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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.
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