Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points, the civitates into which, juridically as in other respects, they dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.[1] When national feeling in this shape is extinguished, there is an end to Classical history.
It will be the task — one of the heaviest tasks of historians — to trace, generation by generation, the quiet fading-out of the Classical nations in the eastern Mediterranean during the "Late Classical" age, and the ever stronger inflow of a new nation-spirit, the Magian.
A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma[2] of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act — circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandæans or the Christians. An unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical — no intercourse with him, no connubium — and this national separation went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-Aramaic dialect formed themselves side by side.[3] The Faustian nation, though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of one or another of the Magian Churches. Inwardly the Classical nation is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its specific world-outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script which each such nation develops as soon as it is born. But for that very reason the inwardness and hidden force — the magic, in fact — of a Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny. This tacit, self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the homes of the Western peoples) is what entered "Roman Law" (called by a Classical label but worked out by Aramæans) as the concept of the "juridical person,"[4] which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community. Post-exilic Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had discovered the concept itself.
The primitives who preceded this evolution were predominantly tribal associations, among them the South-Arabian Minæans,[5] who appear about the beginning of the first millennium, and whose name vanishes in the first century
- ↑ Mommsen described the Roman Empire as a "universal Empire founded upon municipal autonomy." And even Alexander's empire was originally conceived, and to a great extent actually organized, in this spirit. See P. Jouguet, L'Impérialisme macédonien (1926), Ch. IV. — Tr.
- ↑ See p. 67.
- ↑ F. N. Finck, Die Spracbstämme des Erdkreises (1915), pp. 29, et seq.
- ↑ About the end of the second century of our era.
- ↑ See foot-note, p. 197, et seq. — Tr.
