The Fall of the Roman Empire (22 page)

'Give me chastity and continence - but not yet.' But he was utterly convinced that sex must be done away with: it was the punishment for Adam's sin. Jerome strongly felt the same:

. . . Our adversary the devil goeth about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. ... As long as we are held down by this frail body, as long as we keep our treasure in earthen vessels, and the flesh lusteth against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh: so long can there be no sure victory.

Sometimes Jerome descends from this lofty height to advise women not to marry on simple grounds of prudence, because of the troubled character of the times. But more often he was pursuing a principle, notably in a letter directing the upbringing of Paula, a girl of aristocratic family who had been dedicated to a nunnery from her birth - and now the most stringently rigorous education was prescribed for her by Jerome.

His insistence upon such views, while he was secretary to Pope Damasus, contributed largely to his expulsion from Rome in 385 after Damasus' death. For when Paula's aunt Blaesilla died, her end was believed to have been accelerated by the extreme asceticism urged on her by Jerome. At her funeral there were cries of 'The monks into the Tiber!', whereupon Jerome hastily left Rome, never to return. The new Pope, Siricius, who suspected him of aiming at the papacy for himself, was by no means sorry to see him go.

This episode reveals the extraordinary involvement of Jerome with Roman upper-class women - an interest he had shared with Damasus, who was known as 'the ladies' ear-tickler'. Such women, whatever the formal deficiencies of their status by modern standards - for example, their continued exclusion from all official and legal posts, and from public higher education -were far ahead of their menfolk in pressing forward towards Christian austerity. Jerome devotes a letter to the defence of his female friendships. 'Did
I’,
he asked, 'ever enter the house of any woman who was inclined to wantonness? Was I ever attracted by silk dresses, flashing jewels, painted faces, display of gold? No other matron in Rome could win my approval but one who mourned and fasted, who was squalid with dirt, almost blinded with weeping!'

The further shrinkage of the already decreasing population to which this detestation of sexuality must lead was freely admitted by Christians. Their spokesman Eusebius explains that this aversion to sex made them reluctant to have children. For example, Saint Melania the elder - another of Jerome's friends -although she got married, felt no desire whatever to have children, and once they were born she left the last survivor without apparent remorse. Ambrose had been aware of evergrowing accusations that he and his co-religionists, by their praise of the pure unmarried state, were depriving Rome of the sons and daughters it needed. His reply was: 'Since when have men been complaining that they could not find a wife?'

Nevertheless, the opposite view had some right on its side, and the proliferation of monks and hermits and nuns, whatever their moral influence for good, tended to splinter a profoundly divided society still further, creating yet another disunity. So the assertion of Alexander Pope that 'the monks finished what the Goths began' contains a measure of truth. They had dropped out of the world, because they found society more than they could endure.

11

The State against Free Belief

In spite of its warning noises, the state did not take forcible steps to bring back into society the men and women who had opted out to become monks and nuns and hermits. But it practised violent coercion on those who did not adhere to the same religion as itself - and even to the same branch of the same religion. This coercion was a major mistake. For instead of cementing the unity that had been hoped for, it added a worse and more crippling disunity to all the rest.

This ancient coercion proved possible because of a close alliance between church and state. Until the early fourth century AD, the official religion of the Roman world had been pagan. The ancient paganism of the Roman state was willing to be all things to all men. Being polytheistic, it was multiple and versatile. It was very far from exclusive. Nor was it generally intolerant. True, it had developed intolerance towards the Christians, because the Christians, since they owed loyalty to a Higher Master, seemed to be denying the sufficient minimum of loyalty to the Emperor and the nation. But the Christians remained, for a long time, a small and exceptional minority.

Then came the conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity, and his gradual conversion of the Empire to the same faith. These events were astonishing because the Christians were
still
a small minority, and not a very influential one at that. Constantine's revolution, declared the English historian J. B. Bury, was 'perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects'.

The Emperor took this surprising action because he felt an impulsive inner need for divine support; and the Christian faith, with its most satisfying of Redeemers, a Redeemer who had actually dwelt among mankind, gave a better promise of providing this aid than the various pagan saviours who had never been seen upon the earth. And so Constantine, looking around him, and noting all the grievous internal disharmonies which threatened to bring the Empire down, decided that the best possible unifying factor was Christianity. Under his guidance, it would bring everyone together, effectively counterbalancing all the many divisive trends. State and church, he planned, were to work together in the closest possible association. But the state was, at first, the controlling partner. Under Valentinian I, Bishop Optatus of Milevis (Mila) in Algeria admitted this, declaring 'The State is not in the Church, but the Church is in the State.'

Nevertheless Valentinian's policy of toleration could not fail to encourage the idea of ecclesiastical independence. He did not even prevent the scandal of the age, the papal election of 366 in which 137 corpses were left on the pavement of a Roman basilica. The successful candidate was Damasus, who thereafter worked for a Concordat in Which the importance of the Pope would be enhanced. A leading pagan, Praetextatus, commented on his grandeur with the remark, 'Make me Bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian at once.'

Yet it was a bishop not of Rome but of Mediolanum (Milan), now the Imperial residence, who raised the power of the church to a new peak. This was Ambrose, who occupied the bishopric from 374 until his death in 397. Ambrose declared, in contradiction to earlier doctrines, that 'the Emperor is not above the church, but
in
the church. ... If one reads the Scriptures, one sees that it is bishops who judge Emperors. ... A good Emperor does not spurn the assistance of the church: he seeks it.' These words were addressed to Valentinian II, who employed their author on important political missions.

Next, Ambrose had two immensely famous clashes with Theodosius I - from both of which the churchman emerged victorious. First, in 388, when an Eastern bishop had ordered a Jewish synagogue at Nicephorium Callinicum (Raqqa) in Syria to be burnt, and Theodosius instructed that it should be rebuilt and its destroyers punished, Ambrose, speaking from the pulpit, ordered the Emperor to repent, and would not enact the Mass until the Imperial instruction had been revoked. Then, two years later, after the army commander at Thessalonica had been lynched for imprisoning a popular charioteer, and Theodosius, as a punishment, had 7,000 people massacred, Ambrose refused to admit him to Mass until he had done penance. These were moments of decision. By bowing to Ambrose's instruction on both occasions, Theodosius had deferred in spectacular fashion to the power of the church.

After Ambrose's death, the spiritual initiative returned from Milan to Rome, where Pope Innocent I (401-17) made it clear that this new ecclesiastical authority was going to be vested not in a Milanese bishop but in himself. When Alaric approached Rome with his Visigoths, Innocent was the only national leader with sufficient prestige to negotiate with him. Later Pope Leo 1 (440-61) likewise treated with Attila, scoring a triumphant success. It was Leo's view that collaboration between state and church was a bargain beneficial to both, like the contractual arrangements familiar to every Roman jurist.

Some contemporary thinkers, including Jerome and Salvian, deplored the tendencies of churchmen to join the comfortable establishment. But many others were delighted with this union of the spiritual and secular powers, declaring it to have been by no means fortuitous that the births of Jesus and of the Empire had coincided in date.

And indeed this union might well, as was its intention, have proved a factor cementing the disunited Roman world together. But it turned out to be exactly the opposite, because of the excessive zeal with which the civil authorities, carrying out the requests of their ecclesiastical partners, sought to enforce conformity upon all who did not agree with the doctrines of the official church. For by such means they transformed differences of opinion and doctrine into irremediable hostilities.

This willingness to use forcible methods was based on a disastrous interpretation of a text in the Gospel according to St Luke, in which Jesus was declared to have said, 'Go out into the highways and hedges,
and compel them to come in,
that my house may be filled.' In the later Roman world, this sentence, as well as utterances by St Paul, was used by church and state as an invitation to the fatal policy of coercion.

The problem arose in an acute form as early as the lifetime of Constantine himself. When he boldly converted the state to Christianity, the overwhelming majority of his subjects were still pagans. Although this was an obstacle to harmony which would, he believed, eventually be overcome, he initially announced that he was going to 'permit those who are in error to be free to enjoy the same peace and tranquillity as those who believe'. But, in the end, the strength of the opposition compelled him to sharpen this moderate attitude. Pagan temple treasures were confiscated, and finally pagan sacrifices were banned. Then his son Constantius II, whose personal devoutness was intensified by a terror of sorcery, stepped up this fight against paganism, passing laws in 346 and 356 of a strongly repressive nature.

His cousin and successor Julian the Apostate (361-3) reacted strongly against his Christian upbringing, and restored official paganism. At first he appeared to favour religious neutrality, and after the model of Constantine proclaimed a general willingness to permit any and every cult. However, after reinstituting pagan worship, he deprived the Christian churches and clergy of their privileges, and forbade Christian professors to teach the classics. But then he was killed in battle; and pagan historians declared this the most disastrous event in Roman history, an event which directly presaged the downfall of Rome. After his death Christianity was restored as the state religion.

Such was the situation which Valentinian I inherited - a situation in which the relationship between the two faiths, except among a few intellectuals, had become characterized by violent hostility and antipathy.

Although a Christian believer himself, Valentinian, in 371, decided to launch a policy of universal toleration. 'I do not', he said, 'consider
any
rite permitted by our ancestors to be criminal': and the pagan Ammianus, although willing enough to criticize Valentinian in other respects, hails this policy with proper admiration. The Pope of the time, Damasus, had connections with the pagan aristocracy, and this made it easier for Valentinian to damp down the growing intransigence of some of the other bishops.

Valentinian's liberal attitude was one of the few triumphs of the age. In opposition to the general feeling and practice, he felt that unity would better be achieved by tolerance, and this decision stands out as a beacon during a millennium and a half in which, for the most part, rulers of the leading nations continued to think and act otherwise.

Gratian at first adopted a similar policy, because he was initially under the influence of the poet Ausonius, whose Christianity was not obtrusive. But a new phase began when, in 397, Gratian appointed Theodosius i as his Eastern co-Emperor.

First, Gratian abandoned the old traditional pagan chief priesthood, and his new colleague never assumed it. Then Gratian decided to remove the pagan statue of Victory from the Senate-house. Seized upon by influential pagans as a decisive menace to their tradition and faith, this action provoked, over a period of three years, a series of famous oratorical duels between Symmachus, the foremost pagan of the day, and the most outstanding Christian, Ambrose, bishop of Mediolanum (Milan).

The discussion was conducted with decorum. 'Everyone', declared Symmachus, 'has his own custom, his own religion. The love of habit is great. We ask for the restoration of the cult in its former condition, which has been beneficial to the Roman state for so long. One cannot reach so great a secret by one way alone.' This explicit denial of the Christian claim to universality was duly refuted by Ambrose, who insisted that the Emperor should 'do what he knew would be profitable to his salvation in the sight of God'. His view prevailed, and the statue was excluded from the Senate-house. It was the worst setback for paganism so far.

Ambrose also attacked marriages between Christians and pagans, citing the union of Samson and Delilah. And at the same time Symmachus had to contend with the lyrical Prudentius, whose forward-looking, rejuvenated, Christian Rome created a more vigorous impression than his own somewhat melancholy and nostalgic attitude. Besides, Prudentius ingeniously met his opponent's defence of traditionalism by arguing that change did
not
mean the negation of Rome's genius. It was a constructive approach, and Prudentius, a Christian with a profound appreciation of old Rome, sometimes seems nearer than anyone else to a genuine understanding between Christians and pagans. But no such understanding was allowed to develop. For the Christian regime did not feel that its vigilance could be allowed to drop for a single moment.