Even Heathen Things

Even Heathen Things:

For reasons to esoteric to explain here, I was looking at an old 2005 post at Gypsy Scholar. The thing is fascinating:

Unlike, for instance, Islamic or Confucian civilizations, the West finds its identity in something other than itself -- indeed, in two other cultures to which it is secondary, those of ancient Greece and ancient Judaism. Thus, the West's founding texts are in Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew and by requiring repeated translation have kept the West aware of its borrowed identity.

This means that -- postmodernist critiques notwithstanding -- the West, at its core, is open to "the other."

Something very important follow from this: the West preserves sources.

Not every civilization does.

Brague notes that Islamic civilization absorbed the civilizations that it conquered by translating into Arabic the texts that it found useful, then used the translations and almost never returned to the originals. Why not? Because Arabic, being the perfect language chosen for Allah's revelation, perfected the originals. The translated texts were considered better in Arabic.

This is not to deny that Islam achieved a high level of culture. It did. But by denying itself repeated access to original, it closed off recognition of its own cultural borrowings. Thus, it shielded itself from self-critique.

The West, by contrast, in preserving sources and returning to them, checks itself critically against the other at its core.

Why is it that every time I encounter what I think is a new idea, I find that it is captured in a verse from The Ballad of the White Horse?

Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.

How did he do this? The man saw the whole of 20th century thought in advance, and replied to it -- not just in prose, as he did at length in Orthodoxy, but in verse.

Is there an explanation apart from prophesy? I have none, and it moves me to recognize the fact.