To the reader of the foregoing chapters of this volume, containing the recital of the great struggle between Christianity and Paganism, a few pressing questions naturally suggest themselves respecting the fortunes of the Church after the great and sudden change which passed over it in the first quarter of the fourth century.
Without attempting anything like a connected history of the years which directly followed the Edict of Milan, a brief reply may be given to the questions which seem to press for an immediate answer. These are introduced by the inquiries:
(1) What brought about the sudden and rapid conversion of the majority of the peoples of the Empire?
(2) Was the ruin of the Empire, the result of the barbarian invasions in the century following the general acceptance of Christianity, attributable in any way to this acceptance of Christianity?
(3) What was the attitude of Christianity towards the unhappy citizens of the fallen Empire, and the swarms of barbarian invaders who in the fourth and fifth centuries overran her territories, sweeping away Roman society throughout all the Western provinces, including Gaul, Britain, Spain, Italy, and North Africa?
(1) The first of these questions, "What brought about the sudden and rapid conversion of the majority of the peoples of the Empire?" has been already touched upon. It seems that a deep impression was made upon the inhabitants of many of the provinces by the behavior of the Christians in the course of the last terrible persecution carried on under the name of Diocletian and his colleagues, so that when the Imperial decree in favor of the long persecuted sect was promulgated it found a ready acceptance among the multitudes. But much had been done already by the teaching and practice of the Christians towards gaining the hearts of the people during the preceding two and a half centuries. The seed had been sown, and it only needed the powerful impulse to which we have been referring to mature it. Men had gradually come to see what Christianity really was, what a pure and noble system it taught, and how capable it was of realization in action. "Amid the softening influence of philosophy and civilization it taught the supreme sanctity of love. To the slave who had never before exercised so large an influence over Roman religious life it was the religion of the suffering and the oppressed. To the philosopher it was at once the echo of the highest ethics of the later Stoics, and the expansion of the best teaching of the school of Plato. To a world thirsting for prodigy it offered a history replete with wonders. To a world that had grown very weary gazing on the cold, passionless grandeur which Cato realized and which Lucan sang, it presented an ideal of compassion and of love, an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest as well as all that was noblest on earth—a Teacher who could weep by the Sepulcher of His friend, who was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. To a world, in fine, distracted by hostile creeds and colliding philosophies, it taught its doctrines, not as a human speculation but as a Divine revelation. One great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed. There was no doubt that Christianity had transformed the characters of multitudes, vivified the cold heart by a new enthusiasm, redeemed, regenerated and emancipated the most depraved of mankind. Noble lives, crowned by heroic deaths, were the best arguments of the infant Church. Their enemies not infrequently acknowledged it. The love shown by the early Christians to their suffering brethren has never been more emphatically attested than by Lucan, or the beautiful simplicity of their worship than by Pliny, or their ardent charity than by Julian."
(2) The second question stands thus: "Was the ruin of the Empire, brought about by the barbarian invasions in the century following the general acceptance of Christianity, attributable in any way to this acceptance of Christianity?"
The accusation—that in the abandonment of the ancient religion of the Empire must be sought and found the cause of the misfortunes and ruin of the world-wide Roman domination—reaches back to the fourth and fifth centuries, the epoch of the ruin and misfortune. The first and in some ways the most obvious plea urged at that time was that the desolation of the Empire was owing to the anger of the deserted and offended gods, who naturally left to themselves peoples who had contemptuously abandoned their worship; a plea put forward with earnestness and zeal by believers in Paganism—still no inconsiderable number in those centuries when the great change in belief was passing over the Roman world, but this does not now demand serious consideration. Other reasons, however, for supposing that the adoption of Christianity contributed to the ruin of the Empire have been advanced which merit a more grave attention.
It has been urged with considerable truth that in the old world the worship of local deities inspired the dwellers in the city and country where these deities were the especial object of adoration with an intense spirit of patriotism. The deities were identified with the city and country, and noble deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice were performed in the service of the god under whose protecting care the city or country flourished; all this patriotic sentiment was weakened, perhaps extinguished, by Christianity, which swept away all local objects of adoration, substituting in their place One God who loved all peoples, cities, and countries with the same pitying but changeless love. Thus, it is said, Christianity destroyed the patriotic heroism which would, under the old state of things, have defended the Empire against the barbarian invaders. But the truth is that this ancient feeling of patriotism had been extinguished long before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Empire. Already in Rome strange deities, such as Mithras and Serapis, had largely taken the place of the old national objects of worship—foreign gods whose worship could inspire no special patriotic feeling; and the same change had passed over the provincial centers. The mischief, if it were a mischief, dates long before the years of the fourth century, when Christianity was beginning to be generally accepted.
Other and very different causes precipitated the ruin of the mighty Empire, a ruin which, although coincident with the victory of Christianity, was in no way connected with its adoption. These causes had been long at work, for the Empire, both morally and politically, had been for many years in a condition of manifest decline. Within, may be noted in this connection the increase of the slave population and the consequent grave deterioration of morals, the growth of luxury, the gradual decrease of population, the ever augmenting taxation, which reached its culminating point in the last decades of the third century under Diocletian, when the condition of the people under the enormous fiscal burdens they were called upon to bear became almost intolerable. Without, the presence of the barbarian nations on all the frontiers of the Empire, a pressure which the enfeebled provinces each succeeding year were less able to resist. But all these things were of older date than the fourth and fifth centuries, and none of them can be referred to Christianity; they made up an evil heritage upon which the Christianized Empire entered, but the state of things was emphatically not one for which it was in any way responsible.
We have, however, to face the fact that on the morrow, so to speak, of the cessation of persecution of the Church, quickly-followed by the recognition and acceptance of Christianity as the religion of the Roman world, the Empire fell to pieces; Christianity proving powerless to stave off, or even for a single hour to delay, the utter ruin. Nor does it seem in any appreciable degree, after its almost general adoption, to have succeeded in transforming the Pagan society, or in making it more capable of resisting the formidable hordes of invaders. In the century which followed the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Milan, society in all its grades continued as hopelessly corrupt as before; nor was any strenuous effort made to ward off the utter ruin which eventually overtook the Roman civilization. In the course of this sorrowful century a group of singularly able and earnest Christian teachers and writers arose, such as Ambrose and Augustine, Jerome and Chrysostom, Orosius and Salvian, who tell us without disguise what was the feeling of the Church, and admirably voice the hopes, the fears, and outlooks of the more serious Christians of their day and time. There is no doubt that they were at first grievously disappointed with the results of the conversion of the Roman world. Their sad words have been well described as a long cry of grief; they felt themselves swallowed up by Pagan corruption. "Civil society, like religious society, appeared Christian. The Sovereigns and the immense majority of the people had embraced Christianity, but, at bottom, civil society was Pagan, it retained the institutions, the laws, and the manners of Paganism. It was a society which Paganism and not Christianity had made." And yet for that society the Church felt itself in some degree responsible.
Besides this there were various other causes at work which account for the Church's early failure to transform this vast Roman society which had adopted its religion.
We may touch upon certain of the more obvious of these, (a) When all, or well-nigh all, were Christians, or at least nominally Christians, the influence of the Church on the life of the individual, or on the life of society in general, was enormously reduced. The comparatively little body of really earnest believers was lost in the great multitude of professed Christians, very many of whom remained semi-Pagans at heart. This so-called Christian society was exposed to all the temptations sanctioned by the Paganism of the Empire, of which the gladiatorial games are a prominent example. These games, almost inconceivable in their atrocity, were the favorite, even the habitual, amusement of the society of the Empire; and the arrangements for their performance, eclipsing every other monument of Imperial magnificence, are still among the most imposing relics of old Rome. We must remember when we speak or write of these horrible spectacles, that the main diversion of all classes of the people was the spectacle of bloodshed; of the death, sometimes of the torture, not only of animals but of human beings. The ghastly fascination and the inhuman influence of these games of the amphitheatre "pervaded the whole texture of Roman life, they became the commonplace of conversation, the very children imitated them in their play, the philosophers drew from them their metaphors and illustrations. The artists portrayed them in every variety of ornament." "As late as the closing years of the fourth century we read of the Prefect Symmachus, who was regarded as one of the most estimable of the lovers of the old regime, collecting some Saxon prisoners to fight in honor of his son. They strangled themselves in prison, and Symmachus mourned over the misfortune that had befallen him from their impious hands." A few years later even S. Augustine relates how one of his friends, being attracted to the Amphitheatre, endeavored by shutting his eyes to guard against a horrible fascination which he knew to be sinful. A sudden scream caused him to open them, and he never could withdraw his gaze again.
(b) Another cause of the seeming powerlessness of the Church to regenerate or even materially to influence society in the Roman Empire in the fourth century must be sought in the fatal schism which appeared in her communities in the first years which followed her victory. It was a schism which threatened her very existence, and affected to an almost incalculable extent her influence for good. Arianism, with its subtle suggestions casting doubt on the supreme divinity of the blessed Founder of the religion, sapped the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; and with its appeals to unassisted human reason, rapidly obtained a wide, though a comparatively short-lived, popularity. Strangely enough this Arianism found allies, all powerful for a season, on the Imperial throne. The great Constantine gave ear to its teachers. Matters were even worse under his successors. "The Emperor Constantius (A. D. 337-361) put himself at the head of the Arians, and cruelly persecuted the Catholics. Valens, Emperor of the East, an Arian, like Constantius, was a still more violent persecutor."
S. Jerome, writing at the close of the fourth century, uses the following strong expression on the subject of the wide prevalence of this heresy: "The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian."
It is true that the "whole world," to use Jerome's somewhat rhetorical expression, in after years woke up from its feverish dream, and the Catholic faith regained its empire over the hearts of the large majority of Christian believers, while Arianism was gradually relegated to the position of a sect, which, as time passed on, became ever less and less influential. But long before the Catholic doctrine had recovered its supremacy in the Church, the great change had passed over the Roman world, and the Empire had virtually ceased to exist. Among the causes which marred the Church's influence in the early days of its adoption as the religion of the Empire the widespread Arian heresy holds a conspicuous place.
(c) With somewhat greater caution may be adduced another probable cause for the Church's impotence in the matter of the renovation of the corrupt and dissolute Pagan society of the fourth century.
Judging from the clear and definite pictures painted by the popular Christian poet Prudentius, the poems and writings of Paulinus of Nola, and the ideals they exhibit, the side lights thrown on the life of the Church by Pope Damasus of Rome, the stern reproaches of Vigilantius, the grave warnings of Augustine—the Church of the days which immediately followed the Peace established by Constantino, the Church of the fourth century, was curiously weakened with strange superstitions. The cult of the martyrs had introduced into the popular belief elements quite unknown to the professors of the Faith in the first days, elements utterly foreign to the primitive teaching of the Gospel. Such novelties in matters of belief and practice no doubt grievously detracted from the spiritual power of the Church. How deeply these grave errors had sapped the life of Christianity at that time is hard to measure, but that such teaching was widespread and popular is almost certain.
(3) The startling rapidity with which, at the close of the fourth and during the first half of the fifth century, the floods of barbarian invasion, one quickly following on the other, overwhelmed all the fairest and richest provinces of the Roman Empire, came as a terrible surprise upon all sorts and conditions of men. Generally speaking, the resistance of the Imperial forces was feeble, half-hearted, and ill-directed; only one conspicuous example of a great commander can be with certainty quoted as having arisen in that period of tremendous disaster. Stilicho's campaign against Radagaisus, which resulted in the hordes of that famous barbarian chieftain being forced to retire from Italy, stands out in bold relief among the countless disasters which terminated in the total ruin of the Western and more important division of the Roman Empire. The following rough table of some of the principal invasions and their dates will show at a glance what befel the hapless Roman world in these sad years:—
Circa A. D.
396 Alaric's invasion of Greece and Southern Europe. 400-3
406 Radagaisus invades Italy (but is defeated by Stilicho).
408 Alaric and his Goths in Italy; first siege of Rome.
409 Second siege of Rome.
410 Alaric takes and sacks Rome and ravages Italy.
412 Adolphus, King of the Goths, overruns and seizes Gaul.
409 The Suevi, Vandals, and Alans invade Spain.
415-8 The Goths invade and conquer Spain.
430-9 Genseric and the Vandals overrun and conquer North Africa.
450-3 Attila and the Huns overrun Italy and Gaul.
At the close of the fourth and in the early years oi the fifth century the more thoughtful of the Roman people, strange to say, were still apparently unconscious of the utter ruin which menaced the Empire and the whole fabric of Roman society. Clouds of barbarians not only menaced the frontiers, but had already invaded many of the provinces, had even penetrated into Italy, and had been seen at the gates of Rome. Yet in spite of these ominous warnings, men still believed in the majesty of the immemorial city, and were persuaded that the hordes of invaders would be rolled back from her gates, and that the formidable invasions were but transient calamities. The victories of Stilicho over Alaric, and more conspicuously over Radagaisus, were hymned in exultant language by the Christian poet Paulinus of Nola and by the Pagan song-man Claudian. Claudian especially voiced public opinion when he sung of the Roman power as of something which recognized no terms, no limit, and pointed to the barbarian armies seeing before Stilicho as a striking object-lesson for the invaders.
But all these dreams of safety were rudely dissipated by the fall and sack of Rome in A. D. 410, when Alaric and his Goths for ever dissipated the illusion of the inviolability of the Eternal City.
The effect produced throughout the Roman world by the fall of Rome in A. D. 410 was terrible and far-reaching. No succession of invasions of the provinces, no lengthened occupation of a country by a barbarian horde, struck home as did the news of the sack of the Imperial city, so long the center of Roman civilization. Augustine tells us how "the whole world, even in the Far East, shuddered at the dread tidings." Jerome, in his Bethlehem retreat, wrote that the torch of the world was extinguished.
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in the earlier years of the fifth century, was the greatest figure in Christianity since the days of the Apostles; no teacher had enjoyed so wide, so general an authority. His greatest literary work on the "City of God" was begun in the year 413. Its primary object, and especially its earlier part, was devoted to questions connected with the great catastrophe of A. D. 410, and was a well-reasoned answer to the plaint of the Pagan party in the Empire, that the disasters which had befallen Rome were owing to the Christians and their lately acquired supremacy in the Empire. Augustine argued that instead of the Christians being responsible for the calamity which had happened to the great city all would have been lost had it not been for Alaric's friendship for Christianity; as it was, the churches of Rome, and those who sought sanctuary within their walls, were spared, among those who were thus preserved being many Pagans.
Through this important work of the Christian master, the composition of which occupied some thirteen years, a strange vein of optimism as regards the political situation runs. Bad though things seemed, Augustine could not bring himself to believe that all was lost. "The Empire is sorely tried, rather than completely changed; do not let us despair of resurrection, for who knows here what is the will of God."
The thoughts and feelings of some at least of the more responsible leaders of Catholic Christianity in this anxious period of stress and storm, included roughly in the second and third decades of the fifth century, are expressed in the well-known "Universal History" of Orosius. This composition may in certain aspects be regarded as a sequel to the "City of God" of Augustine.
Paul Orosius, a Spaniard by birth, was the disciple and friend of the great Augustine; the same optimistic view of the political situation noticed in "The City of God" runs through the writings of the younger scholar, perhaps even exaggerated. In reality the period when Orosius was writing was one of the saddest the world has ever known; but Orosius viewed the terrible barbarian inroads as a severe trial rather than as the total ruin of the Empire. A sadder and more faithful view of the desperate situation and of the cruel sufferings to which the hapless population of well-nigh all the Western and more important provinces were subjected is, however, given in two anonymous poems belonging to the same period which have come down to us. These represent the Empire as utterly ruined, the aspect of cities and country being completely changed, the sword, fire, and hunger having passed over them. The human race is represented as perishing, war is everywhere. The end of all things is at hand. Another contemporary poem containing a vivid picture of the bitter sufferings endured by the great Gallic proprietors has also been preserved, Paulinus of Pella, a rich and noble provincial connected with some of the great houses of the hapless Empire, lived to see his sumptuous villas burned, his wife and children slain, and in his old age found himself poor and solitary, a little farm quite insufficient for his support being the only relic of his vast estates.
A few years later than Orosius, the weighty and important writings of Salvian give us a lurid picture of the state of the dying Empire about the year 450 or somewhat later. The optimism of the "City of God," and of Orosius' "Universal History," has disappeared in the lengthy and exhaustive treatise "On the Government of God," by Salvian. Events had indeed moved quickly in the twenty years which followed the date of Augustine's death in the year 430; there was no longer any room for hope. Gaul, Spain, Africa, most of Italy, were occupied by barbarian invaders, who had come to stay in those vast, fair provinces, not simply to raid and to harry them. Salvian recognizes the fact that the grand Empire was indeed dying, if it were not already dead. It is no longer to Pagans that his arguments are addressed. Pagans had in effect disappeared from the scene, and the great majority of the world of Rome, outwardly at least, was professedly Christian. Many of the more thoughtful were asking how it came about that the Empire, now a vast Christian community, was so manifestly the object of the Divine wrath. Salvian replies to the agonized inquiry by drawing a picture of the Roman of the dying Empire, and the barbarian raider whom God was using so manifestly as His instrument of punishment.
In his vivid portraiture of the so-called "Christian" Romans, Salvian paints a society living in conditions of awful depravity and degradation rarely surpassed. He spares no class, no order. The merchants and traders are fraudulent and dishonorable, the public functionaries hopelessly corrupt and venal, the legionnaires of the Empire faithless and robbers; the clergy, if possible, worse than the laity, being unjust, greedy, immoral; the ecclesiastic had changed his dress not his life. The Roman society, so sorely tried in that fatal age, Salvian paints as a sink of iniquity; and though he may have overdrawn his gloomy picture, there is little doubt that it was on the whole evil and corrupt. We learn this much at least from other contemporary authorities; men who wrote from very different standpoints, such as Ammianus Marcellinus and, a few years later, Jerome and Chrysostom.
The barbarian invader in Salvian's eyes was, on the whole, a nobler being than the degenerate Roman Christian; cruel he was undoubtedly, a robber and ignorant; but his vices were practiced by the Roman Christians; in some respects the morals of the stranger nations were purer. We read of the Vandal conqueror, Genseric, for instance, after the fall of Carthage purging the city of its haunts of vice. Those of them who professed Christianity were no doubt tainted with the heresy of Arius; but this was the result of no deliberate choice on their part. It was from Arians they had derived their knowledge of the religion of Jesus.
The sum of Salvian's argument undoubtedly is that the rough, often untutored barbarian was more worthy to be the master of the world than the degenerate Roman, Christian though he professed to be. In our day even Montalembert, the fervid Roman Catholic scholar, has strongly endorsed the conclusions of Salvian, when in his "Monks of the West," he describes the Roman Empire without the barbarians as an abyss of servitude and corruption."
Amidst all this chaos of misery into which the once mighty Empire was plunged we catch sight of the presence of a great Church—great in spite of the disorders referred to by Salvian in his burning rhetoric, perhaps with some exaggeration in his details—which, amid all the terrors of the barbaric conquest, amid deep-seated corruption and unspeakable misery, still taught to Roman and to barbarian alike a pure morality and a lofty ideal, enforcing its teaching by the strongest motives of action. This Church was everywhere, in the camps of the invader, in the captured cities, in the desolated country, controlling, strengthening, comforting, or over-awing with its great traditions and splendid history; strongly organized, drawing to its side the best and noblest spirits among the conquerors and the conquered; possessing in its ranks some of the greatest leaders and teachers who have in the long story of Christian progress ever adorned the ranks of the believers in Jesus with their virtue and self-denial, their wisdom and learning.
Among these were Martin of Tours, the more prominent members of the monastic House of Lerins, such men as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Damasus and Athanasius, Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, with others, their friends, and fellow-workers; some known, more whose names have not been handed down, guides of the Church in those dark and perilous times. Naturally their wishes, and for a time their hopes, were bound up with the fortunes of the Empire. We see from the writings of Augustine and Orosius they trusted that things would in the end go right with the immemorial domination of Rome; and it was with deep sorrow they witnessed the rapid decadence of the Empire. But, although the Church naturally grieved over the ruin of the old state of things and mourned the dissolution of the old society, she never threw in her lot with the falling Empire, but gradually separated her cause from the old vanquished Rome, feeling that her work would endure even though Rome perished. So when, recognizing that all was over, she turned to the new conquering nations with her divine story, her hopes, and her promises—saving from the wreck of the old world and the old civilization all that was possible to preserve, and standing between the Romans and the barbarians, somewhat in the position of a neutral power— she obtained with the conquerors a mighty influence which was used for the benefit of the conquered.