In the Saronic Gulf

In the fatally long-drawn-out effort to transcend the institution of Parochial City-State Sovereignty – an effort which began with a tragically swift Athenian failure in the fifth century B.C. and ended no less than four hundred years later with a tragically belated Roman success – the historic sovereign city-states of Hellas played, from first to last, a role which was either negatively unconstructive or else positively mischievous. The appeal of Lampsacus and Smyrna to Rome in 193 B.C., which brought the Seleucid Empire to the ground, was inspired by the same perverse spirit that had once led the allies of Athens in the Delian League to rebel against their treaty obligations, and led Athens herself to transform the League into an Athenian tyranny; and the aberration of inward thought and feeling which was responsible for this perversity in outward behaviour was a stiff-necked persistence in idolizing the institution of City-State Sovereignty in an age when this institution had become inimical instead of serviceable to the life of the Hellenic Society. When this idolatry captivated and paralysed the ancient and famous communities which were the original sources of Hellenic light and leadership, the work of political construction, which had to be performed by somebody, was carried out crudely and painfully and slowly by communities which had been lying in obscurity, in the penumbra [Macedon and Rome], in the age when an Athens and a Corinth and a Chalcis and a Miletus had been the brilliant luminaries of the Hellenic firmament. And at the culmination and close of the Hellenic “Time of Troubles”, when this long labour and travail was on the eve of bearing a tardy and savourless fruit, a sudden view of four once magnificent Greek cities lying derelict within sight of each other, with their brilliance quite extinct, made an overwhelming impression on an experienced Roman statesman of the day.

“On the voyage home from Asia, when my ship was making for Megara from Aegina, I began to take my bearings of the regions round about. Behind me was Aegina, ahead of me Megara, to the right of me Peiraeus, to the left of me Corinth; and all these cities have had their floruit – only to lie now prostrate and ruinous for all eyes to see. I began to think to myself: ‘How monstrous it is for little creatures like ourselves, whose natural term of life is of the shortest, to grow indignant if any of us passes away or has his life taken from him, when the dead bodies of all these cities lie cast out here on this one spot. Servius, pull yourself together and remember that you have been born a son of man.’” [Footnote: Letter written by Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Marcus Tullius Cicero from Athens in 45 B.C. (Ad Familiares, iv. 5), upon receipt of the news of the death of Cicero’s daughter.]

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Jerome’s dream

The difficulty of persuading a sophisticated audience to give a hearing to an outlandish gospel would be great [...] in any case; and the apostles to “the high-brows” would have deprived themselves in advance of all prospect of success if they had gone out of their way to antagonize their shy spiritual quarry at the outset by wantonly making the form of their creed as rébarbatif as the substance of it could hardly fail to seem to an aesthetically sensitive Hellenically-cultivated mind (“si quando … prophetam legere coepissem, sermo horrebat incultus” [“whenever [...] I began to read the prophets, their language seemed to me uncouth”] – Saint Jerome, Ep. xxii ad Eustochium, chap. 30). These diplomatic considerations, however, were not the Fathers’ only motive, and indeed not even their strongest one, for resorting to the use of a cultural instrument which their church had officially condemned as frivolous at its best and, at its worst, pernicious. The evangelists of a cultivated pagan society were moved to address this audience in its own idiom chiefly because these evangelists themselves were mostly converts from these very pagan circles. Their conversion to an alien proletarian religion had not availed to break the spell of a pagan cultural heritage that was their birthright; and, when they used their pagan literary equipment for a religious missionary purpose, they were acting, not on calculation in cold blood, but spontaneously, con amore.

The abiding value of a pagan culture for Christian converts from a cultivated pagan milieu was demonstrated by the severity of the blow which Julian succeeded in dealing to the Christian community in the Hellenic World of his day by his shrewdly malicious stroke of making a professing Christian ineligible, ex officio religionis, for holding a teacher’s official licence [...]. The Christian victims of this sly manoeuvre in a “cold” religious war were so hard hit by their exclusion from a pagan field of cultural activity, and were at the same time so well versed in a literature which was the common heirloom of both parties, that, according to the story (as told by Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxiii, following Sozomen), Christian men of letters “had recourse to the expedient of composing books for their own schools. Within a few months Apollinaris produced his Christian imitations of Homer (a sacred history in twenty-four books), Pindar, Euripides, and Menander; and Sozomen is satisfied that they equalled, or excelled, the originals”.

Julian’s stroke was a shrewd one because the Christians’ unwillingness to dispense with a pagan cultural instrument not only laid them open to a public exposure as hypocrites but also secretly vexed their own consciences and continued to vex them even when Julian was no longer there to taunt them with their inconsistency. At a time when Julian was dead and his Hellenic paganism was moribund, a Saint Jerome suffered the same inward spiritual discomfort from a tension between a Christianity to which he had dedicated himself and a pagan cultural heritage which he had failed to pluck out and cast from him (“bibliothecâ … carere non poteram” [“I was not able to be without the [...] library”] – Saint Jerome, ibid.) as a Father Maffeus [sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit humanist] was to suffer, in his day, from a corresponding tension between a Humanism to which he had dedicated himself and a Christianity from which he had found himself unable to break loose. Jerome’s psychological conflict came to the surface of his consciousness in the celebrated dream in which he fancied that he was hailed before the heavenly tribunal of Christ; was convicted by his divine judge of being still a Ciceronian and no Christian; and was reprieved only thanks to the intercession of the consistory and in consideration of an oath which he swore by Christ’s name, binding himself never to read any profane literature any more: “si legero, te negavi” [“If I read, I reject you”] (Hieronymus [Jerome]: Epistulae, No. xxii ad Eustochium, chap. 30). Paganism had to become not merely moribund but extinct before the Christian heirs of a pagan Hellenic culture could play their part as Hellenism’s literary executors with an easy conscience.

[...]

Subbing point: last Jerome citation is presented inconsistently.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

The closed sea

The only Mediterranean waters that were a mare clausum to the Hellenes [...] were those bounded by the north coast of North Africa west of a point just north by west of Carthage, by the south-east coast of Spain as far [east] as a point at some [...] distance north-east of (the future site of) Cartagena, and by the Carthaginian insular possessions in the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the western tip of Sicily. For the light thrown upon the limits of this Carthaginian preserve by the terms of successive commercial treaties between Carthage and Rome see Strachan-Davidson, J. L.: Selections from Polybius (Oxford 1888, Clarendon Press), pp. 65-70.

Why “north by west” of Carthage?

Plus ultra!

The Carthaginian Empire before the First Punic War, 264-241 BC

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Aurelian’s deluded soldiers

Aurelian used to say that the soldiers deluded themselves in supposing that the destinies of the Emperors lay in their hands. For he used to aver that it was God who had bestowed the purple and … had decided the period of his reign. [Footnote: [quotation from] Anonymous post Dionem, Dindorf’s edition, p. 229.]

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

Double great wars

The social effect of any great war is to speed up the pace of social change; and, when, within the span of a single lifetime, one great war is followed by a second, the cumulative effect is much more than double that of a single great war. In our world in our time we are conscious of this overwhelming cumulative effect in our own experience of the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45. In our own case, however, we have not yet had time to see beyond the beginning of the sequel; so perhaps we may find ourselves interested in looking at past instances in which we do know the whole story.

“Double great wars” are rare; but there were three of them in the history of the Graeco-Roman Civilization; and each of these pairs of wars had a decisive effect on the destinies of the society in which it was perpetrated. The first pair was the Archidamian War of 431-421 B.C. followed by the Decelean War of 413-404 B.C.; and this double great war – the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War – was the occasion of the Greek Civilization’s breakdown. The second pair was the First Romano-Punic War of 264-241 B.C. followed by the Hannibalic [or Second Punic] War of 218-201 B.C.; and this double great war was the occasion of the Greek Civilization’s relapse into a débâcle after a brief third-century rally.

The Roman Empire gave the civilisation a reprieve by providing it with a universal state.

The third pair of great wars was the Romano-Persian War of A.D. 572-90 followed by its successor of A.D. 603-28; and this double great war was the occasion of the Graeco-Roman Society’s final dissolution.

Economic and Social Consequences of the Hannibalic War, lecture about the effects of the second of these double great wars, John Rylands Library, Manchester, March 10 1954; Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Vol 37, No 1, September 1954

Cf similar passage in Vol IX of the Study, published that year, partly quoted here, and see Hannibal’s Legacy, The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life, Vol I: Rome and Her Neighbours before Hannibal’s Entry, Vol II: Rome and Her Neighbours after Hannibal’s Exit, OUP, 1965

The Holy Mountain

According to the Athonite tradition, Mary was sailing, accompanied by St John the Evangelist, from Jaffa to Cyprus to visit Lazarus, when her ship was blown off-course, forcing her to stop there. From that moment the mountain was consecrated as the garden of the Mother of God and was out of bounds to all other women.

Monks have been in the Athos peninsula since the fourth century, possibly since the third. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt, many monks fled there from the Egyptian desert.

Athos has had self-governing privileges since the reign of Basil I, the founder of the Macedonian dynasty, at the end of the ninth century. Its links with Russia are almost as old as Russian Christianity (Christianisation of Kiev late 980s). It remained under Turkish control until the First Balkan War (1912), when the Turks were forced out by the Greek Navy. It was assigned to Greece at the Treaty of London, May 30 1913.

The twenty monasteries in their order in the Athonite hierarchy:

1. Great Lavra (Μεγίστη Λαύρα, Megísti Lávra)
2. Vatopedi (Βατοπέδι, Βατοπαίδι)
3. Iviron (Ιβήρων, ივერთა მონასტერი, Iverta Monasteri), built by Georgians
4. Helandariou (Χιλανδαρίου, Chilandariou, Хиландар), Serbian Orthodox
5. Dionysiou (Διονυσίου)
6. Koutloumousiou (Κουτλουμούσι)
7. Pantokratoros (Παντοκράτορος, Pantokratoros)
8. Xiropotamou (Ξηροποτάμου)
9. Zografou (Ζωγράφου, Зограф), Bulgarian Orthodox
10. Dochiariou (Δοχειαρίου)
11. Karakalou (Καρακάλλου)
12. Filotheou (Φιλοθέου)
13. Simonos Petras (Σίμωνος Πέτρα, Σιμωνόπετρα)
14. Agiou Pavlou (Αγίου Παύλου, Agiou Pavlou, Saint Paul’s)
15. Stavronikita (Σταυρονικήτα)
16. Xenophontos (Ξενοφώντος)
17. Osiou Grigoriou (Οσίου Γρηγορίου, Venerable Gregory)
18. Esphigmenou (Εσφιγμένου)
19. Agiou Panteleimonos (Αγίου Παντελεήμονος, Saint Pantelemon, Пантелеймонов,  Ρωσικόν, Rossikon), Russian Orthodox
20. Konstamonitou (Κωνσταμονίτου)

Do most or all of these monasteries follow the Order of St Basil?

There are also twelve sketes, communities of Christian hermits following a monastic rule, allowing a blend of hermetic and communal life.

I don’t think one should sneer at the casket containing the Marian belt in the last post even when it is carried by a corrupt abbot. The important thing is the notion of the holy, not the doubtful belt.

The three fingers of the Chalcidicean peninsula in the modern Greek region of Central Macedonia; the autonomous area of Mount Athos is part of the peninsula, but not of the region; click to enlarge

Laziness and greed on Mount Athos

The kind of story, then considered gently funny, that used to appear in Douglas Woodruff’s Talking at Random column in The Tablet; it ran from 1936 to ’69 and ’71 to ’78; Toynbee would have read it occasionally:

The monks of a monastery on Mount Athos in which the writer had been spending the night as a guest in June 1912 courteously expressed to him, the morning after, their hope that his sleep had not been disturbed by their frequent nocturnal celebrations of the Liturgy. Wishing to return his hosts’ courtesy in kind, the writer on his side expressed the hope that the monks did not find these never intermitted night-long vigils too painfully exhausting. “Not at all”, replied the monks, “considering that we are able to sleep in the day-time.” – “And how do you manage to do that?” their English guest inquired. “O, well, because we have fine estates in Rumili, with peasants on them to work them for us. You will remember our showing you yesterday our arsenal at the water’s edge, stored with provisions of gram, oil, and wine. All that comes from our estates, and the peasants have to deliver it to us at the arsenal by water.” – “And how do the peasants live?” I asked. “O, the peasants live like dogs”, said the monks, “but you can see for yourself what an admirable arrangement ours is. As the peasants work for us and fetch and carry for us, instead of our having to do any of this for ourselves, we can afford to sleep in the day-time and so keep ourselves fresh for praying at night, and this is really most advantageous, as you can imagine. After all, most people in the World – including, perhaps, Your Honour (τὸν λόγον σας) – are in this respect in the less favourable position of our peasants. Having, as they do have, to work all day, they are forced to spend the night in sleep instead of in prayer, in order to be fit for work again next morning; so at night-time the volume of prayers reaching God is at a minimum, and this means that God can give to a prayer offered up to Him during the night an amount of individual attention that would be out of the question in the day-time, when the great majority of Mankind are awake and in the running to gain a hearing for their prayers at odd moments of their working day. Yes, thanks to the endowments bequeathed to us by pious benefactors, we monks do find ourselves in a decidedly advantageous position.”

Entirely believable. In September 2008, on the eve of the recession in Greece, the Vatopedi monastery, one of twenty monasteries on Mount Athos, was accused of enhancing its real estate portfolio through corrupt deals made by Abbot Ephraim and the monk Arsenios with the government of Kostas Karamanlis. Michael Lewis told the story in Vanity Fair, October 2010 and in Boomerang, Travels in the New Third World, New York, WW Norton, 2011, and compared Ephraim and Arsenios to Skilling and Lay of Enron. They are still being investigated.

Abbot Ephraim carrying the Belt of the Mother of God on a roadshow through Russia in late 2011; who are the others?; picture credit: Valeriy Melnikov at RIA Novosti, cropped, use deemed fair for non-commercial scholarly purposes

Ephraim was jailed in December on his return to Greece, but released the following March.

RIA Novosti:

“The Belt of the Virgin Mary, otherwise referred to as the Precious Sash, or Cincture, of Our Most Holy Lady Theotokos – the holy treasure of the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece – is travelling abroad for the first time. The Belt is travelling in style. It flies in a private jet, chartered by the tour’s organizer, the influential St. Andrew Foundation, and is accompanied by six Vatopedi monks. In St. Petersburg, it was welcomed by none other than Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, Governor Alexander Misharin and the region’s bishop, Metropolitan Kirill, met the relic with the guard of honor before a procession of some 15,000 people took it to the cathedral.”

The report quotes George Fedotov’s The Russian Religious Mind (1946): “Russia knew neither Reformation nor Counter-Reformation with their explanations, symbolic interpretations and the uprooting of medieval idol-worshipping.” Didn’t he mean veneration? What kind of symbolic interpretation could have undermined icon-veneration in the Orthodox world? “People were more superstitious” might have been a better way of putting it.

Mary is supposed to have worn the belt on earth and given it to St Thomas during her transition to heaven. The Monastery also holds a silver and jewel-encrusted reliquary allegedly containing the skull of St John Chrysostom, a chalice made of a single piece of jasper, many icons and a large library.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

America and Rome

… or Ancient, famous states; or The vulgarians of  the west

“Herbert Hart and I were speaking despairingly of the Americans, – these callow, touchy, boastful, flatulent invaders, who seem to think themselves, as politicians, a match for the case-hardened double-crossers of struggling, tortured Europe. Will they never see, I protested, that they are only great children, pampered children of the rich, among experienced and desperate sharpers? Will they never admit that Europe, though torn with immemorial conflicts, is still the foundry of the world’s ideas, while they are fresh from their luxurious nursery? But Herbert likened them to the Romans in the second century B.C., when they overran the East; and they look on us, he said, as the Romans looked upon the Greeks, miserable people, scratching about subtleties and upsetting the peace of the world. What interest have they in the ideas that divide Darlan from de Gaulle? Now I had recently been reading Mommsen, and I saw in terrible detail the picture he had suggested, – those sudden vulgarians of the west, like a fresh, loud, frothy heedless tidal wave, deluging the brilliant but atomised republics, the ‘ancient, famous states’ of the old world, and burying their splendid past in universal banality.”

___

Richard Davenport-Hines, editor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Wartime Journals, IB Tauris, 2012.

Those high-donnish journals are fascinating early Roperiana. The young man seems to parody his older self. Long swathes are about hunting. This passage is silly, but I suppose Hart and Trevor-Roper have a point.

The entry is from January 1943, when Trevor-Roper was in radio intelligence in MI6. Davenport-Hines does not identify the phrase “ancient, famous states”, but it is from a speech by Churchill at the Lord Mayor’s Day luncheon at Mansion House on November 10 1941 in which he warned, four weeks before Pearl Harbour, that Britain would fight on the side of the United States in the event of war between America and Japan. Trevor-Roper uses it again, without quotation marks, in The Last Days of Hitler. The idea for that book came in a conversation between Trevor-Roper, Hart and Dick White.

Wells on Daisy Miller

America and Rome: Google search

Constantine and Peter the Great

Peter transferred the capital of his dominions from Russian Orthodox Moscow to a new city, founded by him in the maritime Western March of the Russian World and named after its founder; and, on the culturally as well as physically virgin soil of St. Petersburg, a Westernizing Russia was to have a seat of government that would be Western from the start, uncontaminated by any antecedent deposit of Orthodox tradition. [Footnote: A corresponding consideration had been in the mind of Constantine the Great when he had transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Old Rome to his own foundation of New Rome or Constantinople. The seat of Government of a converted Roman Empire was to be Christian from the outset, unaffected by the archaistic paganism that was dying so hard in its Senatorial fastness on the banks of the Tiber [...]. In making the transfer, both Constantine and Peter were, of course, moved by political and strategic motives in addition to the cultural motive here in question [...].]

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Constantinople and Vienna

Twin sieges. Of Constantinople by Arabs: 674-78 and 717-18. Of Vienna by Turks: 1529 and 1682-83.

The Arabs never returned to the walls of Constantinople, nor the Turks to Vienna.

Constantine and Ashoka

Constantine’s motive for becoming a convert to Christianity was ethically much inferior to Ashoka’s motive for becoming a convert to Buddhism. Ashoka’s motive had been repentance for his crime of having waged an aggressive war, and he had never gone to war again. Constantine’s motive was gratitude for his victories in three successive civil wars.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Moscow, the Third Rome

When, fourteen years after the ecclesiastical Union of Florence [a last-minute attempt to unify Christendom in the face of the Turkish threat], the Greek Roman Empire was extinguished by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Russians saw in this a divine retribution for the Greeks’ apostasy. Now that the Muslim Ottoman Empire had imposed its rule on all the Orthodox peoples of Anatolia and South-Eastern Europe, Muscovy was the sole surviving independent Orthodox Christian state. What was more, the Russians were the only Orthodox Christian people that had preserved its orthodoxy uncompromised by any concessions to Papal claims. On these grounds a sixteenth-century Russian ecclesiastical publicist asserted that Moscow was “the Third Rome”. Augustus’s Old Rome and Constantine’s New Rome had now each fallen in its turn. Moscow was the heir of both, and her dominion, unlike theirs, was to have no end. This doctrine was endorsed by the Muscovite government implicitly when, in 1547, the Grand Duke Ivan IV “the Terrible” assumed the title “Czar” (Caesar).

The “ecclesiastical publicist” was the monk Philoteus, who in 1510 wrote to the Grand Duke Vasili III (Basil III): “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will not be a fourth. No one will replace your Christian Tsardom!”

The Grand Dukes (or Grand Princes) of Moscow were nominally vassals of the Golden Horde until the reign of Ivan III (the Great), 1462-1505.

The notion of this further Rome seems to have appealed to Toynbee in the Study, but he prints comments by two Oxford scholars who warn him not to make to make too much of it.

[The writer has had] the benefit of comments and criticisms from B. H. Sumner, the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, and from Prince Dmitri Obolensky, the Reader in Russian and Balkan Medieval History in the University of Oxford, on the question of the degree to which the course of Muscovite History was affected by the influence of the Byzantine element in the Russian Orthodox Christian cultural heritage. B. H. Sumner’s opinion on this question is set out in the following passages of a letter of his, dated the 25th January, 1951, to the writer of this Study:

“I find the build-up and development of the Muscovite state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries very difficult to analyse, but, from what I have read of those two centuries from the Russian side, I should say that the most effective and practical influences in building up centralized administration and government came from autochthonous Russian developments of the semi-feudal conditions of Moscow and the other Russian principalities (shot through with a strong nationalist colouring), combined with some Tatar influence, but with little Byzantine influence. I do not think, for instance, that either Ivan the Great or Ivan the Terrible [reigned 1547-84] regarded themselves as successors of the Byzantine emperors, or that they and their civil servants, boyars, diplomats, &c., had any idea of ‘oecumenical’ pretensions. It is true that Ivan the Terrible, for instance, claimed to be Tsar ‘Autocrat’, Gosudar [sovereign], and appointed by God, combining plenitude of power both vis-à-vis his subjects and as against any other states, but he never claimed to be the successor of the Basileus [Roman Emperor in the East], or to be ‘oecumenical’ or ‘Tsar of the Orthodox Christians of the whole World’ (that was the expression used by the Patriarch of Constantinople in a letter to Ivan in A.D. 1561, but not by Ivan). I don’t think that it could be held that Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible and the civilians in Russia held that there had been any translatio imperii, or made any claim over all Christians or all Orthodox.

“Such claims, implicitly or explicitly, had appeared from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, bound up with the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome, but, at any rate at that time, this idea, which admittedly had its origins in writings of certain monks, continued to be confined to certain ecclesiastical circles in Russia, with occasional echoes from Constantinople. It is striking, I think, that the official historiography of the sixteenth century in Russia, which was built up by the Tsars, does not lean at all towards Byzantium: both in the chronicles and in Russian diplomacy of the time the emphasis is all on the heritage of Kiev, not at all on the heritage of Byzantium. That, of course, was because of the continuous struggle for the Russian western lands against Lithuania-Poland.

“From about A.D. 1470 onwards, for more than a century, Moscow had a whole series of overtures, either from Rome or from the Emperor, or both, linking together an anti-Turkish alliance, re-union of churches, recognition of Moscow as the heir of the Byzantine Empire, and elevation of the Metropolitan of Moscow to the patriarchal dignity. It is, I think, significant that the Russians in reply were always silent as regards the inheritance of the Byzantine Empire, or coronation of the Tsar as ‘the Christian Tsar’. What the Russians were interested in was their claims against Lithuania-Poland and their struggle for an exit to the Baltic, and not the Balkans or the Ottomans: hence the failure of Western overtures for an anti-Turkish alliance and of Western attempts to win the Russians for this by dangling before them the lure of the Byzantine heritage.

“Thus, the conception of Moscow as ‘the Third Rome’, or of Muscovy as the inheritor of the ‘oecumenical’ role of Byzantium, was, in my view, of no practical importance and of very little theoretical or emotional importance among the governing class in Muscovy in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Its appeal was in the main limited to certain ecclesiastical circles in Muscovy – and, in a sense, to needy Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire in quest of money from Moscow. It is quite true that the idea of Muscovy as the sole possessor of the pure Orthodox Christian faith after the Council of Florence and the capture of Constantinople was a stock-in-trade element in Muscovite national pride during these centuries, and it fostered Muscovite exclusiveness and xenophobia. But this line is not the same as stepping into the shoes of Byzantium by aspiring to an ‘oecumenical’ role.

“Much later [at the end of the eighteenth century], when the Russians had advanced far southwards and were strong enough to challenge the Turks, then the idea of the liberation of the Orthodox, and sometimes that of some form of resurrected Orthodox empire at Constantinople, became prominent, and increasingly so in the nineteenth century. Even so, I think that the influence of the messianic ideas of the Slavophils and Dostoievsky and their typicalness can be exaggerated, and that the ‘oecumenical’ and messianic elements in Russian nineteenth-century thought ought not to be read back into earlier centuries as being then powerfully creative and proof of a strong and continuous Byzantine heritage.”

In a note communicated to the writer of this Study on the ist June, 1951, Prince Dmitri Obolensky expresses the same view.

“Neither the successive Russian governments of the sixteenth century nor, on the whole, contemporary Russian writers and historians seem to have taken the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ very seriously; for the Muscovite rulers from Ivan III onwards, Moscow was much more the ‘Second Kiev’ than the ‘Third Rome’. I would agree here with Humphrey Sumner. Some recent historians have, rightly, it seems to me, ‘played down’ the importance of the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ in the development of Russian sovereignty. See, for example, G. Olšr: ‘Gli ultimi Rurikidi e le basi ideologiche della sovranità dello Stato russo’, in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, vol. xii, Nos. 3-4 (Rome, 1946), pp. 322-73.”

But he defends part of his view.

It will be seen that Sumner and Obolensky agree in making three points: In the first place, the concept of “Moscow the Third Rome” was an academic idea which was never taken very seriously outside ecclesiastical circles; secondly, the architects of a Muscovite autocracy were indebted to the institutions of the East Roman Empire for little except certain external forms and ceremonies; thirdly, the statesmen in control of Muscovite policy showed themselves unwilling to sacrifice the interests of their own Russian Orthodox Christendom to those of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom which was sundered from Russia by the double barrier of the Eurasian Steppe and the Black Sea. None of these three points would be contested by the present writer; but he would point out, in his turn, that none of them is incompatible with the thesis that the extinction of the last glimmer of the East Roman Empire in A.D. 1453 had an important and enduring psychological effect on Russian souls, [footnote below] and that this effect consisted in the implantation in them of a feeling that Muscovy, as the now sole surviving Orthodox Christian Power of any consequence, had inherited from the East Roman Empire both the mission of preserving intact the purity of the Orthodox Christian Faith and the high destiny which this onerous mission carried with it ex officio.

It will be noticed that Sumner, in the passages quoted above, equates the ideological legacy of the East Roman Empire with a pretension to an oecumenical authority. As the present writer sees it, the idea for which the East Roman Empire had stood, first and foremost, in its own people’s minds was the guardianship of Christian Orthodoxy rather than the possession of a title to world-wide dominion. He would, however, go on to contend that, in fact, the second of these two pretensions was logically latent in the first, since it would be difficult for a people to believe that God had singled them out to be the unique heralds of His Truth on Earth without also believing that He had likewise singled them out to be His instruments for propagating this Truth eventually throughout the Oikoumenê. It was, for example, an article of orthodox Jewish belief among a politically impotent Jewish diasporà that the extinct Kingdom of David would eventually be restored by the Messiah, not in its historic form as a parochial state, but with a dominion that would be coextensive with the Oikoumenê. The writer would therefore take issue with Sumner’s contention that the idea of being the sole possessor of the pure Orthodox Faith does not carry with it an aspiration to an oecumenical role; and he would have consulted his friend and mentor further on this point if, by the date when he was revising the present Part of this Study for the press, Humphrey Sumner’s friends and fellow historians had not suffered an irreparable loss in this saintly scholar’s untimely death.

Footnote to the last paragraph but one:

This psychological effect of the concept of “the Third Rome” is, however, also questioned by Prince Obolensky:

“I do not wish to minimize the importance of the religious factor in the resistance offered by the seventeenth-century Russian conservatives to the infiltration of Western ideas and customs: some of them at least seem to have regarded Russia as a guardian of the Orthodox faith against the heretical West. But I doubt whether the theory of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ had much to do with this attitude, except possibly among the ‘Old Believers’. Except in some ecclesiastical, and particularly monastic, circles, this theory does not seem to have made much headway in Russia. … [It] [bracket in original] does not seem to have been sufficiently accepted to justify the view that future generations of Russians were moved by it to resist the impact of Western culture upon their way of life.”

In an earlier passage – admittedly speaking of “survivals” rather than revivals or successions – he points out that

“survivals” afforded [EA Freeman and his school, with their exaggeration of the link between Hellenic and Western history] the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of tracing – as they imagined – the continuity of this thread and that, as its colour flashed out and vanished and flashed out again in the shot-silk texture of historic sequences. This pleasant exercise of the fancy has sometimes led historians who have indulged in it into irrelevant conceits and barren controversies.

Whether he is right or wrong here, Toynbee was writing of what he knew: he sometimes allowed himself such “pleasant exercises of the fancy”. In due course I will quote the passage to which Sumner and Obolensky were objecting.

Novgorod and St Petersburg (with pre-Ivan background)

Vasili III, contemporary (west) European engraving

Change and Habit, The Challenge of Our Time, OUP, 1966 (first quotation)

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934 (last)

From Leo III the Isaurian to Francis II

Imperial reigns:

Leo III Syrus (the Isaurian) 717-41

Charlemagne 800-14

Otto I 962-73

Otto III 996-1002

Henry IV 1084-1105

Frederick I (Barbarossa) 1155-90

Frederick II (Stupor Mundi) 1220-50

Francis II 1792-1806

Athênê Poliûchus, Athânâ Chalcioecus, Tychê Antiocheôn, Fortuna Praenestina, and the other deified combatants in a mêlée of conflicting parochial idols had eventually been called to order by being subordinated to the oecumenical supremacy of a Dea Roma and a Divus Augustus; and a post-Diocletianic absolute version of this consolidated worship of the concentrated power of a politically unified Mankind was formally revived in Western Christendom, a quarter of a millennium before the revival of city-state-worship in Lombardy, when Charlemagne was crowned as a Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Saint Peter’s on Christmas Day A.D. 800.

The memory of this Carolingian evocation of a “holy” Roman ghost of an extinct Hellenic universal state cannot come into our minds without reminding us simultaneously that, since then, the same ghost had been re-evoked again and again in the Western World in the course of the eleven and a half centuries that had elapsed between the date of the coronation of Charlemagne at Rome and the time of the writing of these lines.

The all but fatal collapse of the nascent Western Christian Civilization itself, which had been the price of Charlemagne’s failure to resuscitate the Roman Empire in the West effectively, did not deter a Saxon Otto I from repeating his Austrasian predecessor’s attempt; and the subsequent failure of Otto’s attempt in its turn did not deter a Swabian Frederick I [Barbarossa] from attempting, for his part, to undo the political effects of the humiliation of a Franconian Henry IV at Hildebrand’s hands by employing against a triumphant Hildebrandine Church the refurbished spiritual weapon of a recently disinterred Justinianean Law. Thereafter, when Frederick Barbarossa’s experience had demonstrated that the necromancer’s wand provided by his Bolognese legists was a broken reed, his grandson Frederick Stupor Mundi set himself to reverse, at the eleventh hour, the cumulative disaster of Charlemagne’s, Henry IV’s, and Frederick I’s successive discomfitures – though the weapon in which Frederick II trusted to conjure a victory out of his forlorn hope was one which had missed fire, more than two hundred years back, in the hands of his Saxon predecessor Otto III.

This imaginative tenth-century forerunner of a thirteenth-century Stupor Mundi had sought to condense an insubstantial wraith of a defunct Imperium Romanum into at least a similitude of flesh and blood by transferring the seat of a rehabilitated Western Christian “Holy Roman Empire” from Western Christendom’s Saxon marches over against the North European barbarians to her Roman march over against Orthodox Christendom. At the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era the Ducatus Romanus was a patch of common ground on which the domains of the two Christendoms overlapped; and, in installing himself in the ci-devant Imperial City, Otto III had hoped to fortify the sickly counterfeit of the Roman Imperial Power that had been palmed off on Western Christendom by reinforcing it with tougher metal imported from a Byzantine mint. The success of Leo III Syrus’s revival of the Roman Empire in Orthodox Christendom had been as conspicuous as the failure of Charlemagne’s subsequent attempt to perform a corresponding feat of political necromancy in the West. Could not a clumsy Western necromancer’s abortive essay be salvaged by the Herodian expedient of turning to Western Christendom’s account the achievements of an Orthodox Christian necromancer’s virtuosity?

This complicated experiment of trying to raise the ghost of a dead civilization by employing a living civilization as a medium, which Otto III had failed to carry to success in the cultural crucible of a late-tenth century City of Rome, was repeated by Frederick II under more promising conditions in a thirteenth-century Kingdom of Sicily which was the East Roman Empire’s Transadriatic successor-state. The outcome of this more ambitious adventure in the black art of political alchemy was [...] a war to the death between a pseudo-Byzantine “Holy Roman Empire” and a Hildebrandine Papal Roman Church which brought the victorious ecclesiastical combatant to the ground in the same ruin as his vanquished secular adversary and thereby compromised the future of a promising Western Christian attempt to explore a previously untried approach towards the goal of the baffling enterprise of Civilization. Yet the ghost of an obsolete Hellenic institution that had been so inauspiciously raised at the close of the eighth century of the Christian Era by an Austrasian king and a Roman patriarch was still able to induce fresh Western victims to feed it with their life-blood within full view of their infatuated predecessors’ unburied corpses.

By the time of the extirpation of Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s brood, the cumulus of historic disasters, that had gradually come to be associated with academic pretensions to the imperial prerogative in the West, had gathered round a tragic imperial crown into a lowering nimbus which might have been expected to serve as an effective deterrent against any further repetition of Charlemagne’s folly. Yet this scarecrow Caesarea Maiestas was eagerly appropriated by the architects of a Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy for the sake of the prestige that it could still lend to their strictly practical enterprise of providing an Early Modern Western World with a local carapace to protect it against Ottoman aggression in the Danube Basin; and, after the decay of the Ottoman Power had rendered a Hapsburg Empire’s service to the Western Civilization superfluous, [a Corsican adventurer proclaimed himself Emperor and on December 2 1804 crowned himself in Paris in the presence of Pope Pius VII].

The last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicated on August 6 1806.

Leo the Isaurian, for Toynbee, is the real founder of a remodelled Orthodox Christian Roman Empire in the east:

The Roman Empire in the East ran out between the death of Justinian in A.D. 565 and the overthrow of Maurice in A.D. 602, the East Roman Empire was constructed by Leo Syrus (imperabat A.D. 717-40).

All Byzantine Emperors regarded themselves as “Roman” Emperors. The first use of the word “Byzantine” was in 1557, when the German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources. The term comes from Byzantium, the name of Constantinople before it became the capital of Constantine.

In 812 the emperor Michael I Rhangabes recognised Charlemagne as Emperor, although not necessarily as “Emperor of the Romans”. What were the relations between the two emperors between 962 and 1453?

The second and third Romes

Augustuli

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

The calamitous seventh century

For the East Roman Empire, the seventh century was a time of almost continuous troubles. The mutiny in 602 and the murder of the Emperor Maurice plunged the Empire into anarchy. In 604 the Persians started to invade the Empire’s Asian provinces, while the Slav Völkerwanderung from the north bank of the lower course of the Danube swamped the whole of the interior of the Balkan Peninsula. The Empire had hardly begun to recover from the last and worst Romano-Persian war of 604-28, when the Arabs launched their assault in 633. The climax of this assault was the Arab siege of Constantinople in 674-8, and this peril had only just been surmounted when, in 680-1, the Eurasian nomad Bulgars established a permanent foothold on the south bank of the Danube.

At the first Arab siege, napalm or Greek fire was first used. There was a second Arab siege in 717-18. The Bulgars were not Slavs, but by the tenth century had become slavicised.

The founder of the First Bulgarian Empire in 681 was Asparukh.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Imperialists, westernisers, intelligentsias

Before the Industrial Revolution, Man had devastated patches of the biosphere. For instance, he had caused mountain-sides to be denuded of soil by felling the trees that previously had saved the soil from being washed away. Man had cut down forests faster than they could be replaced, and he had mined metals that were not replaceable at all. But, before he had harnessed the physical energy of inanimate nature in machines on the grand scale, Man had not had it in his power to damage and despoil the biosphere irremediably. Till then, the air and the ocean had been virtually infinite, and the supply of timber and metals had far exceeded Man’s capacity to use them up. When he had exhausted one mine and had felled one forest, there had always been other virgin mines and virgin forests still waiting to be exploited. By making the Industrial Revolution, Man exposed the biosphere, including Man himself, to a threat that had no precedent.

The Western peoples had begun to dominate the rest of mankind before the Industrial Revolution. In the sixteenth century the Spaniards had subjugated the Meso-American and Andean peoples and had annihilated their civilizations. In the course of the years 1757-64 the British East India Company had become the virtual sovereign of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. In 1799-1818 the British subjugated all the rest of the Indian subcontinent to the south-east of the River Sutlej. They had a free hand because they held the command of the sea and because in 1809 they made a treaty with Ranjit Singh, a Sikh empire-builder, in which the two parties accepted the line of the Sutlej as the boundary between their respective fields of conquest. In 1845-9 the British went on to conquer and annex the Sikh empire in the Punjab. Meanwhile, in 1768-74, Russia had defeated the Ottoman Empire decisively; in 1798 the French had temporarily occupied Egypt, and in 1830 they had started to conquer Algeria; in 1840 three Western powers and Russia had evicted the insubordinate Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, from Syria and Palestine. In 1839-42 the British had defeated China dramatically. In 1853 an American naval squadron compelled the Tokugawa Government of Japan to receive a visit from it. The Japanese recognized that they were powerless to prevent this unwelcome visit by force of arms.

These military successes of Western powers and of one Westernized Eastern Orthodox power, Russia, were won at the cost of occasional reverses. In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were evicted forcibly from both Japan and Abyssinia. A British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1839-42 was annihilated. Yet by 1871 the Western powers and Russia were dominant throughout the World.

Even before the Industrial Revolution in Britain the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, had recognized that the only means by which a non-Western state could save itself from falling under Western domination was the creation of a new-model army on the pattern of the Western armies that were being created in Peter’s time, and Peter also saw that this Western-style army must be supported by a Western-style technology, economy, and administration. The signal military triumphs of the Western powers and of a Westernized Russia over non-Westernized states between 1757 and 1853 moved the rulers of some of the threatened states to do what Peter the Great had done.

Eminent examples of Westernizing statesmen in the first century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain are Ranjit Singh (ruled 1799-1839), the founder of the Sikh successor-state, in the Punjab, of the Abdali Afghan Empire; Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Padishah’s viceroy in Egypt from 1805 to 1848; the Ottoman Padishah Mahmud II (ruled 1808-39); King Mongkut of Thailand (ruled 1851-68); and the band of Japanese statesmen that, in the Emperor’s name, liquidated the Tokugawa regime and took the government of Japan into its own hands in 1868. These Westernizing statesmen have had a greater effect on the history of the Oikoumenê than any of their Western contemporaries. They have kept the West’s dominance within limits, and they have done this by propagating, in non-Western countries, the modern West’s way of life.

While the achievements of all the Westernizers mentioned above are remarkable, the Japanese makers of the Meiji Revolution were outstandingly successful. They themselves were members of the hitherto privileged, though impoverished, traditional military class, the samurai; the Tokugawa Shogunate succumbed after offering only a minimal resistance; a majority of the samurai acquiesced peacefully in the forfeiture of their privileges; a minority of them that rebelled in 1877 was easily defeated by a new Western-style Japanese conscript army composed of peasants who, before 1868, had been prohibited from bearing arms.

Muhammad Ali and Mahmud II did not have so smooth a start. Like Peter the Great, they found that they could not begin to build up a Western-style army till they had liquidated a traditional soldiery. Peter had massacred the Muscovite Streltsy (“Archers”) in 1698-9; Muhammad Ali massacred the Egyptian Mamluks in 1811, and Mahmud II massacred the Ottoman janizaries in 1826. The new Western-style armies all gave a good account of themselves in action. Muhammad Ali began building his new army in 1819 and a navy in 1821; in 1825 his well-drilled Egyptian peasant conscript troops almost succeeded in re-subjugating for his suzerain Mahmud II the valiant but undisciplined Greek insurgents. The Greeks were saved only by the intervention of France, Britain, and Russia, who destroyed the Egyptian and Turkish fleets in 1827 and compelled Muhammad Ali’s son Ibrahim to evacuate Greece in 1828. In 1833 Ibrahim conquered Syria and was only prevented from marching on Istanbul by Russia’s intervention on Mahmud II’s behalf. Muhammad Ali’s army was more than a match for Mahmud’s because he had been able to make an earlier start in building it up. Mahmud could not start before 1826, the year in which he destroyed the janizaries; yet, in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-9, his new-model peasant conscript army put up a much stiffer resistance than the old Ottoman army in the Russo-Turkish wars of 1768-74, 1787-92, and 1806-12.

Ranjit Singh, like his contemporary Muhammad Ali, engaged former Napoleonic officers as instructors. The British succeeded in defeating the Western-trained Sikh army in 1845-6 and again in 1848-9, but these two wars cost the British a greater effort and heavier casualties than their previous conquest of the whole of India outside the Punjab.

Rulers who set out to Westernize non-Western countries could not do this solely with the aid of a few Western advisers and instructors. They had to discover or create, among their own subjects, a class of Western-educated natives who could deal with Westerners on more or less equal terms and could serve as intermediaries between the West and the still un-Westernized mass of their own fellow-countrymen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Ottoman Government had found this newly needed class, ready to hand, among Greek Ottoman subjects who were acquainted with the West through having been educated there or having had commercial relations with Westerners. Peter the Great in Russia, Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and the British in India had to create the intermediary class that they, too, needed. In Russia this class came to be called the intelligentsia, a hybrid word composed of a French root and a Russian termination. During the years 1763-1871, an intelligentsia was called into existence in every country that either fell under Western rule or saved itself from suffering this fate by Westernizing itself sufficiently to succeed in maintaining its political independence. Like the industrial entrepreneurs and the wage-earning industrial workers who made their appearance in Britain in the course of this century, the non-Western intelligentsia was a new class, and by the 1970s it had made at least as great a mark on mankind’s history.

The intelligentsia was enlisted or created by governments to serve these governments’ purposes, but the intelligentsia soon realized that it held a key position in its own society, and in every case it eventually took an independent line. In 1821 the ex-Ottoman Greek Prince Alexander Ypsilantis’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire taught the Ottoman Government that its Greek intelligentsia was a broken reed. In 1825 a conspiracy of Western-educated Russian military officers against Tsar Nicholas I was defeated and was suppressed, but it was a portent of things to come, and this not only in Russia but in a number of other Westernizing countries.

To live between two worlds, which is an intelligentsia’s function, is a spiritual ordeal, and in Russia in the nineteenth century this ordeal evoked a literature that was not surpassed anywhere in the World in that age. The novels of Turgenev (1818-83), Dostoyevsky (1821-81), and Tolstoy (1828-1910) became the common treasure of all mankind.

See the eighth volume of the Study and the Reith lectures.

Vasily Timm, The Decembrist revolt, painted 1853, St Petersburg, Hermitage

The scampering boy in the foreground appears in so many works of this period and somewhat earlier. In British prints he sometimes rolls a hoop and is followed by a scampering dog.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Persia, Macedon, Rome

[...] the successive overthrows of the Achaemenian Empire by Macedon and of Macedon by Rome, [footnote: See Polybius: Oecumenical History, Book XXIX, chap. 21, in which the historian of Macedon’s overthrow by Rome comments on a passage, commenting on Macedon’s triumph over Persia, which he quotes from the work of his predecessor Demetrius of Phalêrum.] [...].

Here is the passage in Polybius. WR Paton, translator, Loeb, 1922-27, online here:

“So then often and bitterly did Perseus [the last king of Macedon, defeated at Pydna] call to mind the words of Demetrius of Phalerum. For he, in his treatise on Fortune, wishing to give men a striking instance of her mutability asks them to remember the times when Alexander overthrew the Persian empire, and speaks as follows: ‘For if you consider not countless years or many generations, but merely these last fifty years, you will read in them the cruelty of Fortune. I ask you, do you think that fifty years ago either the Persians and the Persian king or the Macedonians and the king of Macedon, if some god had foretold the future to them, would ever have believed that at the time when we live, the very name of the Persians would have perished utterly – the Persians who were masters of almost the whole world – and that the Macedonians, whose name was formerly almost unknown, would now be the lords of it all? But nevertheless this Fortune, who never compacts with life, who always defeats our reckoning by some novel stroke; she who ever demonstrates her power by foiling our expectations, now also, as it seems to me, makes it clear to all men, by endowing the Macedonians with the whole wealth of Persia, that she has but lent them these blessings until she decides to deal differently with them.’ And this now happened in the time of Perseus. Surely Demetrius, as if by the mouth of some god, uttered these prophetic words. And I, as I wrote and reflected on the time when the Macedonian monarchy perished, did not think it right to pass over the event without comment, as it was one I witnessed with my own eyes; but I considered it was for me also to say something befitting such an occasion, and recall the words of Demetrius. This utterance of his seems to me to have been more divine than that of a mere man. For nearly a hundred and fifty years ago he uttered the truth about what was to happen afterwards.”

What would a British reader of 1897 have thought of this?

A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954

The winter of Heraclius

P.T.: When you think of English historians of the past, do you have any special affections?

A.T.: I do, I have a great affection for Gibbon, though I think that, in a way, he is naïve and limited. Christianity set his teeth on edge, and he thought that religious people were all either simpletons or cheats. I also have an affection for Gibbon’s successor Bury. I knew him personally. He was kind to me when I was young and when he was famous. Like Gibbon, he was a rationalist who spent his life studying an age of faith, and his rationalism, too, was a hindrance to his understanding of the people he was concerned with. In a supreme military crisis, the Emperor Heraclius is said to have spent a winter in prayer before starting on a daring campaign that was going to be decisive one way or the other. Bury the rationalist said: “Of course, that is humbug. It is obvious that Heraclius spent that winter, not in prayer, but in working out strategic plans.” Yet, if one is in the least sensitive to the atmosphere of the Christian World in the seventh century, it is obvious that the contemporary chronicler is telling the truth. Prayer, not Kriegspiel, was Heraclius’s winter occupation.

With Philip Toynbee, Comparing Notes, A Dialogue across a Generation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963

Cultural diversity in universal states

Owing to the tendency of the parochial states of a broken-down civilization in its Time of Troubles to sharpen their weapons in fratricidal conflicts with one another and to take advantage of this dearly bought increase in their military proficiency to conquer neighbouring societies with their left hands while continuing to fight one another with their right hands, most universal states have embraced not only a fringe of conquered barbarians but substantial slices of the domain of one or more alien civilizations as well. Some universal states, again, have been founded by alien empire-builders, and some have been the product of societies within whose bosoms there has already been some degree of cultural variety even on a reckoning which does not differentiate between march-men and the denizens of the interior of the same social world. [...]

No other universal state known to History appears to have been as homogeneous in culture as Japan under the Tokugawa régime. In “the Middle Empire” of Egypt, in which a fringe of barbarians on the Nubian glacis of its Theban march was one element of variation from the cultural norm of the Egyptiac Society of the age, there was another and more positive feature of cultural diversity in the Empire’s culturally Sumeric provinces and client states in Palestine and Coele Syria. As for “the New Empire”, which was a deliberate revival of the original Egyptiac universal state, it accentuated the pattern of its prototype by completing the assimilation of the barbarians of Nubia and by embracing the domain of an abortive First Syriac Civilization in Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia; and this culturally tripartite structure – in which the cultural domain of the civilization through whose disintegration the universal state has been brought into existence is flanked by culturally alien territories annexed at the expense of both barbarians and neighbouring civilizations – appears to be the standard type.

For example, in the Mauryan Empire, which was the original Indic universal state, an Indic cultural core was flanked by an alien province in the Panjab, which had been at least partially Syriacized during a previous period of Achaemenian rule after having been partially barbarized by an antecedent Völkerwanderung of Eurasian Nomads, while in other quarters the Mauryan Empire’s Indic core was flanked by ex-barbarian provinces in Southern India and possibly farther afield in both Ceylon and Khotan as well. The Guptan Empire, in which the Mauryan was eventually reintegrated, possessed an ex-barbarian fringe, with an alien Hellenic tincture, in the satrapy that had been founded by Saka war-bands in Gujerat and the North-Western Deccan, and a Hellenized fringe, with a Kushan barbarian dilution, in the territories under its suzerainty in the Panjab. In a Han Empire which was the Sinic universal state, the Sinic World proper was flanked by barbarian annexes in what was eventually to become Southern China, as well as on the Eurasian Steppe, and by an alien province in the Tarim Basin, where the Indic, Syriac, and Hellenic cultures had already met and mingled before this cultural corridor and crucible was annexed to the Han Empire for the first time in the second century B.C. and for the second time in the first century of the Christian Era. In the Roman Empire, which was the Hellenic universal state, a culturally Hellenic core in Western Anatolia, Continental European Greece, Sicily, and Italy, with outlying enclaves in Cilicia, in Syria, at Alexandria, and at Marseilles, was combined with the domain of the submerged Hittite Civilization in Eastern Anatolia, with the homelands of the Syriac and Egyptiac civilizations in Syria and in the Lower Nile Valley, with the colonial [Carthaginian] domain of the Syriac Civilization in North-West Africa, and with ex-barbarian hinterlands in North-West Africa and in Western and Central Europe as far as the left bank of the Rhine and the right bank of the Danube. [Footnote: Leaving out of account the late-acquired and early-lost Transdanubian bridgehead in Dacia.]

There are other cases in which this standard cultural pattern has been enriched by some additional element.

In the Muscovite Tsardom, a Russian Orthodox Christian core was flanked by a vast ex-barbarian annex extending northwards to the Arctic Ocean and eastwards eventually to the Pacific, and by an Iranic Muslim annex consisting of the sedentary Muslim peoples of the Volga Basin, the Urals, and Western Siberia. This pattern was afterwards complicated by Peter the Great’s deliberate substitution of a Westernized for a traditional Orthodox Christian cultural framework for the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state, and by the subsequent annexation of additional alien territories – at the expense of the Islamic World on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and at the expense of Western Christendom in the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland.

In the Achaemenian Empire, which was the original Syriac universal state, there was an antecedent cultural diversity, within the Syriac core itself, between the Syrian creators of the Syriac Civilization and their Iranian converts, and a geographical gap between Syria and Iran that was still occupied by the dwindling domain of the gradually disappearing Babylonic culture. The Achaemenian Empire also embraced the domain of the submerged Hittite culture in Eastern Anatolia, the best part of the domain of the Egyptiac Civilization, fringes torn from the Hellenic and Indic worlds, and pockets of partially reclaimed barbarian highlanders and Eurasian Nomads. Moreover, after its life had been prematurely cut short by Alexander the Great, its work was carried on by his political successors, and especially by the Seleucidae, whom it would be more illuminating to describe as alien Hellenic successors of Cyrus and Darius. In the Arab Caliphate, in which the Achaemenian Empire was eventually reintegrated, the Syriac core – in which the earlier diversity between Syrian creators and Iranian converts had been replaced by a cleavage, along approximately the same geographical line, between ex-subjects of the Roman and ex-subjects of the Sasanian Empire – was united politically, by Arab barbarian empire-builders, with barbarian annexes – in North-West Africa, in the fastnesses of Daylam and Tabaristan between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and on the fringes of the Eurasian Steppe adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin – and with fragments of alien civilizations: a slice of the new-born Hindu World in Sind; the potential domain of an abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin; an Orthodox Christian diaspora in Syria and Egypt; and a fossil of the by then elsewhere extinct Babylonic Society at Harran.

In the Mongol Empire, which was a universal state imposed by alien empire-builders on the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, the annexes to a Chinese core were unusually extensive – including, as they did, the whole of the Eurasian Nomad World, the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and the ex-Sasanian portion of a Syriac World which by that time was in extremis. The Mongols themselves were barbarians with a tincture of Far Eastern Christian culture. In the Manchu empire-builders, who subsequently repeated the Mongols’ performance on a less gigantic yet still imposing scale, there was the same tincture in a more diluted form; and the Chinese universal state in its Manchu avatar once again embraced, in addition to its Chinese core, a number of alien annexes: a “reservoir” of barbarians in the still unfelled backwoods and still virgin steppes of Manchuria, the whole of the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist World in Tibet, Mongolia, and Zungaria, and the easternmost continental outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the north-western Chinese provinces of Kansu and Shansi, and the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

In the Ottoman Empire, which provided, or saddled, the main body of Orthodox Christendom with its universal state, the alien ʿOsmanli empire-builders united an Orthodox Christian core with a fringe of Western Christian territory in Hungary, with the whole of the Arabic Muslim World except Morocco, the Sudan, and South-Eastern Arabia, and with pockets of barbarians and semi-barbarians in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, the Mani, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and on the Arabian Steppe. In the Mughal Empire, which was the Ottoman Empire’s counterpart in the Hindu World, the pattern was simpler, since, apart from the Iranic Muslim empire-builders and their co-religionists who had been deposited in the Hindu social environment by earlier waves of invasion from the Middle East and Central Asia [since the twelfth century], the Mughals’ only [sic] non-Hindu subjects were the Pathan barbarian highlanders on the north-western fringe of their dominions. When, however, the Mughal Rāj was replaced by a British Rāj, the pattern of the Hindu universal state became more complex; for the advent of a new band of alien empire-builders, which substituted a Western element for an Islamic at the political apex of the Hindu universal state, did not expel the Indian Muslims from the stage of Hindu history, but merely depressed their status to that of a numerically still formidable alien element in the Hindu internal proletariat, so that the Hindu universal state in its second phase combined elements drawn from two alien civilizations with a Pathan barbarian fringe and a Hindu core.

There had been other universal states in which, as in the Mughal Empire, the cultural pattern had been less complex than the standard type yet not so simple as that of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric universal state, included no representatives of an alien civilization – unless Byblus and other Syrian coast-towns are to be counted as such in virtue of their tincture of Egyptiac culture. On the other hand, the Sumeric Civilization itself was represented in two varieties at least – a Sumero-Akkadian and an Elamite – and in no less than three if the domain of the Indus Culture should prove also to have been included in “the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World”. Moreover, the Babylonian Amorites, who eventually restored a polity that had been first constructed by the Sumerian Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur, were not merely marchmen but marchmen with a barbarian tinge. So, on a broader and a longer view, the cultural pattern of the Sumeric universal state proves to have been less homogeneous than might appear at first sight. “The thalassocracy of Minos”,  again, which was the Minoan universal state, probably included representatives of the continental Mycenaean variety of the Minoan culture as well as the creators of that culture in its Cretan homeland, even if it did not embrace any representatives of an alien civilization.

In the Central American World, two once distinct sister societies – the Yucatec Civilization and the Mexic – had not yet lost their distinctive characteristics, though they had already been brought together by force of Toltec arms, when the task, and prize, of establishing a Central American universal state was snatched, at the eleventh hour, out of the hands of barbarian Aztec empire-builders by Spanish representatives of an utterly alien Western Christendom. In the Andean World the Empire of the Incas, which was the Andean universal state, already included representatives of the Kara variety of the Andean culture [...] before the indigenous Incan empire-builders were suddenly and violently replaced by Spanish conquistadores from Western Christendom who turned the Andean World upside-down, with a vigour reminiscent of Alexander the Great’s, by proceeding to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and to variegate the social map by studding it with immigrant Spanish landlords and self-governing municipalities.

The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which served as a carapace for Western Christendom against the assaults of the ʿOsmanlis, and which, seen from the south-east, wore the deceptive appearance of being a full-blown Western universal state, set itself, like the Tokugawa Shogunate, to achieve domestic cultural uniformity, but lacked both the ruthlessness and the insularity which, between them, enabled the Japanese isolationists for a time to put their policy into effect. In pursuing its aim of being totally Catholic, the Hapsburg Power did succeed, more or less, in extirpating Protestantism within its frontiers; but the very success of its stand, and eventual counter-attack, against the Ottoman embodiment of an Orthodox Christian universal state broke up the Danubian Monarchy’s hardly attained Catholic homogeneity by transferring to Hapsburg from Ottoman rule a stiff-necked minority of Hungarian Protestants and a host of Orthodox Christians of divers nationalities, most of whom proved unwilling to accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, even when the yoke was proffered in the easy form of Uniatism [union with Rome and retention of local rites], while, among those who did accept this relatively light burden, the rank and file remained nearer in heart and mind to their dissident Orthodox ex-co-religionists than they ever came to be to their fellow Catholics who were of the Latin Rite.

The [post-Assyrian] Neo-Babylonian Empire [or Chaldean Empire], which was the Babylonic universal state, similarly forfeited its cultural purity – and thereby worked unwittingly for the eventual extinction of the Babylonic Civilization itself – when Nebuchadnezzar conquered and annexed the homeland of the Syriac Civilization west of the Euphrates; and the impress of the indigenous Babylonic culture became progressively fainter as the domain which Nebuchadnezzar had bequeathed to a short line of native successors was incorporated first into the barbaro-Syriac Empire of the Achaemenids and then into the Hellenic Empire of the Seleucids.

Our survey has shown that, in the cultural composition of universal states, a high degree of diversity is the rule; and, in the light of this fact, it is evident that one effect of the “conductivity” of universal states is to carry farther, by less violent and less brutal means, that process of cultural pammixia that is started, in the antecedent Times of Troubles, by the atrocities that these bring in their train. The refugees, exiles, deportees, transported slaves, and other déracinés of the more cruel preceding age are followed up, under the milder régime of a universal state, by merchants, by professional soldiers, and by philosophic and religious missionaries and pilgrims who make their transit with less tribulation in a more genial social climate.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Syriac vs Hellenic

In the Oriental provinces of the Roman Empire the fifth century saw the Nestorian and Monophysite mass-movements against the “Melchite” adherents of the Imperial Catholic Church. These movements, however, were endeavours, not so much to free the Church from the domination of the Temporal Power, as to free the still submerged portion of the Syriac World from the Hellenic ascendancy to which it had been subject since the days of Alexander the Great. [...]

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Roman anarchies

… or the calamity of the bees.

[...] the recurrent “Time of Troubles” through which the Hellenic World passed between the death of Marcus in A.D. 180 and the accession of Diocletian in A.D. 284. [Footnote: The cause of this terrible relapse into anarchy was analysed long beforehand, with a prophetic insight, by the Stoic sage and Roman statesman Seneca (vivebat circa 5 B.C.-A.D. 65) in a passage of his De Clementia (Book I, chap. 4, §§ 1-2) in which the author gives his view of the social function of a prince.

“He is the bond that holds the Commonwealth together; he is the breath of life that is breathed by subjects, in their thousands, who in themselves would be nothing but a burden and a prey if they were left to their own devices through the removal of a presence which is the soul of the Empire.

Their king is safe? One mind informs them all;
Lost? They break troth straightway.

“If this calamity [which Virgil (Georgics, IV, ll. 212-13) imagines as overtaking the bees] [bracket in original] were to overtake us, it would be the destruction of the Pax Romana and the ruin of a great people. This people will be safe from that particular danger for just so long as it has the sense to put up with the curb; but, if ever it snaps the reins – or refuses to allow itself to be bridled again if the bridle has been accidentally shaken off – then the texture of this mighty empire will be rent, and its present unity will fly apart into a hundred shreds. Rome will cease to bear rule at the moment at which she ceases to render obedience.”

A foretaste of the fulfilment of this prophecy that had been made in a treatise addressed to the Emperor Nero was inflicted upon the Hellenic World in A.D. 69 as an immediate consequence of Nero’s tyranny; but this touch of calamity acted as a stimulus. “The Year of the Four Emperors” was followed by the principate of Vespasian; and, when the Neronian reign of terror was reinaugurated by the son of an emperor who had earned the title of “Saviour and Benefactor of All Men”, this tyranny of Domitian in its turn was followed by the philanthropic régime of a series of philosopher-emperors who succeeded one another without a break from Nerva to Marcus. It was only after the death of Marcus that the new “Time of Troubles” set in; and even then the tyranny of Commodus was followed by the principate of Septimius Severus, who repeated Vespasian’s work – albeit with a rougher hand. It was not till after the death of Alexander Severus that the storm broke with an uncontrollable and shattering violence.]

Translations of Seneca and Virgil presumably by Toynbee.

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939

Charon and Hermes

Charon: “I will tell you, Hermes, what Mankind and human life remind me of. You must, before now, have watched the bubbles rising in the water under the play of a fountain – the froth, I mean, that makes the foam. Well, some of those bubbles are tiny, and these burst at once and vanish, while there are others that last longer and attract their neighbours till they swell to a portentous bulk – only to burst without fail sooner or later in their turn, as every bubble must. Such is human life. The creatures are all inflated – some to a greater and others to a lesser degree – and there are some whose inflation lasts as long as the twinkling of an eye, while others cease to be at the moment of coming into being; but all of them have to burst sooner or later.”

Hermes: “Your simile is as apt as Homer’s simile of the leaves.”

Charon: “Yet, ephemeral though these human beings are, you see, Hermes, how they exert themselves and compete with one another in their struggles for office and honours and possessions – though one day they will have to leave all that behind and come to our place with nothing but one copper in their pockets. Now what do you think? Here we are on an exceeding high mountain. Shan’t I shout to them at the top of my voice and warn them to abstain from useless exertions and to live their lives with Death constantly in mind? I will say to them: ‘You silly fellows, why are you so keen on all that? You had better stop putting yourselves through it. You are not going to live for ever. None of these earthly prizes is everlasting; and nobody, at death, can carry away any of them with him. One day, as sure as fate, the owner will be gone – as naked as he came – and his house and estate and money will pass for ever after to a constant succession of alien possessors.’ Supposing I were to shout this at them, or something like it, and could make myself heard, don’t you think they might stand to benefit enormously and might also become vastly more sensible than they now appear to be?”

Hermes: “I am afraid, Charon, you are suffering under an amiable delusion. I don’t think you realize the condition to which they have been reduced by their ignorance and self-deception. Even with a gimlet you couldn’t now open their ears – they have plugged them and plugged them with wax (as Odysseus treated his companions for fear that they might hear the Sirens singing). They wouldn’t be able to hear you, even if you screamed till you burst. In the world of men Ignorance produces the same effect as Lethe in your Hades. All the same, there are a few of them who have refused to put the wax into their ears; and these few do see life steadily, know it for what it is, and incline towards the truth.”

Charon: “Then shan’t we shout to them, anyway?”

Hermes: “Well, even that would be superfluous. You would only be telling them what they knew already. You can see how pointedly they have drawn away from the rest and how disdainfully they are laughing at what is going on. Obviously they are finding no satisfaction at all in all that, and are planning to make a ‘get-away’ from Life and to seek asylum with you. You know they are not exactly loved by their fellow creatures for showing up their follies.”

[...] [Footnote: Lucian: Charon, 21.]

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939

Tomb of Ignatios

“Here I’m not the Kleon famous in Alexandria
(where they’re not easily dazzled)
for my marvellous houses, my gardens,
for my horses and chariots,
for the jewels and silks I wore.
Far from it – here I’m not that Kleon:
his twenty-eight years are to be wiped out.
I’m Ignatios, lector, who came to his senses very late;
but even so, in that way I lived ten happy months
in the peace, the security of Christ.”

___

Tomb of Ignatios, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com. Spelling anglicised.

Adrianople

Though Adrianople was [...] marked out by its geographical position for playing the part of a capital city, it had not so far achieved its manifest destiny except during the century ending in A.D. 1453, when it had been the seat of government of the Ottoman Empire. There had, on the other hand, been two periods in which Adrianople had had the misfortune to find itself serving as a frontier fortress: first during the three centuries ending in the annexation of Eastern Bulgaria by the East Roman Empire in A.D. 972 [...] and again since the carving of the autonomous principalities of Eastern Rumelia and Bulgaria out of the body of the Ottoman Empire in A.D. 1878 [...].

Edirne (Adrianople) is in Eastern Thrace, or Turkish Thrace. Rumelia had been the term for all the Ottoman Empire’s European provinces.

First Bulgarian Empire (681-1018). Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396). Adrianople came under Bulgarian control at least two occasions before 972 (and at least once afterwards), but on the whole remained Greek.

With the demise of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (1077-1307), Anatolia was divided into the so-called Ghazi emirates. One of them was led by Osman I. The Ottomans took Adrianople from Byzantium in 1365.

Ottoman capitals: Söğüt (1302-26), Bursa (1326-65), Adrianople (1365-1453), Constantinople (1453-1922).

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 led to the re-establishment of the Bulgarian state (under nominal Ottoman suzerainty) and the full independence of Serbia, Romania and Montenegro. The western powers scaled back plans for a large Bulgaria, fearing that it would come under Russian control. Eastern Rumelia (capital Plovdiv, or Philippopolis, after Philip II of Macedon) was created as a separate principality, but it merged with Bulgaria in 1885. Adrianople remained Ottoman.

Adrianople defended Ottoman Constantinople and Eastern Thrace during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 (squabbles between Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, partly at the expense of the Ottoman Empire). It was briefly occupied by the Bulgarians in 1913, following the Battle of Odrin; and by the Greeks between the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and the end of the Turkish War of Independence in 1922.

Bulgarian Orthodox Church of Sts Constantine and Helen, Edirne; Wikimedia Commons

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP (footnote)

Plus ultra!

In A.D. 1952 [...] the feat that had to be performed by Western navigators on the face of the waters of History was to pilot their vessel, without disaster, through perilous straits in the hope of making their way into more open waters beyond; and in this post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced.

To paraphrase and anticipate, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: abjuring war without sinking into consumerism.

Sailing between the Pillars of Hercules: negotiating a spiritual passage between a Christian heresy, Communism, on one shore and a backward-looking Christian orthodoxy on the other.

In terms of our Mediterranean maritime simile, we may compare the social and spiritual enterprise to which these Western adventurers were committed in the twentieth century of the Christian Era with the navigational task confronting Hellenic mariners in the sixth century B.C. who had bidden farewell to their Ionian homeland and had set sail westward rather than submit to the alien dominion of un-Hellenic-minded Achaemenidae. Following in Odysseus’ wake, these Phocaean seafarers would have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without approaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by the whirlpool Charybdis; but, if, by managing to steer their course along the narrow fairway through this first danger-zone, they should succeed in making the friendly port of Marseilles, they would not there find themselves at rest in the haven where they would be; [footnote: Ps. cvii. 30.] for their bold and skilful negotiation of the Straits of Messina would merely have carried them from the inner basin into the outer basin of the Mediterranean, without having liberated them from the imprisoning shores of their landlocked native sea.

I’m not sure why the open waters of the Atlantic would have been a haven for them. Nor did the Persians reach the outer basin. But the speculation is half-fanciful. Rather than submit to Persian rule, the Phocaeans, or some of them, had abandoned Ionia. Where did they sail to, in fact? Some, perhaps, to Chios, some to Phocaean colonies on Corsica and elsewhere. Massalia or Massilia, Marseille (Marseilles, the English sometimes call it), was an existing Phocaean colony: it was an independent Greek city from 600 BC until Caesar conquered it in 49 BC. Some became the founders of Elea, or Velia, in Campania. Some eventually returned to Phocaea.

What were the actual political dangers of Scylla and Charybdis? The straits were controlled by Greeks (Messenians, at least on the Calabrian side), not Carthaginians.

If they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again from the sheltering harbour of their mother country’s daughter city in order to make for the Straits of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to run the gauntlet without their leave, were visible embodiments of Imperial Carthage’s decree that no Hellenic vessel was ever to sail on through this golden gate leading out from the landlocked waters into the main.

Since Carthage controlled both sides of the straits, such a decree would not be surprising, but what source tells us that it was made? Were the Carthaginians in part protecting access to Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, the Azores? Some of these islands must have lain behind the tradition of the Hesperides, which Hercules had visited.

A Phoenician fleet had circumnavigated Africa by about 600 BC in the other direction. Herodotus describes how the Pharaoh Necho II sent out an expedition manned by Phoenician sailors. They sailed out of the Red Sea, rounded the Cape, and headed north to the Mediterranean. They paused on the African coast in two successive years to sow and harvest grain, and reached Egypt in the course of the third year.

A Carthaginian, Hanno, probably early in the 5th century BC, sailed to the Bight of Bonny, probably as far as Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone or Cape Palmas off Liberia. An account of his periplus was engraved in Punic on a bronze tablet set up in the temple of Baal at Carthage. It was translated into Greek. The translation survives, and is the only piece of Carthaginian literature we have. His account was used by Ptolemy and remained the standard guide for seafarers until the Portuguese explorations of the 15th century.

We have fragmentary evidence that a certain Euthymenes of Massalia sailed down the west coast of Africa as far as a river which was infested with crocodiles and whose waters were driven back by strong sea breezes. He thought that this river was the Nile. It may have been the Senegal River. We are not sure what century Euthymenes lived in, but there is a statue of him on the façade of the Marseille bourse.

Pytheas sailed from Massalia past the Pillars of Hercules to northern Europe, including Britain, c 325 BC. (The odd thing is that Queen Elizabeth II has never visited Greece.)

Polybius passed them after Carthage had been destroyed. Pliny the Elder tells us that he sailed down the west coast of Africa c 146 BC in ships lent to him by the destroyer, Scipio Aemilianus. He may have seen Mount Kakulima in Guinea.

So the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and presumably Persians were aware that Africa was surrounded by sea except where it was connected to Asia. Bartolomeu Dias sailed round the Cape in 1488. Vasco da Gama sailed round most of Africa in 1497-98 on his way to India.

And here woe betide the Hellenic mariner who allowed himself [if he wanted to reach his haven] to be intimidated by his adversary’s veto into following the Theban Pindar’s poor-spirited advice to his Agrigentine patron Thêrôn.

“And now Thêrôn’s achievements have carried him to the limit: they have brought him to the Pillars of Hercules on his long voyage from home; and what lies beyond this terminus is out of bounds (ἂβατον) for all men, wise or witless. I will not pursue this venture. I should deserve to lose my senses if I did this senseless thing!” [Footnote: Pindar: Odes in Honour of Victors in the Olympic Games, Ode iii, ll. 43-45.]

Theron had reached a metaphorical Pillars of Hercules by his unsurpassable excellence in the Olympic chariot race in 476 BC.

Ne plus ultra! These were the very words that a forbidding Carthaginian statesmanship had been intending to extort from defeatist Hellenic lips; and, so long as this self-imposed Hellenic psychological inhibition held, no Hellenic explorer would ever sail on to test the truth of a later poet’s intuition that the untried passage of the Ocean would prove to be the avenue to a New World. [Footnote: Seneca: Medea, ll. 364-79 [...].] More than two thousand years were to pass before Columbus’s victorious defiance of the veto once imposed by a jealous Carthage was to be commemorated, in the device of “the dollar sign”, by the first sovereign on whose globe-encircling dominions the Sun could never set. On coins minted for Charles V out of American bullion, the antistrophic words Plus ultra! were triumphantly inscribed on a scroll displayed behind the minatory pair of pillars; and the moral was one which a twentieth-century Odysseus ought to take to heart if this series of episodes in the history of the art of navigation was an apt parable of the spiritual voyage on which his sails were set.

According to a Renaissance tradition, the pillars had been inscribed with the words Ne plus ultra as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further. There is no version of the phrase in Greek.

Luigi Marliano, doctor and advisor to the young King of Spain, proposed Plus Oultre for his motto as an encouragement to ignore the ancient warnings, take risks. (The OED can find no example of the phrase Ne plus ultra from before 1637, but that means in English sources.)

Plus ultra is on the present Spanish coat of arms as an inscription on a banner linking two pillars. Its history between Charles V and now includes use thus on the Spanish dollar (current in the Spanish Empire 1497-19th century; the main currency within Spain was the real). The Spanish dollar was contemporary with the German Thaler and was the basis of the American dollar.

The wrapped pillars do not appear on US dollars, but may be the origin of the US dollar sign.

Future post: global histories of anna, cent, centime, crown, cruzado, cruzeiro, denarius, dinar, dollar, drachma, escudo, florin, franc, Groschen, guinea, gulden, Kreuzer, krone, lira, livre, Mark, penny, peseta, peso, pfennig, piastre, pound, real, rial, ruble, rupee, Schilling, shekel, shilling, solidus, sovereign, talent, Thaler, zloty.

In the interpretation of this parable in terms of the Western Civilization’s prospects, the finding of a passage between Scylla and Charybdis signified the negotiation of the Western World’s immediate problem of finding some way of avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification. Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was in imminent danger of destroying itself by failing to stop making War now that a demonic drive had been put into War by the progress of a Western physical science; and it was in hardly less imminent danger of stultifying itself by seeking asylum from War and Class-Conflict in Circe’s pig-sty. If post-Christian Western souls did succeed in threading their way between these two immediate perils, they would owe their happy issue out of this affliction to an inspiration to take Religion as the mark on which they were once more to set their course; but an impulse to return to Religion would not in itself suffice to bring the Western pilgrims’ ships out of inland waters into open sea; for the call of Religion was being uttered in diverse tongues; [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 28.] and the questions to which the agnostic Western pioneer in search of a Christian oracle would have, at his own peril, to find an answer for himself, were:

“Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? … Have all the gifts of healing? … Do all interpret?” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 29-30.]

In this spiritual ordeal the forbidding Pillars of Hercules were a pair of rival authoritarian and dogmatic faiths, both of which alike were offering to the storm-tossed voyager an everlasting Nirvāna in their stony bosoms and were threatening him with the eternal punishment that had been inflicted on the Flying Dutchman if he were to be so impious and so fool-hardy as to reject their offer and sail on past them out into the blue. From the one shore this ultimatum was being delivered to Western souls by a Christian heresy in which the stone of Communism had been substituted for the bread [footnote: Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. 11.] of the Gospel, and from the other shore by a Christian Orthodoxy in which the body of Christ, [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 27; Eph. iv. 12.] who had “come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, [footnote: John x. 10.] had been petrified into a pillar of salt [footnote: Gen. xix. 26.] by a backward-looking ecclesiastical tradition. To dare the passage between these two frowning Pillars of Hercules was a venture that might daunt even a mariner whose moral had been fortified by a previous success in making his way safely between Scylla and Charybdis. But, if, at this supremely critical point in his voyage, the pilgrim were to feel his heart failing, he might recover his courage and initiative by taking his oracle from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

“Covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet show I unto you a more excellent way.” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 31.]

OED defines petrify as “turn (an organic body) into a stony concretion by gradually replacing its original substance with a calcareous, siliceous, or other mineral deposit”, which I suppose makes “petrify into a pillar of salt” not quite a mixed metaphor.

If a contrite humility was the first of the Christian virtues that were necessary for the Western pilgrim’s salvation, an indomitable endurance was the second. What was required of him at this hour was to hold on his course and to trust in God’s grace; and, if he prayed God to grant him a pilot for the perilous passage, he would find the bodhisattva [in the Mahayana, an enlightened being who has voluntarily delayed his entry into Nirvana in order to help his suffering fellow-beings] psychopompus [conductor of souls through the underworld] whom he was seeking in a Francesco Bernardone of Assisi, who was the most god-like soul that had been born into the Western World so far. A disciple of Saint Francis who followed faithfully enough in the saint’s footsteps to participate in the saint’s gift of receiving Christ’s stigmata would know, with the knowledge that comes only through suffering, that his sacrifice had been accepted by the Lord. [Footnote: Gen. iv. 3-7.] Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor. [Footnote: Ps. l. 9, in the Vulgate Latin text, Ps. li. 7, in the English Authorized Version.]

Seville Town Hall (Ayuntamiento), reign of Charles V

A footnote after “minatory pair of pillars” advises us to

See Raymond, Wayte: The Silver Dollars of North and South America (New York 1939, Wayte Raymond, Inc.) for photographs of dollars coined for the Spanish Crown, over a series of reigns ranging from Charles V’s (regnabat A.D. 1516-56) to the break-up of the Spanish Empire of the Indies in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, which display the pair of pillars with the motto Plus ultra. On 46 of the 67 specimens (not counting “necessity coins” [small mintings of little value]) of “pillar type” coins here reproduced, including the earliest in the series, Charles V’s coin from Santo Domingo (p. 18, No. 1), the two words are inscribed on a single scroll linking the pillars (and passing behind an heraldic shield inserted between the pillars on coins of this type minted for the Bourbons). On fifteen specimens, each of the two pillars is wreathed in a separate scroll of its own, with “Plus” inscribed on the left-hand scroll and “Ultra” on the right-hand scroll. On six specimens, including Philip II’s dollar minted in Peru (reproduced in Supplement, p. 3, No. A 1), the motto is inscribed behind or above the pillars without being mounted on a scroll.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

A dinner-party for Liutprand

What the Lombards thought of the Romans before Rome was restored to glory by the Tuscan Lombard Hildebrand is revealed in the following passage from the works of Liutprand of Cremona, who was Hildebrand’s senior by about a hundred years. The passage occurs in the twelfth chapter of Liutprand’s report on his mission to Constantinople in A.D. 968 [as emissary of Berengar II]. He is describing the high words that passed between himself and the East Roman Emperor Nicephorus Phocas during a dinner-party that the Emperor was giving in his honour.

“When I was on the point”, writes Liutprand, “of answering him back … he would not let me, but added, by way of insulting me: ‘You are not Romans, but Lombards!’ He wanted to say more, and signed to me with his hand to keep quiet, but I lost my temper and burst out. ‘That fratricide Romulus,’ I said, ‘after whom the Romans are named, was a son of a whore – born, I mean, in adultery – as every schoolboy knows. What he did was to set up an alsatia in which debtors, fugitive slaves, murderers, and other criminals whose lives were forfeit received asylum until their numbers mounted up to a mob of undesirables whom their host dubbed Romans. This is the noble origin of the people whom you style the Lords of the World (kosmocratores, id est imperatores). And these are also the people whom we – and by “us” I mean us Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Swabians, and Burgundians – despise so utterly that, when we lose our temper with our enemies and want to insult them, we pronounce the single word “Roman!” – conveying, in the use of this pregnant appellation, all the baseness and cowardice and avarice and effeminacy and mendacity of which human nature is capable.’”

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Ecclesia

The Christian Church is indebted for its very name to the technical term employed, in the city-state of Athens, to denote the general assembly of the citizen-body when it was meeting to transact political, as distinct from judicial, business; but, in thus borrowing the word ecclesia (ἐκκλησία), the Church gave it a dual meaning which was no part of the original Attic usage but was the reflection of a new political order, in which Athens and all other surviving city-states of a disintegrating Hellenic World had been incorporated into the Roman Empire without losing their identities as units of local government and life on the municipal level. In Christian usage, ecclesia came to mean both a local Christian community [footnote: When the “outdoor” Hellenic Civilization gave place to the “indoor” Orthodox and Western Christian civilizations, the word ecclesia, in its local meaning, came to be applied, not only to the local Christian community, but to the parochial building in which it assembled for congregational worship.] and the church universal.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Clergy

The “clergy” took its name from a Greek word (κλῆρος) [klēros] whose general meaning of “lot” had been specialized in a juridical sense to mean an allotted share of an inherited estate, and in a political sense to mean an allotted share of a conquered territory. This political usage, which had been borrowed from Spartan conquerors in the Peloponnese by Athenian conquerors in the Archipelago and Macedonian conquerors in Egypt and South-Western Asia, had given the word a rather unfortunate connotation by the time when the Christian Church began to work out its ecclesiastical organization. The Church adopted the word, nevertheless, to mean the portion of the Christian community that God had allotted to Himself to serve Him as His professional priesthood.

A footnote here quotes

Lightfoot, Bishop J. B., in his edition of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, 7th ed. (London 1882, Macmillan)

on

“the sequence of meanings by which the word κλῆρος arrived at this peculiar sense: (i) the lot by which the office was assigned [as in Acts i. 26]; (ii) the office thus assigned by lot [as in Acts i. 17]; (iii) the body of persons holding the office” [...].

The square brackets referring to Acts are Toynbee summarising Lightfoot.

Acts i. 26 is about the election of the apostle Matthias. He was chosen, as it happens, by lot. Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ and then (according to the Gospel of Matthew) committed suicide in guilt before Christ’s resurrection. Between the ascension of Christ and the day of Pentecost, the remaining apostles elected a new twelfth apostle by casting lots, a traditional Jewish way of determining the will of God.

Acts i. 17 uses the word when it says that Judas had been part of the apostles’ ministry (he was not chosen by lot).

Lightfoot’s point is that “the sense ‘clerical appointment or office’ chronologically precedes the sense ‘clergy’”. Since, as he admits, the election of Matthias by lot is unique, to have both (i) and (ii) in the “sequence of meanings” seems unnecessary. And did Judas and Matthias have “offices”?

[These usages] cannot be traced back to the Old Testament; for, though, according to Num. xviii. 20, God is the κληρονομία [kléronomia] of Aaron, and, according to Deut. xviii. 2, He is the κλῆρος of the Levites, “the Jewish priesthood is never described conversely as the special ‘clerus’ of Jehovah, while on the other hand the metaphor thus inverted is more than once applied to the whole Israelite people” (Lightfoot, op. cit. [...]).

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Scripture

The Christian Church’s sacred book – taken over from the Jews and eventually augmented by the addition of an exclusively Christian “New Testament” to supplement and retrospectively reinterpret “the Old Testament” of Jewish origin – was presented by the Church as its credentials in the belief that this was the authentic Word of God Himself. In so far as the Bible was not referred to as “the Books” (τα βιβλία) [ta biblia] par excellence, it was designated by a term long since current in the vocabulary of the Roman inland revenue. In the fiscal terminology of a post-Hannibalic Roman Commonwealth the word scriptura signified the tax payable for the right to graze cattle on the public lands in the devastated areas in the South of Italy, because an entry in the official register, certifying that a would-be grazier had duly paid his tax, was the warrant that authorized him to make use of the public pasturelands. The Greek equivalent of the Latin scriptura was (γραφή) [graphē], and in a latter-day Kingdom of Greece at the time of writing there was a district in the Southern Pindus, between the plains of Thessaly and the west coast, which was still known as the Agrapha [unwritten] because the agents of an Ottoman inland revenue – and an East Roman inland revenue in an earlier age – had never succeeded even in inscribing in their registers, not to speak of actually collecting, the taxes due from the wild highlanders in this mountain fastness.

The Pindus range is in northwestern Greece and southern Albania.

Spring in Agrafa

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Testament

The two “testaments” of which the Christian scriptures consisted [...] were called διαθήκαι [diathekai, covenants] in Greek and testamenta in Latin because they were thought of as being the equivalents of legal instruments in which God had declared to Mankind, in two instalments, His “will and testament” for the ordering of Human Life on Earth.

The Greek word is translated as either “covenant” or “testament”. The meaning is probably closer to testament or disposition, but the meaning of diatheke is complex.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Service

When the originally informal proceedings at the periodic meetings of each of the local Christian communities crystallized into a hard-and-fast ritual, this religious “public service” (λειτουργία) [leitourgía] took its name from the nominally voluntary corvées which, in a democratic Athenian Commonwealth in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., had been euphemistically known by that name in order to gloze over the truth that they were virtual surtaxes under the guise of “benevolences”.

What about the Mass? Wikipedia: “The term ‘Mass’ is derived from the Late Latin word missa (dismissal), a word used in the concluding formula of the Mass in Latin: ‘Ite, missa est’ (‘Go, it is the dismissal’).” Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): “It may seem strange that this unessential detail should have given its name to the whole service.” Though Catholics are not quite comfortable with the word “service”.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Convent

When these solitaries (μοναχοί) [hermits, anchorites; monachós, singular] had the courage to [subject] themselves to the spiritual discipline of leading a common life together without surrendering the spiritual freedom won by withdrawal from the rest of the World, this creative contradiction in terms – a society of solitaries – took its Latin name from a word which, in its previous secular use, had combined the two meanings of a quarter sessions and a chamber of commerce. [Footnote: The provinces into which the Roman Commonwealth had organized its subject territories had been mapped out into districts corresponding to the principal cities which each province contained; and it had been customary for the provincial governor to go on circuit round these “county towns”, to transact judicial and other public business. During his stay in each “county town” he expected the leading Roman citizens, resident in that district, to hold a rendezvous with him there to serve as his assessors in court and to assist and advise him in other ways. This rendezvous was known as a conventus, and the name came thence to be applied both to the standing organization of Roman residents in each district and to the geographical area itself.]

Wikipedia: “A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion. In modern English usage, ‘convent’ [...] almost invariably refers to a community of women, while ‘monastery’, ‘priory’ or ‘friary’ is used for men; but in historical usage they are often interchangeable.”

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Withdrawal

When, in the fourth century, training to be an anchorite (ἀναχωρητής) [anakhōrētēs] took the place of training to be a martyr in the psychological warfare of a Christian Church which had now made its peace with the Roman Imperial Government, the action of this new-model Christian athlete, whose ordeal was to endure the solitude of the desert instead of facing the publicity of the criminal court, came to be designated by a Greek term taken from the technical administrative vocabulary of the country that bred the pioneer Christian hermits. In Augustan Egypt “anachôrêsis” (ἀναχώρησις) had meant withdrawal from productive economic activities in protest against the exactions of the taxation authorities; [footnote: “So early as A.D. 20 we hear of the flight (anachôrêsis) of tax-payers” (Bell, H. I.: Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), p. 77).] in Diocletianic Egypt the same word came to mean withdrawal from the World in protest against mundane human wickedness. [Footnote: We have observed in an earlier context [...] that this withdrawal of the anchorites was not anti-social either in intention or in effect. The anchorites influenced, aided, and, in great emergencies, sometimes actually governed a tottering Hellenic World with a moral authority which they would never have commanded if they had not proved the sincerity of their disinterestedness by insulating themselves physically from their fellow men.]

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Training

The “training” (ἄσκησις) [áskēsis, whence ascetic] to which a spiritually ambitious élite in the Early Christian Church subjected itself took its name from the physical training of athletes for the Olympian and other international athletic contests that were one of the characteristic expressions of the Hellenic culture [...].

But there never been a proper bridge in Christianity, like yoga, between the two types of training.

Nineteenth-century Muscular Christianity (of the kind associated with Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes; the phrase first appears in an anonymous review in The Eclectic Review of a book of lectures by Alexandre Vinet in December 1852; the Wikipedia article has a list of the Biblical verses to which the movement liked to refer) and the spirit of ora et labora or laborare est orare in the Rule of St Benedict (which does not contain either phrase) aren’t that; St Ignatius’s Exercises don’t have a physical component; the Vatican has been critical of New Age.

Wikipedia: “The explicit advocacy of sport and exercise in Christianity did not appear until 1762, when Rousseau’s Émile described physical education as important for the formation of moral character.”

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Orders

The “orders” (ordines) of clergy in the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy [...] took their name from the politically privileged classes in the Roman body politic, which were known as ordines both collectively and severally (ordo senatorius, ordo equestris), to distinguish them from the common run of Roman citizens.

According to the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the orders of clergy, in ascending order, are porter, reader or lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest. The first four are the Minor Orders, the last three Major or Holy Orders. (Tonsure was a prerequisite for receiving all orders until 1972, though sometimes only a small amount of hair was cut.)

Within the priesthood are ordinary priests, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs and the Supreme Pontiff.

A cardinal can be cardinal bishop, cardinal priest or cardinal deacon. Nowadays even cardinal deacons must at least be priests, most cardinal priests are bishops or higher, and cardinal bishops are bishops only of the suburbicarian dioceses near Rome (Ostia, Velletri-Segni, Porto-Santa Rufina, Frascati, Palestrina, Albano, Sabina-Poggio Mirteto).

The passage just quoted is referring, however, not to the seven orders, but to the threefold ordering of episcopate, presbyterate (ordinary priests) and diaconate.

The members of the highest order in the Christian hierarchy came to be known as “Overseers” (ἐπισκόποι) [episkopoi], and the initial preposition, as well as the literal meaning, of this compound Greek word are likewise to be found in the title (ἔφοροι) [ephoroi] which had been given in the Spartan body politic to the members of a board of supreme executive officers who were appointed by election but were constitutional despots during their term of office.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Preparation

One of the features of the Christian liturgy was a recurrence of its ritual in both annual and weekly cycles. The Christian liturgical week was modelled on a Jewish prototype; and, though the Christian copy had been differentiated from the Jewish original by making the first day of the week the holy day instead of the seventh, the Christian adaptation still followed the pristine Jewish dispensation in retaining the Jewish name for the eve of the Sabbath. In the Greek Christian vocabulary, Friday continued to be called “the preparation” (Παρασκευή) [Paraskevi, which is still the word in modern Greek] – in accordance with a Jewish usage in which this elliptical term explained itself. In the psychological atmosphere of a post-Exilic Judaism, in which a stateless diasporà maintained its esprit de corps by a common devotion to the keeping of the Mosaic Law, “the preparation” sans phrase could mean nothing but “the preparation for the Sabbath”.

Whereas,

in the psychological atmosphere of a pre-Alexandrine Athenian sovereign city-state whose citizens worshipped their own then still potent corporate political power under the name of Athena Poliûchus [Athena Protector],

the word had had a merely political connotation.

In the usage of Thucydides, writing for an Athenian public for whom politics were the breath of life, and whose political-mindedness was being accentuated in the historian’s generation by the military ordeal of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War, the word Παρασκευὴ could be used as elliptically as it was afterwards to be used in the Septuagint [Greek Old Testament] to convey, just as unmistakably, an entirely different meaning. Thucydides uses the word to signify what a generation of Englishmen, overtaken unawares by a world war in the year A.D. 1914, learnt ruefully to take to heart as “preparedness” when they found themselves within an ace of defeat owing to their pre-war neglect to emulate the Germans in building up a stock of armaments to stand them in good stead in a fight for their national existence.

Is he referring to the 1915 shell crisis? Britain is considered to have won the naval arms race.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Saviour

The Greek word σωτὴρ [soter] [came] to mean a saviour, not of Society, but of the Soul.

Thus, previously, Antiochus I Soter, Attalus I Soter, Demetrius I Soter, Diodotus I Soter, Menander I Soter, Ptolemy I Soter, Ptolemy IX Soter, Rabbel II Soter, Seleucus III Soter or Seleucus Ceraunus, Strato I Soter, Strato II Soter, Strato III Soter, doubtless others.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Spirit

The Greek word πνεῦμα [pneuma], with its Latin equivalent “spiritus”, [came] to mean “spirit” instead of “breath”.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Transgression

The “transgression” (παράβασις) [parabasis] which had been a term of art in the Attic “Old Comedy”, in the physical meaning of a parade of the chorus from one side of the theatre to the other, [came] to mean, in Christian language, a figurative “side-step” in the spiritual sense of a sin.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Bells

The customary preparation for the congregational performance of the Christian liturgy was, in a Western Christian town or village, the ringing of a bell; and in a pagan Hellenic walled city this had likewise been a familiar sound with a well-established mental association. Yet a citizen of an Hellenic city-state – if his ghost could walk in some latter-day Western town on a Sunday morning – would never suspect that the sound that was filling the air was a summons to religious worship; for, to his mind, the ringing of a bell would conjure up the utterly different mental vision of a military patrol going its rounds along the city wall to inspect the sentries.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Laity

The “laity” of the Christian Church was suggestively designated by an archaic Greek word (λαός) [laos] which denoted the people as distinct from those in authority over them, with a connotation of amenability to the word of command. In the vocabulary of the Homeric Epic the word had been used of the naïvely loyal comitatus of a barbarian war-lord; in a post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history it had been revived to serve as a technical term for the naïvely submissive labour force on one of the large-scale agricultural estates which the Hellenic conquerors of the Achaemenian Empire had taken over from a dispossessed Persian landed aristocracy. The ambivalency in the nuance, half-heroic and half-servile, which the word had thus come to acquire by the date of the beginning of the Christian Era, aptly fitted the “laity” of a church which, on its own spiritual plane, was both militant and authoritarian.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Communion

The Holy Communion which [the] common participation in the Christian sacrament consummated took its name from a word which, in the previous mundane usage of both its Greek original (κοινωνία) [koinonia] and its Latin translation (communio), had signified “participation” of any kind, but, first and foremost, participation in the membership of a political community, for which the current term was coined, in both languages, out of the same verbal metal (in Greek κοινόν [koinon]; in Latin commune).

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The cup of Lethe

Love has [...] become the axle-tree of the vehicle of the Mahāyāna; and its conquest of Buddhism is more surprising than its outburst in Christianity; for the Christian religion of Love is in conscious and deliberate revolt against the Stoic philosophy of Detachment, whereas the Mahayanian religion of Love purports to be fulfilling the Hinayanian law and not destroying it – though, in Hinayanian eyes, the Mahayanian Bodhisattva is a Hinayanian arhat manqué [...]. The Bodhisattva is in fact an arhat who, at the moment when his age-long efforts to attain Detachment have brought him at last to the brink of Nirvāna, refrains from immediately entering into his rest through taking the final step that would precipitate him into the bliss of self-annihilation, and decides, instead, to postpone the consummation of his own spiritual career – and this, may be, for countless ages more – in order to devote himself to the self-imposed task of helping other beings, by communicating to them some of the light of his own enlightenment [...] (see Thomas, E. J.: The History of Buddhist Thought (London 1933, Kegan Paul), pp. 169-72). A follower of Christ will agree with the follower of the Mahāyāna that the Bodhisattva who, for love of his fellows, forbears to drink of the liberating elixir of Lethe when the cup is at his lips, is overcoming the Self in a far profounder sense than the arhat who exercises his duly earned right to consummate his own self-annihilation without being deterred by any pity for a groaning and travailing creation. The labour of Love to which the Bodhisattva dedicates himself is not unworthy to be compared with the self-sacrifice of Christ [...]. [...]

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)