PRINCIPLES OF UNITY OF THE EASTERN CIVILIZATIONS

It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT at the present time to discover a unifying principle in Western civilization; it might even be said that its unity, while naturally still resting on a number of tendencies that have combined to form a common mentality, no longer amounts to anything more than a simple unity of fact, as lacking in principle as the civilization itself. This has been the case ever since the severing, at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the traditional bond derived from religion which provided the essential principle we have in mind and which gave to Western civilization in the Middle Ages its characteristic form of 'Christendom'. Western intellectuality, within the limits circumscribing its specifically restricted activity, could not have availed itself of any traditional attachment of a different order capable of replacing the one in question; we mean by this that, apart from exceptions that could not become general in such an environment, tradition could not be conceived otherwise than in a religious mode. As for the European race, its unity, as we have already pointed out, is too relative and too vague to serve as a basis for the unity of a civilization. With the rupture of the fundamental unity of Christendom, therefore, a danger arose of several European civilizations coming into being, without any effective or conscious bond to unite them; and in fact it is from this moment that the secondary, fragmentary, and reduced unities represented by the different 'nations' were formed, after many vicissitudes and tentative efforts. Yet even in its mental deviation and as if in spite of itself, Europe preserved the traces of the single molding it had received during the course of the preceding centuries. The influences that produced the deviation worked everywhere in a similar manner, though in different degrees; thus there again emerged a common outlook and a civilization that continued to be shared by all in spite of many divisions. But this new civilization, far from being based upon any legitimate principle, was henceforth vowed, if one might say so, to the service of an 'absence of principle' which condemned it to a hopeless state of intellectual decadence. It might justifiably be argued that this was the price that had to be paid for the material progress toward which the Western world has been exclusively tending ever since, for there are certain paths of development that cannot be reconciled with one another; but in any case, in our opinion, it was an exceedingly heavy price to pay for that much vaunted progress.

This very brief survey will make it plain why in the East there cannot exist anything comparable with the Western nations; the reason is that the appearance of nations within a civilization is undoubtedly the sign of a partial dissolution due to the loss of the element that constituted its basic unity. Even in the West, it must be remembered, the conception of nations is a characteristically modern development; nothing analogous was to be found in earlier times, whether it be in the Greek cities, or in the Roman Empire that arose out of successive extensions of the original city, or in its more or less indirect medieval continuations, or in the confederations or tribal leagues after the Celtic model, or even in the states organized hierarchically on the feudal pattern.

On the other hand, what we have said about the former unity of 'Christendom', an essentially traditional unity conceived according to the specifically religious mode, can also be applied fairly closely to the conception of unity in the Muslim world. Among Eastern civilizations, Islam is in fact the one that approaches closest to the West, and it might even be said in some respects to occupy an intermediary position between East and West, as regards its characteristic features no less than geographically. Furthermore, its tradition can clearly be considered under two quite distinct modes, one purely Eastern, while the other, the religious mode properly so called, is common both to Islam and to Western civilization. Moreover Judaism, Christianity, and Islam appear as three complementary branches of a single body of tradition, outside of which it is indeed difficult to apply the term 'religion' correctly at all, that is if one wishes to preserve any precise and clearly defined meaning for it; but in Islam, as we shall show later on, this purely religious side is really only its most external aspect. However that may be, taking its outward side alone into consideration for the moment, it will be seen that the whole organization of the Muslim world rests on a tradition that may be described as religious: it is not a case, as in present-day Europe, of religion being one of the elements of the social order, but on the contrary the entire social order forms an integral part of religion, from which all legislation is inseparable, since it finds there both its principle and its justification. This is a point that has unfortunately never been grasped by those Europeans who have come into contact with Muslim peoples, with the consequence that this lack of understanding has led them into committing the crudest and most irretrievable political blunders; but we do not intend to spend time over these matters and merely mention them in passing. We can, however, usefully make here two additional observations: firstly, the conception of the Caliphate, which alone could provide a possible basis for a really serious 'Pan-Islamism', is in no wise to be assimilated to any form of national government, and it is moreover well calculated to baffle Europeans, accustomed as they are to seeing an absolute separation, and even an opposition, between the 'spiritual' and the 'temporal' powers;^[1] secondly, the pretension of setting up various national groups inside Islam required all the ignorant self-conceit of certain 'young' Muslims, who so described themselves simply in order to advertise their own 'modernism,' and whose sense of tradition had been completely obliterated by the teachings of Western universities.

There is another point concerning Islam that should be stressed here, namely the unity of its traditional language: we have stated that this language is Arabic, but we must make it clear that by this we mean scriptural Arabic, which is to some extent distinct from vernacular Arabic, the latter representing an altered form and a grammatical simplification of the scriptural language. Here we see a difference that is somewhat reminiscent of that which exists between the written and spoken languages of China: scriptural Arabic alone possesses that fixity which is required if it is to fulfill its task as a traditional language, whereas spoken Arabic, like any other tongue in daily use, naturally goes through various changes in course of time and in different regions. Nevertheless, these variations are far from being as marked as is commonly supposed in Europe; they chiefly affect pronunciation and the use of certain more or less specialized terms, and they are insufficient to amount to a plurality of dialects, for all Arabic-speaking peoples are quite able to understand one another; in fact, even in the case of vernacular Arabic, there exists but one language, spoken from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, and the so-called Arabic dialects, with their greater or lesser variations, are largely an invention of the orientalists. As for the Persian language, though it does not play a fundamental part in the Islamic tradition, it is nevertheless employed in numerous writings on 'Sufism, and this gives it an undoubted intellectual importance in that portion of Islam lying further East.

Passing now to the Hindu civilization, we find that its unity is also purely and solely of a traditional order; it includes in fact elements belonging to very different races or ethnic groups, all of which can with equal justice be called 'Hindu' in the strictest sense of the word, to the exclusion of certain other elements belonging to the same races, or at least to some of them. Certain people maintain that originally this was not the case, but their opinion rests on nothing better than the theory of a supposed 'Aryan race', which is merely an invention of the over-fertile imagination of the orientalists. The Sanskrit term ārya, which gave its name to this hypothetical race, was never really anything more than an epithet applied exclusively to the members of the first three castes, independently of their membership of this or that race, which is not in any way material here. It is true that the principles of caste, like many other things, have been consistently misunderstood in the West, so that it is not at all surprising to come across a confusion of this kind; but we will return to this question at a later stage. What is important to grasp at the moment is the fact that Hindu unity rests entirely on the acknowledgment of a certain tradition, which also embraces the entire social order, but this time only as a simple application to a contingent realm; the latter reservation is called for because the tradition in question is in no wise a religious one as in Islam, but is a more purely intellectual and essentially metaphysical tradition. The kind of twofold polarization we alluded to when speaking of the Islamic tradition is not to be found in India, so that we are precluded in the latter case from making comparisons with the West such as were rendered at least possible in the case of the external side of Islam; here we have absolutely nothing analogous to Western religions, and only superficial observers could maintain the contrary, thus proving their complete ignorance of Eastern modes of thought. As we are about to treat of the civilization of India in some detail, there is no point in going further into the subject at this moment.

The Chinese civilization, as we have already pointed out, is the only one whose unity is essentially and in its very nature a unity of race; its governing feature, in this respect, is what the Chinese call Jen, a conception that can without too great inexactitude be translated as 'solidarity of race'. This solidarity, implying both a perpetuity and a community of existence, is furthermore identified with the 'idea of life', which is an application of the metaphysical principle of the 'initial cause' to existing humanity; and it is the transposition of this notion into the social realm, with the continual application of all its practical consequences, that gives to Chinese institutions their exceptional stability. This same conception also explains why the whole social structure rests on the family, the essential prototype of the race; in the West something of the kind was to be found, to a certain extent, in the ancient city-state, the kernel of which was also the family, and where 'ancestor worship' itself, with all that this really implies, played a part the importance of which is not easily appreciated today. Nevertheless, we do not believe that men anywhere except in China have gone so far in the direction of a family unity opposed to every kind of individualism, to the point for example of suppressing individual ownership and consequently individual inheritance, thus making life well-nigh impossible for any man who, whether of his own free will or not, found himself excluded from the community of the family. In Chinese society the family plays at least as important a part as caste does in Hindu society, and is comparable to caste in some respects, though its principle is quite a different one. Moreover, in China more than anywhere else, the properly metaphysical side of the tradition is sharply divided from the remainder, that is to say from its application to the various orders of relative things; however, it goes without saying that though this separation may be deep, it does not amount to an absolute discontinuity, for this would have the effect of depriving the external forms of the civilization of any real principle. Such a state of things is only too apparent in the modern West, where the civil institutions, robbed of all traditional import, but still carrying with them a few relics of the past that no one understands any longer, sometimes present the appearance of a regular parody of ritual, devoid of all real significance, so that their retention really amounts to nothing but a 'superstition' in the full force of the etymological meaning of that word.^[2]

We have said enough to show that the unity of each of the great Eastern civilizations is of a very different order from that of the present Western civilization, and rests on far more profound principles, which, being less dependent on historical contingencies, are eminently suited to assure to the civilizations in question both permanence and continuity.