truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the "three Aristotles" — Greek, Arabian, and Gothic — who had not one concept or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world-consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call "the" Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable — words, formulæ, rites — was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the original meanings of the holy words — it was simply that they did not know these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study "the" idea of Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic ijma)[1] wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man of a pneuma emanating from the divine pneuma, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century — think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther — and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again presupposed that of divine and human pneuma. Classical man assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two reasons — the idea's not being there at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that his pneuma was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the
- ↑ See Ch. VIII below. — Tr.
