HUMAN EBB AND FLOW

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4802, 26 June 1939, Page 8

HUMAN EBB AND FLOW

THE WEST AND THE EAST. “If you had come into Damascus when Pompey was in command there, before the final conquest of Jerusalem, you would have seen a Western city, the colonnades, the architecture all the externals of a Graeco-Roman thing,” writes Mr. Hilaire Belloc in a recent article. “Such it was when St. Paul lay there blinded. Such it still was when the early Church gathered not within its walls but at Antioch. So it had been for more than two centuries a Greek thing; so it was to remain for nearly seven centuries more. But had you come into Damascus in the days of Charlemagne, 800 years after Pompey and more than 1000 years after Alexander, you would have found it already in the main Oriental and thenceforward more and more did it lose its Western inheritance and take on the strange new aspect which we every where associate with Islam now. “The great Church of St. John (a Roman basilica I suppose?) is now a mosque. The spirit of the whole place has been transformed in those centuries from the one thing to the other from the Occident to the Orient. And only when, if ever, Damascus is retransformed again to be a Western thing, shall we know that the tide has turned; nor perhaps will this ever happen. “This ebb and flow in the great human ocean, this surge of our race Eastward and the return of the current back Westward after generations and centuries, is a movement, of which we moderns are little aware but it determines history. We are perhaps to-day at this very moment, the mid-twentieth century, about to see another change, either the resurrection of Islam, the reaffirmation of its power and another assault from the East against the West, or what is less likely to happen (because we Europeans have lost our unity) a return of the West Eastward and a European stamp again upon the whole of the Mediterranean and its shores even to Mesopotamia.