120 ORIENTALISM even linguistic issues. Thus when an Oriental was referred to, it was in terms of such genetic universals as his “primitive” state, his primary characteristics, his particular spiritual background. The four elements } have described—-expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification——are the currents in eighteenthcentury thought on whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend. Without them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could not have occurred. Moreover, these elements had the effect of releasing the Orient generally, and {slam in particular, from the narrowly religious scrutiny by which it had hitherto been examined (and judged) by the Christian West. In other words, modern Orientalism derives from secularizing elements in eighteenth-century European culture. One, the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and further back temporally loosened, even dissolved, the Biblical framework considerably. Reference points were no longer Christianity and Judaism, with their fairly modest calendars and maps, but India, China, Japan, and Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism, and Manu. Two, the capacity for dealing historically (and not reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European and non-Judeo-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself was conceived of more radically than before; to understand Europe properly meant also understanding the objective relations between Europe and its own previously unreachable temporal and cultural frontiers. In a sense, John of Segovia’s idea of contraferentia between Orient and Europe was realized, but in a wholly secular way; Gibbon could treat Mohammed as a historical figure who influenced Europe and not as a diabolical miscreant hovering somewhere between magic and false prophecy. Three, a selective identification with regions and cultures not one’s own wore down the obduracy of self and identity, which had been polarized into a community of embattled believers facing barbarian hordes. The_borders of Christian Europe no longer served as a kind of custom house; the notions of human’ association and of human possibility acquired a very wide general—-as opposed to parochial—legitimacy. Four, the classifications of mankind were systematically multiplied as the possibilities of designation and derivation were refined beyond the categories of what Vico called gentile and sacred nations; race, color, origin, temperament, character, and types overwhelmed the distinction between Christians and everyone else. But if these interconnected elements represent a secularizing

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 121 tendency, this is not to say that the old religious patterns of human history and destiny and “the existential paradigms” were simply