evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient
writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and
fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we
come to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in
volume, of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, of evidence to the
_truth_ of supernatural doctrines, but of evidence to what these
doctrines and their accompanying ritual and organization were: evidence
to the way in which the Church was constituted, to the way in which she
regarded her mission, to the things she thought important, to the
practice of her rites.
That is why I have taken the early third century as the moment in which
we can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in
being, and this picture is full of evidence to the state of the Church
in its origins three generations before.
I say, again, it is all-important for the reader who desires a true
historical picture to seize the _sequence of the dates with which we
are dealing_, their relation to the length of human life and therefore
to the society to which they relate.
It is all-important because the false history which has had its own way
for so many years is based upon two false suggestions of the first
magnitude. The first is the suggestion that the period between the
Crucifixion and the full Church of the third century was one in which
vast changes could proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original
ideas be rapidly developed; the second is that the space of time during
which those changes are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to
account for them.
It is only because those days are remote from ours that such
suggestions can be made. If we put ourselves by an effort of the
imagination into the surroundings of that period, we can soon discover
how false these suggestions are.
The period was not one favorable to the interruption of record. It was
one of a very high culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual,
and skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than
in any other period with which we are acquainted. It was certainly
greater than it is today. Those times were certainly less susceptible
to mere novel assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under
the influence of the modern press. It was a period astonishingly alive.
Lethargy and decay had not yet touched the world of the Empire. It
built, read, traveled, discussed, and, above all, _criticized_, with an
enormous energy.
In general, it was no period during which alien fashions could rise
within such a community as the Church without their opponents being
immediately able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the
immediate past. The world in which the Church arose was one; and that
world was intensely vivid. Anyone in that world who saw such an
institution as Episcopacy (for instance) or such a doctrine as the
Divinity of Christ to be a novel corruption of originals could have,
and would have, protested at once. It was a world of ample record and
continual communication.
Granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the
distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak
and what is called the Apostolic period; that is, the generation which
could still remember the origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the
preaching of the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps African
cities. We are often told that changes “gradually crept in;” that “the
imperceptible effect of time” did this or that. Let us see how these
vague phrases stand the test of confrontation with actual dates.
Let us stand in the years 200-210, consider a man then advanced in
years, well read and traveled, and present in those first years of the
third century at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were many such
men who, if they had been able to do so, would have reproved novelties
and denounced perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient
proof that the main lines of Catholic government and practice had
developed unbroken and unwarped from at least his own childhood. But an
old man who so witnessed the constitution of the Church and its
practices as I have described them in the year 200, would correspond to
that generation of old people whom we have with us today; the old
people who were born in the late twenties and thirties of the
nineteenth century; the old people who can just remember the English
Reform Bill, and who were almost grown up during the troubles of 1848
and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris: the old people in
the United States who can remember as children the election of Van
Buren to the office of President: the old people whose birth was not
far removed from the death of Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men
and women when gold was first discovered in California.
Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution under Nero.
It was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in
the early history of the Church. It took place in Apostolic times. It
affected men who, though aged, could easily remember Judea in the years
connected with Our Lord’s mission and His Passion. St. Peter lived to
witness, in that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived it. It
came not forty years later than the day of Pentecost. But the
persecution under Nero was to an old man such as I have supposed
assisting at the Eucharist in the early part of the third century, no
further off than the Declaration of Independence is from the old people
of our generation. An old man in the year 200 could certainly remember
many who had themselves been witnesses of the Apostolic age, just as an
old man today remembers well men who saw the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. The old people who had surrounded his childhood would
be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what the old people who
survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to Lafayette, or
to the younger Pitt. They could have seen and talked to that first
generation of the Church as the corresponding people surviving in the
early nineteenth century could have seen and talked with the founders
of the United States.
It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the
Rite of Initiation (Baptism in the name of the Trinity), the
establishment of an Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and
orthodoxy, and all those main lines of Catholicism which we find to be
the very essence of the Church in the early third century, could have
risen without protest. They cannot have come from an innocent, natural,
uncivilized perversion of an original so very recent and so open to
every form of examination.
That there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning
of undecided doctrines is natural, and fits in both with the dates and
with the atmosphere of the period and with the character of the
subject. But that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine
should have developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet
without protest in a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid
intercommunication, and, _above all, so brief_, is quite impossible.
That is what history has to say of the early Church in the Roman
Empire. The Gospels, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of
Clement and Ignatius may tell a true or a false story; their authors
may have written under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception;
or they may have been supremely true and immutably sincere. _But they
are contemporary._ A man may respect their divine origin or he may
despise their claims to instruct the human race; but that the Christian
body from its beginning was not “Christianity” but a Church and that
that Church was identically one with what was already called long
before the third century [Footnote: The Muratorian Fragment is older
than the third century, and St. Ignatius, who also uses the word
Catholic, was as near to the time of the Gospels as I am to the Crimean
War.] the _Catholic_ Church, is simply plain history, as plain and
straightforward as the history, let us say, of municipal institutions
in contemporary Gaul. It is history indefinitely better proved, and
therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern guesswork
on imaginary “Teutonic Institutions” before the eighth century or the
still more imaginary “Aryan” origins of the European race, or any other
of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for
historical truth.
So much for the Catholic Church in the early third century when first
we have a mass of evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined,
powerful growing body, intent on unity, ruled by bishops, having for
its central doctrine the Incarnation of God in an historical Person,
Jesus Christ, and for its central rite a Mystery, the transformation of
Bread and Wine by priests into the Body and Blood which the faithful
consume.
This “State within the States” by the year 200 already had affected the
Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already
transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done.
As the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.
What was the process of that decline?
To answer such a question we have next to observe three developments
that followed: (1) The great increase of barbarian hired soldiery
within the Empire; (2) The weakening of the central power as compared
with the local power of the small and increasingly rich class of great
landowners; (3) The rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted
position (and soon a predominating position) to complete mastery over
all society.
All these three phenomena developed together; they occupied about two
hundred years—roughly from the year 300 to the year 500. When they had
run their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one
society from one Imperial centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary
forces in the Roman Army, drawn from barbaric recruitment, had
established themselves in the various provinces and were calling
themselves “Kings.” The Catholic Church was everywhere the religion of
the great majority; it had everywhere alliance with, and often the use
of, the official machinery of government and taxation which continued
unbroken. It had become, far beyond all other organisms in the Roman
State, the central and typical organism which gave the European world
its note. This process is commonly called “The Fall of the Roman
Empire;” what was that “fall?” What really happened in this great
transformation?
III
WHAT WAS THE “FALL” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
That state of society which I have just described, the ordered and
united society of the Roman Empire, passed into another and very
different state of society: the society of what are called “The Dark
Ages.”
From these again rose, after another 600 years of adventures and
perils, the great harvest of mediæval civilization. Hardly had the
Roman Empire turned in its maturity to accept the fruit of its long
development (I mean the Catholic Church), when it began to grow old and
was clearly about to suffer some great transition. But that transition,
which threatened to be death, proved in the issue not death at all, but
a mixture of Vision and Change.
The close succession of fruit and decay in society is what one expects
from the analogy of all living things: at the close of the cycle it is
death that should come. A plant, just after it is most fruitful, falls
quickly. So, one might imagine, should the long story of Mediterranean
civilization have proceeded. When it was at its final and most complete
stage, one would expect some final and complete religion which should
satisfy its long search and solve its ancient riddles: but after such a
discovery, after the fruit of such a maturity had fully developed, one
would expect an end.
Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that
an end did not come. Dissolution was in some strange way checked. Death
was averted. And the more closely one looks into the unique history of
that salvation—the salvation of all that could be saved in a most
ancient and fatigued society—the more one sees that this salvation was
effected by no agency save that of the Catholic Church. Everything
else, after, say, 250 A.D., the empty fashionable philosophies, the
barbarians filling the army, the current passions and the current
despair, made for nothing but ruin.
There is no parallel to this survival in all the history of mankind.
Every other great civilization has, after many centuries of
development, either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died
and disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, there is nothing left
of Assyria. The Eastern civilizations remain, but remain immovable; or
if they change can only vulgarly copy external models.
But the civilization of Europe—the civilization, that is, of Rome and
of the Empire—had a third fortune differing both from death and from
sterility: it survived to a resurrection. Its essential seeds were
preserved for a Second Spring.
For five or six hundred years men carved less well, wrote verse less
well, let roads fall slowly into ruin, lost or rather coarsened the
machinery of government, forgot or neglected much in letters and in the
arts and in the sciences. But there was preserved, right through that
long period, not only so much of letters and of the arts as would
suffice to bridge the great gulf between the fifth century and the
eleventh, but also so much of what was really vital in the mind of
Europe as would permit that mind to blossom again after its repose. And
the agency, I repeat, which effected this conservation of the seeds,
was the Catholic Church.
It is impossible to understand this truth, indeed it is impossible to
make any sense at all of European history, if we accept that story of
the decline which is currently put forward in anti-Catholic academies,
and which has seemed sufficient to anti-Catholic historians.
_Their_ version is, briefly, this: The Roman Empire, becoming corrupt
and more vicious through the spread of luxury and through a sort of
native weakness to be discovered in the very blood of the
Mediterranean, was at last invaded and overwhelmed by young and
vigorous tribes of Germans. These brought with them all the strength of
those native virtues which later rejected the unity of Christendom and
began the modern Protestant societies—which are already nearly atheist
and very soon will be wholly so.
A generic term has been invented by these modern and false historians
whose version I am here giving; the vigorous, young, uncorrupt, and
virtuous tribes which are imagined to have broken through the
boundaries of the effete Empire and to have rejuvenated it, are grouped
together as “Teutonic:” a German strain very strong numerically,
superior also to what was left of Roman civilization in virile power,
is said to have come in and to have taken over the handling of affairs.
One great body of these Germans, the Franks, are said to have taken
over Gaul; another (the Goths, in their various branches) Italy and
Spain. But most complete, most fruitful, and most satisfactory of all
(they tell us) was the eruption of these vigorous and healthy pagans
into the outlying province of Britain, which they wholly conquered,
exterminating its original inhabitants and colonizing it with their
superior stock.
“It was inevitable” (the anti-Catholic historian proceeds to admit)
“that the presence of uncultured though superior men should accelerate
the decline of arts in the society which they thus conquered. It is
further to be deplored that their simpler and native virtues were
contaminated by the arts of the Roman clergy and that in some measure
the official religion of Rome captured their noble souls; for that
official religion permitted the poison of the Roman decline to affect
all the European mind—even the German mind—for many centuries. But at
the same time this evil effect was counter-balanced by the ineradicable
strength and virtues of the Northern barbaric blood. This sacred
Teutonic blood it was which brought into Western Europe the subtlety of
romantic conceptions, the true lyric touch in poetry, the deep
reverence which was (till recently) the note of their religion, the
love of adventure in which the old civilization was lacking, and a vast
respect for women. At the same time their warrior spirit evolved the
great structure of feudalism, the chivalric model and the whole
military ideal of mediæval civilization.
“Is it to be wondered at that when great new areas of knowledge were
opened up in the later fifteenth century by suddenly expanded travel,
by the printing press, and by an unexpected advance in physical
science, the emancipation of the European mind should have brought this
pure and barbaric stock to its own again?
“In proportion as Teutonic blood was strong, in that proportion was the
hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the hold upon men of Catholic
tradition, shaken in the early sixteenth century; and before that
century had closed the manly stirp of North Germany, Holland,
Scandinavia and England, had developed the Protestant civilization a
society advancing, healthy, and already the master of all rivals;
destined soon to be, if it be not already, supreme.”
Such is not an exaggerated summary of what the anti-Catholic school of
history gave us from German and from English universities (with the
partial aid of anti-Catholic academic forces within Catholic countries)
during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.
There went with this strange way of rewriting history a flood of wild
hypotheses presented as fact. Thus Parliaments (till lately admired)
were imagined—and therefore stated—to be Teutonic, non-Roman, therefore
non-Catholic in origin. The gradual decline of slavery was attributed
to the same miraculous powers in the northern pagans; and in general
whatever thing was good in itself or was consonant with modern ideas,
was referred back to this original source of good in the business of
Europe: the German tribes.
Meanwhile the religious hatred these false historians had of
civilization, that is, of Roman tradition and the Church, showed itself
in a hundred other ways: the conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was
represented by them as the victory of a superior people over a degraded
and contemptible one: the Reconquest of Spain by our race over the
Asiatics as a disaster: its final triumphant instrument, the
Inquisition, which saved Spain from a Moorish ravage was made out a
monstrosity. Every revolt, however obscure, against the unity of
European civilization in the Middle Ages (notably the worst revolt of
all, the Albigensian), was presented as a worthy uplifting of the human
mind against conditions of bondage. Most remarkable of all, the actual
daily life of Catholic Europe, the habit, way of thought and manner of
men, during the period of unity—from, say, the eighth century to the
fifteenth—was simply omitted!
At the moment when history was struggling to become a scientific study,
this school of self-pleasing fairy tales held the field. When at last
history _did_ become a true scientific study, this school collapsed.
But it yet retains, as an inheritance from its old hegemony, a singular
power in the lower and more popular forms of historical writing; and
where the English language is spoken it is, even today, almost the only
view of European development which the general student can obtain.
It will be noted at the outset that the whole of the fantastic picture
which this old and now discredited theory presented, is based upon a
certain conception of what happened at the breakdown of the Roman
Empire.
Unless these barbaric German tribes _did_ come in and administrate,
unless they really _were_ very considerable in number, unless their
character in truth _was_ what this school postulated it to be—vigorous,
young, virtuous and all the rest of it—unless there _did indeed_ take
place a struggle between this imaginary great German nation and the
Mediterranean civilization, in which the former won and ruled as
conquerors over subject peoples; unless these primary axioms have some
historical truth in them, the theory which is deduced from them has no
historical value whatsoever.
A man may have a preference, as a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant
of North Germany or Scandinavia, for the type of man who originally
lived his degraded life outside the Roman Empire. He may, as an
anti-Catholic of any kind, hope that civilization was decadent through
Catholicism at the end of the united Roman Empire, and it may please
him to imagine that the coincidence of what was originally barbaric
with what is now Protestant German Europe is a proof of the former’s
original prowess. Nay, he may even desire that the non-Catholic and
non-traditional type in our civilization shall attain to a supremacy
which it certainly has not yet reached. [Footnote: I wrote that phrase
before the break up of Prussia and at a moment when Prussia was still
the idol of Oxford.] But the whole thing is only a pleasant (or
unpleasant) dream, something to imagine and not something to discover,
unless we have a solid historical foundation for the theory: to wit,
the destruction of the Roman Empire in the way which, and by the men
whom, the theory presupposes.
The validity of the whole scheme depends upon our answer to the
question, “What was the fall of the Roman Empire?”
If it was a conquest such as we have just seen postulated, and a
conquest actuated by the motives of men so described, then this old
anti-Catholic school, though it could not maintain its exaggerations
(though, for instance, it could not connect representative institutions
with the German barbarians) would yet be substantially true.
Now the moment documents began to be seriously examined and compared,
the moment modern research began to approach some sort of finality in
the study of that period wherein the United Roman Empire of the West
was replaced by sundry local Kingdoms, students of history
thenceforward (and in proportion to their impartiality) became more and
more convinced that the whole of this anti-Catholic attitude reposed
upon nothing more than assertion.
There was no conquest of effete Mediterranean peoples by vigorous
barbarians. The vast number of barbarians who lived as slaves within
the Empire, the far smaller number who were pressed or hired into the
military service of the Empire, the still smaller number which entered
the Empire as marauders, during the weakness of the Central Government
towards its end, were not of the sort which this anti-Catholic theory,
mistaking its desires for realities, pre-supposed.
The barbarians were not “Germans” (a term difficult to define), they
were of very mixed stocks which, if we go by speech (a bad guide to
race) were some of them Germanic, some Slav, some even Mongol, some
Berber, some of the old unnamed races: the Picts, for instance, and the
dark men of the extreme North and West.
They had no conspicuous respect for women of the sort which should
produce the chivalric ideal.
They were not free societies, but slave-owning societies.
They did not desire, attempt, or even dream, the destruction of the
Imperial power: that misfortune—which was gradual and never complete—in
so far as it came about at all, came about in spite of the barbarians
and not by their conscious effort.
They were not numerous; on the contrary, they were but handfuls of men,
even when they appeared as successful pillagers and raiders over the
frontiers. When they came in large numbers, they were wiped out.
They did not introduce any new institutions or any new ideas.
Again, you do not find, in that capital change from the old
civilization to the Dark Ages, that the rise of legend and of the
romantic and adventurous spirit (the sowing of the modern seed)
coincides with places where the great mass of barbaric slaves are
settled, or where the fewer barbaric pillagers or the regular barbaric
soldiers in the Roman Army pass. Romance appears hundreds of years
later, and it _appears more immediately and earliest in connection with
precisely those districts in which the passage of the few Teutonic,
Slavonic and other barbarians had been least felt_.