The Forge of Christendom (4 page)

To emperors struggling to hold together their disintegrating patrimony, such talk was pure sedition. To their servants in the Church as well, desperate to see the imperial centre hold, the strident anti-Roman sentiments of St. John’s Revelation had long been an embarrassment. In 338, a council of bishops had sought to drop it altogether from the canon of Holy Scripture. In the East, where the more prosperous half of Rome’s empire was at length, and with colossal effort, shored up against collapse, the Book of Revelation would not be
restored to the Bible for centuries. Even as the western half of the empire crumbled away into ruin, an emperor remained sufficiently secure behind the massive battlements of Constantinople to proclaim that God had granted him authority over the affairs of all humankind – and to believe it. Whatever the barbarians might be who had overwhelmed the provinces of the West, they were self-evidently not Gog and Magog – for the end of days was yet to come, and the Roman Empire still endured.

This conviction, simultaneously vaunting and defiant, would remain constant throughout the succeeding centuries, even in the face of renewed calamities, and the dawning recognition, hard for any people calling themselves Romans to accept, that the empire was no longer the world’s greatest power. Smoke rising from the passage of barbarian war bands might repeatedly be glimpsed from the walls of the very capital; enemy fleets might churn the waters of the Bosphorus; frontiers and horizons might progressively contract, as Syria too, and Egypt, and Cyprus, were lost to the New Rome: and yet the citizens of Constantinople, no matter what the tides of disaster lapping at them, still trusted to their destiny. Like the Jews, they presented themselves as God’s elect, both afflicted and favoured on that account – and, like the Jews, they looked to the future for their ultimate deliverance.

So it was, some time in the seventh century, and amid an unprecedented series of defeats, that startling prophecies began to circulate. Written, it was claimed, by Methodius, a saint who had been martyred some three hundred years previously, these appeared to lift the veil, just as St. John’s vision had done, from the end days of the world. No matter that Methodius himself had been executed on the orders of a Caesar, the writings attributed to him endowed the Roman Empire with an altogether more glorious role than it had been granted in Revelation. Teeming although its pagan enemies already were, Methodius warned, its greatest test was still to come. The hour of Gog and Magog, long dreaded, would come at last. Imprisoned for aeons on the edge of the world behind great walls of brass, these were
barbarians of unspeakable savagery, devourers of “the vermin of the earth, mice and dogs and kittens, and of aborted foetuses, which they eat as though gorging on the rarest delicacies.”
²¹
Against the eruption of such monstrous foes, only the emperor in Constantinople – the last Roman emperor of them all – would stand firm; and in the end he would bring Gog and Magog to defeat. That great victory achieved, he would then travel to Jerusalem; and in Jerusalem, the Son of Perdition, Antichrist himself, would be revealed.

And then the last emperor, Methodius prophesied, would “go up and stand on the hill of Golgotha, and he would find there the Holy Cross, set up just as it had been when it carried Christ.” He would place his diadem on the top of the Cross and then raise up his hands in prayer, delivering his monarchy into the hands of God. “And the Holy Cross on which Christ was crucified will be raised to heaven, and the crown of kingship with it”
²²
– leaving the last emperor dead on Golgotha, and all the kingdoms of the earth subject to Antichrist, steeped in that profoundest darkness that would precede the dawn of Christ’s return.

So it was to come: the last great battle of the world. Small wonder that Methodius’s prognostications should have attracted attention even in imperial circles. They may have been lurid and intemperate, yet they could offer a hard-pressed emperor precisely what St. John, in Revelation, had so signally withheld: reassurance that the Roman Empire would continue in heaven’s favour until the very end of days. More flatteringly, indeed – that the death of its last emperor would serve to precipitate the end of days. Had not St. Paul, when he spoke of Rome “restraining” Antichrist, implied as much? No matter how shrunken the dominion ruled from Constantinople, its rulers needed desperately to believe that it remained the fulcrum of God’s plans for the universe. What in more prosperous times had been taken for granted was now clung to with a grim resolution: the conviction that to be Christian was synonymous with being Roman.

Posterity, as though in mockery of Constantine’s pretensions, has christened the empire ruled from his foundation “Byzantium,” but
this was not a name that the “Byzantines” ever applied to it themselves.
*
Even as Latin, the ancient language of the Caesars, gradually faded from the imperial chanceries, then from the law courts, and finally from the coinage, the citizens of Constantinople continued to call themselves Roman – albeit in their native Greek. Here was no faddish antiquarianism. Rather, the prickliness with which the Byzantines, the “
Romaioi
,” guarded their name went to the very heart of their self-image. It offered them reassurance that they had a future as well as a past. A jealous concern with tradition was precisely what marked them out as a Chosen People. It served, in short, to define their covenant with God.

It is true that the identification of Christendom with empire was not entirely without its problems. A certain degree of awkwardness arose whenever the
Romaioi
were obliged to have dealings with Christians beyond their frontiers. Imperial lawyers had initially spun the optimistic formulation that all of Rome’s former provinces, from Britain to the furthest reaches of Spain, remained subject to the emperor. In the earliest days of their foundation, some of the barbarian kingdoms established in the West had been perfectly content to play along with this fiction – and even those that did not had on occasion been flattered into accepting certain tokens of subordination. After all, trinkets and titles from a Roman emperor were never readily to be sniffed at.

In AD 507, for instance, a confederation of Germanic tribes known collectively as the Franks, axe-throwing pagans who had seized control of much of northern Gaul, had won a great victory that extended their sway southwards as far as the Mediterranean – and Byzantine agents, hurrying to congratulate them, had awarded Clovis, their king, the sonorous if wholly empty title of consul. A year later, and
Clovis had shown himself even more an enthusiast for things imperial by accepting baptism.
*
What precise role the ambassadors from Constantinople might have played in this decision we do not know; but it must surely have struck them as a development rich in promise. For, by their own lights, to be a Christian was to be a Roman.

Not by the lights of the Franks, however. Although Clovis’s people had plunged after their king into the waters of baptism, and although, a century later, missionaries dispatched from Rome would begin persuading the pagan English too to bow their necks before Christ, no submission to a mortal power was implied by these conversions. Just the opposite, in fact. Kings who accepted baptism did so primarily to win for their own purposes the backing of an intimidatingly powerful god: so it was, for instance, that Clovis, as a symbol of his newly Christian status, had taken to sporting “a salvation-giving warhelmet.”
²³
The very notion of tolerating an earthly overlord was anathema to such a man. Neither Clovis nor his successors had any wish to see a global empire re-established.

And already, by the seventh century, memories of Rome in the West were fading into oblivion. Massive still, beyond fields returned to scrub or marsh or forest, or above the huddled huts of peasants long since freed of imperial exactions, or framing perhaps even the high gabled hall of a chieftain and his carousing warriors, Roman buildings continued to loom against the sky – but as the wardens now of an order gone for ever, slowly crumbling before the passage of suns and rains. All the complex apparatus of bureaucracy, the same that in Constantinople still served to feed the emperor, his armies and his taxes, had collapsed utterly into ruin, leaving, amid the rubble, only a single structure standing. The Church in the West, had it followed the course of its eastern counterpart and insisted that Christendom was indeed synonymous with the rule of Rome, would surely have shared
in the general ruin. As it was, it endured; and by enduring, preserved something of the imperious spirit of what had otherwise been left a corpse.

“To rejoice in the vast extent of an earthly kingdom is behaviour that no Christians should ever indulge in.”
²⁴
So had pronounced Augustine, a bishop from north Africa, during the calamitous final century of the Western Empire’s existence. But what of God’s kingdom? That was quite a different matter. Bishops in the West, no longer able to rely upon a universal empire to shield their flocks from danger, could find in the writings of Augustine a theology infinitely better suited to their tattered circumstances than anything originating from the palmier days of the
pax Romana
. The great division in the affairs of the world, Augustine had argued, lay not between civilised and savage, Roman and barbarian, but between those earthly dominions of which Rome had been merely the most prominent example and a dominion incalculably greater and more glorious: the City of God. Within the infinite walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, all might hope to dwell, no matter what their origin; and the entrance way to this city, its portal, was the Church.

A glorious role indeed. Great empires, borne upon the surging flood tides of human sinfulness, might rise and conquer and fall; “but the Heavenly City, journeying on pilgrimage throughout our fallen world, summons people from every nation, speakers of every language, taking no account of how they may differ in their institutions, their customs, or their laws.”
²⁵
Here, for all Christians in the West, whether in the old imperial provinces of southern Gaul, where bishops descended from senators still sat proudly amid the carcasses of Roman towns, or upon the mist-swept fringes of the world, where Irish hermits raised prayers to the Almighty above the ocean’s roar, was a message of mission and hope. Everywhere, across the whole, wide span of the fragmented, tormented world, was the City of God.

And as evidence for this, Augustine had turned, as had so many questers after divine secrets before him, to the vision of St. John. Specifically, he had turned to a passage controversial even by the
vertiginous standards of Revelation. “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven,” St. John had written, “holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.”
²⁶
And for the thousand years of Satan’s imprisonment, until he should again “be loosed for a little while,” to fight the last battle that would see evil defeated once and for all, there would be a rule of saints. But when? Theories as to that, over the centuries, had come thick and fast. Most, feverish with mingled dread and hope, had proclaimed the start of the Millennium imminent. Augustine, however, in a typically innovative manoeuvre, had looked, not to the future, but to the past for the true solution. The rule of saints, he had argued, was already begun. It had been inaugurated by Christ Himself, after His death upon the Cross, when He had descended into the depths of hell and there bound up Satan, in witness of His victory over sin. Within the City of God, where Christ had ascended to reign in splendour, the saints and the martyrs already sat about Him upon their thrones. The Church too, earthly though it was, and therefore unavoidably tainted, was shot through with the radiance of their glory.

St. John’s vision, Augustine had argued, contained no road map of what was to come. Rather, it offered guidance on what it meant to be a Christian in the here and now. To speculate when the world would end on the basis of Revelation was pointless. Why, not even St. John’s allusions to a millennium were to be taken literally. “For he intended his mention of ‘a thousand years’ to stand for the whole span of our world’s history. How else, after all, is one to convey an immensity of time save by deploying a perfectly round number?”
²⁷

The centuries passed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Christians who marked the times felt themselves to be living in an age of shadow. “Cities are destroyed, proud strongholds stormed, fair provinces emptied of people, and the whole earth become a solitude.”
²⁸
Yet though
they mourned, those content to submit themselves to the inscrutable will of God did not despair: for still, proof against the breaking of the world, and illumined, however flickeringly, by the splendour of Christ in His undimmed glory, the Church continued to prosper. And so it seemed increasingly to its leaders that Augustine had been right: that the Millennium spoken of by St. John had indeed begun. Those who disagreed, turning to Revelation in the hunt for their own answers, were deluding themselves – or worse. Wild talk of saints ruling upon earth could not help but undermine those already charged with the task of “governing souls – which is the art to end all arts.”
²⁹
What bishops in Constantinople claimed for their embattled empire, a role as the vehicle for divine providence, even to the very end of days, when Christ would at last return to rule the living and the dead, bishops in the West claimed for themselves. A sense of urgency gnawed at them. “Once the world held us by its delights,” wrote one, gazing mournfully about him at the desolation of an emptied and crumbling Rome. “Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.”
³⁰
Yet precisely for that reason – precisely because the end of times did indeed appear close at hand – so was it all the more essential that the Church not speculate as to the date. Those entrusted with the shepherding of fallen humanity could not risk infecting their flocks with extravagant terrors and enthusiasms. The sheep who in nervous anticipation of the Second Coming broke free of the fold might prove sheep forever lost. Only through the Church could the New Jerusalem be attained. Only through the Church could there be found a path to the rapture of Christ’s return.