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Europe and the Faith

by Hilaire Belloc · English · Gutenberg #8442 · 419,647 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Europe and the Faith

Author: Hilaire Belloc


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8442]
                Most recently updated: May 6, 2022

Language: English

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Europe and the Faith

“Sine auctoritate nulla vita”

by Hilaire Belloc


Contents

 INTRODUCTION. THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY
 I. WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 II. WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 III. WHAT WAS THE “FALL” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 IV. THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS
 V. WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?
 VI. THE DARK AGES
 VII. THE MIDDLE AGES
 VIII. WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?
 IX. THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN
 X. CONCLUSION




INTRODUCTION
THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY


I say the Catholic “conscience” of history—I say “conscience”—that is,
an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which
is one with the knower—I do not say “The Catholic Aspect of History.”
This talk of “aspects” is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is
false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather
do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic
“aspect” of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish
aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all
of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from
within. There is no more a Catholic “aspect” of European history than
there is a man’s “aspect” of himself.

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man’s “aspect” of
himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For
a man’s way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and after a
cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator’s, and
therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the
voice of God. Not only does he know by this that the outer world is
real, but also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within
himself, “I am a mean fellow,” he has hold of reality. When a man,
though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, “My purpose
was just,” he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself.
A man does not know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite
amount he does know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really
there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit
in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed “aspects” of
a man for all others except these two, himself and God Who made him.
These two, when they regard him, see him as he is; all other minds have
their several views of him; and these indeed are “aspects,” each of
which is false, while all differ. But a man’s view of himself is not an
“aspect:” it is a comprehension.

Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of
Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from
without, he understands it from within. He cannot understand it
altogether because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he
has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.

The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages I
mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the
confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other
people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European
civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts
which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person.
He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a
man can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to
unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for
he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the
story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have to deal with
something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly,
by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its centre in its
essence, and together.

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is
The Church.

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins
with the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean.
It goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil
in which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can,
he understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with
the gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived from
the light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the British,
the Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality; what
cousinship we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions,
and even how ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got
poisoned, while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was,
in the old dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say)
sacred: devoted to a peculiar mission.

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The
picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our
great story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.

But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of the
English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped), a
passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile
authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose
knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.

He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,
either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his
finger upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads—if
they are in the English language at least—he finds things lacking which
his instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply
their place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant
of such things, or rather could not conceive them.

I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present
battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all
nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent
to the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would
think) and which yet no historian explains.

The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow:
an especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, of which the modern historian makes nothing but an
incomprehensible contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp
revelation of the half-way house between the Empire and modern
nationalities.

As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in
Europe: clearly an issue—things come to a head. How came it? Why these
two camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding out in
desperate Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a victory
apparently inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox Russian
shell? Where lay the roots of so singular a contempt for our old order,
chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain the
position of the Papacy, the question of Ireland, the aloofness of old
Spain?

It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external—especially
by any materialist or even skeptical—analysis. It was not climate
against climate—that facile materialist contrast of “environment,”
which is the crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was
not race—if indeed any races can still be distinguished in European
blood save broad and confused appearances, such as Easterner and
Westerner, short and tall, dark and fair. It was not—as another foolish
academic theory (popular some years ago) would pretend—an economic
affair. There was here no revolt of rich against poor, no pressure of
undeveloped barbarians against developed lands, no plan of
exploitation, nor of men organized, attempting to seize the soil of
less fruitful owners.

How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of
which was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for
the sake of a decision?

That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the superficial
test of religious differences among modern “sects” must be bewildered
indeed! I have seen the attempt made in more than one journal and book,
enemy and Allied. The results are lamentable!

Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was atheist. But her subject provinces
supported her exultantly, Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely
Catholic Bavaria. Her main support—without which she could not have
challenged Europe—was that very power whose sole reason for being was
Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna,
controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the
House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in
Eastern Europe.

The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.

Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those
things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the
unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within
herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious
analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will make
anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of
“Democracy” as the issue of the Great War may be neglected:
Democracy—one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human
government—was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The
essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy,
the despotism of Russia and Prussia, the immense complex of all other
great modern states gives such nonsense the lie.

People who talk of “A struggle for supremacy between the two Teutonic
champions Germany and England” are less respectable still. England is
not Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet decided by
but the smallest possible majority (a majority of one) to enter the
war. The Prussian Government never dreamt it would have to meet England
at all. There is no question of so single an issue. The world was at
war. Why? No man is an historian who cannot answer from the past. All
who can answer from the past, and are historians, see that it is the
historical depth of the European faith, not its present surface, which
explains all.

The struggle was against Prussia.

Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization
of the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia,
the western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was
an hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from
the Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden
of weeds. And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of
weeds, could not extend until the West weakened through schism. It had
to wait till the battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited.
And at last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed
patch over-ran first Poland and the Germanies, then half Europe. When
it challenged all civilization at last it was master of a hundred and
fifty million souls.

What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they
are Poland and Ireland—the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the
conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which desired to
live its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old
Christian rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the morals spread
upon it by Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three
hundred years ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This
war was the largest, yet no more than the recurrent, example of that
unceasing wrestle: the outer, the unstable, the untraditional—which is
barbarism—pressing blindly upon the inner, the traditional, the
strong—which is Ourselves: which is Christendom: which is Europe.

Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster hesitated!

We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization
failed, but that if the Allies conquered civilization was
reestablished—What did we mean? We meant, not that the New Barbarians
could not handle a machine: They can. But we meant that they had learnt
all from us. We meant that they cannot _continue of themselves_; and
that we can. We meant that they have no roots.

When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be
ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is
one and we its family: That which challenged us, though it controlled
so much which should have aided us and was really our own, was external
to civilization and did not lose that character by the momentary use of
civilized Allies.

When we said that “the Slav” failed us, what did we mean? It was not a
statement of race. Poland is Slav, so is Serbia: they were two vastly
differing states and yet both with us. It meant that the Byzantine
influence was never sufficient to inform a true European state or to
teach Russia a national discipline; because the Byzantine Empire, the
tutor of Russia, was cut off from us, the Europeans, the Catholics, the
heirs, who are the conservators of the world.

The Catholic Conscience of Europe grasped this war—with apologies where
it was in the train of Prussia, with affirmation where it was free. It
saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future—the
two alternative futures which lie before the world.

All other judgments of the war made nonsense: You had, on the Allied
side, the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich
paymasters shouting for “Democracy;” pedants mumbling about “Race.” On
the side of Prussia (the negation of nationality) you have the use of
some vague national mission of conquest divinely given to the very
various Germans and the least competent to govern. You would come at
last (if you listened to such varied cries) to see the Great War as a
mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the emptiest internationals
conceive the thing to have been.

So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to
the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The
Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone
can see and judge in this matter.

From so recent and universal an example I turn to one local, distant,
precise, in which this same Catholic Conscience of European history may
be tested.

Consider the particular (and clerical) example of Thomas à Becket: the
story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of
Thomas a Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in any other
of our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it.

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a
few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many
contemporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to
history. The Catholic may well ask: “How it is I cannot understand the
story as told by these Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?”

The story is briefly this: A certain prelate, the Primate of England at
the time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the
clergy. The chief of these changes was that men attached to the Church
in any way even by minor orders (not necessarily priests) should, if
they committed a crime amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be brought
before the ordinary courts of the country instead of left, as they had
been for centuries, to their own courts. The claim was, at the time, a
novel one. The Primate of England resisted that claim. In connection
with his resistance he was subjected to many indignities, many things
outrageous to custom were done against him; but the Pope doubted
whether his resistance was justified, and he was finally reconciled
with the civil authority. On returning to his See at Canterbury he
became at once the author of further action and the subject of further
outrage, and within a short time he was murdered by his exasperated
enemies.

His death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did penance for it.
But _all the points on which he had resisted_ were in practice waived
by the Church at last. The civil state’s original claim was _in
practice_ recognized at last. Today it appears to be plain justice. The
chief of St. Thomas’ contentions, for instance, that men in orders
should be exempt from the ordinary courts, seems as remote as chain
armors.

So far, so good. The opponent of the Faith will say, and has said in a
hundred studies—that this resistance was nothing more than that always
offered by an old organization to a new development.

Of course it was! It is equally true to say of a man who objects to an
aëroplane smashing in the top of his studio that it is the resistance
of an old organization to a new development. But such a phrase in no
way explains the business; and when the Catholic begins to examine the
particular case of St. Thomas, he finds a great many things to wonder
at and to think about, upon which his less European opponents are
helpless and silent.

I say “helpless” because in their attitude they give up trying to
explain. They record these things, but they are bewildered by them.
They can explain St. Thomas’ particular action simply enough: too
simply. He was (they say) a man living in the past. But when they are
asked to explain the vast consequences that followed his martyrdom,
they have to fall back upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses;
that “the masses were ignorant”—that is as compared with other periods
in human history (what, more ignorant than today?) that “the Papacy
engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm.” As though the Papacy
were a secret society like modern Freemasonry, with some hidden
machinery for “engineering” such things. As though the type of
enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical thing
produced now by caucus or newspaper “engineering!” As though nothing
_besides_ such interferences was there to arouse the whole populace of
Europe to such a pitch!

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas’ tomb,
the historian who hates or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways
of denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the
easiest way of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the
result of a vast conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble
acquiescence of the maim, the halt and the blind supported. The third
(and for the moment most popular) is to give them modern journalistic
names, sham Latin and Greek confused, which, it is hoped, will get rid
of the miraculous character; notably do such people talk of
“auto-suggestion.”

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when he has read all
the original documents, understands it easily enough from within.

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in its
special claims, and was probably (taken as an isolated action)
unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads and as he notes the
rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking
place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a
principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its
general appreciation: the freedom of the Church. He stood out in
particular for what _had_ been the concrete symbols of the Church’s
liberty in the past. The direction of his actions was everything,
whether his symbol was well or ill chosen. The particular customs might
go. But to challenge the new claims of civil power at that moment was
to save the Church. A movement was afoot which might have then
everywhere accomplished what was only accomplished in parts of Europe
four hundred years later, to wit, a dissolution of the unity and the
discipline of Christendom.

St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy; he fought and he
resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. He fought for no
dogmatic point, he fought for no point to which the Church of five
hundred years earlier or five hundred years later would have attached
importance. He fought for things which were purely temporal
arrangements; which had indeed until quite recently been the guarantee
of the Church’s liberty, but which were in his time upon the turn of
becoming negligible. _But the spirit in which he fought was a
determination that the Church should never be controlled by the civil
power_, and the spirit against which he fought was the spirit which
either openly or secretly believes the Church to be an institution
merely human, and therefore naturally subjected, as an inferior, to the
processes of the monarch’s (or, worse, the politician’s) law.

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas was obviously
and necessarily to lose, in the long run, every concrete point on which
he had stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing
for which he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the
enthusiasm of the populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man’s
healthy and moral existence against the threat of the wealthy, and the
power of the State—the self-government of the general Church, had been
defended by a champion up to the point of death. For the morals
enforced by the Church are the guarantee of freedom.

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic,
with a blind, irrational assertion that the miracles _could_ not take
place. He is not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no
marvelous events ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot
believe that there was a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all
proof of such conspiracy). He is moved to a conviction that events so
minutely recorded and so amply testified, happened. Here again is the
European, the chiefly reasonable man, the Catholic, pitted against the
barbarian skeptic with his empty, unproved, mechanical dogmas of
material sequence.

And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are but the extreme points
fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization
was before the twelfth century. He knows what it was to become after
the sixteenth. He knows why and how the Church would stand out against
a certain itch for change. He appreciates why and how a character like
that of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that
the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees that it succeeded
so thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, in a moment when its
occurrence would have been far more dangerous and general than in the
sixteenth century, the overturning of the connection between Church and
State.

The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly comprehends. He grasps
the connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended
St. Thomas’ intercession; not because the miracles were fantasies, but
because a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the later
accompaniment and the recipient of miraculous power.

It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I
have, therefore, chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my
case.

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English
squires and of their position in the English countrysides would have to
explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a foreigner how and why
the evils of the English large estates were, though evils, national;
just as a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity or violent
might afford him a special test; so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes,
for the Catholic who is viewing Europe, a very good example whereby he
can show how well he understands what is to other men not
understandable, and how simple is to him, and how human, a process
which, to men not Catholic, can only be explained by the most grotesque
assumptions; as that universal contemporary testimony must be ignored;
that men are ready to die for things in which they do not believe; that
the philosophy of a society does not permeate that society; or that a
popular enthusiasm ubiquitous and unchallenged, is mechanically
produced to the order of some centre of government! All these
absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel,
nor is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains
it.

The Catholic sees that the whole of the à Becket business was like the
struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to
maintain it (such being the battleground chosen by his opponents) upon
a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot
understand it and does not pretend to understand it.

Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited,
to a third quite different from either of the other two and the widest
of all. Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We
can here make a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can
appreciate what other men only puzzle at, and can determine and know
those things upon which other men make no more than a guess.

The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the Jews
were widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and
especially the Roman intellect, accepted it in its maturity.

The material decline of the Empire is not co-relative with, nor
parallel to, the growth of the Catholic Church; it is the counterpart
of that growth. You have been told “Christianity (a word, by the way,
quite unhistorical) crept into Rome as she declined, and hastened that
decline.” That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it:
“The Faith is that which Rome accepted in her maturity; nor was the
Faith the cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of all that
could be conserved.”

There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood; there
was a serious imperilling of civilization in its old age by some small
(and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric blood; if civilization so
attacked did not permanently fail through old age we owe that happy
rescue to the Catholic Faith.

In the next period—the Dark Ages—the Catholic proceeds to see Europe
saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the
Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that
anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down. The
Mohammedan came within three days’ march of Tours, the Mongol was seen
from the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The
Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul,
and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing
left of Europe but a central core.

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that
dark time—in the Middle Ages—the Catholic notes not hypotheses but
documents and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some
imaginary “Teutonic” root—a figment of the academies—but from the very
real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in
Gaul—never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic
architecture spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the
territory of Paris and thence spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch
Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product of
the soul of Europe, re-awakened—he sees the marvelous new civilization
of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old Roman society,
a transformation wholly from within, and motived by the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth
century, are to him the diseases of one body—Europe—in need of
medicine.

The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the
European body at the Reformation.

It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law
it is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion
and from civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman
stock—save Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that
struggle _England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of
Europe, on Holland, North Germany and the rest. He is anxious to see
whether _Britain_ will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal.

He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance;
how all the forces of wealth—especially the old families such as the
Howards and the merchants of the City of London—are enlisted upon the
treasonable side; how in spite of this a tenacious tradition prevents
any sudden transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance
from the continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England
rising, cities in the South standing siege. Ultimately he sees the
great nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut off,
apparently forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food
upon which they had fed.

Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land
only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or
miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side
by side with that loss the preservation of Ireland.

To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Catholic history to
read) there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization which
has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to
frame fantastic origins for institutions the growth of which are as
plain as an historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids
which desolated the eastern and southeastern coasts of England in the
sixth century the origin of the English people. He perceives that the
success of these small eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and
the spread of their language westward over the island dated from their
acceptance of Roman discipline, organization and law, from which the
majority, the Welsh to the West, were cut off. He sees that the
ultimate hegemony of Winchester over Britain all grew from this early
picking up of communications with the Continent and the cutting off of
everything in this island save the South and East from the common life
of Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are not dimly and
possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic in their origin;
he is not surprised to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean
valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans; he sees how
probable or necessary was such an origin just when the chief effort of
Europe was at work in the _Reconquista_.

In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally
before the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of
theories, self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of
novelty, which has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the
past. Above all, he does not commit the prime historical error of
“reading history backwards.” He does not think of the past as a groping
towards our own perfection of today. He has in his own nature the
nature of its career: he feels the fall and the rise: the rhythm of a
life which is his own.

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century
or the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is
the supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.




EUROPE AND THE FAITH




I
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


The history of European civilization is the history of a certain
political institution which united and expressed Europe, and was
governed from Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by
the growing influence of a certain definite and organized religion:
this religion it ultimately accepted and, finally, was merged in.

The institution—having accepted the religion, having made of that
religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in
through every part until it became the spirit of the whole—was slowly
modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it
did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new
soul. It re-arose and still lives.

This institution was first known among men as _Republica_; we call it
today “The Roman Empire.” The Religion which informed and saved it was
then called, still is called, and will always be called “The Catholic
Church.”

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth
whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or
to a man who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in
distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to
examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as
would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an
intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary
atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history
in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly
departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization
will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to his
science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic
student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the
Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do _not_
grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose
special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic
Church, or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other
anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal
history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists
are innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still
dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the
world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is
anti-Catholic—that concerns another sphere of thought—but that it is
unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and
its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or
to diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a
certain religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a
vague mood, but a determinate and highly organized corporation; to
present in the first centuries some non-existant “Christianity” in
place of the existant Church; to suggest that the Faith was a vague
agreement among individual holders of opinions instead of what it
historically _was_, the doctrine of a fixed authoritative institution;
to fail to identify that institution with the institution still here
today and still called the Catholic Church; to exaggerate the
insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside the Empire
and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire or its
religion have at any time ceased to be—that is, to pretend that there
has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present
of Europe—all these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is
_nothing_ which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is
not demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building
materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple
food and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower,
the well, the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very
words of most of our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order
of still more, the logical sequence of our thought—all spring from that
one source. So with implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the
chisel, the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the
ladder; all these we have from that same origin. Of our institutions it
is the same story. The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the
parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with
their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European cities, the
routes of communication between them, the universities, the
Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence, all these
derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly
foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion
of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.

The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in
history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but
with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave
the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is
equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men
must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might
have risen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact,
spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to this
day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did,
as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial Roman
system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for its
ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements and
the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living or dead:
of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter
of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in its origin and
development that its external accoutrement and its language were those
of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious
bias against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of
which will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one,
error disparate and many.

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,
continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized
fortress; such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from
that, along any one of the infinite number of directions from which a
single point may be approached. Today there is attack from the North,
tomorrow an attack from the South. Their directions are flatly
contradictory, but the contradiction is explained by the fact that each
is directed against a central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan
institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something
alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable
before Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of
the Creed. They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental
disease into the body of a firm Western society which it did not so
much transform as liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous
barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan
qualities—which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant
qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of
the Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its
institutions as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a
new society without considering its Catholic and Imperial origins.
Nothing is commoner, for instance (in English schools), than for boys
to be taught that the pirate raids and settlements of the fifth century
in this Island were the “coming of the English,” and the complicated
history of Britain is simplified for them into a story of how certain
bold seafaring pagans (full of all the virtues we ascribe to ourselves
today) first devastated, then occupied, and at last, of their sole
genius, developed a land which Roman civilization had proved inadequate
to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or
unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning
in him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe
as though it were something quite apart from the general development of
our civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole
history of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the
sixteenth century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as
though a man were to write of England in the nineteenth century without
daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such
historical enormities, the reader is at a loss to understand the
ordinary motives of his ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the
history of the Church obviously escape him, but much more do the great
crises in civil history escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be
ready with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this:
“What was the Roman Empire?”

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and
let him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil
War: if you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and
very summary account: if of all that went before it, right away back to
the first colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or
ludicrously misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then
could he make of the problems in American Society, or how would he be
equipped to understand the nation of which he was to be a citizen? To
give such a man the elements of civic training you must let him know
what the Colonies were, what the War of Independence, and what the main
institutions preceding that event and created by it. He would have
further to know soundly the struggle between North and South, and the
principles underlying that struggle. Lastly, and most important of all,
he would have to see all this in a correct perspective.

So it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization
which is common to both Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigor
has extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and Africa. We cannot
understand it today unless we understand what it developed from. What
was the origin from which we sprang? What was the Roman Empire?

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime characteristic of
which was the acceptation, absolute and unconditional, of one common
mode of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries. It is an
idea very difficult for the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to
a number of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated,
and each separately colored, as it were, by different customs, a
different language, and often a different religion. Thus the modern man
sees France, French speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of
its own, etc.; he saw (till yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian
hegemony, German speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so
forth. When he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of opinion,
such as the discussion between aristocracy and democracy today, he
thinks in terms of different countries. Ireland, for instance, is
Democratic, England is Aristocratic—and so forth.

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, however united, as
something bounded by, and in contrast with, other communities. When he
writes or thinks of France he does not think of France only, but of the
points in which France contrasts with England, North Germany, South
Germany, Italy, etc.

Now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally
different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were
antagonisms _within one State_. No differentiation of State against
State was conceivable or was attempted.

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, from the North Sea to the
Sahara and the Middle Nile, all was one State.

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial
citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no
appreciable arts or sciences, it was _barbaric_. That outside waste of
sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the
frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation.
But that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of
the menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing
a fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities
outside the boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly
populated, and highly organized State within.

The members of these communities (principally the Dutch, Frisian,
Rhenish and other Germanic peoples, but also on the other frontiers,
the nomads of the desert, and in the West, islanders and mountaineers,
Irish and Caledonian) were all tinged with the great Empire on which
they bordered. Its trade permeated them. We find its coins everywhere.
Its names for most things became part of their speech. They thought in
terms of it. They had a sort of grievance when they were not admitted
to it. They perpetually begged for admittance.

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and then
to raid little portions of its frontier wealth.

They never dreamt of “conquest.” On the other hand the Roman
administrator was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an
orderly manner on the frontier fields, so that he could exploit their
labor, with coaxing them to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies,
or (when there was any local conflict) with defeating them in local
battles, taking them prisoners and making them slaves.

I have said that the mere number of these exterior men (German,
Caledonian, Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with
the numbers of civilization, and, I repeat, in the eyes of the citizens
of the Empire, their lack of culture made them more insignificant
still.

At only one place did the Roman Empire have a common frontier with
another civilization, properly so called. It was a very short frontier,
not one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire. It was the
Eastern or Persian frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert. And
though a true civilization lay beyond, that civilization was never of
great extent nor really powerful. This frontier was variously drawn at
various times, but corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia.
The Mediterranean peoples of the Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were
always within that frontier. They were Roman. The mountain peoples of
Persia were always beyond it. Nowhere else was there any real rivalry
or contact with the foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact
(though “The Persian War” is the only serious _foreign_ or equal war in
the eyes of all the rulers from Julius Cæsar to the sixth century)
counted for little in the general life of Rome.

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often repeated, so
strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and so essentially
characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the
formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape.
_Men lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and
which they even regarded as eternal_. There would be much grumbling
against the taxes and here and there revolts against them, but never a
suggestion that the taxes should be levied by any other than imperial
authority, or imposed in any other than the imperial manner. There was
plenty of conflict between armies and individuals as to who should have
the advantage of ruling, but never any doubt as to the type of function
which the “Emperor” filled, nor as to the type of universally despotic
action which he exercised. There were any number of little local
liberties and customs which were the pride of the separate places to
which they attached, but there was no conception of such local
differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one State. That
State was, for the men of that time, the World.

The complete unity of this social system was the more striking from the
fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and
liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of
religious practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current
official language for the educated thought of the Empire: there were
two, Greek and Latin. And in every department of human life there
co-existed this very large liberty of individual and local expression,
coupled with a complete, and, as it were, necessary unity, binding the
whole vast body together. Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a series of
civil wars. Several Emperors might be reigning together. The office of
Emperor might even be officially and consciously held in commission
among four or more men. But the power of the Emperor was always one
power, his office one office, and the system of the Empire one system.

It is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt a full answer to
the question of how such a civic state of mind came to be, but the
reader must have some _sketch_ of its development if he is to grasp its
nature.

The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire grew had consisted
(before that Empire was complete—say, from an unknown most distant past
to 50 B.C.) in two types of society: there stood in it as rare
exceptions _States_, or nations in our modern sense, governed by a
central Government, which controlled a large area, and were peopled by
the inhabitants of many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient
Egypt. But there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great
numbers as to form the predominant type of society, a series of
_Cities_, some of them commercial ports, most of them controlling a
small area from which they drew their agricultural subsistence, but all
of them remarkable for this, that their citizens drew their civic life
from, felt patriotism for, were the soldiers of, and paid their taxes
to, not a nation in our sense but a _municipality_.

These cities and the small surrounding territories which they
controlled (which, I repeat, were often no more than local agricultural
areas necessary for the sustenance of the town) were essentially the
sovereign Powers of the time. Community of language, culture, and
religion might, indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict.
One could talk of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so
forth. But the individual City was always the unit. City made war on
City. The City decided its own customs, and was the nucleus of
religion. The God was the God of the city. A rim of such points
encircled the eastern and central Mediterranean wherever it was
habitable by man. Even the little oasis of the Cyrenæan land with sand
on every side, but habitable, developed its city formations. Even on
the western coasts of the inland ocean, which received their culture by
sea from the East, such City States, though more rare, dotted the
littoral of Algeria, Provence and Spain.

Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was
disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian
Alexander.

The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of
Macedon, when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common
Greek culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant
littoral and much more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is,
“Greecified”) civilization. The separate cities, of course, survived,
and after Alexander’s death unity of control was lost in various and
fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quarrels of his
generals. But the old moral equilibrium was gone and the conception of
a general civilization had appeared. Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew,
the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the Greek tongue was the medium of
all the East for a thousand years. Hence are the very earliest names of
Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest, Baptism, Christ, Greek names.
Hence all our original documents and prayers are Greek and shine with a
Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in idea as the four
Catholic Gospels.

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to
follow (since we have only later accounts—and they are drawn from the
city’s point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the
Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to
taxation and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a
sort of superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined
and perhaps in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at
any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this
city had in a slower and less universal way begun to break down the
moral equilibrium of the City States in Italy, and had produced between
the Apennines and the sea (and in some places beyond the Apennines) a
society in which the City State, though of coarse surviving, was no
longer isolated or sovereign, but formed part of a larger and already
definite scheme. The city which had arrived at such a position, and
which was now the manifest capital of the Italian scheme, was ROME.

Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went
a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come
into conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was
the commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that
is, a Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the
rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had
shown for conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread of its
spirit and for the domination of its laws and modes of thought. The
business of Carthage was to enrich itself: not indirectly as do
soldiers (who achieve riches as but one consequence of the pursuit of
arms), but directly, as do merchants, by using men indirectly, by
commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.

The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever
he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He
employed mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly
step by step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every
commercial empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built
up a scattered hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today
called the “Command of the Sea.”

That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it
wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength
of martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious
struggle, which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our
Lord, ruined the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself
was destroyed by the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman
province. So perished for many hundred years the dangerous illusion
that the merchant can master the soldier. But never had that illusion
seemed nearer to the truth than at certain moments in the duel between
Carthage and Rome.

The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the
struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its
half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind
the cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France,
and the cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system,
and became, but in a more united way, what Italy had already long
before become. The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman
confederation, with its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the
Western Mediterranean and was compelled by its geographical position to
extend itself inland further and further into Spain, and even (what was
to be of prodigious consequence to the world) into GAUL.

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice
that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern
Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the
Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as
that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once
been Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian
East—Syria, Egypt—followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came
to depend upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates,
annexations, and occupations, which two generations or so before the
foundation of the Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was
not yet complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men
whose sons lived to be contemporary with the Nativity saw that the
unity of that world was already achieved. The World was now one, and
was built up of the islands, the peninsulas, and the littoral of the
Inland Sea.

So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally
would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital
experiment which has determined all future history—Julius Cæsar’s
conquest of Gaul—Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental,
exterior to the Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic
and the North Sea: Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be
the foundation of things to come.

It was this experiment—the Roman Conquest of Gaul—and its success which
opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the
world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no
parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially
civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the
Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, “converted”
into citizens of this now united Roman civilization.

It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link
and corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies
between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic, and the Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final
and so immediate that no historian has ever quite been able to explain
the phenomenon. Gaul accepted almost at once the Roman language, the
Roman food, the Roman dress, and it formed the first—and a
gigantic—extension of European culture.

We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example
of that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay.
Gaul led to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle
which any territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close
of the first century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church
had already been obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the
world’s history had come, the Roman Empire was finally established in
its entirety. By that time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic,
from the Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine
and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay a secure and
unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great State.

This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be
sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop.
This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex
political arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the
drift of the surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its
conceptions of law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of
Logic, are still the stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as
universal as itself is still, and perhaps more notably than ever,
apparent to all.




II
WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


So far I have attempted to answer the question, “What Was the Roman
Empire?” We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a
character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution
affected from its origin, and at last permeated by, another
institution. This other institution had (and has) for its name “The
Catholic Church.”

My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question,
“What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” for that I have not yet
touched.

In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in
the place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint
the nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best
be observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived
through the close of the second century and on into the latter half of
the third century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first
moment in which we can perceive the Church as a developed organism now
apparent to all.

If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the
growing Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard
of. We can get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it.
It is from about this time also that many documents survive. I shall
show that the appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is
ample evidence of her original constitution.

A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through
the violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines,
surviving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in
extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the establishment,
of an untrammelled Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and
most terrible of the persecutions), would have been able to answer our
question well. He would have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness
to the emergence, apparent to all Society, of the Catholic Church.

Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great
provincial town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a
comparatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the
municipal government of the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to
a large class of citizens, free men but not senatorial; beneath these
again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves.

In what proportion these three classes of society would have been found
in a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents
to tell us, but we may infer from what we know of that society that the
majority would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less
numerous, while senators were certainly a very small body (they were
the great landowners of the neighborhood); and we must add to these
three main divisions two other classes which complicate our view of
that society. The first was that of the freed men, the second was made
up of perpetual tenants, nominally free, but economically (and already
partly in legal theory) bound to the wealthier classes.

The freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their
masters. They were bound to these masters very strongly so far as
social atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal theory as well.
This preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as a
stationary phenomenon: it was increasing. In another half-dozen
generations it was destined to form the outstanding feature of all
imperial society. In the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman
Empire became from Pagan, Christian, the mark of the world was the
possession of nearly all its soil and capital (apart from public land)
by one small body of immensely wealthy men: the product of the pagan
Empire.

It is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving
would never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free
as a line of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social
arrangement and no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still
chattel, bought and sold; many of them were incapable of any true
family life. But there was nothing uncommon in a slave being treated as
a friend, in his being a member of the liberal professions, in his
acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his master’s fortune, or a
doctor. Certain official things he could not be; he could not hold any
public office, of course; he could never plead; and he could not be a
soldier.

This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it
required no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of
its vast population (for it was not a system of mere repression—no such
system has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a
restricted portion of the population. In the absence of foreign
adventure or Civil Wars, the armies were mainly used as frontier
police. Yet, small as they were, it was not easy to obtain the
recruitment required. The wealthy citizen we are considering would have
been expected to “find” a certain number of recruits for the service of
the army. He found them among his bound free tenants and enfranchised
slaves; he was increasingly reluctant to find them; and they were
increasingly reluctant to serve. Later recruitment was found more and
more from the barbarians outside the Empire; and we shall see on a
subsequent page how this affected the transition from the ancient world
to that of the Dark Ages.

Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a
morning to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be
saluted, as he passed, by many men of the various classes I have
described. Some, though slaves, he would greet familiarly; others,
though nominally free and belonging to his own following or to that of
some friend, he would regard with less attention. He would be
accompanied, it may be presumed, by a small retinue, some of whom might
be freed men of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant class, some in
legal theory quite independent of him, and yet by the economic
necessities of the moment practically his dependents.

As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a
variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods
were now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type
was to greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life
of the city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck
his attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local
Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The
first of these he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an
alien colony in some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of
a small, reserved, unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout
the Empire. The Empire had had trouble with it in the past, but that
trouble was long forgotten; the little colonies of Jews had become
negotiators, highly separate from their fellow citizens, already
unpopular, but nothing more.

With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an
administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was
_endowed_; that it was possessed of property more or less legally
guaranteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the
congregations and corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well
secured. He would further know as an administrator (and this would more
concern him—for the possession of property by so important a body would
seem natural enough), that to this building and the corporation of
which it was a symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow
citizens; a small minority, of course, in any town of such a date (the
first generation of the third century), but a minority most appreciable
and most worthy of his concern from three very definite
characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing; in the
second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of
growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this
was the capital point) it represented a true political organism—_the
only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the
Empire_.

If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in
this description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical
point of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic
Church in Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism;
with its own officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of
vitality, which, if he were a wise man, he would know was certain to
endure and to grow, and which even if he were but a superficial and
unintelligent spectator, he would recognize as unique.

Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes
and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was
growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it
within its own sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the
slave, the soldier, in so far as they were members of this corporation,
were equally bound to certain observances. _Did they neglect these
observances, the corporation would expel them or subject them to
penalties of its own_. He knew that though misunderstandings and fables
existed with regard to this body, there was no social class in which
its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and
it would disturb him to know) that its organization, though in no way
admitted by law, and purely what we should call “voluntary,” was strict
and very formidable.

Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by
the Greek name of _Episcopos_. Greek was a language which the cultured
knew and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to
which he belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien
any more than would be the Greek title of _Presbyter_—the name of the
official priests acting under this monarchical head of the
organization—or than would the Greek title _Diaconos_, which title was
attached to an order, just below the priests, which was comprised of
the inferior officials of the clerical body.

He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that
were represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its
mysteries, its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the
officials of its body, might alone engage, and which the mass of the
local “Christians”—for such was their popular name—attended as a
congregation. But he would further know that this scheme of worship
differed wholly from any other of the many observances round it _by a
certain fixity of definition_. The Catholic Church was not an opinion,
nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not a theory nor a habit; it
was a _clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact
doctrines_, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise
definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with
passionate conviction.

By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official
duties could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one
who was attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way,
perhaps by the influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited
from his father: he would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly
growing body counted very many members who were indifferent and some,
perhaps, who were ignorant of its full doctrine. But the body as a
whole, in its general spirit, and _especially in the disciplined
organization of its hierarchy_, did differ from everything round it in
this double character of precision and conviction. There was no
certitude left and no definite spirit or mental aim, no “dogma” (as we
should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of his time, save
among the Christians.

The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number
of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions,
at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men,
land and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago
merged in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church
alone represented a complete theory of life, to which men were
attached, as they had hundreds of years before been attached to their
local city, with its local gods and intense corporate local life.

Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for
would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a
thing to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and,
what is more, a State within the State.

If he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic Church
would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with
the general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority
even of the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it
would still have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of
his uniform time: and it was growing.

This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the
day. It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial
taxes. He consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental
conception of the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of
importance exactly corresponding to the amount of freehold land which
each possessed. He has to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local
repairs, the making of some new street, or the establishment of some
monument. Probably he hears of some local quarrel provoked (he is told)
by the small, segregated Christian body, and he follows the police
report upon it.

He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts
of his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been
the result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been
made, what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry
for the army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another
with perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some
thousands of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business
he hardly comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It
was not yet rooted in the countryside.

There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be
rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few
hundred fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge
with a Roman garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of
neighboring barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by
pillage in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been
called out against them. He might have, from the hands of a friend in
that garrison, a letter brought to him officially by the imperial post,
which was organized along all the great highways, telling him what had
been done to the marauders or the suppliants; how, too, some had, after
capture, been allotted land to till under conditions nearly servile,
others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for the army. The news would never
for a moment have suggested to him any coming danger to the society in
which he lived.

He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably
literary, and there would have been an end of his day.

In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the
small Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we
are to understand history, that by this time it was already the
phenomenon which contemporaries were also beginning to note most
carefully.

That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local
affairs (including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck
such a man at such a time.

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must
observe certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and
the society around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first
place there had been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic
friction breaking out between the Imperial power and this separate
voluntary organism, the Catholic Church. The Church’s partial secrecy,
its high vitality, its claim to independent administration, were the
superficial causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, we know that the
ultimate causes were more profound. The conflict was a conflict between
Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the one hand, and what Jesus
Christ Himself had called “the world.” But it is unhistorical to think
of a “Pagan” world opposed to a “Christian” world at that time. The
very conception of “a Pagan world” requires some external manifest
Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There was none
such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the third century.
The Church had around her a society in which education was very widely
spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely
skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life,
and tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a
final solution.

It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to
speak of its “luxury” or its “cruelty.” A cruel man could be cruel in
it without suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian
training would render natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could
be, and would be, merciful and would preach mercy, and would be
generally applauded. It was a society in which there were many
ascetics—whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure—but
a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this, that
at bottom it _believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief
to be mere opinions_.

Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings.
It is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the
Catholic Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor
any idea that man is other than sufficient to himself.

The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to
himself, nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the
doors to full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and
proposes) its doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of
faith.

It differed from—or was more solid than—all around it in this: that it
proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical
facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of
“mysteries” as realities instead of symbols.

A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical
training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have
described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it
is evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local
primacies in various other great cities. But what is not so generally
emphasized is the way in which Christian society appears to have
_looked at itself_ at that time.

The conception which the Catholic Church had of _itself_ in the early
third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if
we use the word “Christianity” we are unhistorical. “Christianity” is a
term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it
connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The
Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception. Upon
the contrary, they were attached to its very antithesis. They were
attached to the conception of a _thing_: of an organized body
instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and
remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. One
can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoic_ism_, or
epicurean_ism_, or neoplaton_ism_; but one cannot talk of
“Christian_ism_” or “Christ_ism_.” Indeed, no one has been so ignorant
or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase
“Christianity,” used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in
the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of “Christianism”
or “Christism;” and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea;
it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in
Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of
the two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the
problems and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess
himself Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is
no personal God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for
such and such utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.

The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by
certain “mysteries” into which he has been “initiated:” That is,
symbolical plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high
seclusion before members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to
feel a spiritual life as the natural life round him. He has curiously
followed, and often paid at high expense, the services of necromancers;
he believes that in an “initiation” which he experienced in his youth,
and during the secret and most vivid drama or “mystery” in which he
then took part, he actually came in contact with the spiritual world.
Such men were not uncommon. The declining society of the time was
already turning to influences of that type.

The host’s conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such
things, impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid
kind of man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading
with great interest the literature of the Christians. He is in
admiration of the traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He
quotes certain phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They
move him to eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have
an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying: “For my part, I have
come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had
me act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read
of, and the practical maxims which are attached to His Name seem to me
a sufficient guide to life. That,” he will conclude simply, “is the
groove into which I have fallen, and I do not think I shall ever leave
it.”

Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have
been a _Christian_? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called
him a _Christian_? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where
_Christians_ were unpopular? Would _Christians_ have received him among
themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society?
Would he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of
the _Christian_ body?

The answer is most emphatically _No_.

No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as
coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis
of one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo
would have troubled him with a single question. No Christian
congregation would have regarded him as in any way connected with their
body. Opinion of that sort, “Christism,” had no relation to the Church.
How far it existed we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as
it existed it would have been on all fours with any one of the vague
opinions which floated about the cultured Roman world.

Now it is evident that the term “Christianity” used as a point of view,
a mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally
evident that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to
do with the Christian _religion_ of that day. For the Christian
religion (then as now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in
what I have called an organism, and that organism was the Catholic
Church.

The reader may here object: “But surely there was heresy after heresy
and thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian
whom the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather
than relinquish the name.”

True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove
the point at issue.

These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1)
exact doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were,
all three, regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The
heresies arose one after another, from the action of men who were
prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be, and
to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living
tradition and the right to be regarded as the centre of unity. No
heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. The whole
gist and meaning of a heresy was that it, the heresy, or he, the
heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert
his own definition.

What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church
asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the
heresiarch denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred
miles of such a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that
some doctrine not yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a
man, that his final settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that
after debate and counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part
of the bishops, this man’s solution is rejected and an orthodox
solution is defined. From that moment the heresiarch, if he will not
fall into line with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion; and his
rejection, no less than his own original insistence upon his doctrine,
are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges postulate unity
and definition as the two necessary marks of Catholic truth.

No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his
opponent: “You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form
his part of ‘Christian society’ and look at things from his own point
of view.” The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the
early Church being what it was, be defined one way or the other.

Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and
present everywhere in the first years of the third century?

Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and
documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we
know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify
it from our conceptions of the _probable_ according to our knowledge of
that society—as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a
bishop at Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may
amplify it by guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some
just possible but exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important
canonical Gospel has been lost. There is an infinite range for
guesswork, both orthodox and heretical. But the plain and known facts
which repose upon historical and documentary evidence, and which have
no corresponding documentary evidence against them, are both few and
certain.

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly
true of his time.

Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then
taught as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death
about 170 years before in Palestine—only 130 years before Tertullian’s
birth—had risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real
person with whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian’s childhood men
still lived who had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.

This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you
have an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery,
fruitful in opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to
three centuries of more and more particular definition.

This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions
called Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the
Church. The doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines.
They included the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its
alternative of salvation and damnation.

Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name
of The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain
rite and _Mystery_ called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and
changed them into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be
continued. The central act of worship of the Christian Church was
therefore a consecration of bread and wine by priests in the presence
of the initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality. The bread
and wine so consecrated were certainly called (universally) the Body of
the Lord.

The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and
drank the Wine thus changed in the _Mystery_.

It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the
Lord.

There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop:
regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of
the ritual and the guardian of doctrine.

The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through
their bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially
one ritual.

All that is plain history.

The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where
Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general
suppression to be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases
that it was a tenth of the population. Equally certainly did the unity
of the Christian Church and its bishops teach the institution of the
Eucharist, the Resurrection, the authority of the Apostles, and their
power of tradition through the bishops. A very large number of converts
were to be noted and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority of his
time, by his testimony, were recruited by conversion, and were not born
Christians.

Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the
Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the
undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan
would have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.

I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which
Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of
the points I have set down are, of course, _demonstrably_ anterior to
the third century. I mean by “demonstrably” anterior, proved in earlier
documentary testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long
anterior to the time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common
sense. But there are documents as well.

Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than
Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to
the Reform Bill—and he gave us a full description of the Mass.

We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St.
Justin—perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations
contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone,
Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization
of the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the
Primacy in it of the Roman See.

The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half
after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called
“Apostolic” times—that is, documents proceeding immediately from men
who could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their
quantity (and that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality,
too, a far superior body of evidence to what we possess from the next
generation. We have more in the New Testament than we have in the
writings of these men who came just after the death of the Apostles.
But what does remain is quite convincing. There arose from the date of
Our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the
death of Tiberius and a long lifetime after the Roman organization of
Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly individual _Society_, with
fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a strong discipline of its own.
With a most vivid and distinct personality, unmistakeable. And this
Society was, and is, called “The Church.”

I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which
we are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there
is no matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by
religious bias.

The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of
history as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned
to set forth a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an
advocate or lawyer. And I say that the conclusion we can establish with
regard to the Christian community on these main lines is the conclusion
to which any man must come quite independently of his creed. He will
deny these facts only if he has such bias against the Faith as
interferes with his reason. A man’s belief in the mission of the
Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin, do not move him
to these plain historical conclusions any more than they move him to
his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and organization of
contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth is for
philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact _was_ is plain history.
The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have been a
clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.

By the year 200 the Church was—everywhere, manifestly and in ample
evidence throughout the Roman world—what I have described, and taught
the doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred
and seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title
throughout that era of youth.

To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200
was rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and
seventy years before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and
discipline starts with the first third of the first century, and the
Church was from its birth the Church, the reader must consider the
dates.

We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the “canon”
which the Church has authorized as the “New Testament,” documents
proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the
Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of
phantasy is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the
Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also
(who had conversed with the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may
have been deceiving. I am not here concerned with that point. The
discussion of it belongs to another province of argument altogether.
But they were _contemporaries_ of the things they said they were
contemporaries of. In other words, their writings are what is called
“authentic.”

If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and
such a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the
account of a man who lived at the time when the miracle is _said_ to
have happened. If you read (in Ignatius’ seven certainly genuine
letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, you may think him a
wrong-headed enthusiast. But you know that you are reading the work of
a man who _personally_ witnessed the beginnings of the Church; you know
that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or
takes for granted, were certainly those of his time, that is, of the
_origin_ of Catholicism, though you may think the customs silly and the
doctrines nonsense.

St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the
Catholic Church is exactly in the position—in the matter of dates—of a
man of our time talking about the rise and present character of the
Socialists or of the rise and present character of Leopold’s Kingdom of
Belgium, of United Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is,
virtually, his own time.

Well, there comes after this considerable body of _contemporary_
documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very
spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first
founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a
man.

This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary
evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient
writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and
fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we
come to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in
volume, of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, of evidence to the
_truth_ of supernatural doctrines, but of evidence to what these
doctrines and their accompanying ritual and organization were: evidence
to the way in which the Church was constituted, to the way in which she
regarded her mission, to the things she thought important, to the
practice of her rites.

That is why I have taken the early third century as the moment in which
we can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in
being, and this picture is full of evidence to the state of the Church
in its origins three generations before.

I say, again, it is all-important for the reader who desires a true
historical picture to seize the _sequence of the dates with which we
are dealing_, their relation to the length of human life and therefore
to the society to which they relate.

It is all-important because the false history which has had its own way
for so many years is based upon two false suggestions of the first
magnitude. The first is the suggestion that the period between the
Crucifixion and the full Church of the third century was one in which
vast changes could proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original
ideas be rapidly developed; the second is that the space of time during
which those changes are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to
account for them.

It is only because those days are remote from ours that such
suggestions can be made. If we put ourselves by an effort of the
imagination into the surroundings of that period, we can soon discover
how false these suggestions are.

The period was not one favorable to the interruption of record. It was
one of a very high culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual,
and skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than
in any other period with which we are acquainted. It was certainly
greater than it is today. Those times were certainly less susceptible
to mere novel assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under
the influence of the modern press. It was a period astonishingly alive.
Lethargy and decay had not yet touched the world of the Empire. It
built, read, traveled, discussed, and, above all, _criticized_, with an
enormous energy.

In general, it was no period during which alien fashions could rise
within such a community as the Church without their opponents being
immediately able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the
immediate past. The world in which the Church arose was one; and that
world was intensely vivid. Anyone in that world who saw such an
institution as Episcopacy (for instance) or such a doctrine as the
Divinity of Christ to be a novel corruption of originals could have,
and would have, protested at once. It was a world of ample record and
continual communication.

Granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the
distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak
and what is called the Apostolic period; that is, the generation which
could still remember the origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the
preaching of the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps African
cities. We are often told that changes “gradually crept in;” that “the
imperceptible effect of time” did this or that. Let us see how these
vague phrases stand the test of confrontation with actual dates.

Let us stand in the years 200-210, consider a man then advanced in
years, well read and traveled, and present in those first years of the
third century at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were many such
men who, if they had been able to do so, would have reproved novelties
and denounced perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient
proof that the main lines of Catholic government and practice had
developed unbroken and unwarped from at least his own childhood. But an
old man who so witnessed the constitution of the Church and its
practices as I have described them in the year 200, would correspond to
that generation of old people whom we have with us today; the old
people who were born in the late twenties and thirties of the
nineteenth century; the old people who can just remember the English
Reform Bill, and who were almost grown up during the troubles of 1848
and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris: the old people in
the United States who can remember as children the election of Van
Buren to the office of President: the old people whose birth was not
far removed from the death of Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men
and women when gold was first discovered in California.

Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution under Nero.
It was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in
the early history of the Church. It took place in Apostolic times. It
affected men who, though aged, could easily remember Judea in the years
connected with Our Lord’s mission and His Passion. St. Peter lived to
witness, in that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived it. It
came not forty years later than the day of Pentecost. But the
persecution under Nero was to an old man such as I have supposed
assisting at the Eucharist in the early part of the third century, no
further off than the Declaration of Independence is from the old people
of our generation. An old man in the year 200 could certainly remember
many who had themselves been witnesses of the Apostolic age, just as an
old man today remembers well men who saw the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. The old people who had surrounded his childhood would
be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what the old people who
survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to Lafayette, or
to the younger Pitt. They could have seen and talked to that first
generation of the Church as the corresponding people surviving in the
early nineteenth century could have seen and talked with the founders
of the United States.

It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the
Rite of Initiation (Baptism in the name of the Trinity), the
establishment of an Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and
orthodoxy, and all those main lines of Catholicism which we find to be
the very essence of the Church in the early third century, could have
risen without protest. They cannot have come from an innocent, natural,
uncivilized perversion of an original so very recent and so open to
every form of examination.

That there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning
of undecided doctrines is natural, and fits in both with the dates and
with the atmosphere of the period and with the character of the
subject. But that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine
should have developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet
without protest in a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid
intercommunication, and, _above all, so brief_, is quite impossible.

That is what history has to say of the early Church in the Roman
Empire. The Gospels, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of
Clement and Ignatius may tell a true or a false story; their authors
may have written under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception;
or they may have been supremely true and immutably sincere. _But they
are contemporary._ A man may respect their divine origin or he may
despise their claims to instruct the human race; but that the Christian
body from its beginning was not “Christianity” but a Church and that
that Church was identically one with what was already called long
before the third century [Footnote: The Muratorian Fragment is older
than the third century, and St. Ignatius, who also uses the word
Catholic, was as near to the time of the Gospels as I am to the Crimean
War.] the _Catholic_ Church, is simply plain history, as plain and
straightforward as the history, let us say, of municipal institutions
in contemporary Gaul. It is history indefinitely better proved, and
therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern guesswork
on imaginary “Teutonic Institutions” before the eighth century or the
still more imaginary “Aryan” origins of the European race, or any other
of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for
historical truth.

So much for the Catholic Church in the early third century when first
we have a mass of evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined,
powerful growing body, intent on unity, ruled by bishops, having for
its central doctrine the Incarnation of God in an historical Person,
Jesus Christ, and for its central rite a Mystery, the transformation of
Bread and Wine by priests into the Body and Blood which the faithful
consume.

This “State within the States” by the year 200 already had affected the
Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already
transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done.
As the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.

What was the process of that decline?

To answer such a question we have next to observe three developments
that followed: (1) The great increase of barbarian hired soldiery
within the Empire; (2) The weakening of the central power as compared
with the local power of the small and increasingly rich class of great
landowners; (3) The rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted
position (and soon a predominating position) to complete mastery over
all society.

All these three phenomena developed together; they occupied about two
hundred years—roughly from the year 300 to the year 500. When they had
run their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one
society from one Imperial centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary
forces in the Roman Army, drawn from barbaric recruitment, had
established themselves in the various provinces and were calling
themselves “Kings.” The Catholic Church was everywhere the religion of
the great majority; it had everywhere alliance with, and often the use
of, the official machinery of government and taxation which continued
unbroken. It had become, far beyond all other organisms in the Roman
State, the central and typical organism which gave the European world
its note. This process is commonly called “The Fall of the Roman
Empire;” what was that “fall?” What really happened in this great
transformation?




III
WHAT WAS THE “FALL” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


That state of society which I have just described, the ordered and
united society of the Roman Empire, passed into another and very
different state of society: the society of what are called “The Dark
Ages.”

From these again rose, after another 600 years of adventures and
perils, the great harvest of mediæval civilization. Hardly had the
Roman Empire turned in its maturity to accept the fruit of its long
development (I mean the Catholic Church), when it began to grow old and
was clearly about to suffer some great transition. But that transition,
which threatened to be death, proved in the issue not death at all, but
a mixture of Vision and Change.

The close succession of fruit and decay in society is what one expects
from the analogy of all living things: at the close of the cycle it is
death that should come. A plant, just after it is most fruitful, falls
quickly. So, one might imagine, should the long story of Mediterranean
civilization have proceeded. When it was at its final and most complete
stage, one would expect some final and complete religion which should
satisfy its long search and solve its ancient riddles: but after such a
discovery, after the fruit of such a maturity had fully developed, one
would expect an end.

Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that
an end did not come. Dissolution was in some strange way checked. Death
was averted. And the more closely one looks into the unique history of
that salvation—the salvation of all that could be saved in a most
ancient and fatigued society—the more one sees that this salvation was
effected by no agency save that of the Catholic Church. Everything
else, after, say, 250 A.D., the empty fashionable philosophies, the
barbarians filling the army, the current passions and the current
despair, made for nothing but ruin.

There is no parallel to this survival in all the history of mankind.
Every other great civilization has, after many centuries of
development, either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died
and disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, there is nothing left
of Assyria. The Eastern civilizations remain, but remain immovable; or
if they change can only vulgarly copy external models.

But the civilization of Europe—the civilization, that is, of Rome and
of the Empire—had a third fortune differing both from death and from
sterility: it survived to a resurrection. Its essential seeds were
preserved for a Second Spring.

For five or six hundred years men carved less well, wrote verse less
well, let roads fall slowly into ruin, lost or rather coarsened the
machinery of government, forgot or neglected much in letters and in the
arts and in the sciences. But there was preserved, right through that
long period, not only so much of letters and of the arts as would
suffice to bridge the great gulf between the fifth century and the
eleventh, but also so much of what was really vital in the mind of
Europe as would permit that mind to blossom again after its repose. And
the agency, I repeat, which effected this conservation of the seeds,
was the Catholic Church.

It is impossible to understand this truth, indeed it is impossible to
make any sense at all of European history, if we accept that story of
the decline which is currently put forward in anti-Catholic academies,
and which has seemed sufficient to anti-Catholic historians.

_Their_ version is, briefly, this: The Roman Empire, becoming corrupt
and more vicious through the spread of luxury and through a sort of
native weakness to be discovered in the very blood of the
Mediterranean, was at last invaded and overwhelmed by young and
vigorous tribes of Germans. These brought with them all the strength of
those native virtues which later rejected the unity of Christendom and
began the modern Protestant societies—which are already nearly atheist
and very soon will be wholly so.

A generic term has been invented by these modern and false historians
whose version I am here giving; the vigorous, young, uncorrupt, and
virtuous tribes which are imagined to have broken through the
boundaries of the effete Empire and to have rejuvenated it, are grouped
together as “Teutonic:” a German strain very strong numerically,
superior also to what was left of Roman civilization in virile power,
is said to have come in and to have taken over the handling of affairs.
One great body of these Germans, the Franks, are said to have taken
over Gaul; another (the Goths, in their various branches) Italy and
Spain. But most complete, most fruitful, and most satisfactory of all
(they tell us) was the eruption of these vigorous and healthy pagans
into the outlying province of Britain, which they wholly conquered,
exterminating its original inhabitants and colonizing it with their
superior stock.

“It was inevitable” (the anti-Catholic historian proceeds to admit)
“that the presence of uncultured though superior men should accelerate
the decline of arts in the society which they thus conquered. It is
further to be deplored that their simpler and native virtues were
contaminated by the arts of the Roman clergy and that in some measure
the official religion of Rome captured their noble souls; for that
official religion permitted the poison of the Roman decline to affect
all the European mind—even the German mind—for many centuries. But at
the same time this evil effect was counter-balanced by the ineradicable
strength and virtues of the Northern barbaric blood. This sacred
Teutonic blood it was which brought into Western Europe the subtlety of
romantic conceptions, the true lyric touch in poetry, the deep
reverence which was (till recently) the note of their religion, the
love of adventure in which the old civilization was lacking, and a vast
respect for women. At the same time their warrior spirit evolved the
great structure of feudalism, the chivalric model and the whole
military ideal of mediæval civilization.

“Is it to be wondered at that when great new areas of knowledge were
opened up in the later fifteenth century by suddenly expanded travel,
by the printing press, and by an unexpected advance in physical
science, the emancipation of the European mind should have brought this
pure and barbaric stock to its own again?

“In proportion as Teutonic blood was strong, in that proportion was the
hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the hold upon men of Catholic
tradition, shaken in the early sixteenth century; and before that
century had closed the manly stirp of North Germany, Holland,
Scandinavia and England, had developed the Protestant civilization a
society advancing, healthy, and already the master of all rivals;
destined soon to be, if it be not already, supreme.”

Such is not an exaggerated summary of what the anti-Catholic school of
history gave us from German and from English universities (with the
partial aid of anti-Catholic academic forces within Catholic countries)
during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

There went with this strange way of rewriting history a flood of wild
hypotheses presented as fact. Thus Parliaments (till lately admired)
were imagined—and therefore stated—to be Teutonic, non-Roman, therefore
non-Catholic in origin. The gradual decline of slavery was attributed
to the same miraculous powers in the northern pagans; and in general
whatever thing was good in itself or was consonant with modern ideas,
was referred back to this original source of good in the business of
Europe: the German tribes.

Meanwhile the religious hatred these false historians had of
civilization, that is, of Roman tradition and the Church, showed itself
in a hundred other ways: the conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was
represented by them as the victory of a superior people over a degraded
and contemptible one: the Reconquest of Spain by our race over the
Asiatics as a disaster: its final triumphant instrument, the
Inquisition, which saved Spain from a Moorish ravage was made out a
monstrosity. Every revolt, however obscure, against the unity of
European civilization in the Middle Ages (notably the worst revolt of
all, the Albigensian), was presented as a worthy uplifting of the human
mind against conditions of bondage. Most remarkable of all, the actual
daily life of Catholic Europe, the habit, way of thought and manner of
men, during the period of unity—from, say, the eighth century to the
fifteenth—was simply omitted!

At the moment when history was struggling to become a scientific study,
this school of self-pleasing fairy tales held the field. When at last
history _did_ become a true scientific study, this school collapsed.
But it yet retains, as an inheritance from its old hegemony, a singular
power in the lower and more popular forms of historical writing; and
where the English language is spoken it is, even today, almost the only
view of European development which the general student can obtain.

It will be noted at the outset that the whole of the fantastic picture
which this old and now discredited theory presented, is based upon a
certain conception of what happened at the breakdown of the Roman
Empire.

Unless these barbaric German tribes _did_ come in and administrate,
unless they really _were_ very considerable in number, unless their
character in truth _was_ what this school postulated it to be—vigorous,
young, virtuous and all the rest of it—unless there _did indeed_ take
place a struggle between this imaginary great German nation and the
Mediterranean civilization, in which the former won and ruled as
conquerors over subject peoples; unless these primary axioms have some
historical truth in them, the theory which is deduced from them has no
historical value whatsoever.

A man may have a preference, as a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant
of North Germany or Scandinavia, for the type of man who originally
lived his degraded life outside the Roman Empire. He may, as an
anti-Catholic of any kind, hope that civilization was decadent through
Catholicism at the end of the united Roman Empire, and it may please
him to imagine that the coincidence of what was originally barbaric
with what is now Protestant German Europe is a proof of the former’s
original prowess. Nay, he may even desire that the non-Catholic and
non-traditional type in our civilization shall attain to a supremacy
which it certainly has not yet reached. [Footnote: I wrote that phrase
before the break up of Prussia and at a moment when Prussia was still
the idol of Oxford.] But the whole thing is only a pleasant (or
unpleasant) dream, something to imagine and not something to discover,
unless we have a solid historical foundation for the theory: to wit,
the destruction of the Roman Empire in the way which, and by the men
whom, the theory presupposes.

The validity of the whole scheme depends upon our answer to the
question, “What was the fall of the Roman Empire?”

If it was a conquest such as we have just seen postulated, and a
conquest actuated by the motives of men so described, then this old
anti-Catholic school, though it could not maintain its exaggerations
(though, for instance, it could not connect representative institutions
with the German barbarians) would yet be substantially true.

Now the moment documents began to be seriously examined and compared,
the moment modern research began to approach some sort of finality in
the study of that period wherein the United Roman Empire of the West
was replaced by sundry local Kingdoms, students of history
thenceforward (and in proportion to their impartiality) became more and
more convinced that the whole of this anti-Catholic attitude reposed
upon nothing more than assertion.

There was no conquest of effete Mediterranean peoples by vigorous
barbarians. The vast number of barbarians who lived as slaves within
the Empire, the far smaller number who were pressed or hired into the
military service of the Empire, the still smaller number which entered
the Empire as marauders, during the weakness of the Central Government
towards its end, were not of the sort which this anti-Catholic theory,
mistaking its desires for realities, pre-supposed.

The barbarians were not “Germans” (a term difficult to define), they
were of very mixed stocks which, if we go by speech (a bad guide to
race) were some of them Germanic, some Slav, some even Mongol, some
Berber, some of the old unnamed races: the Picts, for instance, and the
dark men of the extreme North and West.

They had no conspicuous respect for women of the sort which should
produce the chivalric ideal.

They were not free societies, but slave-owning societies.

They did not desire, attempt, or even dream, the destruction of the
Imperial power: that misfortune—which was gradual and never complete—in
so far as it came about at all, came about in spite of the barbarians
and not by their conscious effort.

They were not numerous; on the contrary, they were but handfuls of men,
even when they appeared as successful pillagers and raiders over the
frontiers. When they came in large numbers, they were wiped out.

They did not introduce any new institutions or any new ideas.

Again, you do not find, in that capital change from the old
civilization to the Dark Ages, that the rise of legend and of the
romantic and adventurous spirit (the sowing of the modern seed)
coincides with places where the great mass of barbaric slaves are
settled, or where the fewer barbaric pillagers or the regular barbaric
soldiers in the Roman Army pass. Romance appears hundreds of years
later, and it _appears more immediately and earliest in connection with
precisely those districts in which the passage of the few Teutonic,
Slavonic and other barbarians had been least felt_.

There is no link between barbaric society and the feudalism of the
Middle Ages; there is no trace of such a link. There is, on the
contrary, a very definite and clearly marked historical sequence
between Roman civilization and the feudal system, attested by
innumerable documents which, once read and compared in their order,
leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the mediæval civilization
repose on purely Roman origins.

In a word, the gradual cessation of central Imperial rule in Western
Europe, the failure of the power and habit of one united organization
seated in Rome to color, define and administrate the lives of men, was
an internal revolution; it did not come from without. It was a change
from within; it was nothing remotely resembling an external, still less
a barbaric, conquest from without.

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old,
failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local
government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five
hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened;
the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in
each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry
soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the
local “palaces” as they were called, of Roman administration, secured
such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and,
conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as
the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what
happened, and that is all that happened.

As an historical phenomenon it is what I have called it—enormous. It
most vividly struck the imagination of men. The tremors and the
occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms of this change of
base from the old high civilization to the Dark Ages, singularly
impressed the numerous and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors,
their astonishment, their speculations as to the result, have come down
to us highly emphasized. We feel after all those centuries the shock
which was produced on the literary world of the day by Alaric’s sack of
Rome, or by the march of the Roman auxiliary troops called “Visigoths”
through Gaul into Spain, or by the appearance of the mixed horde
called—after their leaders—“Vandals” in front of Hippo in Africa. But
what we do _not_ feel, what we do _not_ obtain from the contemporary
documents, what was a mere figment of the academic brain in the
generation now just passing away, is that anti-Catholic and
anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient civilization as
conquered by men of another and of a better stock who have since
developed the supreme type of modern civilization, and whose contrast
with the Catholic world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded as
the principle of life in Europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact
in European history.

The reader will not be content with a mere affirmation, though the
affirmation is based upon all that is worth counting in modern
scholarship. He will ask what, then, did really happen? After all,
Alaric did sack Rome. The Kings of the Franks were Belgian chieftains,
probably speaking (at first) Flemish as well as Latin. Those of the
Burgundians were probably men who spoke that hotchpotch of original
barbaric, Celtic and Roman words later called “Teutonic dialects,” as
well as Latin. The military officers called (from the original
recruitment of their commands) “Goths,” both eastern and western, were
in the same case. Even that mixed mass of Slav, Berber, escaped slaves
and the rest which, from original leaders was called in North Africa
“Vandal,” probably had some considerable German nucleus.

The false history has got superficial ground to work upon. Many
families whose origins came from what is now German-speaking Central
Europe ruled in local government during the transition, and distinct
though small tribes, mainly German in speech, survived for a short time
in the Empire. Like all falsehood, the falsehood of the “Teutonic
theory” could not live without an element of truth to distort, and it
is the business of anyone who is writing true history, even in so short
an essay as this, to show what that ground was and how it has been
misrepresented.

In order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly
represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our
united civilization had in its first five centuries reposed, was the
_Roman Army_. By which I do not mean that the number of soldiers was
very large compared with the civilian population, but that the organ
which was vital in the State, the thing that really counted, the
institution upon which men’s minds turned, and which they thought of as
the foundation of all, was the military institution.

The original city-state of the Mediterranean broke down a little before
the beginning of our era.

When (as always ultimately happens in a complex civilization of many
millions) self-government had broken down, and when it was necessary,
after the desperate faction fights which that breakdown had produced,
to establish a strong centre of authority, the obvious and, as it were,
necessary person to exercise that authority (in a State constituted as
was the Roman State) was the Commander-in-Chief of the army; all that
the word “Emperor”—the Latin word _Imperator_—means, is a
commander-in-chief.

It was the Army which made and unmade Emperors; it was the Army which
designed and ordered and even helped to construct the great roads of
the Empire. It was in connection with the needs of the Army that those
roads were traced. It was the Army which secured (very easily, for
peace was popular) the civil order of the vast organism. It was the
Army especially which guarded its frontiers against the uncivilized
world without; upon the edge of the Sahara and of the Arabian desert;
upon the edge of the Scotch mountains; upon the edge of the poor, wild
lands between the Rhine and Elbe. On those frontiers the garrisons made
a sort of wall within which wealth and right living could accumulate,
outside which small and impoverished bodies of men destitute of the
arts (notably of writing) save in so far as they rudely copied the
Romans or were permeated by adventurous Roman commerce, lived under
conditions which, in the Celtic hills, we can partially appreciate from
the analogy of ancient Gaul and from tenacious legends, but of which in
the German and Slavonic sand-plains, marshes and woods we know hardly
anything at all.

Now this main instrument, the Roman Army—the instrument, remember,
which not only preserved civil functions, but actually created the
master of all civic functions, the Government—went through three very
clear stages of change in the first four centuries of the Christian
era—up to the year A.D. 400 or so. And it is the transformation of the
Roman Army during the first four centuries which explains the otherwise
inexplicable change in society just afterwards, in the fifth and sixth
centuries—that is, from 400 to 600 A.D. The turn from the full
civilization of Rome to the beginning of the Dark Ages.

In its first stage, during the early Empire, just as the Catholic
Church was founded and was beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still
theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. [Footnote: A soldier was
still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a
soldier as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a
slave, was in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the soldiers
were almost entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from slave
stock, the soldiers themselves were free citizens always.]

As a matter of fact the Army was already principally professional, and
it was being recruited even in this first stage very largely from the
territories Rome had conquered.

Thus we have Cæsar raising a Gallic legion almost contemporaneous with
his conquest of Gaul. But for a long time after, well into the
Christian era, the Army was conceived of in men’s minds as a sort of
universal institution rooted in the citizenship which men were still
proud to claim throughout the Empire, and which belonged only to a
minority of its inhabitants; for the majority were slaves.

In the second phase (which corresponded with the beginning of a decline
in letters and in the arts, which carries us through the welter of
civil wars in the third century and which introduces the remodeled
Empire at their close) the Army was becoming purely professional and at
the same time drawn from whatever was least fortunate in Roman society.
The recruitment of it was treated much after the fashion of a tax; the
great landed proprietors (who, by a parallel development in the
decline, were becoming the chief economic feature in the Roman State)
were summoned to send a certain number of recruits from their estates.

Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as were the conditions of
military service, it gave them civic freedom, certain honors, a certain
pay, and a future for their children. The poorer freed men would also
go at the command of their lord (though only of course a certain
proportion—for the conscription was very light compared with modern
systems, and was made lighter by reënlistment, long service, absence of
reserves, and the use of veterans).

During this second stage, while the Army was becoming less and less
civic, and more and more a profession for the destitute and the
unfortunate, the unpopularity and the ignorance of military service
among the rest of the population, was increasing. The average citizen
grew more and more divorced from the Army and knew less and less of its
conditions. He came to regard it partly as a necessary police force or
defence of his frontiers, partly as a nuisance to him at home. He also
came to regard it as something with which he had nothing to do. It
lived a life separate from himself. It governed (through the power of
the Emperor, its chief); it depended on, and also supported or re-made,
the Imperial Court. But it was external, at the close of the Empire, to
general society.

Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, and _the habit grew up of
offering the hungry tribes outside the pale of the Empire the advantage
of residence within it on condition that they should serve as Roman
soldiers_.

The conception of territories within the Empire which were affiliated
and allied to it rather than absorbed by it, was a very ancient one.
That conception had lost reality so far as the old territories it had
once affected were concerned; but it paved the way for the parallel
idea of troops affiliated and allied to the Roman Army, part of that
army in discipline and organization, yet possessed of considerable
freedom within their own divisions.

Here we have not only a constant and increasing use of barbaric troops
drafted into the regular corps, but also _whole bodies which were more
and more frequently accepted “en bloc” and, under their local leaders,
as auxiliaries to the Roman forces_.

Some such bodies appear to have been settled upon land on the
frontiers, to others were given similar grants at very great distances
from the frontiers. Thus we have a small body of German barbarians
settled at Rennes in Brittany. And, again, within the legions (who were
all technically of Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from the
full civilization of Rome), the barbarian who happened to find himself
within that civilization tended more than did his non-barbarian fellow
citizen (or fellow slave) to accept military service. He would nearly
always be poorer; he would, unless his experience of civilization was a
long one, feel the hardship of military service less; and in this
second phase, while the army was becoming more sedentary (more
attached, that is, to particular garrisons), more permanent, more of an
hereditary thing handed on from father to son, and distinguished by the
large element of what we call “married quarters,” it was also becoming
more and more an army of men who, whether as auxiliaries or as true
Roman soldiers, were in _blood, descent, and to some extent in manners
and less in language, barbarians_. There were negroes, there were
probably Celts, there were Slavs, Mongols of the Steppes, more numerous
Germans, and so forth.

In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of
the fifth century, the army though not yet wholly barbaric, had already
become in its most vital part, barbaric. It took its orders, of course,
wholly from the Roman State, but great groups within it were only
partly even Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking, and were certainly
regarded both by themselves and by their Roman masters as non-Roman in
manners and in blood.

It must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an
attack upon the Empire entered the heads of these soldiers, but that
the very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them. Had you
proposed it they would not even have known what you meant. That a
particular section of the army should fight against a particular
claimant to the Empire (and therefore and necessarily in favor of some
other claimant) they thought natural enough; but to talk of an attack
upon the Empire itself would have seemed to them like talking of an
attack upon bread and meat, air, water and fire. The Empire was the
whole method and meaning of their lives.

At intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the Roman Empire was,
of course, subjected to attempted pillage by small and hungry robber
bands without its boundaries, but that had nothing to do with the
barbaric recruitment of the Roman Army save when such bands were caught
and incorporated. The army was always ready at a moment’s order to cut
such foreign raiders to pieces—and always did so successfully.

The portion of the Army chosen to repel, cut up, and sell into slavery
a marauding band of Slavs or Germans or Celts, always had Celts or
Slavs or Germans present in large numbers among its own soldiery. But
no tie of blood interfered with the business. To consider such a thing
would have been inconceivable to the opponents on either side. The
distinction was not between speech and speech, still less between vague
racial customs. It was a distinction between the Imperial Service on
the one side, against the outer, unrecognized, savage on the other.

As the machinery of Government grew weak through old age, and as the
recruitment of the Army from barbarians and the large proportion of
auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis of the whole State,
the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the
cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities, grew greater and
greater; but it never occurred to them to attack the Empire as such.
All they wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within
it, and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were compelled
outside its boundaries.

Sometimes they were transformed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer
extended by the Roman authorities; more often they snatched a raid when
there was for the moment no good garrison in their neighborhood. Then a
Roman force would march against them, and if they were not quick at
getting away would cut them to pieces. But with the progress of the
central decline the attacks of these small bands on the frontiers
became more frequent. Frontier towns came to regard such attacks as a
permanent peril and to defend themselves against them. Little groups of
raiders would sometimes traverse great districts from end to end, and
whether in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bands on land,
the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot (but principally to enjoy)
the conditions that civilization offered, grew more and more
persistent.

It must not be imagined, of course, that civilization had not
occasionally to suffer then, as it had had to suffer at intervals for a
thousand years past, the attacks of really large and organized barbaric
armies. [Footnote: For instance, a century and a half before the
breakdown of central Government, the Goths, a barbaric group, largely
German, had broken in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their
successors in the fifth century.] Thus in the year 404, driven by the
pressure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, a vast barbaric
host under one Radagasius pushed into Italy. The men bearing arms alone
were estimated (in a time well used to soldiery and to such estimates)
at 200,000.

But those 200,000 were wiped out. The barbarians were always wiped out
when they attempted to come as conquerors. Stilicho (a typical figure,
for he was himself of barbarian descent, yet in the regular Roman
service) cut to pieces one portion of them, the rest surrendered and
were sold off and scattered as slaves.

Immediately afterwards you have a violent quarrel between various
soldiers who desire to capture the Imperial power. The story is
fragmentary and somewhat confused: now one usurper is blamed, and now
another, but the fact common to all is that with the direct object of
usurping power a Roman General calls in barbarian bands of pillagers
(all sorts of small groups, Franks, Suevians, Vandals) to cross the
Rhine into Gaul, _not_ as barbarian “conquerors,” but as allies, to
help in a civil war.

The succeeding generation has left us ample evidence of the results. It
presents us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined
province by any means; only of a province which has been traversed in
certain directions by the march of barbarian robber bands, who
afterwards disappeared, largely in fighting among themselves.

We have, later, the very much more serious business of the Mongol
Attila and his Huns, leading the great outer mass of Germans and Slavs
into the Empire on an enormous raid. In the middle of the fifth
century, fifty years after the destruction of Radagasius, these
Asiatics, leading more numerous other barbaric dependents of theirs
from the Germanies and the eastern Slavonic lands, penetrated for two
brief moments into Northern Italy and Eastern Gaul. The end of that
business—infinitely graver though it was than the raids that came
before it—is just what one might have expected. The regular and
auxiliary disciplined forces of the Empire destroy the barbarian power
near Chalons, and the last and worst of the invasions is wiped out as
thoroughly as had been all the others.

In general, the barbaric eruptions into the Empire failed wholly as
soon as Imperial troops could be brought up to oppose them.

What, then, were the supposed barbaric successes? What was the real
nature of the action of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome; and
how, later, do we find local “kings” in the place of the Roman
Governors?

The real nature of the action of men like Alaric is utterly different
from the imaginary picture with which the _old_ picturesque popular
history recently provided us. That false history gives us the
impression of a barbarian Chieftain gathering his Clan to a victorious
assault on Rome. Consider the truth upon Alaric and contrast it with
this imaginary picture.

Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but from birth a Roman; at
eighteen years of age he was put by the Court in command of a small
Roman auxiliary force _originally_ recruited from the Goths. He was as
much a Roman officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any other
terms than those of the Roman Army, as any other one of his colleagues
about the throne. He had his commission from the Emperor Theodosius,
and when Theodosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he
counted Alaric’s division as among the most faithful of his Army.

It so happened, moreover, that those few original auxiliaries—mainly
Goths by race—were nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric
survived. The remnant of his division was recruited, we know not how,
but probably from all kinds of sources, to its old strength. It was
still called “Gothic,” though now of the most mixed origin, and it was
still commanded by himself in his character of a Roman General.

Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was rewarded by further
military dignities in the Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of
military titles and of important command, as are all soldiers.

Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of
auxiliaries, he asks for the title of _Magister Militum_, with the
dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor
refuses it. One of the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric,
and suggests to him that he might gather other auxiliary troops under
his command, and make things uncomfortable for his superiors. Alaric
rebels, marches through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece,
and down into the Peloponesus; the regulars march against him
(according to some accounts) and beat him back into Albania.

There ends his first adventure. It is exactly like that of a hundred
other Roman generals in the past, and so are his further adventures. He
remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and makes peace with the
Government—still enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor.

He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in Italy, but his
army is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the armies in Italy—under a
general, by the way, as barbaric in mere descent as was Alaric, but,
like Alaric, wholly Roman in training and ideas.

The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman
service, and is motived, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of
years before, by the ambitions of generals.

Alaric does not lose his commission even after his second adventure; he
begins to intrigue between the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman
Empire. The great invasion under Radagasius interrupts this civil war.
That invasion was for Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman
officer, an invasion of barbaric enemies. That these enemies should be
called by this or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him. They
come from outside the Empire and are therefore, in his eyes, cattle. He
helps to destroy them, and destroyed they are—promptly and thoroughly.

When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had the opportunity to renew
the civil wars within the Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay
that were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general (himself, by
the way, a Vandal in descent), admitted Alaric’s right to arrears of
pay, but just at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue
which was based, like all the real movements of the time, on
differences of religion, not of race. Stilicho, suspected of attempting
to restore paganism, is killed. In the general confusion certain of the
families of the auxiliaries garrisoned in Italy are massacred by the
non-military population. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion
against the Imperial authority, these auxiliaries join him.

The total number of Alaric’s men was at this moment very small; they
were perhaps 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about them. They
were simply a body of discontented soldiers; they had not come from
across the frontier; they were not invaders; they were part of the long
established and regular garrisons of the Empire; and, for that matter,
many garrisons and troops of equally barbaric origin, sided with the
regular authorities in the quarrel. Alaric marches on Rome with this
disaffected Roman Army, claiming that he has been defrauded of his due
in salary, and leaning upon the popularity of the dead Stilicho, whose
murder he says he will avenge. His thirty thousand claim the barbarian
slaves within the city, and certain sums of money which had been, the
pretext and motive of his rebellion.

As a result of this action the Emperor promises Alaric his regular
salary as a general, and a district which he may not only command, but
plant with his few followers. Even in the height of his success, Alaric
again demands the thing which was nearest his heart, the supreme and
entirely Roman title of _Magister Militum_, the highest post in the
hierarchy of military advancement. But the Emperor again refuses to
give that. Alaric again marches on Rome, a Roman officer followed by a
rebellious Roman Army. He forces the Senate to make Attalus nominal
Emperor of the West, and Attalus to give him the desired title, his
very craving for which is most significant of the Roman character of
the whole business. Alaric then quarrels with his puppet, deprives him
of the insignia of the Empire, and sends them to Honorius; quarrels
again with Honorius, reënters Rome and pillages it, marches to Southern
Italy, dies, and his small army is dismembered.

There is the story of Alaric as it appears from documents and as it was
in reality. There is the truth underlying the false picture with which
most educated men were recently provided by the anti-Roman bias of
recent history.

Certainly the story of Alaric’s discontent with his salary and the
terms of his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder of the
capital, shows how vastly different was the beginning of the fifth
century from the society of three hundred years before. It is
symptomatic of the change, and it could only have been possible at a
moment when central government was at last breaking down. But it is
utterly different in motive and in social character from the vague
customary conception of a vast barbarian “invasion,” led by a German
“war lord” pouring over the Alps and taking Roman society and its
capital by storm. It has no relation to such a picture.

If all this be true of the dramatic adventure of Alaric, which has so
profoundly affected the imagination of mankind, it is still truer of
the other contemporary events which false history might twist into a
“conquest” of the Empire by the barbarian.

There was no such conquest. All that happened was an internal
transformation of Roman society, in which the chief functions of local
government fell to the heads of local auxiliary forces in the Roman
Army. As these auxiliary forces were now mainly barbaric, so were the
personalities of the new local governors.

I have only dealt with the particular case of Alaric because it is the
most familiar, and the most generally distorted: a test, as it were, of
my theme.

But what is true of him is true of all other auxiliaries in the
Armies—even of the probably Slavonic Vandals. These did frankly loot a
province—North Africa—and they (and they alone of the auxiliary troops)
did revolt against the Imperial system and defy it for a century: but
the Vandals themselves were already, before their adventure, a part of
the Imperial forces; they were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up
of all the varied elements of rebellion present in the country; and
their experiment in separation went down at last forever before the
Imperial armies. Meanwhile the North African society on which the
rebels lived, and which, with their various recruits—Moors, escaped
slaves, criminals—they maladministered and half ruined, was and
remained Roman.

In the case of local Italian government the case is quite clear. There
was never any question of “invasion” or “conquest.”

Odoacer held a regular Roman commission; he was a Roman soldier:
Theodoric supplanted him by leave of, and actually under orders from,
the Emperor. The last and greatest example, the most permanent, Gaul,
tells the same story. The Burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted
after imploring the aid of the Empire and permission to settle. Clovis,
the Belgian Fleming, fights no Imperial Army. His forebears were Roman
officials: his little band of perhaps 8,000 men was victorious in a
small and private civil war which made him Master in the North over
other rival generals. He defended the Empire against the Eastern
barbaric German tribes. He rejoiced in the titles of Consul and
Patrician.

There was no destruction of Roman society, there was no breach of
continuity in the main institutions of what was now the Western
Christian world; there was no considerable admixture (in these local
civil wars) of German, Slav, or outer Celtic blood—no appreciable
addition at least to the large amount of such blood which, through the
numerous soldiers and much more numerous slaves, had already been
incorporated with the population of the Roman world.

But in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth
centuries local government _did_ fall into the hands of those who
happened to command the main local forces of the Roman Army, and these
were by descent barbarian because the Army had become barbarian in its
recruitment.

Why local government gradually succeeded the old centralized Imperial
Government, and how, in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern
nations, we will next examine.




IV
THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS


European civilization, which the Catholic Church has made and makes, is
by that influence still one. Its unity now (as for three hundred years
past) is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of the Reformation.
The earlier wounds have been healed; that modern wound we hope may
still be healed—we hope so because the alternative is death. At any
rate unity, wounded or unwounded, is still the mark of Christendom.

That unity today falls into national groups. Those of the West in
particular are highly differentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call
it) is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish Peninsula (though
divided into five particular, and three main, regions, each with its
language, of which one, Portugal, is politically independent of the
rest) is another. The old European and Roman district of North Africa
is but partially re-occupied by European civilization. Italy has quite
recently appeared as another united national group. The Roman province
of England has (south of the border) formed one united nation for a
longer period than any of the others. To England Scotland has been
added.

How did these modern nations arise in the transformation of the Roman
Empire from its old simple pagan condition to one complex Christian
civilization? How came there to be also nations exterior to the Empire;
old nations like Ireland, new nations like Poland? We must be able to
answer this question if we are to understand, not only that European
civilization has been continuous (that is, one in time as well as one
in spirit and in place), but also if we are to know _why_ and _how_
that continuity was preserved. For one we are and will be, all
Europeans. The moment something threatens our common morals from
within, we face it, however tardily. We have forgotten what it is to
feel a threat from without: but it may come.

We are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of
the rise of the European nations. This explanation tells us that great
numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman Empire, conquered it,
established themselves as masters, and parceled out its various
provinces.

We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted,
destroys a man’s historic sense of Europe.

We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of
civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded
history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord’s birth; during
the height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the
fourth and the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization
seriously, and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed.
It was in the natural course of things this should be so.

I say “in the natural course of things.” Dreadful as the irruption of
barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale,
the _conquest_ of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily
impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to _destroy_ the
civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it.
But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner
upon civilized men. Now to impose one’s view and manner, _dare leges_
(to give laws), is to conquer.

Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army
with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can
always ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman
Empire the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the
better of the barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians
a hundred years before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not
broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred
years later the Roman armies had the better of another similar horde of
barbarians, the host of Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here
again the vast multitude lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery.
We have seen how the Roman generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed
them.

But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain
auxiliary troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces
of their original tribal character, and probably preserved for a
generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the
original barbaric tongues) assumed greater and greater importance in
the Roman Army towards the end of the imperial period—that is, towards
the end of the fourth, and in the beginning of the fifth, centuries
(say, 350-450).

We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in
importance within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as
Roman soldiers, and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that
they had that importance, or that their officers and generals, acting
as _Roman_ officers and generals, could play the part they did.

The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as
Romans. They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire
enjoyed. They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the
State _in_ which—not _against_ which—they warred. They acted wholly
within the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or
tradition of a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in
some part sprang from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no
living communication with it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals
lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which
guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great and
populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and the bishoprics
of the Catholic Church. Outside was a wilderness with which they had
nothing to do.

Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of
barbarian “conquest”), let us set out to explain that state of affairs
which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids
into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in
middle age.

Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and
wrote his classical work at such a date after Alaric’s Roman adventure
and Radagasius’ defeat that the life of a man would span the distance
between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those
events and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a
spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of that generation might be
born before the year 500. Such a man would have stood towards
Radagasius’ raid, the last futile irruption of the barbarian, much as
men, old today, in England, stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean
War, to the second Napoleon in France, to the Civil War in the United
States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in
his later years, this is what he would have seen:

In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone
on, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now
somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of
free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom
not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as
dependents.

In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic
Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and
headship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the
settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the
main popular preoccupation. And everywhere _save in Northern Gaul_ he
would have perceived small groups of men, wealthy, connected with
government, often bearing barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still
partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now these few men were as a
rule of a special set in religion. They were called _Arians_; heretics
who differed in religion from the mass of their fellow citizens very
much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today differ
from the great mass of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point of
capital importance.

The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian
(with the Mass, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out
of communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers.
They had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial
history. At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the
Imperial Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by
family tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to
rationalize the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a “swagger.” They
thought it an odd title to eminence. And this little vanity had two
effects. It cut them off from the mass of their fellow citizens in the
Empire. It made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to
disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great
Catholic body—the troops led by the local governors of Northern France.

We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the
state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the
beginning of the Dark Ages.

The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would
have been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of
command, were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman
Army. There had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its
corporate life. Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the
old imperial insignia.

The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the
inns, was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium,
or one of his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British
colony today, though that province is virtually independent, will
handle coins stamped with the effigies of English Kings. But though the
coinage was entirely imperial, he would, upon a passport or a receipt
for toll and many another official document he handled, often see side
by side with and subordinate to the imperial name, the name of _the
chief of the local government_.

This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we
must not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united
and truly “Imperial” form of government which had covered all
civilization two hundred to one hundred years before.

_The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred
years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the
Roman Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators
in the capitals of the Roman provinces_.

They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial
powers within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no
positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central
power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but
it made no attempt to act.

Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which
brought him to the centres of local government throughout the Western
Empire. Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has,
let us say, successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has
necessitated his obtaining official documents. He must, that is, come
into touch with _officials_ and with the actual _Government_ in Spain.
Two hundred years before he would have seen the officials of, and got
his papers from, a government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of
the Emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy
on the seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the
old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are
still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman
character; has anything changed at all?

Let us see.

To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the
“_Palatium_.” This word does not mean “Palace.”

When we say “palace” today we mean the house in which lives the real or
nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St.
James’ Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.

But the original word _Palatium_ had a very different meaning in late
Roman society. It signified the _official seat_ of Government, and in
particular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were
issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name
was originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the
Cæsars had their private house. As the mask of private citizenship was
gradually thrown off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years
before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more
and more true and absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more
the official centre of the Empire.

The term “_Palatium_” thus became consecrated to a particular use. When
the centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word
“_Palatium_” followed it; and at last it was applied to _local centres_
as well as to the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its
dignities and honors, in the whole of its official life, the _Palatium_
means the machine of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as
we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to
that Spanish _Palatium_ from which, throughout the five centuries of
Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsular had been locally governed. What
would he find?

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of
exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the
same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations, using
certain fixed formulæ, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No
local dialect was yet of the least importance. But he would also find
that the building was used for acts of authority, and that these acts
were performed in the name of a _certain person_ (who was no longer the
old Roman Governor) _and his Council_. It was this local person’s name,
rather than the Emperor’s, which usually—or at any rate more and more
frequently—appeared on the documents.

Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain,
and at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts
they ruled, the nations of our time and their royal families were to
spring.

The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this
person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia
and manner of Roman Government.

He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor’s delegate had sat: the
provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear
the official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his
symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the
Emperor’s local subordinates before him. But in two points this central
official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly
succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relied for power.

These two points were, first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful
and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not
habitually give himself an imperial Roman title, but was called _Rex_.

Let us consider these points separately.

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in
Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a
multitude of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there
devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most
important of whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not
been officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulæ
of administration were personal formulæ. Now and then he mentioned his
great officials, but he only mentioned them if he chose.

This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost
unconsciously substituted for the old Roman Governors, the _Rex_, was,
on the contrary, a part of his own Council, and all his formulæ of
administration mentioned the Council as his coadjutors and assessors in
administration. This was necessary above all (a most important point)
in anything that regarded the public funds.

It must not be imagined for a moment that the _Rex_ issued laws or
edicts, or (what was much more common and much more vital) levied
taxation under the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, these
great men about him. On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever
the Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could not do
otherwise because the whole machinery he had inherited presupposed
absolute power. But some things were already said to be done “with”
these great men: and it is of capital importance that we should note
this word “with.” The phrases of the official documents from that time
run more and more in one of half-a-dozen regular formulæ, all of which
are based upon this idea of the Council and are in general such words
as these: “So and so, _Rex_, ordered and commanded (_with his chief
men_) that so and so … should be done.”

As to the second point: we note the change of title. The authority of
the Palatium is a _Rex_; not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent
from the Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him,
but a _Rex_. Now what is the meaning of that word _Rex_?

It is usually translated by our word “King.” But it does not here mean
anything like what our word “King” means when we apply it today—or as
we have applied it for many centuries. It does not mean the ruler of a
large independent territory. It means a combination of two things when
it is used to name these local rulers in the later Roman Empire. It
means (1) The _chieftain_ of an auxiliary _group of soldiers_ who holds
an Imperial commission: and it means (2) That man acting as a local
governor.

Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years before, the
word _Rex_ had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty
surrounding district of Rome or of some similar neighboring and small
state. It had in the Latin language always retained some such
connotation. The word “_Rex_” was often used in Latin literature as we
use the word “King” in English: _i.e._, to describe the head of a state
great or small. But as applied to the local rulers of the fifth century
in Western Europe, it was not so used. It meant, as I have said,
Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries. A _Rex_ was not then, in
Spain, or in Gaul, a King in our modern sense of the word: he was only
the military head of a particular armed force. He was originally the
commander (hereditary or chosen or nominated by the Emperor) of an
auxiliary force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, when these
troops—originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric
district—changed by slow degrees into a body half police, half noble,
their original name would extend to the whole local army. The “Rex” of,
say, Batavian auxiliaries, the commander of the Batavian Corps, would
probably be a man of Batavian blood, with hereditary position and would
be called “_Rex Bataviorum_.” Afterwards, when the recruiting was
mixed, he still kept that title and later still, when the _Batavii_, as
such, had disappeared, his fixed title would remain.

There was no similarity possible between the word _Rex_ and the word
_Imperator_, any more than there is between the words “Miners’ Union”
or “Trade Conference” and the word “England.” There was, of course, no
sort of equality. A Roman General in the early part of the process
planning a battle would think of a _Rex_ as we think of a Divisionary
General. He might say: “I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My
auxiliaries (Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) I shall put here.
Send for their ‘Rex’ and I will give him his orders.”

A _Rex_ in this sense was a subject and often an unimportant subject of
the _Imperator_ or Emperor: the _Imperator_ being, as we remember, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which institution the Roman
State or Empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries.

When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of
course after the Roman fashion and forming one body with the Roman
forces, but contracted for “in bulk,” as it were) the chieftains of
these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official
language, _Reges_. Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was
the _Rex_ of his officially appointed auxiliary force; and since the
nucleus of that force had _once_ been a small body of Goths, and since
Alaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because
he had once been, by inheritance, a chieftain of the Goths, the word
_Rex_ was attached to his Imperial Commission in the Roman Army, and
there was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe with
which his command had originally been connected. He was _Rex_ of the
Roman auxiliary troops called “Goths.” The “_Rex_” in Spain was “_Rex
Gotorum_,” not “_Rex Hispaniæ_”—that was altogether a later idea. The
Rex in Northern France was not _Rex Galliæ_, he was “_Rex Francorum_.”
In each case he was the _Rex_ of the particular auxiliary troop from
which his ancestors—sometimes generations before—had originally drawn
their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers in the Roman
Army.

Thus you will have the _Rex Francorum_, or King of the Franks, so
styled in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because
any body of “Franks” still survived as a separate corps—they had been
but a couple of regiments or so [Footnote: We have documentary record.
The greater part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized
with their General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before
and had long disappeared—but because the original title had derived
from a Roman auxiliary force of Franks.

In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the
reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a
hierarchy of officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested in
the hands of a man called “_Rex_,” that is, “Commander” of such and
such an auxiliary force; Commander of the Franks, for instance, or
Commander of the Goths. He still commanded in the year 550 a not very
large military force on which local government depended, and in this
little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because, as
we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the stuff of the army had
become barbaric and the armed force was mainly of barbaric recruitment.
But that small military force was also, and as certainly, very mixed
indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman would enlist, for it had
privileges and advantages of great value; [Footnote: Hence the “leges”
or codes specially regulating the status of these Roman troops and
called in documents the laws of the “Goths” or “Burgundians,” as the
case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these,
sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the mass of them are
obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether the
members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic,
Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins.
Very shortly after—by, say, 600, at latest—the Army had become a
universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of
race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary
right to certain families and called their “laws.”

Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the
mind of a _Rex_. All these _Reges_ without exception held their
military office and power originally by a commission from the Empire.
All of them derived their authority from men who had been regularly
established as Imperial functionaries. When the central power of the
Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the _Rex_ as a fact administered
the whole machinery without control.

But no _Rex_ ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred
for independence against the Emperor. The _Rex_, the local man,
undertook all government simply because the old Government above him,
the central Government, had failed. No _Rex_ ever called himself a
local _Imperator_ or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the
most significant thing in all the transition between the full
civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman
armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought
to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they
seized. No local governor of the later transition, no _Rex_ of Vandal,
Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt of such a thing.
He might fight another local _Rex_ to get part of his taxing-power or
his treasure. He might take part in the great religious quarrels (as in
Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to fight
against the _Empire_ as such or to attempt _conquest_ and _rule_ over a
“subject population” would have meant nothing to him; in theory the
Empire was still under one control.

There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the
machine of government during the period of its degradation and
transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority.
Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles,
Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of
them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman
administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of
administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official
name of _Palatium_.

Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their
small armed forces a military institution descended and derived from
the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of
their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote:
The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized
through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course,
what we call “Teutonic Languages” are in reality half Roman, long
before we get our first full documents in the eighth and ninth
centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a
soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it,
not as even conceivably an enemy of it.

When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those
changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.

The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his
“kingdom” between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with
its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided
into two, still less that there has been what today we call
“annexation” or “partition” of states. It simply means that the honor
and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who
take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather
taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that
the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with
the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast mass of public
work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and
so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial.
This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life
and was only in theory dependent upon the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no
more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote:
Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education
by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate
modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism
was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western:
Greek and Latin.]

The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior
Roman title, such as _Vir Illuster_, as an Englishman today might be
called “Sir Charles So and So” or “Lord So and So,” never anything
more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted
directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the
old popular Roman customs, such as largesse and procession, upon his
induction into that office.

Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply
remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if
one did not know more about that society, that he should have done
this.

The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly
merged into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger mass
of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after
century before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we
wonder, at first, why its moral unity did not continue to be
represented by a central Monarch. Though the civilization continued to
decline, its forms should, one would think, have remained unchanged and
the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the Roman
Emperor at Constantinople should have endured indefinitely. As a fact,
the memory of the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually
forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local government as he got weaker also got
more isolated. He came to coining his own money, to treating directly
as a completely independent ruler. At last the idea of “kings” and
“kingdoms” took shape in men’s minds. Why?

The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the
last links with the Roman Empire of the East—that is, with the supreme
head at Constantinople—gradually dissolved in the West, and that the
modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is
to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men
around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done.

This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were
transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague
underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic,
Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners,
and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.

On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners
were the reality of that time.

We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the
nature of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics.
In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had
concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men
and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had
come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions
lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves.

As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the
middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of
unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands
waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of
the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the
_Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the
Council of Great Men) to new holders.

The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the
“chieftain” of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing
that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of
these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race
(which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It
explains both what happened and what was to happen.

That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should
thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind—the result of
centuries of Roman development in that direction—is the key to all the
material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise,
with an object lesson for our own politics today.

The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary
concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few
great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of
the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial
power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name,
and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to
reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the
first element in that standing “Council of Great Men” which was the
mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official,
imperial, absolute, local power.

There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important
element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it
consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew
its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else,
power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually
administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.

Throughout Western Europe at that moment men’s interest and
preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion.
The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now
decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter.
The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious
organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it,
had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind
(200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to
be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human
beings (400 A.D.).

The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for “creed”
he will read “capital,” and for the “Faith,” “industrial civilization.”
For just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in
pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as
unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our
time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the
_unity_ and _exactitude_ of religion. That the religion to which the
Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should
triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled
themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to
_this_ they sank all other things.

The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil
and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a
spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense
preoccupation of men’s minds, two factors already appear in the fourth
century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The
first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as
possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere
welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so
unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is
Arianism: to which I now return.

Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its
duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of
its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent
centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy
opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.

The Emperor’s Court did indeed at last—after many variations—abandon
it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that
Arianism stood for the “wealthy” and “respectable” in life.

Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in
the Roman armies, the greater part (the “Goths,” for instance, as the
generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning)
had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources,
and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was “the
thing.” Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and
immigrants accepting Protestantism as “gentlemanly” or “progressive”
(some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in
Spain and the _Rex_ in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the
descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the
“court” and “upper class” way of thinking. They were “Arians” and proud
of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts
was small, but their irritant effect was great.

It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.

No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the
final form of the Church.

The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe
was lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation
to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or
later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed,
as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination
and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had
Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.

Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who
were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a
powerful court, _one_ only was not Arian.

That one was the _Rex Francorum_ or chieftain of the little barbaric
auxiliary force of “Franks” which had been drawn into the Roman system
from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time
when the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and
the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town
of Tournai.

A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably
called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language),
succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably
head of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in
the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth
century. Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with
other forces of the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the
barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiacum,
and succeeded to the power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he
could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was
mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had
already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian _Rex_;
but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.

The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an
auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century,
as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who
has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear
trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and
baptized by _Catholics_ and not by _Arians_—in the midst of that
enormous struggle.

Clodovicus—known in history as Clovis—came from a remote corner of
civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of
Arianism; they had no tradition that it was “the thing” or “smart” to
adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of
Europeans. When, therefore, this _Rex Francorum_ was settled in
Paris—about the year 500—and was beginning to administer local
government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown
with the popular feeling and against the Arian _Reges_ in Italy and
Spain.

The new armed forces of the _Rex Francorum_, a general levy continuing
the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle
carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the
Arian _Rex_ out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For
a moment it seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace
against the Arian officials in Italy itself.

At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against
the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the _Palatium_ of
this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and
the Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the _Rex
Francorum’s_ independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very
strong lever for breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost
forgotten administrative unity of the Roman world.

Under such forces—the power of the Bishop in each town and district,
the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great
landowners, the occupation of the _Palatium_ and its official machinery
by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces—Western Europe, slowly,
very slowly, shifted its political base.

For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the
effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of
taking, the Imperial title; the roads were still kept up, the Roman
tradition in the arts of life, though coarsened, was never lost. In
cooking, dress, architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was
Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only
lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradually lost all need for
such a centre.

Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had
always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even
(through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the
old Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that
civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always
find the civilian authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our
Europe as the _Respublica_ or “common weal.” It was already beginning
to become a mass of small and often overlapping divisions. The things
that are older than, and lie beneath, all exact political institutions,
the popular legends, the popular feelings for locality and
countrysides, were rising everywhere; the great landowners were
appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own estates (though
the many estates of one man were often widely separated).

The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity
of jargons.

Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies
and Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in
Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in
North Africa, we may presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers
resumed its sway; Punic also may have survived in certain towns and
villages there. [Footnote: We have evidence that it survived in the
fifth century.] But men paid no attention to the origin of such
diversities. The common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed
Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the Church, now everywhere
supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the
principle of life throughout all this great area of the West.

So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt annexed to Gaul that had
risen in the Germanies to the east of the Rhine; so with nearly all
Italy and Dalmatia, and what today we call Switzerland and a part of
what today we call Bavaria and Baden; so with what today we call Spain
and Portugal; and so (after local adventures of a parallel sort,
followed by a reconquest against Arians by Imperial officers and
armies) with North Africa and with a strip of Andalusia.

But _one_ part of _one_ province _did_ suffer a limited and local—but
sharp—change: on one frontier belt, narrow but long, came something
much more nearly resembling a true barbaric success, and the results
thereof, than anything which the Continent could show. There was here a
real breach of continuity with Roman things.

This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of
Britain; and we have next to ask: “_What happened in Britain when the
rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the breakdown of
central Imperial power?_” Unless we can answer that question we shall
fail to possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe and of the
early perils in spite of which that continuity has survived.

I turn, therefore, next to answer the question: “What happened in
Britain?”




V
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?


I have now carried this study through four sections. My object in
writing it is to show that the Roman Empire never perished but was only
transformed; that the Catholic Church, which, in its maturity, it
accepted, caused it to survive and was, in that origin of Europe, and
has since remained, the soul of one Western civilization.

In the first chapter I sketched the nature of the Roman Empire, in the
second the nature of the Church within the Roman Empire before that
civilization in its maturity accepted the Faith. In the third I
attempted to lay before the reader that transformation and material
decline (it was also a _survival_), which has erroneously been called
“the fall” of the Roman Empire. In the fourth I presented a picture of
what society must have seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of
that transformation and at the entry into what are called the Dark
Ages: the beginnings of the modern European nations which have
superficially differentiated from the old unity of Rome.

I could wish that space had permitted me to describe a hundred other
contemporary things which would enable the reader to seize both the
magnitude and the significance of the great change from Pagan to
Christian times. I should in particular have dwelt upon the
transformation of the European mind with its increasing gravity, its
ripening contempt for material things, and its resolution upon the
ultimate fate of the human soul, which it now had firmly concluded to
be personally immortal and subject to a conscious destiny.

This doctrine of _personal_ immortality is the prime mark of the
European and stamps his leadership upon the world.

Its original seat—long before history begins—lay perhaps in Ireland,
later in Britain, certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or
in Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece and even had some influence
upon the Jews before the Romans subdued them. But it remained an
opinion, an idea looming in the dark, till it was seen strong and
concrete in the full light of the Catholic Church. Oddly enough,
Mahomet, who in most things reacted towards weakness of flesh and
spirit, adopted this Western doctrine fully; it provided his system
with its vigor. Everywhere is that doctrine of immortality the note of
superior intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with the
thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Everywhere does it accompany
health and decision.

Its only worthy counterpart (equally European but rare, uprooted and
private) is the bold affirmation of complete and final death.

The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and
the fifth was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by
its acceptation of the Faith.

To this I might have attached the continued carelessness for the
plastic arts and for much in letters, the continued growth in holiness,
and all that “salting,” as it were, which preserved civilization and
kept it whole until, after the long sequestration of the Dark Ages, it
should discover an opportunity for revival.

My space has not permitted me to describe these things, I must turn at
once to the last, and what is for my readers the chief, of the
historical problems presented by the beginning of the Dark Ages. That
problem is the fate of Britain.

The importance of deciding what happened in Britain when the central
government of Rome failed, does not lie in the fact that an historical
conclusion one way or the other can affect the truth. European
civilization is still one whether men see that unity or no. The
Catholic Church is still the soul of it, whether men know it or do not
know it. But the problem presented by the fate of Britain at that
critical moment when the provinces of the Roman Empire became
independent of any common secular control, has this practical
importance: that those who read it wrongly and who provide their
readers with a false solution (as the Protestant German school and
their copiers in English, Freeman, Green and the rest have done) those
who talk of “the coming of the English,” “the Anglo-Saxon conquest,”
and the rest, not only furnish arguments against the proper unity of
our European story but also produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such
men as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the
entry into the Dark Ages, take for granted many other things
historically untrue. Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else
that is historical truth: for instance, the character of the Normans;
and even contemporary and momentous truth before our eyes today: for
instance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. They not only
render an Englishman ignorant of his own nation and therefore of
himself, they also render all men ignorant of Europe: for a knowledge
of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the period 1530-1630 is the test
of European history: and if you are wrong on these two points you are
wrong on the whole.

A man who desires to make out that the Empire—that is European
civilization—was “conquered” by barbarians cannot today, in the light
of modern research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, or in
the valley of the Rhine. The old German thesis of a barbaric “conquest”
upon the Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has
necessarily been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries
to m

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