§ 4 The Social Failure
Of the eastern Christian empire as it is left curtailed of more than half its area by the Moslem conquest, the one thing that cannot be predicated is progress or transformation. Here again it would be an error to regard Christianity as the cause of stagnation: the whole political science of antiquity had been markedly conservative; but it must be noted that historic Christianity absolutely endorsed the ideal of fixity. Only conditions of stimulating culture-contact could have preserved a vigorous mental life under its sway; and the condition of Byzantium was unhappily one of almost complete racial and religious isolation. The Byzantium of Justinian and Heraclius is almost the ideal of ossification; its very disorders are normal, the habitual outbreaks of a vicious organism. There is nothing in pagan history to compare with the chronic pandemonium set up in Christian Constantinople by the circus factions of blues and greens, whose mutual massacres in generation after generation outdid the slaughters of many civil wars. As painted by its own Christian censors, the Byzantine town population of all orders was at least as worthless as that of pagan Rome in its worst imperial days; it realized the ignorance and unprogressiveness of imperial China without the Chinese compensations of normal good nature, courtesy, domestic unity, and patient toil.
Industry indeed there must have been; it was perhaps the silk industry introduced by Justinian that began the economic salvation of the State; but the law prescribed a system of industrial caste, binding every man, as far as might be, to his father’s trade, which must have kept the working populace very much on the level of that of ancient Egypt. Nor can matters have been socially much better in the West, whether in Italy under Byzantine or Lombard rule, or in the new barbarian States, Arian and Catholic. Everywhere the old inequalities of law were rather worsened than cured, and no Christian teacher dreamed of curing them. The ideals of the most earnest among them, as Jerome and Paulinus, began and ended in mere pietism and physical self-mortification.
It is not surprising, then, that all over the Christian world the most salient social result of the creed was the institution of monasticism, a Christian adaptation of a usage long common in religious and down-trodden Egypt. Everything conduced to promote it. The spectacle of constant strife and sensuality in the cities moved suffering souls of the unworldly type to withdraw to solitude or the cloister; all the leading teachers applauded the ideal, while denouncing its abuses; and for multitudes of unfortunate or inferior types, avoiding toil or escaping tyranny, then as later, the life of the monk or even of the hermit, though poor, was one of relative ease and idleness, greatly preferable to that of the proletary, since all could count on being at least maintained by popular charity, if not enriched by the believers in their sanctity. To these types were added that of the ignorant fanatic, which seems to have been as numerous as that of the slothful, and which under monastic conditions seems to have become more fanatical than ever. Thus some of the best and much of the worse moral elements, the latter of course immensely predominating, combined to weaken the social fabric, the former by withdrawing their finer personalities from a world that doubly needed them; the latter by withdrawing hands from labour and widening the realm of ignorant faith. Some powerful personalities, as Basil and Chrysostom and Gregory, were bred in the monastic life; but in the main it was a mere impoverishment of civilization. In the critical period of Christian history the monks are often found zealous in works of rabid violence, such as the destruction of pagan temples and Jewish synagogues, and the horrible murder of the pagan girl-philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria; and they too had their furious dogmatic strifes, notably in the fourth and fifth centuries, when those of Egypt constituted themselves the champions of the orthodoxy (then impeached) of Origen, for no clear reason save perhaps the fact of his self-mutilation. But, as Christian historians have remarked, they seem to have done nothing to resist the ruinous onslaught of Islam, which above all things despised monks. For that matter, the hierarchy did no better. The hierocracy established in Spain under the Visigoths served so to emasculate or paralyse the race that after an undisturbed life of three hundred years it fell in a day before a handful of Moslem filibusters from North Africa.
There is reason to believe, finally, that the intellectual as well as the political abjection of the Christian mass in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa made multitudes ready material for Islam, even as sectarian hatreds made others welcome the conqueror, and resent only his toleration of their opponents. Christian faith availed so little to make head against the new faith which assailed it, that we must infer a partial paralysis on the Christian side as a result of Moslem success. Success was the theological proof of divine aid; and many calamities, such as earthquakes, had previously seemed to tell of divine wrath against the Christian world. Such arguments shook multitudes. Numbers apostatized at once; and when the Moslem rule was established from Jerusalem to Carthage, the Christian Church, tolerated only to be humiliated, dwindled to insignificance on its former soil. In the African provinces it absolutely disappeared; in the others it became incapable of moving either Arab or Frank to respect. Nestorian Christianity, already settled in Persia, was specially tolerated by the Saracens, as it had been by the Persians, because of its enmity to Christian Byzantium; but though it continued to subsist it was by toleration and not through strength. The Nestorian clergy and laity throve somewhat as Jews had done in Rome; but they made no headway against Islam, and some of the Asiatic States where they had been numerous fell away wholly to Mohammedanism. Thus was given once more the historic proof that any religion may in time be destroyed or degraded by brute force, provided only that the brute force be persistent, and efficiently applied.
What pagan Rome did not do, for lack of systematic effort or continuous purpose, Islam did with the greatest ease, the purpose and the effort being wholehearted. And when we compare the later civilization of the Saracens with that they overthrew, it is hard to feel that the world lost by the change. If monotheism had any civilizing virtue as against polytheism, it was the Moslems, not the Christians, who were monotheists; and the Moslem scorn of Christian man-worship and idolatry reproduced the old Christian tone towards paganism. On the side of morals, Moslem polygamy was indeed relatively evil; but on the other hand the giving of alms, so often claimed as a specially Christian virtue, was under Islam an absolute duty; Moslems could not hold Moslems as slaves; Islam knew no priestcraft; and it substantially excluded the common Christian evils of drunkenness and prostitution. Almost the only art carried on by the Byzantines from their pagan ancestors was that of architecture, their churches being often beautiful; and this art, as well as that of working in gold, the Saracens preserved; while it is to their later adoption of the ancient Greek science that the world owes the revival of knowledge after the night of the Dark Ages. Sculpture and painting were already become contemptible in Christian hands; and literature was in not much better case. It is to be noted, too, that the traditional blame of the Goths and Vandals for the disfigurement of ancient Rome is misplaced, the worst wreckers being the generals of Justinian and the inhabitants themselves, always ready to ruin a pagan memorial for the sake of building material.
When finally we seek to realize the aspect of the Hellenistic world in the time of Mohammed, in contrast with that of the age of Pericles; or the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in contrast with that of Hadrian, we are conscious of an immense loss of human faculty for beauty and joy, no less than for action. It is not too much to say that the Christian ideal of sanctity meant not only self-mortification and sadness but squalor in the individual life. Physical uncleanliness became a Christian virtue; and the mark of a city built in the Christian period came to be the absence of baths. Pagan Greece lives for ever in men’s thought as a dream of grace and beauty and enchanted speech; and though behind the shining vision of art and song there lingers immovably a sombre memory of strife and servitude, the art and the song are a deathless gift to mankind. At every summit of its attainment our civilization looks back to them with an unquenchable envy, an impotent desire, as of a race disinherited. To regain that morning glory of life is the spontaneous yearning of all who have gazed on the distant light of it. But the man who would wish to re-create the Constantinople of Justinian or Heraclius has not yet declared himself.
Dream for dream, the child-like creed of the God-crowded Hellas of Pheidias’ day, peopled with statues and crowned with temples of glorious symmetry, is an incomparably fairer thing than the tortured dogma of the Byzantine church, visually expressing itself in wretched icons, barbaric trappings, and infinite mummeries of ceremonial. Idolatry for idolatry, the adoration of noble statues by chanting bands of youths and maidens can have wrought less harm to head and heart than the prostration of their posterity before the abortions of Byzantine art. Superstition for superstition, there is nothing in old Hellene religion, with all its survivals of savage myth, to be compared for moral and mental abjection to the practice of the Christian Greeks, with their pilgrimages to Arabia to kiss Job’s dunghill, and their grovelling worship of dead men’s bones. Some Christian historians, seeking a vital test, have concluded that under paganism there was no good “life of the heart”; but whatever may be the modern superiority in this regard, there is none to be discerned in the Christian civilizations which in the seventh century still spoke the classic tongues of paganism.
In the West, where a spiritual power had begun obscurely to acquire a Roman empire which parodied the old, there is indeed a potential superiority predicable for the new. Gregory sending Augustine to convert the Britons is a fairer moral spectacle than that of Cæsar, bent on plunder, seeking to conquer them. But whatever might be the moral merit of a sincere fanaticism like that of Gregory, who trampled down culture as eagerly as he pushed propaganda, the life of too many Popes had already shown that the new Romanism was only to be Cæsarism with a difference, and that for the spiritual as for the temporal empire the great end was gold. Tyranny for tyranny, and power for power, the Rome of Trajan, superb and cruel, is hardly a worse thing than the Rome in which Popes fought with hired bands for their chair, or sat in it through the favour of courtesans; and the Roman populace of the days of Gregory was no worthier than that of the days of Caracalla or of Honorius. “Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions,” says Milman, describing the conduct of the Romans at Gregory’s death, when they had become thoroughly Christianized. As of old, the accident of real merit in the ruler could avail for much in administration; but still the calm Antonines can bear comparison as potentates and men with any wearer of the triple crown.