Title: Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"
Author: Belloc, Hilaire
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"" ***


Europe and the Faith

“Sine auctoritate nulla vita”

by Hilaire Belloc


Contents

 INTRODUCTION. THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY
 I. WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 II. WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 III. WHAT WAS THE “FALL” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
 IV. THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS
 V. WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?
 VI. THE DARK AGES
 VII. THE MIDDLE AGES
 VIII. WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?
 IX. THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN
 X. CONCLUSION



INTRODUCTION
THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY


I say the Catholic “conscience” of history—I say “conscience”—that is,
an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which
is one with the knower—I do not say “The Catholic Aspect of History.”
This talk of “aspects” is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is
false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather
do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic
“aspect” of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish
aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all
of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from
within. There is no more a Catholic “aspect” of European history than
there is a man’s “aspect” of himself.

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man’s “aspect” of
himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For
a man’s way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and after a
cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator’s, and
therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the
voice of God. Not only does he know by this that the outer world is
real, but also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within
himself, “I am a mean fellow,” he has hold of reality. When a man,
though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, “My purpose
was just,” he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself.
A man does not know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite
amount he does know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really
there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit
in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed “aspects” of
a man for all others except these two, himself and God Who made him.
These two, when they regard him, see him as he is; all other minds have
their several views of him; and these indeed are “aspects,” each of
which is false, while all differ. But a man’s view of himself is not an
“aspect:” it is a comprehension.

Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of
Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from
without, he understands it from within. He cannot understand it
altogether because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he
has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.

The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages I
mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the
confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other
people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European
civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts
which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person.
He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a
man can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to
unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for
he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the
story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have to deal with
something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly,
by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its centre in its
essence, and together.

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is
The Church.

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins
with the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean.
It goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil
in which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can,
he understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with
the gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived from
the light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the British,
the Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality; what
cousinship we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions,
and even how ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got
poisoned, while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was,
in the old dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say)
sacred: devoted to a peculiar mission.

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The
picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our
great story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.

But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of the
English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped), a
passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile
authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose
knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.

He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,
either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his
finger upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads—if
they are in the English language at least—he finds things lacking which
his instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply
their place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant
of such things, or rather could not conceive them.

I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present
battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all
nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent
to the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would
think) and which yet no historian explains.

The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow:
an especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, of which the modern historian makes nothing but an
incomprehensible contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp
revelation of the half-way house between the Empire and modern
nationalities.

As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in
Europe: clearly an issue—things come to a head. How came it? Why these
two camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding out in
desperate Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a victory
apparently inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox Russian
shell? Where lay the roots of so singular a contempt for our old order,
chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain the
position of the Papacy, the question of Ireland, the aloofness of old
Spain?

It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external—especially
by any materialist or even skeptical—analysis. It was not climate
against climate—that facile materialist contrast of “environment,”
which is the crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was
not race—if indeed any races can still be distinguished in European
blood save broad and confused appearances, such as Easterner and
Westerner, short and tall, dark and fair. It was not—as another foolish
academic theory (popular some years ago) would pretend—an economic
affair. There was here no revolt of rich against poor, no pressure of
undeveloped barbarians against developed lands, no plan of
exploitation, nor of men organized, attempting to seize the soil of
less fruitful owners.

How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of
which was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for
the sake of a decision?

That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the superficial
test of religious differences among modern “sects” must be bewildered
indeed! I have seen the attempt made in more than one journal and book,
enemy and Allied. The results are lamentable!

Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was atheist. But her subject provinces
supported her exultantly, Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely
Catholic Bavaria. Her main support—without which she could not have
challenged Europe—was that very power whose sole reason for being was
Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna,
controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the
House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in
Eastern Europe.

The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.

Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those
things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the
unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within
herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious
analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will make
anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of
“Democracy” as the issue of the Great War may be neglected:
Democracy—one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human
government—was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The
essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy,
the despotism of Russia and Prussia, the immense complex of all other
great modern states gives such nonsense the lie.

People who talk of “A struggle for supremacy between the two Teutonic
champions Germany and England” are less respectable still. England is
not Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet decided by
but the smallest possible majority (a majority of one) to enter the
war. The Prussian Government never dreamt it would have to meet England
at all. There is no question of so single an issue. The world was at
war. Why? No man is an historian who cannot answer from the past. All
who can answer from the past, and are historians, see that it is the
historical depth of the European faith, not its present surface, which
explains all.

The struggle was against Prussia.

Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization
of the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia,
the western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was
an hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from
the Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden
of weeds. And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of
weeds, could not extend until the West weakened through schism. It had
to wait till the battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited.
And at last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed
patch over-ran first Poland and the Germanies, then half Europe. When
it challenged all civilization at last it was master of a hundred and
fifty million souls.

What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they
are Poland and Ireland—the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the
conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which desired to
live its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old
Christian rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the morals spread
upon it by Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three
hundred years ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This
war was the largest, yet no more than the recurrent, example of that
unceasing wrestle: the outer, the unstable, the untraditional—which is
barbarism—pressing blindly upon the inner, the traditional, the
strong—which is Ourselves: which is Christendom: which is Europe.

Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster hesitated!

We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization
failed, but that if the Allies conquered civilization was
reestablished—What did we mean? We meant, not that the New Barbarians
could not handle a machine: They can. But we meant that they had learnt
all from us. We meant that they cannot _continue of themselves_; and
that we can. We meant that they have no roots.

When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be
ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is
one and we its family: That which challenged us, though it controlled
so much which should have aided us and was really our own, was external
to civilization and did not lose that character by the momentary use of
civilized Allies.

When we said that “the Slav” failed us, what did we mean? It was not a
statement of race. Poland is Slav, so is Serbia: they were two vastly
differing states and yet both with us. It meant that the Byzantine
influence was never sufficient to inform a true European state or to
teach Russia a national discipline; because the Byzantine Empire, the
tutor of Russia, was cut off from us, the Europeans, the Catholics, the
heirs, who are the conservators of the world.

The Catholic Conscience of Europe grasped this war—with apologies where
it was in the train of Prussia, with affirmation where it was free. It
saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future—the
two alternative futures which lie before the world.

All other judgments of the war made nonsense: You had, on the Allied
side, the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich
paymasters shouting for “Democracy;” pedants mumbling about “Race.” On
the side of Prussia (the negation of nationality) you have the use of
some vague national mission of conquest divinely given to the very
various Germans and the least competent to govern. You would come at
last (if you listened to such varied cries) to see the Great War as a
mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the emptiest internationals
conceive the thing to have been.

So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to
the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The
Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone
can see and judge in this matter.

From so recent and universal an example I turn to one local, distant,
precise, in which this same Catholic Conscience of European history may
be tested.

Consider the particular (and clerical) example of Thomas à Becket: the
story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of
Thomas a Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in any other
of our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it.

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a
few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many
contemporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to
history. The Catholic may well ask: “How it is I cannot understand the
story as told by these Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?”

The story is briefly this: A certain prelate, the Primate of England at
the time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the
clergy. The chief of these changes was that men attached to the Church
in any way even by minor orders (not necessarily priests) should, if
they committed a crime amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be brought
before the ordinary courts of the country instead of left, as they had
been for centuries, to their own courts. The claim was, at the time, a
novel one. The Primate of England resisted that claim. In connection
with his resistance he was subjected to many indignities, many things
outrageous to custom were done against him; but the Pope doubted
whether his resistance was justified, and he was finally reconciled
with the civil authority. On returning to his See at Canterbury he
became at once the author of further action and the subject of further
outrage, and within a short time he was murdered by his exasperated
enemies.

His death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did penance for it.
But _all the points on which he had resisted_ were in practice waived
by the Church at last. The civil state’s original claim was _in
practice_ recognized at last. Today it appears to be plain justice. The
chief of St. Thomas’ contentions, for instance, that men in orders
should be exempt from the ordinary courts, seems as remote as chain
armors.

So far, so good. The opponent of the Faith will say, and has said in a
hundred studies—that this resistance was nothing more than that always
offered by an old organization to a new development.

Of course it was! It is equally true to say of a man who objects to an
aëroplane smashing in the top of his studio that it is the resistance
of an old organization to a new development. But such a phrase in no
way explains the business; and when the Catholic begins to examine the
particular case of St. Thomas, he finds a great many things to wonder
at and to think about, upon which his less European opponents are
helpless and silent.

I say “helpless” because in their attitude they give up trying to
explain. They record these things, but they are bewildered by them.
They can explain St. Thomas’ particular action simply enough: too
simply. He was (they say) a man living in the past. But when they are
asked to explain the vast consequences that followed his martyrdom,
they have to fall back upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses;
that “the masses were ignorant”—that is as compared with other periods
in human history (what, more ignorant than today?) that “the Papacy
engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm.” As though the Papacy
were a secret society like modern Freemasonry, with some hidden
machinery for “engineering” such things. As though the type of
enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical thing
produced now by caucus or newspaper “engineering!” As though nothing
_besides_ such interferences was there to arouse the whole populace of
Europe to such a pitch!

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas’ tomb,
the historian who hates or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways
of denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the
easiest way of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the
result of a vast conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble
acquiescence of the maim, the halt and the blind supported. The third
(and for the moment most popular) is to give them modern journalistic
names, sham Latin and Greek confused, which, it is hoped, will get rid
of the miraculous character; notably do such people talk of
“auto-suggestion.”

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when he has read all
the original documents, understands it easily enough from within.

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in its
special claims, and was probably (taken as an isolated action)
unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads and as he notes the
rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking
place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a
principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its
general appreciation: the freedom of the Church. He stood out in
particular for what _had_ been the concrete symbols of the Church’s
liberty in the past. The direction of his actions was everything,
whether his symbol was well or ill chosen. The particular customs might
go. But to challenge the new claims of civil power at that moment was
to save the Church. A movement was afoot which might have then
everywhere accomplished what was only accomplished in parts of Europe
four hundred years later, to wit, a dissolution of the unity and the
discipline of Christendom.

St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy; he fought and he
resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. He fought for no
dogmatic point, he fought for no point to which the Church of five
hundred years earlier or five hundred years later would have attached
importance. He fought for things which were purely temporal
arrangements; which had indeed until quite recently been the guarantee
of the Church’s liberty, but which were in his time upon the turn of
becoming negligible. _But the spirit in which he fought was a
determination that the Church should never be controlled by the civil
power_, and the spirit against which he fought was the spirit which
either openly or secretly believes the Church to be an institution
merely human, and therefore naturally subjected, as an inferior, to the
processes of the monarch’s (or, worse, the politician’s) law.

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas was obviously
and necessarily to lose, in the long run, every concrete point on which
he had stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing
for which he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the
enthusiasm of the populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man’s
healthy and moral existence against the threat of the wealthy, and the
power of the State—the self-government of the general Church, had been
defended by a champion up to the point of death. For the morals
enforced by the Church are the guarantee of freedom.

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic,
with a blind, irrational assertion that the miracles _could_ not take
place. He is not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no
marvelous events ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot
believe that there was a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all
proof of such conspiracy). He is moved to a conviction that events so
minutely recorded and so amply testified, happened. Here again is the
European, the chiefly reasonable man, the Catholic, pitted against the
barbarian skeptic with his empty, unproved, mechanical dogmas of
material sequence.

And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are but the extreme points
fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization
was before the twelfth century. He knows what it was to become after
the sixteenth. He knows why and how the Church would stand out against
a certain itch for change. He appreciates why and how a character like
that of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that
the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees that it succeeded
so thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, in a moment when its
occurrence would have been far more dangerous and general than in the
sixteenth century, the overturning of the connection between Church and
State.

The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly comprehends. He grasps
the connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended
St. Thomas’ intercession; not because the miracles were fantasies, but
because a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the later
accompaniment and the recipient of miraculous power.

It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I
have, therefore, chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my
case.

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English
squires and of their position in the English countrysides would have to
explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a foreigner how and why
the evils of the English large estates were, though evils, national;
just as a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity or violent
might afford him a special test; so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes,
for the Catholic who is viewing Europe, a very good example whereby he
can show how well he understands what is to other men not
understandable, and how simple is to him, and how human, a process
which, to men not Catholic, can only be explained by the most grotesque
assumptions; as that universal contemporary testimony must be ignored;
that men are ready to die for things in which they do not believe; that
the philosophy of a society does not permeate that society; or that a
popular enthusiasm ubiquitous and unchallenged, is mechanically
produced to the order of some centre of government! All these
absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel,
nor is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains
it.

The Catholic sees that the whole of the à Becket business was like the
struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to
maintain it (such being the battleground chosen by his opponents) upon
a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot
understand it and does not pretend to understand it.

Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited,
to a third quite different from either of the other two and the widest
of all. Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We
can here make a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can
appreciate what other men only puzzle at, and can determine and know
those things upon which other men make no more than a guess.

The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the Jews
were widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and
especially the Roman intellect, accepted it in its maturity.

The material decline of the Empire is not co-relative with, nor
parallel to, the growth of the Catholic Church; it is the counterpart
of that growth. You have been told “Christianity (a word, by the way,
quite unhistorical) crept into Rome as she declined, and hastened that
decline.” That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it:
“The Faith is that which Rome accepted in her maturity; nor was the
Faith the cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of all that
could be conserved.”

There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood; there
was a serious imperilling of civilization in its old age by some small
(and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric blood; if civilization so
attacked did not permanently fail through old age we owe that happy
rescue to the Catholic Faith.

In the next period—the Dark Ages—the Catholic proceeds to see Europe
saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the
Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that
anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down. The
Mohammedan came within three days’ march of Tours, the Mongol was seen
from the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The
Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul,
and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing
left of Europe but a central core.

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that
dark time—in the Middle Ages—the Catholic notes not hypotheses but
documents and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some
imaginary “Teutonic” root—a figment of the academies—but from the very
real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in
Gaul—never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic
architecture spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the
territory of Paris and thence spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch
Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product of
the soul of Europe, re-awakened—he sees the marvelous new civilization
of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old Roman society,
a transformation wholly from within, and motived by the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth
century, are to him the diseases of one body—Europe—in need of
medicine.

The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the
European body at the Reformation.

It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law
it is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion
and from civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman
stock—save Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that
struggle _England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of
Europe, on Holland, North Germany and the rest. He is anxious to see
whether _Britain_ will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal.

He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance;
how all the forces of wealth—especially the old families such as the
Howards and the merchants of the City of London—are enlisted upon the
treasonable side; how in spite of this a tenacious tradition prevents
any sudden transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance
from the continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England
rising, cities in the South standing siege. Ultimately he sees the
great nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut off,
apparently forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food
upon which they had fed.

Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land
only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or
miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side
by side with that loss the preservation of Ireland.

To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Catholic history to
read) there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization which
has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to
frame fantastic origins for institutions the growth of which are as
plain as an historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids
which desolated the eastern and southeastern coasts of England in the
sixth century the origin of the English people. He perceives that the
success of these small eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and
the spread of their language westward over the island dated from their
acceptance of Roman discipline, organization and law, from which the
majority, the Welsh to the West, were cut off. He sees that the
ultimate hegemony of Winchester over Britain all grew from this early
picking up of communications with the Continent and the cutting off of
everything in this island save the South and East from the common life
of Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are not dimly and
possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic in their origin;
he is not surprised to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean
valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans; he sees how
probable or necessary was such an origin just when the chief effort of
Europe was at work in the _Reconquista_.

In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally
before the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of
theories, self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of
novelty, which has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the
past. Above all, he does not commit the prime historical error of
“reading history backwards.” He does not think of the past as a groping
towards our own perfection of today. He has in his own nature the
nature of its career: he feels the fall and the rise: the rhythm of a
life which is his own.

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century
or the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is
the supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.



EUROPE AND THE FAITH



I
WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


The history of European civilization is the history of a certain
political institution which united and expressed Europe, and was
governed from Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by
the growing influence of a certain definite and organized religion:
this religion it ultimately accepted and, finally, was merged in.

The institution—having accepted the religion, having made of that
religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in
through every part until it became the spirit of the whole—was slowly
modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it
did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new
soul. It re-arose and still lives.

This institution was first known among men as _Republica_; we call it
today “The Roman Empire.” The Religion which informed and saved it was
then called, still is called, and will always be called “The Catholic
Church.”

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth
whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or
to a man who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in
distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to
examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as
would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an
intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary
atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history
in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly
departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization
will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to his
science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic
student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the
Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do _not_
grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose
special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic
Church, or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other
anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal
history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists
are innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still
dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the
world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is
anti-Catholic—that concerns another sphere of thought—but that it is
unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and
its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or
to diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a
certain religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a
vague mood, but a determinate and highly organized corporation; to
present in the first centuries some non-existant “Christianity” in
place of the existant Church; to suggest that the Faith was a vague
agreement among individual holders of opinions instead of what it
historically _was_, the doctrine of a fixed authoritative institution;
to fail to identify that institution with the institution still here
today and still called the Catholic Church; to exaggerate the
insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside the Empire
and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire or its
religion have at any time ceased to be—that is, to pretend that there
has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present
of Europe—all these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is
_nothing_ which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is
not demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building
materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple
food and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower,
the well, the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very
words of most of our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order
of still more, the logical sequence of our thought—all spring from that
one source. So with implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the
chisel, the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the
ladder; all these we have from that same origin. Of our institutions it
is the same story. The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the
parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with
their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European cities, the
routes of communication between them, the universities, the
Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence, all these
derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly
foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion
of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.

The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in
history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but
with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave
the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is
equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men
must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might
have risen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact,
spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to this
day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did,
as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial Roman
system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for its
ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements and
the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living or dead:
of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter
of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in its origin and
development that its external accoutrement and its language were those
of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious
bias against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of
which will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one,
error disparate and many.

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,
continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized
fortress; such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from
that, along any one of the infinite number of directions from which a
single point may be approached. Today there is attack from the North,
tomorrow an attack from the South. Their directions are flatly
contradictory, but the contradiction is explained by the fact that each
is directed against a central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan
institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something
alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable
before Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of
the Creed. They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental
disease into the body of a firm Western society which it did not so
much transform as liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous
barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan
qualities—which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant
qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of
the Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its
institutions as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a
new society without considering its Catholic and Imperial origins.
Nothing is commoner, for instance (in English schools), than for boys
to be taught that the pirate raids and settlements of the fifth century
in this Island were the “coming of the English,” and the complicated
history of Britain is simplified for them into a story of how certain
bold seafaring pagans (full of all the virtues we ascribe to ourselves
today) first devastated, then occupied, and at last, of their sole
genius, developed a land which Roman civilization had proved inadequate
to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or
unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning
in him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe
as though it were something quite apart from the general development of
our civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole
history of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the
sixteenth century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as
though a man were to write of England in the nineteenth century without
daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such
historical enormities, the reader is at a loss to understand the
ordinary motives of his ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the
history of the Church obviously escape him, but much more do the great
crises in civil history escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be
ready with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this:
“What was the Roman Empire?”

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and
let him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil
War: if you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and
very summary account: if of all that went before it, right away back to
the first colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or
ludicrously misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then
could he make of the problems in American Society, or how would he be
equipped to understand the nation of which he was to be a citizen? To
give such a man the elements of civic training you must let him know
what the Colonies were, what the War of Independence, and what the main
institutions preceding that event and created by it. He would have
further to know soundly the struggle between North and South, and the
principles underlying that struggle. Lastly, and most important of all,
he would have to see all this in a correct perspective.

So it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization
which is common to both Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigor
has extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and Africa. We cannot
understand it today unless we understand what it developed from. What
was the origin from which we sprang? What was the Roman Empire?

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime characteristic of
which was the acceptation, absolute and unconditional, of one common
mode of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries. It is an
idea very difficult for the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to
a number of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated,
and each separately colored, as it were, by different customs, a
different language, and often a different religion. Thus the modern man
sees France, French speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of
its own, etc.; he saw (till yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian
hegemony, German speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so
forth. When he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of opinion,
such as the discussion between aristocracy and democracy today, he
thinks in terms of different countries. Ireland, for instance, is
Democratic, England is Aristocratic—and so forth.

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, however united, as
something bounded by, and in contrast with, other communities. When he
writes or thinks of France he does not think of France only, but of the
points in which France contrasts with England, North Germany, South
Germany, Italy, etc.

Now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally
different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were
antagonisms _within one State_. No differentiation of State against
State was conceivable or was attempted.

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, from the North Sea to the
Sahara and the Middle Nile, all was one State.

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial
citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no
appreciable arts or sciences, it was _barbaric_. That outside waste of
sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the
frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation.
But that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of
the menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing
a fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities
outside the boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly
populated, and highly organized State within.

The members of these communities (principally the Dutch, Frisian,
Rhenish and other Germanic peoples, but also on the other frontiers,
the nomads of the desert, and in the West, islanders and mountaineers,
Irish and Caledonian) were all tinged with the great Empire on which
they bordered. Its trade permeated them. We find its coins everywhere.
Its names for most things became part of their speech. They thought in
terms of it. They had a sort of grievance when they were not admitted
to it. They perpetually begged for admittance.

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and then
to raid little portions of its frontier wealth.

They never dreamt of “conquest.” On the other hand the Roman
administrator was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an
orderly manner on the frontier fields, so that he could exploit their
labor, with coaxing them to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies,
or (when there was any local conflict) with defeating them in local
battles, taking them prisoners and making them slaves.

I have said that the mere number of these exterior men (German,
Caledonian, Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with
the numbers of civilization, and, I repeat, in the eyes of the citizens
of the Empire, their lack of culture made them more insignificant
still.

At only one place did the Roman Empire have a common frontier with
another civilization, properly so called. It was a very short frontier,
not one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire. It was the
Eastern or Persian frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert. And
though a true civilization lay beyond, that civilization was never of
great extent nor really powerful. This frontier was variously drawn at
various times, but corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia.
The Mediterranean peoples of the Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were
always within that frontier. They were Roman. The mountain peoples of
Persia were always beyond it. Nowhere else was there any real rivalry
or contact with the foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact
(though “The Persian War” is the only serious _foreign_ or equal war in
the eyes of all the rulers from Julius Cæsar to the sixth century)
counted for little in the general life of Rome.

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often repeated, so
strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and so essentially
characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the
formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape.
_Men lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and
which they even regarded as eternal_. There would be much grumbling
against the taxes and here and there revolts against them, but never a
suggestion that the taxes should be levied by any other than imperial
authority, or imposed in any other than the imperial manner. There was
plenty of conflict between armies and individuals as to who should have
the advantage of ruling, but never any doubt as to the type of function
which the “Emperor” filled, nor as to the type of universally despotic
action which he exercised. There were any number of little local
liberties and customs which were the pride of the separate places to
which they attached, but there was no conception of such local
differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one State. That
State was, for the men of that time, the World.

The complete unity of this social system was the more striking from the
fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and
liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of
religious practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current
official language for the educated thought of the Empire: there were
two, Greek and Latin. And in every department of human life there
co-existed this very large liberty of individual and local expression,
coupled with a complete, and, as it were, necessary unity, binding the
whole vast body together. Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a series of
civil wars. Several Emperors might be reigning together. The office of
Emperor might even be officially and consciously held in commission
among four or more men. But the power of the Emperor was always one
power, his office one office, and the system of the Empire one system.

It is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt a full answer to
the question of how such a civic state of mind came to be, but the
reader must have some _sketch_ of its development if he is to grasp its
nature.

The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire grew had consisted
(before that Empire was complete—say, from an unknown most distant past
to 50 B.C.) in two types of society: there stood in it as rare
exceptions _States_, or nations in our modern sense, governed by a
central Government, which controlled a large area, and were peopled by
the inhabitants of many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient
Egypt. But there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great
numbers as to form the predominant type of society, a series of
_Cities_, some of them commercial ports, most of them controlling a
small area from which they drew their agricultural subsistence, but all
of them remarkable for this, that their citizens drew their civic life
from, felt patriotism for, were the soldiers of, and paid their taxes
to, not a nation in our sense but a _municipality_.

These cities and the small surrounding territories which they
controlled (which, I repeat, were often no more than local agricultural
areas necessary for the sustenance of the town) were essentially the
sovereign Powers of the time. Community of language, culture, and
religion might, indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict.
One could talk of the Phoenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so
forth. But the individual City was always the unit. City made war on
City. The City decided its own customs, and was the nucleus of
religion. The God was the God of the city. A rim of such points
encircled the eastern and central Mediterranean wherever it was
habitable by man. Even the little oasis of the Cyrenæan land with sand
on every side, but habitable, developed its city formations. Even on
the western coasts of the inland ocean, which received their culture by
sea from the East, such City States, though more rare, dotted the
littoral of Algeria, Provence and Spain.

Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was
disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian
Alexander.

The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of
Macedon, when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common
Greek culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant
littoral and much more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is,
“Greecified”) civilization. The separate cities, of course, survived,
and after Alexander’s death unity of control was lost in various and
fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quarrels of his
generals. But the old moral equilibrium was gone and the conception of
a general civilization had appeared. Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew,
the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the Greek tongue was the medium of
all the East for a thousand years. Hence are the very earliest names of
Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest, Baptism, Christ, Greek names.
Hence all our original documents and prayers are Greek and shine with a
Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in idea as the four
Catholic Gospels.

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to
follow (since we have only later accounts—and they are drawn from the
city’s point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the
Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to
taxation and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a
sort of superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined
and perhaps in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at
any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this
city had in a slower and less universal way begun to break down the
moral equilibrium of the City States in Italy, and had produced between
the Apennines and the sea (and in some places beyond the Apennines) a
society in which the City State, though of coarse surviving, was no
longer isolated or sovereign, but formed part of a larger and already
definite scheme. The city which had arrived at such a position, and
which was now the manifest capital of the Italian scheme, was ROME.

Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went
a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come
into conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was
the commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that
is, a Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the
rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had
shown for conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread of its
spirit and for the domination of its laws and modes of thought. The
business of Carthage was to enrich itself: not indirectly as do
soldiers (who achieve riches as but one consequence of the pursuit of
arms), but directly, as do merchants, by using men indirectly, by
commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.

The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever
he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He
employed mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly
step by step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every
commercial empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built
up a scattered hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today
called the “Command of the Sea.”

That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it
wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength
of martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious
struggle, which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our
Lord, ruined the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself
was destroyed by the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman
province. So perished for many hundred years the dangerous illusion
that the merchant can master the soldier. But never had that illusion
seemed nearer to the truth than at certain moments in the duel between
Carthage and Rome.

The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the
struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its
half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind
the cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France,
and the cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system,
and became, but in a more united way, what Italy had already long
before become. The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman
confederation, with its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the
Western Mediterranean and was compelled by its geographical position to
extend itself inland further and further into Spain, and even (what was
to be of prodigious consequence to the world) into GAUL.

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice
that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern
Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the
Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as
that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once
been Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian
East—Syria, Egypt—followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came
to depend upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates,
annexations, and occupations, which two generations or so before the
foundation of the Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was
not yet complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men
whose sons lived to be contemporary with the Nativity saw that the
unity of that world was already achieved. The World was now one, and
was built up of the islands, the peninsulas, and the littoral of the
Inland Sea.

So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally
would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital
experiment which has determined all future history—Julius Cæsar’s
conquest of Gaul—Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental,
exterior to the Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic
and the North Sea: Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be
the foundation of things to come.

It was this experiment—the Roman Conquest of Gaul—and its success which
opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the
world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no
parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially
civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the
Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, “converted”
into citizens of this now united Roman civilization.

It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link
and corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies
between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic, and the Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final
and so immediate that no historian has ever quite been able to explain
the phenomenon. Gaul accepted almost at once the Roman language, the
Roman food, the Roman dress, and it formed the first—and a
gigantic—extension of European culture.

We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example
of that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay.
Gaul led to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle
which any territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close
of the first century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church
had already been obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the
world’s history had come, the Roman Empire was finally established in
its entirety. By that time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic,
from the Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine
and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay a secure and
unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great State.

This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be
sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop.
This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex
political arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the
drift of the surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its
conceptions of law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of
Logic, are still the stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as
universal as itself is still, and perhaps more notably than ever,
apparent to all.



II
WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?


So far I have attempted to answer the question, “What Was the Roman
Empire?” We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a
character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution
affected from its origin, and at last permeated by, another
institution. This other institution had (and has) for its name “The
Catholic Church.”

My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question,
“What was the Church in the Roman Empire?” for that I have not yet
touched.

In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in
the place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint
the nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best
be observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived
through the close of the second century and on into the latter half of
the third century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first
moment in which we can perceive the Church as a developed organism now
apparent to all.

If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the
growing Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard
of. We can get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it.
It is from about this time also that many documents survive. I shall
show that the appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is
ample evidence of her original constitution.

A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through
the violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines,
surviving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in
extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the establishment,
of an untrammelled Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and
most terrible of the persecutions), would have been able to answer our
question well. He would have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness
to the emergence, apparent to all Society, of the Catholic Church.

Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great
provincial town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a
comparatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the
municipal government of the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to
a large class of citizens, free men but not senatorial; beneath these
again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves.

In what proportion these three classes of society would have been found
in a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents
to tell us, but we may infer from what we know of that society that the
majority would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less
numerous, while senators were certainly a very small body (they were
the great landowners of the neighborhood); and we must add to these
three main divisions two other classes which complicate our view of
that society. The first was that of the freed men, the second was made
up of perpetual tenants, nominally free, but economically (and already
partly in legal theory) bound to the wealthier classes.

The freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their
masters. They were bound to these masters very strongly so far as
social atmosphere went, and to no small extent in legal theory as well.
This preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as a
stationary phenomenon: it was increasing. In another half-dozen
generations it was destined to form the outstanding feature of all
imperial society. In the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman
Empire became from Pagan, Christian, the mark of the world was the
possession of nearly all its soil and capital (apart from public land)
by one small body of immensely wealthy men: the product of the pagan
Empire.

It is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving
would never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free
as a line of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social
arrangement and no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still
chattel, bought and sold; many of them were incapable of any true
family life. But there was nothing uncommon in a slave being treated as
a friend, in his being a member of the liberal professions, in his
acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his master’s fortune, or a
doctor. Certain official things he could not be; he could not hold any
public office, of course; he could never plead; and he could not be a
soldier.

This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it
required no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of
its vast population (for it was not a system of mere repression—no such
system has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a
restricted portion of the population. In the absence of foreign
adventure or Civil Wars, the armies were mainly used as frontier
police. Yet, small as they were, it was not easy to obtain the
recruitment required. The wealthy citizen we are considering would have
been expected to “find” a certain number of recruits for the service of
the army. He found them among his bound free tenants and enfranchised
slaves; he was increasingly reluctant to find them; and they were
increasingly reluctant to serve. Later recruitment was found more and
more from the barbarians outside the Empire; and we shall see on a
subsequent page how this affected the transition from the ancient world
to that of the Dark Ages.

Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a
morning to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be
saluted, as he passed, by many men of the various classes I have
described. Some, though slaves, he would greet familiarly; others,
though nominally free and belonging to his own following or to that of
some friend, he would regard with less attention. He would be
accompanied, it may be presumed, by a small retinue, some of whom might
be freed men of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant class, some in
legal theory quite independent of him, and yet by the economic
necessities of the moment practically his dependents.

As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a
variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods
were now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type
was to greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life
of the city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck
his attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local
Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The
first of these he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an
alien colony in some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of
a small, reserved, unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout
the Empire. The Empire had had trouble with it in the past, but that
trouble was long forgotten; the little colonies of Jews had become
negotiators, highly separate from their fellow citizens, already
unpopular, but nothing more.

With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an
administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was
_endowed_; that it was possessed of property more or less legally
guaranteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the
congregations and corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well
secured. He would further know as an administrator (and this would more
concern him—for the possession of property by so important a body would
seem natural enough), that to this building and the corporation of
which it was a symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow
citizens; a small minority, of course, in any town of such a date (the
first generation of the third century), but a minority most appreciable
and most worthy of his concern from three very definite
characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing; in the
second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of
growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this
was the capital point) it represented a true political organism—_the
only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the
Empire_.

If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in
this description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical
point of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic
Church in Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism;
with its own officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of
vitality, which, if he were a wise man, he would know was certain to
endure and to grow, and which even if he were but a superficial and
unintelligent spectator, he would recognize as unique.

Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes
and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was
growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it
within its own sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the
slave, the soldier, in so far as they were members of this corporation,
were equally bound to certain observances. _Did they neglect these
observances, the corporation would expel them or subject them to
penalties of its own_. He knew that though misunderstandings and fables
existed with regard to this body, there was no social class in which
its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and
it would disturb him to know) that its organization, though in no way
admitted by law, and purely what we should call “voluntary,” was strict
and very formidable.

Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by
the Greek name of _Episcopos_. Greek was a language which the cultured
knew and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to
which he belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien
any more than would be the Greek title of _Presbyter_—the name of the
official priests acting under this monarchical head of the
organization—or than would the Greek title _Diaconos_, which title was
attached to an order, just below the priests, which was comprised of
the inferior officials of the clerical body.

He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that
were represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its
mysteries, its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the
officials of its body, might alone engage, and which the mass of the
local “Christians”—for such was their popular name—attended as a
congregation. But he would further know that this scheme of worship
differed wholly from any other of the many observances round it _by a
certain fixity of definition_. The Catholic Church was not an opinion,
nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not a theory nor a habit; it
was a _clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact
doctrines_, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise
definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with
passionate conviction.

By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official
duties could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one
who was attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way,
perhaps by the influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited
from his father: he would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly
growing body counted very many members who were indifferent and some,
perhaps, who were ignorant of its full doctrine. But the body as a
whole, in its general spirit, and _especially in the disciplined
organization of its hierarchy_, did differ from everything round it in
this double character of precision and conviction. There was no
certitude left and no definite spirit or mental aim, no “dogma” (as we
should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of his time, save
among the Christians.

The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number
of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions,
at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men,
land and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago
merged in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church
alone represented a complete theory of life, to which men were
attached, as they had hundreds of years before been attached to their
local city, with its local gods and intense corporate local life.

Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for
would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a
thing to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and,
what is more, a State within the State.

If he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic Church
would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with
the general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority
even of the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it
would still have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of
his uniform time: and it was growing.

This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the
day. It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial
taxes. He consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental
conception of the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of
importance exactly corresponding to the amount of freehold land which
each possessed. He has to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local
repairs, the making of some new street, or the establishment of some
monument. Probably he hears of some local quarrel provoked (he is told)
by the small, segregated Christian body, and he follows the police
report upon it.

He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts
of his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been
the result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been
made, what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry
for the army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another
with perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some
thousands of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business
he hardly comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It
was not yet rooted in the countryside.

There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be
rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few
hundred fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge
with a Roman garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of
neighboring barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by
pillage in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been
called out against them. He might have, from the hands of a friend in
that garrison, a letter brought to him officially by the imperial post,
which was organized along all the great highways, telling him what had
been done to the marauders or the suppliants; how, too, some had, after
capture, been allotted land to till under conditions nearly servile,
others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for the army. The news would never
for a moment have suggested to him any coming danger to the society in
which he lived.

He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably
literary, and there would have been an end of his day.

In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the
small Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we
are to understand history, that by this time it was already the
phenomenon which contemporaries were also beginning to note most
carefully.

That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local
affairs (including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck
such a man at such a time.

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must
observe certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and
the society around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first
place there had been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic
friction breaking out between the Imperial power and this separate
voluntary organism, the Catholic Church. The Church’s partial secrecy,
its high vitality, its claim to independent administration, were the
superficial causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, we know that the
ultimate causes were more profound. The conflict was a conflict between
Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the one hand, and what Jesus
Christ Himself had called “the world.” But it is unhistorical to think
of a “Pagan” world opposed to a “Christian” world at that time. The
very conception of “a Pagan world” requires some external manifest
Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There was none
such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the third century.
The Church had around her a society in which education was very widely
spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely
skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life,
and tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a
final solution.

It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to
speak of its “luxury” or its “cruelty.” A cruel man could be cruel in
it without suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian
training would render natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could
be, and would be, merciful and would preach mercy, and would be
generally applauded. It was a society in which there were many
ascetics—whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure—but
a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this, that
at bottom it _believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief
to be mere opinions_.

Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings.
It is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the
Catholic Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor
any idea that man is other than sufficient to himself.

The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to
himself, nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the
doors to full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and
proposes) its doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of
faith.

It differed from—or was more solid than—all around it in this: that it
proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical
facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of
“mysteries” as realities instead of symbols.

A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical
training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have
described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it
is evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local
primacies in various other great cities. But what is not so generally
emphasized is the way in which Christian society appears to have
_looked at itself_ at that time.

The conception which the Catholic Church had of _itself_ in the early
third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if
we use the word “Christianity” we are unhistorical. “Christianity” is a
term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it
connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The
Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception. Upon
the contrary, they were attached to its very antithesis. They were
attached to the conception of a _thing_: of an organized body
instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and
remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. One
can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoic_ism_, or
epicurean_ism_, or neoplaton_ism_; but one cannot talk of
“Christian_ism_” or “Christ_ism_.” Indeed, no one has been so ignorant
or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase
“Christianity,” used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in
the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of “Christianism”
or “Christism;” and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea;
it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in
Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of
the two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the
problems and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess
himself Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is
no personal God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for
such and such utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.

The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by
certain “mysteries” into which he has been “initiated:” That is,
symbolical plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high
seclusion before members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to
feel a spiritual life as the natural life round him. He has curiously
followed, and often paid at high expense, the services of necromancers;
he believes that in an “initiation” which he experienced in his youth,
and during the secret and most vivid drama or “mystery” in which he
then took part, he actually came in contact with the spiritual world.
Such men were not uncommon. The declining society of the time was
already turning to influences of that type.

The host’s conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such
things, impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid
kind of man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading
with great interest the literature of the Christians. He is in
admiration of the traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He
quotes certain phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They
move him to eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have
an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying: “For my part, I have
come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had
me act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read
of, and the practical maxims which are attached to His Name seem to me
a sufficient guide to life. That,” he will conclude simply, “is the
groove into which I have fallen, and I do not think I shall ever leave
it.”

Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have
been a _Christian_? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called
him a _Christian_? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where
_Christians_ were unpopular? Would _Christians_ have received him among
themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society?
Would he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of
the _Christian_ body?

The answer is most emphatically _No_.

No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as
coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis
of one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo
would have troubled him with a single question. No Christian
congregation would have regarded him as in any way connected with their
body. Opinion of that sort, “Christism,” had no relation to the Church.
How far it existed we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as
it existed it would have been on all fours with any one of the vague
opinions which floated about the cultured Roman world.

Now it is evident that the term “Christianity” used as a point of view,
a mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally
evident that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to
do with the Christian _religion_ of that day. For the Christian
religion (then as now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in
what I have called an organism, and that organism was the Catholic
Church.

The reader may here object: “But surely there was heresy after heresy
and thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian
whom the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather
than relinquish the name.”

True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove
the point at issue.

These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1)
exact doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were,
all three, regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The
heresies arose one after another, from the action of men who were
prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be, and
to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living
tradition and the right to be regarded as the centre of unity. No
heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. The whole
gist and meaning of a heresy was that it, the heresy, or he, the
heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert
his own definition.

What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church
asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the
heresiarch denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred
miles of such a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that
some doctrine not yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a
man, that his final settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that
after debate and counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part
of the bishops, this man’s solution is rejected and an orthodox
solution is defined. From that moment the heresiarch, if he will not
fall into line with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion; and his
rejection, no less than his own original insistence upon his doctrine,
are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges postulate unity
and definition as the two necessary marks of Catholic truth.

No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his
opponent: “You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form
his part of ‘Christian society’ and look at things from his own point
of view.” The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the
early Church being what it was, be defined one way or the other.

Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and
present everywhere in the first years of the third century?

Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and
documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we
know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify
it from our conceptions of the _probable_ according to our knowledge of
that society—as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a
bishop at Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may
amplify it by guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some
just possible but exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important
canonical Gospel has been lost. There is an infinite range for
guesswork, both orthodox and heretical. But the plain and known facts
which repose upon historical and documentary evidence, and which have
no corresponding documentary evidence against them, are both few and
certain.

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly
true of his time.

Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then
taught as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death
about 170 years before in Palestine—only 130 years before Tertullian’s
birth—had risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real
person with whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian’s childhood men
still lived who had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.

This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you
have an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery,
fruitful in opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to
three centuries of more and more particular definition.

This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions
called Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the
Church. The doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines.
They included the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its
alternative of salvation and damnation.

Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name
of The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain
rite and _Mystery_ called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and
changed them into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be
continued. The central act of worship of the Christian Church was
therefore a consecration of bread and wine by priests in the presence
of the initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality. The bread
and wine so consecrated were certainly called (universally) the Body of
the Lord.

The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and
drank the Wine thus changed in the _Mystery_.

It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the
Lord.

There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop:
regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of
the ritual and the guardian of doctrine.

The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through
their bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially
one ritual.

All that is plain history.

The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where
Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general
suppression to be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases
that it was a tenth of the population. Equally certainly did the unity
of the Christian Church and its bishops teach the institution of the
Eucharist, the Resurrection, the authority of the Apostles, and their
power of tradition through the bishops. A very large number of converts
were to be noted and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority of his
time, by his testimony, were recruited by conversion, and were not born
Christians.

Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the
Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the
undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan
would have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.

I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which
Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of
the points I have set down are, of course, _demonstrably_ anterior to
the third century. I mean by “demonstrably” anterior, proved in earlier
documentary testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long
anterior to the time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common
sense. But there are documents as well.

Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than
Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to
the Reform Bill—and he gave us a full description of the Mass.

We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St.
Justin—perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations
contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone,
Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization
of the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the
Primacy in it of the Roman See.

The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half
after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called
“Apostolic” times—that is, documents proceeding immediately from men
who could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their
quantity (and that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality,
too, a far superior body of evidence to what we possess from the next
generation. We have more in the New Testament than we have in the
writings of these men who came just after the death of the Apostles.
But what does remain is quite convincing. There arose from the date of
Our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the
death of Tiberius and a long lifetime after the Roman organization of
Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly individual _Society_, with
fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a strong discipline of its own.
With a most vivid and distinct personality, unmistakeable. And this
Society was, and is, called “The Church.”

I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which
we are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there
is no matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by
religious bias.

The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of
history as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned
to set forth a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an
advocate or lawyer. And I say that the conclusion we can establish with
regard to the Christian community on these main lines is the conclusion
to which any man must come quite independently of his creed. He will
deny these facts only if he has such bias against the Faith as
interferes with his reason. A man’s belief in the mission of the
Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin, do not move him
to these plain historical conclusions any more than they move him to
his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and organization of
contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth is for
philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact _was_ is plain history.
The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have been a
clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.

By the year 200 the Church was—everywhere, manifestly and in ample
evidence throughout the Roman world—what I have described, and taught
the doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred
and seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title
throughout that era of youth.

To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200
was rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and
seventy years before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and
discipline starts with the first third of the first century, and the
Church was from its birth the Church, the reader must consider the
dates.

We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the “canon”
which the Church has authorized as the “New Testament,” documents
proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the
Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of
phantasy is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the
Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also
(who had conversed with the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may
have been deceiving. I am not here concerned with that point. The
discussion of it belongs to another province of argument altogether.
But they were _contemporaries_ of the things they said they were
contemporaries of. In other words, their writings are what is called
“authentic.”

If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and
such a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the
account of a man who lived at the time when the miracle is _said_ to
have happened. If you read (in Ignatius’ seven certainly genuine
letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, you may think him a
wrong-headed enthusiast. But you know that you are reading the work of
a man who _personally_ witnessed the beginnings of the Church; you know
that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or
takes for granted, were certainly those of his time, that is, of the
_origin_ of Catholicism, though you may think the customs silly and the
doctrines nonsense.

St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the
Catholic Church is exactly in the position—in the matter of dates—of a
man of our time talking about the rise and present character of the
Socialists or of the rise and present character of Leopold’s Kingdom of
Belgium, of United Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is,
virtually, his own time.

Well, there comes after this considerable body of _contemporary_
documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very
spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first
founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a
man.

This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary
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_.

There is no link between barbaric society and the feudalism of the
Middle Ages; there is no trace of such a link. There is, on the
contrary, a very definite and clearly marked historical sequence
between Roman civilization and the feudal system, attested by
innumerable documents which, once read and compared in their order,
leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the mediæval civilization
repose on purely Roman origins.

In a word, the gradual cessation of central Imperial rule in Western
Europe, the failure of the power and habit of one united organization
seated in Rome to color, define and administrate the lives of men, was
an internal revolution; it did not come from without. It was a change
from within; it was nothing remotely resembling an external, still less
a barbaric, conquest from without.

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old,
failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local
government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five
hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened;
the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in
each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry
soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the
local “palaces” as they were called, of Roman administration, secured
such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and,
conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as
the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what
happened, and that is all that happened.

As an historical phenomenon it is what I have called it—enormous. It
most vividly struck the imagination of men. The tremors and the
occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms of this change of
base from the old high civilization to the Dark Ages, singularly
impressed the numerous and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors,
their astonishment, their speculations as to the result, have come down
to us highly emphasized. We feel after all those centuries the shock
which was produced on the literary world of the day by Alaric’s sack of
Rome, or by the march of the Roman auxiliary troops called “Visigoths”
through Gaul into Spain, or by the appearance of the mixed horde
called—after their leaders—“Vandals” in front of Hippo in Africa. But
what we do _not_ feel, what we do _not_ obtain from the contemporary
documents, what was a mere figment of the academic brain in the
generation now just passing away, is that anti-Catholic and
anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient civilization as
conquered by men of another and of a better stock who have since
developed the supreme type of modern civilization, and whose contrast
with the Catholic world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded as
the principle of life in Europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact
in European history.

The reader will not be content with a mere affirmation, though the
affirmation is based upon all that is worth counting in modern
scholarship. He will ask what, then, did really happen? After all,
Alaric did sack Rome. The Kings of the Franks were Belgian chieftains,
probably speaking (at first) Flemish as well as Latin. Those of the
Burgundians were probably men who spoke that hotchpotch of original
barbaric, Celtic and Roman words later called “Teutonic dialects,” as
well as Latin. The military officers called (from the original
recruitment of their commands) “Goths,” both eastern and western, were
in the same case. Even that mixed mass of Slav, Berber, escaped slaves
and the rest which, from original leaders was called in North Africa
“Vandal,” probably had some considerable German nucleus.

The false history has got superficial ground to work upon. Many
families whose origins came from what is now German-speaking Central
Europe ruled in local government during the transition, and distinct
though small tribes, mainly German in speech, survived for a short time
in the Empire. Like all falsehood, the falsehood of the “Teutonic
theory” could not live without an element of truth to distort, and it
is the business of anyone who is writing true history, even in so short
an essay as this, to show what that ground was and how it has been
misrepresented.

In order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly
represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our
united civilization had in its first five centuries reposed, was the
_Roman Army_. By which I do not mean that the number of soldiers was
very large compared with the civilian population, but that the organ
which was vital in the State, the thing that really counted, the
institution upon which men’s minds turned, and which they thought of as
the foundation of all, was the military institution.

The original city-state of the Mediterranean broke down a little before
the beginning of our era.

When (as always ultimately happens in a complex civilization of many
millions) self-government had broken down, and when it was necessary,
after the desperate faction fights which that breakdown had produced,
to establish a strong centre of authority, the obvious and, as it were,
necessary person to exercise that authority (in a State constituted as
was the Roman State) was the Commander-in-Chief of the army; all that
the word “Emperor”—the Latin word _Imperator_—means, is a
commander-in-chief.

It was the Army which made and unmade Emperors; it was the Army which
designed and ordered and even helped to construct the great roads of
the Empire. It was in connection with the needs of the Army that those
roads were traced. It was the Army which secured (very easily, for
peace was popular) the civil order of the vast organism. It was the
Army especially which guarded its frontiers against the uncivilized
world without; upon the edge of the Sahara and of the Arabian desert;
upon the edge of the Scotch mountains; upon the edge of the poor, wild
lands between the Rhine and Elbe. On those frontiers the garrisons made
a sort of wall within which wealth and right living could accumulate,
outside which small and impoverished bodies of men destitute of the
arts (notably of writing) save in so far as they rudely copied the
Romans or were permeated by adventurous Roman commerce, lived under
conditions which, in the Celtic hills, we can partially appreciate from
the analogy of ancient Gaul and from tenacious legends, but of which in
the German and Slavonic sand-plains, marshes and woods we know hardly
anything at all.

Now this main instrument, the Roman Army—the instrument, remember,
which not only preserved civil functions, but actually created the
master of all civic functions, the Government—went through three very
clear stages of change in the first four centuries of the Christian
era—up to the year A.D. 400 or so. And it is the transformation of the
Roman Army during the first four centuries which explains the otherwise
inexplicable change in society just afterwards, in the fifth and sixth
centuries—that is, from 400 to 600 A.D. The turn from the full
civilization of Rome to the beginning of the Dark Ages.

In its first stage, during the early Empire, just as the Catholic
Church was founded and was beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still
theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. [Footnote: A soldier was
still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a
soldier as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a
slave, was in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the soldiers
were almost entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from slave
stock, the soldiers themselves were free citizens always.]

As a matter of fact the Army was already principally professional, and
it was being recruited even in this first stage very largely from the
territories Rome had conquered.

Thus we have Cæsar raising a Gallic legion almost contemporaneous with
his conquest of Gaul. But for a long time after, well into the
Christian era, the Army was conceived of in men’s minds as a sort of
universal institution rooted in the citizenship which men were still
proud to claim throughout the Empire, and which belonged only to a
minority of its inhabitants; for the majority were slaves.

In the second phase (which corresponded with the beginning of a decline
in letters and in the arts, which carries us through the welter of
civil wars in the third century and which introduces the remodeled
Empire at their close) the Army was becoming purely professional and at
the same time drawn from whatever was least fortunate in Roman society.
The recruitment of it was treated much after the fashion of a tax; the
great landed proprietors (who, by a parallel development in the
decline, were becoming the chief economic feature in the Roman State)
were summoned to send a certain number of recruits from their estates.

Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as were the conditions of
military service, it gave them civic freedom, certain honors, a certain
pay, and a future for their children. The poorer freed men would also
go at the command of their lord (though only of course a certain
proportion—for the conscription was very light compared with modern
systems, and was made lighter by reënlistment, long service, absence of
reserves, and the use of veterans).

During this second stage, while the Army was becoming less and less
civic, and more and more a profession for the destitute and the
unfortunate, the unpopularity and the ignorance of military service
among the rest of the population, was increasing. The average citizen
grew more and more divorced from the Army and knew less and less of its
conditions. He came to regard it partly as a necessary police force or
defence of his frontiers, partly as a nuisance to him at home. He also
came to regard it as something with which he had nothing to do. It
lived a life separate from himself. It governed (through the power of
the Emperor, its chief); it depended on, and also supported or re-made,
the Imperial Court. But it was external, at the close of the Empire, to
general society.

Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, and _the habit grew up of
offering the hungry tribes outside the pale of the Empire the advantage
of residence within it on condition that they should serve as Roman
soldiers_.

The conception of territories within the Empire which were affiliated
and allied to it rather than absorbed by it, was a very ancient one.
That conception had lost reality so far as the old territories it had
once affected were concerned; but it paved the way for the parallel
idea of troops affiliated and allied to the Roman Army, part of that
army in discipline and organization, yet possessed of considerable
freedom within their own divisions.

Here we have not only a constant and increasing use of barbaric troops
drafted into the regular corps, but also _whole bodies which were more
and more frequently accepted “en bloc” and, under their local leaders,
as auxiliaries to the Roman forces_.

Some such bodies appear to have been settled upon land on the
frontiers, to others were given similar grants at very great distances
from the frontiers. Thus we have a small body of German barbarians
settled at Rennes in Brittany. And, again, within the legions (who were
all technically of Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from the
full civilization of Rome), the barbarian who happened to find himself
within that civilization tended more than did his non-barbarian fellow
citizen (or fellow slave) to accept military service. He would nearly
always be poorer; he would, unless his experience of civilization was a
long one, feel the hardship of military service less; and in this
second phase, while the army was becoming more sedentary (more
attached, that is, to particular garrisons), more permanent, more of an
hereditary thing handed on from father to son, and distinguished by the
large element of what we call “married quarters,” it was also becoming
more and more an army of men who, whether as auxiliaries or as true
Roman soldiers, were in _blood, descent, and to some extent in manners
and less in language, barbarians_. There were negroes, there were
probably Celts, there were Slavs, Mongols of the Steppes, more numerous
Germans, and so forth.

In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of
the fifth century, the army though not yet wholly barbaric, had already
become in its most vital part, barbaric. It took its orders, of course,
wholly from the Roman State, but great groups within it were only
partly even Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking, and were certainly
regarded both by themselves and by their Roman masters as non-Roman in
manners and in blood.

It must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an
attack upon the Empire entered the heads of these soldiers, but that
the very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them. Had you
proposed it they would not even have known what you meant. That a
particular section of the army should fight against a particular
claimant to the Empire (and therefore and necessarily in favor of some
other claimant) they thought natural enough; but to talk of an attack
upon the Empire itself would have seemed to them like talking of an
attack upon bread and meat, air, water and fire. The Empire was the
whole method and meaning of their lives.

At intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the Roman Empire was,
of course, subjected to attempted pillage by small and hungry robber
bands without its boundaries, but that had nothing to do with the
barbaric recruitment of the Roman Army save when such bands were caught
and incorporated. The army was always ready at a moment’s order to cut
such foreign raiders to pieces—and always did so successfully.

The portion of the Army chosen to repel, cut up, and sell into slavery
a marauding band of Slavs or Germans or Celts, always had Celts or
Slavs or Germans present in large numbers among its own soldiery. But
no tie of blood interfered with the business. To consider such a thing
would have been inconceivable to the opponents on either side. The
distinction was not between speech and speech, still less between vague
racial customs. It was a distinction between the Imperial Service on
the one side, against the outer, unrecognized, savage on the other.

As the machinery of Government grew weak through old age, and as the
recruitment of the Army from barbarians and the large proportion of
auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis of the whole State,
the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the
cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities, grew greater and
greater; but it never occurred to them to attack the Empire as such.
All they wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within
it, and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were compelled
outside its boundaries.

Sometimes they were transformed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer
extended by the Roman authorities; more often they snatched a raid when
there was for the moment no good garrison in their neighborhood. Then a
Roman force would march against them, and if they were not quick at
getting away would cut them to pieces. But with the progress of the
central decline the attacks of these small bands on the frontiers
became more frequent. Frontier towns came to regard such attacks as a
permanent peril and to defend themselves against them. Little groups of
raiders would sometimes traverse great districts from end to end, and
whether in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bands on land,
the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot (but principally to enjoy)
the conditions that civilization offered, grew more and more
persistent.

It must not be imagined, of course, that civilization had not
occasionally to suffer then, as it had had to suffer at intervals for a
thousand years past, the attacks of really large and organized barbaric
armies. [Footnote: For instance, a century and a half before the
breakdown of central Government, the Goths, a barbaric group, largely
German, had broken in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their
successors in the fifth century.] Thus in the year 404, driven by the
pressure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, a vast barbaric
host under one Radagasius pushed into Italy. The men bearing arms alone
were estimated (in a time well used to soldiery and to such estimates)
at 200,000.

But those 200,000 were wiped out. The barbarians were always wiped out
when they attempted to come as conquerors. Stilicho (a typical figure,
for he was himself of barbarian descent, yet in the regular Roman
service) cut to pieces one portion of them, the rest surrendered and
were sold off and scattered as slaves.

Immediately afterwards you have a violent quarrel between various
soldiers who desire to capture the Imperial power. The story is
fragmentary and somewhat confused: now one usurper is blamed, and now
another, but the fact common to all is that with the direct object of
usurping power a Roman General calls in barbarian bands of pillagers
(all sorts of small groups, Franks, Suevians, Vandals) to cross the
Rhine into Gaul, _not_ as barbarian “conquerors,” but as allies, to
help in a civil war.

The succeeding generation has left us ample evidence of the results. It
presents us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined
province by any means; only of a province which has been traversed in
certain directions by the march of barbarian robber bands, who
afterwards disappeared, largely in fighting among themselves.

We have, later, the very much more serious business of the Mongol
Attila and his Huns, leading the great outer mass of Germans and Slavs
into the Empire on an enormous raid. In the middle of the fifth
century, fifty years after the destruction of Radagasius, these
Asiatics, leading more numerous other barbaric dependents of theirs
from the Germanies and the eastern Slavonic lands, penetrated for two
brief moments into Northern Italy and Eastern Gaul. The end of that
business—infinitely graver though it was than the raids that came
before it—is just what one might have expected. The regular and
auxiliary disciplined forces of the Empire destroy the barbarian power
near Chalons, and the last and worst of the invasions is wiped out as
thoroughly as had been all the others.

In general, the barbaric eruptions into the Empire failed wholly as
soon as Imperial troops could be brought up to oppose them.

What, then, were the supposed barbaric successes? What was the real
nature of the action of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome; and
how, later, do we find local “kings” in the place of the Roman
Governors?

The real nature of the action of men like Alaric is utterly different
from the imaginary picture with which the _old_ picturesque popular
history recently provided us. That false history gives us the
impression of a barbarian Chieftain gathering his Clan to a victorious
assault on Rome. Consider the truth upon Alaric and contrast it with
this imaginary picture.

Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but from birth a Roman; at
eighteen years of age he was put by the Court in command of a small
Roman auxiliary force _originally_ recruited from the Goths. He was as
much a Roman officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any other
terms than those of the Roman Army, as any other one of his colleagues
about the throne. He had his commission from the Emperor Theodosius,
and when Theodosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he
counted Alaric’s division as among the most faithful of his Army.

It so happened, moreover, that those few original auxiliaries—mainly
Goths by race—were nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric
survived. The remnant of his division was recruited, we know not how,
but probably from all kinds of sources, to its old strength. It was
still called “Gothic,” though now of the most mixed origin, and it was
still commanded by himself in his character of a Roman General.

Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was rewarded by further
military dignities in the Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of
military titles and of important command, as are all soldiers.

Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of
auxiliaries, he asks for the title of _Magister Militum_, with the
dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor
refuses it. One of the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric,
and suggests to him that he might gather other auxiliary troops under
his command, and make things uncomfortable for his superiors. Alaric
rebels, marches through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece,
and down into the Peloponesus; the regulars march against him
(according to some accounts) and beat him back into Albania.

There ends his first adventure. It is exactly like that of a hundred
other Roman generals in the past, and so are his further adventures. He
remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and makes peace with the
Government—still enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor.

He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in Italy, but his
army is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the armies in Italy—under a
general, by the way, as barbaric in mere descent as was Alaric, but,
like Alaric, wholly Roman in training and ideas.

The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman
service, and is motived, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of
years before, by the ambitions of generals.

Alaric does not lose his commission even after his second adventure; he
begins to intrigue between the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman
Empire. The great invasion under Radagasius interrupts this civil war.
That invasion was for Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman
officer, an invasion of barbaric enemies. That these enemies should be
called by this or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him. They
come from outside the Empire and are therefore, in his eyes, cattle. He
helps to destroy them, and destroyed they are—promptly and thoroughly.

When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had the opportunity to renew
the civil wars within the Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay
that were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general (himself, by
the way, a Vandal in descent), admitted Alaric’s right to arrears of
pay, but just at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue
which was based, like all the real movements of the time, on
differences of religion, not of race. Stilicho, suspected of attempting
to restore paganism, is killed. In the general confusion certain of the
families of the auxiliaries garrisoned in Italy are massacred by the
non-military population. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion
against the Imperial authority, these auxiliaries join him.

The total number of Alaric’s men was at this moment very small; they
were perhaps 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about them. They
were simply a body of discontented soldiers; they had not come from
across the frontier; they were not invaders; they were part of the long
established and regular garrisons of the Empire; and, for that matter,
many garrisons and troops of equally barbaric origin, sided with the
regular authorities in the quarrel. Alaric marches on Rome with this
disaffected Roman Army, claiming that he has been defrauded of his due
in salary, and leaning upon the popularity of the dead Stilicho, whose
murder he says he will avenge. His thirty thousand claim the barbarian
slaves within the city, and certain sums of money which had been, the
pretext and motive of his rebellion.

As a result of this action the Emperor promises Alaric his regular
salary as a general, and a district which he may not only command, but
plant with his few followers. Even in the height of his success, Alaric
again demands the thing which was nearest his heart, the supreme and
entirely Roman title of _Magister Militum_, the highest post in the
hierarchy of military advancement. But the Emperor again refuses to
give that. Alaric again marches on Rome, a Roman officer followed by a
rebellious Roman Army. He forces the Senate to make Attalus nominal
Emperor of the West, and Attalus to give him the desired title, his
very craving for which is most significant of the Roman character of
the whole business. Alaric then quarrels with his puppet, deprives him
of the insignia of the Empire, and sends them to Honorius; quarrels
again with Honorius, reënters Rome and pillages it, marches to Southern
Italy, dies, and his small army is dismembered.

There is the story of Alaric as it appears from documents and as it was
in reality. There is the truth underlying the false picture with which
most educated men were recently provided by the anti-Roman bias of
recent history.

Certainly the story of Alaric’s discontent with his salary and the
terms of his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder of the
capital, shows how vastly different was the beginning of the fifth
century from the society of three hundred years before. It is
symptomatic of the change, and it could only have been possible at a
moment when central government was at last breaking down. But it is
utterly different in motive and in social character from the vague
customary conception of a vast barbarian “invasion,” led by a German
“war lord” pouring over the Alps and taking Roman society and its
capital by storm. It has no relation to such a picture.

If all this be true of the dramatic adventure of Alaric, which has so
profoundly affected the imagination of mankind, it is still truer of
the other contemporary events which false history might twist into a
“conquest” of the Empire by the barbarian.

There was no such conquest. All that happened was an internal
transformation of Roman society, in which the chief functions of local
government fell to the heads of local auxiliary forces in the Roman
Army. As these auxiliary forces were now mainly barbaric, so were the
personalities of the new local governors.

I have only dealt with the particular case of Alaric because it is the
most familiar, and the most generally distorted: a test, as it were, of
my theme.

But what is true of him is true of all other auxiliaries in the
Armies—even of the probably Slavonic Vandals. These did frankly loot a
province—North Africa—and they (and they alone of the auxiliary troops)
did revolt against the Imperial system and defy it for a century: but
the Vandals themselves were already, before their adventure, a part of
the Imperial forces; they were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up
of all the varied elements of rebellion present in the country; and
their experiment in separation went down at last forever before the
Imperial armies. Meanwhile the North African society on which the
rebels lived, and which, with their various recruits—Moors, escaped
slaves, criminals—they maladministered and half ruined, was and
remained Roman.

In the case of local Italian government the case is quite clear. There
was never any question of “invasion” or “conquest.”

Odoacer held a regular Roman commission; he was a Roman soldier:
Theodoric supplanted him by leave of, and actually under orders from,
the Emperor. The last and greatest example, the most permanent, Gaul,
tells the same story. The Burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted
after imploring the aid of the Empire and permission to settle. Clovis,
the Belgian Fleming, fights no Imperial Army. His forebears were Roman
officials: his little band of perhaps 8,000 men was victorious in a
small and private civil war which made him Master in the North over
other rival generals. He defended the Empire against the Eastern
barbaric German tribes. He rejoiced in the titles of Consul and
Patrician.

There was no destruction of Roman society, there was no breach of
continuity in the main institutions of what was now the Western
Christian world; there was no considerable admixture (in these local
civil wars) of German, Slav, or outer Celtic blood—no appreciable
addition at least to the large amount of such blood which, through the
numerous soldiers and much more numerous slaves, had already been
incorporated with the population of the Roman world.

But in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth
centuries local government _did_ fall into the hands of those who
happened to command the main local forces of the Roman Army, and these
were by descent barbarian because the Army had become barbarian in its
recruitment.

Why local government gradually succeeded the old centralized Imperial
Government, and how, in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern
nations, we will next examine.



IV
THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS


European civilization, which the Catholic Church has made and makes, is
by that influence still one. Its unity now (as for three hundred years
past) is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of the Reformation.
The earlier wounds have been healed; that modern wound we hope may
still be healed—we hope so because the alternative is death. At any
rate unity, wounded or unwounded, is still the mark of Christendom.

That unity today falls into national groups. Those of the West in
particular are highly differentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call
it) is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish Peninsula (though
divided into five particular, and three main, regions, each with its
language, of which one, Portugal, is politically independent of the
rest) is another. The old European and Roman district of North Africa
is but partially re-occupied by European civilization. Italy has quite
recently appeared as another united national group. The Roman province
of England has (south of the border) formed one united nation for a
longer period than any of the others. To England Scotland has been
added.

How did these modern nations arise in the transformation of the Roman
Empire from its old simple pagan condition to one complex Christian
civilization? How came there to be also nations exterior to the Empire;
old nations like Ireland, new nations like Poland? We must be able to
answer this question if we are to understand, not only that European
civilization has been continuous (that is, one in time as well as one
in spirit and in place), but also if we are to know _why_ and _how_
that continuity was preserved. For one we are and will be, all
Europeans. The moment something threatens our common morals from
within, we face it, however tardily. We have forgotten what it is to
feel a threat from without: but it may come.

We are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of
the rise of the European nations. This explanation tells us that great
numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman Empire, conquered it,
established themselves as masters, and parceled out its various
provinces.

We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted,
destroys a man’s historic sense of Europe.

We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of
civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded
history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord’s birth; during
the height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the
fourth and the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization
seriously, and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed.
It was in the natural course of things this should be so.

I say “in the natural course of things.” Dreadful as the irruption of
barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale,
the _conquest_ of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily
impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to _destroy_ the
civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it.
But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner
upon civilized men. Now to impose one’s view and manner, _dare leges_
(to give laws), is to conquer.

Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army
with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can
always ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman
Empire the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the
better of the barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians
a hundred years before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not
broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred
years later the Roman armies had the better of another similar horde of
barbarians, the host of Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here
again the vast multitude lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery.
We have seen how the Roman generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed
them.

But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain
auxiliary troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces
of their original tribal character, and probably preserved for a
generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the
original barbaric tongues) assumed greater and greater importance in
the Roman Army towards the end of the imperial period—that is, towards
the end of the fourth, and in the beginning of the fifth, centuries
(say, 350-450).

We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in
importance within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as
Roman soldiers, and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that
they had that importance, or that their officers and generals, acting
as _Roman_ officers and generals, could play the part they did.

The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as
Romans. They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire
enjoyed. They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the
State _in_ which—not _against_ which—they warred. They acted wholly
within the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or
tradition of a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in
some part sprang from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no
living communication with it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals
lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which
guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great and
populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and the bishoprics
of the Catholic Church. Outside was a wilderness with which they had
nothing to do.

Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of
barbarian “conquest”), let us set out to explain that state of affairs
which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids
into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in
middle age.

Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and
wrote his classical work at such a date after Alaric’s Roman adventure
and Radagasius’ defeat that the life of a man would span the distance
between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those
events and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a
spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of that generation might be
born before the year 500. Such a man would have stood towards
Radagasius’ raid, the last futile irruption of the barbarian, much as
men, old today, in England, stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean
War, to the second Napoleon in France, to the Civil War in the United
States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in
his later years, this is what he would have seen:

In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone
on, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now
somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of
free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom
not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as
dependents.

In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic
Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and
headship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the
settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the
main popular preoccupation. And everywhere _save in Northern Gaul_ he
would have perceived small groups of men, wealthy, connected with
government, often bearing barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still
partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now these few men were as a
rule of a special set in religion. They were called _Arians_; heretics
who differed in religion from the mass of their fellow citizens very
much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today differ
from the great mass of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point of
capital importance.

The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian
(with the Mass, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out
of communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers.
They had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial
history. At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the
Imperial Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by
family tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to
rationalize the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a “swagger.” They
thought it an odd title to eminence. And this little vanity had two
effects. It cut them off from the mass of their fellow citizens in the
Empire. It made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to
disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great
Catholic body—the troops led by the local governors of Northern France.

We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the
state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the
beginning of the Dark Ages.

The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would
have been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of
command, were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman
Army. There had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its
corporate life. Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the
old imperial insignia.

The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the
inns, was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium,
or one of his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British
colony today, though that province is virtually independent, will
handle coins stamped with the effigies of English Kings. But though the
coinage was entirely imperial, he would, upon a passport or a receipt
for toll and many another official document he handled, often see side
by side with and subordinate to the imperial name, the name of _the
chief of the local government_.

This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we
must not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united
and truly “Imperial” form of government which had covered all
civilization two hundred to one hundred years before.

_The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred
years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the
Roman Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators
in the capitals of the Roman provinces_.

They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial
powers within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no
positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central
power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but
it made no attempt to act.

Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which
brought him to the centres of local government throughout the Western
Empire. Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has,
let us say, successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has
necessitated his obtaining official documents. He must, that is, come
into touch with _officials_ and with the actual _Government_ in Spain.
Two hundred years before he would have seen the officials of, and got
his papers from, a government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of
the Emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy
on the seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the
old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are
still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman
character; has anything changed at all?

Let us see.

To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the
“_Palatium_.” This word does not mean “Palace.”

When we say “palace” today we mean the house in which lives the real or
nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St.
James’ Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.

But the original word _Palatium_ had a very different meaning in late
Roman society. It signified the _official seat_ of Government, and in
particular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were
issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name
was originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the
Cæsars had their private house. As the mask of private citizenship was
gradually thrown off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years
before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more
and more true and absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more
the official centre of the Empire.

The term “_Palatium_” thus became consecrated to a particular use. When
the centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word
“_Palatium_” followed it; and at last it was applied to _local centres_
as well as to the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its
dignities and honors, in the whole of its official life, the _Palatium_
means the machine of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as
we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to
that Spanish _Palatium_ from which, throughout the five centuries of
Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsular had been locally governed. What
would he find?

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of
exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the
same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations, using
certain fixed formulæ, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No
local dialect was yet of the least importance. But he would also find
that the building was used for acts of authority, and that these acts
were performed in the name of a _certain person_ (who was no longer the
old Roman Governor) _and his Council_. It was this local person’s name,
rather than the Emperor’s, which usually—or at any rate more and more
frequently—appeared on the documents.

Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain,
and at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts
they ruled, the nations of our time and their royal families were to
spring.

The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this
person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia
and manner of Roman Government.

He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor’s delegate had sat: the
provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear
the official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his
symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the
Emperor’s local subordinates before him. But in two points this central
official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly
succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relied for power.

These two points were, first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful
and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not
habitually give himself an imperial Roman title, but was called _Rex_.

Let us consider these points separately.

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in
Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a
multitude of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there
devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most
important of whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not
been officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulæ
of administration were personal formulæ. Now and then he mentioned his
great officials, but he only mentioned them if he chose.

This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost
unconsciously substituted for the old Roman Governors, the _Rex_, was,
on the contrary, a part of his own Council, and all his formulæ of
administration mentioned the Council as his coadjutors and assessors in
administration. This was necessary above all (a most important point)
in anything that regarded the public funds.

It must not be imagined for a moment that the _Rex_ issued laws or
edicts, or (what was much more common and much more vital) levied
taxation under the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, these
great men about him. On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever
the Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could not do
otherwise because the whole machinery he had inherited presupposed
absolute power. But some things were already said to be done “with”
these great men: and it is of capital importance that we should note
this word “with.” The phrases of the official documents from that time
run more and more in one of half-a-dozen regular formulæ, all of which
are based upon this idea of the Council and are in general such words
as these: “So and so, _Rex_, ordered and commanded (_with his chief
men_) that so and so … should be done.”

As to the second point: we note the change of title. The authority of
the Palatium is a _Rex_; not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent
from the Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him,
but a _Rex_. Now what is the meaning of that word _Rex_?

It is usually translated by our word “King.” But it does not here mean
anything like what our word “King” means when we apply it today—or as
we have applied it for many centuries. It does not mean the ruler of a
large independent territory. It means a combination of two things when
it is used to name these local rulers in the later Roman Empire. It
means (1) The _chieftain_ of an auxiliary _group of soldiers_ who holds
an Imperial commission: and it means (2) That man acting as a local
governor.

Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years before, the
word _Rex_ had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty
surrounding district of Rome or of some similar neighboring and small
state. It had in the Latin language always retained some such
connotation. The word “_Rex_” was often used in Latin literature as we
use the word “King” in English: _i.e._, to describe the head of a state
great or small. But as applied to the local rulers of the fifth century
in Western Europe, it was not so used. It meant, as I have said,
Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries. A _Rex_ was not then, in
Spain, or in Gaul, a King in our modern sense of the word: he was only
the military head of a particular armed force. He was originally the
commander (hereditary or chosen or nominated by the Emperor) of an
auxiliary force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, when these
troops—originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric
district—changed by slow degrees into a body half police, half noble,
their original name would extend to the whole local army. The “Rex” of,
say, Batavian auxiliaries, the commander of the Batavian Corps, would
probably be a man of Batavian blood, with hereditary position and would
be called “_Rex Bataviorum_.” Afterwards, when the recruiting was
mixed, he still kept that title and later still, when the _Batavii_, as
such, had disappeared, his fixed title would remain.

There was no similarity possible between the word _Rex_ and the word
_Imperator_, any more than there is between the words “Miners’ Union”
or “Trade Conference” and the word “England.” There was, of course, no
sort of equality. A Roman General in the early part of the process
planning a battle would think of a _Rex_ as we think of a Divisionary
General. He might say: “I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My
auxiliaries (Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) I shall put here.
Send for their ‘Rex’ and I will give him his orders.”

A _Rex_ in this sense was a subject and often an unimportant subject of
the _Imperator_ or Emperor: the _Imperator_ being, as we remember, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which institution the Roman
State or Empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries.

When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of
course after the Roman fashion and forming one body with the Roman
forces, but contracted for “in bulk,” as it were) the chieftains of
these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official
language, _Reges_. Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was
the _Rex_ of his officially appointed auxiliary force; and since the
nucleus of that force had _once_ been a small body of Goths, and since
Alaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because
he had once been, by inheritance, a chieftain of the Goths, the word
_Rex_ was attached to his Imperial Commission in the Roman Army, and
there was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe with
which his command had originally been connected. He was _Rex_ of the
Roman auxiliary troops called “Goths.” The “_Rex_” in Spain was “_Rex
Gotorum_,” not “_Rex Hispaniæ_”—that was altogether a later idea. The
Rex in Northern France was not _Rex Galliæ_, he was “_Rex Francorum_.”
In each case he was the _Rex_ of the particular auxiliary troop from
which his ancestors—sometimes generations before—had originally drawn
their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers in the Roman
Army.

Thus you will have the _Rex Francorum_, or King of the Franks, so
styled in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because
any body of “Franks” still survived as a separate corps—they had been
but a couple of regiments or so [Footnote: We have documentary record.
The greater part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized
with their General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before
and had long disappeared—but because the original title had derived
from a Roman auxiliary force of Franks.

In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the
reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a
hierarchy of officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested in
the hands of a man called “_Rex_,” that is, “Commander” of such and
such an auxiliary force; Commander of the Franks, for instance, or
Commander of the Goths. He still commanded in the year 550 a not very
large military force on which local government depended, and in this
little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because, as
we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the stuff of the army had
become barbaric and the armed force was mainly of barbaric recruitment.
But that small military force was also, and as certainly, very mixed
indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman would enlist, for it had
privileges and advantages of great value; [Footnote: Hence the “leges”
or codes specially regulating the status of these Roman troops and
called in documents the laws of the “Goths” or “Burgundians,” as the
case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these,
sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the mass of them are
obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether the
members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic,
Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins.
Very shortly after—by, say, 600, at latest—the Army had become a
universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of
race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary
right to certain families and called their “laws.”

Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the
mind of a _Rex_. All these _Reges_ without exception held their
military office and power originally by a commission from the Empire.
All of them derived their authority from men who had been regularly
established as Imperial functionaries. When the central power of the
Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the _Rex_ as a fact administered
the whole machinery without control.

But no _Rex_ ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred
for independence against the Emperor. The _Rex_, the local man,
undertook all government simply because the old Government above him,
the central Government, had failed. No _Rex_ ever called himself a
local _Imperator_ or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the
most significant thing in all the transition between the full
civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman
armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought
to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they
seized. No local governor of the later transition, no _Rex_ of Vandal,
Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt of such a thing.
He might fight another local _Rex_ to get part of his taxing-power or
his treasure. He might take part in the great religious quarrels (as in
Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to fight
against the _Empire_ as such or to attempt _conquest_ and _rule_ over a
“subject population” would have meant nothing to him; in theory the
Empire was still under one control.

There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the
machine of government during the period of its degradation and
transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority.
Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles,
Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of
them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman
administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of
administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official
name of _Palatium_.

Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their
small armed forces a military institution descended and derived from
the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of
their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote:
The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized
through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course,
what we call “Teutonic Languages” are in reality half Roman, long
before we get our first full documents in the eighth and ninth
centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a
soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it,
not as even conceivably an enemy of it.

When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those
changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.

The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his
“kingdom” between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with
its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided
into two, still less that there has been what today we call
“annexation” or “partition” of states. It simply means that the honor
and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who
take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather
taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that
the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with
the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast mass of public
work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and
so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial.
This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life
and was only in theory dependent upon the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no
more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote:
Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education
by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate
modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism
was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western:
Greek and Latin.]

The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior
Roman title, such as _Vir Illuster_, as an Englishman today might be
called “Sir Charles So and So” or “Lord So and So,” never anything
more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted
directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the
old popular Roman customs, such as largesse and procession, upon his
induction into that office.

Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply
remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if
one did not know more about that society, that he should have done
this.

The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly
merged into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger mass
of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after
century before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we
wonder, at first, why its moral unity did not continue to be
represented by a central Monarch. Though the civilization continued to
decline, its forms should, one would think, have remained unchanged and
the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the Roman
Emperor at Constantinople should have endured indefinitely. As a fact,
the memory of the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually
forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local government as he got weaker also got
more isolated. He came to coining his own money, to treating directly
as a completely independent ruler. At last the idea of “kings” and
“kingdoms” took shape in men’s minds. Why?

The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the
last links with the Roman Empire of the East—that is, with the supreme
head at Constantinople—gradually dissolved in the West, and that the
modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is
to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men
around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done.

This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were
transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague
underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic,
Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners,
and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.

On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners
were the reality of that time.

We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the
nature of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics.
In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had
concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men
and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had
come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions
lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves.

As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the
middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of
unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands
waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of
the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the
_Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the
Council of Great Men) to new holders.

The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the
“chieftain” of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing
that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of
these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race
(which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It
explains both what happened and what was to happen.

That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should
thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind—the result of
centuries of Roman development in that direction—is the key to all the
material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise,
with an object lesson for our own politics today.

The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary
concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few
great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of
the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial
power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name,
and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to
reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the
first element in that standing “Council of Great Men” which was the
mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official,
imperial, absolute, local power.

There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important
element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it
consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew
its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else,
power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually
administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.

Throughout Western Europe at that moment men’s interest and
preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion.
The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now
decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter.
The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious
organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it,
had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind
(200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to
be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human
beings (400 A.D.).

The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for “creed”
he will read “capital,” and for the “Faith,” “industrial civilization.”
For just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in
pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as
unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our
time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the
_unity_ and _exactitude_ of religion. That the religion to which the
Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should
triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled
themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to
_this_ they sank all other things.

The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil
and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a
spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense
preoccupation of men’s minds, two factors already appear in the fourth
century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The
first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as
possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere
welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so
unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is
Arianism: to which I now return.

Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its
duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of
its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent
centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy
opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.

The Emperor’s Court did indeed at last—after many variations—abandon
it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that
Arianism stood for the “wealthy” and “respectable” in life.

Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in
the Roman armies, the greater part (the “Goths,” for instance, as the
generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning)
had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources,
and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was “the
thing.” Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and
immigrants accepting Protestantism as “gentlemanly” or “progressive”
(some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in
Spain and the _Rex_ in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the
descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the
“court” and “upper class” way of thinking. They were “Arians” and proud
of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts
was small, but their irritant effect was great.

It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.

No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the
final form of the Church.

The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe
was lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation
to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or
later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed,
as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination
and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had
Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.

Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who
were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a
powerful court, _one_ only was not Arian.

That one was the _Rex Francorum_ or chieftain of the little barbaric
auxiliary force of “Franks” which had been drawn into the Roman system
from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time
when the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and
the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town
of Tournai.

A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably
called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language),
succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably
head of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in
the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth
century. Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with
other forces of the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the
barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiacum,
and succeeded to the power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he
could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was
mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had
already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian _Rex_;
but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.

The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an
auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century,
as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who
has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear
trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and
baptized by _Catholics_ and not by _Arians_—in the midst of that
enormous struggle.

Clodovicus—known in history as Clovis—came from a remote corner of
civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of
Arianism; they had no tradition that it was “the thing” or “smart” to
adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of
Europeans. When, therefore, this _Rex Francorum_ was settled in
Paris—about the year 500—and was beginning to administer local
government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown
with the popular feeling and against the Arian _Reges_ in Italy and
Spain.

The new armed forces of the _Rex Francorum_, a general levy continuing
the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle
carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the
Arian _Rex_ out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For
a moment it seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace
against the Arian officials in Italy itself.

At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against
the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the _Palatium_ of
this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and
the Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the _Rex
Francorum’s_ independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very
strong lever for breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost
forgotten administrative unity of the Roman world.

Under such forces—the power of the Bishop in each town and district,
the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great
landowners, the occupation of the _Palatium_ and its official machinery
by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces—Western Europe, slowly,
very slowly, shifted its political base.

For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the
effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of
taking, the Imperial title; the roads were still kept up, the Roman
tradition in the arts of life, though coarsened, was never lost. In
cooking, dress, architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was
Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only
lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradually lost all need for
such a centre.

Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had
always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even
(through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the
old Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that
civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always
find the civilian authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our
Europe as the _Respublica_ or “common weal.” It was already beginning
to become a mass of small and often overlapping divisions. The things
that are older than, and lie beneath, all exact political institutions,
the popular legends, the popular feelings for locality and
countrysides, were rising everywhere; the great landowners were
appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own estates (though
the many estates of one man were often widely separated).

The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity
of jargons.

Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies
and Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in
Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in
North Africa, we may presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers
resumed its sway; Punic also may have survived in certain towns and
villages there. [Footnote: We have evidence that it survived in the
fifth century.] But men paid no attention to the origin of such
diversities. The common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed
Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the Church, now everywhere
supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the
principle of life throughout all this great area of the West.

So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt annexed to Gaul that had
risen in the Germanies to the east of the Rhine; so with nearly all
Italy and Dalmatia, and what today we call Switzerland and a part of
what today we call Bavaria and Baden; so with what today we call Spain
and Portugal; and so (after local adventures of a parallel sort,
followed by a reconquest against Arians by Imperial officers and
armies) with North Africa and with a strip of Andalusia.

But _one_ part of _one_ province _did_ suffer a limited and local—but
sharp—change: on one frontier belt, narrow but long, came something
much more nearly resembling a true barbaric success, and the results
thereof, than anything which the Continent could show. There was here a
real breach of continuity with Roman things.

This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of
Britain; and we have next to ask: “_What happened in Britain when the
rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the breakdown of
central Imperial power?_” Unless we can answer that question we shall
fail to possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe and of the
early perils in spite of which that continuity has survived.

I turn, therefore, next to answer the question: “What happened in
Britain?”



V
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?


I have now carried this study through four sections. My object in
writing it is to show that the Roman Empire never perished but was only
transformed; that the Catholic Church, which, in its maturity, it
accepted, caused it to survive and was, in that origin of Europe, and
has since remained, the soul of one Western civilization.

In the first chapter I sketched the nature of the Roman Empire, in the
second the nature of the Church within the Roman Empire before that
civilization in its maturity accepted the Faith. In the third I
attempted to lay before the reader that transformation and material
decline (it was also a _survival_), which has erroneously been called
“the fall” of the Roman Empire. In the fourth I presented a picture of
what society must have seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of
that transformation and at the entry into what are called the Dark
Ages: the beginnings of the modern European nations which have
superficially differentiated from the old unity of Rome.

I could wish that space had permitted me to describe a hundred other
contemporary things which would enable the reader to seize both the
magnitude and the significance of the great change from Pagan to
Christian times. I should in particular have dwelt upon the
transformation of the European mind with its increasing gravity, its
ripening contempt for material things, and its resolution upon the
ultimate fate of the human soul, which it now had firmly concluded to
be personally immortal and subject to a conscious destiny.

This doctrine of _personal_ immortality is the prime mark of the
European and stamps his leadership upon the world.

Its original seat—long before history begins—lay perhaps in Ireland,
later in Britain, certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or
in Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece and even had some influence
upon the Jews before the Romans subdued them. But it remained an
opinion, an idea looming in the dark, till it was seen strong and
concrete in the full light of the Catholic Church. Oddly enough,
Mahomet, who in most things reacted towards weakness of flesh and
spirit, adopted this Western doctrine fully; it provided his system
with its vigor. Everywhere is that doctrine of immortality the note of
superior intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with the
thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Everywhere does it accompany
health and decision.

Its only worthy counterpart (equally European but rare, uprooted and
private) is the bold affirmation of complete and final death.

The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and
the fifth was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by
its acceptation of the Faith.

To this I might have attached the continued carelessness for the
plastic arts and for much in letters, the continued growth in holiness,
and all that “salting,” as it were, which preserved civilization and
kept it whole until, after the long sequestration of the Dark Ages, it
should discover an opportunity for revival.

My space has not permitted me to describe these things, I must turn at
once to the last, and what is for my readers the chief, of the
historical problems presented by the beginning of the Dark Ages. That
problem is the fate of Britain.

The importance of deciding what happened in Britain when the central
government of Rome failed, does not lie in the fact that an historical
conclusion one way or the other can affect the truth. European
civilization is still one whether men see that unity or no. The
Catholic Church is still the soul of it, whether men know it or do not
know it. But the problem presented by the fate of Britain at that
critical moment when the provinces of the Roman Empire became
independent of any common secular control, has this practical
importance: that those who read it wrongly and who provide their
readers with a false solution (as the Protestant German school and
their copiers in English, Freeman, Green and the rest have done) those
who talk of “the coming of the English,” “the Anglo-Saxon conquest,”
and the rest, not only furnish arguments against the proper unity of
our European story but also produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such
men as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the
entry into the Dark Ages, take for granted many other things
historically untrue. Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else
that is historical truth: for instance, the character of the Normans;
and even contemporary and momentous truth before our eyes today: for
instance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. They not only
render an Englishman ignorant of his own nation and therefore of
himself, they also render all men ignorant of Europe: for a knowledge
of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the period 1530-1630 is the test
of European history: and if you are wrong on these two points you are
wrong on the whole.

A man who desires to make out that the Empire—that is European
civilization—was “conquered” by barbarians cannot today, in the light
of modern research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, or in
the valley of the Rhine. The old German thesis of a barbaric “conquest”
upon the Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has
necessarily been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries
to make out a plausible case when it speaks of Britain, because so much
of the record here is lost that there is more room for make-believe;
and having made it out, the tale of a German and barbaric England, his
false result will powerfully affect modern and immediate conclusions
upon our common civilization, upon our institutions, and their nature,
and in particular upon the Faith and its authority in Europe.

For if _Britain_ be something other than _England_: if what we now know
is not original to this Island, but is of the Northern German barbarism
in race and tradition, if, in the breakdown of the Roman Empire,
Britain was the one exceptional province which really did become a
separate barbaric thing, cut off at the roots from the rest of
civilization, then those who desire to believe that the institutions of
Europe are of no universal effect, that the ancient laws of the Empire
as on property and marriage—were local, and in particular that the
Reformation was the revolt of a race—and of a strong and conquering
race—against the decaying traditions of Rome, have something to stand
on. It does not indeed help them to prove that our civilization is bad
or that the Faith is untrue, but it permits them to despair of, or to
despise, the unity of Europe, and to regard the present Protestant
world as something which is destined to supplant that unity.

Such a point of view is wrong historically as it is wrong in morals. It
will find no basis of military success in the future any more than it
has in the past. [Footnote: I wrote and first printed these words in
1912. I leave them standing with greater force in 1920.] It must
ultimately break down if ever it should attempt to put into practice
its theory of superiority in barbaric things. But meanwhile as a
self-confident theory it can do harm indefinitely great by warping a
great section of the European mind; bidding it refer its character to
imaginary barbaric origins, so divorcing it from the majestic spirit of
Western Civilization. The North German “Teutonic” school of false
popular history can create its own imaginary past, and lend to such a
figment the authority of antiquity and of lineage.

To show how false this modern school of history has been, but also what
opportunities it had for advancing its thesis, is the object of what
follows.

Britain, be it remembered, is today the only part of the Roman world in
which a conscious antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilization
of Europe exists. The Northern Germanies and Scandinavia, which have
had, since the Reformation, a religious agreement with all that is
still politically powerful in Britain, lay outside the old
civilization. They would not have survived the schism of the sixteenth
century had Britain resisted that schism. When we come to deal with the
story of the Reformation in Britain, we shall see how the strong
popular resistance to the Reformation nearly overcame that small
wealthy class which used the religious excitement of an active minority
as an engine to obtain material advantage for themselves. But as a fact
in _Britain_ the popular resistance to the Reformation failed. A
violent and almost universal persecution directed, in the main by the
wealthier classes, against the religion of the English populace and the
wealth which endowed it just happened to succeed. In little more than a
hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle. By the year 1600
the Faith of the British masses had been stamped out from the Highlands
to the Channel.

It is our business to understand that this phenomenon, the moral
severance of Britain from Europe, was a phenomenon of the sixteenth
century and not of the fifth, and that Britain was in no way
predestined by race or tradition to so lamentable and tragic a loss.

Let us state the factors in the problem.

The main factor in the problem is that the history of Great Britain
from just before the middle of the fifth century (say the years 420 to
445) until the landing of St. Augustine in 597 is a blank.

It is of the first importance to the student of the general history in
Europe to seize this point. It is true of no other Roman western
province, and the truth of it has permitted a vast amount of empty
assertion, most of it recent, and nearly all of it as demonstrably (as
it is obviously) created by a religious bias. When there is no proof or
record men can imagine almost anything, and the anti-Catholic
historians have stretched imagination to the last possible limit in
filling this blank with whatever could tell against the continuity of
civilization.

It is the business of those who love historic truth to get rid of such
speculations as of so much rubbish, and to restore to the general
reader the few certain facts upon which he can solidly build.

Let me repeat that, had Britain remained true to the unity of Europe in
that unfortunate oppression of the sixteenth century which ended in the
loss of the Faith, had the populace stood firm or been able to succeed
in the field and under arms, or to strike terror into their oppressors
by an efficient revolt, in other words had the England of the Tudors
remained Catholic, the solution of this ancient problem of the early
Dark Ages would present no immediate advantage, nor perhaps would the
problem interest men even academically. England would now be one with
Europe as she had been for a thousand years before the uprooting of the
Reformation. But, as things are, the need for correction is immediate
and its success of momentous effect. No true historian, even though he
should most bitterly resent the effect of Catholicism upon the European
mind, can do other than combat what was, until quite recently, the
prevalent teaching with regard to the fate of Britain when the central
government of the Empire decayed.

I will first deal with the evidence—such as it is—which has come down
to us upon the fate of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries,
and next consider the conclusions to which such evidence should lead
us.

THE EVIDENCE

When we have to deal with a gap in history (and though none in Western
European history is so strangely empty as this, yet there are very many
minor ones which enable us to reason from their analogy), two methods
of bridging the gap are present to the historian. The first is research
into such rare contemporary records as may illustrate the period: the
second is the parallel of what has happened elsewhere in the same case,
or better still (when that is possible) the example of what was
proceeding in similar places and under similar circumstances at the
same time. And there is a third thing: both of these methods must be
submitted to the criterion of common sense more thoroughly and more
absolutely than the evidence of fuller periods. For when you have full
evidence, even of a thing extraordinary, you must admit its truth. But
when there is little evidence guess-work comes in, and common sense is
the correction of guess-work.

If, for instance, I learn, as I can learn from contemporary records and
from the witness of men still living, that at the battle of Gettysburg
infantry advanced so boldly as to bayonet gunners at their guns, I must
believe it although the event is astonishing.

If I learn, as I can learn, that a highly civilized and informed
government like that of the French in 1870, entering into a war against
a great rival, had only the old muzzle-loading cannon when their
enemies were already equipped with modern breech-loading pieces, I must
accept it on overwhelming evidence, in spite of my astonishment.

When even the miraculous appears in a record—if its human evidence is
multiple, converging and exact—I must accept it or deny the value of
human evidence.

But when I am dealing with a period or an event for which evidence is
lacking or deficient, then obviously it is a sound criterion of
criticism to accept the probable and not to presuppose the improbable.
Common sense and general experience are nowhere more necessary than in
their application, whether in a court of law or in the study of
history, to those problems whose difficulty consists in the absence of
direct proof. [Footnote: For instance, there is no contemporary account
mentioning London during the last half of the fifth and nearly all the
sixth century. Green, Freeman, Stubbs, say (making it up as they go
along) that London ceased to exist: disappeared! Then (they assert)
after a long period of complete abandonment it was laboriously cleared
by a totally new race of men and as laboriously rebuilt on exactly the
same site. The thing is not physically impossible, but it is so
exceedingly improbable that common sense laughs at it.]

Remembering all this, let us first set down what is positively known
from record with regard to the fate of Britain in the hundred and fifty
years of “the gap.”

We begin by noting that there were many groups of German soldiery in
Britain before the Pirate raids and that the southwest was—whether on
account of earlier pirate raids or on account of Saxon settlers the
descendants of Roman soldiers—called “the Saxon shore” long before the
Imperial system broke down.

Next we turn to documents.

There is exactly one contemporary document professing to tell us
anything at all of what happened within this considerable period,
exactly one document set down by a witness; and that document is almost
valueless for our purpose.

It bears the title, _De Excidio Brittaniæ Liber Querulus_. St. Gildas,
a monk, was its author. The exact date of its compilation is a matter
of dispute—necessarily so, for the whole of that time is quite dark.
But it is certainly not earlier than 545. So it was written one hundred
years after the beginning of that darkness which covers British history
for one hundred and fifty years; most of the Roman regulars had been
called away for a continental campaign in 410. They had often so left
the island before. But this time the troops sent out on expedition did
not return. Britain was visited in 429 and 447 by men who left records.
It was not till 597 that St. Augustine landed. St. Augustine landed
only fifty years at the most after Gildas wrote his _Liber Querulus_,
whereas the snapping of the links between the Continent and
southeastern Britain had taken place at least a hundred years before.

Well, it so happens that this book is, as I have called it, almost
valueless for history. It is good in morals; its author complains, as
all just men must do in all times, of the wickedness of powerful men,
and of the vices of princes. It is a homily. The motive of it is not
history, but the reformation of morals. In all matters extending to
more than a lifetime before that of the writer, in all matters, that
is, on which he could not obtain personal evidence, he is hopelessly at
sea. He is valuable only as giving us the general impression of
military and social struggles as they struck a monk who desired to make
them the text of a sermon.

He vaguely talks of Saxon auxiliaries from the North Sea being hired
(in the traditional Roman manner) by some Prince in Roman Britain to
fight savages who had come out of the Highlands of Scotland and were
raiding. He says this use of new auxiliaries began after the Third
Consulship of Aëtius (whom he calls “Agitius”), that is, after 446 A.D.
He talks still more vaguely of the election of local kings to defend
the island from the excesses of these auxiliaries. He is quite as much
concerned with the incursions of robber bands of Irish and Scotch into
the civilized Roman province as he is with the few Saxon auxiliaries
who were thus called in to supplement the arms of the Roman
provincials.

He speaks only of a handful of these auxiliaries, three boatloads; but
he is so vague and ill-instructed on the whole of this early period—a
hundred years before his time—that one must treat his account of the
transaction as half legendary. He tells us that “more numerous
companies followed,” and we know what that means in the case of the
Roman auxiliaries throughout the Empire, a few thousand armed men.

He goes on to say that these auxiliaries mutinying for pay (another
parallel to what we should expect from the history of all the previous
hundred years all over Europe), threatened to plunder the civil
population. Then comes one sentence of rhetoric saying how they ravaged
the countrysides “in punishment for our previous sins,” until the
“flames” of the tumult actually “licked the Western Ocean.” It is all
(and there is much more) just like what we read in the rhetoric of the
lettered men on the Continent who watched the comparatively small but
destructive bands of barbarian auxiliaries in revolt, with their
accompaniment of escaped slaves and local ne’er-do-wells, crossing Gaul
and pillaging. If we had no record of the continental troubles but that
of some one religious man using a local disaster as the opportunity for
a moral discourse, historians could have talked of Gaul exactly as they
talk of Britain on the sole authority of St. Gildas. All the
exaggeration to which we are used in continental records is here: the
“gleaming sword” and the “flame crackling,” the “destruction” of cities
(which afterward quietly continue an unbroken life!) and all the rest
of it. We know perfectly well that on the Continent similar language
was used to describe the predatory actions of little bodies of
barbarian auxiliaries; actions calamitous and tragic no doubt, but not
universal and in no way finally destructive of civilization.

It must not be forgotten that St. Gildas also tells us of the return
home of many barbarians with plunder (which is again what we should
have expected). But at the end of this account he makes an interesting
point which shows that—even if we had nothing but his written record to
judge by—the barbarian pirates had got some sort of foothold on the
eastern coasts of the island.

For after describing how the Romano-British of the province organized
themselves under one Ambrosius Aurelianus, and stood their ground, he
tells us that “sometimes the citizens” (that is, the Roman and
civilized men) “sometimes the enemy were successful,” down to the
thorough defeat of some raiding body or other of the Pagans at an
unknown place which he calls “Mons Badonicus.” This decisive action, he
also tells us, took place in the year of his own birth.

Now the importance of this last point is that Gildas after that date
can talk of things which he really knew. Let anyone who reads this page
recall a great event contemporary with or nearly following his own
birth, and see how different is his knowledge of it from his knowledge
of that which came even a few years before. This is so today with all
the advantages of full record. How much greater would be the contrasts
between things really known and hearsay when there was none!

This defeat of the pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon Gildas calls the last but
not the least slaughter of the barbarians; and though he probably wrote
in the West of Britain, yet we know certainly from his contemporary
evidence _that during the whole of his own lifetime up to the writing
of his book_—a matter of some forty-four years—there was no more
serious fighting. In other words, we are _certain_ that the little
pagan courts settled on the east coast of Britain were balanced by a
remaining mass of declining Roman civilization elsewhere, and that
there was no attempt at anything like expansion or conquest from the
east westward. For this state of affairs, remember, we have direct
contemporary evidence during the whole lifetime of a man and up to
within at the most fifty years—perhaps less—from the day when St.
Augustine landed in Kent and restored record and letters to the east
coast.

We have more rhetoric and more homilies about the “deserted cities and
the wickedness of men and the evil life of the Kings;” but that you
might hear at any period. All we really get from Gildas is: (1) the
confused tradition of a rather heavy predatory raid conducted by
barbaric auxiliaries summoned from across the North Sea in true Roman
fashion to help a Roman province against uncivilized invaders, Scotch
and Irish; (2) (which is most important) the obtaining by these
auxiliary troops or their rulers (though in small numbers it is true),
of political power over some territory within the island; (3) the early
cessation of any racial struggle, or conflict between Christian and
Pagan, or between Barbarian and Roman; even of so much as would strike
a man living within the small area of Britain, and the confinement of
the new little pagan Pirate courts to the east coast during the whole
of the first half of the sixth century.

Here let us turn the light of common sense on to these most imperfect,
confused and few facts which Gildas gives us. What sort of thing would
a middle-aged man, writing in the decline of letters and with nothing
but poor and demonstrably distorted verbal records to go by, set down
with regard to a piece of warfare, if (a) that man were a monk and a
man of peace, (b) his object were obviously not history, but a sermon
on morals, and (c) the fighting was between the Catholic Faith, which
was all in all to the men of his time, and Pagans? Obviously he would
make all he could of the old and terrified legends of the time long
before his birth, he would get more precise as his birth approached
(though always gloomy and exaggerating the evil), and he would begin to
tell us precise facts with regard to the time he could himself
remember. Well, all we get from St. Gildas is the predatory incursions
of pagan savages from Scotland and Ireland, long, long before he was
born; a small number of auxiliaries called in to help the Roman
Provincials against these; the permanent settlement of these
auxiliaries in some quarter or other of the island (we know from other
evidence that it was the east and southeast coast); and (d) what is of
capital importance because it is really contemporary, _the settling
down of the whole matter, apparently during Gildas’ own lifetime in the
sixth century_—from say 500 A.D. or earlier to say 545 or later.

I have devoted so much space to this one writer, whose record would
hardly count in a time where any sufficient historical document
existed, because his book is _absolutely the only one contemporary
piece of evidence we have upon the pirate, or Saxon, raiding of
Britain_. [Footnote: The single sentence in Prosper is
insignificant—and what is more, demonstrably false as it stands.] There
are interesting fragments about it in the various documents known (to
us) collectively today as “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”—but these
documents were compiled many hundreds of years afterwards and had
nothing better to go on than St. Gildas himself and possibly a few
vague legends.

Now we happen to have in this connection a document which, though not
contemporary must be considered as evidence of a kind. It is sober and
full, written by one of the really great men of Catholic and European
civilization, written in a spirit of wide judgment and written by a
founder of history, the Venerable Bede.

True, the Venerable Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_ was not produced
until _three hundred years after_ the first raids of these predatory
bands, not until nearly two hundred years after St. Gildas, and not
until one hundred and forty years after reading and writing and the
full tide of Roman civilization had come back to Eastern Britain with
St. Augustine: but certain fundamental statements of his are evidence.

Thus the fact that the Venerable Bede takes for granted permanent
pirate settlements (established as regular, if small, states), all the
way along the North Sea coast from the northern part of Britain in
which he wrote, brought down to the central south by Southampton Water,
is a powerful or rather a conclusive argument in favor of the existence
of such states some time before he wrote. It is not credible that a man
of this weight would write as he does without solid tradition behind
him; and he tells us that the settlers on this coast of Britain came
from three lowland Frisian tribes, German and Danish, called Saxons,
Jutes and Angles.

The first name “Saxon” was _at that time_ the name of certain pirates
inhabiting two or three small islands on the coasts between the Elbe
and the Rhone. [Footnote: The name has retained a vague significance
for centuries and is now attached to a population largely Slavonic and
wholly Protestant, south of Berlin—hundred of miles from its original
seat.] Ptolemy puts these “Saxons” two hundred years earlier, just
beyond the mouth of the Elbe; the Romans knew them as scattered pirates
in the North Sea, irritating the coasts of Gaul and Britain for
generations. The name later spread to a large island confederation: but
that was the way with German tribal names. The German tribal names do
not stand for fixed races or even provinces, but for chance
agglomerations which suddenly rise and as suddenly disappear. The local
term, “Saxon,” in the fifth and sixth century had nothing to do with
the general term, “Saxon,” applied to all northwest of the Germanies
two hundred years and more afterwards. These pirates then provided
small bands of fighting men under chieftains who founded small
organized governments north of the Thames Estuary, at the head of
Southampton Water, and on the Sussex coast, when they may or may not
have found (but more probably _did_ find) existing settlements of their
own people already established as colonies by the Romans. The chiefs
very probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but
seem rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence.
They learnt no new language, but continued to talk that of their
original seat on the Continent, which language was split up into a
number of local dialects, each of which was a mixture of original
German and adopted Greek, Latin and even Celtic words.

Of the Jutes we know nothing; there is a mass of modern guess work
about them, valueless like all such stuff. We must presume that they
were an insignificant little tribe who sent out a few mercenaries for
hire; but they had the advantage of sending out the first, for the
handful of mercenaries whom the Roman British called into Kent were by
all tradition Jutish. The Venerable Bede also bears witness to an
isolated Jutish settlement in the Meon Valley near Southampton Water,
comparable to the little German colonies established by the Romans at
Bayeux in Normandy and near Rennes.

The Angles were something more definite; they held that corner of land
where the neck of Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This we know
for certain. There was a considerable immigration of them; enough to
make their departure noticeable in the sparsely populated heaths of
their district, and to make Bede record the traveler’s tale that their
barren country still looked “depopulated.” How many boatloads of them,
however, may have come, we have of course no sort of record: we only
know from our common sense that the number must have been insignificant
compared with the total free and slave population of a rich Roman
province. Their chiefs got a hold of the land far above the Thames
Estuary, in scattered spots all up the east coast of Britain, as far as
the Firth of Forth.

There are no other authorities. There is no other evidence save St.
Gildas, a contemporary and—two hundred years after him, _three_ hundred
after the first event—Bede. A mass of legend and worse nonsense called
the _Historia Brittonum_ exists indeed for those who consult it—but it
has no relation to historical science nor any claim to rank as
evidence. As we have it, it is centuries late, and it need not concern
serious history. Even for the existence of Arthur—to which it is the
principal witness—popular legend is a much better guide. As to the
original dates of the various statements in the _Historia Brittonum_,
those dates are guesswork. The legendary narrative as a whole, though
very ancient in its roots, dates only from a period subsequent to
Charlemagne, much more than a century later than Bede and a time far
less cultured.

The life of St. Germanus, who came and preached in Britain after the
Roman legions had left, is contemporary, and deals with events sixty
years before St. Gildas’ birth. It would be valuable if it told us
anything about the Pirate settlements on the coast—whether these were
but the confirmation of older Roman Saxon garrisons or Roman
agricultural colonies or what—but it tells us nothing about them. We
know that St. Germanus dealt in a military capacity with “Picts and
Scots”—an ordinary barbarian trouble—but we have no hint at Saxon
settlements. St. Germanus was last in Britain in 447, and it is good
negative evidence that we hear nothing during that visit of any real
trouble from the Saxon pirates who at that very time might be imagined,
if legend were to be trusted, to be establishing their power in Kent.

That ends the list of witnesses; that is all our _evidence_. [Footnote:
On such a body of evidence—less than a morning’s reading—did Green
build up for popular sale his romantic _Making of England_.] To sum up.
So far as recorded history is concerned, all we know is this: that
probably some, but certainly only few, of the Roman regular forces were
to be found garrisoned in Britain after the year 410; that in the Roman
armies there had long been Saxon and other German auxiliaries some of
whom could naturally provide civilian groups and that Rome even planted
agricultural colonies of auxiliaries permanently within the Empire;
that the south and east coasts were known as “the Saxon shore” even
during Imperial times; that the savages from Scotland and Ireland
disturbed the civilized province cruelly; that scattered pirates who
had troubled the southern and eastern coasts for two centuries, joined
the Scotch and Irish ravaging bands; that some of these were taken in
as regular auxiliaries on the old Roman model, somewhere about the
middle of the fifth century (the conventional date is 445); that, as
happened in many another Roman province, the auxiliaries mutinied for
pay and did a good deal of bad looting and ravaging; finally that the
ravaging was checked, and that the Pirates were thrown back upon some
permanent settlements of theirs established during these disturbances
along the easternmost and southernmost coasts. Their numbers must have
been very small compared with the original population. No town of any
size was destroyed.

Now it is most important in the face of such a paucity of information
to seize three points:

First, that the ravaging was not appreciably worse, either in the way
it is described or by any other criterion, than the troubles which the
Continent suffered at the same time and which (as we know) did not
_there_ destroy the continuity or unity of civilization.

Secondly, that the sparse raiders, Pagan (as were also some few of
those on the Continent) and incapable of civilized effort, obtained, as
they did upon the Continent (notably on the left bank of the Rhine),
little plots of territory which they held and governed for themselves,
and in which after a short period the old Roman order decayed in the
incapable hands of the newcomers.

But, thirdly (and upon this all the rest will turn), the _position
which these less civilized and pagan small courts happened permanently
to hold, were positions that cut the link between the Roman province of
Britain and the rest of what had been the united Roman Empire_.

This last matter—not numbers, not race—is the capital point in the
story of Britain between 447 and 597.

The uncivilized man happened, by a geographical accident, to have cut
the communication of the island with its sister provinces of the
Empire. He was numerically as insignificant, racially as unproductive
and as ill provided with fruitful or permanent institutions as his
brethren on the Rhine or the Danube. But on the Rhine and the Danube
the Empire was broad. If a narrow fringe of it was ruined it was no
great matter: only a retreat of a few miles. Those sea communications
between Britain and Europe were narrow—and the barbarian had been
established across them.

The circulation of men, goods and ideas was stopped for one hundred and
fifty years because the small pirate settlements (mixed perhaps with
barbarian settlements already established by the Empire) had, by the
gradual breakdown of the Roman ports, destroyed communication with
Europe from Southampton Water right north to beyond the Thames.

It seems certain that even the great town of London, whatever its
commercial relations, kept up no official or political business beyond
the sea. The pirates had not gone far inland; but, with no intention of
conquest (only of loot or continued establishment), they had snapped
the bond by which Britain lived.

Such is the direct evidence, and such our first conclusion on it.

But of indirect indications, of reasonable supposition and comparison
between what came after the pirate settlements and what had been
before, there is much more. By the use of this secondary matter added
to the direct evidence one can fully judge both the limits and the
nature of the misfortune that overtook Britain after the central Roman
government failed and before the Roman missionaries, who restored the
province to civilization, had landed.

We may then arrive at a conclusion and know what that Britain was to
which the Faith returned with St. Augustine. When we know that, we
shall know what Britain continued to be until the catastrophe of the
Reformation.

I say that, apart from the direct evidence of St. Gildas and the late
but respectable traditions gathered by the Venerable Bede, the use of
other and indirect forms of evidence permits us to be certain of one or
two main facts, and a method about to be described will enable us to
add to these a half-dozen more; the whole may not be sufficient,
indeed, to give us a general picture of the time, but it will prevent
us from falling into any radical error with regard to the place of
Britain in the future unity of Europe when we come to examine that
unity as it re-arose in the Middle Ages, partly preserved, partly
reconstituted, by the Catholic Church.

The historical method to which I allude and to which I will now
introduce the reader may properly be called that of _limitations_.

We may not know what happened between two dates; but if we know pretty
well how things stood for some time before the earlier date and for
sometime after the later one, then we have two “jumping off places,” as
it were, from which to build our bridge of speculation and deduction as
to what happened in the unexplored gap of time between.

Suppose every record of what happened in the United States between 1862
and 1880 to be wiped out by the destruction of all but one insufficient
document, and supposing a fairly full knowledge to survive of the
period between the Declaration of Independence and 1862, and a
tolerable record to survive of the period between 1880 and the present
year. Further, let there be ample traditional memory and legend that a
civil war took place, that the struggle was a struggle between North
and South, and that its direct and violent financial and political
effects were felt for over a decade.

The student hampered by the absence of direct evidence might make many
errors in detail and might be led to assert, as probably true, things
at which a contemporary would smile. But by analogy with other
contemporary countries, by the use of his common sense and his
knowledge of human nature, of local climate, of other physical
conditions, and of the motives common to all men, he would arrive at a
dozen or so general conclusions which would be just. What came after
the gap would correct the deductions he had made from his knowledge of
what came before it. What came before the gap would help to correct
false deductions drawn from what came after it. His knowledge of
contemporary life in Europe, let us say, or in western territories
which the war did not reach, between 1862 and 1880, would further
correct his conclusions.

If he were to confine himself to the most general conclusions he could
not be far wrong. He would appreciate the success of the North and how
much that success was due to numbers. He would be puzzled perhaps by
the different positions of the abolitionist theory before and after the
war; but he would know that the slaves were freed in the interval, and
he would rightly conclude that their freedom had been a direct
historical consequence and contemporary effect of the struggle. He
would be equally right in rejecting any theory of the colonization of
the Southern States by Northerners; he would note the continuity of
certain institutions, the non-continuity of others. In general, if he
were to state first what he was sure of, secondly, what he could fairly
guess, his brief summary, though very incomplete, would not be _off the
rails_ of history; he would not be employing such a method to produce
historical nonsense, as so many of our modern historians have done in
their desire to prove the English people German and barbaric in their
origins.

This much being said, let me carefully set down what we know with
regard to Britain before and after the bad gap in our records, the
unknown one hundred and fifty years between the departure of St.
Germanus and the arrival of St. Augustine.

We know that before the bulk of Roman regulars left the country in 410,
Britain was an organized Roman province. Therefore, we know that it had
regular divisions, with a town as the centre of each, many of the towns
forming the Sees of the Bishops. We know that official records were
kept in Latin and that Latin was the official tongue. We further know
that the island at this time had for generations past suffered from
incursions of Northern barbarians in great numbers over the Scottish
border and from piratical raids of seafarers (some Irish, others
Germanic, Dutch and Danish in origin) in much lesser numbers, for the
amount of men and provisions conveyable across a wide sea in small
boats is highly limited.

Within four years of the end of the sixth century, nearly two hundred
years after the cessation of regular Roman government, missionary
priests from the Continent, acting on a Roman episcopal commission,
land in Britain; from that moment writing returns and our chronicles
begin again. What do they tell us?

First, that the whole island is by that time broken up into a number of
small and warring districts. Secondly, that these numerous little
districts, each under its petty king or prince, fall into two
divisions: some of these petty kings and courts are evidently
Christian, Celtic-speaking and by all their corporate tradition inherit
from the old Roman civilization. The other petty kings and courts speak
various “Teutonic” dialects, that is, dialects made up of a jargon of
original German words and Latin words mixed. The population of the
little settlements under these eastern knights spoke, apparently, for
the most part the same dialects as their courts. Thirdly, we find that
these courts and their subjects are not only mainly of this speech, but
also, in the mass, pagan. There may have been relics of Catholicism
among them, but at any rate the tiny courts and petty kinglets were
pagan and “Teutonic” in speech. Fourthly, the divisions between these
two kinds of little states were such that the decayed Christians were,
when St. Augustine came, roughly-speaking in the West and centre of the
island, the Pagans on the coasts of the South and the East.

All this tallies with the old and distorted legends and traditions, as
it does with the direct story of Gildas, and also with whatever of real
history may survive in the careful compilation of legend and tradition
made by the Venerable Bede.

The _first_ definite historical truth which we derive from this use of
the method of limitations, is of the same sort as that to which the
direct evidence of Gildas leads us. A series of settlements had been
effected upon the coasts of the North Sea and the eastern part of the
Channel from, let us say, Dorsetshire or its neighborhood, right up to
the Firth of Forth. They had been effected by the North Sea pirates and
their foothold was good.

Now let us use this method of limitations for matters a little less
obvious, and ask, first, what were the limits between these two main
groups of little confused and warring districts; secondly, how far was
either group coherent; thirdly, what had survived in either group of
the old order; and, fourthly, what novel thing had appeared during the
darkness of this century-and-a-half or two centuries? [Footnote: A
century-and-a-half from the very last Roman evidence, the visit of St.
Germanus in 447 to the landing of St. Augustine exactly 150 years later
(597); nearly two centuries from the withdrawal of the expeditionary
Roman Army to the landing of St. Augustine (410-597).]

Taking these four points _seriatim_:

(1) Further inland than about a day’s march from the sea or from the
estuaries of rivers, we have no proof of the settlement of the pirates
or the formation by them of local governments. It is impossible to fix
the boundaries in such a chaos, but we know that most of the county of
Kent and the seacoast of Sussex, also all within a raiding distance of
Southampton Water, and of the Hampshire Avon, the maritime part of East
Anglia and of Lincolnshire, so far as we can judge, the East Riding of
Yorkshire, Durham, the coastal part at least of Northumberland and the
Lothians, were under numerous pagan kinglets, whose courts talked this
mixture of German and Latin words called “Teutonic dialects.”

What of the Midlands? The region was a welter, and a welter of which we
can tell very little indeed. It formed a sort of march or borderland
between the two kinds of courts, those of the kinglets and chieftains
who still preserved a tradition of civilization, and those of the
kinglets who had lost that tradition. This mixed borderland tended
apparently to coalesce (the facts of which we have to judge are very
few) under one chief. It was later known not under a Germanic or Celtic
name, but under the low Latin name of “Mercia” that is the
“Borderland.” To the political aspect of this line of demarcation I
will return in a moment.

(2) As to the second question: What kind of cohesion was there between
the western or the eastern sets of these vague and petty governments?
The answer is that the cohesion was of the loosest in either case.
Certain fundamental habits differentiated East from West, language, for
instance, and much more religion. Before the coming of St. Augustine,
all the western and probably most of the central kinglets were
Christians; the kinglets on the eastern coasts Pagan.

There was a tendency in the West apparently to hold together for common
interests, but no longer to speak of one head. But note this
interesting point. The West that felt some sort of common bond, called
itself the _Cymry_, and only concerned the mountain land. It did not
include, it carefully distinguished itself from the Christians of the
more fertile Midlands and South and East, which it called “_Laghans_.”

Along the east coast there was a sort of tradition of common headship,
very nebulous indeed, but existent. Men talked of “chiefs of Britain,”
“_Bretwaldas_,” a word, the first part of which is obviously Roman, the
second part of which may be Germanic or Celtic or anything, and which
we may guess to indicate a titular headship. But—and this must be
especially noted—there was no conscious or visible cohesion among the
little courts of the east and southeast coasts; there was no conscious
and deliberate continued pagan attack against the Western Christians as
such in the end of the sixth century when St. Augustine landed, and no
Western Celtic Christian resistance, organized as such, to the
chieftains scattered along the eastern coast. Each kinglet fought with
each, pagan with pagan, Christian with Christian, Christian and pagan
in alliance against pagan and Christian in alliance—and the cross
divisions were innumerable. You have petty kings on the eastern coasts
with Celtic names; you have Saxon allies in Celtic courts; you have
Western Christian kings winning battles on the coasts of the North Sea
and Eastern kings winning battles nearly as far west as the Severn,
etc., etc. I have said that it is of capital importance to appreciate
this point—that the whole thing was a chaos of little independent
districts all fighting in a hotchpotch and not a clash of warring races
or tongues.

It is difficult for us with our modern experience of great and highly
conscious nations to conceive such a state of affairs. When we think of
fighting and war, we cannot but think of one considerable conscious
_nation_ fighting against another similar _nation_, and this modern
habit of mind has misled the past upon the nature of Britain at the
moment when civilization reëntered the South and East of the island
with St. Augustine. Maps are published with guesswork boundaries
showing the “frontiers” of the “Anglo-Saxon conquest,” at definite
dates, and modern historians are fond of talking of the “limits” of
that conquest being “extended” to such and such points. There were no
“frontiers:” there was no “conquest” either way—of east over west or
west over east. There were no “extending” limits of Eastern (or of
Western) rule. There was no “advance to Chester,” no “conquest of the
district of Bath.” There were battles near Bath and battles near
Chester, the loot of a city, a counter raid by the Westerners and all
the rest of it. But to talk of a gradual “Anglo-Saxon conquest” is an
anachronism.

The men of the time would not have understood such language, for indeed
it has no relation to the facts of the time.

The kinglet who could gather his men from a day’s march round his court
in the lower Thames Valley, fought against the kinglet who could gather
his men from a day’s march round his stronghold at Canterbury. A Pagan
Teutonic-speaking Eastern kinglet would be found allied with a
Christian Celtic-speaking Western kinglet and his Christian followers;
and the allies would march indifferently against another Christian or
another pagan.

There was indeed _later_ a westward movement in language and habit
which I shall mention; that was the work of the Church. So far as
warfare goes there was no movement westward or eastward. Fighting went
on continually in all directions, from a hundred separate centres, and
if there are reliable traditions of an Eastern Pagan kinglet commanding
some mixed host once reaching so far west as to raid the valley of the
Wiltshire Avon and another raiding to the Dee, so there are historical
records of a Western Christian kinglet reaching and raiding the Eastern
settlements right down to the North Sea at Bamborough.

(3) Now to the third point: What had survived of the old order in
either half of this anarchy? Of Roman government, of Roman order, of
true Roman civilization, of that _palatium_ of which we spoke in a
previous chapter, nothing had anywhere survived. The disappearance of
the Roman taxing and judicial machinery is the mark of Britain’s great
wound. It differentiates the fate of Britain from that of Gaul.

The West of Britain had lost this Roman tradition of government just as
much as the East. The “Pict and Scot” [Footnote: The “Scots”—that is,
the Irish—were, of course, of a higher civilization than the other
raiders of Britain during this dark time. The Catholic Church reached
them early. They had letters and the rest long before Augustine came to
Britain.] and the North Sea pirates, since they could not read or
write, or build or make a road or do anything appreciably
useful—interrupted civilized life and so starved it. The raids did more
to break up the old Roman society than did internal decay. The Western
chieftains who retained the Roman Religion had thoroughly lost the
Roman organization of society before the year 600. The Roman language,
probably only really familiar in the towns, seems to have gone; the
Roman method of building had certainly gone. In the West the learned
could still write, but they must have done so most sparingly, if we are
to judge by the absence of any remains. The Church in some truncated
and starved form, survived indeed in the West; it was the religion to
which an Imperial fragment cut off from all other Roman populations
might be expected to cling. Paganism seems to have died out in the
West; but the mutilated Catholicism that had taken its place became
provincial, ill-instructed, and out of touch with Europe. We may guess,
though it is only guesswork, that its chief ailment came from the
spiritual fervor, ill-disciplined but vivid, of Brittany and of
Ireland.

What had survived in the eastern part of Britain? On the coasts, and up
the estuaries of the navigable rivers? Perhaps in patches the original
language. It is a question whether Germanic dialects had not been known
in eastern Britain long before the departure of the Roman legions. But
anyhow, if we suppose the main speech of the East to have been Celtic
and Latin before the pirate raids, then that main speech had gone.

So, perhaps altogether, certainly for the most part had religion. So
certainly had the arts—reading and writing and the rest. Over-sea
commerce had certainly dwindled, but to what extent we cannot tell. It
is not credible that it wholly disappeared; but on the other hand there
is very little trace of connection with southern and eastern Britain in
the sparse continental records of this time.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the old bishoprics had gone.

When St. Gregory sent St. Augustine and his missionaries to refound the
old Sees of Britain, his original plan of that refounding had to be
wholly changed. He evidently had some old imperial scheme before him,
in which he conceived of London, the great city, as the Metropolis and
the lesser towns as suffragan to its See. But facts were too strong for
him. He had to restore the Church in the coasts that cut off Britain
from Europe, and in doing so he had to deal with a ruin. Tradition was
lost; and Britain is the only Roman province in which this very great
break in the continuity of the bishoprics is to be discovered.

One thing did _not_ disappear, and that was the life of the towns.

Of course, a Roman town in the sixth or seventh century was not what it
had been in the fourth or fifth; but it is remarkable that in all this
wearing away of the old Roman structure, its framework (which was, and
is, municipal) remained.

If we cast up the principal towns reappearing when the light of history
returns to Britain with St. Augustine’s missionaries, we find that all
of them are Roman in origin; what is more important, we find that the
proportion of _surviving_ Roman towns centuries later, when full
records exist, is even larger than it is in other provinces of the
Empire which we know to have preserved the continuity of civilization.
Exeter (perhaps Norwich), Chester, Manchester, Lancaster, Carlisle,
York, Canterbury, Lincoln, Rochester, Newcastle, Colchester, Bath,
Winchester, Chichester, Gloucester, Cirencester, Leicester, Old
Salisbury, Great London itself—these pegs upon which the web of Roman
civilization was stretched—stood firm through the confused welter of
wars between all these petty chieftains, North Sea Pirate, Welsh and
Cumbrian and Pennine highlander, Irish and Scotch.

There was a slow growth of suburbs and some substitution of new
suburban sites for old city sites—as at Southampton, Portsmouth,
Bristol, Huntingdon, etc. It is what you find all over Europe. But
there was no real disturbance of this scheme of towns until the
industrial revolution of modern times came to diminish the almost
immemorial importance of the Roman cities and to supplant their
economic functions by the huge aggregations of the Potteries, the
Midlands, South Lancashire, the coal fields and the modern ports.

The student of this main problem in European history, the fate of
Britain, must particularly note the phenomenon here described. It is
the capital point of proof that Roman Britain, though suffering
grievously from the Angle, Saxon, Scotch, and Irish raids, and though
cut off for a time from civilization, did survive.

Those who prefer to think of England as a colony of barbarians in which
the European life was destroyed, have to suppress many a truth and to
conceive many an absurdity in order to support their story; but no
absurdity of theirs is _worse_ than the fiction they put forward with
regard to the story of the English towns.

It was solemnly maintained by the Oxford School and its German masters
that these great Roman towns, one after the other, were first utterly
destroyed by the Pirates of the North Sea, then left in ruins for
generations, and then _re-occupied_ through some sudden whim by the
newcomers! It needs no historical learning to laugh at such a fancy;
but historical learning makes it even more impossible than it is
laughable.

Certain rare towns, of course, decayed in the course of centuries: the
same is true, for that matter, of Spain and Gaul and Italy. Some few
here (as many in Spain, in Gaul and in Italy) may have been actually
destroyed in the act of war. There is tradition of something of the
sort at Pevensey (the old port of Anderida in Sussex) and for some time
a forgery lent the same distinction to Wroxeter under the Wrekin. A
great number of towns again (as in every other province of the Empire)
naturally diminished with the effect of time. Dorchester on the Thames,
for instance, seems to have been quite a large place for centuries
after the first troubles with the pirates, though today it is only a
village; but it did not decay as the result of war. Sundry small towns
became smaller still, some few sank to hamlets as generation after
generation of change passed over them: but we find just the same thing
in Picardy in the Roussillon, in Lombardy and in Aquitaine. What did
_not_ happen in Britain was a subversion of the Roman municipal system.

Again, the unwalled settlement outside the walled town often grew at
the expense of the municipality within the walls. I have given
Huntingdon as an example of this; and there is St. Albans, and
Cambridge. But these also have their parallels in every other province
of the West. Even in distant Africa you find exactly the same thing.
You find it in the northern suburb of Roman Paris itself. That suburb
turns into the head of the mediæval town—yet Paris is perhaps the best
example of Roman continuity in all Europe.

The seaports naturally changed in character and often in actual site,
especially upon the flat, and therefore changeable, eastern shores—and
that is exactly what you find in similar circumstances throughout the
tidal waters of the Continent. There is not the shadow or the trace of
any widespread destruction of the Roman towns in Britain. On the
contrary there is, as much or more than elsewhere in the Empire, the
obvious fact of their survival.

The phenomenon is the more remarkable when we consider first that the
names of Roman towns given above do not pretend to be a complete list
(one may add immediately from memory the southern Dorchester, Dover,
Doncaster, etc.), and, secondly, that we have but a most imperfect list
remaining of the towns in Roman Britain.

A common method among those who belittle the continuity of our
civilization, is to deny a Roman origin to any town in which Roman
remains do not happen to have been noted as yet by antiquarians. Even
under that test we can be certain that Windsor, Lewes, Arundel,
Dorking, and twenty others, were seats of Roman habitation, though the
remaining records of the first four centuries tell us nothing of them.
But in nine cases out of ten the mere absence of catalogued Roman
remains proves nothing. The soil of towns is shifted and reshifted
continually generation after generation. The antiquary is not stationed
at every digging of a foundation, or sinking of a well, or laying of a
drain, or paving of a street. His methods are of recent establishment.
We have lost centuries of research, and, even with all our modern
interest in such matters, the antiquary is not informed once in a
hundred times of chance discoveries, unless perhaps they be of coins.
When, moreover, we consider that for fifteen hundred years this turning
and returning of the soil has been going on within the municipalities,
it is ridiculous to affirm that such a place as Oxford, for instance—a
town of importance in the later Dark Ages—had no Roman root, simply
because the modern antiquary is not yet possessed of any Roman remains
recently discovered in it: there may have been no town here before the
fifth century: but it is unlikely.

One further point must be noticed before we leave this prime matter:
had there been any considerable destruction of the Roman towns in
Britain, large and small, we should expect it where the pirate raids
fell earliest and most fiercely. We should expect to find the towns
near the east and the south coast to have disappeared. The historical
truth is quite opposite. The garrison of Anderida indeed and of
Anderida alone (Pevensey) was, if we may trust a vague phrase written
four hundred years later, massacred in war. But Lincoln, York,
Newcastle, Colchester, London, Dover, Canterbury, Rochester,
Chichester, Portchester, Winchester, the very principal examples of
survival, are all of them either right on the eastern and southern
coast or within a day’s striking distance of it.

As to decay, the great garrison centre of the Second Legion, in the
heart of the country which the pirate raiders never reached, has sunk
to be little Caerleon-upon-Usk, just as surely as Dorchester on the
Thames, far away from the eastern coast, has decayed from a town to a
village, and just as surely as Richboro’, an island right on the pirate
coast itself, has similarly decayed! As with destruction, so with
decay, there is no increasing proportion as we go from the west
eastward towards the Pirate settlements.

But the point need not be labored. The supposition that the Roman towns
disappeared is no longer tenable, and the wonder is how so astonishing
an assertion should have lived even for a generation. The Roman towns
survived, and, with them, Britain, though maimed.

(4) Now for the last question: what novel things had come in to Britain
with this break down of the central Imperial authority in the fifth and
sixth centuries? To answer that is, of course, to answer the chief
question of all, and it is the most difficult of all to answer.

I have said that presumably on the South and East the language was new.
There were numerous Germanic troops permanently in Britain before the
legions disappeared, there was a constant intercourse with Germanic
auxiliaries: there were probably colonies, half military, half
agricultural. Some have even thought that “Belgic” tribes, whether in
Gaul or Britain, spoke Teutonic dialects; but it is safer to believe
from the combined evidence of place names and of later traditions, that
there was a real change in the common talk of most men within a march
of the eastern sea or the estuaries of its rivers.

This change in language, if it occurred (and we must presume it did,
though it is not absolutely certain, for there may have been a large
amount of mixed German speech among the people before the Roman
soldiers departed)—this change of language, I say, is the chief novel
matter. The decay of religion means less, for when the pirate raids
began, though the Empire was already officially Christian at its heart,
the Church had only just taken firm root in the outlying parts.

The institutions which arose in Britain everywhere when the central
power of Rome decayed—the meetings of armed men to decide public
affairs, money compensation for injuries, the organizing of society by
“hundreds,” etc., were common to all Europe. Nothing but ignorance can
regard them as imported into Britain (or into Ireland or Brittany for
that matter) by the Pirates of the North Sea. They are things native to
all our European race when it lives simply. A little knowledge of
Europe will teach us that there was nothing novel or peculiar in such
customs. They appear universally among the Iberians as among the Celts,
among the pure Germans beyond the Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians
upon the delta of that river, and the lowlands of the Scheldt and the
Meuse; even among the untouched Roman populations.

Everywhere you get, as the Dark Ages approach and advance, the meetings
of armed men in council, the chieftain assisted in his government by
such meetings, the weaponed assent or dissent of the great men in
conference, the division of the land and people into “hundreds,” the
fine for murder, and all the rest of it.

Any man who says (and most men of the last generation said it) that
among the changes of the two hundred years’ gap was the introduction of
novel institutions peculiar to the Germans, is speaking in ignorance of
the European unity and of that vast landscape of our civilization which
every true historian should, however dimly, possess. The same things,
talked of in a mixture of Germanic and Latin terms between Poole
Harbour and the Bass Rock, were talked of in Celtic terms from the
Start to Glasgow; the chroniclers wrote them down in Latin terms alone
everywhere from the Sahara to the Grampians and from the Adriatic to
the Atlantic. The very Basques, who were so soon to begin the
resistance of Christendom against the Mohammedan in Spain, spoke of
them in Basque terms. But the actual things—the institutions—for which
all these various Latins, Basque, German, and Celtic words stood (the
blood-fine, the scale of money—reparation for injury, division of
society into “hundreds,” the Council advising the Chief, etc.) were
much the same throughout the body of Europe. They will always reappear
wherever men of our European race are thrown into small, warring
communities, avid of combat, jealous of independence, organized under a
military aristocracy and reverent of custom.

Everywhere, and particularly in Britain, the Imperial measurements
survived—the measurement of land, the units of money and of length and
weight were all Roman, and nowhere more than in Eastern Britain during
the Dark Ages.

Lastly, let the reader consider the curious point of language. No more
striking _simulacrum_ of racial unity can be discovered than a common
language or set of languages; but it is a _simulacrum_, and a
_simulacrum_ only. It is neither a proof nor a product of true unity.
Language passes from conqueror to conquered, from conquered to
conqueror, almost indifferently. Convenience, accident, and many a
mysterious force which the historian cannot analyze, propagates it, or
checks it. Gaul, thickly populated, organized by but a few garrisons of
Roman soldiers and one army corps of occupation, learns to talk Latin
universally, almost within living memory of the Roman conquest. Yet two
corners of Gaul, the one fertile and rich, the other barren, Amorica
and the Basque lands, never accept Latin. Africa, though thoroughly
colonized from Italy and penetrated with Italian blood as Gaul never
was, retains the Punic speech century after century, to the very ends
of Roman rule—seven hundred years after the fall of Carthage: four
hundred after the end of the Roman Republic!

Spain, conquered and occupied by the Mohammedan, and settled in very
great numbers by a highly civilized Oriental race, talks today a Latin
only just touched by Arabic influence. Lombardy, Gallic in blood and
with a strong infusion of repeated Germanic invasions (very much larger
than ever Britain had!) has lost all trace of Gallic accent, even in
language, save in one or two Alpine valleys, and of German speech
retains nothing but a few rare and doubtful words. The plain of Hungary
and the Carpathian Mountains are a tesselated pavement of languages
quite dissimilar, Mongolian, Teutonic, Slav. The Balkan States have,
_not_ upon their westward or European side, but at their extreme
opposite limit, a population which continues the memory of the Empire
in its speech; and the vocabulary of the Rumanians is _not the Greek of
Byzantium_, which civilized them, but the Latin of Rome!

The most implacable of Mohammedans now under French rule in Algiers
speak, and have spoken for centuries, not Arabic in any form, but
Berber; and the same speech reappears beyond a wide belt of Arabic in
the far desert to the south.

The Irish, a people in permanent contrast to the English, yet talk in
the main the English tongue.

The French-Canadians, accepting political unity with Britain, retain
their tongue and reject English.

Look where we will, we discover in regard to language something as
incalculable as the human will, and as various as human instinct. The
deliberate attempt to impose it has nearly always failed. Sometimes it
survives as the result of a deliberate policy. Sometimes it is restored
as a piece of national protest—Bohemia is an example. Sometimes it
“catches on” naturally and runs for hundreds of miles covering the most
varied peoples and even the most varied civilizations with a common
veil.

Now the Roman towns were not destroyed, the original population was
certainly not destroyed even in the few original settlements of Saxon
and Angles in the sea and river shores of the East. Such civilization
as the little courts of the Pirate chieftains maintained was degraded
Roman or it was nothing. But the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” _language_—the
group of half-German [Footnote: I say “_half_-German” lest the reader
should think, by the use of the word “German” or “Teutonic” that the
various dialects of this sort (including those of the North Sea
Pirates) were something original, uninfluenced by Rome. It must always
be remembered that with their original words and roots was mixed an
equal mass of superior words learned from the civilized men of the
South in the course of the many centuries during which Germans had
served the Romans as slaves and in arms and had met their merchants.]
dialects which may have taken root before the withdrawal of the Roman
legions in the East of Britain, and which at any rate were well rooted
there a hundred years after—stood ready for one of two fates. Either it
would die out and be replaced by dialects half Celtic, half Latin
vocabulary, or it would spread westward. That the Teutonic dialects of
the eastern kinglets should spread westward might have seemed
impossible. The unlettered barbarian does not teach the lettered
civilized man; the pagan does not mold the Christian. It is the other
way about. Yet in point of fact that happened. Why?

Before we answer that question let us consider another point. Side by
side with the entry of civilization through the Roman missionary
priests in Kent, there was going on a missionary effort in the North of
the Island of Britain, which effort was Irish. It had various Celtic
dialects for its common daily medium, though it was, of course, Roman
in ritual at the altar. The Celtic missionaries, had they alone been in
the field, would have made us all Celtic speaking today. But it was the
direct mission from Rome that won, and this for the reason that it had
behind it the full tide of Europe. Letters, order, law, building,
schools, re-entered England through Kent—not through Northumberland
where the Irish were preaching.

Even so the spread westward of a letterless and starved set of dialects
from the little courts of the eastern coasts (from Canterbury and
Bamborough and so forth) would have been impossible but for a
tremendous accident.

St. Augustine, after his landing, proposed to the native British
bishops that they should help in the conversion of the little pagan
kinglets and their courts on the eastern coast. They would not. They
had been cut off from Europe for so long that they had become warped.
They refused communion. The peaceful Roman Mission coming just at the
moment when the Empire had recovered Italy and was fully restoring
itself, was thrown back on the Eastern courts. It used them. It backed
_their_ tongue, _their_ arms, _their_ tradition. The terms of Roman
things were carefully translated by the priests into the Teutonic
dialects of these courts; the advance of civilization under the
missionaries, recapturing more and more of the province of Britain,
proceeded westward from the courts of the Eastern kinglets. The
schools, the official world—all—was now turned by the weight of the
Church against a survival of the Celtic tongues and in favor of the
Eastern Teutonic ones.

Once civilization had come back by way of the South and East,
principally through the natural gate of Kent and through the Straits of
Dover which had been blocked so long, this tendency of the Eastern
dialects to spread as the language of an organized clerical officialdom
and of its courts of law, was immediately strengthened. It soon and
rapidly swamped all but the western hills. But of colonization, of the
advance of a race, there was none. What advanced was the Roman
organization once more and, with it, the dialects of the courts it
favored.

What we know, then, of Britain when it was re-civilized we know through
Latin terms or through the half-German dialects which ultimately and
much later merge into what we call Anglo-Saxon. An historic King of
Sussex bears a Celtic name, but we read of him in the Latin, then in
the Teutonic tongues, and his realm, however feeble the proportion of
over-sea blood in it, bears an over-sea label for its court—“the South
Saxon.”

The mythical founder of Wessex bears a Celtic name, Cerdic: but we read
of him if not in Latin then in Anglo-Saxon. Not a _cantref_ but a
_hundred_ is the term of social organization in England when it is
re-civilized; not an _eglywys_ but a _church_ [Footnote: This word
“church” is a good example of what we mean by Teutonic dialect. It is
straight from the Mediterranean. The native German word for a temple—if
they had got so far as to have temples (for we know nothing of their
religion)—is lost.] is the name of the building in which the new
civilization hears Mass. The ruler, whatever his blood or the blood of
his subjects, is a _Cynning_, not a _Reg_ or a _Prins_. His house and
court are a _hall_ [Footnote: And “hall” is again a Roman word adopted
by the Germans.] not a _plâs_. We get our whole picture of renovated
Britain (after the Church is restored) colored by this half-German
speech. But the Britain we see thus colored is not barbaric. It is a
Christian Britain of mixed origin, of ancient municipalities cut off
for a time by the Pirate occupation of the South and East, but now
reunited with the one civilization whose root is in Rome.

This clear historical conclusion sounds so novel today that I must
emphasize and confirm it.

Western Europe in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries was largely
indifferent to our modern ideas of race. Of nationality it knew
nothing. It was concerned with the maintenance of the Catholic Church
especially against the outer Pagan. This filled the mind. This drove
all the mastering energies of the time. The Church, that is, all the
acts of life, but especially record and common culture, came back into
a Britain which had been cut off. It reopened the gate. It was refused
aid by the Christian whom it relieved. It decided for the courts of the
South and East, taught them organization, and carried their dialects
with it through the Island which it gradually recovered for
civilization.

We are now in a position to sum up our conclusions upon the matter:

Britain, connected with the rest of civilization by a narrow and
precarious neck of sea-travel over the Straits of Dover, had, in the
last centuries of Roman rule, often furnished great armies to usurpers
or Imperial claimants, sometimes leaving the Island almost bare of
regular troops. But with each return of peace these armies also had
returned and the rule of the central Roman government over Britain had
been fairly continuous until the beginning of the fifth century. At
that moment—in 410 A.D.—the bulk of the trained soldiers again left
upon a foreign adventure. But the central rule of Rome was then
breaking down: these regulars never returned—though many auxiliary
troops may have remained.

At this moment, when every province of the West was subject to
disturbance and to the over-running of barbarian bands, small but
destructive, Britain particularly suffered. Scotch, Irish and German
barbarians looted her on all sides.

These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as auxiliaries in the Roman
fashion, may already have been settled in places upon the eastern
coast, their various half-German dialects may have already been common
upon those coasts; but at any rate, after the breakdown of the Roman
order, detached communities under little local chiefs arose. The towns
were not destroyed. Neither the slaves, nor, for that matter, the
greater part of the free population fell. But wealth declined rapidly
in the chaos as it did throughout Western Europe. And side by side with
this ruin came the replacing of the Roman official language by a welter
of Celtic and of half-German dialects in a mass of little courts. The
new official Roman religion—certainly at the moment of the breakdown
the religion of a small minority—almost or wholly disappeared in the
Eastern pirate settlements. The Roman language similarly disappeared in
the many small principalities of the western part of the island; they
reverted to their original Celtic dialects. There was no boundary
between the hotchpotch of little German-speaking territories on the
East and the little Celtic territories on the West. There was no more
than a vague common feeling of West against East or East against West;
all fought indiscriminately among themselves.

After a time which could be covered by two long lives, during which
decline had been very rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the
East throughout the Island, the full influence of civilization
returned, with the landing in 597 of St. Augustine and his missionaries
sent by the Pope.

_But the little Pirate courts of the East happened to have settled on
coasts which occupied the gateway into the Island_; it was thus through
them that civilization had been cut off, and it was through them that
civilization came back. On this account:

(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce under the united discipline
of the Church.

(2) The united British civilization so forming was able to advance
gradually _westward_ across the island.

(3) Though the institutions of Europe were much the same wherever Roman
civilization had existed and had declined, though the councils of
magnates surrounding the King, the assemblies of armed men, the
division of land and people into “hundreds” and the rest of it were
common to Europe, _these things were given, over a wider and wider area
of Britain, Eastern, half-German names because it was through the
courts of the Eastern kinglets that civilization had returned_. The
kinglets of the East, as civilization grew, were continually fed from
the Continent, strengthened with ideas, institutions, arts, and the
discipline of the Church. Thus did they politically become more and
more powerful, until the whole island, except the Cornish peninsula,
Wales and the Northwestern mountains, was more or less administered by
the courts which had their roots in the eastern coasts and rivers, and
which spoke dialects cognate to those beyond the North Sea, while the
West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed in political power
and saw its Celtic dialects shrink in area.

By the time that this old Roman province of Britain re-arises as an
ordered Christian land in the eighth century, its records are kept not
only in Latin but in the Court “Anglo-Saxon” dialects: by far the most
important being that of Winchester. Many place names, and the general
speech of its inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a superficial
but a very vivid change, is the chief outward change in the slow
transformation that has been going on in Britain for three hundred
years (450-500 to 750-800).

Britain is reconquered for civilization and that easily; it is again an
established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the
same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound
Europe together even more firmly than the old central government of
Rome had bound it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom
England was to remain for eight hundred years.



VI
THE DARK AGES


So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman Empire (that is of
European civilization and of the Catholic Church with which that
civilization was identified) from the origins both of the Church and of
the Empire, to the turning point of the fifth century. We have seen the
character of that turning point.

There was a gradual decline in the power of the central monarchy, an
increasing use of auxiliary barbarian troops in the army upon which
Roman society was founded, until at last (in the years from 400 to 500
A.D.) authority, though Roman in every detail of its form, gradually
ceased to be exercised from Rome or Constantinople, but fell
imperceptibly into the hands of a number of local governments. We have
seen that the administration of these local governments usually
devolved on the chief officers of the auxiliary barbarian troops, who
were also, as a rule, their chieftains by some kind of inheritance.

We have seen that there was no considerable infiltration of barbarian
blood, no “invasions” in our modern sense of the term—(or rather, no
successful ones); no blotting out of civilization, still less any
introduction of new institutions or ideas drawn from barbarism.

The coast regions of Eastern Britain (the strongest example of all, for
there the change was most severe) were reconquered for civilization and
for the Faith by the efforts of St. Augustine; Africa was recaptured
for the direct rule of the Emperor: so was Italy and the South of
Spain. At the end of the seventh century that which was in the future
to be called Christendom (and which is nothing more than the Roman
Empire continuing though transformed) is again reunited.

What followed was a whole series of generations in which the forms of
civilization were set and crystallized in a few very simple,
traditional and easily appreciated types. The whole standard of Europe
was lowered to the level of its fundamentals, as it were. The primary
arts upon which we depend for our food and drink, and raiment and
shelter survived intact. The secondary arts reposing upon these, failed
and disappeared almost in proportion to their distance from fundamental
necessities of our race. History became no more than a simple
chronicle. Letters, in the finer sense, almost ceased. Four hundred
years more were to pass before Europe was to reawaken from this sort of
sleep into which her spirit had retreated, and the passage from the
full civilization of Rome through this period of simple and sometimes
barbarous things, is properly called the Dark Ages.

It is of great importance for anyone who would comprehend the general
story of Europe, to grasp the nature of those half-hidden centuries.
They may be compared to a lake into which the activities of the old
world flowed and stirred and then were still, and from which in good
time the activities of the Middle Ages, properly so called, were again
to flow.

Again one may compare the Dark Ages to the leafsoil of a forest. They
are formed by the disintegration of an antique florescence. They are
the bed from which new florescence shall spring.

It is a curious phenomenon to consider: this hibernation, or sleep:
this rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and
reflux of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse
than to a growth. It makes us remember that _rhythm_ which is observed
in all forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere progress from
simplicity to complexity which used to be affirmed as the main law of
history.

The contemplation of the Dark Ages affords a powerful criticism of that
superficial theory of social evolution which is among the intellectual
plagues of our own generation. Much more is the story of Europe like
the waking and the sleeping of a mature man, than like any indefinite
increase in the aptitudes and powers of a growing body.

Though the prime characteristic of the Dark Ages is one of
recollection, and though they are chiefly marked by this note of Europe
sinking back into herself, very much more must be known of them before
we have the truth, even in its most general form.

I will put in the form of a category or list the chief points which we
must bear in mind.

In the first place the Dark Ages were a period of intense military
action. Christendom was besieged from all around. It was held like a
stronghold, and in those centuries of struggle its institutions were
molded by military necessities: so that Christendom has ever since had
about it the quality of a soldier. There was one unending series of
attacks, Pagan and Mohammedan, from the North, from the East and from
the South; attacks not comparable to the older raids of external
hordes, eager only to enjoy civilization within the Empire, small in
number and yet ready to accept the faith and customs of Europe. The
barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries—at the end of the
United Roman Empire—had been of this lesser kind. The mighty struggles
of the eighth, ninth and especially the tenth centuries—of the Dark
Ages—were a very different matter. Had the military institutions of
Europe failed in _that_ struggle, our civilization would have been
wiped out; and indeed at one or two critical points, as in the middle
of the eighth against the Mohammedan, and at the end of the ninth
century against the northern pirates, all human judgment would have
decided that Europe _was_ doomed.

In point of fact, as we shall see in a moment, Europe was just barely
saved. It was saved by the sword and by the intense Christian ideal
which nerved the sword arm. But it was only just barely saved.

The first assault came from Islam.

A new intense and vividly anti-Christian thing arose in a moment, as it
were, out of nothing, out of the hot sands to the East and spread like
a fire. It consumed all the Levant. It arrived at the doors of the
West. This was no mere rush of barbarism. The Mohammedan world was as
cultured as our own in its first expansion. It maintained a higher and
an increasing culture while ours declined; and its conquest, where it
conquered us, was the conquest of something materially superior for the
moment over the remaining arts and traditions of Christian Europe.

Just at the moment when Britain was finally won back to Europe, and
when the unity of the West seemed to be recovered (though its life had
fallen to so much lower a plane), we lost North Africa; it was swept
from end to end in one tidal rush by that new force which aimed
fiercely at our destruction. Immediately afterwards the first
Mohammedan force crossed the Straits of Gibraltar; and in a few months
after its landing the whole of the Spanish Peninsula, that strong Rock
as it had seemed of ancient Roman culture, the hard Iberian land,
crumbled. Politically, at least, and right up to the Pyrenees, Asia had
it in its grip. In the mountain valleys alone, and especially in the
tangle of highlands which occupies the northwestern corner of the
Spanish square, individual communities of soldiers held out. From these
the gradual reconquest of Spain by Christendom was to proceed, but for
the moment they were crowded and penned upon the Asturian hills like
men fighting against a wall.

Even Gaul was threatened: a Mohammedan host poured up into its very
centre far beyond Poitiers: halfway to Tours. Luckily it was defeated;
but Moslem garrisons continued to hold out in the Southern districts,
in the northern fringes of the Pyrenees and along the shore line of the
Narbonese and Provence.

Southern Italy was raided and partly occupied. The islands of the
Mediterranean fell.

Against this sudden successful spring which had lopped off half of the
West, the Dark Ages, and especially the French of the Dark Ages, spent
a great part of their military energy. The knights of Northern Spain
and the chiefs of the unconquered valleys recruited their forces
perpetually from Gaul beyond the Pyrenees; and the northern valley of
the Ebro, the high plains of Castile and Leon, were the training ground
of European valor for three hundred years. The Basques were the
unyielding basis of all the advance.

This Mohammedan swoop was the first and most disastrously successful of
the three great assaults.

Next came the Scandinavian pirates.

Their descent was a purely barbaric thing, not numerous but (since
pirates can destroy much with small numbers) for centuries unexhausted.
They harried all the rivers and coasts of Britain, of Gaul, and of the
Netherlands. They appeared in the Southern seas and their efforts
seemed indefatigable. Britain especially (where the raiders bore the
local name of “Danes”) suffered from a ceaseless pillage, and these new
enemies had no attraction to the Roman land save loot. They merely
destroyed. They refused our religion. Had they succeeded they would not
have mingled with us, but would have ended us.

Both in Northern Gaul and in Britain their chieftains acquired
something of a foothold, but only after the perilous moment in which
their armies were checked; they were tamed and constrained to accept
the society they had attacked.

This critical moment when Europe seemed doomed was the last generation
of the ninth century. France had been harried up to the gates of Paris.
Britain was so raided that its last independent king, Alfred, was in
hiding.

Both in Britain and Gaul Christendom triumphed and in the same
generation.

Paris stood a successful siege, and the family which defended it was
destined to become the royal family of all France at the inception of
the Middle Ages. Alfred of Wessex in the same decade recovered South
England. In both provinces of Christendom the situation was saved. The
chiefs of the pirates were baptized; and though Northern barbarism
remained a material menace for another hundred years, there was no
further danger of our destruction.

Finally, less noticed by history, but quite as grievous, and needing a
defence as gallant, was the pagan advance over the North German Plain
and up the valley of the Danube.

All the frontier of Christendom upon this line from Augsburg and the
Lech to the course of the Elbe and the North Sea, was but a line of
fortresses and continual battlefields. It was but recently organized
land. Until the generations before the year 800 there was no
civilization beyond the Rhine save the upper Danube partially
reclaimed, and a very scanty single extension up the valley of the
Lower Main.

But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric
Germanies right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept
religion, letters and arts. He extended Europe to these new boundaries
and organized them as a sort of rampart in the East: a thing the Roman
Empire had not done. The Church was the cement of this new belt of
defence—the imperfect population of which were evangelized from Ireland
and Britain. It was an experiment, this creation of the Germanies by
Western culture, this spiritual colonization of a _March_ beyond the
limits of the Empire. It did not completely succeed, as the Reformation
proves; but it had at least the strength in the century after
Charlemagne, its founder, to withstand the Eastern attack upon
Christendom.

The attack was not racial. It was Pagan Slav, mixed with much that was
left of Pagan German, even Mongol. Its character was the advance of the
savage against the civilized man, and it remained a peril two
generations longer than the peril which Gaul and Britain had staved off
from the North.

This, then, is the first characteristic to be remembered of the Dark
Ages: the violence of the physical struggle and the intense physical
effort by which Europe was saved.

The second characteristic of the Dark Ages proceeds from this first
military one: it may be called Feudalism.

Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of
the old Roman provincial centres of administration into the hands of
each small local society and its lord. On such a basis there was a
reconstruction of society from below: these local lords associating
themselves under greater men, and these again holding together in great
national groups under a national overlord.

In the violence of the struggle through which Christendom passed, town
and village, valley and castle, had often to defend itself alone.

The great Roman landed estates, with their masses of dependents and
slaves, under a lord or owner, had never disappeared. The descendants
of these Roman, Gallic, British, _owners_ formed the fighting class of
the Dark Ages, and in this new function of theirs, perpetually lifted
up to be the sole depositories of authority in some small imperiled
countryside, they grew to be nearly independent units. For the purposes
of cohesion that family which possessed most estates in a district
tended to become the leader of it. Whole provinces were thus formed and
grouped, and the vaguer sentiments of a larger unity expressed
themselves by the choice of some one family, one of the most powerful
in every county, who would be the overlord of all the other lords,
great and small.

Side by side with this growth of local independence and of voluntary
local groupings, went the transformation of the old imperial nominated
offices into hereditary and personal things.

A _count_, for instance, was originally a _“comes”_ or “companion” of
the Emperor. The word dates from long before the break-up of the
central authority of Rome. A _count_ later was a great official: a
local governor and judge—the Vice-Roy of a large district (a French
county and English shire). His office was revocable, like other
official appointments. He was appointed for a season, first at the
Emperor’s, later at the local King’s discretion, to a particular local
government. In the Dark Ages the _count_ becomes hereditary. He thinks
of his government as a possession which his son should rightly have
after him. He bases his right to his government upon the possession of
great estates within the area of that government. In a word, he comes
to think of himself not as an official at all but as a _feudal
overlord_, and all society (and the remaining shadow of central
authority itself) agrees with him.

The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of
Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed
proprietors, taxed and administered by a regular government, to a
society of fighting _nobles_ and their descendants, organized upon a
basis of independence and in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and
supported no longer by _slaves_ in the _villages_, but by half-free
serfs or “_villeins_.”

Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalize this
living and real thing. It was pretended—by a legal fiction—that the
central King owned nearly all the land, that the great overlords “held”
their land of him, the lesser lords “holding” theirs hereditarily of
the overlords, and so forth. This idea of “holding” instead of
“owning,” though it gave an easy machinery for confiscation in time of
rebellion, was legal theory only, and, so far as men’s views of
property went, a mere form. The reality was what I have described.

The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was the curious fixity of
morals, of traditions, of the forms of religion, and of all that makes
up social life.

We may presume that all civilization originally sprang from a soil in
which custom was equally permanent.

We know that in the great civilizations of the East an enduring fixity
of form is normal.

But in the general history of Europe, it has been otherwise. There has
been a perpetual flux in the outward form of things, in architecture,
in dress, and in the statement of philosophy as well (though not in its
fundamentals).

In this mobile surface of European history the Dark Ages form a sort of
island of changelessness. There is an absence of any great heresies in
the West, and, save in one or two names, an absence of speculation. It
was as though men had no time for any other activity but the ceaseless
business of arms and of the defence of the West.

Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the central figure of those
centuries. It is spent almost entirely in the saddle. One season finds
him upon the Elbe, the next upon the Pyrenees. One Easter he celebrates
in Northern Gaul, another in Rome. The whole story is one of perpetual
marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the
boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to
learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its
passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand. An anxious and
sometimes desperate determination to preserve the memory of a great but
half-forgotten past is the business of his court, which dissolves just
before the worst of the Pagan assault; as it is the business of Alfred,
who arises a century later, just after the worst assault has been
finally repelled.

Religion during these centuries settled and consolidated, as it were.
An enemy would say that it petrified, a friend that it was enormously
strengthened by pressure. But whatever the metaphor chosen, the truth
indicated will be this: that the Catholic Faith became between the
years 600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last vestiges of the
antique and Pagan civilization of the Mediterranean were absorbed. A
habit of certitude and of fixity even in the details of thought was
formed in the European mind.

It is to be noted in this connection that geographically the centre of
things had somewhat shifted. With the loss of Spain and of Northern
Africa, the Mohammedan raiding of Southern Italy and the islands, the
Mediterranean was no longer a vehicle of Western civilization, but the
frontier of it. Rome itself might now be regarded as a frontier town.
The eruption of the barbarians from the East along the Danube had
singularly cut off the Latin West from Constantinople and from all the
high culture of its Empire. Therefore, the centre of that which
resisted in the West, the geographical nucleus of the island of
Christendom, which was besieged all round, was France, and in
particular Northern France. Northern Italy, the Germanies, the Pyrenees
and the upper valley of the Ebro were essentially the marches of Gaul.
Gaul was to preserve all that could be preserved of the material side
of Europe, and also of the European spirit. And therefore the New
World, when it arose, with its Gothic Architecture, its Parliaments,
its Universities, and, in general, its spring of the Middle Ages, was
to be a Gallic thing.

The fourth characteristic of the Dark Ages was a material one, and was
that which would strike our eyes most immediately if we could transfer
ourselves in time, and enjoy a physical impression of that world. This
characteristic was derived from what I have just been saying. It was
the material counterpart of the moral immobility or steadfastness of
the time. It was this: that the external forms of things stood quite
unchanged. The semi-circular arch, the short, stout pillar,
occasionally (but rarely) the dome: these were everywhere the mark of
architecture. There was no change nor any attempt at change. The arts
were saved but not increased, and the whole of the work that men did
with their hands stood fast in mere tradition. No new town arises. If
one is mentioned (Oxford, for instance) for the first time in the Dark
Ages, whether in Britain or in Gaul, one may fairly presume a Roman
origin for it, even though there be no actual mention of it handed down
from Roman times.

No new roads were laid. The old Roman military system of highways was
kept up and repaired, though kept up and repaired with a declining
vigor. The wheel of European life had settled to one slow rate of
turning.

Not only were all these forms enduring, they were also few and simple.
One type of public building and of church, one type of writing,
everywhere recognizable, one type of agriculture, with very few
products to differentiate it, alone remained.

The fifth characteristic of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only
apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character
which I have just been describing. It is this: the Dark Ages were the
point during which there very gradually germinated and came into
outward existence things which still remain among us and help to
differentiate our Christendom from the past of classical antiquity.

This is true of certain material things. The spur, the double bridle,
the stirrup, the book in leaves distinct from the old roll—and very
much else. It is true of the road system of Europe wherever that road
system has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages
with the gradual break-down of expensive causeways over marshes; with
the gradual decline of certain centres; with bridges left unrepaired;
culverts choked and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that
you got the deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river
valley in England, where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its
low-lying banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us
in our road system: you may see the modern road leaving the old Roman
line and picking its way across the wet lands from one drier point to
another, and rejoining the Roman line beyond. It is a thing you will
see in almost anyone of our Strettons, Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords,
etc., which everywhere mark the crossing of a Roman road over a water
course.

But much more than in material things the Dark Ages set a mold wherein
the European mind grew. For instance, it was they that gave to us two
forms of legend. The one something older than history, older than the
Roman order, something Western reappearing with the release of the mind
from the rigid accuracy of a high civilization; the other that legend
which preserves historical truth under a guise of phantasy.

Of the first, the British story of Tristan is one example out of a
thousand. Of the second, the legend of Constantine, which gradually and
unconsciously developed into the famous Donation.

The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story coloring and enlivening all
our European life, and what is more, largely preserving historic truth;
for nothing is more valuable to true history than legend. They also
gave us our order in speech. Great hosts of words unknown to antiquity
sprang up naturally among the people when the force of the classical
centre failed. Some of them were words of the languages before the
Roman armies came—cask, for instance, the old Iberian word. Some of
them were the camp talk of the soldiers. Spade, for instance, and
“_épée_,” the same piece of Greek slang, “the broad one,” which has
come to mean in French a sword; in English that with which we dig the
earth. Masses of technical words in the old Roman laws turned into
popular usage through that appetite the poor have for long official
phrases: for instance, our English words _wild_, _weald_, _wold_,
_waste_, _gain_, _rider_, _rode_, _ledge_, _say_, and a thousand
others, all branch out from the lawyers’ phrases of the later Roman
Empire.

In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages crystallized also—by a process
which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses—that rich mass
of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress, which
differentiates one place from another, when the communications of a
high material civilization break down. In all this the Dark Ages are a
comfort to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the
process of increasing complexity reaches its term; that the strain of
development is at last relieved; that humanity sooner or later returns
upon itself; that there is an end in repose and that the repose is
fruitful.

The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most
engrossed, puzzled, and warped the judgment of non-Catholic historians
when they have attempted a conspectus of European development; it was
the segregation, the homogeneity of and the dominance of clerical
organization. The hierarchy of the Church, its unity and its sense of
discipline was the chief civil institution and the chief binding social
force of the times. Side by side with it went the establishment of the
monastic institution which everywhere took on a separate life of its
own, preserved what could be preserved of arts and letters, drained the
marshes and cleared the forests, and formed the ideal economic unit for
such a period; almost the only economic unit in which capital could
then be accumulated and preserved. The great order of St. Benedict
formed a framework of living points upon which was stretched the moral
life of Europe. The vast and increasing endowments of great and fixed
religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries. They
were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the
fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their
violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic
tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.

Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution—I have already
called it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution—at any rate as a
political institution—remained absolute above the social disintegration
of the time.

All natural things were slowly growing up unchecked and disturbing the
strict lines of the old centralized governmental order which men still
remembered. In language Europe was a medley of infinitely varying local
dialects.

Thousands upon thousands of local customs were coming to be separate
laws in each separate village.

Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed history. The tribal basis
from which we spring was thrusting its instincts back into the strict
and rational Latin fabric of the State. Status was everywhere replacing
contract, and habit replacing a reason for things. Above this medley
the only absolute organization that could be was that of the Church.
The Papacy was the one centre whose shifting could not even be
imagined. The Latin tongue, in the late form in which the Church used
it, was everywhere the same, and everywhere suited to rituals that
differed but slightly from province to province when we contrast them
with the millioned diversity of local habit and speech.

Whenever a high civilization was to re-arise out of the soil of the
Dark Ages, it was certain first to show a full organization of the
Church under some Pope of exceptional vigor, and next to show that
Pope, or his successors in this tradition, at issue with new civil
powers. Whenever central government should rise again and in whatever
form, a conflict would begin between the new kings and the clerical
organization which had so strengthened itself during the Dark Ages.

Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its long sleep. The eleventh
century was the moment of its awakening. Three great forces—the
personality of St. Gregory VII., the appearance (by a happy accident of
slight cross breeding: a touch of Scandinavian blood added to the
French race) of the Norman race, finally the Crusades—drew out of the
darkness the enormous vigor of the early Middle Ages. They were to
produce an intense and active civilization of their own; a civilization
which was undoubtedly the highest and the best our race has known,
conformable to the instincts of the European, fulfilling his nature,
giving him that happiness which is the end of men.

As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages,
after four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater
heights when it suffered shipwreck.

With that disaster, the disaster of the Reformation, I shall deal later
in this series.

In my next chapter I shall describe the inception of the Middle Ages,
and show what they were before our promise in them was ruined.



VII
THE MIDDLE AGES


I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages might be compared to a
long sleep of Europe: a sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old
society in the fifth century to the spring and rising of the eleventh
and twelfth. The metaphor is far too simple, of course, for that sleep
was a sleep of war. In all those centuries Europe was desperately
holding its own against the attack of all that desired to destroy it:
refined and ardent Islam from the South, letterless barbarian pagans
from the East and North. At any rate, from that sleep or that besieging
Europe awoke or was relieved.

I said that three great forces, humanly speaking, worked this miracle;
the personality of St. Gregory VII.; the brief appearance, by a happy
accident, of the Norman State; and finally the Crusades.

The Normans of history, the true French Normans we know, are stirring a
generation after the year 1000. St. Gregory filled that same
generation. He was a young man when the Norman effort began. He died,
full of an enormous achievement, in 1085. As much as one man could,
_he_, the heir of Cluny, had re-made Europe. Immediately after his
death there was heard the march of the Crusades. From these three the
vigor of a fresh, young, renewed Europe proceeds.

Much might be added. The perpetual and successful chivalric charge
against the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified
it. Asia was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of
the Pyrenees perpetually cavalcaded the high adventurers of
Christendom. The Basques—a strange and very strong small people—were
the pivot of that reconquest, but the valley of the torrent of the
Aragon was its channel. The life of St. Gregory is contemporaneous with
that of El Cid Campeador. In the same year that St. Gregory died,
Toledo, the sacred centre of Spain, was at last forced from the
Mohammedans, and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All Southern
Europe was alive with the sword.

In that same moment romance appeared; the great songs: the greatest of
them all, the Song of Roland; then was a ferment of the European mind,
eager from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields. That
watching skepticism which flanks and follows the march of the Faith
when the Faith is most vigorous had also begun to speak.

There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that
something of the unfruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke
and Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas
Aquinas, was to appear. The plastic arts leapt up: Color and Stone.
Humor fully returned: general travel: vision. In general, the moment
was one of expectation and of advance. It was spring.

For the purposes of these few pages I must confine the attention of my
reader to those three tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I
have said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., and the Crusades.

Of the Norman race we may say that it resembled in history those _miræ_
or new stars which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for
some few hours or weeks or years, and then are lost or merged in the
infinity of things. He is indeed unhistorical who would pretend William
the Conqueror, the organizer and maker of what we now call England,
Robert the Wizard, the conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman
names that light Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be
even partly Scandinavians. They were Gauls: short in stature, lucid in
design, vigorous in stroke, positive in philosophy. They bore no
outward relation to the soft and tall and sentimental North from which
some few of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral names.

But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and
ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was _merely_ Gallo-Roman, would
commit an error: an error far less gross but still misleading. In
speech, in manner, in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the
horse, in the cooking of food, in that most intimate part of man, his
jests, the Norman was wholly and apparently a Gaul. In his body—hard,
short, square, broad-shouldered, alert—the Norman was a Frenchman only.
But no other part of Gaul _then_ did what Normandy did: nor could any
other French province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, organized
and creative power, during the few years that the marvel lasted.

That marvel is capable of explanation and I will attempt to explain it.
Those dull, blundering and murderous ravagings of the coasts of
Christian Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (few in number, futile
in achievement) which we call in English history, “The Danish
Invasions,” were called upon the opposite coast of the Channel, “The
Invasions of the Nordmanni” or “the Men of the North.” They came from
the Baltic and from Norway. They were part of the universal assault
which the Dark Ages of Christendom had to sustain: part of a ceaseless
pressure from without against civilization; and they were but a part of
it. They were few, as pirates always must be. It was on the estuaries
of a few continental rivers and in the British Isles that they counted
most in the lives of Europeans.

Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was the estuary of the
Seine. The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end
of the ninth century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly
becoming the political centre of Gaul.

So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold
of the Roman Empire that the quieting of invading hordes by their
settlement (by inter-marriage with and granting of land in, a fixed
Roman province) was a policy still obvious to those who still called
themselves “The Emperors” of the West.

In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of
tradition, produced its last example and the barbarian troublers from
the sea were given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The
maritime province “Lugdunensis Secunda” [Footnote: The delimitation of
this province dated from Diocletian. It was already six hundred years
old, its later name of “Normandy” masked this essential fact that it
was and is a Roman division, as for that matter are probably our
English counties.] was handed over to them for settlement, that is,
they might not attempt a partition of the land outside its boundaries.

On the analogy of all similar experiments we can be fairly certain of
what happened, though there is no contemporary record of such domestic
details in the case of Normandy.

The barbarians, few in number, coming into a fertile and thickly
populated Roman province, only slightly affected its blood, but their
leaders occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs of existing
childless lords, took to wife the heiresses of others; enfeoffed groups
of small men; took a share of the revenue; helped to answer for
military levy and general government. Their chief was responsible to
the crown.

To the mass of the population the new arrangement would make no change;
they were no longer slaves, but they were still serfs. Secure of their
small farms, but still bound to work for their lord, it mattered little
to them whether that lord of theirs had married his daughter to a
pirate or had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the management
of the estate. All the change the serf would notice from the settlement
was that the harrying and the plundering of occasional barbarian raids
had ceased.

In the governing class of perhaps some ten to twenty thousand families
the difference would be very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers,
though insignificant in number compared with the total population, were
a very large fraction added to so small a body. The additional blood,
though numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly throughout the
whole community. Scandinavian names and habits may have had at first
some little effect upon the owner-class with which the Scandinavians
first mingled; it soon disappeared. But, as had been the case centuries
before in the earlier experiments of that sort, it was the barbarian
chief and his hereditary descendants who took over the local government
and “held it,” as the phrase went, of the universal government of Gaul.

These “North-men,” the new and striking addition to the province, the
Gallo-Romans called, as we have seen “Nordmanni.” The Roman province,
within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second
Lyonnese, came to be called “Normannia.” For a century the slight
admixture of new blood worked in the general Gallo-Roman mass of the
province and, numerically small though it was, influenced its
character, or rather produced a new thing; just as in certain chemical
combinations the small admixture of a new element transforms the whole.
With the beginning of the eleventh century, as everything was springing
into new life, when the great saint who, from the chair of Peter, was
to restore the Church was already born, when the advance of the
Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to strike its decisive conquering
blows, there appeared, a sudden phenomenon, this new thing—French in
speech and habit and disposition of body, yet just differentiated from
the rest of Frenchmen—_the Norman Race_.

It possessed these characteristics—a great love of exact order, an
alert military temper and a passion for reality which made its building
even of ships (though it was not in the main seafaring) excellent, and
of churches and of castles the most solid of its time.

All the Normans’ characteristics (once the race was formed), led them
to advance. They conquered England and organized it; they conquered and
organized Sicily and Southern Italy; they made of Normandy itself the
model state in a confused time; they surveyed land; they developed a
regular tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they endured for but a hundred
years, and after that brief coruscation they are wholly merged again in
the mass of European things!

You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin in, say 1030,
for the beginning of the Norman thing; you may take the Court of young
Henry II. with his Southerners and his high culture in, say 1160, most
certainly for the burial of it. During that little space of time the
Norman had not only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men,
he had also provided the sword of the new Papacy and he had furnished
the framework of the crusading host. But before his adventure was done
the French language and the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the
Euphrates.

Of the Papacy and the Crusades I now speak.

St. Gregory VII., the second of the great re-creative forces of that
time, was of the Tuscan peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian
in speech, by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his
career or no is a very test of whether that historian understands the
nature of Europe. For St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing upon Europe. He
made nothing new. What he did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He
provoked a resurrection of the flesh. He made corporate the centralized
Church and the West.

For instance; it was the ideal, the doctrine, the tradition, the major
custom by far, that the clergy should be celibate. He enforced celibacy
as universal discipline.

The awful majesty of the Papacy had been present in all men’s minds as
a vast political conception for centuries too long to recall; St.
Gregory organized that monarchy, and gave it proper instruments of
rule.

The Unity of the Church had been the constant image without which
Christendom could not be; St. Gregory VII. at every point made that
unity tangible and visible. The Protestant historians who, for the most
part, see in the man a sporadic phenomenon, by such a misconception
betray the source of their anæmia and prove their intellectual
nourishment to be unfed from the fountain of European life. St. Gregory
VII. was not an inventor, but a renovator. He worked not upon, but in,
his material; and his material was the nature of Europe: our nature.

Of the awful obstacles such workers must encounter all history speaks.
They are at conflict not only with evil, but with inertia; and with
local interest, with blurred vision and with restricted landscapes.
Always they think themselves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died.
Always they prove themselves before posterity to have done much more
than any other mold of man. Napoleon also was of this kind.

When St. Gregory was dead the Europe which he left was the monument of
that triumph whose completion he had doubted and the fear of whose
failure had put upon his dying lips the phrase: “I have loved justice
and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”

Immediately after his death came the stupendous Gallic effort of the
Crusades.

The Crusades were the second of the main armed eruptions of the Gauls.
The first, centuries before, had been the Gallic invasion of Italy and
Greece and the Mediterranean shores in the old Pagan time. The third,
centuries later, was to be the wave of the Revolution and of Napoleon.

The preface to the Crusades appeared in those endless and already
successful wars of Christendom against Asia upon the high plateaus of
Spain. _These_ had taught the enthusiasm and the method by which Asia,
for so long at high tide flooding a beleaguered Europe, might be slowly
repelled, and from _these_ had proceeded the military science and the
aptitude for strain which made possible the advance of two thousand
miles upon the Holy Land. The consequences of this last and third
factor in the re-awakening of Europe were so many that I can give but a
list of them here.

The West, still primitive, discovered through the Crusades the
intensive culture, the accumulated wealth, the fixed civilized
traditions of the Greek Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It
discovered also, in a vivid new experience, the East. The mere covering
of so much land, the mere seeing of so many sights by a million men
expanded and broke the walls of the mind of the Dark Ages. The
Mediterranean came to be covered with Christian ships, and took its
place again with fertile rapidity as the great highway of exchange.

Europe awoke. All architecture is transformed, and that quite new
thing, the Gothic, arises. The conception of representative assembly,
monastic in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, appears in
the institutions of Christendom. The vernacular languages appear, and
with them the beginnings of our literature: the Tuscan, the Castilian,
the Langue d’Oc, the Northern French, somewhat later the English. Even
the primitive tongues that had always kept their vitality from beyond
recorded time, the Celtic and the German [Footnote: I mean, in neither
of the groups of tongues as we first find them recorded, for by that
time each—especially the German—was full of Southern words borrowed
from the Empire; but the original stocks which survived side by side
with this new vocabulary. For instance, our first knowledge of Teutonic
dialect is of the eighth century (the so-called Early Gothic is a
fraud) but even then quite half the words or more are truly German,
apparently unaffected by the Imperial laws and speech.] begin to take
on new creative powers and to produce a new literature. That
fundamental institution of Europe, the University, arises; first in
Italy, immediately after in Paris—which last becomes the type and
centre of the scheme.

The central civil governments begin to correspond to their natural
limits, the English monarchy is fixed first, the French kingdom is
coalescing, the Spanish regions will soon combine. The Middle Ages are
born.

The flower of that capital experiment in the history of our race was
the thirteenth century. Edward I. of England, St. Louis of France, Pope
Innocent III., were the types of its governing manhood. Everywhere
Europe was renewed; there were new white walls around the cities, new
white Gothic churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law
codified, the classics rediscovered, the questions of philosophy sprung
to activity and producing in their first vigor, as it were, the summit
of expository power in St. Thomas, surely the strongest, the most
virile, intellect which our European blood has given to the world.

Two notes mark the time for anyone who is acquainted with its building,
its letters, and its wars: a note of youth, and a note of content.
Europe was imagined to be at last achieved, and that ineradicable dream
of a permanent and satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh
and to have come to live forever among Christian men.

No such permanence and no such good is permitted to humanity; and the
great experiment, as I have called it, was destined to fail.

While it flourished, all that is specially characteristic of our
European descent and nature stood visibly present in the daily life,
and in the large, as in the small, institutions, of Europe.

Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or
all; we produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman;
we founded coöperative industry. In arms that military type arose which
lives upon the virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may
breed. Above all, an intense and living appetite for truth, a
perception of reality, invigorated these generations. They saw what was
before them, they called things by their names. Never was political or
social formula less divorced from fact, never was the mass of our
civilization better welded—and in spite of all this the thing did not
endure.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was
tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere
intrigue successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of
sophistry in philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not
an institution of the thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it; the
Papacy professional and a prisoner, the parliaments tending to
oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed in the minds of the rulers, the
new and vigorous and democratic monastic orders already touched with
mere wealth and beginning also to change—but these last can always, and
do always, restore themselves.

Upon all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Here half
the people, there a third, there again a quarter, died; from that
additional blow the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not
recover.

Men clung to their ideal for yet another hundred and fifty years. The
vital forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material
perfection to another; the art of government, the suggestion of
letters, the technique of sculpture and of painting (here raised by a
better vision, there degraded by a worse one), everywhere developed and
grew manifold. But the supreme achievement of the thirteenth century
was seen in the later fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in the fifteenth
it was apparent that the attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe
had failed.

The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that
science and history were too slight; that the material side of life was
insufficient; that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to
permanence was lacking—or one may say that the ideal was too high for
men. I, for my part, incline to believe that wills other than those of
mortals were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat
daily for the souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual
battle, fought over our heads perpetually, some accident of the
struggle turned it against us for a time. If that suggestion be
fantastic (which no doubt it is), at any rate none other is complete.

With the end of the fifteenth century there was to come a supreme test
and temptation. The fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek:
the rediscovery of the Classic past: the Press: the new great
voyages—India to the East, America to the West—had (in the one lifetime
of a man [Footnote: The lifetime of one very great and famous man did
cover it. Ferdinand, King of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of
the noblest of English queens, was born the year before Constantinople
fell. He died the year before Luther found himself swept to the head of
a chaotic wave.] between 1453 and 1515) suddenly brought Europe into a
new, a magic, and a dangerous land.

To the provinces of Europe, shaken by an intellectual tempest of
physical discovery, disturbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement
in the material world, in physical science, and in the knowledge of
antiquity, was to be offered a fruit of which each might taste if it
would, but the taste of which would lead, if it were acquired, to evils
no citizen of Europe then dreamt of; to things which even the criminal
intrigues and the cruel tyrants of the fifteenth century would have
shuddered to contemplate, and to a disaster which very nearly overset
our ship of history and very nearly lost us forever its cargo of
letters, of philosophy, of the arts, and of all our other powers.

That disaster is commonly called “The Reformation.” I do not pretend to
analyze its material causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were
wholly material. I rather take the shape of the event and show how the
ancient and civilized boundaries of Europe stood firm, though shaken,
under the tempest; how that tempest might have ravaged no more than
those outlying parts newly incorporated—never sufficiently penetrated
perhaps with the Faith and the proper habits of ordered men—the outer
Germanies and Scandinavia.

The disaster would have been upon a scale not too considerable, and
Europe might quickly have righted herself after the gust should be
passed, had not one exception of capital amount marked the intensest
crisis of the storm. That exception to the resistance offered by the
rest of ancient Europe was the defection of Britain.

Conversely with this loss of an ancient province of the Empire, one
nation, and one alone, of those which the Roman Empire had not bred,
stood the strain and preserved the continuity of Christian tradition:
that nation was Ireland.



VIII
WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?


This is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions, after the
original question: “What was the Church in the Empire of Rome?” A true
answer to this original question gives the nature of that capital
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity and attained
to a full consciousness of itself. An answer to the other question:
“What was the Reformation?” begins to explain our modern ill-ease.

A true answer to the question: “What was the Reformation?” is of such
vast importance, because it is only when we grasp _what the Reformation
was_ that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the
united body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a
wound. The abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital
by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of modern
discovery to serve the end of man; the series of larger and still
larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and
destruction—till the dead are now counted in tens of millions; the
increasing chaos and misfortune of society—all these attach one to the
other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller phenomena as
well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the magnitude
of that fundamental catastrophe.

It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to its end,
and that (though those now living will not live to see it) Christendom
may enter into a convalescence: may at last forget the fever and be
restored. With that I am not here concerned. It is my business only to
explain that storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago and
within a century brought Christendom to shipwreck.

The true causes are hidden—for they were spiritual.

In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human kind, in
that proportion does it spring not from apparent—let alone
material—causes, but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit.
To pretend an examination of the secret springs whence the human mind
is fed is futile. The greater the affair, the more directly does it
proceed from unseen sources which the theologian may catalogue, the
poet see in vision, the philosopher explain, but with which positive
external history cannot deal, and which the mere historian cannot
handle. It is the function of history to present the outward thing, as
a witness might have seen it, and to show the reader as much as a
spectator could have seen—illuminated indeed by a knowledge of the
past—and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events. The historian
answers the question, “_What_ was?” this or that. To the question,
“_Why_ was it?” if it be in the spiritual order (as are all major
things), the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other
aptitudes than those of historic science.

It is the neglect of this canon which makes barren so much work upon
the past. Read Gibbon’s attempt to account for “why” the Catholic
Church arose in the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure.
[Footnote: It is true that Gibbon was ill equipped for his task because
he lacked historical imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a
past age. He could not enter into any mood save that of his master,
Voltaire. But it is not only true of Gibbon that he fails to explain
the great revolution of A.D. 29-304. No one attempting that explanation
has succeeded. It was not of this world.]

Mark also how all examination of the causes of the French Revolution
are colored by something small and degraded, quite out of proportion to
that stupendous crusade which transformed the modern world. The truth
is, that the historian can only detail those causes, largely material,
all evident and positive, which lie within his province, and such
causes are quite insufficient to explain the full result. Were I here
writing “Why” the Reformation came, my reply would not be historic, but
mystic. I should say that it came “from outside mankind.” But that
would be to affirm without the hope of proof, and only in the
confidence that all attempts at positive proof were contemptible.
Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an issue, but only in the
presentation of the thing as it was. Upon this I now set out.

With the close of the Middle Ages two phenomena appeared side by side
in the society of Europe. The first was an ageing and a growing fatigue
of the simple mediæval scheme; the second was a very rapid accretion of
technical power.

As to the first I have suggested (it is no more than a suggestion),
that the mediæval scheme of society, though much the best fitted to our
race and much the best expression which it has yet found, though
especially productive of happiness (which here and hereafter is the end
of man), was not properly provided with instruments of survival.

Its science was too imperfect, its institutions too local, though its
philosophy was the widest ever framed and the most satisfying to the
human intelligence.

Whatever be the reason, that society _did_ rapidly grow old. Its every
institution grew formal or debased. The Guilds from true coöperative
partnerships for the proper distribution of the means of production,
and for the prevention of a proletariat with its vile cancer of
capitalism, tended to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of
Christian Europe, the village, showed faint signs that it might become
an oligarchy of privileged farmers with some land and less men at their
orders. The Monastic orders were tainted in patches up and down Europe,
with worldliness, with an abandonment of their strict rule, and
occasionally with vice. Civil government grew befogged with tradition
and with complex rules. All manner of theatrical and false trappings
began to deform society, notably the exaggeration of heraldry and a
riot of symbolism of which very soon no one could make head or tail.

The temporal and visible organization of the Church did not escape in
such a welter. The lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that
organization suffered, has been both grossly exaggerated and set out of
perspective. A wild picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But in
a degree the temporal organization of the Church had decayed at the
close of the Middle Ages. It was partly too much a taking of things for
granted, a conviction that nothing could really upset the unity of
Europe; partly the huge concentration of wealth in clerical hands,
which proceeded from the new economic activity all over Europe, coupled
with the absolute power of the clergy in certain centres and the
universal economic function of Rome; partly a popular loss of faith.
All these between them helped to do the business. At any rate the evil
was there.

All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their origins, or
they fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of
united Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic attempts to
revivify the common life, especially upon its spiritual side, by a
return to the primitive communal enthusiasms in which religion
necessarily has its historical origins.

This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it remarkable that each such
sporadic and spontaneous outburst should have its own taint or vice or
false color.

What was remarkable and what made the period unique in the whole
history of Christendom (save for the Arian flood) was the incapacity of
the external organization of the Church at the moment to capture the
spiritual discontent, and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of which
these errors were the manifestation.

In a slower time the external organization of the Church would have
absorbed and regulated the new things, good and evil. It would have
rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have canalized the
exaltations, it would have humanized the discoveries. But things were
moving at a rate more and more rapid, the whole society of Western
Christendom raced from experience to experience. It was flooded with
the newly found manuscripts of antiquity, with the new discoveries of
unknown continents, with new commerce, printing, and, an effect perhaps
rather than a cause, the complete rebirth of painting, architecture,
sculpture and all the artistic expression of Europe.

In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted return to early
religious enthusiasm were not digested and were not captured. The
spiritual hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not
exposed to the solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient
indignation: they were therefore neither withered nor eradicated. For
the spirit had grown old. The great movement of the spirit in Europe
was repressed haphazard and, quite as much haphazard, encouraged, but
there seemed no one corporate force present throughout Christendom
which would persuade, encourage and command: even the Papacy, the core
of our unity, was shaken by long division and intrigue.

Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of special
heresies the business was local, peculiar and contemptible. Wycliffe,
for instance, was no more the morning star of the Reformation than
Catherine of Braganza’s Tangier Dowry, let us say, was the morning star
of the modern English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of
men who were theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society
and morals, each with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each
with his “system.” Such men have always abounded; they abound today.
Some of Wycliffe’s extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen,
later, to have held; others (such as his theory that you could not own
land unless you were in a state of grace) were of the opposite extreme
to Protestantism. And so it is with the whole lot: and there were
hundreds of them. There was no common theory, no common feeling in the
various reactions against a corrupted ecclesiastical authority which
marked the end of the Middle Ages. There was nothing the least like
what we call Protestantism today. Indeed that spirit and mental color
does not appear until a couple of generations after the opening of the
Reformation itself.

What there _was_, was a widespread discontent and exasperated friction
against the existing, rigid, and yet deeply decayed, temporal
organization of religious affairs; and in their uneasy fretting against
that unworthy rule, the various centres of irritation put up now one
startling theory which they knew would annoy the official Church, now
another, perhaps the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied
something as old as Europe—such as the right to property: now a new
piece of usage or discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a
partial regional rule, such as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others,
at the contrary extreme, did no more than expose false relics.

A general social ill-ease was the parent of all these sporadic
heresies. Many had elaborate systems, but none of these systems was a
true creed, that is, a _motive_. No one of the outbursts had any
philosophic driving power behind it; all and each were no more than
violent and blind reactions against a clerical authority which gave
scandal and set up an intolerable strain.

Shall I give an example? One of the most popular forms which the
protest took, was what I have just mentioned, a demand for Communion in
both kinds and for the restoration of what was in many places ancient
custom, the drinking from the cup after the priest.

Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation against the
external organization of the Church was the power at work? Could any
point have less to do with the fundamentals of the Faith? Of course, as
an _implication_ of false doctrine—as that the Priesthood is not an
Order, or that the Presence of Our Lord is not in both species—it had
its importance. But in itself how trivial a “kick.” Why should anyone
desire the cup save to mark dissension from established custom!

Here is another example. Prominent among the later expressions of
discontent you have the Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities
is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one
hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of
various longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling
rapidly in numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred
years, others like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime:
others like the Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons
near a century, their close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado
in 1891 whose friends thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Wycliffites
certain members of the Adamites until lately survived in Austria.] who
among other tenets rejected clothes upon the more solemn occasions of
their ritual and went naked: raving maniacs. The whole business was a
rough and tumble of protest against the breakdown of a social system
whose breakdown seemed the more terrible because it _had_ been such a
haven! Because it _was_ in essence founded upon the most intimate
appetites of European men. The heretics were angry because they had
lost their home.

This very general picture omits Huss and the national movement for
which he stood. It omits the Papal Schism; the Council of Constance;
all the great facts of the fifteenth century on its religious side. I
am concerned only with the presentation of the general character of the
time, and that character was what I have described: an irrepressible,
largely justified, discontent breaking out: a sort of chronic rash upon
the skin of Christian Europe, which rash the body of Christendom could
neither absorb nor cure.

Now at this point—and before we leave the fifteenth century—there is
another historical feature which it is of the utmost importance to
seize if we are to understand what followed; for it was a feature
common to all European thought until a time long after the final
establishment of permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature which
nearly all historians neglect and yet one manifest upon the reading of
any contemporary expression. That feature is this: _No one in the
Reformation dreamt a divided Christendom to be possible_.

This flood of heretical movement was _oecumenical_; it was not peculiar
to one race or climate or culture or nation. The numberless uneasy
innovators thought, even the wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a
whole. They desired to affect the universal Church and change it _en
bloc_. They had no local ambition. They stood for no particular blood
or temperament; they sprang up everywhere, bred by the universal
ill-ease of a society still universal. You were as likely to get an
enthusiast declaring himself to be the Messiah in Seville as an
enthusiast denying the Real Presence in Aberdeen.

That fatal habit of reading into the past what we know of its future
has in this matter most deplorably marred history, and men, whether
Protestant or Catholic, who are now accustomed to Protestantism, read
Protestantism and the absurd idea of a local religion—a religion true
in one place and untrue in another—into a time where the least
instructed clown would have laughed in your face at such nonsense.

The whole thing, the evil coupled with a quite ineffectual resistance
to the evil, was a thing common to all Europe.

It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or to recede. But
this movement was destined to advance with devastating rapidity, and
that on account of what I have called the _second_ factor in the
Reformation: the very rapid accretion in technical power which marked
the close of the Middle Ages.

Printing; navigation; all mensuration; the handling of metals and every
material—all these took a sudden leap forward with the _Renaissance_,
the revival of arts: that vast stirring of the later Middle Ages which
promised to give us a restored antiquity Christianized: which was burnt
in the flame of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing but ashes
and incommiscible salvage.

Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical experience and technical
skill, were moving in the century before the Reformation at such a rate
that a contemporary spiritual phenomenon, if it advanced at all, was
bound to advance very rapidly, and this spiritual eruption in Europe
came to a head just at the moment when the contemporary expansion of
travel, of economic activity and of the revival of learning, had also
emerged in their full force.

It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that the
coalescing of the various forces of spiritual discontent and revolt
began to be apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to burst and
the Reformation proper to be started on its way.

But as a preliminary to that matter, the reader should first understand
how another and quite disconnected social development had prepared the
way for the triumph of the reformers. This development was the advent
of Absolute Government in civil affairs.

Here and there in the long history of Europe there crops up an isolated
accident, very striking, very effective, of short duration. We have
already seen that the Norman race was one of these. Tyranny in civil
government (which accompanied the Reformation) was another.

A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest and most enduring
of historical things. Countless centuries of the old Empires of the
East were passed under such a claim, the Roman Empire was based upon
it; the old Russian State was made by it, French society luxuriated in
it for one magnificent century, from the accession of Louis XIV. till
Fontenoy. It is the easiest and (when it works) the most prompt of all
instruments.

But the sense of an absolute civil government at the moment of the
Reformation was something very different. It was a demand, an appetite,
proceeding from the whole community, a worship of civil authority. It
was deification of the State and of law; it was the adoration of the
Executive.

“This governs me; therefore I will worship it and do all it tells me.”
Such is the formula for the strange passion which has now and then
seized great bodies of human beings intoxicated by splendor and by the
vivifying effects of command. Like all manias (for it is a mania) this
exaggerated passion is hardly comprehended once it is past. Like all
manias, while it is present it overrides every other emotion.

Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered such a mania. The free
cities manifested that disease quite as much as the great monarchical
states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the Papal sovereign was
then magnificent beyond all past parallel. In Geneva Calvin was a god.
In Spain Charles and Philip governed two worlds without question. In
England the Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. Men might and did
rebel against a particular government, but it was only to set up
something equally absolute in its place. Not the form but the fact of
government was adored.

I will not waste the reader’s time in any discussion upon the causes of
that astonishing political fever. It must suffice to say that for a
moment it hypnotized the whole world. It would have been
incomprehensible to the Middle Ages. It was incomprehensible to the
nineteenth century. It wholly occupied the sixteenth. If we understand
it, we largely understand what made the success of the Reformation
possible.

Well, then, the increasing discontent of the masses against the
decaying forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing irritation
against the temporal government and the organization of the Church,
came to a head just at that moment when civil government was worshipped
as an awful and almost divine thing.

Into such an atmosphere was launched the last and the strongest of the
overt protests against the old social scheme, and in particular against
the existing power of the Papacy, especially upon its economic side.

The name most prominently associated with the crisis is that of Martin
Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by birth and speech, and one of
those exuberant sensual, rather inconsequential, characters which so
easily attract hearty friendships, and which can never pretend to
organization or command, though certainly to creative power. What he
precisely meant or would do, no man could tell, least of all himself.
He was “out” for protest and he floated on the crest of the general
wave of change. That he ever intended, nay, that he could ever have
imagined, a disruption of the European Unity is impossible.

Luther (a voice, no leader) was but one of many: had he never lived,
the great bursting wave would have crashed onward much the same. One
scholar after another (and these of every blood and from every part of
Europe) joined in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic
training to the newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride
of life, of the logician to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl
swept men of every type into the disruption. One thing only united
them. They were all inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great
names which in the ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to
preserve—the greatest is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear
in the roll of that of the Catholic martyrs—the blessed Thomas More is
the greatest of these—must here be counted with the names of men like
the narrow Calvin on the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other.
Not one ardent mind in the first half of the sixteenth century but was
swept into the stream.

Now all this would and must have been quieted in the process of time,
the mass of Christendom would have settled back into unity, the
populace would have felt instinctively the risk they ran of spoliation
by the rich and powerful, if the popular institutions of Christendom
broke down: the masses would have all swung round to solidifying
society after an upheaval (it is their function): we should have
attained repose and Europe, united again, would have gone forward as
she did after the rocking of four hundred years before—but for that
other factor of which I have spoken, the passion which this eager
creative moment felt for the absolute in civil government—that craving
for the something godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne or a
national hymn.

This it was which caught up and, in the persons of particular men, used
the highest of the tide. Certain princes in the Germanies (who had, of
all the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning of authority)
befriended here one heresiarch and there another. The very fact that
the Pope of Rome stood for one of these absolute governments put other
absolute governments against him. The wind of the business rose; it
became a quarrel of sovereigns. And the sovereigns decided, and
powerful usurping nobles or leaders decided, the future of the herd.

Two further characters appeared side by side in the earthquake that was
breaking up Europe.

The first was this: the tendency to fall away from European unity
seemed more and more marked in those outer places which lay beyond the
original limits of the old Roman Empire, and notably in the Northern
Netherlands and in Northern Germany—where men easily submitted to the
control of wealthy merchants and of hereditary landlords.

The second was this: a profound distrust of the new movement, a
reaction against it, a feeling that moral anarchy was too profitable to
the rich and the cupidinous, began at first in a dull, later in an
angry way, to stir the masses of the populace throughout _all_
Christendom.

The stronger the old Latin sense of human equality was, the more the
populace felt this, the more they instinctively conceived of the
Reformation as something that would rob them of some ill-understood but
profound spiritual guarantee against slavery, exploitation and
oppression.

There began a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers, who were
now already schismatic: their rich patrons fell under the same
suspicion. By the time the movement had reached a head and by the time
the central power of the Church had been openly defied by the German
princes, this protest took, as in France and England and the valley of
the Rhone (the ancient seats of culture), a noise like the undertone of
the sea before bad weather. In the outer Germanies it was not a defence
of Christendom at all, but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere
the populace stirred.

A general observer, cognizant of what was to come, would have been
certain at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose
_intelligently_ the movement against the Church and civilization would
come to nothing. The Revolt elsewhere—in half barbaric Europe—would
come to no more than the lopping off of outer and insignificant things.
The Baltic Plain, sundry units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia,
probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in
Switzerland and Savoy and France and the Pyrenees, which had suffered
from lack of instruction and could easily be recovered—these would be
affected. The outer parts, which had never been within the pale of the
Roman Empire might go. But the soul and intelligence of Europe would be
kept sound; its general body would reunite and Christendom would once
more reappear whole and triumphant. It would have reconquered these
outer parts at its leisure: and Poland was a sure bastion. We should,
within a century, have been ourselves once more: Christian men.

So it would have been—but for one master tragedy, which changed the
whole scheme. Of the four great remaining units of Western
civilization, Iberia, Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical
moment, broke down by a tragic accident and lost continuity. It was
hardly intended. It was a consequence of error much more than an act of
will. But it had full effect.

The breakdown of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the
chief event of all. It made the Reformation permanent. It confirmed a
final division in Europe.

By a curious accident, one province, extraneous to the Empire, Ireland,
heroically preserved what the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies
and Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of Britain, and cut
off by that loss from direct succor, Ireland preserved the tradition of
civilization.

It must be my next business to describe the way in which Britain failed
in the struggle, and, at the hands of the King, and of a little group
of avaricious men (such as the Howards among the gentry, and the Cecils
among the adventurers) changed for the worse the history of Europe.



IX
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN


One thing stands out in the fate of modern Europe: the profound
cleavage due to the Reformation. One thing made that wound (it was
almost mortal) so deep and _lasting_: the failure of one ancient
province of civilization, and one only, to keep the Faith: this
province whereof I write: Britain.

The capital event, the critical moment, in the great struggle of the
Faith against the Reformation, was the defection of Britain.

It is a point which the modern historian, who is still normally
anti-Catholic, does not and cannot make. Yet the defection of Britain
from the Faith of Europe three hundred years ago is certainly the most
important historical event in the last thousand years: between the
saving of Europe from the barbarians and these our own times. It is
perhaps the most important historical event since the triumph of the
Catholic Church under Constantine.

Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they would be seen by
an impartial observer from some great distance in time, or in space, or
in mental attitude. Let me put them as they would appear to one quite
indifferent to, and remote from, the antagonists.

To such an observer the history of Europe would be that of the great
Roman Empire passing through the transformation I have described: its
mind first more and more restless, then more and more tending to a
certain conclusion, and that conclusion the Catholic Church.

To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the
fifth century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe.
It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of
the Eastern schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault;
from within, because it deals with matters not open to positive proof;
from without, because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites,
who are not of our civilization, are naturally its enemies.

The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and the unity of this
soul were preserved from generation to generation, declined in its body
during the Dark Ages—say, up to and rather beyond the year 1000. It
became coarsened and less in its material powers. It lost its central
organization, the Imperial Court (which was replaced first by
provincial military leaders or “kings,” then, later, by a mass of local
lordships jumbled into more or less national groups). In building, in
writing, in cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculpture, the Roman
Empire of the West (which is ourselves) forgot all but the fundamentals
of its arts—but it expanded so far as its area is concerned. A whole
belt of barbaric Germany received the Roman influence—Baptism and the
Mass. With the Creed there came to these outer parts reading and
writing, building in brick and stone—all the material essentials of our
civilization—and what is characteristic of that culture, the power of
thinking more clearly.

It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian reached
longitude ten degrees east, and the Scandinavian peninsula. But a
thousand years after Our Lord it has reached even these, and there
remains between the unbroken tradition of our civilization in the West
and the schismatic but Christian civilization of the Greek Church,
nothing but a belt of paganism from the corner of the Baltic southward,
which belt is lessened, year after year, by the armed efforts and the
rational dominance of Latin culture. Our Christian and Roman culture
proceeds continuously eastward, mastering the uncouth.

After this general picture of a civilization dominating and mastering
in its material decline a vastly greater area than it had known in the
height of its material excellence—this sort of expansion in the
dark—the impartial observer, whom we have supposed, would remark a sort
of dawn.

That dawn came with the eleventh century; 1000-1100. The Norman race,
the sudden invigoration of the Papacy, the new victories in Spain, at
last the first Crusade, mark a turn in the tide of material decline,
and that tide works very rapidly towards a new and intense civilization
which we call that of the Middle Ages: that high renewal which gives
Europe a second and most marvelous life, which is a late reflowering of
Rome, but of Rome revivified with the virtue and the humor of the
Faith.

The second thing that the observer would note in so general a picture
would be the peculiar exception formed within it by the group of large
islands lying to the North and West of the Continent. Of these the
larger, Britain, had been a true Roman Province; but very early in the
process—in the middle and end of the fifth century—it had on the first
assault of the barbarians been cut off for more than the lifetime of a
man. Its gate had been held by the barbarian. Then it was
re-Christianized almost as thoroughly as though even its Eastern part
had never lost the authority of civilization. The Mission of St.
Augustine recaptured Britain—but Britain is remarkable in the history
of civilization for the fact that alone of civilized lands it needed to
be recaptured at all. The western island of the two, the smaller
island, Ireland, presented another exception.

It was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German
barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic
armies forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the
Germanies; it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was
not a morass of shifting tribes; it was a nation. But in a most
exceptional fashion, though already possessed, and perhaps because so
possessed, of a high pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the
lifetime of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit
of the Creed. The civilization of the Roman West was accepted by
Ireland, not as a command nor as an influence, but as a discovery.

Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the north and west of
the Continent remain in the observer’s mind, and he will note, when the
shock of what is called “the Reformation” comes, new phenomena
attaching to those islands, cognate to their early history.

Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present in the pages
that follow.

What we call “the Reformation” was essentially the reaction of the
barbaric, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old
and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of that
civilization. The Reformation was not racial. Even if there were such a
physical thing as a “Teutonic Race” (and there is nothing of the kind),
the Reformation shows no coincidence with that race. The Reformation is
simply the turning-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five
hundred years, had set steadily forward and had progressively dominated
the insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the
confused by the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by the conquered
against a moral and intellectual superiority which offended them. The
Slavs of Bohemia joined in that sincere protest of the lately and
insufficiently civilized, quite as strongly as, and even earlier than,
the vague peoples of the Sandy Heaths along the Baltic. The
Scandinavian, physically quite different from these tribes of the
Baltic Plain, comes into the game. Wretched villages in the mark of
Brandenburg, as Slavonic in type as the villages of Bohemia, revolt as
naturally against exalted and difficult mystery as do the isolated
villages of the Swedish valleys or the isolated rustics of the Cevennes
or the Alps. The revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore
enjoying the sincere motive which accompanies such risings, but
deprived of unity and of organizing power. There has never been a fixed
Protestant creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction against
the traditions of Europe.

Now the point to seize is this:

Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to speak upon the mere
historical plane) to civilization, bad as it was that the tide of
culture should have begun to ebb from the far regions which it had once
so beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is, the reaction against
the unity, the discipline, and the clear thought of Europe, would never
have counted largely in human affairs had it been confined to the
external fringe of the civilized world. That fringe would probably have
been reconquered. The inherent force attaching to reality and to the
stronger mind should have led to its recovery. The Northern Germanies
were, as a fact, reconquered when Richelieu stepped in and saved them
from their Southern superiors. But perhaps it would not have been
reconquered. Perhaps it would have lapsed quite soon into its original
paganism. At any rate European culture would have continued undivided
and strong without these outer regions. Unfortunately a far worse thing
happened.

Europe was rent and has remained divided.

The disaster was accomplished through forces I will now describe.

Though the revolt was external to the foundations of Europe, to the
ancient provinces of the Empire, yet an external consequence of that
revolt arose within the ancient provinces. It may be briefly told. _The
wealthy took advantage within the heart of civilization itself of this
external revolt against order_; for it is always to the advantage of
the wealthy to deny general conceptions of right and wrong, to question
a popular philosophy and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of
the human will, organized throughout the whole community. It is always
in the nature of _great_ wealth to be insanely tempted (though it
should know from active experience how little wealth can give), to push
on to more and more domination over the bodies of men—and it can do so
best by attacking fixed social restraints.

The landed squires then, and the great merchants, powerfully supported
by the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt
that—with the Reformation—their opportunity had come. The largest
fortune holders, the nobles, the merchants of the ports and local
capitals even in Gaul (that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human
life) licked their lips. Everywhere in Northern Italy, in Southern
Germany, upon the Rhine, wherever wealth had congested in a few hands,
the chance of breaking with the old morals was a powerful appeal to the
wealthy; and, therefore, throughout Europe, even in its most ancient
seats of civilization, the outer barbarian had allies.

These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe from within, had no
excuse. _Theirs_ was not any dumb instinctive revolt like that of the
Outer Germanies, the Outer Slavs, nor the neglected mountain valleys,
against order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences
that clear thought brings. _They_ were in no way subject to enthusiasm
for the vaguer emotions roused by the Gospel or for the more turgid
excitements derivable from Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of
prophecy. _They_ were “on the make.” The rich in Montpelier and Nîmes,
a knot of them in Rome itself, many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris,
enlisted intellectual aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the
Renaissance, supported the strong inflamed critics of clerical
misliving, and even winked solemnly at the lunatic inspirations of
obscure men and women filled with “visions.” They did all these things
as though their object was religious change. But their true object was
money.

One group, and one alone, of the European nations was too recently
filled with combat against vile non-Christian things to accept any
parley with this anti-Christian turmoil. That unit was the Iberian
Peninsula. It is worthy of remark, especially on the part of those who
realize that the sword fits the hand of the Church and that Catholicism
is never more alive than when it is in arms, I say it is worthy of
remark by these that Spain and Portugal through the very greatness of
an experience still recent when the Reformation broke, lost the chance
of combat. There came indeed, from Spain (but from the Basque nation
there) that weapon of steel, the Society of Jesus, which St. Ignatius
formed, and which, surgical and military, saved the Faith, and
therefore Europe. But the Iberian Peninsula rejecting as one whole and
with contempt and with abhorrence (and rejecting rightly) any
consideration of revolt—even among its rich men—thereby lost its
opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which
revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain would be the stronger
today had it fallen to her task, as it did to the general populace of
Gaul, to come to hand-grips with the Reformation at home, to test it,
to know it, to dominate it, to bend the muscles upon it, and to
reemerge triumphant from the struggle.

I say, then, that there was present in the field against the Church a
powerful ally for the Reformers: and that ally was the body of immoral
rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the popular organization
of society. The atheism and the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality,
the scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance answered, over the
heads of the Catholic populace, the call of barbarism. The Iconoclasts
of greed joined hands with the Iconoclasts of blindness and rage and
with the Iconoclasts of academic pride.

Nevertheless, even with such allies, barbarism would have failed, the
Reformation would today be but an historical episode without fruit,
Europe would still be Christendom, had not there been added the
decisive factor of all—which was the separation of Britain.

Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss of Britain of such capital
importance?

The loss of Britain was of such capital importance because Britain
alone of those who departed, was Roman, and therefore capable of
endurance and increase. And _why_ did Britain fail in that great
ordeal? It is a question harder to answer.

The province of Britain was not a very great one in area or in numbers,
when the Reformation broke out. It was, indeed, very wealthy for its
size, as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth does not account for
the fundamental importance of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the
sixteenth century. The real point was that one and only one of the old
Roman provinces with their tradition of civilization, letters,
persuasive power, multiple soul—one and only one went over to the
barbaric enemy and gave that enemy its aid. That one was Britain. And
the consequence of its defection was the perpetuation and extension of
an increasingly evil division within the structure of the West.

To say that Britain lost hold of tradition in the sixteenth century
because Britain is “Teutonic,” is to talk nonsense. It is to explain a
real problem by inventing unreal words. Britain is not “Teutonic,” nor
does the word “Teutonic” itself mean anything definite. To say that
Britain revolted because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than
in any ancient province of Europe, is to know nothing of history. The
seeds of revolt were in her then as they were in every other community;
as they must be in every individual who may find any form of discipline
a burden which he is tempted, in a moment of disorder, to lay down. But
to pretend that England and the lowlands of Scotland, to pretend that
the Province of Britain in our general civilization was more ready for
the change than the infected portions of Southern Gaul, or the humming
towns of Northern Italy, or the intense life of Hainult, or Brabant, is
to show great ignorance of the European past.

Well, then, how did Britain break away?

I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next page or so. I
believe it to be of capital value in explaining the general history of
Europe, and I know it to be hardly ever told; or—if told at all—told
only in fragments.

England went because of three things. First, her Squires had already
become too powerful. In other words, the economic power of a small
class of wealthy men had grown, on account of peculiar insular
conditions, greater than was healthy for the community.

Secondly, England was, more than any other part of Western Europe (save
the Batavian March), [Footnote: I mean Belgium: that frontier of Roman
Influence upon the lower Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith
and just preserved it.] a series of markets and of ports, a place of
very active cosmopolitan influence, in which new opportunities for the
corrupt, new messages of the enthusiastic, were frequent.

In the third place, that curious phenomena on which I dwelt in the last
chapter, the superstitious attachment of citizens to the civil power,
to awe of, and devotion to, the monarch, was exaggerated in England as
nowhere else.

Now put these three things together, especially the first and third
(for the second was both of minor importance and more superficial), and
you will appreciate why England fell.

One small, too wealthy class, tainted with the atheism that always
creeps into wealth long and securely enjoyed, was beginning to possess
too much of English land. It would take far too long to describe here
what the process had been. It is true that the absolute monopoly of the
soil, the gripping and the strangling of the populace by landlords, is
a purely Protestant development. Nothing of that kind had happened or
would have been conceived of as possible in pre-Reformation England;
but still something like a quarter of the land (or a little less) had
_already_ before the Reformation got into the full possession of one
small class which had also begun to encroach upon the judiciary, in
some measure to supplant the populace in local law-making, and quite
appreciably to supplant the King in central law-making.

Let me not be misunderstood; the England of the fifteenth century, the
England of the generation just before the Reformation, was not an
England of Squires; it was not an England of landlords; it was still an
England of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old
boroughs nearly always show a great number of freeholds. The process by
which the later English aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up,
was but in germ before the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. But
for the Reformation it would not have matured. Sooner or later a
popular revolt (had the Faith revived) would have killed the growing
usurpation of the wealthy. But the germ was there; and the Reformation
coming just as it did, both was helped by the rich and helped them.

The slow acquisition of considerable power over the Courts of Law and
over the soil of the country by an oligarchy, imperfect though that
acquisition was as yet, already presented just after 1500 a
predisposing condition to the disease. It may be urged that if the
English people had fought the growing power of the Squires more
vigorously, the Squires would not have mastered them as they did,
during and on account of the religious revolution. Possibly; and the
enemies of the English people are quick to suggest that some native
sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing down of the social balance
in favor of the rich. But no one who can even pretend to know mediæval
England will say that the English consciously desired or willingly
permitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful foreign wars,
dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of national
consciousness, which consciousness had centred in the wealthier
classes—all these combined to let the evil in without warning, and, on
the eve of the Reformation, a rich, avaricious class was already
empowered to act in Britain, ready to grasp, as all the avaricious
classes were throughout the Western world, at the opportunity to revolt
against that Faith which has ever suspected, constrained and reformed
the tyranny of wealth.

Now add to this the strange, but at that time very real, worship of
government as a fetish. This spirit did not really strengthen
government: far from it. A superstition never strengthens its object,
nor even makes of the supposed power of that object a reality. But
though it did not give real power to the long intention of the prince,
it gave to the momentary word of the prince a fantastic power. In such
a combination of circumstances—nascent oligarchy, but the prince
worshipped—you get, holding the position of prince, Henry VIII., a
thorough Tudor, that is, a man weak almost to the point of
irresponsibility where his passions were concerned; violent from that
fundamental weakness which, in the absence of opposition, ruins things
as effectively as any strength.

No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt
against civilization than was the Tudor family. Upon the contrary,
Henry VII., his son, and his two granddaughters if anything exceeded in
their passion for the old order of the Western world. But at the least
sign of resistance, Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who intrigued, Henry,
their father, who pillaged, Henry, their grandfather, who robbed and
saved, were one. To these characters slight resistance was a spur; with
strong manifold opposition they were quite powerless to deal. Their
minds did not grip (for their minds, though acute, were not large) but
their passions shot. And one may compare them, when their passions of
pride, of lust, of jealousy, of doting, of avarice or of facile power
were aroused, to vehement children. Never was there a ruling family
less statesmanlike; never one less full of stuff and of creative power.

Henry, urged by an imperious young woman, who had gained control of
him, desired a divorce from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, grown old
for him. The Papal Court temporized with him and opposed him. He was
incapable of negotiation and still more incapable of foresight. His
energy, which was “of an Arabian sort,” blasted through the void,
because a void was there: none would then withstand the Prince. Of
course, it seemed to him no more than one of these recurrent quarrels
with the mundane power of Rome, which all Kings (and Saints among them)
had engaged in for many hundred years. All real powers thus conflict in
all times. But, had he known it (and he did not know it), the moment
was fatally inopportune for playing that game. Henry never meant to
break permanently with the unity of Christendom. A disruption of that
unity was probably inconceivable to him. He meant to “exercise
pressure.” All his acts from the decisive Proclamation of September 19,
1530, onwards prove it. But the moment was the moment of a
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, blundered into
disaster without knowing what the fullness of that moment was. He was
devout, especially to the Blessed Sacrament. He kept the Faith for
himself, and he tried hard to keep it for others. But having lost
unity, he let in what he loathed. Not, so long as he lived, could those
doctrines of the Reformers triumph here: but he had compromised with
their spirit, and at his death a strong minority—perhaps a tenth of
England, more of London—was already hostile to the Creed.

It was the same thing with the suppression of the monasteries. Henry
meant no effect on religion by that loot: he, none the less, destroyed
it. He intended to enrich the Crown: he ruined it. In the matter of
their financial endowment, an economic crisis, produced by the unequal
growth of economic powers, had made the monastic foundation ripe for
re-settlement. Religious orders were here wealthy without reason—poor
in spirit and numbers, but rich in land; there impoverished without
reason—rich in popularity and spiritual power, but poor in land. The
dislocation, which all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic
side through the mere efflux of time, inclined every government in
Europe to a re-settlement of religious endowment. Everywhere it took
place; everywhere it involved dissolution and restoration.

But Henry did not re-settle. He plundered and broke. He used the
contemporary idolatry of executive power just as much at Reading or in
the Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and immediate popular
feeling was with him, as at Glastonbury where it was against him, as in
Yorkshire where it was in arms, as in Galway where there was no bearing
with it at all. There was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of
complexity, and when in this Jacobin, unexampled way, he had simply got
rid of that which he should have restored and transformed, of what
effect was that vast act of spoliation? It paralyzed the Church. It
ultimately brought down the Monarchy.

From a fourth to a third of the economic power over the means of
production in England, which had been vested top-heavily in the
religious foundations—here, far too rich, there, far too poor—Henry got
by one enormous confiscation. Yet he made no permanent addition to the
wealth of _the Crown_. On the contrary, he started its decline. _The
land passed by an instinctive multiple process—but very rapidly—to the
already powerful class which had begun to dominate the villages_. Then,
when it was too late, the Tudors attempted to stem the tide. But the
thing was done. Upon the indifference which is always common to a
society long and profoundly Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or, having
conquered heresy, ignorant at any rate of struggle for the Faith, two
ardent minorities converged: the small minority of confused enthusiasts
who really did desire what they believed to be a restoration of
“primitive” Christianity: the much larger minority of men now grown
almost invincibly powerful in the economic sphere. The Squires, twenty
years after Henry’s death, had come to possess, through the ruin of
religion, _something like half the land of England_. With the rapidity
of a fungus growth the new wealth spread over the desolation of the
land. The enriched captured both the Universities, all the Courts of
Justice, most of the public schools. They won their great civil war
against the Crown. Within a century after Henry’s folly, they had
established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy
and central government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in
vain; they killed one embarrassed King—Charles I., and they set up his
son, Charles II., as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their
victory over the Crown, they and the capitalists, who have sprung from
their avarice and their philosophy, and largely from their very loins,
have been completely masters of England.

Here the reader may say: “What! this large national movement to be
interpreted as the work of such minorities? A few thousand squires and
merchants backing a few more thousand enthusiasts, changed utterly the
mass of England?” Yes; to interpret it otherwise is to read history
backwards. It is to think that England then was what England later
became. There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any
illusion to which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past
in the light of the recent past; to think the process of the one
towards the other “inevitable;” to regard the whole matter as a slow
inexorable process, independent of the human will, still suits the
materialist pantheism of our time. There is an inherent tendency in all
men to this fallacy of reading themselves into the past, and of
thinking their own mood a consummation at once excellent and necessary:
and most men who write of these things imagine a vaguely Protestant
Tudor England growing consciously Protestant in the England of the
Stuarts.

That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a combined effort
of reading and of imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though you
did not know what Wednesday was to be, and then to describe what
Tuesday was. England did not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she
was Protestant then. Rather, she is Protestant now because she then
lost the Faith.

Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century Englishman in the
midst of the Reformation, and what do you perceive? A society wholly
Catholic in tradition, lax and careless in Catholic practice; irritated
or enlivened here and there by a few furious preachers, or by a few
enthusiastic scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of the civil
government; intensely national; in all the roots and traditions of its
civilization, Roman; impatient of the disproportion of society, and in
particular of economic disproportion in the religious aspect of
society, because the religious function, by the very definition of
Catholicism, by its very Creed, should be the first to redress
tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes first, a mania for his King;
next, a violent economic revolution, which, in many parts, can be made
to seem an approach to justice; finally, a national appeal of the
strongest kind against the encroaching power of Spain.

When the work was done, say by 1620, the communication between England
and those parts of the ancient West, which were still furiously
resisting the storm, was cut. No spiritual force could move England
after the Armada and its effect, save what might arise spontaneously in
the many excited men who still believed (they continued to believe it
for fifty years) that the whole Church of Christ had gone wrong for
centuries; that its original could be restored and that personal
revelations were granted them for their guidance.

These visionaries were the Reformers; to these, souls still athirst for
spiritual guidance turned. They were a minority even at the end of the
sixteenth century, the last years of Elizabeth, but they were a
minority full of initiative and of action. With the turn of the century
(1600-1620) the last men who could remember Catholic training were very
old or dead. The new generation could turn to nothing but the new
spirit. For authority it could find nothing definite but a printed
book: a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. For teachers, nothing but
this minority, the Reformers. That minority, though remaining a
minority, leavened and at last controlled the whole nation: by the
first third of the seventeenth century Britain was utterly cut off from
the unity of Christendom and its new character was sealed. The Catholic
Faith was dead.

The governing class remained largely indifferent (as it still is) to
religion, yet it remained highly cultured. The populace drifted here,
into complete indifference, there, into orgiastic forms of worship. The
middle class went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbarism of
the outer Germanies permeated it and transformed it. The
closer-reasoned, far more perverted and harder French heresy of Calvin
partly deflected the current—and a whole new society was formed and
launched. That was the English Reformation.

Its effect upon Europe was stupendous; for, though England was cut off,
England was still England. You could not destroy in a Roman province
the great traditions of municipality and letters. It was as though a
phalanx of trained troops had crossed the frontier in some border war
and turned against their former comrades. England lent, and has from
that day continuously lent, the strength of a great civilized tradition
to forces whose original initiative was directed against European
civilization and its tradition. The loss of Britain was the one great
wound in the body of the Western world. It is not yet healed.

Yet all this while that other island of the group to the Northwest of
Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed
civilization as were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously
accepted the Faith, presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss
of Britain, which had been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke
of battle cleared off, could discover the astonishing loyalty of
Ireland. And over against this exceptional province—Britain—now lost to
the Faith, lay an equally exceptional and unique outer part which had
never been a Roman province, yet which now remained true to the
tradition of Roman men; it balanced the map like a counterweight. The
efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence,
persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part or time of the
world. They have failed. As I cannot explain why they have failed, so I
shall not attempt to explain how and why the Faith in Ireland was saved
when the Faith in Britain went under. I do not believe it capable of an
historic explanation. It seems to me a phenomenon essentially
miraculous in character, not _generally_ attached (as are all
historical phenomena) to the general and divine purpose that governs
our large political events, but _directly_ and _specially_ attached. It
is of great significance; how great, men will be able to see many years
hence when another definite battle is joined between the forces of the
Church and her opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe has
maintained a perfect integrity and has kept serene, without internal
reactions and without their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe
which is the Catholic Church.

I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this
disaster: its spiritual result—an isolation of the soul; its political
result—a consequence of the spiritual—the prodigious release of energy,
the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few
under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the
ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.



X
CONCLUSION


The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul.

This was its fruit: from this all its consequences proceed: not only
those clearly noxious, which have put in jeopardy the whole of our
traditions and all our happiness, but those apparently advantageous,
especially in material things.

The process cannot be seen at work if we take a particular
date—especially too early a date—and call it the moment of the
catastrophe. There was a long interval of confusion and doubt, in which
it was not certain whether the catastrophe would be final or no, in
which its final form remained undetermined, and only upon the
conclusion of which could modern Europe with its new divisions, and its
new fates, be perceived clearly. The breach with authority began in the
very first years of the sixteenth century. It is not till the middle of
the seventeenth century at least, and even somewhat later, that the new
era begins.

For more than a hundred years the conception of the struggle as an
oecumenical struggle, as something affecting the whole body of Europe,
continued. The general upheaval, the revolt, which first shook the West
in the early years of the sixteenth century—to take a particular year,
the year 1517—concerned all our civilization, was everywhere debated,
produced an universal reaction met by as universal a resistance, for
three generations of men. No young man who saw the first outbreak of
the storm could imagine it even in old age, as a disruption of Europe.
No such man lived to see it more than half way through.

It was not till a corresponding date in the succeeding century—or
rather later—not till Elizabeth of England and Henry IV. of France were
dead (and all the protagonists, the Reformers on the one side, Loyola,
Neri, on the other, long dead) not till the career of Richelieu in the
one country and the beginnings of an aristocratic Parliament in England
were apparent, that the Reformation could clearly be seen to have
separated certain districts of our civilization from the general
traditions of the whole, and to have produced, in special regions and
sections of society, the peculiar Protestant type which was to mark the
future.

The work of the Reformation was accomplished, one may say, a little
after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. England in particular was
definitely Protestant by the decade 1620-1630—hardly earlier. The
French Huguenot body, though still confused with political effort, had
come to have a separate and real existence at about the same time. The
Oligarchy of Dutch merchants had similarly cut off their part of the
Low Countries from imperial rule, and virtually established their
independence. The North German Principalities and sundry smaller states
of the mountains (notably Geneva), had definitely received the new
stamp. As definitely France, Bohemia, the Danube, Poland and Italy and
all the South were saved.

Though an armed struggle was long to continue, though the North Germans
were nearly recaptured by the Imperial Power and only saved by French
policy, though we were to have a reflex of it here in the Civil Wars
and the destruction of the Crown, and though the last struggle against
the Stuarts and the greater general war against Louis XIV. were but
sequels to the vast affair, yet the great consequence of that affair
was fixed before these wars began. The first third of the seventeenth
century launches a new epoch. From about that time there go forward
upon parallel lines the great spiritual and consequent temporal
processes of modern Europe. They have yet to come to judgment, for they
are not yet fulfilled: but perhaps their judgment is near.

These processes filling the last three hundred years have been as
follows: (1) A rapid extension of physical science and with it of every
other form of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things. (2)
The rise, chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe (but spreading
thence in part to the Catholic) of what we call today “Capitalism,”
that is, the possession of the means of production by the few, and
their exploitation of the many. (3) The corruption of the principle of
authority until it was confused with mere force. (4) The general,
though not universal, growth of total wealth with the growth of
physical knowledge. (5) The ever widening effect of skepticism, which,
whether masked under traditional forms or no, was from the beginning a
spirit of _complete_ negation and led at last to the questioning not
only of any human institutions, but of the very forms of thought and of
the mathematical truths. (6) With all these of course we have had a
universal mark—the progressive extension of despair.

Could anyone look back upon these three centuries from some very great
distance of time, he would see them as an episode of extraordinary
extension in things that should be dissociated: knowledge and wealth,
on the one hand, the unhappiness of men upon the other. And he would
see that as the process matured, or rather as the corruption deepened,
all its marks were pushed to a degree so extreme as to jeopardize at
last the very structure of European society. Physical science acquired
such power, the oppression of the poor was pushed to such a length, the
reasoning spirit in man was permitted to attain such a tottering pitch
of insecurity, that a question never yet put to Europe arose at
last—whether Europe, not from external foes, but from her own inward
lesion may not fail.

Corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question—the
culmination of so much evil—necessarily arises this the sole vital
formula of our time: “_Europe must return to the Faith, or she will
perish._”


I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation
of the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much more
than its mere statement might promise.

The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the
sane balance produced by general experience, the weight of security,
and the general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition
of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much
more than merely complete and confirm human misery.

In the first place and underlying all, the isolation of the soul
releases in a society a furious new accession of _force_. The break-up
of any stable system in physics, as in society, makes actual a
prodigious reserve of potential energy. It transforms the power that
was keeping things together with a power driving separably each
component part: the effect of an explosion. That is why the Reformation
launched the whole series of material advance, but launched it
chaotically and on divergent lines which would only end in disaster.
But the thing had many other results.

Thus, we next notice that the new isolation of the soul compelled the
isolated soul to strong vagaries. The soul will not remain in the void.
If you blind it, it will grope. If it cannot grasp what it appreciates
by every sense, it will grasp what it appreciates by only one.

On this account in the dissolution of the corporate sense and of
corporate religion you had successive idols set up, worthy and
unworthy, none of them permanent. The highest and the most permanent
was a reaction towards corporate life in the shape of a worship of
nationality—patriotism.

You had at one end of the scale an extraordinary new _tabus_, the
erection in one place of a sort of maniac god, blood-thirsty, an object
of terror. In another (or the same) a curious new ritual observance of
nothingness upon every seventh day. In another an irrational attachment
to a particular printed book. In another successive conceptions: first,
that the human reason was sufficient for the whole foundations of human
life—that there were no mysteries: next, the opposite extravagance that
the human reason had no authority even in its own sphere. And these
two, though contradictory, had one root. The rationalism of the
eighteenth century carried on through the materialism of the
nineteenth, the irrational doubts of Kant (which included much
emotional rubbish) carried on to the sheer chaos of the later
metaphysicians, with their denial of contradictions, and even of being.
Both sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to make itself
some system from within: as the unsupported soul, in an evil dream, now
stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved in some fearful
emptiness.

All this, the first interior effect of the Reformation, strong in
proportion to the strength of the reforming movement, powerful in the
regions or sects which had broken away, far less powerful in those
which had maintained the Faith, would seem to have run its full course,
and to have settled at last into universal negation and a universal
challenge proffered to every institution, and every postulate. But
since humanity cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy, we may well
believe that there is coming, or has already begun, yet another stage,
in which the lack of corporate support for the soul will breed
attempted strange religions: witchcrafts and necromancies.

It may be so. It may be that the great debate will come up for final
settlement before such novel diseases spread far. At any rate, for the
moment we are clearly in a stage of complete negation. But it is to be
repeated that this breaking up of the foundations differs in degree
with varying societies, that still in a great mass of Europe,
numerically the half perhaps, the necessary anchors of sanity still
hold: and that half is the half where directly by the practice of the
Faith, or indirectly through a hold upon some part of its tradition,
the Catholic Church exercises an admitted or distant authority over the
minds of men.

The next process we note is—by what some may think a paradox—also due
to the isolation of the soul. It is the process of increasing
knowledge. Men acting in a fashion highly corporate will not so readily
question, nor therefore so readily examine, as will men acting alone.
Men whose major results are taken upon an accepted philosophy, will not
be driven by such a need of inquiry as those who have abandoned that
guide. In the moment, more than a thousand years ago, when the last of
the evangelizing floodtide was still running strongly, a very great man
wrote of the physical sciences: “Upon such toys I wasted my youth.” And
another wrote, speaking of divine knowledge: “All the rest is smoke.”

But in the absences of faith, demonstrable things are the sole
consolation.

There are three forms in which the human mind can hold the truth: The
form of Science, which means that we accept a thing through
demonstration, and therefore cannot admit the possibility of its
opposite. The form of Opinion, which means that we accept a thing
through probability, that is through a partial, but not complete
demonstration, and therefore we do not deny the possibility of the
opposite. The form of Faith, where we accept the thing without
demonstration and yet deny the possibility of its opposite, as for
instance, the faith of all men, not mad, in the existence of the
universe about them, and of other human minds.

When acknowledged and defined Faith departs, it is clear that of the
remaining two rivals, Opinion has no ground against Science. That which
can be demonstrated holds all the field. Indeed, it is the mark of
modern insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude
save certitude through demonstration, and therefore does not, as a
rule, appreciate even its own unproved first principles.

Well, this function of the isolated soul, inquiry and the necessity for
demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and
physical fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the three
modern centuries. We all are equally familiar with its prodigious
results. Not one of them has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one
but has been increasingly misused to the misery of man. There is in the
tragedy something comic also, which is the perpetual puzzlement of
these the very authors of discovery, to find that, somehow or other,
discovery alone does not create joy, and that, somehow or other, a
great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else can be used ill. Also
in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further extension of physical
science as promising, in some illogical way, relief.

A progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so
natural to man (so long as civic order is preserved) that it would,
indeed, have taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the unity
of Europe been preserved. But the destruction of that unity totally
accelerated the pace and as totally threw the movement off its rails.

The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older
than the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The
doors upon modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was
to enter them, had been cut off from its fellows. We owe the
miscarriage of all our great endeavor in this field, not to that spring
of endeavor, but to its deflection. It is a blasphemy to deny the value
of advancing knowledge, and at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it
for its supposed consequences. Its consequences are only evil through
an evil use, that is, through an evil philosophy.

In connection with this release of powerful inquiry through the
isolation of the soul, you have an apparently contradictory, and
certainly supplementary effect: the setting up of unfounded external
authority. It is a curious development, one very little recognized, but
one which a fixed observance of the modern world will immediately
reveal; and those who come to see it are invariably astonished at the
magnitude of its action. Men—under the very influence of
skepticism—have come to accept almost any printed matter, almost any
repeated name, as an authority infallible and to be admitted without
question. They have come to regard the denial of such authority as a
sort of insanity, or rather they have in most practical affairs, come
to be divided into two groups: a small number of men, who know the
truth, say, upon a political matter or some financial arrangement, or
some unsolved problem; and a vast majority, which accepts without
question an always incomplete, a usually quite false, statement of the
thing because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in
a hundred books.

This singular and fantastic result of the long divorce between the
non-Catholic mind and reason has a profound effect upon the modern
world. Indeed, the great battle about to be engaged between chaos and
order will turn largely upon this form of suggestion, this acceptation
of an unfounded and irrational authority.

Lastly, there is of the major consequences of the Reformation that
phenomenon which we have come to call “Capitalism,” and which many,
recognizing its universal evil, wrongly regard as the prime obstacle to
right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now
intolerable modern strains.

What is called “Capitalism” arose directly in all its branches from the
isolation of the soul. That isolation permitted an unrestricted
competition. It gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent an
unchecked career. It gave every license to greed. And on the other side
it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in an
economic stability. Through it there arose in England first, later
throughout the more active Protestant nations, and later still in
various degrees throughout the rest of Christendom, a system under
which a few possessed the land and the machinery of production, and the
many were gradually dispossessed. The many thus dispossessed could only
exist upon doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human life a care
to these. The possessors also mastered the state and all its
organs—hence the great National Debts which accompanied the system:
hence even the financial hold of distant and alien men upon subject
provinces of economic effort: hence the draining of wealth not only
from increasingly dissatisfied subjects over-seas, but from the
individual producers of foreign independent states.

The true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement,
and you naturally get a demand for relief through the denial of the
principle of ownership altogether. Here again, as in the matter of the
irrational _tabus_ and of skepticism, two apparently contradictory
things have one root: Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman system (not
realizable) called Socialism, both spring from one type of mind and
both apply to one kind of diseased society.

Against both, the pillar of reaction is peasant society, and peasant
society has proved throughout Europe largely coördinate with the
remaining authority of the Catholic Church. For a peasant society does
not mean a society composed of peasants, but one in which modern
Industrial Capitalism yields to agriculture, and in which agriculture
is, in the main, conducted by men possessed in part or altogether of
their instruments of production and of the soil, either through
ownership or customary tenure. In such a society all the institutions
of the state repose upon an underlying conception of secure and
well-divided private property which can never be questioned and which
colors all men’s minds. And that doctrine, like every other sane
doctrine, though applicable only to temporal conditions, has the firm
support of the Catholic Church.


So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of
that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which
cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the
spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere
feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening
road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a
settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more.
Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this
awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is
still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly
insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the
ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final,
thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our
European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical
antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will
stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.