6th
June 2013
Rome:
Last
week, I was chatting to a friend about the fall of the Roman Empire. The
conversation had begun as a reflection on the rise of Christianity and the conversion
of the fourth-century emperor Constantine (r. AD 306-37), who, in his Edict of
Milan (313), ended state persecution of Christians and legalized the practice
of the Christian faith in public. The edict, which initiated the emergence of
the church as an institution that would come to dominate every aspect of
European life for the next millennium and a half, celebrates its 1700th
anniversary this year.
“Christian
Europe is dying”, my friend said gloomily, pointing to declining church
attendance, growing secularism and moral relativism: “The world Constantine
created is fading away.” A Roman Catholic, she thought it wouldn’t be long
before the rest of Western society began to fall apart too, hollowed out by a
materialistic individualism empty of real values. “We’re losing our moral
compass,” she affirmed: “And we know what happened in ancient Rome: when people
lost their morality, their civilization collapsed.”
I
disputed my friend’s assertion about Christian persecution—after all the church
is still an established institution in many Europeans countries, not least here
in Italy where it has its own state in the heart of Rome. But the second part
of her statement interested me more: that the fate of modern Western
civilization was somehow tied to the health of church attendance, and that its decline
would bring about moral decay and, ultimately, the collapse of Western society.
So
I went back to my friend’s diagnosis of why Rome fell. “If you’re right about
moral decay, why was it then that the empire fell apart only after the emperor
had converted to Christianity—and just about made everyone else to do the
same?” After all, the barbarian invasions got underway just as Constantine’s successors
were outlawing pagan sacrifices and, tentatively, reforming the law code to
reflect Christian mores. When Rome was sacked in 410, many traditionalists said
it was precisely because the old gods had been abandoned.
By
the 430s, a century after Constantine, even the very conservative Roman
aristocracy was converting to Christianity, with some senators and their
families giving up colossal riches to become monks and nuns, priests and
bishops. They were encouraged by a new imperial dynasty—the Theodosians—that
made being a Roman synonymous with being a Christian, and whose ethos was
summed up in the notion of concordia,
harmony between ruler and people, God and the emperor.
Nevertheless,
Roman armies kept losing and, by the end of the century, Gaul (modern France),
Spain and Africa (modern Tunisia) belonged to the barbarians. In 476, the last
emperor in Italy was deposed. But since this happened at the same time as the
religious changes mentioned above, a connection between moral decay and political
and military decline seems hard to draw. Indeed, when the empire was gone, many
of these late Roman aristocrat-bishops whose world had fallen down around them
became the source of law and order in the new barbarian West.
Now,
the last Romans weren’t all paragons of virtue. Plenty of vice and hypocrisy can
be found among the senators in Rome, generals at the front and the imperial
house. But as a whole, Roman society in late antiquity was undergoing a moral
revolution—a conscious effort to identify with Christian values such as poverty
and chastity (which hadn’t been central to traditional Roman ideas of virtue), with
the expectation of finding these reflected in the individual lives of the
ruling class. This was a story about the Fall of Rome my friend hadn’t
heard—one about monasteries, asceticism and moral seriousness rather than languid
self-satisfaction or gluttonous debauchery.
When
it comes to the present day, however, this story arguably leaves us at
something of a loss. If Rome didn’t fall because people became more godless or
more immoral, does that mean we have nothing to worry about today if we think
our neighbours and colleagues are? Alternatively, does the world’s most famous
example of a government and society’s falling apart have nothing to tell us, no
warning or instructions about what to avoid, at all? I hope to return to that
question in a later blog entry. The “Fall of Rome” might be widely misunderstood. But
if history’s legacy is merely silence, it would seem to be a spectacular failure
on the part of the discipline.
