The problem of leaders and followers is a famous one in intellectual history. Marx once remarked wryly that he was not a Marxist. Dostoevski and Kierkegaard, in mordant moments, saw Christians severed from Jesus. What was the relation between Confucius (551-479 B.C.), an ineffective political adviser in a disintegrating feudal society, and the enormously influential Confucianists in the later highly organized bureaucratic imperial regimes?

Starting from certain intuitions—which I would like to suppose are well founded—I shall try to discover if it is possible to speak of the visual arts characteristic of the American continent throughout the centuries.

Dreams have a privileged status among all the images. They do not depend on our will and appear to give evidence of the spontaneous eruption in our life of a power that is beyond us. Their most remarkable characteristic is that they make us believe they contain a mystery, that they open a door onto the reverse side of things, revealing to us an enigma to which we must find the key. The interpretations of dreams may differ, but everyone concedes that they have a power of transcendence with regard to the world of the wake. It is through dreams that the divine power has most frequently chosen to appear to its elected. The signs of dreams (if not of the other images of night, the stars) were considered when the future was to be foretold. But dreams, certainly also, restore to us a past long since effaced from our memory, dreams betray our most secret desires, ignored even by our conscience, and it is hence on dreams that we rely to discover the hidden motivations of our aberrant behaviour. In dreams things speak to us from a distance, people absent or even dead communicate with us; how many friends and lovers, whom life has separated, find each other every night and experience what Gérard de Nerval calls a second life? We pronounce the word “dream” when we want to describe an event that has astonished us, delighted us, and fulfilled us beyond what we would have dared to hope.

To begin with, the subject of this paper is not simply “authority,” nor “the Church and authority,” still less “the Church and political authority,” but Christianity and authority. This means to say that it is intended to discuss the meaning of authority amongst “all those who profess and call themselves Christians,” irrespective of their affiliation to one or another Christian Church or denomination. This proposition makes it incumbent upon us to admit that, although Christians in general owe allegiance to one or another such Church or denomination, these are as yet divided and unreconciled, neither has the recently expressed desire to come to a closer understanding between them been strong enough to bring the different denominations closer to each other. This is a very healthy, but at the same time a very difficult, attitude to take for any Christian who is consciously attached to “his” Church. It is healthy because it makes us admit that our efforts have been too weak—or that no efforts have been made at all—to render the Church to which we belong so overwhelmingly convincing to the other Christians that it has become the rallying point for all Christians. There is a certain fluctuation from one Church to another, but in the effect these movements cancel each other out. Thus the attitude advocated here can serve as a test for the efficacy of our faith. For we believe that “the” Church is built by faith upon faith; and if our faith were but sufficiently effective no true Christian would be able to resist the invitation to join our Church. On the other hand, it is a most difficult attitude to take. For it is a delusion to speak, as the Church of England frequently does, of being “a branch of Western Catholicism.” For no other such “branch” seems to be in communion with this one; and the phrase only tends to obscure “our unhappy divisions.” However, if it is true to say that the Church is the Body of Christ, meaning by this the visibile vestige of His Incarnation, how can it be divided?

The most ancient Turkish texts known to us at the present day consist of inscriptions carved onto tombstones, which are to be found in Central Asia, in territories, where, from the fifth century of the Christian era, vast confederations of Turkish tribes, comprising nomad shepherds and soldiers, had formed powerful States, which, strongly national in character, promoted the development of a truly original culture.

In order to dispel “the iron curtain of false enigmas,” of which Claude Roy speaks, it is urgent to undertake a revision, a critical reevaluation of the general conception, the methods and implements for the understanding of the Orient that have been used by the West, notably from the beginning of the last century, on all levels and in all fields.

This is an imperative of every exact science, which aims at understanding. And yet the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations, was required in order to provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of national liberation on a world scale.

A meridional American space, a brief history, a rapid rythm of change and finally a specific time element, these are perhaps the fundamental elements of American history. These fundamental elements determine a conjucture. America entered the mainstream of history rather late. But America has more than fully made up for this because events and economic factors, which take place there, have an amazing ability to stamp by their shifts and changes the worldwide resultant of all specific conjunctures. To the extent that, almost everywhere, the rythm of a worldwide conjuncture can be felt, whose peaks and troughs impose themselves on men and have to be forcibly taken into account by all strategies, this conjuncture, ever since America took her place in history, has borne the imprint of America. One is tempted to write that it is American.

Fiction and myth have been used for centuries in writing history as well as in making it. And this is not surprising; for Clio was not only the muse of history but also that of epic poetry. This personal union of the two functions shows that the Greeks may have felt what we know today, thanks to the additional experience of twenty-five hundred years: that in historiography as well as in its subject matter, history as reality, it is not always possible to draw a neat line of demarcation between historical truth and poetical fiction. History as res scriptae is, and has to be, a product of documentation and imagination. If this imagination is subjected to logical methodology, it will result in “scientific” history, in which the word “science” has to be interpreted in that liberal sense proposed by Collingwood, as “any organized body of knowledge.” If, on the contrary, the imaginative component of historiography is abandoned to poetical fancy, it will result in mythological history. Finally, if the imagination of the historian is guided by the conscious, half-conscious or sub-conscious wish to influence and manipulate the readers’ minds, the result will be ideological history.

The epistemological situation of the human sciences today is characterized by a state of dismemberment corresponding very closely to the very dislocation of the present world. For all science of man is a knowledge of man.

The need for unification of this knowledge is, therefore, also an aspect of the urgent demand for world unification, and for a reconciliation of man with his fellows and with himself. Having predetermined this need, the importance of the task to be undertaken comes to the forefront; at the same time, its limitations are marked. Carrying such a reflection to its conclusion implies a gathering together of the human community: a state of affairs certainly very far from the present political and social universe.