'Byron syndrome'.

Henry Hopwood-Phillips.

Many things need to remain unconscious and just 'done' (as opposed to consciously contemplated) to remain alive. Call it 'Byron syndrome'... When, you try and seize on something, as Byron did on Greece, what was once just a way, a feeling, a BEING becomes a shell, something comprehended, its parameters fixed and therefore reduced to the status of an instrument.

Byron, therefore, didn't fall as Constantine XI fell, totally immersed and utterly Byzantine; Byron died with the very conscious knowledge that he could reinstate distance between himself and his subject, his theme. This freedom (granted by knowledge, a sort of original sin), the very fact this distinction could even be made suggests a breaking down of the whole. This is the instinct of the Romantic period, it is the nostalgia of being unconscious. Blake called it innocence but he mistook innocence of being for innocence of mind and therefore fell back on the child as the symbol. Rousseau, l'enfant terrible of his times, then conflated spiritual innocence with natural innocence, calling on a sort of unhistorical and ahistorical Eden to be resuscitated.

All these thoughts were the part and parcel of a West asphyxiating as it tried to remove its Christian skeleton. Rosenzweig famously split the Western soul between the two eternal ideas of

i) Contingent pagan Peoples
and
ii) An eternal Godly People.

Identity has been a very obvious Modern casualty in this struggle. You can see it in the wrinkles that line Pius II's brow as the Pope notices few come to Constantinople's aid. You can see it in Thomas More and Erasmus as they hyperventilate over the Christian Princes turning on each other. Next comes the Thirty Years War, an awkward prologue to the more efficient World Wars (identities on steroids as the Christian fabric ruptures). Technology enabled this identity complex, an integral part of Modernity, to be exported in imperialism.

Nationalism belongs in (i). It is the death-march of a doomed journey. It can only seek death, Boudica style, because it knows deep down that even its best aspects: family, home, glory, honour etc. are in vain. This plays off the First Sin: Hubris - both being ultimately in vain (no matter how superficially justified in Milton). Nationalism is the attempt to reduce a feeling, a being, to a system, a dead fossil; it is a caricature of home. 

And so it is with Islamism. Islam is reduced to a pastiche, its civilisational signposts stand but its dignity, its holiness stand as pillars of an otherwise bald and bigoted temple. It's suicide bombers are only the most dramatic way to expire in a civilisation which has birth rates plummeting at rates last recorded by lead balloons. But if Islam dies by death, we die by ossification; letting our bodies mirror our minds... We have stopped being human and become instruments: the worst death of all. The devil in Byron's mind at Missolonghi.