CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN TIME

X CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN TIME (RENAISSANCES)

A. ‛THE RENAISSANCE’

B. A SURVEY OF RENAISSANCES

I. A PLAN OF OPERATIONS

II. OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN

(a) RENAISSANCES OF POLITICAL IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS

(b) RENAISSANCES OF SYSTEMS OF LAW

(c) RENAISSANCES OF PHILOSOPHIES

(d) RENAISSANCES OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

(e) RENAISSANCES OF VISUAL ARTS

(f) RENAISSANCES OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS

C. THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCES

D. THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION

E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF NECROMANCY

I.THE TRANSFUSION OF PSYCHIC ENERGY

II. THE CHALLENGE FROM THE REVERENANT AND A PAIR OF ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE RESPONSES

III. THE BLESSEDNESS OF IMMUNITY, MERCIFULNESS OF MORTLAITY, AND UNTOWARDNESS OF PRECOCITY

IV. THE STERILITY OF THE BLACK ART

Even, however, when a necromancer avoids or escapes the nemesis of being enslaved by a ghost that he has reanimated at his own expense by nurturing it with a transfusion of his own life-blood, the sterility to which even the least noxious achievements of the Black Art are condemned ex officio originis is exposed remorselessly when these are compared with contemporary achievements of a necromantic society's native genius.

In the field of politics, for example, it is evident that, in the Medieval chapter of Western history, the master-institution was not an Imperium Romanum Redivivum but was a newly created Papal Roman Respublica Christiana,³ and that in the Arabic Muslim history it was, not the Cairene ghost of an ‛Abbasid Caliphate, but a novel self-recruiting Mamlūks corps, that endowed this society, in its infancy, with the strength to hold its own against the world-conquering Mongols.⁴ In the modern chapter of Western history, again, the indigenous Western institution of parliamentary representative government eclipsed the resuscitated Hellenic institution of demagogic Democracy that was apt—first in the city-states in Italy after A.D. 1254 and then in a nation-state in France after A.D. 1789—to turn, as fast as milk turns in thundery weather, into the sour brew of a plebiscitary dictatorship. In the field of Law the genius of an Orthodox Christian Civilization revealed itself, not in a Macedonian Dynasty's revival of a dead Justinian Hellenic law, but in an antecedent Syrian Dynasty's new creation of an East Roman law inspired by Christian principles. In the field of Philosophy, likewise, the genius of a Far Eastern Civilization revealed itself, not in the revival of a dead Confucianism, but in the foregoing new creation of indigenous Far Eastern philosophies inspired by Mahayanian Buddhist though, while, in the intellectual history of a Medieval Western Christendom, the genius of Saint Thomas Aquinas revealed itself, in his Summa Theologica, not in the resuscitation of Aristotelian these but in the construction of a system that was the Angelic Doctor's own.¹ In the field of Physical nature in vacuo, as if logic could do duty for verification, threatened to sterilize, and succeeded in retarding, the harvest that was to be garnered from application of an experimental method of research in accordance with the Western Civilization's native bent.² In the field of language and Literature the all flawlessly Ciceronian Latinity of an Erasmus, who had taught himself to speak with the tongues of men and angels, was become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal³ in a Modern Western house of many mansions,⁴ that had been filled with a sound as of a rushing mighty wind⁵ by a vernacular poetry in a chorus of divers living Western languages, while, in a contemporary Far Eastern World, a creative art of Drama and the Novel, conveyed in a living 'mandarin' lingua franca, had likewise eventually taken the light out of a pedantic reproduction of the style and themes of the Sinic classics. In the field of the Visual Arts an orthodox Christian Civilization's miniature reminiscences in ivory of an Hellenic style of bas-relief carving in marble turn deathly pale, exquisite though they are, in the presence of mosaics glowing and vibrating with a veritable life engendered by the fruitful marriage of an indigenous Byzantine creativity with an indigenous Byzantine technique.

the last word on the comparative merits of the realm of Hades and the land of the living was spoken to Odysseus by the shade of Achilles:

'I would rather be a wretched peasant on the land, labouring as a serf with a poor portionless man for my master, than be sovereign lord of the legions of the shades of the dead and departed.'⁶