The essential point of the doctrine was that
truth was twofold, according to faith and according to reason. Any one
who was subtle enough to recognise both kinds of truth could preserve
his orthodoxy: but the theory contained one great danger, which was
immediately obvious to the Christian church. The consequent struggle
is marked by the constant connection of Arab ideas with the
characteristic expressions of Christian feeling; these again are
connected with the outset of a new period, when the pioneers of the
Renaissance liberate the West from the chains of Greek ecclesiastical
classicism, from Oriental metaphysical religion and slowly pave the
way for the introduction of Germanic ideals directly derived from true
classicism. Not until that period does the West burst the bonds in
which Orientalism had confined it.
Christianity and Islam then stand upon an equal footing in respect
both of intellectual progress and material wealth. But as the West
emerges from the shadow-land of the middle ages the more definite
becomes its superiority over the East. Western nations become
convinced that the fetters which bind them were forged in the East,
and when they have shaken off their chains, they discover their own
physical and intellectual power. They go forth and create a new world,
in which Orientalism finds but scanty room.
The East, however, cannot break away from the theories of life and
mind which grew in it and around it. Even at the present day the
Oriental is swathed in mediaevalism.
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