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downward, and the recumbent ones are the fallen dead. Or, other
analogies may equally well be applied to describe societies-runners
in a circle, or marchers on a treadmill, or ridef3 on an elevator. These
metaphorical devices are infinitely malleable in the mind of the
dreamer for they can only illustrate and dramatize what is already
assumed; they cannot take the place of proof.
The tortuous reasoning with which the whole is set forth ex–
presses the eagerness to identify the images of the dream with the
real world. Yet comparison of the two realms exposes gross errors of
fact, significant by their very perpetration.
For instance:
Epic poetry is the product of barbarian invaders
beating against civilization's walls. The
Chanson de Roland
"parent
of all the poetry that has ever been written since that day in any of
the vernacular languages of the Western World" was the creation
of the "French semi-barbarian Crusaders" who broke through the
Spanish front of the Syriac universal state. But this work is in no sense
barbaric or primitive. Product of the pen of a cultivated poet, it was
one of the first signs of the renaissance of the twelfth century. In–
fluenced by the current rebirth of literature and of learning, it was
inspired by the purification of Christianity in the same period, else–
where marked by Toynbee as
a
tour de force
of a creative minority.
Again:
"The very names of the three chief wars of the first half
of the eighteenth century ... suggest that wars only occurred when
matrimonial arrangements had got into an inextricable tangle." During
that period war was "merely a 'sport of kings.' " Surely no other his–
torian could forget that colonial empires were involved in these strug–
gles, which were not simply European but reached around the world.
Or:
Throughout the work runs the assumption that the teach–
ings of Christ were rejected by the Jews at a specific point in history.
Two generations of scholars have labored to demonstrate the essential
place of Christianity in the Pharisaic tradition and to show that the
differentiation of Christians from other Jews, was a process lasting
four centuries. It may be said in passing that all the references to
Judaism reveal fundamental ignorance. The general picture of a
rigid fossilized culture, the same now as two thousand years ago, flies
in the face of a long history of variations and adjustments, Babylon
to Spain to Poland. The discussion of Ashkenazi-Sephardic differ–
ences is steeped in error and prejudice. And the description of the
Marxian picture of class war as a notion borrowed by "the German
Jew Karl Marx" from the "apocalyptic visions of a repudiated religious
tradition," speaks for itself.
