ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 175

If our two concepts of the character of metaphysical 'law' can thus
both be held simultaneously by the same mind, and if at any rate one or
other of them has actually been held by the children of most of the
civilizations known to History, it is not surprising to find that the Western
Christian Civilization was originally no exception to this rule. A belief
that the whole life of the Universe was governed by 'the Law of God' was
the qiblah of a Judaic Weltanschauung that was the common heritage of
the Orthodox Christian, the Western Christian, the Arabic Muslim, and
the Iranic Muslim societies; and a theocentric philosophy of history
derived from the intuitions or inspirations of the Prophets of Israel and
Judah and the Iranian Prophet Zarathustra was bequeathed to Western
Christendom in Saint Augustine's De Cimtate Dei and to the Arab
Muslim World in Ibn Khaldtin's Prolegomena to his History of the
Berbers—two works of spiritual genius which unmistakably reflect one
single common outlook and whose mutual affinity can only be accounted
for by their indebtedness to a common source, since Ibn Khaldtin was as
ignorant of his Christian predecessor and fellow Maghribi's theodicy as
Augustine was of Muqaddamdt that did not see the light till more than
nine hundred years after the Christian North African Father's death.

The Augustinian version of a Judaic view of history was taken for
granted by Western Christian thinkers throughout the first millennium
(circa A.D. 675-1675) of the Western Civilization's life and was reformu-
lated—to incorporate the additions made to Western knowledge since
the fifteenth century of the Christian Era by an Italian renaissance of
Hellenism and an Iberian conquest of the Ocean—in a Discours sur I'His-
toire Universelle published in A.D. 1681 by Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
(vivebat A.D, 1627-1704). The Eagle of Meaux's majestic variation on a
traditional Judaic theme was, however, the last serious Western per-
formance of this spiritual masterpiece; for, while Bossuet was in the act
of writing his classic discourse, a spiritual revolution was taking place
around him in his world. Within the brief span of the last few decades of
the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, a Western World that was
exorcizing a stalking ghost of Hellenism1 was at the same time liquidating
its own ancestral Judaic Weltanschauung.

This Late Modern Western act of apostasy has an explanation which
is also an excuse. The Western exponents of the view that History was
governed by a 'Law of God' had 'given great occasion to the enemies of
the Lord to blaspheme'2 by allowing themselves to fall into an anthropo-
morphic misconstruction and misrepresentation of the Prophets' and
Evangelists' insight into the relation established between God and Man
by God. The heart of the Judaic discovery—or revelation—had been an
intuition of the truth that, in virtue of a love, forbearance, and self-
abnegation (tf&cocrts-)3 that were the stigmata of God's divine creativity,
God's service is Man's perfect freedom4 and God's Law is a perfect law
of liberty;5 but this revelation had become blurred in human hearts and

* See pp. 62-73, above. 2 2 Sam. xii. 14,

3 Phil, S. 7-8 (as translated in the Revised Version).

4 The Second Collect, for Peace, in the order for Morning Prayer in the Book of
Common Prayer according to the Use of the Church of England.

s Jag. i. 25 and ii. 12.