Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/90

74 is a product of this same outlook. A canonical text is in its very idea true and incapable of improvement. But the actual needs of the spirit alter, and so there grew up a technique of secret modifications which outwardly kept up the fiction of inalterability and which is employed very freely indeed in all religious writings of the Arabian world, the Bible included.

After Mark Antony, Justinian is the most fateful personality of the Arabian world. Like his "contemporary" Charles V he ruined everything for which he was invoked. Just as in the West the Faustian dream of a resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire runs through all the political romanticism that darkened the sense of fact during and beyond the age of Napoleon — and even that of the princely fools of 1848 — so also Justinian was possessed with a Quixotic urgency to recover the entire Imperium. It was always upon distant Rome instead of upon his proper world, the Eastern, that his eyes were fixed. Even before he ascended the throne, he was already in negotiation with the Pope of Rome, who was still subordinate to the great Patriarch of Christendom and not yet generally recognized even as primus inter pares. It was at the Pope's instance that the dual-nature symbol was introduced at Chalcedon, a step which lost the Monophysite countries wholly and for ever. The consequence of Actium was that Christianity in its first two decisive and formative centuries was pulled over into the West, into Classical territories, where the higher intellectual stratum held aloof. Then the Early Christian spirit rose afresh with the Monophysites and Nestorians. But Justinian thrust this revival back upon itself, and the result was that in the realms of Eastern Christianity the reformist movement, when in due course it appeared, was not a Puritanism but the new religion of Islam. And in the same way, at the very moment when the Eastern customary law had become ripe for codification, he framed a Latin codex which, for language reasons in the East and for political reasons in the West, was condemned from the first to remain a literary product.

The work itself, like the corresponding codes of Dracon and Solon, came into being at the threshold of a "Late" period, and with political intentions. In the West, where the fiction of a continuing Imperium Romanum produced the utterly meaningless campaigns of Belisarius and Narses, Latin codes had been put together (about A.D. 500) by Visigoths, Burgundians and Ostrogoths for subjugated Romans, and so Byzantium must needs get out a genuine Roman code in opposition. In the East the Jewish nation has already settled its code, the Talmud, while, for the immense numbers of people who were subject to the Emperor's law, a code proper for the Emperor's own nation, the Christian, had become a necessity.

For the Corpus Juris with its topsy-turviness and its technical faults is, in spite of everything, an Arabic — in other words, a religious — creation, as evidenced