When finally we seek to realize the aspect of the Hellenistic world in the time of Mohammed, in contrast with that of the age of Pericles; or the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in contrast with that of Hadrian, we are conscious of an immense loss of human faculty for beauty and joy, no less than for action. It is not too much to say that the Christian ideal of sanctity meant not only self-mortification and sadness but squalor in the individual life. Physical uncleanliness became a Christian virtue; and the mark of a city built in the Christian period came to be the absence of baths. Pagan Greece lives for ever in men’s thought as a dream of grace and beauty and enchanted speech; and though behind the shining vision of art and song there lingers immovably a sombre memory of strife and servitude, the art and the song are a deathless gift to mankind. At every summit of its attainment our civilization looks back to them with an unquenchable envy, an impotent desire, as of a race disinherited. To regain that morning glory of life is the spontaneous yearning of all who have gazed on the distant light of it. But the man who would wish to re-create the Constantinople of Justinian or Heraclius has not yet declared himself.
Dream for dream, the child-like creed of the God-crowded Hellas of Pheidias’ day, peopled with statues and crowned with temples of glorious symmetry, is an incomparably fairer thing than the tortured dogma of the Byzantine church, visually expressing itself in wretched icons, barbaric trappings, and infinite mummeries of ceremonial. Idolatry for idolatry, the adoration of noble statues by chanting bands of youths and maidens can have wrought less harm to head and heart than the prostration of their posterity before the abortions of Byzantine art. Superstition for superstition, there is nothing in old Hellene religion, with all its survivals of savage myth, to be compared for moral and mental abjection to the practice of the Christian Greeks, with their pilgrimages to Arabia to kiss Job’s dunghill, and their grovelling worship of dead men’s bones. Some Christian historians, seeking a vital test, have concluded that under paganism there was no good “life of the heart”; but whatever may be the modern superiority in this regard, there is none to be discerned in the Christian civilizations which in the seventh century still spoke the classic tongues of paganism.
In the West, where a spiritual power had begun obscurely to acquire a Roman empire which parodied the old, there is indeed a potential superiority predicable for the new. Gregory sending Augustine to convert the Britons is a fairer moral spectacle than that of Cæsar, bent on plunder, seeking to conquer them. But whatever might be the moral merit of a sincere fanaticism like that of Gregory, who trampled down culture as eagerly as he pushed propaganda, the life of too many Popes had already shown that the new Romanism was only to be Cæsarism with a difference, and that for the spiritual as for the temporal empire the great end was gold. Tyranny for tyranny, and power for power, the Rome of Trajan, superb and cruel, is hardly a worse thing than the Rome in which Popes fought with hired bands for their chair, or sat in it through the favour of courtesans; and the Roman populace of the days of Gregory was no worthier than that of the days of Caracalla or of Honorius. “Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions,” says Milman, describing the conduct of the Romans at Gregory’s death, when they had become thoroughly Christianized. As of old, the accident of real merit in the ruler could avail for much in administration; but still the calm Antonines can bear comparison as potentates and men with any wearer of the triple crown.