by Will Durant
Augustine’s initial answer was that Rome had been punished not for her new religion but for her continued sins. He described the indecency of the pagan stage, and quoted Sallust and Cicero on the corruption of Roman politics. Once Rome had been a nation of stoics, strengthened by Catos and Scipios; she had almost created law, and had given order and peace to half the world; in those heroic days God had made His face to shine upon her. But the seeds of moral decay lay in the very religion of ancient Rome, in gods who encouraged, rather than checked, the sexual nature of man: “the god Virgineus to loose the virgin’s girdle, Subigus to place her under the man, Prema to press her down … Priapus upon whose huge and beastly member the new bride was commanded by religious order to get up and sit!”89 Rome was punished because she worshiped, not because she neglected, such deities. The barbarians spared Christian churches and those who fled to them, but showed no mercy to the remnants of pagan shrines; how, then, could the invaders be the agents of a pagan revenge?
Augustine’s second answer was a philosophy of history—an attempt to explain the events of recorded time on one universal principle. From Plato’s conception of an ideal state existing “somewhere in heaven,” from St. Paul’s thought of a community of saints living and dead,90 from the Donatist Tyconius’ doctrine of two societies, one of God and one of Satan,91 Augustine took the basic idea of his book as a tale of two cities: the earthly city of worldly men devoted to earthly affairs and joys; and the divine city of the past, present, and future worshipers of the one true God. Marcus Aurelius had provided a noble phrase: “The poet could say of Athens, Thou lovely city of Cecrops; and shalt not thou say of the world, Thou lovely city of God?”92—but Aurelius had meant by this the whole orderly universe. The civitas Dei, says Augustine, was founded by the creation of the angels; the civitas terrena by the rebellion of Satan. “Mankind is divided into two sorts: such as live according to man, and such as live according to God. These we mystically call the ‘two cities’ or societies, the one predestined to reign eternally with God, the other condemned to perpetual torment with the Devil.”93 An actual city or empire need not in all aspects be confined within the Earthly City; it may do good things—legislate wisely, judge justly, and aid the Church; and these good actions take place, so to speak, within the City of God. This spiritual city, again, is not identical with the Catholic Church; the Church too may have terrestrial interests, and its members may fall into self-seeking and sin, slipping from one city into the other. Only at the Last Judgment will the two cities be separate and distinct.94
By a symbolic extension of her membership to heavenly as well as to earthly souls, to pre-Christian as well as Christian righteous men, the Church may be—and by Augustine occasionally is—identified with the City of God.95 The Church would later accept this identification as an ideological weapon of politics, and would logically deduce from Augustine’s philosophy the doctrine of a theocratic state, in which the secular powers, derived from men, would be subordinate to the spiritual power held by the Church and derived from God. With this book paganism as a philosophy ceased to be, and Christianity as a philosophy began. It was the first definitive formulation of the medieval mind.
4. The Patriarch
The old lion of the faith was still at his post when the Vandals came. To the end he remained in the theological arena, felling new heresies, countering critics, answering objections, resolving difficulties. He considered gravely whether woman will retain her sex in the next world; whether the deformed and the mutilated, the thin and the fat, will be reborn as they were; and how those will be restored who were eaten by others in a famine.96 But age had come upon him, with sad indignities. Asked about his health he replied: “In spirit I am well … in body I am confined to bed. I can neither walk nor stand nor sit down because of swelling piles. … Yet even so, since that is the Lord’s good pleasure, what should I say but that I am well?”97
He had done his best to deter Boniface from rebellion against Rome, and had shared in recalling him to loyalty. As Gaiseric advanced, many bishops and priests asked Augustine should they stay at their posts or flee; he bade them stay, and gave example. When the Vandals laid siege to Hippo, Augustine maintained the morale of the starving people by his sermons and his prayers. In the third month of the siege he died, aged seventy-six. He left no will, having no goods; but he had written his own epitaph: “What maketh the heart of the Christian heavy? The fact that he is a pilgrim, and longs for his own country.”98
Few men in history have had such influence. Eastern Christianity never took to him, partly because he was thoroughly un-Greek in his limited learning and in his subordination of thought to feeling and will; partly because the Eastern Church had already submitted to the state. But in the West he gave a definitive stamp to Catholic theology. Anticipating and inspiring Gregory VII and Innocent III, he formulated the claim of the Church to supremacy over the mind and the state; and the great battles of popes against emperors and kings were political corollaries of his thought. Until the thirteenth century he dominated Catholic philosophy, giving it a Neoplatonic tinge; and even Aquinas the Aristotelian often followed his lead. Wyclif, Huss, and Luther believed they were returning to Augustine when they left the Church; and Calvin based his ruthless creed upon Augustine’s theories of the elect and the damned. At the same time that he stimulated men of intellect, he became an inspiration to those whose Christianity was more of the heart than of the head; mystics tried to retrace his steps in seeking a vision of God; and men and women found food and phrases for their piety in the humility and tenderness of his prayers. It may be the secret of his influence that he united and strengthened both the philosophical and the mystical strains in Christianity, and opened a path not only for Thomas Aquinas but for Thomas à Kempis as well.
His subjective, emotional, anti-intellectual emphasis marked the end of classical, the triumph of medieval, literature. To understand the Middle Ages we must forget our modern rationalism, our proud confidence in reason and science, our restless search after wealth and power and an earthly paradise; we must enter sympathetically into the mood of men disillusioned of these pursuits, standing at the end of a thousand years of rationalism, finding all dreams of utopia shattered by war and poverty and barbarism, seeking consolation in the hope of happiness beyond the grave, inspired and comforted by the story and figure of Christ, throwing themselves upon the mercy and goodness of God, and living in the thought of His eternal presence, His inescapable judgment, and the atoning death of His Son. St. Augustine above all others, and even in the age of Symmachus, Claudian, and Ausonius, reveals and phrases this mood. He is the most authentic, eloquent, and powerful voice of the Age of Faith in Christendom.
VI. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD
Augustine’s argument against paganism was the last rebuttal in the greatest of historic debates. Paganism survived in the moral sense, as a joyous indulgence of natural appetites; as a religion it remained only in the form of ancient rites and customs condoned, or accepted and transformed, by an often indulgent Church. An intimate and trustful worship of saints replaced the cult of the pagan gods, and satisfied the congenial polytheism of simple or poetic minds. Statues of Isis and Horus were renamed Mary and Jesus; the Roman Lupercalia and the feast of the purification of Isis became the Feast of the Nativity;99 the Saturnalia were replaced by Christmas celebrations, the Floralia by Pentecost, an ancient festival of the dead by All Souls’ Day,100 the resurrection of Attis by the resurrection of Christ.101 Pagan altars were rededicated to Christian heroes; incense, lights, flowers, processions, vestments, hymns, which had pleased the people in older cults were domesticated and cleansed in the ritual of the Church; and the harsh slaughter of a living victim was sublimated in the spiritual sacrifice of the Mass.
Augustine had protested against the adoration of saints, and in terms that Voltaire might have used in dedicating his chapel at Ferney: “Let us not treat the saints as gods; we do not wish to imitate those pagans who adore the dead. Let us not
build them temples, nor raise altars to them; but with their relics let us raise an altar to the one god.”102 The Church, however, wisely accepted the inevitable anthropomorphism of popular theology. She resisted,103 then used, then abused, the cult of martyrs and relics. She opposed the worship of images and icons, and warned her faithful that these should be reverenced only as symbols;104 but the ardor of public feeling overcame these cautions, and led to the excesses that aroused the Byzantine iconoclasts. The Church denounced magic, astrology, and divination, but medieval, like ancient, literature, was full of them; soon people and priests would use the sign of the cross as a magic incantation to expel or drive away demons. Exorcisms were pronounced over the candidate for baptism, and total nude immersion was required lest a devil should hide in some clothing or ornament.105 The dream cures once sought in the temples of Aesculapius could now be obtained in the sanctuary of Sts. Cosmas and Damian in Rome, and would soon be available at a hundred shrines. In such matters it was not the priests who corrupted the people, but the people who persuaded the priests. The soul of the simple man can be moved only through the senses and the imagination, by ceremony and miracle, by myth and fear and hope; he will reject or transform any religion that does not give him these. It was natural that amid war and desolation, poverty and disease, a frightened people should find refuge and solace in chapels, churches, and cathedrals, in mystic lights and rejoicing bells, in processions, festivals, and colorful ritual.
By yielding to these popular necessities the Church was enabled to incul-cate a new morality. Ambrose, always the Roman administrator, had tried to formulate the ethics of Christianity in Stoic terms, converting Cicero to his needs; and in the greater Christians of the Middle Ages, from Augustine to Savonarola, the Stoic ideal of self-control and uncompromising virtue informed the Christian mold. But that masculine morality was not the ideal of the people. They had had Stoics long enough; they had seen the masculine virtues incarnadine half the world; they longed for gentler, quieter ways, by which men might be persuaded to live in stability and peace. For the first time in European history the teachers of mankind preached an ethic of kindliness, obedience, humility, patience, mercy, purity, chastity, and tenderness—virtues perhaps derived from the lowly social origins of the Church, and their popularity among women, but admirably adapted to restore order to a de-moralized people, to tame the marauding barbarian, to moderate the violence of a falling world.
The reforms of the Church were greatest in the realm of sex. Paganism had tolerated the prostitute as a necessary mitigation of an arduous monogamy; the Church denounced prostitution without compromise, and demanded a single standard of fidelity for both sexes in marriage. She did’not quite succeed; she raised the morals of the home, but prostitution remained, driven into stealth and degradation. Perhaps to counterbalance a sexual instinct that had run wild, the new morality exaggerated chastity into an obsession, and subordinated marriage and parentage to a lifelong virginity or celibacy as an ideal; and it took the Fathers of the Church some time to realize that no society could survive on such sterile principles. But this puritanic reaction can be understood if we recall the licentiousness of the Roman stage, the schools of prostitution in some Greek and Oriental temples, the widespread abortion and infanticide, the obscene paintings on Pompeian walls, the unnatural vice so popular in Greece and Rome, the excesses of the early emperors, the sensuality of the upper classes as revealed in Catullus and Martial, Tacitus and Juvenal. The Church finally reached a healthier view, and indeed came in time to take a lenient attitude to sins of the flesh. Meanwhile some injury was done to the conception of parentage and the family. Too many Christians of these early centuries thought that they could serve God best—or, rather, most easily escape hell—by abandoning their parents, mates, or children, and fleeing from the responsibilities of life in the frightened pursuit of a selfishly individual salvation. In paganism the family had been the social and religious unit; it was a loss that in medieval Christianity this unit became the individual.
Nevertheless the Church strengthened the family by surrounding marriage with solemn ceremony, and exalting it from a contract to a sacrament. By making matrimony indissoluble she raised the security and dignity of the wife, and encouraged the patience that comes from hopelessness. For a time the status of woman was hurt by the doctrine of some Christian Fathers that woman was the origin of sin and the instrument of Satan; but some amends were made by the honors paid to the Mother of God. Having accepted marriage, the Church blessed abundant motherhood, and sternly forbade abortion or infanticide; perhaps it was to discourage these practices that her theologians damned to a limbo of eternal darkness any child that died without baptism. It was through the influence of the Church that Valentinian I, in 374, made infanticide a capital crime.
The Church did not condemn slavery. Orthodox and heretic, Roman and barbarian alike assumed the institution to be natural and indestructible; a few philosophers protested, but they too had slaves. The legislation of the Christian emperors in this matter does not compare favorably with the laws of Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius. Pagan laws condemned to slavery any free woman who married a slave; the laws of Constantine ordered the woman to be executed, and the slave to be burned alive. The Emperor Gratian decreed that a slave who accused his master of any offense except high treason to the state should be burned alive at once, without inquiry into the justice of the charge.106 But though the Church accepted slavery as part of the law of war, she did more than any other institution of the time to mitigate the evils of servitude. She proclaimed, through the Fathers, the principle that all men are by nature equal—presumably meaning in legal and moral rights; she practiced the principle in so far as she received into her communion all ranks and classes: though no slave could be ordained to the priesthood, the poorest freedman could rise to high places in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Church repudiated the distinction made in pagan law between wrongs done to a freeman and those done to a slave. She encouraged manumission, made emancipation of slaves a mode of expiating sins, or of celebrating some good fortune, or of approaching the judgment seat of God. She spent great sums freeing from slavery Christians captured in war.107 Nevertheless slavery continued throughout the Middle Ages, and died without benefit of clergy.
The outstanding moral distinction of the Church was her extensive provision of charity. The pagan emperors had provided state funds for poor families, and pagan magnates had done something for their “clients” and the poor. But never had the world seen such a dispensation of alms as was now organized by the Church. She encouraged bequests to the poor, to be administered by her; some abuses and malversation crept in, but that the Church carried out her obligations abundantly is attested by the jealous emulation of Julian. She helped widows, orphans, the sick or infirm, prisoners, victims of natural catastrophes; and she frequently intervened to protect the lower orders from unusual exploitation or excessive taxation.108 In many cases priests, on attaining the episcopacy, gave all their property to the poor. Christian women like, Fabiola, Paula, and Melania devoted fortunes to charitable work. Following the example of pagan valetudinaria, the Church or her rich laymen founded public hospitals on a scale never known before. Basil established a famous hospital, and the first asylum for lepers, at Caesarea in Cappadocia. Xenodochia—refuges for wayfarers—rose along pilgrim routes; the Council of Nicaea ordered that one should be provided in every city Widows were enlisted to distribute charity, and found in this work a new significance for their lonely lives. Pagans admired the steadfastness of Christians in caring for the sick in cities stricken with famine or pestilence.109
What did the Church do in these centuries for the minds of men? As Roman schools still existed, she did not feel it her function to promote intellectual development. She exalted feeling above intellect; in this sense Christianity was a “romantic” reaction against the “classic” trust in reason; Rousseau was merely a lesser Augustine. Convinced that survival demanded organization, that organization
required agreement on basic principles and beliefs, and that the vast majority of her adherents longed for authoritatively established beliefs, the Church defined her creed in unchangeable dogmas, made doubt a sin, and entered upon an unending conflict with the fluent intellect and changeable ideas of men. She claimed that through divine revelation she had found the answers to the old problems of origin, nature, and destiny; “we who are instructed in the knowledge of truth by the Holy Scriptures,” wrote Lactantius (307), “know the beginning of the world and its end.”110 Tertullian had said as much a century before (197), and had suggested a cloture on philosophy.111 Having displaced the axis of man’s concern from this world to the next, Christianity offered supernatural explanations for historical events, and thereby passively discouraged the investigation of natural causes; many of the advances made by Greek science through seven centuries were sacrificed to the cosmology and biology of Genesis.
Did Christianity bring a literary decline? Most of the Fathers were hostile to pagan literature, as permeated with a demonic polytheism and a degrading immorality; but the greatest of the Fathers loved the classics notwithstanding, and Christians like Fortunatus, Prudentius, Jerome, Sidonius, and Ausonius aspired to write verse like Virgil’s or prose like Cicero’s. Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine outweigh, even in a literary sense, their pagan contemporaries—Ammianus, Symmachus, Claudian, Julian. But after Augustine prose style decayed; written Latin took over the rough vocabulary and careless syntax of the popular speech; and Latin verse for a time deteriorated into doggerel before molding new forms into majestic hymns.
