of the identity of state and creed-community, persecution became a national duty. It was on this account that first the "orthodox" (or "Greek") and then the Nestorian Christians suffered in the Persian Empire. Diocletian also, who as "Caliph"[1] (Dominus et Deus) had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult-Churches and saw himself in all sincerity as Commander of these Faithful, could not evade the duty of suppressing the second Church. Constantine changed the "true" Church and in that act changed the nationality of the Byzantine Empire. From that point on, the Greek name slowly passed over to the Christian nation, and specifically to that Christian nation which the Emperor as Head of the Faithful recognized and allowed to sit in the Great Councils. Hence the uncertain lines of the picture of Byzantine history — in 290 the organization that of a Classical Imperium, but the substance already a Magian national state; in 312 a change of nationality without change of name. Under this name of "Greeks," first Paganism as a nation fought the Christians, and then Christianity as a nation fought Islam. And in the latter fight, Islam itself being a nation also (the Arabian), nationality stamped itself more and more deeply upon events. Hence the present-day Greeks are a creation of the Magian Culture, developed first by the Christian Church, then by the sacred language of this Church, and finally by the name of this Church. Islam brought with it from the home of Mohammed the Arab name as the badge of its nationality. It is a mistake to equate these "Arabs" with the Beduin tribes of the desert. What created the new nation, with its passionate and strongly characteristic soul, was the consensus of the new faith. Its unity is no more derived from race and home than that of the Christian, Jewish, or Persian, and therefore it did not "migrate"; rather it owes its immense expansion to the incorporation within itself of the greater part of the early Magian nations. With the end of the first millennium of our era these nations one and all pass over into the form of fellah-peoples, and it is as fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the Balkans under Turkish rule, the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe have lived ever since.[2]
In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved.[3] Already by A.D. 1000 the men who
- ↑ See Vol. I., p. 212.
- ↑ The author's meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the old Magian nations as was not Arabized became fellah peoples, either outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India) or within it, under the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab-element itself was largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the Turks came. — Tr.
- ↑ I am convinced that the nations of China which sprang up in members in the middle, Hwang-Ho region at the beginning of the Chóu dynasty, as also the regional peoples of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (which had each its own capital and its own religion, and as late as Roman times fought each other in definitely religious wars), were in their inward form more closely akin to the peoples of the West than to those of the Classical and the Arabian worlds. However, research into such fields has hitherto been conspicuous by its absence.
