Rome in the fourth century contained eighteen hundred family houses and forty-five thousand tenement buildings. There were a small number of immensely wealthy men, most of them senators, and a vast number of slaves, peasants, small tenant farmers, living near the subsistence level. The precarious situation of the small man was aggravated by the tax system. The financial needs of the Government were mostly met by a tax on land, levied at a fixed rate. A big landowner with estates scattered over the Empire could suffer a loss here through civil disturbance, a loss there through a bad harvest, and still be able to pay his taxes and show a'profit; a tenant farmer with a single piece of land, visited by similar misfortunes, could easily be ruined and forced to sell.
All of this meant that the Empire operated on a narrow margin of financial safety. The wars of the Republic had been wars of shameless aggression in which, as Gibbon says, ‘the perpetual violation of justice was maintained by the political virtues of prudence and courage’, but they had paid: money, slaves, plunder of all kinds, had poured into Italy. The stabilisation of the frontiers under the Emperors put an end to such adventures; henceforth the Roman army was maintained for the purposes of defence, and a defensive war, though normally more commendable than an offensive, is a dead financial loss.
So long as the barbarians outside the frontiers remained too weak or too afraid to attack, so long as no ambitious army commander started a civil war in a bid for power, so long as it suffered no natural catastrophe like an epidemic of plague, the Empire could just manage. But any prolonged war or serious catastrophe strained its resources to breaking-point.
* * *
Political stability depended upon the Emperor being approved of both by the senate and by the army. So long as he commanded the loyalty of the army, an emperor could, of course, ignore the wishes of the senate or cow it into submission, and some emperors did, but such a procedure was always risky. By tradition, senators of pretorian rank were put in command of all the legions except the one in Egypt, and senators of consular rank were appointed as governors of all the major frontier provinces, so that they were in a good position, if they found an emperor really intolerable, to start a military revolt; if that failed, senators were rich enough and influential enough to hire an assassin.
It was also highly desirable that an emperor should reign for a long time, on account of the custom of the donative. Upon his accession an emperor was expected to present every soldier in his army with a substantial sum in cash; consequently, a succession of short reigns meant a ruinous drain on the Treasury.
In every respect the age of the Antonines was lucky. The senate, who distrusted the hereditary principle, and the army, who tended to be loyal to the last emperor’s legitimate heir, were able to agree because the Antonine emperors were childless. Each was able to please the senate by nominating as his successor someone from among their members of proven ability and, by adopting him into his family, to secure the support of the army. Furthermore, most of them lived to a ripe old age. In the hundred-and-twenty-one years between the accession of Vespasian and the death of Marcus Aurelius, there were only eight emperors, the average length of a reign was fifteen years, and only one, Domitian, died a violent death.
Even during this period of peace and tranquility, however, there were signs that all was not well economically. Since the reign of Augustus, the State had kept down the expenses of administration by entrusting local government to city councils who served without pay, on the assumption that in every city there were enough persons of substance with the civic pride and patriotism to undertake the task willingly. The pride and patriotism were there alright, but there was less money than either the State or the cities imagined. The sums spent by the city councils, in jealous competition with each other, upon public buildings, water-works, free public entertainment, exceeded their resources and, by Trajan’s time, the State found it necessary to appoint auditors to keep a check on extravagance. The two campaigns, lasting less than a year each, in which Trajan conquered Dacia, were small-scale affairs, but to pay for them, he had to debase the coinage, a practice continued by his successors with the inevitable results.
Culturally, too, something was lacking. The Augustan settlement had put an end to an intolerable state of anarchy and, for two centuries at least, made it possible for a citizen to live what the Greeks would have called an ‘idiotic’ life, that is to say, a private life free from political cares, but the price paid for this tranquility was a general decline in intellectual curiosity and invention. In the field of technology, for example, the characteristic Roman contributions, the use in architecture of the arch, the vault and concrete, the use of pumps and archimedian screws for draining mines, the arts of surveying and road-making, the military techniques of the legion, the techniques of organising large disciplined bodies of men for labor or war, all of these ante-date the Empire.
During the five centuries that it lasted, the only new inventions we hear of are an improved siege-engine and the use of heavily-armed cavalry. In 370 an anonymous inventor of a portable pontoon bridge and a paddle-wheel war-ship driven by oxen offered his services to the State but was,
apparently, ignored.
Then, in the arts, where there can be no progress, only blossoming or sterility, the Imperial flowers, it must be admitted, are few. The poets, for example, who are still widely read with both admiration and pleasure are Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid. All of them grew up under the Republic, and the youngest of them, Ovid, is dead by A.D.17. After them, who is there? Seneca (d. 65), Martial (c. 104), Juvenal (c. 140); readable, but hectic, strained, and basically unpleasant. Then nobody for two hundred years. In the fourth and fifth centuries, a mysterious little masterpiece, the Pervigilium Veneris, and some poets, Pagan and Christian, like Prudentius, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Claudian, who wrote one or two nice pieces, but are very minor figures. Finally, in the sixth century after the West has fallen, one really remarkable poet, Maximian. The list is not long.
Serious trouble began during the reign of Marcus Aurelius with a long campaign along the Danube and an outbreak of plague. After his death, disaster followed disaster. Invasion by Frank and Goth and Berber, peasant revolts in Gaul, frequent civil war, anarchy and galloping inflation. The picture drawn by St. Cyprian (200-258) is probably not much exaggerated.
The world to-day speaks for itself; by the evidence of its decay it announces its dissolution. The farmers are vanishing from the countryside, commerce from the sea, soldiers from the camps; all honesty in business, all justice in the courts, all solidarity in friendship, all skill in the arts, all standards in morals—all are disappearing.
For the next hundred years few of the emperors were even competent and none were nice. In the seventy-three years between the death of Severus and the accession of Diocletian there were twenty legitimate emperors, not counting their nominal co-regents, and a host of usurpers. The average length of a reign was two-and-a-half years. Claudius died of the plague, Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians, Decius fell in battle against the Goths; all the rest, and almost every usurper, were assassinated or lynched or killed in civil war. Great areas of land went out of cultivation—they may have been of poor quality, but hitherto they had been found worth cultivating—, and the denarius sank to 0.5% of its value in the second century.
Diocletian, Constantine and his successors managed for a time to stop the anarchy, but at the cost of a wholesale regimentation and immobilisation of society under which any personal freedom ceased to exist, a rate of taxation which destroyed all private initiative and sense of civic responsibility, and forcible conscription of peasants, who were branded like cattle so as to make it easier to recognise deserters. The main victims of the inflation were the city governments whose income was derived from long-term mortgages and fixed rents, and govern- ment employees on salary. Diocletian increased the size of the army, but attempted to cut down expenses by paying it in kind. During the first two centuries, equipment and rations were issued to a soldier against stoppage of pay, yet he could still hope to save half of his pay, and requisitions of food or material from the cities were paid for.
Under Diocletian promotion in the army was rewarded by an increase not in pay but in rations, and requisitions were not paid for. Both the soldier and the civil servant were much worse off than they had been earlier, and the temptation to plunder and peculation became correspondingly greater. The time was long past when candidates eagerly stood for election to municipal office. Men had now to be compelled by law to serve, and edict after edict, threatening with fines and confiscations officials who evaded their responsibilities by hiding out in the country, show that this was in fact what was happening.
By 380 the Government had to forbid the construction of new city buildings until the old ones had been repaired; in 385 it had to undertake to pay a third of the cost of such repairs. Some idea of what it must have been like to be a citizen in the time of Theodosius can be gained from the following edicts.
Landowners found harboring persons who have left their legal domicile, or evaders of military service, shall be burned alive. (379)
Anyone who cuts down a vine or limits the productivity of fruit-trees with the intent of cheating the tax-assessors shall be subject to capital punishment, and his property shall be confiscated. (381)
Anyone who thrusts himself into a position to which he is not entitled shall be tried for sacrilege. (384)
By 404 the State had become impotent to maintain even elementary law and order, for an edict of that year authorises all persons to exercise with impunity the right of public vengeance against the common enemy ‘by exterminating malefactors, brigands, deserters, wherever they may be found.’ The partition of the Empire into an Eastern half and a Western half did not take place officially until after the death of Theodosius in 395, but from the time of Diocletian they had begun to go different ways, and, once they did so, the collapse of the West could only be a matter of time. The West was much poorer than the East, and its frontiers much longer and more difficult to defend. Invasion followed invasion. In 410 the Goths under Alaric entered and sacked Rome. In 476 a boy who bore the names of the founder of the Republic and the founder of the Empire, the emperor Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian king Odoacer and retired to a villa in Ravenna. Turnus was avenged at last.
* * *
The decline of the Roman Empire has been attributed to many causes: defects in the economy, a falling birth-rate, the dessication of the grasslands in Asia which set the barbarians in motion, Christianity, etc, and there is something to be said for them all. The question remains, however, whether there was not some radical defect in the fundamental principles upon which the Empire was originally based which in the long run were bound to bring it to disaster.
The Imperial civilisation derived its categories of thought, its concepts of Nature, Man and Society from Greek idealist philosophy. (Epicurean materialism of the Lucretian kind died an early death.)
Classical idealism postulates two co-eternal principles, Mind and primordial Matter. Matter-in-itself is an amorphous meaningless flux upon which Mind imposes forms or patterns, aside from which, Matter is nothing or all-but-nothing. The imposed forms which impart to Matter the nature of body do not in the process lose their formal character but remain timeless and immutable. Matter-in- motion, moreover, resists the imposition of forms, and can never furnish perfect copies. The material cosmos is a world of becoming which never quite becomes; it remains an inadequate reflection of the truly real and intelligible world. The latter, the divine and truly real, whether as Plato’s Ideas or as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, is self-sufficient, without either knowledge of or concern for anything but itself. To account for the existence of form and order in the cosmos, Platonism postulates an intermediary demiurge, the World Soul, which looks upward to contemplate the archetypes and downward to impose them on Matter; Aristotelianism postulates an inherent wish for order in Matter. While ‘God has no need of friends, neither indeed can he have any’, all things are ‘in love’ with God and become as orderly as it is possible for things in motion to become, inanimate beings like the stars by making their movements regular, living beings by trying to live an existence in conformity to the species or type to which they belong. For man alone, by virtue of his reason, the divinely real can become an object of experience and through that experience the master of his destiny. To live according to reason is, however, immensely difficult and calls for a heroic effort by the ‘super-ego’. The ‘Id’, the energies of the body are hostile, and no help can be expected from the Divine. Knowledge of the true and the good, which are not apparent to the senses, presupposes a longing for it, and this longing is to be found only in a few individuals. Plato’s Philosopher and Aristotle’s Great-Souled-Man are both social freaks.
To classical idealism, motion, processes, change as such are misfortunes: the perfect does not move. The consequences of such a view for science, politics, art and history are serious. It permits the study of mathematics and logic, and the classification of biological and social types, but experimental investigation of nature must be a waste of time, since the real truth cannot be found in the imperfect copy. Corresponding to the antithetical pair Mind—Matter, in its cosmology, classical idealism sees history and politics as an interaction between timeless Virtue and mutable Fortune. To call the historical circumstances in which man finds himself Fortune, implies that, like primordial matter, they are unintelligible; to attempt to discover what has caused them to be what they are or to predict what may follow from them must be a waste of time. Then, since few men possess Virtue, the majority must be persuaded to lead a life they do not and cannot understand by habituating them to laws and telling them ‘noble lies’.
The peace and happiness of mankind depend upon a tiny élite. On them falls the task of discovering and maintaining the perfect form of State, of which there can be only one, under which human beings will lead the life proper to their species. All that is essential about an individual is the ‘type’ to which he belongs, and this type cannot change, only repeat itself. An individual can progress from ignorance
to knowledge, but communal or social development is ruled out. The goal of ‘creative’ politics is to conquer Fortune and so put an end to history, a task so formidable that only a superman can accomplish it.
Supermen the Roman Emperors tried to be. Cicero and others might make fine speeches about Natural Law before which all men were equal, but their words had very little to do with Roman reality. Roman Law may be a fascinating ‘subject of study for lawyers, and, since I know nothing about them, I am willing to believe that in certain sectors of Civil Law, like laws of contract and testament, the Romans made great advances. What I do know is that debtors were treated as criminals. In the two legal domains of most concern to the average man, Criminal Procedure and Administrative Law, that is to say, decrees concerning taxation, military service, the rights and limits of freedom of speech and movement, I cannot see that the Roman record is anything to boast about. Its criminal procedure was brutal and inefficient, relying largely upon informers and torture, and did not make the faintest pretence at equal treatment for all. If, in its later days, the Empire became legally more democratic, this was a democracy of slavery; the use of the lash was no longer confined to the lower orders.
As for Administrative Law, the citizen had no say whatsoever in its decrees, and no right of protest. Since the emperor was both the executive and the legislative head of the State, there was nothing, theoretically, to stop him issuing any decree he liked; ‘what is pleasing to the Prince’, says Ulpian, ‘has the force of law.’ Moreover, since he was regarded as a sacred being, any violation of his decrees could be interpreted as an act of treason or sacrilege, the one offence for which a member of the honestiores, or upper classes, could be tortured and executed; a number of emperors made use of this legal possibility.
Classical idealism cannot tolerate the arts as gratuitous activities; either they must be reduced to didactic instruments of some ethical or political purpose, or they must be suppressed. Plato had the intelligence to see this clearly; Aristotle in his Poetics merely betrays his utter misunderstanding of his subject.
Roman literature, both in verse and prose, was an aristocratic art addressed to a small highly sophisticated audience. This in itself was not a fault. Once the age of the bard reciting tribal lays in the hall of his chief is over, and until printing has been invented and literacy has become common, literature cannot be anything else. Indeed, a ‘courtly’ period is probably necessary if a language is to realise its full possibilities. In writing for a small critical circle, the classical Latin authors discovered what could be done with Latin, the wealth of its conjunctions and subordinate phrases, the flexibility of its tenses and word-order, which make it such a superb instrument for organising facts into a logical and co-herent whole. The defect of Latin literature was not its way of treating facts, but the extraordinar[il]y small number of facts it considered worth treating. It averts its face from all experience save that of the highly educated and the politically powerful. The literature of the middle-ages had an equally small audience, but readily drew its material from popular sources. The Canterbury Tales were written for a courtly audience, but its characters are neither courtiers nor figures of farce. As W. P. Ker has written:
Classical literature perished from a number of contributory ailments, but none of these was more desperate than the want of romance in the Roman Empire, and especially in the Latin Language. . . . ‘The Gothic mythology of fairies’, as Dr Johnson calls it, was no less the property of Italy than of the North. In any mountain village the poets might have found the great-great grandmothers of those story-tellers for whom Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods offers a courteous defence. The elves and fays of Italy, Lamiae, as Boccaccio calls them, might have refreshed the poets. But the old wives and their fairy tales are left unnoticed, except by Apuleius.
And Apuleius, one must add, was only interested in their gruesome or grotesque elements. What was a limitation in the poets was quite fatal to the historians.
It is significant that history was regarded by the Romans, not as the matrix from which all literature is derived, but as a handmaid to literature. One may admire the Roman historians for their style, or enjoy their scandalous gossip, but for historical understanding one looks to them in vain. As Gibbon remarked: “They said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what it was essential to say.’ Conceiving of the human individual as a specimen embodying a type, in abstraction from all those concrete features and relations which give him an historical existence, they assumed that men are free to choose between arbitrary and abstract alternatives of ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’, that there is nothing to stop them, if they wish, from living the life of their great-grandfathers. Of their historical approach, Erich Auerbach says:
It does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. Its formulation of problems is not concerned with historical developments, either intellectual or material, but with ethical judgements. It shows an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless . . . The ethical and even the political concepts of antiquity (aristocracy, democracy, etc) are
fixed aprioristic model concepts.
One symptom of this approach is the complete lack of interest shown by the classical historians in what people actually say, all the idiosyncracies of phrasing and vocabulary which reveal the personality of the speaker. Face-to-face dialogue goes unreported by them. When they do employ Direct Speech, it is a set piece of oratory written in the style of the historian himself.
One may like or dislike Christianity, but no one can deny that it was Christianity and the Bible which raised Western literature from the dead. A faith which held that the Son of God was born in a manger, associated himself with persons of humble station in an unimportant Province, and died a slave’s death, yet did this to redeem all men, rich and poor, freemen and slaves, citizens and barbarians, required a completely new way of looking at human beings; if all are children of God and equally capable of salvation, then all, irrespective of status or talent, vice or virtue, merit the serious attention of the poet, the novelist and the historian. St Jerome, trained in the classical rhetorical tradition, might find the Bible ‘uncouth’, but in his translation he made no attempt to ‘classicalise’ it. (Only the sixteenth century humanists were crazy enough to try that.) Old Testament stories, like Abraham and Isaac, or David and Absalom, New Testament stories like Peter’s denial, did not fit into any of the classical stylistic categories; to translate them called for a quite different vocabulary, even a different syntax.
* * *
Most of the writings which have survived from the third and fourth centuries are polemic theological journalism, Neo-platonists versus Christians, Christians with one interpretation of their faith against Christians with another. From being an obscure sect, disliked by the mob, as oddities always are, and suspected of horrid secret rites, but people no man of education would give a thought to, by the reign of Marcus Aurelius Christians had become numerous enough and influential enough to be taken seriously both by the authorities and by intellectuals. Persecution, hitherto sporadic and incoherent, became a deliberate planned policy under the more serious-minded emperors.
Intellectuals like Celsus and Porphyry felt that Christianity was a cultural threat serious enough to deserve attack, and, on the Christian side, there were now converts like Tertullian and Origen educated enough to explain and defend their beliefs. Reading their polemics today, one is more struck by the points upon which they agreed than by their differences.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake:
Breasts more soft than a dove’s, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death.
So Swinburne. But his contrast between jolly, good-looking, sexy, extrovert Pagans on the one hand, and gloomy, emaciated, guilt-ridden, introvert Christians on the other is a romantic myth without any basis in historical fact. The writings of Christian and Pagan alike during this period seem to indicate that, as Joseph Bidez says;
Men were ceasing to observe the external world and to try to understand it, utilise it, or improve it. They were driven in on themselves. The idea of the beauty of the heavens and of the world went out of fashion and was replaced by that of the Infinite.
Such an attitude is consonant neither with orthodox Platonism nor with orthodox Christianity. Despite its latent dualism, orthodox Platonism held that the material universe was in some manner a manifestation of the Divine. The cosmos, says Plato in the aTimaeus, ‘is the image of the intelligible, a perceptible god, supreme in greatness and excellence and perfection’. For the orthodox Christian, God created the world ‘and saw that it was good’, and “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.’ But in the third century, both among Pagans and among those who imagined themselves to be Christians, radical dualistic theories began to take hold. ‘Some held that the cosmos had been created by an evil spirit, or by an ignorant one, or by bodiless intelligences who had become bored with contemplating God and turned to the inferior; others concluded that it had somehow fallen into the power of star- demons.’ (E. R. Dodds) The incarnation of the human soul in a fleshly mortal, body was felt by many to be a curse and accounted for as being either a punishment for an earlier sin committed in heaven, or the result of a false choice made by the soul itself. Consequently, to an increasing number, the body became an object of disgust and resentment. Among some Christians there was a tendency to make a heretical substitution of Lust for Pride as the archetypal sin, and to see in violent mortification of the flesh, not a discipline, but the only road to salvation. A fascination with the occult, with astrology, spiritualism, magic, was wide-spread. Both Pagans and Christians took oracles and ‘belly-talkers’ seriously. Reading the Christian polemics of the third century, one gets the impression that the Church was in grave danger of going crackpot. Only one writer, Irenaeus, can be called orthodox, as orthodoxy was to be defined in the next two centuries. The fact that the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedeon were able to arrive at the credal definitions they did, suggests, however, that the most vociferous and articulate Christians were not typical of their third century brethren. Not all, not even the majority, can have been Gnostics who believed that Christ’s body was an optical illusion, or crypto-materialists like Tertullian, or crypto-idealists like Clement, or indulged in glossolalia like Montanus, or castrated themselves like Origen, or behaved like the Marcionite, who always washed his face in his spittle to avoid using water, the creation of the demiurge.
* * *
The fiasco of Julian’s attempt to establish his solar monotheism, and the ease with which his successors suppressed pagan worship—there were very few Pagan martyrs—suggests that, by the time of Constantine’s so-called conversion, Christianity as a faith had already won out over its competitors, Neo-platonism, Manicheeism and Mithraism. For this victory many explanations can be given;—the impression made by the courage of the martyrs, the refusal of the Church to limit its membership to a spiritual or intellectual élite, or to make mystical experience necessary to salvation, the opportunities it offered to any man of talent and character to rise to high office in its hierarchy, its superior ability to give its converts a sense of belonging to and being needed by a community, and its philosophical superiority. Credo ut intelligam is a maxim which applies to all experiences except that of physical pain, and the Christian creed made better sense of human experience than the others. Far from Constantine and his successors contributing to this victory, they very nearly ruined it. The greatest disasters which have befallen the Church, disasters for which we have not yet finished paying the price, were the adoption by Theodosius of Christianity as the official State religion, backed by the coercive powers of the State, and the mass, often forcible, conversions of the barbarians in the centuries that followed.
Constantine and Theodosius took up Christianity for a purely pagan reason; they hoped that the ‘Christian’ God would ensure them political and military success; a view neatly diagrammed by Blake in his re-translation of Dr Thornton’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Our Father Augustus Caesar, who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to thy Name or Title, a reverence to thy Shadow. Thy Kingship come upon Earth first & then in Heaven. Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought Bread; deliver from the Holy Ghost whatever cannot be Taxed; for all is debts & Taxes between Caesar & us & one another; lead us not to read the Bible, but let our Bible be Virgil & Shakespeare; & deliver us from Poverty in Jesus, that Evil One. For thine is the Kingship, or Allegoric Godship, & the Power, or War, & the Glory, or Law, Ages after Ages in thy descendants; for God is only an Allegory of Kings & nothing else. AMEN.
As Charles Cochrane has written:
To envisage the faith as a political principle was not so much to christianise civilisation as to ‘civilise’ Christianity; it was not to consecrate human institutions to the service of God but rather to identify God with the maintenance of human institutions, represented in this case by a tawdry and meritricious empire, a system which, originating in the pursuit of human and terrestrial aims, had so far degenerated as to deny to men the very values which had given it birth, and was now held together only by sheer and unmitigated force. So far from rejuvenating Romanitas, the attempted substitution of reli- gion for culture as a principle of cohesion served merely to add a final and decisive element to the forces making for the dissolution of the Roman order.
The eremitic movement, and the monastic movement which succeeded, it, were essentially movements of protest not against Paganism but against worldly Christianity. Before we condemn the desert hermits, as the humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century did, for refusing to accept their civic responsibilities, we must remember what, especially for the better educated and better off, who might have become magistrates or civil servants, taking such posts involved. A magistrate had to inflict torture; a bureaucrat could not live without taking bribes. Even what seems to us their most peculiar and repellant trait, their horror of washing, might be more under- standable if we knew more about how men and women behaved in the public city baths. To anyone who took his faith seriously, the urban life of the ‘Christian’ Empire must have seemed an appalling spectacle. It was now worldly advantage to be labelled a Christian, and there must have been a great multitude who, counting upon a death-bed repentance to cancel their sins, continued to enjoy gladiatorial shows, wild-beast fights, obscene mimes, etc. Cavafy’s description of the reaction of the citizens of Antioch to a visit from the emperor Julian is probably not far from the truth.
Was it possible that they would ever deny
Their comely way of living; the variety
Of their daily recreations; their splendid
Theatre where they found the union of Art
With the erotic propensities of the flesh!
Immoral to a certain, probably to a considerable extent,
They were. But they had the satisfaction that their life
Was the much talked-of life of Antioch,
The delightful life, in absolutely good taste.
Were they to deny all this, to give their minds after all to what?
To his airy chatter about the false gods,
To his annoying chatter about himself;
To his childish fear of the theatre;
His graceless prudery; his ridiculous beard.
Most certainly they preferred the letter CHI, Most certainly they preferred the KAPPA—a hundred times.
(translated by John Mavrogordato)
Most people’s idea of the Desert Fathers is derived from what they have heard about Simeon Stylites, and this is unjust to them. To begin with, few of them were mendicants; most earned their modest keep by weaving palm-leaf baskets and mats. Lunatics and spiritual prima donnas were, it is true, to be found among them, but many anecdotes reveal that they were recognised for what they were by their saner and humbler brethren. At its best the movement produced characters of impressive integrity and wisdom, with great psychological understanding, charity and good-humor. Nor was excessive mortification ever encouraged by the Church authorities. An early canon condemns those who abstain from wine and meat on fast-days for ‘blasphemously inveighing against the creation.’ We owe the Desert Fathers more than we generally realise. The classical world knew many pleasures, but of one which means a great deal to us, it was totally ignorant until the hermits discovered it, the pleasure of being by oneself. Nothing could better illustrate the relentlessly public character of classical civilisation than an anecdote of Augustine’s, in which he tells of his utter astonishment when he saw a hermit reading to himself without pronouncing the words aloud: this was a new world. Again, they seem to have been the first people in history to appreciate the beauties of wild nature, and the first to make friends with wild animals instead of hunting them.
Though it did not reach its full development until after the collapse of the West, the monastic movement had already started. It began to be realised that, while solitary withdrawal could be valuable for certain exceptional persons and for certain periods in their lives, man was a social animal who normally needed to live with others. The problem was one of devising a kind of social organisation which would be neither totalitarian, based on collective egoism, nor competitive, based on the egoism and ambition of the individual. At its best, the monastic movement solved this problem better than any other social form before or since. Its drawback is of course that it has been limited so far, to the celibate. Perhaps it has to be: perhaps family life and communal life are incompatible, except under catastrophic conditions. But the matter deserves more attention than we give it.
* * *
‘Histories of the downfall of Kingdoms’, said Dr Johnson, ‘and revolutions of empires are read with great tranquility.’ I am not sure that to-day it would not be more accurate to say ‘with great excitement’. On the evidence of contemporary historical novels (a surprising number are concerned with the fall of Rome) and science fiction, it would seem that what really fascinates us to read about is a post-catastrophic society and landscape—abandoned ruins of once great cities, bad lands, roads overgrown with grass, individuals and small groups, which have been brought up in a civilised society, learning how to cope with life under barbaric conditions. It is noticeable, too, that there is a far greater public interest in neolithic or bronze-age archaeology than in Graeco-roman archaeology.
I can guess at various reasons for th
