THE DIVERGENCE

IF WE COMPARE what is usually referred to as classical antiquity with the Eastern civilizations, it will readily be seen that, in some respects at least, it has more in common with those civilizations than modern Europe has. The differences between East and West seem to have been continually on the increase, but this divergence can be said to have been one-sided in the sense that it is only the West which has changed, whereas the East, broadly speaking, has remained much the same as it was in times that we are accustomed to call ancient, but that nevertheless are comparatively recent. Stability—one might even say immutability—is a quality quite commonly conceded to the Eastern civilizations, notably to the Chinese, but it is perhaps not quite so easy to agree on the assessing of this quality. Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in 'progress' and in 'evolution', that is to say since a little more than a century ago,^[1] profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas, for our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilization has failed to achieve. Moreover, this stability shows itself in small things as well as in great; a striking example of this is to be found in the fact that 'fashion', with its continual changes, is only to be met with in the West. In short, Westerners, and especially modern Westerners, ap-pear to be endowed with changeable and inconstant natures, hankering after movement and excitement, whereas the Eastern nature shows quite the opposite characteristics.

Therefore, if one wished to represent diagrammatically the divergence we are discussing, it would be incorrect to draw two lines moving in contrary directions away from an axis. The East would have to be shown as the axis itself and the West as a line starting from the axis and moving further and further away from it, after the fashion of a branch growing out of a trunk, as mentioned before. We are all the more justified in using this symbolism since the West, at least from the outset of the period called historical, insofar as it has had an intellectual life at all, has lived primarily by borrowing from the East, directly or indirectly. The Greek civilization itself is far from possessing the originality ascribed to it by people of restricted vision, who would willingly go to the length of declaring that the Greeks libelled themselves whenever they happened to acknowledge their debt to Egypt, to Phoenicia, to Chaldea, to Persia, and even to India. All these civilizations may well be incomparably more ancient than the Greek, but this does not prevent some people, blinded by what may be termed the 'classical prejudice', from persistently maintaining the theory, in the face of all the evidence, that it is those other civilizations that are indebted to the Greek and have felt its influence: it is extremely hard to carry on a discussion with such people because their opinion rests on rooted preconceptions; but we will return to this subject later in order to treat of it at greater length. It is nevertheless true that the Greeks did possess a certain measure of originality, though not of the kind usually supposed; it was largely confined to the form under which they presented and displayed borrowed ideas, which they altered more or less happily in the process of adapting them to suit their own mentality, so unlike the mentality of the Easterners, and in many respects directly opposed to it.

Before going any further, it should be explained that we have no wish to dispute the originality of the Hellenic civilization in respect of what appear to us as certain secondary points of view, that of art for example; we only contest its originality from the purely intellectual standpoint, which was moreover much more restricted among the Greeks than among Easterners. This curtailment, one might even say this cramping of intellectuality, is strikingly confirmed if we compare the Hellenic with the surviving Eastern civilizations of which we possess direct knowledge; and the same will presumably be true also of a comparison with the vanished civilizations of the East, according to all that is known of them and judging, above all, from features they clearly possessed in common with the other Eastern civilizations both past and present. Indeed, the study of the East as we know it today, if undertaken in a really direct way, would be of great assistance toward the understanding of all antiquity, on account of that very quality of fixity and stability to which we have referred; it would even facilitate the understanding of Greek antiquity, for which purpose we cannot rely upon any direct evidence, because here again we are dealing with a civilization that is quite definitely extinct; the contemporary Greeks can hardly lay claim to be the representatives of the ancient Hellenes, of whom they are probably not even lineal descendants.

It should be remembered nevertheless that Greek thought was, in spite of everything, Western in its essence and that it already contained among its other characteristics, the origin and, as it were, the germ of most of those tendencies which developed much later among the modern Westerners. We must not therefore push this analogy between Greek and Eastern civilizations too far; if kept however in proper proportion, it can be of considerable service to those who feel a genuine desire to understand antiquity and to interpret it with a minimum of conjecture. In any case, there can be no danger if we are careful to take into account all that is known for certain about the character of the Greek mentality. Any new tendencies met with in the Greco-Roman world are really almost entirely of a restricting and limiting nature, so that the reservations called for when making a comparison with the East must derive almost entirely from a fear of ascribing to the ancient peoples of the West a quality of thought which they did not really possess: whenever they are found to have taken something from the East, it must not be imagined that they completely assimilated it, nor is one justified in concluding that this borrowing denotes identity of thought. Many interesting points of likeness can be established for which there is no parallel in the modern West, but it is nonetheless true that the essential modes of Eastern thought are markedly different; therefore, unless one's mind has shaken itself free of the Western outlook, even in its ancient form, one will inevitably neglect and misjudge just those aspects of Eastern thought that are the most important and characteristic. Since it is plain that the 'greater' cannot issue from the 'less', this one distinction ought to be enough, in the absence of any other consideration, to show to which category a civilization belongs that has borrowed from others.

To return to the simile we used a short while back, it must be pointed out that its main defect—natural to all schematic representations—is that it rather oversimplifies matters by representing the divergence as widening continually from the days of antiquity to the present time. In reality, there have been respites in the divergence, there have even been less remote times when the West again received the direct influence of the East: we allude mainly to the Alexandrian period and to the contributions to European thought during the Middle Ages made by the Arabs, some of which were entirely their own, the rest being derived from India; their influence in the development of mathematics is well-known, but it was far from being limited to this particular field. The divergence continued once more with the Renaissance, at which time the rift with the preceding period became very marked; the truth is that this so-called 'rebirth' proved to be the death of many things, even in the arts, but above all in an intellectual sense. It is difficult for a modern man to grasp the whole extent and range of what was lost during that period. The attempted return to classical antiquity had for its result the diminution of intellectuality, a phenomenon comparable to that which had already occurred at an earlier time in the case of the Greeks themselves, but with this cardinal difference that now it was manifesting itself in the course of the existence of one and the same race and not during the passage of ideas from one people to another. It is almost as if the Greeks, at a moment when they were about to disappear from history, wished to avenge themselves for their own incomprehension by imposing on a whole section of mankind the limitations of their own mental horizon. When the Reformation also came to add its influence to that of the Renaissance, with which it was perhaps not altogether unconnected, then the fundamental tendencies of the modern world took definite shape; the French Revolution—which was equivalent to a rejection of all tradition—with all its repercussions in various fields, was bound to follow as a logical consequence of the development of these tendencies. But now is not the moment to discuss these questions in detail, with a consequent risk of being drawn too far afield; it is not our present intention to write a history of the Western mentality, but only to say as much as is necessary to show how greatly it differs from Eastern intellectuality. Before completing what has to be said about the moderns in regard to this question, we must again return to the Greeks and set forth in greater detail things we have so far only hinted at; these further explanations will help to clear the ground and to cut short various objections that it is only too easy to foresee.

We have only one more word to add with regard to the divergence of East and West: will this divergence go on increasing indefinitely? Appearances might lead one to think so, and in the present state of the world the question is one which is undoubtedly open to discussion; nevertheless, for our part, we do not think such a thing possible and we will give our reasons for this opinion at the finish.