Theodosius was the last ruler of the empire proper who was capable of leading his army; and from his death onwards the fall of the western section proceeded at headlong rate. His sons, Honorius and Arcadius, were worse weaklings than even the sons of Valentinian: to fit for the throne a child born in the purple, always a hard task, seemed impossible under Christianity. At the end of the fourth century begins the series of convulsions which mark the end of the Roman empire properly so-called. In the year after Theodosius’ death, Alaric invaded and ravaged Greece; and, manoeuvred thence by Stilicho, proceeded to invade Italy. The tentative character of these unsuccessful first attempts, and of that of Rhadagast, only made more sure the triumph of the later; and invasion followed on invasion, till by the middle of the fifth century the West had lost Gaul, Spain, and Africa; and in the year 476 Rome, thrice sacked, received at last a barbarian king.

Through all these storms Christianity as a whole more than held its ground. The invaders were Christians, like the invaded, albeit heretics; the first conversion of Goths by the Arian Ulphilas in the previous century having been widely extended. The form of the dogma mattered nothing to the political function of the church, which was, among the barbarians as in the empire, to promote centralization up to the point at which schism became ungovernable. The Teutonic chieftains, it is clear, saw in the Christian Church a means of partially welding their peoples somewhat as Rome had been welded; and while Arianism held the ground among them, it furthered the unity that in the eastern empire was now being lost. And inasmuch as normal community of creed made possible an assimilation between the invaders and the conquered, Christianity positively facilitated the fall of the western empire. In Africa, again, where the Donatists, with their four hundred bishops, had been freshly persecuted under Honorius, the schism helped the invading Vandals, who paid for the Donatists’ help by giving them freedom of worship. It is probable that the ManichÆans, who were numerous in the same province, and who were also much persecuted, at first welcomed the invaders. So obvious was the risk of such alienations of heretics that Honorius, listening for a moment to the advice of tolerant pagans, went so far as to issue a law of general toleration. This, however, the orthodox clergy forced him to repeal, and the persecution of Donatists went from bad to worse. All the while the old paganism was still so common in the West that Honorius, who on the advice of his pious minister Olympius, after the fall of Stilicho, had sought to expel by edict all pagans and Arians from the service of the State, was fain later to entreat leading pagans to return. But the Arian Goths in turn showed the pagans no favour; in Greece, Alaric even broke up the Eleusinian mysteries; and the Vandals in Africa soon persecuted the ManichÆans even more bloodily than they did the Athanasians, whom they went far to drive out of the province. In this way they in turn weakened their State, besides otherwise undergoing the social diseases of empire, so that in the sixth century Belisarius was able to reconquer it for Justinian, the emperor of the East. In Spain, conquered by the Arian Visigoths, there was relative toleration. The Arian clergy, however, being mostly unlettered Teutons, were less useful instruments to the ruler than Catholics could be; and late in the sixth century a new king at his accession there adopted Trinitarianism.

The further the orthodox faith went, the more dangerous, it was clear, was the position of the remaining Arian kingdoms, since their heresy was always a pretext for a union of the others to crush them. A barbarian king, told by his clergy that he did God service in destroying heretics, needed little further encouragement to war; and such counsel the orthodox Church was always ready to give. Already at the end of the fifth century the immigrant Franks established in Gaul under Clovis were “converted” in mass, by the mere fiat of their king, to orthodox Christianity; and the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses further strengthened the Catholic cause. It was thus good policy for the Lombards, who in their turn conquered the north and south but never the centre of Italy, to begin to give up their Arianism at the end of the century. It is probable, however, that in any case Arianism would in course of time have fallen in the new barbaric States as it did in the eastern empire. The toleration given by Theodoric in Italy, and by the earlier Arian Goths in Spain and Gaul, to the Catholic creed, could avail nothing to stay the orthodox purpose of destroying heresy; and the element of rationalism on the Arian side was precisely what could least prosper in an era of ignorance. Thus the Catholic creed had time and credulity on its side; and, Christianity at that stage being above all things politically useful as an aid to arbitrary government, the most pronounced and sacerdotal and superstitious form of Christianity must be the most useful from a calculating monarch’s point of view.

Such, broadly, was the development in the East, where the virtual suppression or expulsion of Arianism by Theodosius and his successors showed what persistent persecution could do when carried on by both penal and economic means, through a hierarchy who knew how and where to strike, and had their hearts in the work. Arianism was not destroyed; indeed all of the great heresies of the first five centuries—Marcionism, Montanism, Arianism, ManichÆism, Monophysitism, to say nothing of the Nestorian Church in Asia—are found subsisting in the eastern empire in the seventh century, despite both disendowment and cruel persecution, thus in effect proving that had Christianity been simply left alone, neither helped nor attacked by the State, it would have been dissolved in a score of warring sects by the fifth century. The ManichÆans were as inflexible as ever were any of the Christists; and as against the convictions of the heretics in general the moral failure of the orthodox Church was absolute. By executing Priscillian in the fourth century it simply inflamed his following, which was strong in Spain two hundred years later. But though the endowed clergy could not convert or exterminate the others, they could keep them poor and ostracized, and wield against them the subsidized mob as well as the whole machinery of the State. Against such oppression the heretics could not compete as the early Jesuists had done against the careless course of paganism, with its isolated priests, so much more often indifferent than fanatical.

Where early Christism had met the cravings alike of ascetics, of mystics, of simple emotionalists, and of poor seekers after a concrete God not hedged around with altars and priests, thus appealing both to heretic Jews and to heretic Gentiles, the later heresies ostensibly appealed as a rule either to ascetics or to dogmatists, and offered nothing to the multitude that it could not find within the Church, shades of dogma apart. ManichÆism indeed remained to prove that what was virtually a new religion could rise and persist for centuries in the teeth of Christianity, by methods and appeals very like those of Christism; but it also served to prove that organized and endowed and established Christianity, inspired by an enduring hate, could check and overshadow the rival religion where unorganized paganism, for lack of general animus and systematic official zeal, had failed to subdue Christianity. And the political elimination of nominal Arianism in the West served to prove afresh that orthodoxy finally triumphed in that regard by enlisting on its side not only the instincts of polytheism but the interests of monarchy. It is significant that, driven from the empire, Arianism flourished best in the barbarian world, where for a time some mental freedom might be supposed to subsist. If any rational motive is to be assigned for the zealous adoption of the Athanasian creed by such rulers as Theodosius, it is presumably their perception that the most irrational dogma went best with discipline: that the spirit which presumed to rationalize religion was the less ready for political obedience. On the other hand, the Trinitarian clergy of Spain found their advantage as a hierarchy by bringing round their Arian masters to the orthodox creed. In any case, the triumph of orthodoxy went step for step not only with intellectual dissolution and moral paralysis, but with the disruption of the empire.

The constant law of theological development was that all stirrings of reason were anathematized as heresy, and that dogmas became orthodox in the ratio of their extravagance. Paganizing and polytheistic heresy such as that of the Collyridians of Arabia (4th c.), who worshipped Mary as a Goddess and offered her cakes (collyridÆ) as their mothers had done to Ashtaroth, ran little risk: their heresy in fact was on the way to be orthodoxy. Saner heresies fared differently. Late in the fourth century we find the Italian monk Jovinian opposing asceticism, urging a rational morality, and explaining that Mary ceased to be a virgin on bringing forth Jesus; for which offences he was condemned in Church Councils, flogged, and banished to a desolate island. A little later, Vigilantius, a presbyter from Gaul, ventured to oppose the growing worship of relics, prayers to saints, the use of sacred tapers, vigils, and pilgrimages, as well as to decry many current miracles. So furious was the outcry of Jerome in his case that he had to hold his peace if he would save his life. No leading churchman said a word for either reformer: Ambrose and Jerome both condemned Jovinian; and the language of Jerome against Vigilantius is a revelation of the new possibilities of intellectual malice created by creed. On this side, human nature had reverted several degrees to Hebraism.

Later still, the heresy of Pelagius, also a western, aroused a bitter orthodox opposition, led by Augustine. Pelagius (a name probably the Grecized form of the British name Morgan) and Coelestius, an Irishman, both monks in Rome about the years 400–410, drew up a systematic argument against the doctrines of human depravity, predestination, and salvation by grace; denied the damnation of unbaptized infants and virtuous unbaptized adults; rejected the Biblical teaching that Adam died in consequence of his sin or entailed sin on posterity; and taught a relatively rational ethic. Flying from Rome on Alaric’s invasion, they went, Coelestius to Carthage and Pelagius to the East; the former to be condemned by a Council at Carthage (412), the latter to be for a time supported against attacks, but later to be condemned likewise. Henceforth the half-suppressed vestiges of Pelagianism (chiefly in the hesitating form of semi-Pelagianism, according to which God foreordained good but merely foreknew evil) were the only signs left in the West, apart from Arianism, of the spirit of critical reason, till the first stirrings of the medieval renascence.

In the West, it will be observed, spontaneous heresy had run to questions of action and ethics, partly following a Roman tradition of concern for conduct, partly expressing barbarian common-sense. To such thought, Christianity was alien, and it was cried down by voluble theologians like Augustine, backed, doubtless, not only by the average obedient priest, but by some who saw that the principles of Pelagius, logically carried out, made an end on the one hand of the whole Christian scheme, and on the other of the conception of an omnipotent God. Such reasoners must equally have seen that the Augustinian dogmas of predestination and grace made an end of human responsibility; and this was urged by some Pelagians, but with no effect. The irrational dogma best consisted with the functions and finance of the church, and it was ecclesiastically established accordingly.

In the East, though there also Pelagius found followers, spontaneous heresy, as we have seen, was usually a matter of abstract dogma, as in the schisms of Praxeas, Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, Arius, and the Gnostics. What critical thought there was continued to follow the lead given to it by the older Greek dialectics. AËrius, who raised in Asia Minor in the fourth century an agitation against episcopacy, fasts, prayers for the dead, and the ceremony of slaying a lamb at Easter, is an exception among eastern heretics; and the dogmatic-dialectic tendency persisted. In the fifth century, Theodorus of Mopsuestia, a voluminous writer, taught rationally that most of the Old Testament prophecies applied by orthodoxy to Jesus had reference to events in pre-Christian history. Needless to say, this was heresy. But the chief new schisms of the period were those of Nestorius and the Monophysites. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, a pupil of Theodorus, but a zealous persecutor of heresy, became embroiled in the second stage of the endless wrangle as to the nature of Christ. In the latter half of the fourth century, Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, a strong anti-Arian, holding that the dogma of a God-Man was monstrous, had taught that Jesus was without a human soul (or mind, as distinguished from mere animal life), having only a divine one. This was to “confound the two natures”; Apollinaris was condemned; and the Syrian orthodox rectified matters by insisting that there were two, while the Egyptians, recoiling from the risk of a theory of two Christs, insisted that the two were nevertheless one.

Nestorius stood with his fellow-Syrians, and sought to crush the Apollinarians as he had helped to hound down Arians, Novatians, and other misbelievers. The Apollinarians, however, had a stronghold in their deification of Mary, whom they called Theotokos or Deipara, “the mother (bearer) of God”; and when the Nestorians denounced the common use of this term they incurred the wrath of the multitude, who, wont in the past to worship Goddess-mothers with a special devotion, and wroth at the attempt to put Mary lower than Isis and CybelÊ, naturally sought to exalt Mary as they had exalted Jesus. A general Council (431) was called at Ephesus to denounce Nestorius; and he, the heresy-hunter, was convicted of blasphemy, classed with Judas, and banished for life. Thenceforth, orthodox Christianity was for all practical purposes a worship of a Goddess and two supreme Gods; and Nestorian Christianity, flourishing in Asia, where its adherents were known by the old label of “NazarÆans,” became a hostile religion. Thus in the East as in the West the State was riven in new religious factions at the very hour when it needed above all things unity. Persia was at that very time beginning the acquisition of half of Armenia, as the Vandals were beginning the conquest of North Africa. To Persia the Nestorians were driven; and there, declaring themselves the friends of the enemies of the Byzantine empire, they were fostered, while the orthodox Christians were persecuted, massacred, and expelled.

To a thoughtful pagan, viewing the course of things, it must have seemed as if the Gods had given over the Christians to madness. Among the chief enemies of Nestorius was Eutyches, an abbot of a Constantinople monastery. In the year 448, by way of making an end of Nestorianism, he explicitly taught that Christ had only one nature, the divine. Instantly this was in turn denounced as a return to the Apollinarian heresy, and Eutyches was cast out of the church by a hostile council. Another council, skilfully packed, acquitted him, and caused his accuser to be flogged and banished; but a third, that of Chalcedon (451), again condemned him. Thus was the Christian dogma fixed in the form of maximum arbitrariness and unintelligibility. The Council of NicÆa (321) had determined against Arius that Christ was truly God, co-equal and co-eternal with his Father, separate and yet one; the Council of Constantinople (381) had determined against Apollinaris that he was also truly man; that of Ephesus (431) had established that the two natures were indivisibly one; and that of Chalcedon (451) that they were nevertheless perfectly distinct. All four dogmas became fixed constituents of the Christian creed. To this length had men evolved a myth. And there were still developments to come.

The condemned Eutycheans, modifying their position, but still calling themselves Monophysites, became in turn a force of fatal cleavage. The emperor Zeno, in the year 482, conciliated them by an edict called his Henoticon (“unifying”); but the orthodox only opposed them the more; though all the while the Monophysites professed to regard the “one nature” as a union of two, “yet without any conversion, confusion, or commixture.” On this absolutely unintelligible difference the sects finally sundered their very nationality. Late in the sixth century, under a new leader, Jacobus BaradÆus, they became known as Jacobites; and when in the next century the rising movement of the Mohammedan Arabs broke upon Egypt, where they abounded, the hatred of Jacobites for Catholics was such as to make them welcome the anti-Christian enemy, as they and others had previously welcomed the Persians in Syria.

It is not to be supposed, indeed, that the creed of Christianity was the sole or primary cause of such a miserable evolution. The very insanity of the strifes of Christians over meaningless dogmas is primarily to be traced to the fatal constriction of life and energy represented by the imperial system. It was because men had no rational interests to strive over if they would that they strove insanely over abracadabras of creed, and made war flags of the two colours of the charioteers of the circus; even as in Egypt the abject populations of the old cities, down to the time of Julian, fought to the death for their respective animal-Gods. But it is essential to note the absolute failure of Christianity to give to the decaying civilization any light for its path. It flourished by reason of decadence, and it could not arrest it. What ultimately preserved any section of the Christian empire was the pagan heritage of law and system, applied to a State shorn of all its outlying and alien provinces, and reduced to the homogeneity and the status of a kingdom proper with a commercial and industrial life. Justinian was fain to set a non-Christian lawyer—Tribonian, a pagan or atheist—to frame the code of laws by which Byzantium went on living. Himself we find fulminating against revived heresies, anathematizing the long-dead Origen, and latterly enouncing heresies of his own which, had he lived longer, would have wrought fresh convulsions in the State.

Such is the note of Greek-Christian life down to the very hour of the supreme catastrophe which tore from the warlike Heraclius the provinces of Syria and Egypt (632–639), and, engulfing next North Africa, overthrew Christianity forever in the lands in which it had been built up. Heraclius, struggling to save a shaken empire, had early realized, as did Maurice before him, the madness of driving myriads of Nestorians into the arms of Persia; and after his triumph over Chosroes he sought to conciliate both Nestorians and Monophysites by a decree (630) to the effect that, while there were in Christ two natures, there was only one will, as was admitted by the Nestorians. For a time all seemed well, and many Monophysites in the outlying provinces returned to the Church. But in a few years an orthodox zealot, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, reopened the eternal debate, and declared that the new formula was a revival of the Eutychean heresy. In vain Heraclius, striving to save the remnants of the empire, sought to enforce his solution (639) by an ecthesis, or formula, which forbade further debate on the subject. The Catholics decided that there were two wills, though they always coincided; and the doctrine of one will—the “Monothelite” heresy—at length became a ground for the repudiation of the rule of Constans II over Italy, a hundred bishops anathematizing the typus or formula in which he endorsed the ecthesis of his grandfather. Finally, Constantine II (681) accepted the doctrine that in Christ two wills were harmonized, and one more orthodox countersense was added to the definition of the God-Man who never was. The so-called Athanasian creed—really a product of the Latin Church some centuries later than Athanasius—is a parade of the whole series. To this much had Christianity attained after four hundred years of indescribable strife. The one clue through the chaos is the perception that in every stage the dispute logically went back to the original issue of monotheism and polytheism. The church, holding by the Hebrew sacred books as well as its own, was committed doctrinally to the former, but practically to the latter. Every affirmation of “one” tended to imperil the separate divinity of the sacrificed Jesus; and every affirmation of duality gave an opening to the polytheists. The one durable solution was, at each crisis, to make both affirmations, and so baffle at once reason and schismatic fanaticism.

In effect, Christianity had become polytheistic; and were it not that the personalities of Father, Mother and Son satisfied the average religious need, as it had so long done in pre-Christian Egypt, the dispute actually begun by Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople in the fourth century over the modality of the Holy Ghost would have gone as far as those over the Son and “the Mother of God.” In its first stage, the conception of the Holy Spirit, so vague and purposeless in the orthodox doctrine, would seem to have been distinctly that of a feminine Deity. We know from Origen that in the lost gospel of the Hebrews Jesus was made to speak of “My Mother the Holy Spirit.” This was a heretical reversion, on JudÆo-Gnostic lines, to the original Semitic theosophy, according to which every God had his female counterpart; but ordinary Jewish monotheism, which had put aside the female Spirit (Ruach) of its older lore, was sufficiently strong to prevent the acceptance of such a heresy in the gospel-making period; and the accepted gospel birth-myth was better adapted to the general purposes of the cult. For the paganized Church, finally, the divinization of Mary was a simple matter, as we have seen; and the Holy Spirit, which had obscurely entered the orthodox myth in a form really Samaritan, but permitted by Judaic doctrine, thenceforth remained a gratuitous enigma, capping the mystery of the co-eternal Father and Begotten Son. The Eastern Church, recoiling from a reiteration of the latter countersense, decided (381) that the Spirit “proceeded from” the Father, but not from the Son, thus virtually depriving the Son, after all, of his so-often affirmed equality.

The root of the difficulty, as of the Trinitarian dogma in general, is to be seen in the old Egyptian pantheism, according to which the all-comprehending Amun “is at once the Father, the Mother, and the Son of God”; but even as the Amunite priests made play with the Son-God Khonsu after affirming the oneness of Amun, so the Christian priesthood was forced at every step to distinguish the Son while affirming the oneness of the Trinity; and each new dogma was a fresh ground for the old quarrel. In the end the Western Church rejected this Eastern heresy as it did the Monothelite; and the Council of Toledo (589) added to the creed the Filioque clause, thus stating that the Spirit proceeded from the Father “and from the Son.” But at this point the Eastern Church remained obstinate; it admitted that the Spirit came through the Son, but would not say it “proceeded from” the Son; and the Filioque clause remained a standing ground of feud between East and West, as well as a standing instance of the irrationality of the orthodox system. It is no wonder that in the seventh century eastern churchmen were still writing treatises against paganism, which, despite all the penal laws, persisted in virtue of its incoherent simplicity as against the systematic unintelligibility of the Christian creed.

A politic Christian, indeed, might point to the mere history of heresy as showing the need for a dogma which should give no foothold to reason. Like the Arians, the Monophysites had divided into warring sects, their crux being that of the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the body of Christ; and the two parties thus formed split in turn into five. The total schism was in the main racial, Egyptian opposing Greek; and the carnal jealousies of the patriarchs and bishops seem to have played a great part in creating it; but nothing could arrest the process of sub-division and strife. In one furious feud over the election of a bishop of the Monophysite church of Alexandria, a hundred and seventy years after the first Eutychean schism, the fighting reached the lowest stage of savagery; and Justinian’s general Narses, who supported the “incorruptible” candidate at the behest of the empress Theodora, had to burn a large part of the city before he could carry his point. Soon afterwards, another imperial nominee, who entered the city in battle array, had to fight for his place; and the carnage was enormous. In every doctrinal strife in turn the parties proceeded to bloodshed with a speed and zest which turned to derision the moral formulas of their creed. Such social delirium was chronic in Christendom from the age of Constantine to the triumph of the Saracens; and, needless to say, under such conditions there was no progress in civilization.

On the intellectual side, ancient Christianity is on the whole at its strongest in the West, just before the fall of the western empire, as if the last mental energies of the Roman world had there found a channel. Augustine passed on to the middle ages a body of polemic theology sufficiently vivacious to constitute a Christian classic; and in him at last the Latin church had produced a personality comparable to Origen. Jerome, on the other hand, could compare with Origen as a scholar, and like him he laid bases for the scholarship of a later and reviving age. But the total achievement of Christianity on behalf of ancient civilization had amounted to nothing. By spreading the dogma that error of belief, whether as paganism or as heresy, doomed men to eternal torment, it negated the very basis of human brotherhood, and gave a new dominion to hate, individual and corporate. It made neither good rulers nor a sound society. Valentinian must have been made tolerant in state affairs by the spirit of pagan policy: as a man he was so abnormally cruel that had he been a pagan the historians would have compared him to Nero. That a year after Julian’s death there should be on the throne a Christian emperor who caused offenders to be thrown to wild bears in his own presence is a memorable item in Christian history. Of his Arian brother Valens it is told that he caused to be burned at sea a shipload of eighty ecclesiastics who had come to him as a deputation. This may be an orthodox fiction; but such fictions are themselves signal proofs of demoralizing malignity; as is the orthodox suppression of the story of how the Arian bishop Deogratius at Carthage succoured the captives brought by the Vandals from the sack of Rome—one of the rare records of magnanimous humanity in the history of the age.

From the orthodox themselves we know how Pope Leo had banished and imprisoned the ManichÆans and Pelagians who sought refuge at Rome when the Vandals attacked Carthage. The emperors exhibit the process of decivilization. Valentinian died of rage: his pious sons were weaklings; and Theodosius, when the rabble of Thessalonica braved him by murdering his governor for enforcing the law against a popular charioteer, treacherously planned a systematic and indiscriminate massacre by which there perished from seven to fifteen thousand men, women, and children. No pagan emperor had ever done the like; and no such number of Christians can have been put to death by Nero. Heraclius, after beheading Phocas, sent his head and limbs to be dragged through the streets of Constantinople—a reversion to barbarism. Two centuries earlier (415) a rabble of Alexandrian monks, acting in the interest of Cyril the Patriarch, seized the pagan teacher Hypatia, stripped her, tore her flesh from her bones with shells, and burned the remains. It is one of the anomalies of historiography that a moral rebirth of the world should have been held to begin in an age in which such things could be. Rather the Mediterranean world had grown more neurotically evil than ever before. The facts that Bishop Ambrose of Milan denounced the act of Theodosius, forcing him to do penance for seven months before re-admitting him to worship, and that Theodosius in his remorse submitted to the sentence and was afterwards less vindictive, are the best that can be recorded per contra. Ambrose himself warmly justified the burning of Jewish synagogues; and while he, with all his ecclesiastical frauds, showed a public spirit, it is a commonplace of Christian history that from the third century onwards bishops in general were self-seekers, who battled furiously over questions of diocesan boundaries, and were the ideal contrast to the legendary apostles. Among the Christianized barbarians who in their turn overran the empire the moral phenomena become even worse, their religion seeming only to make them more savage and vicious.

All that Christianity had yielded under the form of moral betterment was an increasing glorification of chastity and celibacy, with some restraint on infanticide. When the western empire is on the verge of destruction, Rome being already sacked, we find Jerome expanding in an insane exultation over the news that a young Roman lady had taken the vow of virginity, an event to which he ascribes cosmic importance. The mother of such a virgin, he declares, becomes ipso facto “the mother-in-law of God.” As always happens where sexual virtue is identified with abstinence, vice was excessive. Chrysostom in the East, and Salvian in Gaul, testify that alike in licence and in cruelty the Christianized State at the beginning of the fifth century was the worsened copy of the pagan world of four centuries before. The Greek Basil and the Italian Ambrose alike bear witness to the survival in the Christian Church of all the excesses of the old Bacchanalia. Even the tradition that in the reign of Honorius (404) the horrible gladiatorial games were abolished, is admitted by Christian scholarship to be false. It may be that a humane monk did lose his life in trying to stop them; but there is clear proof that the games subsisted in Christian Gaul at a later date, though even humane pagans had called for their abolition, and their cost was a heavy burden on the falling revenue. Centuries before the time of Honorius, Apollonius of Tyana was credited with causing them to be abolished at Athens. Not till the Gothic conquest did the games cease in the West; nor did the piety of Honorius and his advisers withhold them from treacherous massacres, and from enacting the punishment of burning alive for frauds on the fisc.

And the wrong of wrongs was left not only untouched but unchallenged. Slavery remained, and the average lot of the slave was no better than in the Rome of Horace. Christian matrons in the East were as cruel mistresses as those of the West in the days before Nero. That Christian credences counted for little in setting up even the species of virtue most esteemed may be gathered from the Confessions of Augustine. By his own account, what first drew him in his youth to moral reflection and conduct was not the pious teaching of his mother but the writing of Cicero; he was scrupulous as a ManichÆan before he became orthodox; and his charges of hypocrisy against some ManichÆans merely place the heretical sect on a level with the orthodox. As regarded the weightier matters of morals there could be no vital reform, because there was at work neither an intellectual force nor a self-saving pressure from the wronged orders of society. The ethic which led Origen to make himself a eunuch was not a force for betterment.

A survey of the literature of the fourth and fifth centuries will make equally clear the failure of Christianity to renew the mental life which had been dwindling in the Hellenic world since the days of Alexander, and in the western since those of Augustus. No modern seeker for wisdom or beauty in ancient lore thinks of turning for it to the Greek and Latin writings of the age of established Christianity. Augustine, whose energy was sufficient for a great literary performance, leaves a mass of work out of which two or three treatises only have any truly literary as distinct from an archÆological interest; and these are vitiated as compared with good pagan work by their wearisome hysterical pietism no less than by their utter lack of serenity. The Confessions, which might have been a great human document, are reduced by their religious content almost to the plane of the surrounding wilderness of rhetorical theology, whereof a library still subsists, unreadable and unread. Rhetoric, the bane of the decadent pagan literature, infects equally all the Christian writers, giving to the most vehement the ring of inflation and false passion. Literature of artistic or intellectual value was almost at an end. Such Christian poets as Prudentius and Paulinus have indeed merit in their kind; but they could not begin a literary renascence under the conditions set up either by fanatical Christianity or by the worldly spirit which divided with fanaticism the control of the Christian Church and State in the West as in the East. And when the spirit of literature did later revive, it turned with less zest to the pietists named than to their pagan contemporary Claudian, who if not a great poet is yet high among the lesser classics of Rome.

It would seem as if Claudian, coming to the writing of Latin after a Greek education, was partly saved by that circumstance from the artistic fatuity which had become normal among the westerns as among the easterns. The need to think in a new speech may have vitalized his use of it. But he remained wholly pagan in his creed. And such pagan thinkers as Macrobius and Simplicius, though unoriginal in comparison with those whom they commented, reward attention in many ways better than do their contemporaries of the Church. What of permanent appeal there is in the teaching of Augustine comes largely from his early philosophic culture; and Ambrose has hardly anything in the way of serious or philosophic thought which he does not borrow from pagan lore. Boethius, the last of the ancient philosophers, was a Christian only in name, expounding its orthodox dogma as a lawyer might expound law: when he came to write his consolations in prison he went back to the ancient and universal ethic, putting aside his creed as he might a mask. The vogue of his book in the Dark Ages is the expression of thinking men’s satisfaction in a late Latin treatise which brooded gravely on life and death in terms of human feeling and wisdom, with no hint of the formulas of the priest.

On the side of science in particular and education in general the Christian tendency was increasingly repressive. When Christianity was established there were still grammar schools in every considerable town in the empire, and many higher schools in the great cities; and though for long the Christians were fain to use these schools, pagan as they were in character, by reason of their almost purely literary or rhetorical curriculum, the Church gradually let them die out, never even attempting a Christian system of education, apart from a few theological schools. Nor did the process of extinction of knowledge end there. Early in the fifth century Theodosius II forbade all public lecturing by non-official teachers; and a century later Justinian plundered and abolished the philosophical schools at Athens, thus ending the last vestige of the higher intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great fanatically discouraged literary culture; and in the East it soon became a matter of orthodox rule that the laity should not read the sacred books, the only literature that could well come in their way. Science so-called was practically a synonym for heresy: it was denounced as impious by zealous believers in the third century; and in the sixth we find Cosmas “Indicopleustes,” the Indian voyager, a Nestorian Christian, denouncing the pagan doctrine of the roundness of the earth, and religiously demonstrating that it is an oblong plane. Medicine had gone far under pagan auspices, and Antoninus Pius had provided for municipal physicians throughout the empire; but the Christians, seeing heresy in all science, put prayer and exorcism above leechcraft; the temple-schools of the healing God Æsculapius were closed with the rest, and medical like other science virtually died out of Christian hands, to be recovered from old Greek lore by the Saracens. Gregory the Great exhibits the superstition of an ignorant Asiatic.

What the world needed above all things was new study and real knowledge in place of rhetoric: the fatality of the Christian system was that it set up the conviction that all vital knowledge was contained in itself. Yet all the while the religious habit of mind, which saw in pious fraud a service to deity, had almost destroyed the rational conception of truth, so that a thousand years were to elapse before human testimony could return to the standards of Thucydides, or human judgment rise above a gross credulity. Had it been only in the West, overrun by barbarism, that the lights of knowledge and art went out, the barbarian invasion might be put as the cause; but the history of Christian Byzantium is the history of an intellectual arrest of a thousand years on the very soil of civilization.

Of the eastern Christian empire as it is left curtailed of more than half its area by the Moslem conquest, the one thing that cannot be predicated is progress or transformation. Here again it would be an error to regard Christianity as the cause of stagnation: the whole political science of antiquity had been markedly conservative; but it must be noted that historic Christianity absolutely endorsed the ideal of fixity. Only conditions of stimulating culture-contact could have preserved a vigorous mental life under its sway; and the condition of Byzantium was unhappily one of almost complete racial and religious isolation. The Byzantium of Justinian and Heraclius is almost the ideal of ossification; its very disorders are normal, the habitual outbreaks of a vicious organism. There is nothing in pagan history to compare with the chronic pandemonium set up in Christian Constantinople by the circus factions of blues and greens, whose mutual massacres in generation after generation outdid the slaughters of many civil wars. As painted by its own Christian censors, the Byzantine town population of all orders was at least as worthless as that of pagan Rome in its worst imperial days; it realized the ignorance and unprogressiveness of imperial China without the Chinese compensations of normal good nature, courtesy, domestic unity, and patient toil.

Industry indeed there must have been; it was perhaps the silk industry introduced by Justinian that began the economic salvation of the State; but the law prescribed a system of industrial caste, binding every man, as far as might be, to his father’s trade, which must have kept the working populace very much on the level of that of ancient Egypt. Nor can matters have been socially much better in the West, whether in Italy under Byzantine or Lombard rule, or in the new barbarian States, Arian and Catholic. Everywhere the old inequalities of law were rather worsened than cured, and no Christian teacher dreamed of curing them. The ideals of the most earnest among them, as Jerome and Paulinus, began and ended in mere pietism and physical self-mortification.

It is not surprising, then, that all over the Christian world the most salient social result of the creed was the institution of monasticism, a Christian adaptation of a usage long common in religious and down-trodden Egypt. Everything conduced to promote it. The spectacle of constant strife and sensuality in the cities moved suffering souls of the unworldly type to withdraw to solitude or the cloister; all the leading teachers applauded the ideal, while denouncing its abuses; and for multitudes of unfortunate or inferior types, avoiding toil or escaping tyranny, then as later, the life of the monk or even of the hermit, though poor, was one of relative ease and idleness, greatly preferable to that of the proletary, since all could count on being at least maintained by popular charity, if not enriched by the believers in their sanctity. To these types were added that of the ignorant fanatic, which seems to have been as numerous as that of the slothful, and which under monastic conditions seems to have become more fanatical than ever. Thus some of the best and much of the worse moral elements, the latter of course immensely predominating, combined to weaken the social fabric, the former by withdrawing their finer personalities from a world that doubly needed them; the latter by withdrawing hands from labour and widening the realm of ignorant faith. Some powerful personalities, as Basil and Chrysostom and Gregory, were bred in the monastic life; but in the main it was a mere impoverishment of civilization. In the critical period of Christian history the monks are often found zealous in works of rabid violence, such as the destruction of pagan temples and Jewish synagogues, and the horrible murder of the pagan girl-philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria; and they too had their furious dogmatic strifes, notably in the fourth and fifth centuries, when those of Egypt constituted themselves the champions of the orthodoxy (then impeached) of Origen, for no clear reason save perhaps the fact of his self-mutilation. But, as Christian historians have remarked, they seem to have done nothing to resist the ruinous onslaught of Islam, which above all things despised monks. For that matter, the hierarchy did no better. The hierocracy established in Spain under the Visigoths served so to emasculate or paralyse the race that after an undisturbed life of three hundred years it fell in a day before a handful of Moslem filibusters from North Africa.

There is reason to believe, finally, that the intellectual as well as the political abjection of the Christian mass in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa made multitudes ready material for Islam, even as sectarian hatreds made others welcome the conqueror, and resent only his toleration of their opponents. Christian faith availed so little to make head against the new faith which assailed it, that we must infer a partial paralysis on the Christian side as a result of Moslem success. Success was the theological proof of divine aid; and many calamities, such as earthquakes, had previously seemed to tell of divine wrath against the Christian world. Such arguments shook multitudes. Numbers apostatized at once; and when the Moslem rule was established from Jerusalem to Carthage, the Christian Church, tolerated only to be humiliated, dwindled to insignificance on its former soil. In the African provinces it absolutely disappeared; in the others it became incapable of moving either Arab or Frank to respect. Nestorian Christianity, already settled in Persia, was specially tolerated by the Saracens, as it had been by the Persians, because of its enmity to Christian Byzantium; but though it continued to subsist it was by toleration and not through strength. The Nestorian clergy and laity throve somewhat as Jews had done in Rome; but they made no headway against Islam, and some of the Asiatic States where they had been numerous fell away wholly to Mohammedanism. Thus was given once more the historic proof that any religion may in time be destroyed or degraded by brute force, provided only that the brute force be persistent, and efficiently applied.

What pagan Rome did not do, for lack of systematic effort or continuous purpose, Islam did with the greatest ease, the purpose and the effort being wholehearted. And when we compare the later civilization of the Saracens with that they overthrew, it is hard to feel that the world lost by the change. If monotheism had any civilizing virtue as against polytheism, it was the Moslems, not the Christians, who were monotheists; and the Moslem scorn of Christian man-worship and idolatry reproduced the old Christian tone towards paganism. On the side of morals, Moslem polygamy was indeed relatively evil; but on the other hand the giving of alms, so often claimed as a specially Christian virtue, was under Islam an absolute duty; Moslems could not hold Moslems as slaves; Islam knew no priestcraft; and it substantially excluded the common Christian evils of drunkenness and prostitution. Almost the only art carried on by the Byzantines from their pagan ancestors was that of architecture, their churches being often beautiful; and this art, as well as that of working in gold, the Saracens preserved; while it is to their later adoption of the ancient Greek science that the world owes the revival of knowledge after the night of the Dark Ages. Sculpture and painting were already become contemptible in Christian hands; and literature was in not much better case. It is to be noted, too, that the traditional blame of the Goths and Vandals for the disfigurement of ancient Rome is misplaced, the worst wreckers being the generals of Justinian and the inhabitants themselves, always ready to ruin a pagan memorial for the sake of building material.

When finally we seek to realize the aspect of the Hellenistic world in the time of Mohammed, in contrast with that of the age of Pericles; or the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in contrast with that of Hadrian, we are conscious of an immense loss of human faculty for beauty and joy, no less than for action. It is not too much to say that the Christian ideal of sanctity meant not only self-mortification and sadness but squalor in the individual life. Physical uncleanliness became a Christian virtue; and the mark of a city built in the Christian period came to be the absence of baths. Pagan Greece lives for ever in men’s thought as a dream of grace and beauty and enchanted speech; and though behind the shining vision of art and song there lingers immovably a sombre memory of strife and servitude, the art and the song are a deathless gift to mankind. At every summit of its attainment our civilization looks back to them with an unquenchable envy, an impotent desire, as of a race disinherited. To regain that morning glory of life is the spontaneous yearning of all who have gazed on the distant light of it. But the man who would wish to re-create the Constantinople of Justinian or Heraclius has not yet declared himself.

Dream for dream, the child-like creed of the God-crowded Hellas of Pheidias’ day, peopled with statues and crowned with temples of glorious symmetry, is an incomparably fairer thing than the tortured dogma of the Byzantine church, visually expressing itself in wretched icons, barbaric trappings, and infinite mummeries of ceremonial. Idolatry for idolatry, the adoration of noble statues by chanting bands of youths and maidens can have wrought less harm to head and heart than the prostration of their posterity before the abortions of Byzantine art. Superstition for superstition, there is nothing in old Hellene religion, with all its survivals of savage myth, to be compared for moral and mental abjection to the practice of the Christian Greeks, with their pilgrimages to Arabia to kiss Job’s dunghill, and their grovelling worship of dead men’s bones. Some Christian historians, seeking a vital test, have concluded that under paganism there was no good “life of the heart”; but whatever may be the modern superiority in this regard, there is none to be discerned in the Christian civilizations which in the seventh century still spoke the classic tongues of paganism.

In the West, where a spiritual power had begun obscurely to acquire a Roman empire which parodied the old, there is indeed a potential superiority predicable for the new. Gregory sending Augustine to convert the Britons is a fairer moral spectacle than that of CÆsar, bent on plunder, seeking to conquer them. But whatever might be the moral merit of a sincere fanaticism like that of Gregory, who trampled down culture as eagerly as he pushed propaganda, the life of too many Popes had already shown that the new Romanism was only to be CÆsarism with a difference, and that for the spiritual as for the temporal empire the great end was gold. Tyranny for tyranny, and power for power, the Rome of Trajan, superb and cruel, is hardly a worse thing than the Rome in which Popes fought with hired bands for their chair, or sat in it through the favour of courtesans; and the Roman populace of the days of Gregory was no worthier than that of the days of Caracalla or of Honorius. “Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions,” says Milman, describing the conduct of the Romans at Gregory’s death, when they had become thoroughly Christianized. As of old, the accident of real merit in the ruler could avail for much in administration; but still the calm Antonines can bear comparison as potentates and men with any wearer of the triple crown.