EAST AND WEST 145 



might have happened if the Greeks and the Christians had seen 

 their respective good points instead of seeing only the evil ones. 

 How beautiful if their two types of other-worldliness could have 

 been harmonized! How many miseries mankind would have been 

 spared! But it was not to be. The path of progress is not straight 

 but very crooked; the general direction is clear enough, but only 

 if one considers a very long stretch of it from far off. Before being 

 able to reconcile the love of truth with the love of man, the 

 scientific spirit with the Golden Rule, mankind was obliged to 

 make many strange and cruel experiments. 



To begin with, under the influence of Christian education com- 

 bined with Roman narrow-mindedness and later with Barbarian 

 ignorance, the connection with Greek culture — which was the 

 only source of positive knowledge — became looser and looser. 

 The debasement of thought is well illustrated by the fact that 

 even in the Byzantine empire, where there was no linguistic bar- 

 rier to the transmission of ancient science, much of the latter 

 remained practically unknown. This is so true that in the thir- 

 teenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Latin world was finally 

 awakened, Byzantine scholars preparing a scientific revival re- 

 translated from the Arabic and the Latin a number of writings 

 which were nothing but translations from the Greek or poor imita- 

 tions of such translations. Their intellectual indigence was such 

 that they did not recognize the work of their own ancestors. 



The contact between ancient Greece and western Christendom 

 ended by being so precarious that it might have conceivably been 

 broken altogether, but for the intervention of another oriental 

 people, the Arabs. Please note that this was the third great wave 

 of oriental wisdom, the third time that the creative impulse came 

 from the East. The first initiative — and the most fundamental of 

 all — came from Egypt and Mesopotamia; the second from Israel, 

 and though it influenced science only in an indirect way, it was 

 also of incalculable pregnancy; the third, with which I am going 

 to deal now, came from Arabia and from Persia. 



