Under equivalent conditions took place the great evolution of architectural art in France and northern Europe. It was mainly the economic demand of the Church that evolved the admirable architecture called "Gothic"--a misnomer first applied by the later artificial taste which could see beauty only in classical symmetry, and disdained the wild grace and power of the medieval architecture as mere barbarism. It was really a special development of artistic faculty. Modern fancy has ascribed to the guilds of cathedral-builders on the one hand a passion for occult lore, supposed to be the source of the modern mummery of "Freemasonry," and on the other hand a deep religious feeling, of which the cathedral is supposed to be the expression. How far this is from the truth may be gathered from a closer study of their sculptures in many of the older cathedrals and churches, which reveal not only a riotous irreverence and indecency, but at times a positive derision for the faith. Nonetheless, organized Christianity had, by its demand for their work, provided a wonderful artistic environment for a cult which could no more than those of antiquity evolve a humanity worthy of beautiful things. CHAPTER V BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer's name per century which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that Christianity was not the determining cause of the arrest. Civilization progresses by the contact of cultures; and where that is lacking the results are the same under all religious systems. Byzantium presents the symptoms of China, because, like China, it was politically and intellectually isolated for a whole era, under a centralized government which imposed certain norms of life and doctrine, and prevented the variation and mutual reaction that would otherwise have arisen between its provinces. Only inasmuch as it promoted and consecrated such a system was Christianity a primary factor in the resulting arrest of growth. As a matter of fact, it lent itself alternately to division and to petrifaction. In the period to the end of the seventh century, dogma was a source of strife which dismembered the empire; in the period of contracted empire, face to face with the Moslem enemy, religious feeling tended to prevent further disruption, very much as the Church had been unified in the pagan period by persecution.