A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

It would seem as if Claudian, coming to the writing of Latin after a Greek education, was partly saved by that circumstance from the artistic fatuity which had become normal among the westerns as among the easterns. The need to think in a new speech may have vitalized his use of it. But he remained wholly pagan in his creed. And such pagan thinkers as Macrobius and Simplicius, though unoriginal in comparison with those whom they commented, reward attention in many ways better than do their contemporaries of the Church. What of permanent appeal there is in the teaching of Augustine comes largely from his early philosophic culture; and Ambrose has hardly anything in the way of serious or philosophic thought which he does not borrow from pagan lore. Boethius, the last of the ancient philosophers, was a Christian only in name, expounding its orthodox dogma as a lawyer might expound law: when he came to write his consolations in prison he went back to the ancient and universal ethic, putting aside his creed as he might a mask. The vogue of his book in the Dark Ages is the expression of thinking men’s satisfaction in a late Latin treatise which brooded gravely on life and death in terms of human feeling and wisdom, with no hint of the formulas of the priest.

On the side of science in particular and education in general the Christian tendency was increasingly repressive. When Christianity was established there were still grammar schools in every considerable town in the empire, and many higher schools in the great cities; and though for long the Christians were fain to use these schools, pagan as they were in character, by reason of their almost purely literary or rhetorical curriculum, the Church gradually let them die out, never even attempting a Christian system of education, apart from a few theological schools. Nor did the process of extinction of knowledge end there. Early in the fifth century Theodosius II forbade all public lecturing by non-official teachers; and a century later Justinian plundered and abolished the philosophical schools at Athens, thus ending the last vestige of the higher intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great fanatically discouraged literary culture; and in the East it soon became a matter of orthodox rule that the laity should not read the sacred books, the only literature that could well come in their way. Science so-called was practically a synonym for heresy: it was denounced as impious by zealous believers in the third century; and in the sixth we find Cosmas “Indicopleustes,” the Indian voyager, a Nestorian Christian, denouncing the pagan doctrine of the roundness of the earth, and religiously demonstrating that it is an oblong plane. Medicine had gone far under pagan auspices, and Antoninus Pius had provided for municipal physicians throughout the empire; but the Christians, seeing heresy in all science, put prayer and exorcism above leechcraft; the temple-schools of the healing God Æsculapius were closed with the rest, and medical like other science virtually died out of Christian hands, to be recovered from old Greek lore by the Saracens. Gregory the Great exhibits the superstition of an ignorant Asiatic.

What the world needed above all things was new study and real knowledge in place of rhetoric: the fatality of the Christian system was that it set up the conviction that all vital knowledge was contained in itself. Yet all the while the religious habit of mind, which saw in pious fraud a service to deity, had almost destroyed the rational conception of truth, so that a thousand years were to elapse before human testimony could return to the standards of Thucydides, or human judgment rise above a gross credulity. Had it been only in the West, overrun by barbarism, that the lights of knowledge and art went out, the barbarian invasion might be put as the cause; but the history of Christian Byzantium is the history of an intellectual arrest of a thousand years on the very soil of civilization.

§ 4. The Social Failure

Of the eastern Christian empire as it is left curtailed of more than half its area by the Moslem conquest, the one thing that cannot be predicated is progress or transformation. Here again it would be an error to regard Christianity as the cause of stagnation: the whole political science of antiquity had been markedly conservative; but it must be noted that historic Christianity absolutely endorsed the ideal of fixity. Only conditions of stimulating culture-contact could have preserved a vigorous mental life under its sway; and the condition of Byzantium was unhappily one of almost complete racial and religious isolation. The Byzantium of Justinian and Heraclius is almost the ideal of ossification; its very disorders are normal, the habitual outbreaks of a vicious organism. There is nothing in pagan history to compare with the chronic pandemonium set up in Christian Constantinople by the circus factions of blues and greens, whose mutual massacres in generation after generation outdid the slaughters of many civil wars. As painted by its own Christian censors, the Byzantine town population of all orders was at least as worthless as that of pagan Rome in its worst imperial days; it realized the ignorance and unprogressiveness of imperial China without the Chinese compensations of normal good nature, courtesy, domestic unity, and patient toil.

Industry indeed there must have been; it was perhaps the silk industry introduced by Justinian that began the economic salvation of the State; but the law prescribed a system of industrial caste, binding every man, as far as might be, to his father’s trade, which must have kept the working populace very much on the level of that of ancient Egypt. Nor can matters have been socially much better in the West, whether in Italy under Byzantine or Lombard rule, or in the new barbarian States, Arian and Catholic. Everywhere the old inequalities of law were rather worsened than cured, and no Christian teacher dreamed of curing them. The ideals of the most earnest among them, as Jerome and Paulinus, began and ended in mere pietism and physical self-mortification.

It is not surprising, then, that all over the Christian world the most salient social result of the creed was the institution of monasticism, a Christian adaptation of a usage long common in religious and down-trodden Egypt. Everything conduced to promote it. The spectacle of constant strife and sensuality in the cities moved suffering souls of the unworldly type to withdraw to solitude or the cloister; all the leading teachers applauded the ideal, while denouncing its abuses; and for multitudes of unfortunate or inferior types, avoiding toil or escaping tyranny, then as later, the life of the monk or even of the hermit, though poor, was one of relative ease and idleness, greatly preferable to that of the proletary, since all could count on being at least maintained by popular charity, if not enriched by the believers in their sanctity. To these types were added that of the ignorant fanatic, which seems to have been as numerous as that of the slothful, and which under monastic conditions seems to have become more fanatical than ever. Thus some of the best and much of the worse moral elements, the latter of course immensely predominating, combined to weaken the social fabric, the former by withdrawing their finer personalities from a world that doubly needed them; the latter by withdrawing hands from labour and widening the realm of ignorant faith. Some powerful personalities, as Basil and Chrysostom and Gregory, were bred in the monastic life; but in the main it was a mere impoverishment of civilization. In the critical period of Christian history the monks are often found zealous in works of rabid violence, such as the destruction of pagan temples and Jewish synagogues, and the horrible murder of the pagan girl-philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria; and they too had their furious dogmatic strifes, notably in the fourth and fifth centuries, when those of Egypt constituted themselves the champions of the orthodoxy (then impeached) of Origen, for no clear reason save perhaps the fact of his self-mutilation. But, as Christian historians have remarked, they seem to have done nothing to resist the ruinous onslaught of Islam, which above all things despised monks. For that matter, the hierarchy did no better. The hierocracy established in Spain under the Visigoths served so to emasculate or paralyse the race that after an undisturbed life of three hundred years it fell in a day before a handful of Moslem filibusters from North Africa.

There is reason to believe, finally, that the intellectual as well as the political abjection of the Christian mass in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa made multitudes ready material for Islam, even as sectarian hatreds made others welcome the conqueror, and resent only his toleration of their opponents. Christian faith availed so little to make head against the new faith which assailed it, that we must infer a partial paralysis on the Christian side as a result of Moslem success. Success was the theological proof of divine aid; and many calamities, such as earthquakes, had previously seemed to tell of divine wrath against the Christian world. Such arguments shook multitudes. Numbers apostatized at once; and when the Moslem rule was established from Jerusalem to Carthage, the Christian Church, tolerated only to be humiliated, dwindled to insignificance on its former soil. In the African provinces it absolutely disappeared; in the others it became incapable of moving either Arab or Frank to respect. Nestorian Christianity, already settled in Persia, was specially tolerated by the Saracens, as it had been by the Persians, because of its enmity to Christian Byzantium; but though it continued to subsist it was by toleration and not through strength. The Nestorian clergy and laity throve somewhat as Jews had done in Rome; but they made no headway against Islam, and some of the Asiatic States where they had been numerous fell away wholly to Mohammedanism. Thus was given once more the historic proof that any religion may in time be destroyed or degraded by brute force, provided only that the brute force be persistent, and efficiently applied.

What pagan Rome did not do, for lack of systematic effort or continuous purpose, Islam did with the greatest ease, the purpose and the effort being wholehearted. And when we compare the later civilization of the Saracens with that they overthrew, it is hard to feel that the world lost by the change. If monotheism had any civilizing virtue as against polytheism, it was the Moslems, not the Christians, who were monotheists; and the Moslem scorn of Christian man-worship and idolatry reproduced the old Christian tone towards paganism. On the side of morals, Moslem polygamy was indeed relatively evil; but on the other hand the giving of alms, so often claimed as a specially Christian virtue, was under Islam an absolute duty; Moslems could not hold Moslems as slaves; Islam knew no priestcraft; and it substantially excluded the common Christian evils of drunkenness and prostitution. Almost the only art carried on by the Byzantines from their pagan ancestors was that of architecture, their churches being often beautiful; and this art, as well as that of working in gold, the Saracens preserved; while it is to their later adoption of the ancient Greek science that the world owes the revival of knowledge after the night of the Dark Ages. Sculpture and painting were already become contemptible in Christian hands; and literature was in not much better case. It is to be noted, too, that the traditional blame of the Goths and Vandals for the disfigurement of ancient Rome is misplaced, the worst wreckers being the generals of Justinian and the inhabitants themselves, always ready to ruin a pagan memorial for the sake of building material.