CHAPTER 3. THE BYZANTINES

FROM SIFTING THE NUMEROUS IMPLICATIONS of meaning attaching to the word "civilization," there emerges a definition, which presumes it to consist in the vitality of three elements in man's corporate mode of living. These are: the Stable; the Transcendental; and the Cultural. Vitality in each simultaneously is seldom found, save in large cities whence they radiate their combined influence throughout their city's dominion. And the rarity of even this coincidence constitutes the rarity of civilizations. Failure in the vitality of any one of them denotes a lapse from true civilization to conditions of life comparable with those of fifteenth century Italy or the present Middle West of the United States.

First essential to the definition of civilization is the stable element, the universal confidence in the social organism to maintain itself and its government, and to modify itself to external and internal necessity. This confidence, when it exists, pervades people unconsciously. Security of property, the standards of living, the countless services of local government-all go for granted without thought or investigation, like the sun and the stars, symbolized in those outward features, dinner jackets, bathrooms and asphalt roads, which evoke the awe and envy of less advanced peoples.

Second is that composite element in human activity, the quest of transcendental values, and their collateral ethics. To every race, in infancy and succeeding childhoods, is vouchsafed the concept of a God. This, ultimately, may lose identity in that of a gentleman. But underneath social demeanor, there remains to man his soul proper, his own greatness, his unquiet spirit seeking cosmic direction, ever striving to soar above the mental gravities of earth. It is contended that civilizations such as that upon which we are entering, retard the divine quest in humanity by the very security with which they encushion it against the fundamental workings between man and earth, man and man, man and God. But it remains to be seen whether those relationships do not, as the scientific revolution approaches its climax, attain a depth and precision of definition hitherto undreamed. And the soul, mathematically propelled, may redouble the exploration of its affinity in space, dictating, with historical experience as its partner, successive codes and morals for the earth.

Third and final element in civilization is the cultural, product of the scientific and artistic impulse generated by a corporate intellectual activity. It is in this province that the inspired individual souls of an age become accessible to the majority, whose diversity of intelligence and occupation will not permit their investigation of the mysteries with which they arc communicant, but not, beyond the one-sided peephole of religion, conversant.

The stable, the transcendental, the cultural: genii of civilization. Each has existed without the others. Hellas had Culture, Judah a Soul, Renaissance Europe both. The United States of America now enjoy the blessings of Stability. But it is the fusion of the three that constitutes a civilization, the vitality of which will vary inversely with the deficiency in any one of them. We in Europe, sponsors of a civilization which posterity will term the most momentous phenomenon in history, are conscious of the necessity to hold the balance between them, if less certain of the ability. And it is at this point that the relevance of civilization's analysis in connection with the eastern Mediterranean becomes clear. Only once, during the whole history of our continent and all the peoples that have contributed to our present, has this balance been discovered; and once discovered maintained for nine centuries, to contend against the agony of dissolution for another two. This was behind the walls, and within the sphere, of Constantinople.

Thus, in considering the role of the Levant during the convulsions of the early twentieth century, it is to be remembered that not only may the population of the Aegean coasts contribute a larger share to the maintenance of our present vital civilization than is popularly supposed; but that it, Greek, alone of European races, has experienced such a phenomenon in the past. Culture it had. Out of the East rose a soul. From the 'West marched stability. The soul transformed the culture, the culture the soul. And the Byzantine civilization, the joyous life that once crowded on the Golden Horn and flourished in woods and gardens by the sweet waters of Asia, has left a heritage to the world and its imprint uneffaced upon the Levant. Its interest in the present derives partly from the state of its people today; and partly from its share in the formation of, and in its affinity with, its universal successor of the West.

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In considering the stability of the social edifice, the affinity between Western and Byzantine civilization is both external and internal.

In the external relations of its political units, the chief hope of the modern world lies in the elimination of the armed and insular state, and the aggressive racial consciousness of its inhabitants. It was this spirit, though confined within the smaller units of municipalities, which reduced ancient Greece to the point of extinction. Hellenic culture, art, science, literature and philosophy, were saved only through the medium of the Roman Empire; and at long last through the creation, culminating in the transference of the capital to Constantinople, of an international spirit that was, in fact, an all-pervasive Hellenism. More influential, still, in this process of transcending racial barriers, was Christianity, newly adopted as the state religion. For it was in this process that lay the strength and cohesion of the Byzantine Empire. The world of the present day offers a comparison almost exactly similar. The European countries correspond to the city-states of Greece; the range of Anglo-Saxon institutions to that of Roman; Europeanism to Hellenism; and the intellectual effect of the scientific revolution to Christianity. It may be argued that, far from creating an international spirit, the British Empire has done no more than propagate an evil nationalism. During the last half-century, the charge may hold good. But by its work of Europeanization, of which, indeed, it is only the foremost exponent, it has laid a common ground on which the peoples of the world may find the basis of international concord. This also, on a lesser territorial scale, did Constantinople accomplish. Within her walls mingled all the races of Eurasia, and all their products, commercial, cultural, philosophical. And even now, after all her centuries of misfortune, the same races jostle in Constantinople and the ghost of the old cosmopolitan ideal pervades the city. For the Greeks she has no name: she is "[Greek characters]-the capital." And her present Greek inhabitants, should the traveler ask their nationality, are still "[Greek characters]-Romans" To them, a precarious 400,000, has the Byzantine identity descended.

It is widely believed that the Anglo-Saxon political ideal, lately swallowed undigested by the world, affords the greatest promise to any people of internal strength. In so far as generalization is possible, this ideal may be termed a perpetual seeking to readjust the equilibrium which enables the state to care for the interests of the individual without prejudice to its own. Failure to maintain this equilibrium must result either in disruption, as in the case of the Roman Empire, or in the forging of hard, aggressive political units, such as Europe has endured ever since. In the light of this ideal, the internal structure of the Byzantine state bears, if not a physiognomic likeness, a singular affinity to that of ourselves: the same equilibrium, if by different means, is held; the difference in means arising from the fact that instead of, as with us, developing compactly as a manifestation of national life, this equilibrium was the result of two diverse and opposite forces. For the internal strength of the Byzantine Empire was attained by the imposition of a supremely practical machinery of government upon the most individualistic people on earth.

The previous chapter has attempted to analyze that satirical element in Greek character which must always ensure democracy wherever there are communities of Greeks, and has always prevented the arising of those aristocratic and priestly caste systems, which have only, during the last twenty years, ceased to be the inevitable outcome of the search for Stability in the older continents. The Byzantine state does not, it must be admitted, present at first sight a democratic complexion. But it may be borne in mind that the Greeks, while able to discern in all men the failings that make all men equal, are capable of an almost superstitious veneration for traditions and institutions. It was this faculty, already permeated, in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, with the deeper and more austere mysticism of the Aramean peoples, which enabled them to accept and consolidate the Eastern conception of sovereignty that beat like a strong man's heart for eleven centuries within the walls of Constantinople. The Emperor, ruling or fighting, was the viceregent of God; to God he was responsible. But he was also a man, and as such, bound by the laws of his other self's making. The support of the people was given not to his person, but his office, to his crown, his scepter, and the mystical procession of his days. In their eyes, the partition or even usurpation of his functions was justified by the subsequent success of the usurper....