SECOND ARTICLE.
During the centuries of persecution, then, the Northern heavens grew darker and darker, and the storm-clouds thickened on the horizon. God was at work behind that dark and heavy cloud-wall planning the most terrible campaign that was ever executed. The heedless, sinning empire little thought what fire and tempest would sweep over it when that storm-cloud should burst. It considered itself a veritable part of the rock-built earth, and immovable while the world lasted; that it would only perish when the universe should cease to exist. But behind that fiery storm-cloud that hangs heavy and threatening in the Northern skies, there is a mightier God than paganism knows of, who will sweep the Roman power away as the leaves are swept by the autumn blasts. The moment of vengeance is fixed. Whilst the cry of the martyrs’ blood has been sounding in the ears of God, he has been preparing for that moment of wrath. But there was another cry, too, rising up to heaven from the length and breadth of the empire, and calling down vengeance and wrath. It was the cry of sin—a never-ceasing, clamorous, many-voiced cry—going up night and day from city and town and hamlet over the wide area of Roman dominion. The corruption, then, deep and universal, of the Roman Empire was the second cause of the barbarian invasion. Of this we have still to speak.
We must remark at the outset that, when we speak of the corruption of the Roman Empire, we are not referring to that period of history which preceded Christ. We wish to speak of that period which immediately preceded the great invasion of the Northern barbarians in the fifth century. We are about to point out another object which God evidently had in view in sending down his wild warriors, and why their course was one of fire and devastation. In a word, we are about to speak of that moral rottenness which had eaten through the very vitals of the Roman Colossus, and which God, unable to bear it longer before his high heaven, infecting, as it was, the very universe with its pestilent stench, sent his messengers of wrath with flaming sword and fiery torch to cleanse away from the afflicted earth. We must insist upon God being an active power in the world. We are no followers of Professor Seeley, who lectures to the young men of Cambridge on the Fall of the Roman Empire as if God had had no hand in it. However ingenious Prof. Seeley may be, he will never convince us that God does not make and unmake empires. We want no new theory of the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Invasion of the Barbarians. The grandest and the truest was given us long ages ago by St. Augustine in his immortal work De Civitate Dei, and it has satisfied all Christian thinkers up to the present day. Prof. Seeley asks what is the cause of the decaying condition of the empire? “It has been common,” he says, “to suppose a moral degradation in the Romans, caused by luxury and excessive good fortune. To support this, it is easy to quote the satirists and cynics of the imperial times, and to refer to such accounts as Ammianus gives of the mingled effeminacy and brutality of the aristocracy of the capital in the fourth century. But the history of the wars between Rome and the barbaric world does not show us the proofs we might expect of this decay of spirit. We do not find the Romans ceasing to be victorious in the field and beginning to show themselves inferior in valor to their enemies. The luxury of the capital could not affect the army, which had no connection with the capital, but was levied from the peasantry of the whole empire, a class into which luxury can never penetrate. Nor can it be said the luxury corrupted the generals, and through them the army.... Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical, not a moral, decay.”[179]
This specimen of Mr. Seeley’s philosophy of history gives us a very low opinion of his powers of penetration. If the professor could see a little further below the surface, he would surely discover that a frightful moral decay was the underlying cause of the physical decay. He cannot persuade us that, if the capital were so corrupt, the generals and the army would still maintain a manly and a vigorous character. If the central heart be corrupt, a corrupting influence will flow out over the whole body. It was so, beyond doubt, with the Roman Empire in past days; it has been so with another mighty empire in our own times. Moral corruption flowed out from the capitals of both empires, and destroyed the vigor, courage, and all the manly virtues of their peoples. And then the messengers of God came. They came from the North in both cases, and terrible was the devastation which God gave them power to effect. In both cases they were irresistible, simply because he who beckoned them on and was hid in the smoke of battle was the God of battles himself. This is the theory which a Christian professor at least will naturally follow. There is something far more satisfactory in this, both to the intellect and to faith, than in any theory that can be suggested by the naturalistic views of men of Mr. Seeley’s school. We wonder if the young men who sat under Mr. Seeley at Cambridge were satisfied when the professor summed up his theory of the fall of the empire in these words: “Men were wanting; the empire perished for want of men”? To go no further than that seems to us pitiably shallow indeed. We are not at all captivated by Mr. Seeley’s view. We feel far more satisfied in believing the grand, old Christian theory, viz., that the empire perished at the hands of God for its savage cruelty to the holy martyrs and for its widespread corruption and revolting crimes.
We have already endeavored to sketch out the history of the age of blood: it now remains for us to give a picture of the corruption in which the empire lay steeped at the period previous to the descent of the barbaric hordes. But we most honestly state that we cannot do more than give a faint portraiture of what is so offensive to Christian purity of mind. To point to the life in this case, even if we were able to do so, would be too painful for Catholic ideas. The picture would necessarily be too frightful for the eye of modesty to gaze upon. It would be a dreadful exposure to the light of day of the blackest and the most shameful side of fallen human nature. Of necessity, then, must the painting be in somewhat dim outlines. But even so, it will sufficiently answer our present purpose.
For well-nigh five centuries, then, had Christianity been at work over the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and yet paganism and its demoralizing influence were not dead. We know well how boldly and triumphantly the apostles went from the Cenacle to the conversion of the pagan world. The heavenly fire that had come down upon them had lodged itself in their hearts. It shot its wondrous power through their whole bodies, darting forth from their eyes in living light, issuing from their mouths in burning words, nerving them up to brave tortures and racks. They went forth, did that little band from the Cenacle, fire-girt and heaven-inspired, to the most arduous task ever confided to mortal men. Their wondrous success we need not here recount. It was such as only men with God in their midst could effect. They no longer knew fear of earthly powers; they quailed not in the presence of the terrors of death. Nothing could withstand them in their course. The demons of paganism fled before them; a thrill of horror ran through the vast Pantheon of pagan worship, and the idols trembled on their pedestals. Like the Titans of old, those messengers of the Crucified scaled the Olympus of paganism, and hurled down the false gods that were enthroned there. Hell and Olympus mingled their groans at the sounding blows which were levelling the idols of false worship and shaking the universe. But was, then, paganism utterly destroyed? Did it never recover from the shock which it received at the hands of the apostles of Christ? Did the darkness flee away before the bright torches of light which Christians held up in the midst of cities and towns and on every hill-top, and never return? Did the demons who lurked in the pagan temples and spoke by the mouths of the idols plunge into the deep abyss at the approach of Christ’s preachers, and never come back again? It is usual to think that something like this was the case. But it is far from the historic truth. We must admit, indeed, that the success of the first apostles of Christianity was the most amazing fact which we have ever read of in history. The light of divine truth flashed with miraculous swiftness through the world. Thousands of persons abandoned the idols of paganism, and joined the strange, new standard of the Cross. But yet paganism, continued to exist and to spread its baneful influence—it was not a dead thing. It had become welded into the very substance of the empire. It was associated with so much of the grand historic past.
The Roman could not read of the warlike glories of his country without finding them mingled with the worship of Jupiter and Mars. He could not take up the verses of his immortal poets without meeting at every page with the gods and goddesses of Olympus. The laws of the empire recalled pagan gods; the customs and festivals and games kept their remembrance fresh in the mind. We do not wonder, then, that paganism was not easily destroyed. It would almost seem that the life of the empire and the life of paganism were one; that the pillars of the pagan temples were, so to speak, identical with the pillars of the state. When we bear all this in mind, we are not so much surprised to find that paganism was still a living thing more than eighty years after the first Christian emperor had taken the Labarum for his military standard, and had lifted Christianity out of the dark caves of the Catacombs to place it on the throne of the Cæsars. We are also more prepared for what we read regarding the Emperor Honorius. When in 404 he visited Rome, in order to celebrate his sixth consulate, pagan temples still surrounded the imperial palace, the sanctuary of Jupiter Tarpeius still crowned the capital, and from sacred edifices still standing on every side a whole host of pagan gods yet looked down, as of old, on Rome and the world. So real a thing was paganism still even in the fifth century that the pagan poet Claudian, who had been appointed to celebrate in verse the occasion just referred to, could with impunity and, we suppose, with apparent propriety, point out the gods as seeming to guard the imperial palace by their divine presence and smile propitiously upon one who was the heir of so many Christian emperors.[180] Some years later a work was written by an unknown author who lived in the time of Honorius or of Valentinian III., giving a topographical description of Rome, and mentioning those monuments which had been spared by the fire and sword of the Goths. The writer enumerates as still existing 43 pagan temples and 480 cediculæ. The Colossus of the Sun, a hundred feet high, still towered aloft close by the Coliseum, where so many holy martyrs had poured out their blood for Christ. The statues of Apollo, of Hercules and Minerva still stood, as of old, at the crossings and in the public squares. Still the fountains flowed under the invocation of nymphs. And this, though Constantine and Theodosius had wielded the sceptre of the empire, and SS. Sylvester and Damasus had sat in the midst on the throne of Peter. Time passes on, and with it the age of the great fathers of the church. Those days which Christianity filled with its spirit, when Gregory and Chrysostom and Basil and Jerome and mighty Augustine preached and taught, go by with their brightness and their glory, and yet in 419, in the time of Valentinian III., we find Rutilius Numatianus celebrating the greatness of pagan Rome, the mother of gods and heroes. Christianity had been throwing bright gleams of light over the whole world for these 400 years, the voices of the great fathers of the church had been thundering in the principal cities of the empire, yet Claudian and Rutilius Numatianus were as though they had caught no glimpse of the light which shone around them nor heard a sound from Hippo or Milan. Claudian had found a cord of that Latin lyre which was broken to pieces on the day when Lucan opened his own veins in the bath. Though living in Christian times, he was as pagan as his great model, and his imagination revelled amid the fabled splendors of Olympus and the baseless fictions of mythology. He can sing of the rape of Proserpine whilst the cultus of our Blessed Lady is taking possession of the temple of Ceres at Catana. He invites the graces, the nymphs, and the hours to prepare their garlands for the fair spouse of Stilico, though she had, in hatred and contempt of the gods of paganism, snatched the golden collar from the neck of the statue of Cybele. His genius takes even a more daring flight when he introduces Christian princes into the abodes of the immortals, and represents Theodosius, the greatest hater of the gods, as holding familiar converse with Jupiter. Rutilius Numatianus, on the other hand, pours out his soul in passionate words of patriotism upon Rome herself, the last and the greatest divinity of the ancient world. To him Rome is the ever beautiful queen of the universe, whose dominion she holds for all ages. To him she is the mother of men and of gods. “When we pray in thy temples,” he exclaims in his burning ardor, “we are not far from heaven. Of all nations she has made one country, of a whole world one city. Her trophies are countless as the stars of heaven, her temples too dazzling for the eyes to look upon. Spread yet further thy laws; they shall govern ages yet unborn which shall become Roman despite themselves, and thou alone, of all earthly things, shalt not fear the power of the fates.”[181]
We might easily imagine on reading these two writers that Christianity had not yet dawned upon the world, yet we are in the fifth century. We naturally ask if the Christian emperors used their power to crush out paganism. History tells us of many imperial edicts which ordered the pagan temples to be closed and the sacrifices to be discontinued. We find those edicts often renewed, and hence, we argue, often disobeyed. Nothing, however, surprises us so much as to find that in the middle of the fifth century the sacred chickens were still kept at the capital, and the consuls, on their appointment to office, went to seek from them the auspices which they were supposed to be able to give. At this date also the public calendar indicated the feasts of the false gods by the side of those in honor of Christ and his saints. In a word, paganism is yet a living power, with its temples and idols, and sacrifices and sacred groves.
In Rome itself, where the smoke of incense ascends to the only true God, the smoke of sacrifice also rises to the false gods of Olympus. And beyond Rome, over Italy and Gaul and throughout the whole of Western Christendom, there are still symbols of pagan worship; still undoubted indications of its enduring influence over thousands who believe that the empire and the pagan gods are equally eternal, and will still be in existence when men here become tired of the folly of the cross and the name of the crucified Nazarene has faded from their minds. How true, then, does it appear that paganism continues to hold its ground to a far greater extent than is commonly imagined! It was a fearful task for Christianity, divine though it was, to level to the ground the temples and idols of pagan worship. Paganism seemed to hold on to the empire with unrelaxing tenacity; it was bound up with its institutions; it seemed built with the very stones into the walls of the great capital.
The incontrovertible fact, then, that paganism still existed and retained a stout hold upon the empire even so late as the fifth century will prepare the reader to believe that its demoralizing principles were still working their natural results. We will not maintain that human sacrifices were as common at this date as they had been some centuries before; but we do not feel sure that they were altogether abandoned. We know that in the time of Constantine, when Christianity was looking down from the throne of the Cæsars over the empire, pagan priests poured out each year a patera of human blood to Jupiter Latial. The example which the Romans themselves had set was followed by the conquered nations, and those dreadful horrors long continued to be practised among them in spite of imperial decrees and prohibitions. “All the laws of civilization,” says F. Ozanam in his striking way, “could not smother the instincts of that savage beast which paganism had unmuzzled in the heart of fallen humanity.” But even if human sacrifices had altogether ceased, yet the essential principles of paganism were still at work. The direct tendency of pagan worship was to enslave man to his senses. The fearful degradation to which mankind were thus brought, it is almost impossible for Christian minds to credit. St. Augustine, in the seventh book of his City of God, tells us of horrors which we cannot read without a sense of shame and disgust for our race. Those processions through the towns and fields of Latium on the feast of Bacchus are too shocking to describe. We know, also, that unnamable crimes were honored with a religious cultus, and had temples dedicated to their worship at Cyprus, Samos, at Corinth, and on Mount Eryx. When we read of this utter degradation to which paganism reduces human nature, we wonder how such a religion could endure. But it was precisely because it ministered so readily and so generously to the worst passions of human nature that it maintained its influence so long. When in course of time, and, by the repeated pressure of imperial edicts, the priests of Cybele and the priestesses of Venus were dispersed, paganism still had its temples and its thousands of worshippers in the circus, the theatre, and the amphitheatre. In these centres of resort, where the most reckless and the most unholy passions had full play, the gods were in their strongholds. St. Cyprian had understood the true nature of paganism well when he said that it was “the mother of the games.” Nothing could have seized upon human nature with a more powerful grasp than paganism did by making pleasure into a religious worship. The two strong tendencies of mankind, viz., the religious sentiment and the intense love of pleasure, were thus directed to one and the same object. The combats of the gladiators, which exercised such a fascination on the Romans for so many years, were supposed to appease the spirits of the departed; the dances of the stage were thought to avert the anger of heaven. The symbolism which covered all lent an air of mystery and solemnity to these exciting entertainments. We are told that the courses of the circus represented the evolutions of the stars, the dances of the theatre symbolized the voluptuous whirl of pleasure in which all living beings were hurried along, and the combats of the amphitheatre were a type of the struggles in which the human race is ever engaged. The circus, theatre, and amphitheatre were, then, so many temples of worship, and, as we may well believe, the most popular and the best frequented temples that paganism ever consecrated to its false and corrupting rites. The other religious temples of the Roman were notoriously small and poor, but on these he lavished his gold, his marble, and all that he held most precious, so that he has left behind him nothing grander or richer than the monuments of his pleasures, and, we may add, nothing more defiled, more foul or more bloody.