There was also brought against Christianity the charge that it discouraged military service and looked askance upon the profession of arms. The accusation is true within certain limits. Christianity was and is a gospel of peace. Ideally, therefore, it is always antagonistic to war as a general principle, and there is always a considerable section of Christian opinion which is opposed, irrespective of the justice of the quarrel, to an appeal to arms. That section of Christian opinion was naturally at its strongest when the Roman Empire was pagan, and when it was practically impossible for a Christian to be a soldier without finding himself compelled to worship, at the altars of Rome, the Roman Emperor and the Roman gods. Omnis militia est religio, Seneca had said most truly. There was a permanent altar fixed before the prætorium of every camp. That being the case, one can understand that the army was regarded with abhorrence by every Christian at a time when Christianity was a proscribed, or barely tolerated, religion, and hence the violent denunciations of the army and military service to be found in some of the early Fathers. Hence too the number of Christian soldier martyrs, who had been converted while serving in the ranks. But the whole case was changed when the Roman Emperor was a Christian, and the army took its oath to a champion and no longer to an enemy of the Church. The bishops at once changed front—they could not help themselves—and at the Council of Arles we have seen the Gallican bishops passing a canon anathematising any Christian who flung down his arms in time of peace. There were still extremists, as there are to-day, who denounced war with indiscriminate censure; there must have been a much larger number who acquiesced in standing armies as a necessary evil, but themselves carefully kept aloof from service; the majority, as to-day, would recognise that the security of a State rests ultimately upon force, and would pray that their cause might be just whenever that force had to be put into operation. It is not Tertullian with his dangerous doctrine that politics have no interest for the Christian (nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica), that the Christian has no country but the world, and that Christ had bidden the nations disarm when he bade Peter put up his sword—it is not Tertullian who is the typical representative of the Church in its relations with the State and mundane affairs, but the broad-minded Augustine who, when nervous Christians appealed to him to say whether a Christian could serve God as a soldier, said that a man might do his duty to his God and his Emperor as well in a camp as elsewhere.
God-fearing men could spend their days in the legions without peril to their souls, but the atmosphere of a Roman camp, full as it was of barbarians and semi-barbarians, naturally cannot have been congenial to the Christian religion. In spite of the Labarum, service in the army was discountenanced by the more zealous Christian bishops. Yet nothing could be more unfair than to charge Christianity with having introduced into the Roman world the reluctance to carry arms. That reluctance dated back to the latter days of the Republic. Christianity merely intensified it.
Christianity, again, may be acquitted of having caused the decadence of literature and the arts. That decadence was of long standing. There had been a steady decline from the brilliant circle of Augustan poets and prose writers to the days of the Antonines. The third century had been utterly barren of great names. Literature had become imitation; originality was lost. Society was literary in tone; grammarians and rhetoricians flourished; learning was not dead but active; yet the results, so far as creative work was concerned, were miserably small. But if Christianity cannot be held responsible for the poverty of imagination in the ranks of pagan society, it must be held responsible for its own shortcomings. It often assumed an attitude of open hostility to the ancient literature, which was to be explained—and, so long as paganism was a living force, might be justified—by the fact that the poetry of Rome was steeped in pagan associations. Men to whom Jupiter was a false deity or demon; to whom the radiance of Apollo was hateful because it was a snare to the unwary; to whom the purity of Diana, the cold stateliness of Minerva, the beauty of Venus, and the bountifulness of Ceres, were all treacherous delusions and masks of sin, and all equally pernicious to the soul, found in the very charm of style and the seductiveness of language of the old poetry another reason for keeping it out of the hands of their children and for themselves eschewing its dangerous delights. It is difficult to blame them. Protestants and Catholics even of the present day are studiously ignorant of the special literatures of the other, and if the Christian eschewed the classical poets, the educated pagan was grotesquely ignorant of the Christian’s “Holy Books.”
But this point must not be pursued too far. Education itself was based on the ancient literature of Greece and Rome—there was, indeed, nothing else on which to base it—and in the ablest and most cultured of the Christian writers the influence of the classical authors is evident on every page. Jerome dreamt that an angel came to rebuke him for his love of the rounded periods of Cicero—Ciceronianus es, non Christianus. Augustine bewails the tears he had wasted on the moving story of the Fall of Troy, while his heart was insensible to the sufferings of the Son of God. Lines and half lines from Virgil, or the choice of a Virgilian epithet, betray the ineradicable influence of the Mantuan over Ambrose. Even the author of the De Mortibus Persecutorum, despite his ferocious hatred of paganism, takes evident pleasure in the Ciceronian flavour of his maledictions. Do what he would, the cultured and educated Christian could not escape from the spell of the poets of antiquity. There were, of course, narrow-minded fanatics in plenty who would cheerfully have burned the contents of every pagan library and have imagined that they were offering an acceptable sacrifice, and there were doubtless many more who, without vindictiveness towards the classics, were quite content with want of culture, deeming that ignorance was more becoming to Christian simplicity (Simplex sermo veritatis.) The tendencies of Christianity, as compared with paganism, were not towards what we call the humanities and a liberal education, for the dominant feeling was that there was only one book in the world which really mattered, and that was the Bible. There was, it is true, a slight literary renaissance starting at the close of the fourth century, with which we associate the names of Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, and Claudian. This was mainly Christian. Ausonius strictly followed classical models; the graceful yet vigorous hymns of Prudentius were an original and valuable contribution to literature; Claudian stands neutral. “The last of the classics,” as Mr. Mackail has well said,[[152]] “he is, at the same time, the earliest and one of the most distinguished of the classicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth century.” This literary renaissance, however, was a last flicker, and while we have to thank the Church for preserving the Latin tongue, we owe it little thanks—compared with the paganism it had overthrown—for its services to culture and the humanities. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the classics had to be rediscovered and relearnt: the dead spirit of humanism had to be quickened to a new birth.
Hard things have been said of Christianity and its influence upon the Roman Empire, harder perhaps than the facts warrant, though the bitterness of many of the critics has been directly provoked by the boundless assumptions of the Christian apologists. Looking back dispassionately upon the period with which we have been dealing, it is not difficult to see why the Church triumphed and why the nations acquiesced as readily as they did in the downfall of paganism. The reason is that the world had grown stale. It had outlived all its old ideals. It was sick of doubt, weary of bloodshed and strife, and nervously apprehensive, we can hardly question, of the cataclysm that was to burst upon the West and submerge it before another century was over. The philosophies were worn out. The gods themselves had grown grey. There was a general atmosphere of numbness and decrepitude. Men wanted consolation and hope. Christianity alone could supply it, and though Christianity itself had lost its early joyousness, freshness, and simplicity, it retained unimpaired its marvellous powers to console. To a world tired of questioning and search it returned an answer for which it claimed the sanction of absolute Truth. The old spirit was not wholly dead. One may see it revive from time to time in the various heresies which split the Church. But it was ruthlessly suppressed, and humanity had to purchase back its liberty of thought at a great price, ten or more centuries later, when the world realised that her ancient deliverer had herself become a tyrant. Nevertheless, few can seriously doubt that the triumph of the Christian Church was an unspeakable boon to mankind. The Roman Empire was doomed. Its downfall was certain and, on the whole, was even to be desired, so long as its civilisation was not wholly wiped out and the genius of past generations was not wholly destroyed.
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