name of that; and that other which proclaimed
human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling,
originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own
efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic
Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last,
for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a
fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No
wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of
flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry,
Iamblichus,--they had worked wonders; but not the crowning
wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come:
Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for
the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.--So now Constantine has
made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now
Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the
state or to the emperor at its head, but to an _imperium_ within
the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the
kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of
divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in
his scales,--and finds the fate is death, and no help for it:
there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then
Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like
barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,--blackest night
over the western world for God knows how long: night, with
nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no
refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now
made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of
Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,--
everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old,
to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,--these
people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the
thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and
shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn
the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no
saving grace, from them whatever;--will learn from them nothing
in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at
them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So,
Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call
civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of
life: all that _soap_ stands symbol for is to be anathema