The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Constantine promulgated edicts banning gladiatorial games and establishing Sunday as a day of compulsory Christian worship. Another edict outlawed homosexuality.21 In 325, he summoned more than three hundred bishops to the city of Nicaea and personally presided over the first universal church council, where he made sure that a Neoplatonized Trinity became part of the Christian creed as a matter of sworn oath for all Christians.

  The Council of Nicaea was a major step toward making religious orthodoxy compulsory under imperial law—just what Lactantius wanted and predicted. Thirteen years after Constantine’s Edict of Milan, the empire’s once persecuted Christians were poised to become the new persecutors. The emperor’s successors would increasingly apply the standards of a Christian societas against the non-Christians in their midst. The place left in the public square for pagans and Jews would steadily diminish until it vanished.22

  For now, however, the rise of Christian intolerance seemed a matter of celebration rather than regret. Once, Christianity and empire had been enemies. Now they were one. As the thirtieth year of his reign drew to a close in 336, Constantine issued new coins celebrating himself as Victor Omnium Gentium (“Victor over All the Nations”). His last major military campaign crushed the Goths along the lower Danube, reestablishing a Roman province his pagan predecessors had lost. He had founded a series of new magnificent churches both in Rome and in Constantinople, including one for the bishop of Rome at Saint John Lateran. His treasury was flush, his people peaceful and grateful.23

  He could hardly have guessed that his son’s distinguished tutor had already doomed him to irrelevance.

  This was because with his Aristotelian turn of mind, Lactantius saw the emergence of Christendom as a largely self-perpetuating process. He had been as devoted to Constantine as Eusebius and just as lavish in his praise of Constantine’s role in establishing a true Christian society. But in the final analysis Constantine himself was not essential to it. The victory at Milvian Bridge, however welcome, was just another step in a process that would have gone on without him—and which God’s will would extend even if future emperors were not Christians.

  The test came when the last of Constantine’s sons died in 361. Constantine was born a pagan and died a baptized Christian. His nephew Julian went the opposite route. Julian had lived in Athens, where pagan disciples of Plotinus taught him the old Hellenic tradition of literature and philosophy along with Neoplatonism’s criticism of Christianity, including the works of that now-despised figure, Celsus. Julian’s conversion was as complete as his uncle’s had been. He shed his family’s faith, grew a long beard in the manner of his Greek teachers, and came to the imperial purple in 361 determined to return the Roman Empire to its pagan glories and Neoplatonism to its pre-Christian roots.

  It was hopeless from the start.

  Julian the Apostate, as he is known to history, lived the highest virtues of a Greek sage. He was merciful and modest (in the imperial palace he insisted on sleeping on the floor), temperate and sexually continent (he left no children). Even Christians, noted the historian Edward Gibbon, had to acknowledge that Julian wielded his authority for the happiness of his subjects; that he was “a lover of his country, and that he deserved the empire of the world.”24

  By casting off his office’s Christian moorings, however, Julian cut off all connections with the emerging society around him. The great palace at Constantinople became deserted as courtiers and lobbyists realized they would only get the cold shoulder from this paragon of virtue. Julian reopened the old pagan temples and made himself sit in the imperial box at the Hippodrome, although he despised sports as intensely as any Christian bishop. But the whole thing had an air of artificiality and insincerity. In the three short years of his reign, Julian became a cold, incomprehensible figure even to would-be supporters.

  The same thing happened with his brand of Neoplatonism. Julian wanted to return to the serene pre-Christian world picture of Plotinus. He described his authority as emperor as an emanation of the Absolute, which “has been preserved in my hands pure and immaculate.”25 By now, however, Christianity had given that lofty system a solid grounding in human experience. It was lived every day in the churches across the empire and underscored in every reading of Holy Scripture. Once that was stripped away, what was left (to quote Gibbon again) was “solemn trifling” and “impenetrable obscurity.” When Julian tried to reinterpret pagan myths like the birth of Venus with the same allegorical subtlety that Origen and Eastern Church Fathers had brought to the Old and New Testaments, not only was the result unconvincing, it looked positively ridiculous.26

  The truth was that Greco-Roman culture, even in its highest ideals, was no longer going anywhere without Christianity. When Julian realized this, it shattered his spirit. He died in 363 leading a reckless campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia. His last words were, “Man of Galilee, thou hast won.” The brief but spectacular failure of Julian’s reign guaranteed the triumph of Christian civilization. It also hastened the doom of the Roman Empire.27

  Constantine’s Christian empire began with a battle. Sixty-six years later, it ended with one. In 378, the emperor Valens confronted roving war bands of Germanic Goths at Adrianople near Constantinople. With a massive cavalry charge, the Goths shattered Valens’s army and killed the emperor. It was a disaster of the first order.28 The capital managed to shut its gates against the German invader. However, the price of the Eastern Empire’s survival was the loss of the West.

  One Germanic tribe after another—Goths, Vandals, Franks, Allemanni, Burgundians—shot westward through the Balkans, overrunning the Rhine frontier and the Roman provinces on the other side, including Italy. The basic framework of imperial government, like the Roman road system dating back to Caesar Augustus, collapsed under the strain. So did law and order.

  Only the Church held firm. In virtually every town, starting with Rome itself, its leaders became symbols of resistance. Like the young Genovefa (later canonized Saint Genevieve) in Paris, they rallied citizens to stand fast and defend their cities; like Pope Leo I with Attila the Hun, they struck deals with the invaders to spare their congregations. When negotiations failed they organized humanitarian relief for the devastated areas and offered words of comfort and hope when everything looked its bleakest.

  The Catholic bishop became the one upholder of a social and cultural order to which the people living in his diocese, including pagans, could still cling. His basilica (originally an imperial building), where he administered the sacraments and offered sanctuary to refugees; his collection of holy relics left by illustrious predecessors; and his books, like the pope’s library in the Vatican, which included his personal copies of the ancient classics—these were often all that was left standing in the flood.

  What Lactantius had predicted had come true. The empire was finished, at least in the West. Christendom was here to stay. The proof is that the diocese as an imperial administrative unit vanished after the fourth century; as a unit of church administration, it survives to this day.

  This is due in large part to the intrepid figures who took it upon themselves to save what was left of their civilization, along with their faith. One of the most intrepid, and the most influential, was the reluctant bishop of the wealthy North African town of Hippo Regius, the man we know as Saint Augustine.

  “I desire to have knowledge of God and the soul. Nothing else? No, nothing else whatever.”29

  With Saint Augustine, we come to the end of the road as far as the Greco-Roman world is concerned. Before becoming a bishop, he had been brilliantly trained in that tradition of ancient rhetoric stretching back to Aristotle, with its ideal of using the power of speech and language to shape the good life.30

  It was Augustine’s curse to live in an age when that ideal, and the texts and authors who formed it, seemed a superfluous luxury. Augustine and his contemporaries were like men in a lifeboat: they had to make hard choices about what they needed to survive and what they had to jettison to
stay afloat.

  In the end, that meant throwing overboard the great ancient schools of thought. “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” One of Augustine’s fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

  Certainly, Augustine’s writings contrast sharply with the buoyant optimism of the great Christian Apologists. There are plenty of reasons for this. There were the barbarian invasions, the collapse of imperial institutions, economic dislocation and depression, and all the things that usually come under the heading “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

  Another reason, however, was Augustine’s deep awareness of original sin. Lactantius had written about man’s natural impulse to virtue as if he had never heard of the doctrine.31 Augustine had felt the hidden corrosive effect of Adam’s Fall, like the worm in the apple, firsthand. He tells us about it in the most fascinating work to come out of the end of the ancient world, but also the one I find the most harrowing, his Confessions.

  It tells of growing up in the small North African town of Thagaste, where his working-class Christian mother sacrificed everything to get him the finest classical education, including Cicero, Virgil, and especially Plato. He paid her back by partying, stealing, drinking, womanizing, and denigrating his mother’s church and faith. He did this, Augustine remembers, not because he didn’t know better, but precisely because he did: “I loved … not the things for which I committed wrong, but the wrong itself.”32

  So much for Plato’s assertion that knowledge is the key to virtue. Like the boy from the expensive prep school who becomes a drug dealer, or the evangelist preacher who steals from his congregation, Augustine had discovered that simply knowing right from wrong was not enough. What’s needed is a deeper emotional commitment to rightness and truth. Augustine saw it coming not from our reason or from our conscious will, which bears the stain of Adam, but from our faith.

  Most people know the quotation from the Confessions “O God, make me good, but not yet!” But few realize the tension and despair underlying that famous bon mot. Like Aristotle, Augustine believed that the quality of life we lead depends on the choices we make. The tragedy is that left to our own devices—and contrary to Aristotle—most of those choices will be wrong. There can be no true morality without faith and no faith without the presence of God.

  It was that presence he discovered in 384 when he traveled to Milan in northern Italy. It was the new imperial capital for the West, where grim, armor-clad emperors were trying to get a handle on a steadily dissolving frontier. Augustine went to find a political career. Instead, he found God, and the man who would be his mentor, Milan’s bishop Saint Ambrose. It was Ambrose who brought Augustine back to his mother’s faith and who personally baptized him in Milan’s basilica in 387. Augustine was thirty-three.

  Conversion changed Augustine’s life in more ways than one. He learned that his Christian faith offered not only a steady anchor but a set of priorities. He could see them in Ambrose himself. Spare, elegant, exquisitely educated in the Greek as well as Latin classics, Ambrose had been a provincial governor and a major figure at court. He was not a priest at all, but when the people of Milan called on him to become their bishop and protector, Ambrose never looked back.

  The ancient classics and the values they represented became dead to him. The time has come to move on, Ambrose taught Augustine. Ours is a new, far more volatile and dangerous world. When we look through Saint Ambrose’s surviving letters, we can see that everything he did was focused on reforming and strengthening his congregation and building the bonds of Lactantius’s great ideal, Christian society. Augustine would follow Ambrose’s example when he returned to Africa in 396 and the people of Hippo Regius made a similar urgent call to him to be their bishop.

  For mentor and pupil, the ancient authors were reduced to a box of useful tools, nothing more. Ambrose’s celebrated manual on the duties of priests, which became a standard textbook for the medieval Church, was based on Cicero’s On Moral Obligations, but only in the sense that West Side Story is based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Augustine would make the same use of Plato and Neoplatonism when he found himself dealing with the single most unimaginable event in the empire’s history.

  In the late summer of 410, the Western Goths (or Visigoths) arrived at the gates of a defenseless Rome. Their king Alaric wanted to cooperate with Rome in finding a permanent home for his people within the empire. He knew what Romans did not, that a far more dangerous and menacing foe was on the move in the hinterlands behind him: the Huns.

  Alaric and other barbarian chieftains would gladly have joined forces with the Romans against these Asian marauders. However, the king of the Visigoths decided that Rome’s officials were playing tricks on him. On August 24, he ordered his troops to take the city and pillage it, which they did for three days.

  The physical damage the Visigoths did was minor. However, the psychological damage was felt from one end of the empire to the other. Rome, mistress of the world, had fallen to the blast of trumpets and the howling of the Goths, as one eyewitness described it. Constantinople held three days of mourning at the news. “If Rome can perish,” Saint Jerome wrote from distant Palestine, where he was struggling to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into usable Latin, “what can be safe?”33

  Refugees from Rome brought the horror stories of the siege and sack to Hippo Regius that winter: stories of murder and rapine, even cannibalism. Their listeners shivered and wondered when the forces of destruction would reach them. Already there were whispers about how for seven hundred years the pagan gods had protected Rome; then the Christians forced the emperors to close the gods’ temples and remove their altars. Rome’s fall, some began to say, was the awful price of embracing Christianity.

  Augustine decided he had to meet the rumors head-on. When he entered his basilica, he addressed his congregation with all the skill and eloquence he could muster from his years as a teacher of rhetoric. “Do not lose heart, brethren,” he told them, “there will be an end of every earthly kingdom.” He told his astonished listeners that the fall of Rome was not actually bad news, but good news. It was merely another step in God’s construction of His new Jerusalem.

  “Do not hold on to the old man, the world.… The world is passing away; the world is losing its grip; the world is short of breath. Do not fear, thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle.”34 The sermons Saint Augustine composed to reassure his congregation would be the basis of his most influential work, The City of God.

  The very title (De Civitate Dei) was a direct slap in the face of the classical ideal of the polis. According to Augustine, all societies built around earthly ends, the needs and desires of human beings, are doomed to destruction—including Rome. The first half of The City of God is a devastating survey of the history of the city by the Tiber. It begins with Romulus murdering his brother Remus in founding Rome and continues through one gruesome scene of bloodshed, murder, cruelty, and betrayal after another.

  To those who claim Rome had been the home of ancient virtue, Augustus could quote Sallust back in their faces. Yet Sallust lied when he praised the early republic, Augustine said, since he knew full well Rome had been governed then by the same pack of killers and thieves who governed it later. Even the veneer of Christianity under Constantine, Augustine had to conclude, could not save an empire whose foundations were rotten from the start.35

  This is what happens, he explained, when a community tries to survive with human virtue as its only protection. The Earthly City may be founded on an ideal of liberty, but it ends in a “blood lust for domination and glory.” It may claim to uphold justice as its ultimate aim, as did Plato’s Republic. However, “true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ.…”36

  Th
is will be the new and true res publica that will emerge from the current rubble of Rome, Augustine proclaimed. A Heavenly City will replace the Earthly City with a genuine community of hearts and minds united under God.

  What are the tools Christians will use to build Rome’s replacement? First of all the Christian faith, an unshakable belief in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. However, there is also a role for man’s reason: for if Augustine was ready to throw away the entire tradition of Greek thought, he was keen to hang on to its most important discovery. Augustine was no philosopher. However, he recognized his debt both to Plato (whose philosophy comes closest to Christianity and who would have been a Christian, Augustine affirms, if he had had the opportunity) and to the man who was Augustine’s principal interpreter of Plato, the great Plotinus.37

  From Plotinus, Augustine had learned that man’s reason is like the soul’s flashlight, beaming out into the surrounding gloom. It is able to identify the shape and nature of the material objects around it; but when its beam falls on those objects that share the same God-derived incorporeal essence as our soul, they flash out with a sudden luminosity and meaning that we recognize instantly as truth.38

  In Neoplatonist terms, our reason picks out the trail of divine emanation like a phosphorescent glow in the dark, which eventually leads our soul out of the cave, toward the ultimate source of the light of reason and everything else, God Himself. This is what Saint Augustine means (or seems to mean) when he speaks of “the divine illumination of the intellect.”39 Man’s reason is not superfluous to Augustine’s relationship with God. Fused together with faith, it is essential to it. It is just that reason alone gets us nowhere; it remains stuck at the cave’s exit. Faith provides that needed extra boost, by affirming the supreme immutable truth imbedded in the Word of God, which no human being could hope to discover in this mortal life by himself. We see the luminous trail for what it really is, the path to salvation.