CHAPTER 3. THE BYZANTINES

FROM SIFTING THE NUMEROUS IMPLICATIONS of meaning attaching to the word “civilization,” there emerges a definition, which presumes it to consist in the vitality of three elements in man’s corporate mode of living. These are: the Stable; the Transcendental; and the Cultural. Vitality in each simultaneously is seldom found, save in large cities whence they radiate their combined influence throughout their city’s dominion. And the rarity of even this coincidence constitutes the rarity of civilizations. Failure in the vitality of any one of them denotes a lapse from true civilization to conditions of life comparable with those of fifteenth century Italy or the present Middle West of the United States.

First essential to the definition of civilization is the stable element, the universal confidence in the social organism to maintain itself and its government, and to modify itself to external and internal necessity. This confidence, when it exists, pervades people unconsciously. Security of property, the standards of living, the countless services of local government—all go for granted without thought or investigation, like the sun and the stars, symbolized in those outward features, dinner jackets, bathrooms and asphalt roads, which evoke the awe and envy of less advanced peoples.

Second is that composite element in human activity, the quest of transcendental values, and their collateral ethics. To every race, in infancy and succeeding childhoods, is vouchsafed the concept of a God. This, ultimately, may lose identity in that of a gentleman. But underneath social demeanor, there remains to man his soul proper, his own greatness, his unquiet spirit seeking cosmic direction, ever striving to soar above the mental gravities of earth. It is contended that civilizations such as that upon which we are entering, retard the divine quest in humanity by the very security with which they encushion it against the fundamental workings between man and earth, man and man, man and God. But it remains to be seen whether those relationships do not, as the scientific revolution approaches its climax, attain a depth and precision of definition hitherto undreamed. And the soul, mathematically propell