XXIII. "THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND"
The time is the middle of the fourth century A.D. The top of the Crest-Wave is in India, now the greatest country in the world. The young Samudragupta, about thirty years old now, has been filling the whole peninsula with his renown as warrior, poet, conqueror, patron of arts and letters, musician. The Hindus are a busy and efficient people, masterly in this material world. Their colonies are spread over Java, Sumatra, and the other islands; Formosa (think where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are filled with Indian shipping.—And with Arab shipping, too, by the way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton. But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing, ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same precious House of Tsin into the south.—Persia is on the back of the Wave, something lower than the Crest: Sapor II, a dozen or so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since some months before his (Sapor's) birth; and has now grown up into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there; persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine took them into favor;—and of late years unmercifully banging about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses. This, you may say, with one hand: with the other he has been very busy with his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in Khorassan,—famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a certain Tent-maker of song-rich memory. In Armenia an Arsacid— that is, Parthian—house has survived and holds sovereignty: and Armenia is a sort of weak Belgium between Persia and Rome; inclining to the latter, of course, because ruled by Arsacids, who are the natural dynastic enemies of the Sassanids of Persia. Rome has turned Christian; so, to cement his alliance with Rome and insure Roman aid against powerful Persia, the Armenian king has had himself coverted likewise, and his people follow suit with great piety;—which sends Shah Sapor, King of the kings of Iran and Turan, Brother of the Sun and Moon, to it with a missionary as well as a dynastic zeal; and a war that is to be of nearly thirty years' duration has been in process along the frontier since 336. Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps, than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as against imperial Rome's—who can say? The population there must have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines, with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that have harrowed the years between.
The sons of Constantine have succeeded to the throne of their father; and the portions of Constantine II, the eldest of the three, and Constans, the youngest, have at last fallen into the hands, or the web, of Constantius,—a sort of cross between a spider, an octopus, and an elderly maiden aunt,—and in general about as unpleasant a creature as ever sat on a throne. Constantine the Great, indeed, had willed the succession into the hands of a much larger number of his relatives; but this Constantius, his father once decently buried, had taken time by the forelock, and insured things to his two brothers and himself by killing out two of his uncles and seven of their sons; so that now, Constantine II and Constans being dead, no male scions of the house of Constantius Chlorus remain as possible rivals to him, except two boys who had been at the time of the massacre, the one too young, and the other too sickly, to count. We shall come to them by and by.
Christianity is well established; though Constantius, followed his father's wise example, is deferring his baptism until the last possible moment: he partly knows the weakness of his nature, and desires to have license for a little pleasant sinning until the end, with the certainty of a glorious resurrection to follow in despite of it.—Dismiss your kindly apprehensions; God was good to Constantius; no untimely accident cut him off unbaptized; his plan worked excellently, and providing an Arian heretic may go to heaven, in heaven he is to this day, singing his Alleluias with the best of them,—and perhaps between whiles arguing it out with the various uncles and cousins he murdered.
Meanwhile, however, priests and bishops are the great men of his empire; and they enjoy immunities from duties and taxation to an extent that throws the whole rational order of government out of gear. Thus, for example, the upkeep of the great roads and posts system,—the lines of communication,—falls upon a certain class called the Decurions, who in each district at their own expense have to maintain all in order. But churchmen,—an enormous class now,—are immune from the decurionship; and are allowed further the use of the post-horses and inns free of cost;—with the result that, practically speaking, no one else can use them at all. Because these churchmen are forever hurrying hither and thither to conference, council, or synod; there each sect,— Arian and Athanasian chiefly,—to damn to eternal perdition (and temporal excommunication when possible) the vile heretics of the other: Homoiousian to thunder against Homoousian, Homoousian against Homoiousian: Arius contra Athanasium, and Athanasius contra mundum:—till the air of the whole Roman world is thick with the fumes of brimstone and the stench of the Nether Pit. Taxation, on those left to tax, falls an intolerable burden; —we have seen how Shah Sapor is dealing with one end of the empire;—at the other end, in Gaul, one Magnentius rose against Constantius, and the latter thoughtfully invited in the Germans to put him down and help themselves to what they found handy;— and a certain Chnodomar, a king in those trans-Rhenish regions, has taken him much at his word. Result: a strip forty miles wide along the left bank of the Rhine from source to mouth has been conquered and annexed; three times as much this side is a perfectly desolate No-man's land; forty-five important cities, including Cologne and Strasbourg, have been reduced to ashes, with innumerable smaller towns and villages; all open towns in north-eastern Gaul have been abandoned; the people of the walled cities are starving on what corn they can grow on vacant corner lots and in their own back-gardens; hundreds of thousands have been killed out, or carried off into slavery in Germany; and King Chnodomar has every reason to think that God is behaving in a very reasonable manner.—As for the rest of the empire, whatever may be its population in human bodies, there is a plentiful lack of human souls to inhabit them; the Roman world has fallen on evil years, truly, but is by no means unchanged;— and the one thing you can prophesy with any decent security is that affairs cannot go on in this way much longer. Rome has conducted a number of funerals in her day, of this nation and that conquered and put an end to; not much intuition is required now, to foresee that the next funeral will be her own.—(Though indeed, I doubt you should have found half-a-dozen in the Roman world who could foresee it.)
Now there is a Way, narrow and most difficult to find,—a Way of conducting the affairs of this life and this world, in balance, in equilibrium; in that fine I condition through which alone the life-renewing forces from the vaster worlds within may flow down, and keep existence here in harmony, and forefend decay. This was, of course, the essence of Chinese thought, Confucian and Taoist. You maintained the inner harmony, and the forces of heaven might use you as their channel. You found Tao (the Way), and grew never old; you succeeded in all enterprises; walked through life unruffled,—duty flowing, beautifully accomplished, at every moment from your hands. You met with no snags or adjusted yourself always to conditions as they arose, and over-rode them in quietest triumph.—They said that, possessing Tao, one might live on many times the common threescore years and ten; very likely there is some truth in it; it seems as if it were true at any rate, of the life of nations. China caught glimpses, and lived on and on; grew old, and reviewed her youth time and again. But normally, what do we find with these un-Taoist nations of the West?—They go easily for some period; then it becomes harder and harder for them to adjust theniselves to conditions. They become clogged with the detritus of old thought and action. What is the meaning of the incessant need we see for reform? Under whatever form of government a nation may be, it arises perpetually; it carries us around the ring of the-archies and-cracies, and there is no finality anywhere.—No; there is no straight line of political progress; but round in a ring you go! You turn out your kings, because they are tyrannical: which means that their government is no longer efficient, and cannot cope with affairs; there is a lack of adjustment between the inner and the outer, between the needs and the provision made to meet them. The monarchy, which was at first representative and the true expression of the nation,—because it, or anything else, when there was no detritus, but things were new and the inner air uncluttered, gave freedom to the national aspirations to pour themselves out in action,—gives such freedom no longer; it irks; it misfits; you feel it chafing everywhere. And yet it has not ceased by any means to be representative: it represents now a nation which has lost its adjustment to the inner things and is clogged up by the detritus of old thought and action, and it is that detritus that irks and misfits and chafes you. So you rise and smash an astral mold or two; turn out your kings; shout freedom and liberty, and are very glorious for a time under a totally free and independent republic;—which means, at once or after a while, government by a class. And this succeeds just as well and badly as its predecessor; neither has found Tao, the Way,—following which, your detritus should be consumed as it goes, and life lifted above the sway of Karma. So once more the detritus accumulates, and blocks the channels; and the life of the nation labors and is oppressed. Need arises for reforms; and the reforms are difficultly carried through; the franchise is extended, and there is loud talk about political growth and what not; we see the millennium at hand, and ourselves its predestined enjoyers. And the old process repeats itself, till you have a very full-fledged democracy:—you make all the men vote, and all the women; and presently no doubt all the children; but even when you have all adult dogs and cats and cows voting as well,—you will not find that that order is Tao, the Way, any more than the others were. The presence of a cow or two, or an ass or two, more or less, in your parliament will not really insure efficiency of administration. The detritus grows again, under the most democratic of democracies; and weighs things down;—and you cast about for new methods of reform. Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected of it; is not the panacea;—you see that, to bring the chaos of affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering, and set up some undivided council,—some Man, for God's sake!—a Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your Imperator, and have peace, and decent government; and you have, wittingly or not, started up old bugbear Monarchy again; and things go well for a time. But, bless you, you have not found the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to do with forms of government. So you go in search once more for a political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing thing, the detritus,—your karma;—and away you go squirreling round the changes again; and all this you call political evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in his cage;—whereas if you found Tao,—if you lived balancedly,— if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,— there would be no political evolution at all—no squirreling,— but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping the channels open.—At least, I imagine so.
Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus' day, the detritus had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as Dominus, and so forth:—all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it. Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch, from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his own wife and daughter;—the total failure of his life and labors thus miserably brought home to him before he died.
"Where there is no vision the people perish," said that learned Hebrew of old, King Solomon; and by that one saying proclaimed his right to his title of 'the Wise.' Look into it, and you have almost the whole philosophy of history. The incessant need of humanity is this thing Vision: men and nations go mad for lack of it: they seek in hell the joys of heaven which should be theirs, and which they cannot see. It means vision of the Inner Worlds, of the heaven that lies around us. Oh, nothing spooky or foolish; one is far from meaning the Astral Light. People who go burrowing into that are again seeking a substitute for Vision, and a very poisonous one.—If I may speak of a personal experience: coming to Point Loma from London was like coming from the bottom of the sea into the upper ether. There, in the heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here—if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,—the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: "When the detritus has accumulated to the point where, like a thick fog, it shuts away all vision of the True, then the nation must go into abeyance; it must fall."—Rome was very near that point.
One wishes one could say something about those Inner Worlds of Beauty. When the voices of self are silenced, and desires abashed and at peace,—how they shine through! This outer world, truly, reflects them; but another and ugly world of our own making.
…..is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!