Part 4

A man of even greater influence than St. Ambrose of Milan was St. Jerome, a monk of the fifth century, who is chiefly remembered to-day because of his Latin translation of the Bible, ‘the Vulgate’ as it is called, that is still the recognized edition of the Roman Catholic Church.

St. Jerome was born in Italy, but in his extreme asceticism he followed the practices of the Eastern rather than the Western Church. As a youth he had led a wild life, but, suddenly repenting, he disappeared to live as a hermit in the desert, starving and mortifying himself. So strongly did he believe that this was the only road to Heaven that when he went to Rome he preached continually in favour of celibacy, urging men and women not to marry, as if marriage had been a sin. He was afraid that if they became happy and contented in their home life they would forget God.

Many of the leading families, and especially their women, came under St. Jerome’s influence, but such exaggerated views could never be really popular and, instead of being chosen Bishop of Rome as he had expected, he was forced, by the many enemies he had aroused, to leave the town, and returned once more to the desert. Of his sincerity there can be little doubt, but his outlook on life was warped because, like so many good and earnest contemporary Christians, he believed that human nature and this earth were entirely bad and that only by the suppression of any enjoyment in them could the soul obtain salvation.

Several centuries were to pass before St. Francis of Assisi taught his fellow men the beauty and value of what is human.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Foundation of Constantinople]

Constantinople (the _Polis_ or city of Constantine) had been a Greek colony under the name of Byzantium long before Rome existed. Built on the headland of the Golden Horn, its walls were lapped by an inland sea whose depth and smoothness made a splendid harbour from the rougher waters of the Mediterranean. Almost impregnable in its fortifications, it frowned on Asia across the narrow straits of the Hellespont and completely commanded the entrance to the Black Sea, with its rich ports, markets then as now for the corn and grain of southern Russia.

Constantine, when he decided that Byzantium should be his capital, was well aware of these advantages. He had been born in the Balkans, had spent a great part of his life as a soldier in Asia, had assumed the imperial crown in Britain, and ruled Gaul for his first kingdom. This medley of experience left little place in his heart for Italy, and the name of Rome had no power to stir his blood. Rome to him was a corrupt town in one of the outlying limbs of his Empire: it had no harbour nor special military value on land, while the Alps were a barrier preventing news from passing quickly to and fro. Byzantium, on the other hand, near the mouth of the Danube, was easy of access and yet could be rendered almost impregnable to his foes. It had the great military advantage also of serving as an admirable head-quarters for keeping watch over the northern frontier and an outlook towards the East.

The walls of the original town could not embrace the Emperor’s ambitions, and he himself, wand in hand, designed the boundaries. His court, following him, gasped with dismay. ‘It is enough,’ they urged; ‘no imperial city was ever so great before.’ ‘I shall go on,’ replied Constantine, ‘until he, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks fit to stop.’

Not until the seven hills outside Byzantium were enclosed within his circuit was the Emperor satisfied; and then the great work of building began, and the white marble of Forum and Baths, of Palaces and Colonnades, arose to adorn the Constantinople that has ever since this time played so large a part in the history of Europe. In the new market-place, just beyond the original walls, was placed the ‘Golden Milestone’, a marble column within a small temple, bearing the proud inscription that here was the ‘central point of the world’. Inside were statues of Constantine and Queen Helena his mother, while Rome herself and the cities of Greece were robbed of their masterpieces of sculpture to embellish the buildings of the new capital.

In May A.D. 330 Constantinople was solemnly consecrated, and the Empire kept high festival in honour of an event that few of the revellers recognized would alter the whole course of her destiny. The new capital, through her splendid strategic position, was to preserve the imperial throne with one short lapse for more than a thousand years, but this advantage was obtained at the expense of Rome, and the complete severance of the interests of the Empire in the East and West.

The Romans had never loved the Greeks, even when they most admired their art and subtle intellect, and now in the fourth century this persistent distrust was intensified when Greece usurped the glory that had been her conqueror’s. In the absence of an Emperor and of the many high officials who had gone to swell the triumph of his new court, Rome set up another idol. The symbols of material glory might vanish, but the Christian faith had supplied men with fresh ideals through the teaching of the Apostles and their representatives, the Bishops.

Roman bishops claimed that the gift of grace they received at their consecration had been passed down to them by the successive laying-on of hands from St. Peter himself. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church ... and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ These words of Christ seemed to grant to his apostle complete authority over the souls of men; and Christians at Rome began to ask if the power of St. Peter to ‘bind and loose’ had not been handed down to his successors? If so _Il Papa_, that is, ‘their father’, the Pope, was undoubtedly the first bishop in Christendom, for on no other apostle had Christ bestowed a like authority.

It must not be imagined that this reasoning came like a flash of inspiration or was willingly received by all Christians. Many generations of Popes, from the days of St. Peter onwards, were regarded merely as Bishops of Rome, that is, as ‘overseers’ of the Church in the chief city of the Empire. They were loved and esteemed by their flock not on account of special divine authority but because they stood neither for self-interest nor for faction, but for principles of justice, mercy, and brotherhood.

Had a Roman been robbed by a fellow citizen, were there a plague or famine, was the city threatened by enemies without her walls, it was to her bishop Rome turned, demanding help and protection. Afterwards it was only natural that the one power that could and did afford these things when Emperors and Senators were far away should in time take the Emperor’s place, and that the Pope should appear to Rome, and gradually as we shall see to Western Europe, God’s very viceroy on earth.

To the Church in Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor he never assumed this halo of glory. Byzantium, the great Constantinople, was the pivot on which the eastern world turned, and the Bishop of Rome with his tradition of St. Peter made no authoritative appeal. Thus far back in the fourth century the cleft had already opened between the Churches of the East and West that was to widen into a veritable chasm.

Constantine ‘the Great’ died in 337, and if greatness be measured by achievement he well deserves his title. Where men of higher genius and originality had failed he had succeeded, beating down with calm perseverance every object that threatened his ambitions, until at last the Christian ruler of a united empire, feared and respected by subjects and enemies alike, he passed to his rest.

V

THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS

Instead of endeavouring to maintain a united empire, Constantine in his will divided up his dominions between three sons and two nephews. Before thirty years were over, however, a series of murders and civil wars had exterminated his family; and two brothers, Valentian and Valens, men of humble birth but capable soldiers, were elected as joint emperors. Valens ruled at Constantinople, his brother at Milan; and it was during this reign that the Empire received one of the worst blows that had ever befallen her.

We have already mentioned the Goths, a race of barbarians half-civilized by Roman influence and converted to Christianity by followers of Arius. One of their tribes, the Visigoths, had settled in large numbers in the country to the north of the Danube. On the whole their relations with the Empire were friendly, and it was hardly their fault that the peace was finally broken, but rather of a strange Tartar race the Huns, that, massing in the plains of Asia, had suddenly swept over Europe. Here is a description given of the Huns by a Gothic writer: ‘Men with faces that can scarcely be called faces, rather shapeless black collops of flesh with tiny points instead of eyes: little in stature but lithe and active, skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, hiding under a barely human form the ferocity of a wild beast.’

Tradition says that these monsters, mounted on their shaggy ponies, rode women and children under foot and feasted on human flesh. Whether this be true or no, their name became a terror to the civilized world, and after a few encounters with them the Visigoths crowded on the edge of the Danube and implored the Emperor to allow them to shelter behind the line of Roman forts.

Valens, to whom the petition was made, hesitated. There was obvious danger to his dominions in this sudden influx of a whole tribe; but on the other hand fear might madden the Visigoths into trying to cross even if he refused, and if so could he withstand them?

‘All the multitude that had escaped from the murderous savagery of the Huns,’ says a writer of the day, ‘no less than 200,000 fighting men besides women and old men and children, were there on the river bank, stretching out their hands with loud lamentations ... and promising that they would ever faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance, if only the boon was granted them.’

Reluctantly Valens yielded; and soon the province of Dacia was crowded with refugees; but here the real trouble began. Food must be found for this multitude, and it was evident that the local crops would not suffice. In vain the Emperor commanded that corn should be imported: the greed of officials who were responsible for carrying out this order led them to hold up large consignments, and to sell what little they allowed to pass at wholly extortionate rates. Their unwelcome guests, half-starved and fleeced of the small savings they had been able to bring with them, complained, plotted, and broke at last into open rebellion.

This treatment of the Visigoths in Dacia is one of the worst pages in the history of the Roman Empire, but it brought its own speedy punishment. The suspicion and hatred engendered by misery spread like a flame, and the barbarian forces were joined by deserters of their own race from the imperial legions and by runaway slaves until they had grown into a formidable army. Valens, forced to take steps to preserve his throne, met them on the battle-field of Adrianople, but only to suffer crushing defeat. He himself was slain, and some 40,000 of those who had served under his banner.

[Sidenote: The Emperor Theodosius]

Never before had the imperial eagles met with such a reverse at barbarian hands, and the Visigoths after the first moment of triumph were almost alarmed at the extent of their own success. Before the frowning walls of Constantinople their courage faltered, and without attempting a siege they retreated northwards into Thrace. Gladly they came to terms with Theodosius, Valens’s successor, who, not content with regranting them the lands to the south of the Danube that they so much desired, increased his army by taking whole regiments of their best warriors into his pay.

‘Lover of peace and of the Goths’ is the character with which Theodosius has passed down to posterity, and during his reign the Visigoths and other northern tribes received continual marks of his favour.

One of the Gothic kings, the old chief Athanaric, went to visit him at Constantinople, and was overwhelmed by the magnificence and luxury he saw around him. ‘Now do I at last behold,’ he exclaimed, ‘what I have often heard but deemed incredible.... Doubtless the Emperor is a God on earth, and he who raises a hand against him is guilty of his own blood.’

The alliance between Goth and Greek served its purpose at the moment, for by the aid of his new troops Theodosius was able to defeat the rival Emperor of Rome and to conquer Italy. When he died he left Constantinople and the East to his eldest son Arcadius, a youth of eighteen, and Rome and the West to the younger, Honorius, who was only eleven. True to his belief in barbarian ability, Theodosius selected a Vandal chief, Stilicho, to whom he had given his niece in marriage, that he might act as the boy’s adviser and command the imperial forces.

Under a wise regent a nation may wait in patience for their child ruler to mature. Unfortunately, Honorius, as he grew up, belied any promise of manliness he had ever shown, languidly refusing to continue his boyish sports of riding or archery, and taking no interest save in some cocks and hens that it was his daily pleasure to feed himself. He had no affection or reverence for Rome, and finally settled in Ravenna on the Adriatic as the safest fortress in his dominions. From here he consented to sign the orders that dispatched the legions to protect his frontiers, or issued haughty manifestoes to his enemies.

So long as Stilicho lived such feebleness passed comparatively unnoticed; for the Vandal, a man of giant build and strength, possessed to the full the tireless energy and daring that the dangers of the time demanded.

Theodosius had made the Visigoths his friends; but on his death they began to chafe at the restrictions laid upon them by the imperial alliance. Arcadius was nearly as poor a creature as his younger brother, ‘so inactive that he seldom spoke and always looked as though he were about to fall asleep.’ The barbarians bore him no hatred, but on the other hand he could scarcely inspire their affection or fear, and so they chose a king of their own, Alaric, one of their most famous generals, and from this moment they began to think of fresh conquests and pillage.

[Sidenote: Visigothic Invasion]

The suggestion of sacking Constantinople was put on one side. Those massive walls against their background of sea would make it a difficult task; besides, the Visigoths argued, were there not other towns equally rich and more vulnerable? With an exultant shout that answered this question they set out on their march first towards Illyricum on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, and then to the fertile plains of Italy.

Alaric and Stilicho were well matched as generals, and for years, through arduous campaigns of battles and sieges, the Vandal kept the Goth at bay. When at last death forced him to resign the challenge, it was no enemy’s sword but the weapon of treachery that robbed Rome of her best defender.

Honorius, lacking in gratitude as in other virtues, had been ill pleased at the success of his armies; for wily courtiers, hoping to plant their fortunes amid another’s ruin, told him that Stilicho intended to secure the imperial throne for himself and that in order to do so he would think little of murdering his royal master. Suspicion made the timid Emperor writhe with terror through sleepless nights. It seemed to him that he would never know peace of mind again until he had rid himself of his formidable commander-in-chief; and so by his orders Stilicho was put to death and Italy lay at the mercy of Alaric and his followers.

Sweeping across the Alps, the Visigoths paused at last before the gates of Rome. ‘We are many in number and prepared to fight,’ boldly began the ambassadors sent out from the city. ‘Thick grass is easier to mow than thin,’ replied Alaric.

Dropping their lofty tone, the ambassadors demanded the price of peace, and on the answer, ‘Your gold and silver, your treasures, all that you have,’ they exclaimed in horror, ‘What then do you leave us?’ ‘Your souls,’ was the mocking rejoinder.

After much argument the Visigoths consented to be bought off and retreated northwards, but it was only to return in the summer of the year 410, when Rome after a feeble resistance opened her gates. Her enemies poured in triumph through the streets; but Alaric was no Hun loving slaughter for its own sake, and ordered his troops to respect human life and to spare the churches and the gold and silver vessels that rested on their altars.

He spent only a few days in sacking the city and then marched southwards, intending to invade Africa. While his army was embarking, however, he fell ill and died, and so great was his loss that all thought of the campaign was surrendered. Alaric was mourned by his people as a national hero, and, unable to bear the thought that his enemies might one day desecrate his tomb, they dammed up a river in the neighbourhood, and dug a grave for their general deep in its bed. When they had laid his body there, they released the stream into its old course, and so left their hero safe from insult beneath the waters.

The sack of Rome that moved the civilized world profoundly made little impression upon the young Emperor. He had named one of his favourite hens after the capital; and when a messenger, haggard with the news he had brought, fell on his knees, gasping, ‘Sire, Rome has perished,’ Honorius only frowned, and replied, ‘Impossible! I fed her myself this morning.’

St. Jerome, in his hermit’s cell at Bethlehem, was stupefied at the fate of the ‘Eternal City’. ‘The world crumbles,’ he said. ‘There is no created work that rust or age does not consume: but Rome! Who could have believed that, raised by her victories above the universe, she would one day fall?’

Why had Rome fallen? This was the question on everybody’s lips. We know to-day that the process of her corruption had been working for centuries; but men and women rarely see what is going on around them, and some began to murmur that the old gods of Olympus were angry because their religion had been forsaken. It was affirmed that Christ would save the world, but what had He done to save Rome?

Christianity was not long in finding a champion to defend her cause--an African monk, Augustine, to mediaeval minds the greatest of all the ‘Fathers of the Church’. Augustine was the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother and grew up a wild and undisciplined boy. After some years at the University of Carthage, spent in casual study and habitual dissipation, he determined to go to Rome, and from there passed to Milan, where he went out of curiosity to listen to the preaching of St. Ambrose. It was obvious that he would either hate or be strongly influenced by this fiery old man; and in truth Augustine, who secretly repented of the way he had wasted his life, was in a ripe mood to receive the message that he had refused to hear from the lips of Monica his mother. Soon he was converted and baptized, and later he was made Bishop of Hippo, a place not far from Carthage.

It is difficult to give a picture of Augustine in a few words. Like St. Ambrose and others of the early ‘Fathers’ he was quite intolerant of heresy and believed that ordinary human love and the simplest pleasures of the world were snares set by the devil to catch the unwary; but against these unbalanced views, largely the product of the age in which he lived, must be set his burning enthusiasm for God, and the services that he rendered to Christianity.

A modern writer says of him, ‘As the supreme man of his time he summed up the past as it still lived, remoulded it, added to it from himself, and gave it a new unity and form wherein it was to live on.... The great heart, the great mind, the mind led by the heart’s inspiration, the heart guided by the mind--this is Augustine.’

Superior in intellect to other men of his day, his whole being filled with the love of God and fired by the desire to make the world share his worship, he preached, worked, and wrote only to this end. In his _Confessions_ he describes his youth and repentance; but his most famous work is his _Civitas Dei_.

Here was the answer to those who declared that Rome had fallen because she neglected her pagan deities. Rome, he maintained, was not and never could be eternal; for the one eternal kingdom was the _Civitas Dei_, or ‘City of God’, towards whose reign of triumph the human race had been tending since earliest times. Before her glory the kingdoms of this world, and all the culture and civilization of which men boasted, must fade away. Thus God had destined; and St. Augustine exerted all his eloquence and powers of reasoning to prove from history the magnitude and sureness of the divine purpose.

[Sidenote: Vandal Invasion]

The author of the _Civitas Dei_ was to have his faith severely tested, for he died amid scenes of desolation and horror that held out no hope of happiness for man on earth. Rome stood at the mercy of barbarians, and Christian Africa was also fast falling under their yoke. These new invaders, the Vandals, were also a German tribe, who, as soon as Stilicho withdrew legions from the Rhine to defend Italy from the Visigoths, broke over the weakened frontier into Gaul, and from there crossed the Pyrenees and marched southwards.

Spain had been one of the richest of Rome’s provinces, and besides her minerals and corn had provided the Empire with not a few rulers as well as famous authors and poets. In her commercial prosperity she had grown, like her neighbours, corrupt and unwarlike, so that the Vandals met with little resistance and plundered and pillaged at their will. Instead of settling down amid their conquests they were driven by the promise of further loot and the pressure of other barbarian tribes following hard on their heels to cross the narrow Strait of Gibraltar and to pursue their way due east along the African coast. In Spain they have left the memory of their presence in the name of one of her fairest provinces, Andalusia.