ugustine cried aloud upon the ancient beauty, or Dante
said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans.
The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest
the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her.
We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is not
a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms;
as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying
the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence
imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods.
This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam. Islam, as I
have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play
with anything. And the cause of the contrast is the historical
cause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind.
The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of
reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation.
It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old
balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose
its balance any more than they. It differed because the old system
was one of many religions under one government, while the new
was one of many governments under one religion. But the idea
of variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed.
A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard
to find a place for everything in the system, however much might
be denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything,
but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The very
nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this.
Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore
ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome.
Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked
at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter's might have looked
at the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning; it was content with
the idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth.
It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth.

Islam was a movement; that is why it has ceased to move.
For a movement can only be a mood. It may be a very necessary movement
arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its
level in a larger philosophy, and be balanced against other things.
Islam was a reaction towards simplicity; it was a