India the conception of Space as infinite-indefinite required a primacy of the priesthood. In the Arabian Culture the Magian world-feeling involved in principle the inclusion of the worldly visible society of believers as a constituent in the grand consensus, and therefore the unity of spiritual and temporal polity, law, and sovereignty. Not that there was not friction between the two estates; far from it; in the Sassanid Empire there were bloody feuds between the country aristocracy of the Dikhans and the party of the Magi — even in some instances murders of sovereigns — and in Byzantium the whole fifth century is full of the struggles between the Imperial power and the clergy, which from an ever-present background to the Monophysite and Nestorian controversies.[1] But the basic interconnexion of the two orders was not in dispute.
In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense, Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit-bodies; as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical prime-symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the knightly world-feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers the tomb-temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Cæsars, the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again the revolution of the "heretic" king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) — in which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious side — and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior- and priestly-castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.
In the Faustian Culture this battle between two high symbols of equal force has been waged in somewhat the same spirit, but with far greater passion still than in the Egyptian — so that, from the early Gothic onward, only armistice, never peace, has seemed possible between State and Church. But in this conflict the handicap against waking-being tells — it would shake off its dependence upon being, but it cannot. The mind needs the blood, but the blood does not need the mind. War belongs to the world of time and history — intellectual battle is only a fight with reasons, only disputation — and, therefore a militant Church must step from the world of truths into the world of facts — from the world of Jesus into that of Pilate. And so it becomes an element in race-history and subject to the formative powers of the political side of life. From early Feudalism to modern Democracy it fights with sword and cannon, poison and dagger,
- ↑ The life of John Chrysostom is an instance.
