CHAPTER XI

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.