| ### CHAPTER 2:THE CHURCH AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 395-537 ###  |

| #### 1. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395 |

| #### #### CATHOLICISM was not the product of the civilisation in which it first appeared; nor did it draw from that civilisation the strength by which it developed and spread abroad. It could not, in the nature of things, be essentially dependent on that civilisation, but it was immensely conditioned by it in all the circumstances of its growth. The Roman roads, the ease of communication, the internal peace and order secured to a whole world through the single political administration, the common languages, the common cultural idiom of Hellenism, all these undoubtedly helped the early propaganda. With the fortunes of the Roman State those of the new religion were, inevitably, very closely linked indeed. Whatever menaced the one would certainly handicap the other. #### It so happened that, in little more than two centuries from the first preaching of the Gospel, the political regime we call the Empire was brought to the verge of disruption. The basis of the Empire was military power. The emperor was, in essence, the magistrate to whom the command of the army and dictatorial power were made over for life. Upon the commander-in- chief's hold over the army, therefore, upon the reality of his command, all was based. The senate's delegation of powers, its assent to his nomination were, from the beginning, formalities merely. The real power lay with the army, and increasingly, as the first two centuries went by, it was the man who could manage the army who ruled. Periodically the army got out of hand. Rival armies supported rival claimants to the supreme power, and civil wars had to be fought to settle the issue. There was one such crisis in 68-69, another in 192-193, and the emperor who emerged victorious from this last, Septimius Severus, summed up for his successors the policy which alone would make the position safe for them, "See that the soldiers have plenty of money. Nothing else matters." #### In the seventy years that followed the death of this shrewd realist, the weakness inherent in the State's foundations bred all its fullness of destruction. Emperor after emperor was set up by the soldiers, only to be murdered when he ceased to please them, twenty-six emperors in fifty years. One they slew because he proved an incompetent general in the field; another because he strove to restore military discipline; another because, his private fortune exhausted, he ceased to be able to be generous; others again from sheer boredom. In different parts of the empire different armies set up their own emperors, none of them strong enough even to attempt to suppress his rivals, and for the best part of a generation whole provinces were ruled as independent states. Finally, a succession of able soldiers from Illyria (Diocletian and Constantine the chief of them) halted the long anarchy. The State was now reorganised. Every last vestige of the republic was swept away. The emperor was, henceforth, an absolute monarch of the oriental type; and by a careful redistribution of the powers of his subordinates -- whether generals in the army or governors of provinces -- and a systematic separation of the civil and military authority throughout the administration, barriers were set against any return of the anarchy. Diocletian recognised, too, how inevitable was the competition for the supreme position, and to guard against this he associated others with himself as joint emperors of the one state. There were two emperors from 285 and four from 293. #### Even this far reaching change did not immediately succeed. On the retirement of Diocletian and his senior colleague in 306 the new senior looked outside the imperial families for his two new assistants. Whereupon Constantine and Maxentius, the sons of the late emperors, Constantius and Maximian, took up arms, and a new civil war began among the six emperors. It ended in 312 with Constantine master of the West. Eleven years later he had conquered his eastern colleague and was sole lord of the Roman world. He was almost the last to hold that place for any length of time. When he died (337) he left his power by will-betraying thereby an un-Roman conception of political power simply monstrous in its scale -- to his sons and nephews. Organised murder disposed of the nephews, a civil war of the eldest son (340), and for ten years the dyarchy was restored to the profit of Constans and Constantius II. In 350 Constans was murdered, and three years of war followed between his murderer and his surviving brother. Constantius was in the end victorious and thenceforward, until the one surviving nephew of Constantine rose to contest his supremacy in 360, he ruled alone like his father thirty years before. Death came to him in 361, just in time to prevent a new struggle between himself and Julian his cousin. Julian, in his short reign of twenty months, had no rival nor had his successor Jovian in his still shorter reign. But with the accession, on Jovian's death (364), of Valentinian I, the army insisted on his associating his brother as emperor. Thenceforward, except for a brief three months at the end of the reign of Theodosius I (November, 394-January, 395), no one man ever ruled again the lands of the empire of Augustus. #### For all who could read, death was written very evidently on the face of the imperial system. It was, indeed, only the chance of the succession of great princes in the second century that had preserved the empire beyond its first hundred years. The empire was a pyramid balanced on its apex and the most marvellous thing about it is that it survived at all. Thanks to Diocletian and to Constantine in the first place, it survived even the wholesale destruction of the third century and, even as a united political system, it was to outlive in the East by many centuries its disappearance from the West. But there was a further fundamental weakness against which even the greatest of emperors could not secure the State -- weakness of an economic nature. It is one of the capital facts of the situation that the political breakdown and the invasions of the fifth century occurred while an economic revolution was in progress. #### The world in which the Church was founded and in which it had so far developed, was a world in which the town was all important, and in which the countryside existed only for the sake of the town. It was the towns that were, necessarily, the first centres of the new religion; and the bishops, one in each city, the cells which together made up the Church Universal. By the time of Diocletian's restoration of the Roman State -- or, to look at it from another point of view, by the time of Constantine's conversion -- the first beginnings were, however, apparent of a social revolution whose final effect would be to reverse this relation of town and countryside. The towns were already beginning to lose their primacy as social organisms. During the whole of the fourth century the pace of this new development increased rapidly. It was still in its first stage when the mainstay of the town's importance as against the countryside -- the central imperial government -- disappeared altogether from the West. Simultaneously with that disappearance there broke over the ill-defended frontiers wave after wave of primitive nomadic peoples bent on plunder; and there also took place, through the so-called barbarian troops of the army, the establishment in Spain, Gaul, and Italy itself, of kingdoms which, theoretically within the empire, were in fact autonomous. In-these momentous years were laid the foundations of that new civilisation in which the Catholic Church was to work for the next eight hundred years. To understand at all what the Church did for that civilisation, to understand how the Church's development was in turn conditioned by it, there must be borne in mind something of its leading characteristics as they differentiate it from the older world in which the Church was founded. The army, at the end of that century whose early years saw Constantine's conversion, still kept the frontier. What of the life within? #### From about the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (16-1-180) there is observable a slow but unmistakable drift in the economic life of the Roman world, a strong ebb towards a more primitive (or more natural) system. There is a persistent debasement of the coinage (hardly checked until Diocletian). There is that debasement's inevitable effect in a chaotic flux of prices. Money-gold coins which really are gold, silver which really is silver-disappears. All that remains are the copper coins covered with a mere wash of silver, "metal assignats," as Mommsen called them. The State begins to be willing to take its taxes in kind, in goods and services. It even begins to grade and to pay its salaries, too, in kind. The army had always been the empire's greatest burden, and in this third century (Septimius Severus to Diocletian) the army was absolute master, greater than ever, better paid, the empire its prey to be looted at will. The bureaucracy, too, swelled its numbers beyond anything hitherto known. Industries -- the commercialised industries of modern times-there were none to speak of, none to be a source of wealth to the State. Commerce on the large scale, again hardly existed. The one real source of wealth was land. The chief means, apart from land, open to the man who wished to "invest" money was the letting it out at interest or the farming of taxes. The towns in such a system, were parasites, places where the middlemen lived, markets where they traded, barracks where were housed the soldiers who protected the exploitation. For exploitation was really the ultimate end of the system. The very rich grew richer still, the poor remained poor. The middle class disappeared. #### Diocletian's success as restorer was, in the economic sphere, inevitably limited. His reforms amounted, often enough, to little more than a legal consecration of existing abuses. He restored the coinage; he simplified, while he extended, the system of imperial taxation; he tried, but failed signally, to stabilise prices by imperial edict; his great feat was to inaugurate a regime in which the whole population of the empire was gradually conscripted and bound down, each class with its descendants -- for the burden was hereditary -- to work for the welfare of the State. The taxes are not excessive, the administration is not extravagant. But every possible source of wealth is surveyed and its owner assessed -- land, cattle, slaves, serfs, peasants and owners too. All are now bound by law to the trade in which they work, and their children are bound to follow them in it -- civil servants, the artificers in the armament factories and in the textile factories where are made the costumes for the court and the uniforms for the army; the ship owners, millers and bakers on whom the population of the cities depends for its daily food-allowance; the various building crafts and trades; the bath keepers, and by no means least, the army of workmen, keepers, charioteers, gladiators, actors -- "slaves of the people's pleasure" the law styles them- who produce the public games given now, at Rome, on 175 days of the year. The free farmer, the colonus, is likewise bound to the land. The owner cannot dispossess this class of tenant. If he sells the land the coloni go with it. It is to the land, rather than to the owner, that the new regime enslaves them. The free peasants of the villages are likewise bound to their village. No man shall escape his due share of the great burden. Nor is this a matter that affects only the trader and the working class. For there is yet another conscription -- of the time and brains of the more leisured class to the service of the city where they live. #### The Roman civitas is more than a town. It is the town and the hinterland of countryside, often very extensive, upon which the town lives. It is a thing founded for the purpose of exploiting that countryside. It has its “constitution," its senate and its magistrates. It is a tiny State in itself, with considerable autonomy, and from this point of view it is not incorrect to describe the empire as a federation of self-governing municipalities. For the senate and the high offices there is a considerable property qualification. It is the local aristocracy who rule, and amongst whom the honours, the titles, the social consideration of high office are shared. This cursus honorum entails expense on whoever proceeds through it, expense which is ever increasing. Moreover, the class from which the office-holders are drawn is made responsible for the taxation. In case of deficit or maladministration this class, as a class, is liable. Whence supervision from- the central government and, often enough, an endeavour to escape from the burden of one's rank. Whence conscription here too, and a conscription which, once more, is hereditary. The man born a curialis cannot escape his destiny of ruling the civitas and of being responsible to the State for the quota it should contribute to the imperial revenue. One way out there did remain -- a way only the very wealthiest could take. This was to buy rank as an honorary member of the Roman senate itself. It was a way all who could ultimately went, and these last two centuries of the Empire in the West saw a steady flight of these clarissimi viri from the towns to their country estates. #### The towns, then, slowly shrank. They became once again mere centres for bargaining, and for the offices of what local government still went on. The great landed estate, on the other hand, gained a new importance. It was a fiscal unit independent of the civitas and gradually it became, under the protection of its privileged owner, an asylum for all who fled the heavy burden of the urban regime, for the impoverished curialis and the harassed artificer alike. Economically the landed estate had always been self-sufficient. Now it slowly began to acquire a political self-sufficiency too. The owner gradually began to exercise judicial authority over those who lived on his land, settling their disputes, punishing their misdoings. He had his prison. He had his armed guards. The emperors protested and legislated, but in vain. Nor was it merely in an accidental fashion that one wealthier private citizen thus became the master of his co-citizens, and his private will more powerful in their lives than the law. Already, from the beginning of the fourth century, the weaker man had begun consciously and deliberately to surrender himself to the more powerful, the poorer man to the richer, for the sake of the influential patronage he thereby gained. This is the patrocinium and here, too, the emperors legislated in a contrary sense and here, too, they legislated in vain. Here, very notably, the coming "invasion" will wear down to nothing the check of their government. #### The federation of self-governing municipalities is, throughout the later fourth century, steadily losing its importance. More and more there is beginning to count this new arrangement of patron and client -- we cannot yet say overlord and vassal -- and the empire in the West is beginning to be a mass of such private associations, based on ownership of land, associations not yet legal, a mass held together by one thing only, the fact -- itself steadily less and less of a reality -- that all these inhabitants are citizens of the one state that the central government protects. That central government is, too, the last support of the importance of the towns, and with the fifth century it is to disappear. #### During these centuries of the steady decay of the imperial regime, of alternate chaos and temporary restoration, the Catholic Church has steadily grown and developed. It is the one institution that escapes the universal mortification, the one living free thing amid the new all-embracing mechanical despotism. Here alone does the tradition of individual initiative continue, of spiritual liberty, of social activity. Here alone do men continue to govern themselves, to find an escape from the paralysis to which, ultimately, the over-governed succumb. Popular life can, here, still find corporate expression; personality, stifled elsewhere, save in the army, can flourish. It is no matter for surprise that the best thought of the time is within the Church, that it is the Church alone which continues to breed thinkers and orators and rulers. The only live literature of this dull stagnant time is ecclesiastical, and inevitably the bishop's power and prestige increase enormously. He is indeed, in the city, the "one power capable of counterbalancing and resisting the all-pervading tyranny of the imperial bureaucracy." When that bureaucracy disappears what will be left to rival his place? Moreover, the possession of land is, in this new regime, to be the all-important, determining factor of political importance. The owner of land is to be ruler. In the coming age the Church is to be one of the greatest landowners of all. For in the new system of a rural economy the abbeys are to be, in the flourishing countrysides, what the bishops continue to be in the diminished towns. ####  |