....., I shall consider as European all those peoples who in the course of history have undergone the three influences I shall name. The first is that of Rome. Wherever the Roman Empire has ruled and its power has asserted itself; and further, wherever the Empire has been the object of fear, admiration, and envy; wherever the weight of the Roman sword has been felt; wherever the majesty of Roman institutions and laws, or the apparatus and dignity of its magistrature have been recognized or copied, and sometimes even incongruously aped -there is something European. Rome is the eternal model of organized and stable power. Then came Christianity. You know how gradually spread throughout the area of the Roman conquest. If we discount the New World )which was not so much Christianized as peopled by Christians) and Russia (which for the greater part was unaware of Roman law and the empire of Caesar) we see that the area covered by religion of Christ still coincides almost exactly with the domain of the Empires authority. These two very different conquests yet have a kind of resemblance, and that resemblance is important to us. The policy of the Romans, growing ever more supple and ingenious with the increasing weakness of the central power, that is to say, with the extent and heterogeneity of the Empire, brought about a remarkable innovation in the practice of one people dominating many. HOWEVER, this is not yet a finished portrait of us Europeans. Something is still missing from our make-up. What is missing is that marvelous transformation to which we owe, not the sense of public order, the cult of the city and of temporal justice; nor even the depth of our consciousness, our capacity for absolute ideality, and our sense of an eternal justice... what is missing is rather that subtle yet powerful influence to which we owe the best of our intelligence, the acuteness and solidity of our knowledge, as also the clarity, purity, and elegance of our arts and literature: it is from Greece that these virtues came to us. What we owe to Greece is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of humanity. To her we owe the discipline of the Mind, the extraordinary example of perfection in everything. To her we owe the method of thought that tends to relate all things to man, the complete man. Man became for himself the system of reference to which all things must in the end relate. He must therefore develop all the parts of his being and maintain them in a harmony as clear and even as evident as possible. He must develop both body and mind. As for the mind, he must learn to defend himself against its excesses and its reveries, those of its products which are vague and purely imaginary, by means of scrupulous criticism and minute analysis of its judgments, the rational separation of its functions, and the regulation of its forms. Those columns, capitals architraves, those entablatures and their subdivisions, and the ornaments that derive from them, never protruding beyond their proper place and fitness, all make me think of those elements of pure science as the Greeks first conceived them: definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, corollaries, porisms, problems ... that is to say, the mechanism of the mind made visible, the very architecture of intelligence drawn to a plan -the temple erected to Space by the Word, yet a temple that can rise to infinity. Paul Valery Nationality: French Poet Born: October 30, 1871 Died: July 20, 1945
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 08:55:14 +0000
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