(b) There are also facts of a historic nature. Whenever a doctrine has come to the Mediterranean region, in the ensuing clash of ideas it is always the Mediterranean that has remained intact, the region that has conquered the doctrine. Christianity was originally a moving but hermetic teaching, primarily Judaic in character, hostile to compromise, harsh, exclusive, and admirable. Its encounter with the Mediterranean gave rise to something new: Catholicism. A philosophical doctrine was added to the initial emotional aspirations. The monument was adapted to man and thus completed and embellished. The Mediterranean enabled Christianity to enter the world and embark on its miraculous career.
It was also a Mediterranean, Francis of Assisi, who turned Christianity from a religion of inner torment into a hymn to nature and naïve joy. And it was a northerner, Luther, who was responsible for the one attempt to separate Christianity from the world. Protestantism, strictly speaking, is Catholicism wrenched from the Mediterranean and its exalting but dangerous influence.
Let us take a closer look. To anyone who has lived in both Germany and Italy, it is obvious that fascism in these two places is not the same. In Germany its presence is pervasive. One sees it on faces and in the streets. Dresden, a military town, is suffocating beneath an invisible enemy. What you sense first in Italy is the country. What you see on first approaching a German is the Hitlerian, who greets you by saying “Heil Hitler!” In an Italian you see a man who is affable and gay. In this respect, too, the doctrine seems to have receded in the face of the country. By dint of some Mediterranean miracle, people who think humanely are able to live without oppression in a country under inhumane rule.
III
The living reality that is the Mediterranean is nothing new for us, however. For some, the culture of the region is a reflection of Latin antiquity, the antiquity that the Renaissance sought beyond the Middle Ages. It is this Latinity that Maurras and his friends are trying to appropriate. Following the Ethiopian invasion, twenty-four Western intellectuals sought to defend this Latin order by signing a degrading manifesto extolling Italy’s effort to civilize the barbarian African land.
But this is not the Mediterranean to which our Maison de la Culture lays claim, because it is not the true Mediterranean. It is the abstract, conventional Mediterranean symbolized by Rome and the Romans, a people of imitators, which, though it lacked imagination, nevertheless imagined that its martial genius could make up for the artistic genius and zest for life it did not possess. The Roman order that has garnered so much praise was an order imposed by force rather than steeped in intelligence. Even when the Romans copied, they diminished.
And what they imitated was not even the essence of Greek genius but rather the fruit of Greek decadence and error. It was not the strong, tough Greece of the great tragedians and comedians but the prettiness and daintiness of the final centuries. What Rome took from Greece was not the life but rather the puerile abstraction and reasoning. The Mediterranean is elsewhere. It is the very negation of Rome and of the Latin genius. It is a vibrant culture, which has nothing to do with abstraction. One can readily assent to Mussolini’s claim that he is the worthy successor of the Caesars and Augustuses of antiquity, if by that one means that he, like them, sacrifices truth and grandeur to soulless violence.
What we take from Mediterranean culture is not the taste for reasoning and abstraction but the life—the streams, the cypresses, the bouquets of color. It is Aeschylus, not Euripides, the Doric Apollos, not the copies in the Vatican. It is Spain, with its vigor and pessimism, and not the bluster of Rome. It is landscapes drenched in sun, not the theatrical backdrops in front of which a dictator gets drunk on the sound of his own voice and subjugates the mob. What we want is not the lie that triumphed in Ethiopia but the truth that is being murdered in Spain.
IV
An international zone traversed by many currents, the Mediterranean is perhaps the only region in the world that brings together the great eastern philosophies. It is not a classical and orderly place but a diffuse and turbulent one, like the Arab quarters of many of its cities or the ports of Genoa and Tunisia. The triumphant zest for life, the sense of oppression and boredom, the deserted squares of Spain at noontime, the siesta—that is the true Mediterranean, and it is closer to the East than to the Latin West. North Africa is one of the only regions in which East and West cohabit. At this crossroads, there is no difference between the way in which a Spaniard or Italian lives on the Algerian waterfront and the way Arabs live in the same neighborhoods. What is most essential in the Mediterranean genius may well emerge from this unique encounter of East and West. (On this point, Audisio3 is the indispensable reference.)
This Mediterranean culture, this Mediterranean truth, exists and is apparent everywhere: (1) linguistic unity: the ease, when one knows one Latin language, of learning another; (2) unity of origin: the prodigious collectivism of the Middle Ages, chivalric orders, religious orders, feudalisms, etc. In all these respects, the Mediterranean offers a concrete image of a vibrant and variegated civilization, impressing its own stamp on all doctrines while accepting new ideas without altering its intrinsic nature.
So why go on?
V
The point is that a region that has transformed so many doctrines in the past must also transform today’s doctrines. A Mediterranean collectivism will be different from a Russian collectivism. The fate of collectivism will not be determined in Russia but in the Mediterranean, and at this very moment in Spain. To be sure, the fate of man has been the issue for a long time now, but the contest may have attained its most tragic form in the Mediterranean. So many resources have been concentrated in our hands. Our ideas will change and adapt. Our adversaries therefore miss the point with their objections. The fate of a doctrine should not be prejudged, nor should our future be gauged by what has been done in the past, even in Russia.
Our task here and now is to rehabilitate the Mediterranean, to reclaim it from those who have unjustly appropriated it, and lay the groundwork for a new economic order. It is to discover what is real and alive in Mediterranean culture and therefore to encourage its most diverse forms. We are well prepared for this task, especially because we are in direct contact with the East, which has so much to teach us in this regard. We stand here with the Mediterranean against Rome. Cities like Algiers and Barcelona have a crucial role to play, namely, to serve in their own small way those aspects of Mediterranean culture that sustain man rather than oppress him.
VI
The role of the intellectual is difficult right now. It is not his job to change history. Regardless of what people say, revolutions happen first, and ideas come later. It takes great courage today to declare one’s faith in the things of the spirit. Such courage is not wasted. Why do intellectuals attract such opprobrium and disapproval? Because people tend to think of them as abstract and argumentative, incapable of taking life as it comes, and giving priority to their own egos over the rest of the world. For those who do not wish to avoid their responsibilities, however, the crucial task is to rehabilitate intelligence by giving it new material to work on. It is to restore the true meaning of spirit by restoring the true meaning of culture, a meaning full of health and sunshine. This courage, I insist, is not wasted, because although it is not the job of intelligence to change history, its proper task is to act on man, who makes his own history.
We have something to contribute to this task. We want to restore the link between culture and life. The Mediterranean, which surrounds us with smiles, sun, and sea, teaches us how. Xenophon, in “Retreat of the Ten Thousand,” tells us that the Greek army, dying of hunger and thirst after an excursion to Asia marked by repeated failure and humiliation, climbed to the top of a mountain from which the soldiers could see the sea, and they began to dance, forgetting their fatigue and disgust with life. We do not wish to cut ourselves off from life either. There is only one culture: not the culture that feeds
