At that time, having barely departed a state of ignorance, men—whom we might call humanity—had gathered to undertake a communal work. Above them they saw a sky, and because they were men they already experienced the sense of the superhuman, the beyond, so they said to themselves: “Let us build a city and a tower, whose summit will touch the sky, in order that we might secure our place in eternity.” And they set to work as one, kneading clay and firing bricks, and began to build their first colossal work.

But God gazed down from heaven—so says the Bible—at this ambitious striving and realized the magnificent scale of the work. He recognized the greatness of the spirit with which he had endowed his creature man, and the extraordinary strength which existed, irresistibly, in this humanity, as long as it remained as one. And in order that humanity was not presumptuous, the Creator decided to obstruct the work and said: “Let us confuse them, so that none knows the language of the other.” And the Bible states that the men’s work quickly foundered, since they could no longer understand each other; and because of this they became angry and irritable among themselves. They threw down their bricks, their trowels and other tools and fought each other; then they abandoned their half-begun work, each returning to his home and town. They cultivated their own ground and stayed in their own homesteads, professing love for their country and language alone. Thus the Tower of Babel, a communal work of all humanity, remained deserted and fell into ruins.

This myth taken from the opening pages of the Bible is a wonderful symbol of the idea that with humanity as a community all is possible, even the highest aspirations, but only when it is united, and never when it is partitioned into languages and nations which do not understand each other and do not want to understand each other. And perhaps—who knows what mysterious memories can still be traced in our blood?—there is still some vague reminiscence in our spirit of those distant times, the Platonic memory of when humanity was united and the persuasive, haunted longing that it might eventually recommence the unfinished work; in any case, this dream of a unified world, a unified humanity, is more ancient than all literature, art and scientific knowledge.

A legend, a childish myth, a heroic fable—but what was it our great master of psychology Sigmund Freud taught us on the subject of myths? That they are nothing more than the wish dreams of a people, no different to an individual’s dreams, which are merely expressions of the unconscious and conceal a desire hidden deep within. Never are dreams, especially those of whole generations, completely futile. We should trust in these myths of primitive epochs. For each idea which occurs was formerly a dream, and all we invent and realize now was simply what our courageous forefathers desired or longed for before us.

But let us depart from the vestibule of legend and enter the inner sanctum of history. In its earliest beginnings there was unrelieved darkness. Then we see, on the shore of the Mediterranean and in the east, empires begin to form, then disappear, their destiny sometimes down to the will of a single man, an Alexander, or that of a whole people concentrated in a force so powerful it spreads like a tide across different countries, but only to plunder, ravage and destroy them; and when this warrior tide draws back there is left only the silt of decay. Those civilizations born at the dawn of history possessed no edifying or organizational powers; they did not yet serve the idea of community, and even the Greek civilization did not stamp the seal of unity on the world. There was a measure of it, and it was new and wondrous for the human soul, but it was not bestowed on humanity. The true political and intellectual unification of Europe only began with Rome and the Roman Empire. Here for the first time a city was established, a language and, through law, the will to govern and administer all peoples, all nations of the world under a single system, brilliantly worked out—domination not only by force of arms but on the basis of a spiritual principle, domination not as an objective in itself but for the intelligent organization of the world. With Rome, Europe had for the first time a unified format—and one might say for the last time, for never was the world so unified as in that distant epoch. A single plan, a visionary plan, stretched like an ingenious network across the countries of Europe, still uninformed and devoid of culture, from the cloudy isles of the Britons to the blistering sands of the Parthian Empire, from the columns of Hercules to the Black Sea and the steppes of Scythia. One single system of administration, of finances, military organization, justice, morals, science, and a single language, Latin, dominated all others. On the roads constructed with Roman technology, marching behind the legions came Roman culture, a methodical and constructive spirit to succeed one of unthinking destructive force. Where the sword had cleared the land, language, laws and morals were sown and germinated. For the first time Europe’s chaos was replaced by unified order, a new idea was born, the idea of civilization, of humanity managed according to moral principle. If this edifice had held out for two or three centuries more, the roots of peoples would have been inexorably intertwined and the unified Europe which is today a mere dream would have been a reality, and all continents discovered later would have fallen in line with the central idea.

But precisely because this Roman Empire was so huge, so sprawling and so deeply anchored to the European soil, its unravelling signified nothing less than a moral and spiritual catastrophe, a collapse without parallel in the history of European culture. From this standpoint, the fall of the Roman Empire can only be compared to a man who, following a terrible convulsion of the brain, has suddenly forgotten everything that happened before, and from a mature intellectual state falls into one of complete imbecility. Communication between peoples ground to a halt and roads fell into disrepair; towns became depopulated, for a common language and Roman organization no longer linked the countries. The new colonies, like the old, forgot over an incredibly short period of time all they had known: art, science, architecture, painting, medicine—they all dried up overnight like springs following an earthquake. In a single blow European culture fell far below that of the Orient and China. Let us recall this moment of European shame; literary works were burnt or sat rotting in libraries. Italy and Spain were forced to hire their doctors and scholars from the Arabs and clumsily and onerously learnt art and trade from the Byzantines.