ISLAM
The end of the Fifth Book and the beginning of the Sixth Book of Mr.
Wells’s _Outline of History_ deals with the early Persian religious
movements after the Incarnation, with the History of China during the
period corresponding to the early Dark Ages in Europe, and with the
rise, first preaching and original conquests of Mohammedanism.
The whole of it is well done; best of all the Chinese part, but also
very excellently the Mohammedan part. And here, as everywhere in the
book, it is in the rapid presentation of a long period vividly to the
reader’s mind that this writer shows peculiar talent.
The reason that Mr. Wells is always at his best when he is dealing with
China is that there is here no complication. He and his readers are on
the same level. We none of us know anything about Chinese history,
except a few experts, and what there is to know is apparently less
detailed, or, at any rate (to our completely foreign minds), less
manifold than what there is to know about our own old world between the
Asian and African deserts and the Atlantic.
Moreover, the temper of China, with its absence of religious enthusiasm,
is sympathetic to a mind which does not understand the qualities of that
emotion, save in the comparatively narrow field of what may be called
“Hot Gospel.” Moreover, Mr. Wells’s way of dealing with the story of
China is moderate and unexcited, because he is here completely removed
from that goad to which he reacts with such violence, the Catholic
Church. With no Catholic Church to send the blood to his head, he can
deal with matters as calmly as the proverbial “Mongolian Dynasties: so
restful; so impartial.”
In the whole of these pages on China I can find but one “jerk” provoked
by a sudden reminiscence of Christian doctrine (though, it is true,
exactly the same phrase is repeated ten pages later rather
irrelevantly)—I allude to the term “Immaculate Conception.” He is
talking of the experience of a Chinese traveller in India during the
seventh century, and in giving a list of “the preposterous rubbish”
attached to the Buddhist negations and despairs (which, by the way, Mr.
Wells never remarks to be negations or despairs), he includes (likening
it to a “Christmas pantomime”) the strange fairy-tales about what he
calls “Immaculate Conceptions” by monstrous animals.
Now, since I understand Mr. Wells does me the honour to read these
careful comments and corrections of mine upon his momentarily popular
work, I will put this in italics, so that he can have it before him in
sharp form.
_The term “Immaculate Conception” does not mean Incarnation._
Mr. Wells thinks it does. He thinks it means a miraculous birth without
a human father, and, in particular, the miraculous birth of a divine
being without a human father, of which central doctrine the instinct of
mankind is full—wherefore, indeed, it does but seem the more absurd in
Mr. Wells’s eyes.
Mr. Wells may here plead that he sins in company; and he may also plead
that, unlike the greater part of his errors, this error is not
particularly old-fashioned. Ill-educated men of the English-speaking
world constantly use the term “Immaculate Conception” under the
impression that it means a miraculous _incarnation_. They do it almost
as often as they talk of Socialism as meaning a wide distribution of
property.
But it will be to Mr. Wells’s advantage if, in future, he does not go
wrong on this point. Insignificant as it may seem to him, it is a very
characteristic test of general culture, and outside the world to which
he belongs everybody laughs at this common blunder. Mr. Wells would be
the first to ridicule a Continental journalist who should talk of “Sir
Gladstone.” But this blunder about the Immaculate Conception—a doctrine
affecting the whole of Christian theology, and a commonplace in the
mouths of all instructed Europeans—is far less excusable. The term
“Immaculate Conception” is a specific theological term, signifying the
absence in a human soul from its first moment of original sin. It has
nothing whatever to do with the idea that the origin of that human soul
is supernatural, save in the sense in which the origin of all our souls
is the effect of a supernatural creative act. Mr. Wells himself, for
instance, believes (as do, I am sure, much the greater part of his
readers) that he was immaculately conceived, and that the whole of the
human race is so.
We Catholics, on the contrary, believe this to be a peculiar state,
attaching to the Mother of Jesus Christ and to no other human being.
Is that quite clear? I hope so; and I hope we shall not see this howler
falling again from a pen so distinguished.
Mr. Wells is also unable, in this very clear, readable, and interesting
summary of the early Chinese story, to avoid two passing references to
his own exceedingly simple theology of “progress.” One is that in which
he makes certain that images of animals and men put into graves are but
substitution for earlier living sacrifices; the other is that in which
he refers to mankind as (in the matter of its conservatism) “still an
animal.” But, on the other hand, he modifies the general commonplace,
mechanical, explanation that the lack of change in Chinese culture is
due to the nature of its script. He modifies such a conclusion (which he
repeats from an earlier page) by the word “plausible.” He says, “There
is much that is plausible in this explanation,” and that is a perfectly
reasonable way of putting it. So also, he keeps his nationalism within
reasonable bounds when he calls the London Royal Society “the Mother
Society of Modern Science.” Many foreigners would be angry at reading
that phrase, and nearly all foreigners would smile at it; but there is
something to be said for it, all the same.
Just before his account of the early Chinese, he has a fairly clear,
though very brief, account of the origin of Manichæism, and clearly
states the very great effect it had upon producing Christian heresy: but
he is, I think, a little out of it in confining that effect to a
thousand years. It is most powerful to-day. The whole of what is called
Puritanism is based upon it. It is probably inseparable from true
religion, of which it seems to be a necessary parasite or poisonous
by-product. He also here brings in his King Charles’s head of Mithras,
and makes the error of saying that the cult was “enormously popular”
among the “common people.” We have no proof of that at all. What we do
find (as Mr. Wells also quite rightly notes) is what I have already
pointed out, its presence in the Roman army; but, as I have said in a
previous chapter, the idea of Mithraism was never really widespread in
the sense of affecting millions, let alone was it ever a serious rival
to the Catholic Church. That was one of those exploded guesses of the
nineteenth century, which still do duty in popular textbooks, but have
lost all serious historical value.
We have in the next sentence, by the way, another of those little
half-informed sneers at the Catholic Church which Mr. Wells seems to be
quite unable to avoid, when he talks of Mithras “proceeding from the
Deity” and gratuitously adds, to relieve his feelings, “in much the same
way that the Third Person in the Christian Trinity proceeds from the
First.” (He prints God the Father, by the way, without capitals—to put
Him in His place.)
Here, again, I can do Mr. Wells a good service, by giving him a little
elementary instruction in the outworn creed of Augustine, Anselm and
Mercier.
The dogma is not what Mr. Wells fancies it to be. He has read of the
“Filioque” discussion, though perhaps he does not know that it was a
pretext and not a cause; he is acquainted with this word “Proceed” in
connection with the Blessed Trinity, and therefore connects it with the
Holy Ghost in procession from the Father alone, thinking this to be the
original doctrine. As an historical fact the doctrine stood thus: that
the Son is born of the Father, and the Holy Ghost proceeds from the
Father and the Son. Also it is a doctrine implied at the origin of our
religion, and one which is found in high antiquity long before the
Greeks broke away from Unity. And though there was _late_ argument
against the double Procession, the complaint against the “Filioque” was
not only, nor perhaps chiefly, that it was innovation in doctrine as
that it was an unwarranted Western addition to the Creed.
I know that all these names and terms sound very ridiculous to Mr.
Wells, just as the etiquette of the gentry seemed ridiculous to Sancho
Panza; but, at any rate, an elementary historian ought to know the
historical facts about a doctrine which fills all History, even if he
thinks it absurd. A man may have no great respect for the Mormons; but
if he is writing a popular history of Utah he must not mix up Brigham
Young with Smith, or think that the Book of Mormon is only another name
for the Bible.
If Mr. Wells deserves praise—and he certainly does—for his treatment of
the Chinese passage, he also deserves it in a high degree for his
treatment of the rise and effect of Mohammed.
He avoids the too obvious temptations of indiscriminate praise (to which
he would naturally be led by the antagonism between Islam and
Catholicism), and he gives a lucid, well-proportioned account of those
famous ten years, their immediate preparation and their astonishing
sequel.
He illustrates the vast sudden sweep of Islam in the best possible
fashion by two accurate, plain and good sketch maps (on successive
pages, 383 and 384), and, what is perhaps best of all, he fully
appreciates and distinctly states the capital point that the success of
Islam in the East was in the nature of a social revolution rather than
of a conquest. There he is perfectly right, and the point is of great
value to the proper appreciation of all our history.
Very few historians have—in the past—seized the fact that the appeal of
Islam was to the slave and small-holder caught in the net of Roman Law
and enfranchised by the new subversive movement.
Mr. Wells sees that clearly and it is a good example of historical
judgment.
Moreover, in the whole of these thirteen pages he admits only two sneers
at Catholic doctrine; one in which he remarks that the plain man cannot
make head or tail of it (on p. 379); the other a few lines further on,
where he discovers a new and strange Catholic tenet to the effect that
Priests and Kings have a place in heaven equal to the great saints, and
superior to the common herd! (What fun it would be to put Mr. Wells
through an elementary examination on that philosophy which the whole of
our civilization once held, and which the more intelligent of us still
hold!)
He emphasizes quite rightly and very strongly the strength of
_simplicity_ in the Arab enthusiasm, and the solvent effect of this upon
the first societies which it approached.
But there is one bad unhistorical note running through the whole
description which spoils it: he does not understand the greatness of his
own people, of Europe: the European religion: the Græco-Roman culture,
even in its material decline. He does understand that its complexity of
social rank, of bureaucratic administration in the East, and of minute
legal regulations everywhere (a complexity inseparable from the heights
it had reached) subjected it to a heavy strain, and that the new
enthusiasm out of the desert relaxed that strain; but he does not
appreciate that the relaxation was also a general breakdown. Nor does he
appreciate the strength and majesty, the toughness and dignity, of this
age-long structure of European civilization now faced with so sudden and
overwhelming an attack of “levellers.”
But there is a worse failure: he does not grasp the fact that Islam,
being but a reaction against the highly developed Christian system of
society, law, and religion, therefore proceeded from that system. Islam
started more as a heresy than anything else, and was talked and felt
about as a sort of heresy. It is a modern error, due to our long
separation from it, which makes it look like a new religion. It is a
pity Mr. Wells has got this fundamental point wrong; but for that
essential misunderstanding of the situation and for his inability to
keep his text quite clean from insults against the Catholic
Church—usually dragged in by the hair—these pages might have had a
permanent value and might have been reckoned among the best pieces of
generalization of our time.
All the doctrines preached by Mohammed are discoverable in the great
body of Catholic theology. Not one came from outside. The Fatherhood of
God, the truth that God is Personal, that He is the Creator of all
things; that He is supremely good; that the human soul is immortal; that
it may attain eternal beatitude or sink to eternal wretchedness; that
the souls of men are equal in the sight of God; and that a man should
regard all other men as his brethren: such a complete “corpus” of
doctrine Mohammed did not find among the Jews (for they were
exclusive—Immortality was not an original tenet with them let alone the
dual fate of man); he did not find it taught in Buddhism, which despairs
and knows nothing of God, let alone of the Immortal individual soul.
Mohammedanism drew of necessity from _our_ culture. There was nothing
else for it to draw from. The Græco-Roman world overshadowed all its
origins. It is the failure to appreciate the magnitude of his own
ancestry, which thus makes Mr. Wells misunderstand the nature of the
first amazing growth of Islam. Or, rather, he understands one-half of
that magnitude, its burdensome complexity; but he does not understand
the wealth of mind out of which alone such complexity could come. That
is why he does not know that Islam submerged and degraded a higher
thing. We have the ruins of column and capital to prove it; but I do not
think that Mr. Wells would understand, say, Timgad. We have the _Veni
Creator Spiritus_ and the _Vexilla Regis_ and all that comes between
them; but I doubt whether Mr. Wells would understand what that great
poetry is or the profound theology that nourished it. He exaggerated
(though it is difficult to exaggerate) the material decline of the early
Dark Ages. For instance, they kept up their roads. Islam could never
make a road.
He does not know in how heroic a fashion our culture was kept alive
until it should again easily dominate the world. He has against his own
civilization something of a twist, like that which makes occasional,
cranky Englishmen anti-English. Nor does he grasp the central truth that
the bad blows which came nearest to destroying us, were not those of the
fifth and sixth centuries, but those of the ninth. He says, for
instance, that “Islam prevailed because it was the best social and
political order the times could offer ... the broadest, freshest, and
cleanest political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the
world.” You might just as well say that of Bolshevism. For, though Islam
was a much finer thing than Bolshevism, yet its appeal was of exactly
the same simple, subversive sort. It did not flood the East, Africa, and
Spain because it was “broad” or “fresh”—words of doubtful meaning. But
when he adds, “It offered better terms than any other to the mass of
mankind,” he is right, especially as regards the first area of its
expansion: Syria. It appealed there to the underworld of a very ancient
and fatigued civilization, and met an army largely recruited from the
Arabs themselves for its then decisive cavalry arm. These Arab troops of
the Empire half-sympathized with the enemy before battle and readily
joined them during and after it.
Nor must we forget that Islam failed to extirpate even in Syria the
religion which it attacked, nor again that in those areas there had been
years of desolation through war and violent religious quarrel with the
central power. It was not till the tenth century that Islam became
universal in Barbary. It swept Spain, because the ownership of land in
Spain was in too few hands; but the mass of the people of Spain retained
the Faith; and, but for their civilized traditions, their Mohammedan
rulers of three hundred years could not have achieved what they did in
building and tillage—for they certainly failed to do anything so great
in North Africa after the Christian culture of Barbary had been killed.
The defeat of Islam in the heart of Gaul had nothing to do with the
“vast line of communications from Arabia.” Can Mr. Wells really think
that the military base of the Arabs in Central Gaul was a base in
Arabia?
No. The victory of Charles Martel which saved all Europe in the eighth
century was a victory of European brain and muscle over Asiatic: not the
last. It was the rally of our people; and from that rally they pressed
forward unceasingly, until at last they undid the greater part of the
evil which had been done.
In his description of the Mohammedan world between the opening of the
eighth century and the great Mongol invasions, Mr. Wells is at his best.
He has an exceedingly difficult task to perform, because the
multiplicity and confusion of details, as well as the area to be covered
are very great; but he has managed to give the main features in good
relief and without loss of proportion. I have already spoken of the few
sentences here and there where his obsession against the Catholic Church
betrays him into folly, sometimes puerile, sometimes mixed with
startling ignorance, but the occasions for this sort of thing are rare,
for he is dealing with a time and place in which the Christian religion
was overwhelmed.
I expected, with some anxiety, the presence in this division of some one
of those anti-Christian sneers (which he might have got from Gibbon or
some other Voltairean authority) upon the Christians in Spain, but I am
glad to say that he has omitted any such—for the very good reason that
he does not here deal with Spain under the Moors.
He does justice, but not more than justice, to the beauty of detail in
Arabic architectural work, and has properly noted in his authorities the
literary beauty of which all those authorities assure us—though very few
of us (and certainly neither Mr. Wells nor I)—can judge it for
ourselves.
His great virtue of accuracy in detail also appears in his presentation
of the Arabic contribution to mathematics. What he quotes tends slightly
to exaggeration (for instance, the measurement of the angle of the
ecliptic is not an Arabic discovery, but was open to anyone to make to
within a fraction of a degree, at any time, for centuries, before
Mohammed. It was as a fact made by the Greek civilization, centuries
before).
He gives his right place to Averroës, though to say of this great mind
that it “made a sharp distinction between Religious and Scientific truth
and so prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from
theological dogmatism, both under Christianity and under Islam,” is out
of proportion. What Averroës did was to propound a beginning of
something very like atheism or at the best pantheism. Nor was there any
sort of proportion between the restraint upon physical dogmatism and
vagary then exercised (and happily still exercised) by the supreme force
of Catholic theology and the corresponding restraint created by the much
too simple system of Islam.
Mr. Wells is further much to be congratulated upon his contrast between
the universality of writing and reading in the world of Arabic culture
at its height, and the lack of them in the contemporary world of Latin
culture, which was, perhaps, the chief external difference between them.
He is careful to note (in quoting another authority—and this is an
example of his accuracy in detail) the presence of the so-called Arabic
numerals in our civilization long before Islam arose. He very justly
puts down the development of algebra to Islam, and adds, what is much
less known, its possible or probable connection with India. He
emphasizes with right judgment the historic function of Islam in
creating a flux, as it were, between Asia and Europe and making a
passage for ideas between the world east of the old Roman boundary and
our world. But where he is most to be congratulated is in his emphasis
upon the effect of the Mongol irruption upon Europe, and much more upon
the Mohammedan world.
It is true that this feature in universal history has long been
appreciated. It has been fully present in the minds of historians for
more than a lifetime; but an appreciation of it is not yet popularized,
and Mr. Wells, writing for a popular audience, has underlined it much
more than any other contemporary whom I can call to mind. It would
perhaps have been better had he given the origins of the catastrophe (in
so far as concerned Islam) with more emphasis. It is true that the
horrible Mongolian disaster of the thirteenth century was on another
scale, and had ultimately far more effect; but the Turkish beginnings
are very important; he gives a short paragraph to the Kahzars (pp.
411–12) who determined the history of Russia—or at any rate _begin_ the
determination of it. He very rightly says that the second Turkish
branch, the Seljuks, raiding the original Mohammedan Empire of the Near
East, was more important. He gives this barely half a page, but he very
properly emphasizes the supreme importance of their breaking through the
mountain-wall which had hitherto been the defence of our civilization
upon the East from the Black Sea to the Levantine coast; and the few
lines in which he alludes to the battle of Manzikart and its effect, are
striking and just.
I am not surprised at, but regret, the inevitable failure of the author
to note here something which should give pause to every opponent of the
Christian religion such as himself. He perceives (and very well
describes) the breakdown of Islam as a culture after its early
brilliancy. He notes that the second chapter in its power was only begun
by that tide of abominable barbarism in the eleventh century—the Turkish
hordes. He might have noted—it is certainly a thing which every judicial
student of religion should note (unfortunately Mr. Wells cannot possibly
be judicial when the Catholic Church is anywhere within ten miles)—that
the Christian culture alone has not shown this recurrent “fainting
sickness.” Its material circumstance has risen and fallen slowly. It has
had a rhythm, as every living organism must have; but it has not had
fatal fatigues. _Its resurrections have been from within._ Attacks from
without have always strengthened it, whether it were attack upon the
spiritual body—martyrdom and heresy—or attack upon the political
body—Mohammedan and Pagan invasions. This Character in the Catholic
culture is unique. The comparative history of religion will give you no
parallel to this: and I say again that the impartial and really
sceptical student of religion would note immediately in his studies this
mark peculiar to the Catholic Church; account for it as best he could by
some natural explanation, but note it.
The long passages upon the Ottoman Turks, upon the great
thirteenth-century Mongol move, form the opening of Book VII. The
description is full and good, and the accompanying sketch maps
illuminating. Mr. Wells is to be blamed in sparing those men the
epithets which he is ready to fling at any Christian armies and
particularly at those which impose orthodoxy upon the mortal enemies of
our culture. But that is only to be expected; and I think I have wearied
the reader enough with emphasizing this unfortunate feature which
deprives his work of solidity and permanence. Our armies never reached
the barbaric depths of cruelty and mere destruction. They were creative.
The section on the travels of Marco Polo is first-rate. I find in it
again, of course, the silly little sentences against Catholicism which
he cannot avoid, the condemnation of the word “illiterate” coupled with
the word “theologian” as applied to Charlemagne; the contrasting of the
Catholic Church with an imaginary “teaching of Jesus” (p. 443); an
absurd suggestion that the Mongols would have become Catholics if it had
not been for the Priest; a sneer at the Catholic Church in the
thirteenth century (of all centuries!) for its loss of the conquering
fire of the early Christian Missions; a complaint that the Papacy did
not convert the Empire of Kubla-Khan—which he imagines to have been
thirsting for conversion to Papistry, but only willing (apparently) to
accept it in a Protestant form.
Apart from these inevitable breakdowns in judgment, such as fanaticism
can never escape, the description of the period is, as I have said,
good, and that of the travels of Marco Polo excellent. The succeeding
pages which begin the story of the Ottoman Turks I must leave to a later
chapter.
I lay down this, the best of the passages I have yet come across in this
popular work, and I cannot resist an inclination to muse a little upon
the conditions which make it a failure. I hope that I appreciate as much
as anyone the great qualities possessed by Mr. Wells for making it a
success. He need only, for instance, in this excellent summary of the
Middle History of Islam, with its very just and powerful appreciation of
the effect upon universal history of the “Asiatic Tide,” have written
with detachment to have made it a perfect piece of work; and had he
carried a similar detachment with him throughout all his pages he might
have done something enduring, or, if not that, at any rate something
valuable for his own generation.
But his nervous reaction against the Catholic Church is too strong for
him, and the result is that the colouring of the picture is all wrong.
In proportion as a set of known facts are remote from our own
civilization and do not touch upon the philosophy which made us all
(including Mr. Wells), in that proportion his judgment is well balanced
and his selection sound enough. That is why he is best when he talks of
China or Islam, third rate when he talks of his own blood, the European,
and quite below the average level of his popular contemporaries when he
has to deal with the great debate as to whether religion be from God or
from man, and as to whether the Catholic Church be what it claims to be
or a maleficent illusion.
It is perfectly possible to write enduring and, in a fashion, valuable,
historical stuff with as complete a conviction as Mr. Wells himself has
that all religion is from mankind, and the Catholic Faith not only
man-made, but ill-made.
What one cannot do is to write good History under the effect of mere
irritation, and exasperated irritation at that. There is between such
nervous weakness and a proper balance something comparable to the
contrast between the advocacy of a good lawyer and the temper of a
touchy witness. The lawyer, though pleading for a false cause, keeps
himself, if he knows his trade, detached from the passions of that
cause; presents the arguments soberly though cumulatively, throwing
stress upon what will achieve his result, but without betraying loss of
control. And that is what the historian should do: he should so write
that his reader says to himself, “I am reading what actually happened,”
and not so that the reader says to himself, “There he is off again at
his _bête noire_”!
Such criticism is parallel to what one has to say too often with regard
to military history. It is essential to good military history that its
writer should be absorbed in the combinations of the affair, and see
battle and campaign with apparent indifference to either combatant, or,
at any rate, with a major interest only in war as war. While the bad
military historian is he who, however great his interest in the main
affair, cannot avoid a Jingo note—or an anti-Jingo, they are equally
bad—in his writing. It is the difference between seeing human events
from above as on a map—which should be the whole business of an outline
of History—and seeing them slantways from the ground, and therefore out
of proportion.
There, then, is Mr. Wells on one great chapter of History: Islam. He
shows in it both his advantages and his defects. He is quick to grasp
the real meaning of it as a social phenomenon; he shows admirable skill
in simple and lucid concentration upon main historical features. But he
also betrays here his two main weaknesses. He can’t keep off a petty and
violent anti-Christian obsession which ruins his work and deprives it of
any chance of permanence; and he shows occasional examples of quite
startling ignorance in matters which are common knowledge to his
educated contemporaries.