The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  Augustine's attitude incurred the intense disapproval and anger of another Christian theologian of the day. This was Pelagius. Of British or Irish extraction, he came to Rome as a monk about 400. Like others, he was horrified by Alaric's sack of Rome, when 'the mistress of the world shivered, crushed with fear, at the sound of the blaring trumpets and the howling of the Goths'.

  But Pelagius' reaction to such disasters was by no means limited to fatalistic gloom and despair. Both before and after the capture of the city, he found himself deeply dissatisfied with the moral sluggishness of many prosperous people of Rome. In an attempt to raise their easygoing standards, he insisted on a strenuous individual endeavour to attain salvation. He was convinced that the barrier of corruption which keeps original innocence and goodness out of our reach is insubstantial, and can be overcome by a bracing effort: we sin by a voluntary imitation of Adam, and an equally voluntary decision can cast our sins behind us.

  The salvation to which Pelagius primarily referred was not of this world. Yet his doctrine was obviously applicable to worldly salvation as well - to the rehabilitation of the failing Roman Empire. If people bestirred themselves more and tried harder, it could be deduced from Pelagius, they would be better men. And that also meant, though he did not put it in such a way, that they would be better able to come to the rescue of their country.

  This earnest belief in self-help caused him to abhor the tenth book of Augustine's Confessions, in which the writer repeatedly emphasized his dependence not on his own will but on the Grace of God. Pelagius himself, on the other hand, while not disbelieving in God's Grace, failed to see it as an overriding necessity. To him it was rather a form of divine assistance which can derive from moral exhortation and from a study of the supreme example of Christ: Grace, in this sense, will help us to fulfil and express the noble natures that have been bestowed on us by God. Like the earlier sort of modern existentialists before they became closely aligned with Marxism, Pelagius believed that man makes his own history on his own account.

  Learning of this insistence upon the basic soundness and effectiveness of the human will, Augustine revolted against Pelagius even more violently than Pelagius had revolted against Augustine. He accused Pelagius of teaching, 'like the philosophers of the pagans', that man by his own unassisted free will could achieve goodness without any help from God at all. Probably the criticism was unjustified, since what Pelagius really wanted to say was that heaven helps those who help themselves. But Augustine persisted in his censures for many years and wrote a treatise, On Free Will, endeavouring to strike what he felt to be a more pious balance between men's limited capacity for autonomous enterprise and his dependence on the divine power. In effect, however, the 'higher freedom' which emerged, while professing to admit the liberty of the will, tended towards its annihilation as a well-spring of action.

  Although Augustine's diffidence in his own powers (reflected in his formulation) displays an engaging humility, the doctrine of Pelagius was of greater value - on the practical plane of daily events and emergencies - to the later Roman Empire. It is true that he disliked the current spiritual inertia, and perhaps the whole social system that lay behind it, so much that he even spoke warmly in favour of monasticism. Nevertheless, his doctrine of the will at least wanted people to try. Augustine's philosophy, on the other hand, led to fatalism. Yet his incomparable eloquence, ably supported by many other preachers, ensured that it was his view which ultimately prevailed.

  So Pelagius was doomed to failure. Jerome called him a fat hound weighed down by Scotch porridge, and he twice suffered excommunication. When and where he died is unknown. But after his death, the controversy continued with unabated vigour, and the Gallic monks and theologians felt considerable sympathy with his views, for Augustine's increasingly vehement assertions of Grace as man's only hope seemed to undermine human effort.

  Indeed, his pronouncements also carried more fundamental political implications, affecting the whole concept of the Roman Empire. For since man, he concluded, is so totally corrupted by the fall of Adam that he is bound at some time to sin, and even Grace cannot prevent this inevitable outcome; since, that is to say, for as long as he lives, he can never cease to be flawed, then all his institutions are flawed as well. Even the church, though it provides the only bridge to the heavenly city, remains a mixture of good wheat and bad weeds. How much more imperfect, then, must be the state, the Roman Empire itself!

  True, although often perverted by evil wills, it is a natural and a divine necessity which God granted to the Romans. By his ordinance, continued Augustine, there is a king for temporal life, as there is a king for eternal life. Earthly rulers have special services they can render to God, just because they are rulers. And although Constantine was by no means perfect - for Augustine was one of those who believed that Christianity had lost virtue as it gained wealth and power - he paid honour to Theodosius i, as a prince whose devotion to the faith was exemplary.

  When such men rule, one can see 'a faint shadowy resemblance between the Roman Empire and the heavenly city'. The state, in fact, has its uses. Love of our neighbour, felt Augustine, makes our patriotic and civic duties obligatory. Soldiers, rulers, and judges alike have to stay at their posts. And yet, all the same, we are reading the thoughts of a man in whom national feeling is so strictly and totally subordinated to religious considerations that it can hardly, in any meaningful sense, be said to exist.

  From the nationalist sentiments which had defended the frontiers of ancient Rome for so many centuries we have travelled a vast distance. For example, while granting that wars can be just and even necessary, Augustine concludes that their 'victories bring death with them or are doomed to death', and the vast extent of Rome's Empire, he adds, has given rise to every sort of detestable foreign and civil war. Augustine even says he would have preferred a number of small nations living in peace to the monolithic Empire of the Romans. 'Without justice', he declares, 'governments are merely great bands of brigands' - gangsterism on a massive scale. But 'without justice' is precisely what, in the very nature of things, these states inevitably were: and what Rome could not fail to be.

  And so he preached, as others had preached before him, that 'we do not want to have dealings with the powers that be'. That is frank: it is a call to withhold service from the government. Equally frank is his reminder that the Empire is bound to collapse anyway. 'If heaven and earth are to pass away, why is it surprising if at some time the state is going to come to a stop? - if what God has made will one day vanish, then surely what Romulus made will disappear much sooner.' Even the current identification of church and state will not, cannot, suffice to stop the rot.

  Where does all this leave the individual citizen? Rome, for his benefit, has been firmly cut down to size. Our real, permanent fatherland, he is told - the only true kingdom, according to the strictest idea of what is right - is elsewhere altogether. 'What we want', states Augustine, 'is a way to help us to return to that kingdom: that is how we shall bring our sorrows to an end.' As for all the earthly crises and catastrophes, they can just be ignored - or even welcomed, seeing that God has sent them as a discipline. The calamities of a country in which you are merely a foreigner do not really affect your interests at all. When, therefore, such calamities appear, just treat them as an invitation to concentrate your desires on things eternal: and rejoice that your treasure is in a place where no enemy has the power to approach. To a patriotic pagan, disturbed by the disasters that have befallen Rome, Augustine spells out the message: 'Please pardon us if our country, up above, has to cause trouble to yours . . . you would acquire still greater merit if you served a higher fatherland.'

  Those are not words that will impel a man to the defence of the falling Roman Empire. Augustine has shifted the centre of gravity so that the state is now a good deal less than half of what matters: far from helping his country to survive, his attitude contributed to its downfall. But his implied suggestion that, since it was up to Providence whet
her the Roman world should collapse or not, human endeavour could do nothing about it in any case, met with the strong disapproval of thinkers such as Pelagius. 'Man is not trapped by history', as David P. Jordan expressed it in his book Gibbon and his Roman Empire: 'he does not live in a haunted house, he can emancipate himself through reason'.

  Although Augustine's full influence was not exerted for generations to come, subsequent writers during the last years of the Western Roman Empire were already echoing his fatalistic attitude. For example, it was perhaps now that the poet Commodianus positively gloated over the downfall of the city: 'She who bragged that she was eternal now weeps to eternity.' And in the words of Orientius, bishop of Ausci (formerly Elimberris, now Auch) in south-west France, 'why go over the funeral ceremonies of a world falling into ruins, in accordance with the common law of all that passes away?' Moreover, Orosius, whom Augustine commissioned to write a history of

  Rome, not only reminds us once again that Rome deserved the German onslaughts - because in earlier days it had persecuted the Christians - but that these attacks will actually be beneficial, 'although this may involve the crumbling of our Empire'. Presbyter Salvian, who believed the same, added two realistic comments. First, the Empire was already dead, or breathing its last. Secondly, most Romans lacked the imagination to realize the supreme peril they were in: and if they did happen to possess such discernment, they lacked the nerve to do anything about it.

  For the existence of this inertia - which is a very accurate diagnosis - the suggestion of Augustine that human endeavour could be of no consequence, either in this situation or any other, bore a share of the blame; or at least he very accurately represented a prevailing feeling which fell all too readily into line with the numerous other tendencies conspiring to bring about Rome's fall.

  Appendix 1

  Some Religious Disunities

  CATHOLIC AGAINST ORTHODOX

  The separation and friction between the Western and Eastern Empires, described in Chapter 8, helped to bring about the most important internal division in the history of Christianity: the split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

  The bishopric of Rome, described subsequently as the papacy, had enjoyed particular respect from the earliest beginnings of the faith. Christians in the Eastern provinces admitted the special prestige of the Roman church, yet were reluctant to agree that it had the right to dictate to them or legislate on their behalf. They also maintained that ecclesiastical authority was not vested in any one person, but (with the reservations that certain sees were entitled to precedence of honour) was assigned by the Scriptures to all bishops, who expressed this authority corporately through their general councils. For the Greeks of the East did not share the legal, centralized, autocratic approach which the Romans of the West owed to their legal tradition and metropolitan location; while the Romans, for their part, felt little sympathy for the Hellenizing, philosophical tendencies with which Eastern Christianity had become imbued.

  Another factor that perpetuated these failures of mutual comprehension was the continuing, widening, cultural gulf between the Latin and Greek-speaking peoples of the Empire. Bilingualism was becoming increasingly rare in either region: after the 230’s AD, spokesmen for the Greek point of view were no longer to be found in the church at Rome, while few Eastern ecclesiastics possessed any knowledge of Latin. Nor did they feel any inclination to acquire any, since the language of the New Testament was Greek. Moreover, the continual absences of successive third-century Emperors from Rome gave its bishops, especially in times of persecution, ever greater opportunities for accepting independent responsibility on their own account and thus enhancing their own status.

  But after Constantine had founded his new capital at Constantinople, a fresh situation arose. For although previously the Roman bishops or Popes had hitherto felt more independent when the Emperor was away, it now became clear that his decision to reside permanently at Constantinople was going to elevate the bishop of that city (known as the Patriarch, as elsewhere in the East) to a powerful position which might eventually rival Rome. For Constantine, desirous that Christianity should create a universal bond linking the whole Empire together, hoped that his foundation of Constantinople would play a special part in this process. In the words of St Gregory of Nazianzus in Cappadocia (eastern Asia Minor), the new capital was to be 'a bond of union between East and West to which the most distant extremes from all sides were to come together, and to which they look up as the common centre and emporium of their faith'.

  However, what happened was exactly the opposite. Far from contributing to the union of the two parts of the Empire, the new capital led to their increasing religious polarization. This became apparent at the Council of Serdica (Sofia, 343), when a vigorous dispute on theological matters rapidly turned into a split between the Eastern and Western governments. Then, after the political division between the two territories in 364, the difficulties affecting their relations soon extended to the ecclesiastical sphere. For one thing, the growing power of the Roman Popes inspired those dignitaries to make increasingly far-reaching claims for their own universal authority. And Western Emperors were naturally not averse to these claims - though they caused tension with the Eastern Patriarchs.

  Meanwhile, Latin religious scholarship was flourishing. Hitherto Latin Christian literature had been far inferior to Greek, but an immense step towards remedying this was Jerome's translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin, the Vulgate, originating from a commission by Pope Damasus to revise the old Latin texts of the Gospels. Augustine's treatise On the Trinity, too, showed that at last Latin theological skill had reached a level unrivalled by any contemporary Greek. These achievements increased the ecclesiastical prestige of the West.

  Before long the relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople had deteriorated further, with ill effects on the general political relationship between West and East. In 404 an Eastern church council, jealous of the popular, progressive John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, ordered his deposition and sent him into exile. This angered the Western administration of Honorius, who twice wrote to deplore that this hasty sentence had been passed without awaiting any decision from the head of the Roman church, Pope Innocent 1, who, according to Honorius, should have been consulted. Further friction occurred over the religious control of the Balkan provinces, after most of these had been transferred from the West to the East. For Pope Siricius, in spite of this change, declared that the bishop of Thessalonica (Salonica), the capital of the area, remained dependent upon himself. Subsequently the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II issued the counter-claim that all ecclesiastical disputes in the transferred territory should be judged by the bishop of Constantinople, 'which rejoices in the prerogatives of the old Rome'. But when Honorius protested, he gave way.

  In 451, the Council of Calchedon (Kadikoy) in Bithynia (western Asia Minor) further embroiled the Western and Eastern churches. The Council voted to confirm the precedence of the Patriarch of Constantinople over other Eastern bishops, and added three dioceses to his jurisdiction. The papal envoys, however, who had played a prominent role at the Council, protested, and Pope Leo 1 himself, in subsequent letters, objected categorically to this explicit promotion of Constantinople to the second place in the hierarchy. But what he probably disliked most was the allocation of the three additional dioceses to the bishop of Constantinople, whose residence in the Eastern capital, where he could easily obtain the support of its Emperors, seemed to make him a serious rival to Rome. Leo was also worried because the offending clause made no specific mention of the Apostolic, Petrine character of the Roman see, which his delegates had stressed on every occasion. In consequence, Leo delayed his acquiescence for two years, and even thereafter, although Constantinople effectively controlled its three new dioceses, the clause was not officially accepted at Rome until the sixth century.

  Although it was not apparent at the time, much the most far-reaching and long-lasting feature of the rift
between the Western and Eastern Empires was taking substantial shape. Later stages of this growing breach between Catholic and Orthodox can be identified in one subsequent century after another. But the estrangement had already begun during the concluding period of the ancient Roman Empire.

  The initial divergences which set them apart were largely theological. But these differences were enhanced by the general political tensions between the Western and Eastern Empires -tensions which they in their turn made even more acute.

  STATE AND CHURCH AGAINST TWO HERESIES

  In Chapter 11 it was explained how the government of the later Western Empire allied itself with the ecclesiastical authorities, and, with the approval of Augustine, persecuted those who failed to conform, including the deviant Christian sects. These sects, however, although denounced comprehensively as heresies, differed greatly in character. One, Pelagianism, was discussed in Chapter 13. Two others of special importance, Arianism and Donatism, will be briefly described here.

  The earliest of the important heretics of the Christian Empire was Arius, probably a Libyan by birth, who became a religious teacher at Alexandria. Like Unitarians in recent times, he was accused of stressing the humanity of Jesus at the expense of his divinity. Among Alexandrian Christians brought up in the classical tradition, such opinions already had a long and complex past. These philosophically minded men could not tolerate the duality of God the Father and God the Son, for it seemed to them that only one God was possible. Their views culminated in Arius, who concluded that Jesus could not be God, since, being the Son, he derived his being from the Father, and was therefore both younger and inferior.