CLASSICAL LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 709
Latin as the liturgical language of the Western Catholic Church and as
one of the two classical languages of the Western Civilization

In some of these cases this simultaneous use of the same dead language
in two different roles did not produce any sense of incongruity and there-
fore did not generate any cultural friction. No effect of the kind followed
from, for example, the dual role played by Arabic, since the liturgy of the
Islamic Church and the secular Arabic literature that came to be canon-
ized as classical had a common fountain-head in the Qur'an.1 The dual
role of Sanskrit was likewise eased by a pre-established harmony, since
the Sanskrit epic had been transfigured, long before it had become one
of the classics of the Hindu World, into one of the holy scriptures of
Hinduism, and this not merely through the interpolation of the Bhaga-
vad Glta, but through a permeation of the secular native substance of tha
Mahabharata by a religious leaven.2 In the Sinic and Hellenic worlds,
as in the Indie World, the secular language and literature that were
eventually to be canonized and cultivated as classical in the latter-day
life of an affiliated civilization had already been going concerns before
the epiphany of a universal church in the underworld of an internal pro-
letariat ; but in these cases the church was either unable or unwilling, or
both unable and unwilling, to swallow an existing secular literature and
digest it.

A nascent church did, nevertheless, in both these cases, adopt the lan-
guage or languages in which the existing secular literature had been
written, since in the Sinic World at the time of the epiphany of the
Mahayanian and Taoist churches and hi the Hellenic World at the time
of the epiphany of the Christian Church even the most militant 'futurist*
innovator would never have dreamed of using any language but Ancient
Chinese in the one case and Ancient Greek and Latin in the other case as
the medium for any serious literary work, either secular or religious; and,
if a Buddhist, Taoist, or Christian missionary had attempted to boycott
languages that were current, not only as vehicles of an ancient and revered
secular literature, but also as lingue franche, he would have defeated his
own purpose by eschewing the only linguistic media that were both
universally familiar and universally esteemed in his day in the world that
was his mission-field. But, when a church thus found itself constrained
to use a current oecumenical language as its literary vehicle without
being able or being willing, as the case might be, to capture, appropriate,
and transfigure the secular literature that had already been written in
this language either in its current form or in some older dialect, the
inevitable result was the production of a new corpus of religious litera-
ture—a liturgy, holy scriptures, commentaries on the scriptures, and
treatises on theology—in rivalry with the already existing corpus of
seqular literature in the same language.

1 It is true that the Qur*Sn was not the only source of a subsequent secular Arabic
literature's inspiration. It was also inspired in part by a pre-Islamic lyric poetry tipat -was
one of the spontaneous cultural products of an heroic age of the Arab transfrontier bar-
barians adjoining the Syrian limes of the Roman Empire (see V. v. 234). The Quran
itself, however, had already drawn inspiration from this same pre-Islamic source; so
there was no clear-cut division between a pagan source of an Arabic used in a secular
Arabic literature and an Islamic source of an Arabic used in the Islamic Church s
liturgy. 2 See V. v. 596-9 and 604-6.