CHAP. XVII. with the conception of a universal Christian commonwealth was a part of that imaginative vision and mystic sense which ennoble the Middle Ages, and which make it delightful and refreshing to turn back to those times from the garish day of a world ruled by the methods of physical science and the methods of historical criticism. This power it was which enabled them to bequeath to us so much on which our imagination still feeds, so much splendid poetry, so much myth and fancy and legend, matter fit for poetry, on which the creative genius of later centuries has worked.

The East

Romans

less disposed to idealize their

Emperor.

The West was full of imaginative minds, not in Italy, Provence, and Germany only, but as far as remote Erin and still remoter Iceland. But the East Romans were not imaginative. They were a practical people, with their eyes fixed on the actual. Superstitious they were, and full of a reverence for the past which often ran into a fantastic antiquarianism. But they were neither poetical nor mythopoeic. Their Emperor was a living and familiar personage. He was, like the kings of other countries, king over a nation, the ruler of a realm which, once universal, had been narrowed to a nation, with a national language and a national character. He was indeed a far more resplendent sort of king than were the kings of the barbarians, being the successor of the Caesars of old, with a never abandoned claim to be the first of all potentates. But he was so essential to their particular state, so firmly rooted in all its traditions, that neither the disobedience of the Roman city nor the hostility of the Roman pontiff affected their confidence in his right and their right to represent the Roman dominion. The rivalry of the West had no doubt cost them Italy, and it detracted from their importance in the eyes of other nations. It was an odious fact, like the existence of the Bulgarians, who had robbed them

of Thrace, and the existence of the Hagarenes, who had CHAP. XVII. robbed them of Syria. But it never shook their self-confidence, and their sense of immeasureable superiority to the barbarians of Central and Western Europe. Even Latin had become to them what it had been to the Athenians ten centuries before, a barbarian language.

This difference of attitude illustrates the contrast between the people of the Western and those of the Eastern Empire in the sphere of thought and letters.

Contrast of

the East and

the West as

respects

and

The Holy Empire, except in so far as it was united with literature the German kingdom, was a dream, a sublime conception, thought. half theology and half poetry, of the unity of mankind, who are themselves the children of God, as realized in one Church, which is also a State, and in one State, which is also a Church. The East Roman Empire was a reality, a tangible fact in an actual world, drawing neither strength nor beauty from any theory, and not appearing to need any theory to support it. Why was this so? Why did not the same group of ideas which had kept alive the memory of Rome in the West down to the days of Charles the Great, and which in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries developed those ideas into that ordered form which they held in men's minds in the time of Dante -why did not these ideas fill and sway men's minds in the East also, and find due expression in their literature and their art? Why did not the Ideal array the Actual in those gorgeous hues which the great Westerns lavished on their two heads of Christendom, the Sun and the Moon of their ethereal firmament?

why did the East theorize

so little

One reason may have been because the Emperor had in the East always been a tangible and permanent fact. The Easterns were reverent, and they were not less super- regarding This was the name by which they usually called their Saracen or Arab enemies.

the Empire?

CHAP. XVII. stitious than the Westerns.

Superstition goes with a profound belief in forms and ceremonies. But the constant presence of the successor of Constantine made him an object not so fit to be idealized as the Emperor of tradition had become in the West, and dispensed with the need for a philosophic theory." The autocrat of Constantinople required no doctrinal scheme to buttress his power: the Western did require it just because he was less able to stand by his own strength. So perhaps we may find another reason in the fact that the East had not in its capital a mystic Mother of Empire, such as was Old Rome, filled with the bones of martyrs, and had not, as its chief pastor, the Universal Bishop, the living representative on earth of the Divine Word in heaven. The Patriarch of Constantinople was only a primate, standing not greatly above other bishops. Constantinople was, moreover, an artificial creation, the work of one Emperor, suddenly raised into a capital out of a town previously famous only for its admirable site. It had neither the immemorial renown nor the hallowed associations of the elder city on the Tiber.

Yet perhaps we must seek a still deeper cause. The East was not steeped, as was the West, in the idea of a Church organized and administered like a State. Italy, which had stamped her type of practical intellect upon the whole Latin West, had achieved in earlier days two great things she had created an Administration and a Law fitted for a world. The Hellenistic East, not Greek in the old classical sense, as we are too apt to assume, but a mix

u It must be admitted that the Popes of the (later) ninth and tenth centuries were a reality in Rome and a reality not fit for idealization. But it was the Catholic world at a distance that idealized their office: it was the Teutonic Emperors that effected the great reformation which begins at the end of the tenth century.

ture of Hellenic and Asiatic elements, had shewn no gift CHAP. XVII. for the creation of institutions, but had applied an amazing speculative and dialectic faculty to the abstract problems of theology. After the extinction of imperial rule in the West, the Latin Church, still permeated by the practical instincts of Rome, went on developing an ecclesiastical organization, modelled upon the civil administration which had perished, till her efforts culminated in the mediaeval hierarchy and the system of Canon Law. She could not think of the Christian people except in the form of a body of worshippers organized under a government, and a government with an autocratic head. Thus she created the Pope; and the Pope (as we have seen) re-created the Emperor. But to the Eastern Christians, occupied as they had been with determining the nature of God and of Christ, the Christian people appeared in the form of a body of worshippers professing exactly the same lifegiving dogmas. Doctrine, not organization, came first in their minds. As their civil administration had never been shattered, they had less need, even if they had possessed the capacity, to build up an ecclesiastical system like that of the West; nor would the secular power have permitted them to do so. Hence they did not turn their Patriarch into a Pope and hence there was no Pope to create an Emperor in his own image. Herein may lie an explanation of the seeming paradox that the Eastern monarch, with far greater practical authority in ecclesiastical affairs than his Western rivals exercised, except perhaps in the days of Charles and again of Henry the Third, had not that ideal position in the world of politics, morals, and religion three things which were virtually the same to these mediaeval thinkers - which Christian theory assigned to the Emperor in the West.

* See chapter VII, ante.

CHAP. XVII.

Want of

creative power among the Easterns.

Let us note one more difference, affecting the conception of the imperial office, between the temper and mind of East and of West.

The intellect of the East Romans had ceased to be creative. Whether it was that they had not experienced that renewal of vital forces which the intermixture of Northern blood gave to the Italians, or that they lacked the freshness of vision and susceptibility to impressions which a new set of social conditions create, or that they were too much isolated, too little stirred by peaceful intercourse with other peoples (for their contact with their neighbours was almost always hostile), or whether they were oppressed by the stores of knowledge which had come down to them from the ancient world — whatever be the cause, they seemed to want intellectual initiative and that kind of constructive faculty which depends on imagination. Their talent and their industry—and there was plenty both of talent and of industry- ran to the piling up of knowledge, the recording of facts, the investigation of minute points in theology or in archaeology. The West had creative power without learning: the East had learning without creative power. This is perhaps the reason why the Eastern Empire lost, and may never regain, its hold upon the interest of mankind. Standing apart and unfriended, it has a splendid record of stubborn resistance to formidable enemies on every side, and of a patriotism which the bitterest internal discords never extinguished. Its annals are full of striking incidents and brilliant personalities. But these personalities, brilliant by their energy and their adventures, seldom touch the deepest springs of interest, for they are not associated with great principles,

There was a great deal of literary activity at Constantinople, and it was not confined, as it practically was in the West, to clerics; laymen who were men of affairs wrote and wrote well.