EUROPE AND THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY 3 phenomenon of 'modernity'. In many ways it was the moment of Europe's self-realization as the regulatory social order that achieved a kind of fruition. This was the telos in which Europe acquired her normative claim over the rest of the world. It is when this identity of 'modernity' emerged that the need to define the tripartite division of the civilisation between ancient, medieval and modern was sharpened. The predicament that Martin Bernal tried to bring out in Black Athena was precisely the predicament of the growing sense of 'modernity' of Europe. It is the exigency of the temporal arrivism that governs the formation of the classical. As Martin Bernal fascinatingly argues, far from the ethnic exclusiveness of Europe being a construct of Enlightenment rationalism, it is its withdrawal into romantic argument of blood and kinship in the expressivity of poetry and the family trees of philology that firmly consolidate the racism of Europe. The Aryan myth becomes the paradigm of hegemony. It results in the 'fabrication' of the Hellenic Greece and the ideological annexation of the Indie with the help of Orientalism. It should cause no surprise, therefore, that Renaissance as a historiographic model was a product of the nineteenth century, a collapsing of the triadic structure of Ancient, Medieval and Modern to the moment of the self-discovery of modernity of Europe. Characteristically, this was read as a re-birth. If modernity was a rebirth of the Ancient, the Ancient surely deserves the face-lift to suit the modernity into which it is reborn. The complex paradox of this phenomenon of the classical presence in the nineteenth century culture of Romanticism is tellingly revealed in the writings of Mathew Arnold, who rejected the liberation individualism of the Romantic artist, trapped, according to him, within the anarchic prison of 'feeling'. However, this does not prevent him from reading a kind of normative naturalism in the best poetry of the English Romantics. On the best poetry of both Wordsworth and Byron, the two Romantic poets whose originary impulse was human liberty, Arnold's comment was: 'Nature seemed to take the pen from his hand and write it for him.' In the hands of Arnold, this nature was not the democratizing 'nature' of Wordsworth's early poetry, but more of the prescriptive-normative 'nature' of modernity, legitimized by the idealist reading of classical Greece. As Arnold would like to 'remind' the reader: There was an epoch in Greek life, in pagan life, of the highest possible brevity and value. That epoch by itself goes far towards making Greece the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece.... The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding, the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is