1. Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History (5)
The Inevitable End of Imperial Intoxication
The Greek’s intoxication of empire, ending in spiritual debasement and national demoralization, had its pendant or parallel in the fate of the Roman. The people of the tough little Republican State on the Seven Hills had a mentality of their own, and an outlook of their own—the Romans were limited, well balanced, intensely permeated with local patriotism, disciplined, and constitutional. Cato the Elder, no very amiable figure but a great citizen, was the perfect exponent of it. To these Romans came, because of their splendid military organization and their unbounded loyalty to the state, that same delusive boon which had ruined the Greek—world-empire won by the sword. They lost their religion and they lost their liberty in the process. Compare the historical perspective of the elder Cato with that of the half-cosmopolitanized but yet patriotic Cicero, and again that of Cicero—who still thought that liberty might be saved—with the melancholy outlook of Lucan and Tacitus and Juvenal, who saw that the things which made life worth living were gone, though life itself had become incomparably more splendid and complicated under the emperors who had slain liberty.
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento!
had cried Virgil. Art and culture and philosophy may (he sang) be the province of the Greek, but the Roman has discovered the greater art of ruling East and West. Truly he had done so, but at what cost! “What shall it profit a man if he win the whole world and lose his own soul?”
And has there often been a century more morally dead than that culminating period of Roman empire the Age of the Antonines—which Gibbon vainly praised as the time in which the greatest number of mortals in recorded history enjoyed the greatest amount of peace and prosperity? Outward prosperity no doubt there was, but it is not true that
Whate’er is best administered is best.
And a period in which the old official religion was defunct, and practically replaced by the absurd institution of Caesar-worship, when Art and Literature were slowly sinking, when ideals were dead and national ambitions exhausted, and liberty a name with which emperors sometimes played as a solemn farce, was no Golden Age. An emperor who was a philosopher saw the hollowness of the whole thing, and did not shrink from setting it down; the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are really some of the most melancholy pages in Literature. The world professed to depend on Caesar and to worship him, and Caesar was a Stoic of a resigned cast, and thought that the world was hollow, and that the good man could get no pleasure out of it. Truly the historical perspective was gloomy. Indeed, putting shallow people of superficial life aside, I doubt if there were any real Optimists save the Christian propagandists, who often came to unhappy ends in this Golden Age of Gibbon’s. For Marcus Aurelius, odd though it may appear, was not merely a depressed Stoic, but also a persecutor of Christians.
The soulless prosperity of the Antonine Age crumpled up into the lawless anarchy of the IIIrd century, during which some thirty emperors and some fifty usurpers asserted in turn that they were about to restore happiness to the World—FELICITAS TEMPORUM—SAECULUM NOVUM—Or RESTITUTIO ORBIS TERRARUM—before they came to an untimely end by the swords of a mutinous soldiery. The time was as debased as the currency struck by the ephemeral wearers of the purple. And it looked for ten years as if the Roman Empire was about to break up, partly to coalesce into new local states like the empire of the Gauls or the empire of Syria, partly to become the prey of the oncoming barbarian—the Goth or the Persian.
From this particular disaster (if it would have been a disaster, which some may possibly dispute) the civilized world was saved for a time by the line of tough soldier emperors of Illyrian provincial blood—Aurelian, Probus, Carus, Diocletian, Constantine, whose military genius and organizing power gave the Roman Empire another century of survival, if not of vitality. For the state as Diocletian left it was a bureaucratic reconstruction, living on an exhausted tradition, and with no inspiring ideal of religion or patriotism. Mars and Jupiter were as dead as Cincinnatus and Scipio. There only remained a vague confidence in the diuturnity of the Roman Empire as an inevitable ancient fact. To the people of this exhausted and dispirited civilization came in the IVth century two cataclysms, the one preceding the other by a couple of generations—the triumph of Christianity and the triumph of the outer barbarians, each a complete negation of the old Imperial theory of the world ruled as a Roman Empire by a divine Caesar. There had been full warning of the approach of these two cataclysms—already there had been emperors who were more or less Christians in secret, and already the Barbarians had been seen for a moment at Aquileia, at Delphi, at Trebizond, at Ephesus, and at Antioch in the evil years of the Illrd century. A moral or political cataclysm put off for some decades is not thereby averted. The triumph of Christianity and the triumph of the Barbarians were both inevitable, because the moribund Imperial system had no inspiration or enthusiasm in it, while both the Christian propagandist and the wild men of the Northern woods were overflowing with vitality—however unamiable the one might appear to a pagan pedant like Julian the Apostate, or the other to a cultured Littérateur like Sidonius Apollinaris.
Between A.D. 320 and A.D. 420 the whole outlook of the civilized world changed. There was never such a complete alteration of moral and political values in such a short time before or since. Imagine Horace or Tacitus faced by problems of Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the precise definition of the doctrine of the Trinity as the most important intellectual problems of mankind, the all-engrossing topics of the philosophically minded individual. The conception would have appeared even more impossible than the idea of a Gothic king of Italy, ruling at Ravenna and dictating orders to a subservient Roman senate, the astounding phenomenon which was to be seen two generations later.
One might add that the enormity of this change of historical perspective for the civilized world was felt most acutely at the time. Orosius wrote his immense general history, at the request of St. Augustine, about A.D. 417, precisely to demonstrate to the surviving adherents of the old theory of the Roman Empire that they had misjudged the universe. From the earliest records of the East down to the Gothic invasions of his own day, as he demonstrated, mankind had been a sinful race, vexed by well-deserved wars and disasters. Empires had crumpled up, nations been exterminated, all down the centuries. Salvation was for the individual soul. Sin was the dominating fact in the world, and sin involved punishment by a just God. Man was to look after his own soul—and by the grace of God might preserve it—but there was no official or bureaucratic guarantee of salvation for a man, merely as a citizen of the Roman Empire, or even as a baptized Christian. Whether salvation was gained mainly by faith or mainly by works, or by the fiat of the divinity unconditioned by mere faith or works, was another problem; and that problem was to be discussed by the Christian world down to our own day.
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