SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 673
—Sienpi, Tanguts, Tibetans, and Huns—in which the Chinese element
can hardly be said to have played an independent role. Every petty cap-
tain of mercenaries who enjoys an official status and has troops at his
command becomes the ruler of a piece of territory, makes himself inde-
pendent, and founds a state in which all the [traditional Sink] imperial
pomp and circumstance—a distinctive dynastic era, the supreme sacri-
ficial rites, the traditional offices of state, and the rest—is faithfully repro-
duced. And thus, while the political power of the Chinese population in
the North dwindles to the vanishing point of a complete insignificance)
the formal institutions of the Sinic State succeed in subjugating every
[barbarian] people and every [barbarian] ruler, in the teeth of all other
spiritual influences, in virtue of their being enjoined by Confucian doc-
trine. . . . Confucianism was the force to which the [Sinic] universal state
(Weltstaaf) owed its salvation and its renaissance.'1

This northern triumph of the official Sinic imperial philosophy of
state is the more impressive in view of the unparalleled strength of those
'other spiritual influences' with which Confucianism had to contend in
a northern arena; for the same Sinic corporation of Confucian licen-
tiates that was endowed, in the Han Empire's inviolate southern citadel,
with a local asylum, for which they would have been envied by post-
Diocletianic Roman imperial civil servants, had to hold their ground
in the North against a convergent drum-fire of radioactive alien spiritual
influences that their Roman confreres were never called upon to face
in any quarter.

A Sinic World under a Han imperial regime and an Hellenic World
under a Roman imperial regime were both exposed, like other dis-
integrating civilizations in their universal states, to the impact of alien
spiritual influences of two kinds—higher religions organized in uni-
versal churches making their epiphany among an internal proletariat,
and the barbarian ethos of an external proletariat's Heroic Age—but
the distribution of the incidence of this twofold impact was quite
different in the two particular cases with which we are concerned at
the moment. The Hellenic World in its universal state was attacked by
Barbarism and Religion2 from opposite quarters of the compass; and,
though the two attacking forces* fields of fire did eventually come to
overlap in the last phase of the assaulted civilization's debacle, there
was never a stage of the battle at which the defence had to contend
with both invaders at once on one and the same sector of the perimeter
of Hellenism's beleaguered fortress.

The province of the Hellenic World in which Christianity made its
earliest lodgement in the greatest force, and entrenched itself thereafter
most strongly, was an Anatolia which Saint Paul and his fellow mis-
sionaries rapidly overran from a base of spiritual operations at Antioch;3
but this precociously Christianized province of Hellenism in Anatolia

1 Franke, O.: GescHchU des CMnesischen Reichest vol. ii (Berlin and Leipzig 1936, de

™§ibbo^*^ward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap.
I™ (already quoted in this Study in I. i. 42 and IV. tv. 58).

s In VI. vii. 93-95, we have noticed that, in making this conquest of Anatolia from
a North Syrian base, Saint Paul was brilliantly succeeding on the religious plane in an
enterprise which the Seleucidae had previously attempted on the military and political
plane with signal ill-success.

B 2915, nc Z