The new division was even more of a hindrance in some respects than the old to the moral progress of the world; for there was not merely created a tendency to the limitation of Christian charity to the community of believers, but there was fostered an intolerant and persecuting spirit. The world into which Christianity entered was, speaking generally, a tolerant world. There were, it is true, persecutions for opinion’s sake in the pre-Christian age, but these were comparatively infrequent. In general, persecution in classical antiquity sprang from some other motive than dislike or fear of religious dissent, as we have seen to have been the case in the persecution of the Christians by the pagan emperors of Rome.[654]
But after the promulgation of the moral code of the Church, which made wrong belief or denial of the orthodox creed a fault of unmeasured criminality, toleration ceased to be a virtue and became a vice. Thus the virtue of toleration, which Lecky pronounces “the supreme attainment of Roman civilization,” was lost. Intolerance became a duty, and remained such for more than a thousand years, making a tragedy of centuries of European history. Wars of annihilation or subjection against pagans and infidels were waged, and the persecution of heretics was carried on with a hatred and ferocity in strange contrast to the unbounded charity and infinite tenderness of the Founder of the religion in the name of which these things were done.
This spirit of intolerance thus called into existence led, during the period under review, to the suppression, first, in the fourth century by the Christian emperors, of freedom of religious worship; and then quickly to the suppression of liberty of thought throughout Christendom.[655] By the opening of the sixth century no one in any Christian land could freely think or freely express his thought, even on philosophical themes. This retrograde movement in its ultimate consequences was one of the most far-reaching revolutions in the moral history of the Western world.
“Between moralities”; the new-forming ideal
Aside from the broad ethical movements traced above, induced by the Christian conception of life and its new valuation of particular virtues and duties, there was in this epoch a moral phenomenon of another sort which we must now notice, namely, the moral anarchy which characterized the later centuries of the period under review.
In an earlier chapter we spoke of the fusion of moral ideals which ultimately takes place when two races meet and unite to form a new race and a new culture.[656] But as Bagehot has pointed out, such a commingling of races is always attended by a special danger. It is likely for a time to produce “something not only between races, but between moralities.”[657]
In the fact here stated we must doubtless look for the explanation in part of the turbulent, anarchical character, ethically viewed, of the period which immediately followed the downfall of ancient civilization, and which saw the creation, out of Roman and barbarian elements, of the new Romano-German world. In the migrations and settlements of the German conquerors in the Roman provinces, and in the mixture of races which there took place, there resulted necessarily, on the one side, a break-up of all the old tribal relations which formed the basis of the morality of the barbarians, and, on the other side, the destruction of all the restraints and conventions which had formed the bulwark and stay of the more refined, if less simple and pure, morality of the Romans. With the old moral codes discredited, with ancestral ethical ideals disintegrated,[658] men stood, to use Bagehot’s phrase, not between races only but also between moralities, and the historical ethical evolution was broken by what has been aptly called a moral interregnum. The epoch covering the interval between the destruction of the Roman governmental system in the West in the fifth century and the establishment of a semblance of social order by Charlemagne toward the end of the eighth century, presents, according to the concurrent view of all chroniclers and historians of the period, one of the most appalling spectacles of moral anarchy afforded by the records of human history.
In the midst of this moral chaos, however, a new moral world was forming. Gradually, under various influences, racial, cultural, and religious, there was taking shape and form, through a fusion of different ethical elements, a new moral ideal, the ideal of knighthood, which for an epoch—throughout the crusading centuries—was to absorb a large part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom, and to determine in great measure the character of the enterprises of the age.
Since one of the influences which produced this great transformation in the Christian ideal was the creed and moral code of Islam, we shall in our next chapter turn aside from following the ethical evolution among the European peoples to watch for a space the rise and progress of this new faith whose martial ethics was destined to leave so deep an impress upon the moral ideal of Christianity.