantic reproduction of the style and themes of the Sinic
classics. In the field of the Visual Arts an Orthodox Christian Civiliza^
tion's miniature reminiscences in ivory of an Hellenic style of bas-relief
carving in marble turn deathly pale, exquisite though they are, in the
presence of mosaics glowing and vibrating with a veritable life engen-
dered by the fruitful marriage of an indigenous Byzantine creativity with
an indigenous Byzantine technique.

The last word on the comparative merits of the realm of Hades and
the land of the living was spoken to Odysseus by the shade of Achilles:

'I would rather be a wretched peasant on the land, labouring as a serf
with a poor portionless man for my master, than be sovereign lord of all
the legions of the shades of the dead and departed.'6

* This point is made by Taylor, H. 0.: The Mediaeval Mind (London 1911, Mao*
millan, a vols.)» vol. i, p. 18, and vol. ii, p. 437,

* See III. iii, 385-6, 3 i Cor. xiii, i. 4 John xiv, *,
s Acts ii. a, 6 OA, Book XI, U. 489-91.