FANATICISM, LUXURY, CORRUPTION OF MORALS, AND IRRELIGION DO NOT
NECESSARILY LEAD TO THE FALL OF SOCIETIES
I must first explain what I understand by a “society.” I do not mean the
more or less extended sphere within which, in some form or other, a
distinct sovereignty is exercised. The Athenian democracy is not a
“society” in our sense, any more than the Kingdom of Magadha, the empire
of Pontus, or the Caliphate of Egypt in the time of the Fatimites. They
are fragments of societies, which, no doubt, change, coalesce, or break
up according to the natural laws that I am investigating; but their
existence or death does not imply the existence or death of a society.
Their formation is usually a mere transitory phenomenon, having but a
limited or indirect influence on the civilization in which they arise.
What I mean by a “society” is an assemblage of men moved by similar
ideas and the same instincts; their political unity may be more or less
imperfect, but their social unity must be complete. Thus Egypt, Assyria,
Greece, India, and China were, or still are, the theatre where distinct
and separate societies have played out their own destinies, save when
these have been brought for a time into conjunction by political
troubles. As I shall speak of the parts only when my argument applies to
the whole, I shall use the words “nation” or “people” either in the wide
or the narrow sense, without any room for ambiguity. I return now to my
main subject, which is to show that fanaticism, luxury, corruption of
morals, and irreligion do not necessarily bring about the ruin of
nations.
All these phenomena have been found in a highly developed state, either
in isolation or together, among peoples which were actually the better
for them—or at any rate not the worse.
The Aztec Empire in America seems to have existed mainly “for the
greater glory” of fanaticism. I cannot imagine anything more fanatical
than a society like that of the Aztecs, which rested on a religious
foundation, continually watered by the blood of human sacrifice. It has
been denied,[4] perhaps with some truth, that the ancient peoples of
Europe ever practised ritual murder on victims who were regarded as
innocent, with the exception of shipwrecked sailors and prisoners of
war. But for the ancient Mexicans one victim was as good as another.
With a ferocity recognized by a modern physiologist[5] as characteristic
of the races of the New World, they massacred their fellow-citizens on
their altars, without pity, without flinching, and without
discrimination. This did not prevent their being a powerful,
industrious, and wealthy people, which would certainly for many ages
have gone on flourishing, reigning, and throat-cutting, had not the
genius of Hernando Cortes and the courage of his companions stepped in
to put an end to the monstrous existence of such an Empire. Thus
fanaticism does not cause the fall of States.
Luxury and effeminacy have no better claims than fanaticism. Their
effects are to be seen only in the upper classes; and though they
assumed different forms in the ancient world, among the Greeks, the
Persians, and the Romans, I doubt whether they were ever brought to a
greater pitch of refinement than at the present day, in France, Germany,
England, and Russia—especially in the last two. And it is just these
two, England and Russia, that, of all the States of modern Europe, seem
to be gifted with a peculiar vitality. Again, in the Middle Ages, the
Venetians, the Genoese, and the Pisans crowded their shops with the
treasures of the whole world; they displayed them in their palaces, and
carried them over every sea. But they were certainly none the weaker for
that. Thus luxury and effeminacy are in no way the necessary causes of
weakness and ruin.
Again, the corruption of morals, however terrible a scourge it may be,
is not always an agent of destruction. If it were, the military power
and commercial prosperity of a nation would have to vary directly with
the purity of its morals; but this is by no means the case. The curious
idea that the early Romans had all the virtues[6] has now been rightly
given up by most people. We no longer see anything very edifying in the
patricians of the early Republic, who treated their wives like slaves,
their children like cattle, and their creditors like wild beasts. If
there were still any advocates to plead their unrighteous cause by
arguing from an assumed “variation in the moral standard of different
ages,” it would not be very hard to show how flimsy such an argument is.
In all ages the misuse of power has excited equal indignation. If the
rape of Lucrece did not bring about the expulsion of the kings, if the
tribunate[7] was not established owing to the attempt of Appius
Claudius, at any rate the real causes that lay behind these two great
revolutions, by cloaking themselves under such pretexts, reveal the
state of public morality at the time. No, we cannot account for the
greater vigour of all early peoples by alleging their greater virtue.
From the beginning of history, there has been no human society, however
small, that has not contained the germ of every vice. And yet, however
burdened with this load of depravity, the nations seem to march on very
comfortably, and often, in fact, to owe their greatness to their
detestable customs. The Spartans enjoyed a long life and the admiration
of men merely owing to their laws, which were those of a robber-state.
Was the fall of the Phœnicians due to the corruption that gnawed their
vitals and was disseminated by them over the whole world? Not at all; on
the contrary, this corruption was the main instrument of their power and
glory. From the day when they first touched the shores of the Greek
islands,[8] and went their way, cheating their customers, robbing their
hosts, abducting women for the slave-market, stealing in one place to
sell in another—from that day, it is true, their reputation fell not
unreasonably low; but they did not prosper any the less for that, and
they hold a place in history which is quite unaffected by all the
stories of their greed and treachery.
Far from admitting the superior moral character of early societies, I
have no doubt that nations, as they grow older and so draw nearer their
fall, present a far more satisfactory appearance from the censor’s point
of view. Customs become less rigid, rough edges become softened, the
path of life is made easier, the rights existing between man and man
have had time to become better defined and understood, and so the
theories of social justice have reached, little by little, a higher
degree of delicacy. At the time when the Greeks overthrew the Empire of
Darius, or when the Goths entered Rome, there were probably far more
honest men in Athens, Babylon, and the imperial city than in the
glorious days of Harmodius, Cyrus the Great, and Valerius Publicola.
We need not go back to those distant epochs, but may judge them by
ourselves. Paris is certainly one of the places on this earth where
civilization has touched its highest point, and where the contrast with
primitive ages is most marked; and yet you will find a large number of
religious and learned people admitting that in no place and time were
there so many examples of practical virtue, of sincere piety, of saintly
lives governed by a fine sense of duty, as are to be met to-day in the
great modern city. The ideals of goodness are as high now as they ever
were in the loftiest minds of the seventeenth century; and they have
laid aside the bitterness, the strain of sternness and savagery—I was
almost saying, of pedantry—that sometimes coloured them in that age. And
so, as a set-off to the frightful perversities of the modern spirit, we
find, in the very temple where that spirit has set up the high altar of
its power, a striking contrast, which never appeared to former centuries
in the same consoling light as it has to our own.
I do not even believe that there is a lack of great men in periods of
corruption and decadence; and by “great men” I mean those most richly
endowed with energy of character and the masculine virtues. If I look at
the list of the Roman Emperors (most of them, by the way, as high above
their subjects in merit as they were in rank) I find names like Trajan,
Antoninus Pius, Septimius Severus, and Jovian; and below the throne,
even among the city mob, I see with admiration all the great
theologians, the great martyrs, the apostles of the primitive Church, to
say nothing of the virtuous Pagans. Strong, brave, and active spirits
filled the camps and the Italian towns; and one may doubt whether in the
time of Cincinnatus, Rome held, in proportion, so many men of eminence
in all the walks of practical life. The testimony of the facts is
conclusive.
Thus men of strong character, men of talent and energy, so far from
being unknown to human societies in the time of their decadence and old
age, are actually to be found in greater abundance than in the days when
an empire is young. Further, the ordinary level of morality is higher in
the later period than in the earlier. It is not generally true to say
that in States on the point of death the corruption of morals is any
more virulent than in those just born. It is equally doubtful whether
this corruption brings about their fall; for some States, far from dying
of their perversity, have lived and grown fat on it. One may go further,
and show that moral degradation is not necessarily a mortal disease at
all; for, as against the other maladies of society, it has the advantage
of being curable; and the cure is sometimes very rapid.
In fact, the morals of any particular people are in continual ebb and
flow throughout its history. To go no further afield than our own
France, we may say that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the conquered
race of the Gallo-Romans were certainly better than their conquerors
from a moral point of view. Taken individually, they were not always
their inferiors even in courage and the military virtues.[9] In the
following centuries, when the two races had begun to intermingle, they
seem to have deteriorated; and we have no reason to be very proud of the
picture that was presented by our dear country about the eighth and
ninth centuries. But in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, a great
change came over the scene. Society had succeeded in harmonizing its
most discordant elements, and the state of morals was reasonably good.
The ideas of the time were not favourable to the little casuistries that
keep a man from the right path even when he wishes to walk in it. The
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of terrible conflict and
perversity. Brigandage reigned supreme. It was a period of decadence in
the strictest sense of the word; and the decadence was shown in a
thousand ways. In view of the debauchery, the tyranny, and the massacres
of that age, of the complete withering of all the finer feelings in
every section of the State—in the nobles who plundered their villeins,
in the citizens who sold their country to England, in a clergy that was
false to its professions—one might have thought that the whole society
was about to crash to the ground and bury its shame deep under its own
ruins.... The crash never came. The society continued to live; it
devised remedies, it beat back its foes, it emerged from the dark cloud.
The sixteenth century was far more reputable than its predecessor, in
spite of its orgies of blood, which were a pale reflection of those of
the preceding age. St. Bartholomew’s day is not such a shameful memory
as the massacre of the Armagnacs. Finally, the French people passed from
this semi-barbarous twilight into the pure splendour of day, the age of
Fénelon, Bossuet, and the Montausier. Thus, up to Louis XIV, our history
shows a series of rapid changes from good to evil, from evil to good;
while the real vitality of the nation has little to do with its moral
condition. I have touched lightly on the larger curves of change; to
trace the multitude of lesser changes within these would require many
pages. To speak even of what we have all but seen with our own eyes, is
it not clear that in every decade since 1787 the standard of morality
has varied enormously? I conclude that the corruption of morals is a
fleeting and unstable phenomenon; it becomes sometimes worse and
sometimes better, and so cannot be considered as necessarily causing the
ruin of societies.
I must examine here an argument, put forward in our time, which never
entered people’s heads in the eighteenth century; but as it fits in
admirably with the subject of the preceding paragraph, I could not find
a better place in which to speak of it. Many people have come to think
that the end of a society is at hand when its religious ideas tend to
weaken and disappear. They see a kind of connexion between the open
profession of the doctrines of Zeno and Epicurus at Athens and Rome,
with the consequent abandonment (according to them) of the national
cults, and the fall of the two republics. They fail to notice that these
are virtually the only examples that can be given of such a coincidence.
The Persian Empire at the time of its fall was wholly under the sway of
the Magi. Tyre, Carthage, Judæa, the Aztec and Peruvian monarchies were
struck down while fanatically clinging to their altars. Thus it cannot
be maintained that all the peoples whose existence as a nation is being
destroyed are at that moment expiating the sin they committed in
deserting the faith of their fathers. Further, even the two examples
that go to support the theory seem to prove much more than they really
do. I deny absolutely that the ancient cults were ever given up in Rome
or Athens, until the day when they were supplanted in the hearts of all
men by the victorious religion of Christ. In other words, I believe that
there has never been a real breach of continuity in the religious
beliefs of any nation on this earth. The outward form or inner meaning
of the creed may have changed; but we shall always find some Gallic
Teutates making way for the Roman Jupiter, Jupiter for the Christian
God, without any interval of unbelief, in exactly the same way as the
dead give up their inheritance to the living. Hence, as there has never
been a nation of which one could say that it had no faith at all, we
have no right to assume that “the lack of faith causes the destruction
of States.”
I quite see the grounds on which such a view is based. Its defenders
will tell us of “the notorious fact” that a little before the time of
Pericles at Athens, and about the age of the Scipios at Rome the upper
classes became more and more prone, first to reason about their
religion, then to doubt it, and finally to give up all faith in it, and
to take pride in being atheists. Little by little, we shall be told, the
habit of atheism spread, until there was no one with any pretensions to
intellect at all who did not defy one augur to pass another without
smiling.
This opinion has a grain of truth, but is largely false. Say, if you
will, that Aspasia, at the end of her little suppers, and Lælius, in the
company of his friends, made a virtue of mocking at the sacred beliefs
of their country; no one will contradict you. But they would not have
been allowed to vent their ideas too publicly; and yet they lived at the
two most brilliant periods of Greek and Roman history. The imprudent
conduct of his mistress all but cost Pericles himself very dear; we
remember the tears he shed in open court, tears which would not of
themselves have secured the acquittal of the fair infidel. Think, too,
of the official language held by contemporary poets, how Sophocles and
Aristophanes succeeded Æschylus as the stern champions of outraged
deity. The whole nation believed in its gods, regarded Socrates as a
revolutionary and a criminal, and wished to see Anaxagoras brought to
trial and condemned.... What of the later ages? Did the impious theories
of the philosophers succeed at any time in reaching the masses? Not for
a single day. Scepticism remained a luxury of the fashionable world and
of that world alone. One may call it useless to speak of the thoughts of
the plain citizens, the country folk, and the slaves, who had no
influence in the government, and could not impose their ideas on their
rulers. They had, however, a very real influence; and the proof is that
until paganism was at its last gasp, their temples and shrines had to be
kept going, and their acolytes to be paid. The most eminent and
enlightened men, the most fervent in their unbelief, had not only to
accept the public honour of wearing the priestly robe, but to undertake
the most disagreeable duties of the cult—they who were accustomed to
turn over, day and night, _manu diurna, manu nocturna_, the pages of
Lucretius. Not only did they go through these rites on ceremonial
occasions, but they used their scanty hours of leisure, hours snatched
with difficulty from the life-and-death game of politics, in composing
treatises on augury. I am referring to the great Julius.[10] Well, all
the emperors after him had to hold the office of high-priest, even
Constantine. He, certainly, had far stronger reason than all his
predecessors for shaking off a yoke so degrading to his honour as a
Christian prince; yet he was forced by public opinion, that blazed up
for the last time before being extinguished for ever, to come to terms
with the old national religion. Thus it was not the faith of the plain
citizens, the country folk, and the slaves that was of small account; it
was the theories of the men of culture that mattered nothing. They
protested in vain, in the name of reason and good sense, against the
absurdities of paganism; the mass of the people neither would nor could
give up one belief before they had been provided with another. They
proved once more the great truth that it is affirmation, not negation,
which is of service in the business of this world. So strongly did men
feel this truth in the third century that there was a religious reaction
among the higher classes. The reaction was serious and general, and
lasted till the world definitely passed into the arms of the Church. In
fact, the supremacy of philosophy reached its highest point under the
Antonines and began to decline soon after their death. I need not here
go deeply into this question, however interesting it may be for the
historian of ideas; it will be enough for me to show that the revolution
gained ground as the years went on, and to bring out its immediate
cause.
The older the Roman world became, the greater was the part played by the
army. From the emperor, who invariably came from the ranks, down to the
pettiest officer in his Prætorian guard and the prefect of the most
unimportant district, every official had begun his career on the
parade-ground, under the vine-staff of the centurion; in other words
they had all sprung from the mass of the people, of whose unquenchable
piety I have already spoken. When they had scaled the heights of office,
they found confronting them, to their intense annoyance and dismay, the
ancient aristocracy of the municipalities, the local senators, who took
pleasure in regarding them as upstarts, and would gladly have turned
them to ridicule if they had dared. Thus the real masters of the State
and the once predominant families were at daggers drawn. The commanders
of the army were believers and fanatics—Maximin, for example, and
Galerius, and a hundred others. The senators and decurions still found
their chief delight in the literature of the sceptics; but as they
actually lived at court, that is to say among soldiers, they were forced
to adopt a way of speaking and an official set of opinions which should
not put them to any risk. Gradually an atmosphere of devotion spread
through the Empire; and this led the philosophers themselves, with
Euhemerus at their head, to invent systems of reconciling the theories
of the rationalists with the State religion—a movement in which the
Emperor Julian was the most powerful spirit. There is no reason to give
much praise to this renaissance of pagan piety, for it caused most of
the persecutions under which our martyrs have suffered. The masses,
whose religious feelings had been wounded by the atheistic sects, had
bided their time so long as they were ruled by the upper classes. But as
soon as the empire had become democratic, and the pride of these classes
had been brought low, then the populace determined to have their
revenge. They made a mistake, however, in their victims, and cut the
throats of the Christians, whom they took for philosophers, and accused
of impiety. What a difference there was between this and an earlier age!
The really sceptical pagan was King Agrippa, who wished to hear St. Paul
merely out of curiosity.[11] He listened to him, disputed with him, took
him for a madman, but did not dream of punishing him for thinking
differently from himself. Another example is the historian Tacitus, who
was full of contempt for the new sectaries, but blamed Nero for his
cruelty in persecuting them. Agrippa and Tacitus were the real
unbelievers. Diocletian was a politician ruled by the clamours of his
people; Decius and Aurelian were fanatics like their subjects.
Even when the Roman Government had definitely gone over to Christianity,
what a task it was to bring the different peoples into the bosom of the
Church! In Greece there was a series of terrible struggles, in the
Universities as well as in the small towns and villages. The bishops had
everywhere such difficulty in ousting the little local divinities that
very often the victory was due less to argument and conversion than to
time, patience, and diplomacy. The clergy were forced to make use of
pious frauds, and their ingenuity replaced the deities of wood, meadow,
and fountain, by saints, martyrs, and virgins. Thus the feelings of
reverence continued without a break; for some time they were directed to
the wrong objects, but they at last found the right road.... But what am
I saying? Can we be so certain that even in France there are not to be
found to this day a few places where the tenacity of some odd
superstition still gives trouble to the parish priest? In Catholic
Brittany, in the eighteenth century, a bishop had a long struggle with a
village-people that clung to the worship of a stone idol. In vain was
the gross image thrown into the water; its fanatical admirers always
fished it out again, and the help of a company of infantry was needed to
break it to pieces. We see from this what a long life paganism had—and
still has. I conclude that there is no good reason for holding that Rome
and Athens were for a single day without religion.
Since then, a nation has never, either in ancient or modern times, given
up one faith before being duly provided with another, it is impossible
to claim that the ruin of nations follows from their irreligion.
I have now shown that fanaticism, luxury, and the corruption of morals
have not necessarily any power of destruction, and that irreligion has
no political reality at all; it remains to discuss the influence of bad
government, which is well worth a chapter to itself.