THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became
apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death
of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and
that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a
good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of
government.
Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together
in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the
Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house
and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the
curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.
At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath, but when
bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians
increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath-day
and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had
taken place.
These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as
well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no
set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women,
whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in
meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes, if we
are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout brethren, “speaking with
tongues,” had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for
the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No
one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations but very often
they got so excited that they raved like maniacs and while a church may
survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts
of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order
into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.
At first these efforts met with little success. A regular program seemed
in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith.
In the end, however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings
became subject to a definite ritual.
They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish
Christians who might be present). Then the congregation united in a song
of praise of more recent composition for the benefit of the Roman and the
Greek worshipers.
The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus
had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for
several centuries remained entirely spontaneous and the sermons were
delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.
But when the number of those gatherings increased, when the police,
forever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries,
it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians
in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken
highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities
which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were
tossed upon a turbulent sea and were very much in need of a clever pilot
if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.
And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and
deaconesses, pious men and women who were the “servants” of the
community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great
concern to the early Christians) and who looked after the property of the
community and took care of all the small daily chores.
Still later when the church continued to grow in membership and the
business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs,
it was entrusted to a small group of “elders.” These were known by their
Greek name of Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”
After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian
church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an
“overseer” (an Episkopos or Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire
district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.
Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the empire, and
those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome
and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who
were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their
provinces.
In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over that part of the
world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest
respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which
had expected the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared
from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in his ruined palace saw
himself deprived of his former prestige.
And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by
the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the civilized world and who
guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west,
had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.
This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa, the common
expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy.
In the course of centuries, the title of Papa however became almost
exclusively associated in people’s minds with the particular “Father”
who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the
Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome, and not by
any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This
was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about
“the President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.” We
know that the head of our government is meant and not the President of
the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President of Harvard University or the
President of the League of Nations.
The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the
year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful
empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of
the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant
menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar
began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This
they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called
Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said to
have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated on the straits
which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between
the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important
monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already
Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.
Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander and
after having been for a short while part of Macedonia it had finally been
incorporated into the Roman Empire.
And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn
filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the
center of the empire.
The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven
knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had
come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when
one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the
Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws
made a thousand miles away.
But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some
one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the
most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible
successors to the glory of the imperial throne.
And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were
shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office
had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be
the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a
hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared
to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate
necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.
But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved
consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said
and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God
and the strength and power of the organization which represented the
divine will on earth.
How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.
While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which
hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the
empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand
institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much
useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but
more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.
The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible
cost.
For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a
palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in
which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and
mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary
human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred
years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the
old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and
carefree citizens.
And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall
now try to show you.
Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and
within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where
thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.
But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions
of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with
religious intolerance.
They were purely political.
The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest
possible freedom.
But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector,
who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with
foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every
suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an
enemy of the state and was treated as such.
That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the
slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when
he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary
looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.
A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found
himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him
a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience
had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides
he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use
“tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and
argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles,
very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.
In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering
the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified
vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture
meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until
after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to
leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.
The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the
authorities and their Christian subjects was long and painful. We
possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims.
According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century,
several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one
of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their
convictions could easily be enumerated.”
On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we
find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we
begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous
persecutions could ever have survived at all.
No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a
prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my
readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors
Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a
fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance
during the worst era of persecution.
Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler
as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his
Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea about the
difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of
the empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to
their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbors
who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon
which the imperial government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.
Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality towards
their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily extending the sphere of their
influence.
Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the request of the
Christian members of the Roman senate who complained that it hurt their
feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the
removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years
had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested.
This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent
into exile.
It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great
personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to
suggest a compromise.
“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian neighbors
not live in peace and harmony? We look up to the same stars, we are
fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky.
What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the
ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be
only one path leading to an answer.”
He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which
threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy.
Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a
violent quarrel had broken out between two contending factions of the
Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise
to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which the
world had ever listened. Themistius the philosopher, who was the author,
had remained faithful to the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor
Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox
Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true
duty.
“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can hope to
exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially
that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that
field causes hypocrisy and conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence
it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only
by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is
a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for
a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by
which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery.
God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him. He likes
the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians
again others.”
Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.
The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all
efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life
means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society
was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign
mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other
outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.
When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in
centuries past had entered the service of the state found themselves
deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the
Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise
the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors, they
could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote
themselves exclusively to theological subjects. As Christian diplomats,
they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent
the bishop of Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake
the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous chieftain in
the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers,
they could hope to make fortunes administering those rapidly increasing
estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest
landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.
We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years.
Up to the year 1914 the young men of Europe who were ambitious and did
not depend upon manual labor for their support almost invariably entered
the service of the state. They became officers of the different imperial
and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions,
administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors
or military commanders. They did not expect to grow very rich, but the
social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the
application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,
they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable old age.
Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal
fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some
few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a
lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,
surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated
to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention.
Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between
an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry
for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so
within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former
officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not
have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most
of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in
executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have
found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are
today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had
ever expected to be.
What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.
It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry
back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take
orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple
cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young
men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes
of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were
both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to
appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully.
For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things
appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.
Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall
be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much
larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the
obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different
periods known by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and
Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other.
They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and
Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious
law which governs human development works the same in Moscow as it does
in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor
place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises.
More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its
love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring
about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath such
pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim
truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man
is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a
world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us
“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they have always
regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they are shocked to discover
that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the
rest of the universe. They might as well fight against the habits of
parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.
Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.
For then and only then can history some day be turned into something
that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the
ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice, tribal
intolerance and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow
citizens.
And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him look for the
proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few
pages back.
Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the
first four centuries.
Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of
the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the
Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when
they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were
attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart
and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly
master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the
latter were infinitely greater.
The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did
not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new
disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to
be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical
and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of
politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took
their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity
to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence
upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal
holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their
souls.
In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion
and contemplation.
The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely
a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from
the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as
ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast
real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less
opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to
harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent
their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might
again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a
natural development of the times.
This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an
enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the
next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of
very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of
Oriental origin.
This need not surprise us.
In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,
civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point
of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of
culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied
the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between
the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of
all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples
and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as
an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained
energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious
experiences in a different mood.
To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being
alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from
the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert
that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore
look upon the reality of existence.
For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have
had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people,
have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of
civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be
accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors
to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of
the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual
stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of
the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian.
When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group
of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed
from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully
among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead
to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very
regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on
the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby
giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief
to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a
more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first
religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century)
hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who
was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots
who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so
many fortresses of the Lord.
Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from
Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of
people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its
wickedness and its too insistent creditors.
The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it
necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed.
Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in
the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was
disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which
seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.
“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become
of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress?
Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by
the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in
the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”
The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic
institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation
goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His
name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His
parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his
Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in
the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that
once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.
There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame
of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the
number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had
enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.
He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European
monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it
showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to
obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours
which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled
with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were
expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful
citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the
Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of
education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional
ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.
In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a
sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they
could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to
work or to prayer.
But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that
the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and
their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became
the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity
by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were
expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the
glory of the kingdom of God.
The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had
already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come
to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up
by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The
monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the
wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland.
They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school
and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a
civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.
In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make
use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.
The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to
distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of
the woods. There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste.
And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor
nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying humble attention
to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the
followers of the Christ.
The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest.
For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical
causes and was not (as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and
overwhelming outburst of religious ardor.
The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor
Diocletian.
Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those
many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their body-guards. But
he suffered from a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who
are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon
the subject of elementary economics.
He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly going to pieces.
Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay
in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the
defenses of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had
gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,
selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were
supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.
It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He
therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army,
composed of young and agile men who at a few weeks’ notice could be
marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an
invasion.
This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military
nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in
the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was
to be expected, they raised a great hue and cry and claimed that they
could not pay another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor
answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers
certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no
avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which
assured them a deficit at the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house
and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.
His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures and he solved
the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman
Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of
his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and
commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers
were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons
of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater
aptitude for music or pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed
to a life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they rowed across
the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although technically they
continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same
piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but
a very ordinary variety of slaves.
To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability
either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively
small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and
edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for
his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he
was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause
to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited
by the measures he had taken for their protection but refused to carry
their share of the common burden.
You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble
to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at
almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary
efforts which in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from
Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story
of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to
be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true
disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for
some authentic book upon the subject and a number of short biographies
of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been
preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New
Testament.
This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of Revelations
and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies
about and anent a city built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built
on seven hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days of
Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter
carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon. But it took no
great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to
understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the
“Mother of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town that was
drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become
the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of
every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and
slightly uncomplimentary nature.
Such sentences might have been explained away as the ravings of a poor
fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends
who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of
the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated
in those places where the Christians came together and it was no more
than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true
sentiments of all Christians towards the mighty city on the Tiber. I do
not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason
to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he
failed to share their enthusiasm.
But that was not all.
The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which
the world thus far had never heard. That was the word “heretics.”
Originally the name “heretic” was given only to those people who had
“chosen” to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.”
But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen
to believe certain doctrines which were not held “correct” or “sound”
or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly established authorities of the
Church and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were
“heretical, unsound, false and eternally wrong.”
The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically
free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the
fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held
to account for their private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter
the imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that
“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition and drunkenness”
and a few other things which common decency prevents me from repeating on
this page.
All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction and
misunderstanding led to persecution and once more Roman jails were filled
with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of
Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was
accomplished and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his
home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of
ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime
of raising great big cabbages in his back yard.
His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary,
since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he
decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the good will of his
enemies by offering them some special favors.
This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having been the first to
“recognize” the Christian church officially belongs to a man by the name
of Constantine.
Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning
Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and
mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their
claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will
have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is
the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.
This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of
Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus,
was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his
brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the
executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just
before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had
made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the
“second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the
Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian
who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days
tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of
sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view
of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto
his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their
private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of
molestation.”
For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century,
as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when
they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree,
they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity
of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner
this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and
although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks
the arrangement never quite lost its original character.
* * * * *
“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto
Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and
in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who
disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting
down thine enemies.”
There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty
centuries.
But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came
to power.