Americans would do well to ask the question posed by Ponticianus sixteen centuries ago: “What is our aim in life?”
By Dr. Edmund J. Mazza
Perhaps Rome is not perishing; perhaps she is only scourged, not utterly destroyed; perhaps she is chastened, not brought to nought. It may be so; Rome will not perish, if the Romans do not perish. And perish they will not if they praise God; perish they will if they blaspheme Him.[1]
— St. Augustine
I was so stupefied and dismayed that day and night I could think of nothing but the welfare of the [Christian] community; it seemed as though I was sharing the captivity of the saints, and I could not open my lips until I knew something more definite; and all the while, full of anxiety, I was wavering between hope and despair, and was torturing myself with the misfortunes of other people. But when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city. ‘I became dumb and humbled myself, and kept silence from good words, but my grief broke out afresh, my heart glowed within me, and while I meditated the fire was kindled;’[2]
— St. Jerome
From his monastic cell in Bethlehem, the great Western Father and Doctor of the Church, St. Jerome bewailed Late Antiquity’s “9/11,” the Fall of Rome. Rome’s fall has been an object of fascination for western writers, not least because ever since the Founding Fathers, patriotic Americans have seen parallels between that shining city on seven hills and our own noble republic. Indeed, events of the last few years have called into question whether America herself is now likewise doomed to irreversible “decline and fall.”
On August 24, 410, Rome was sacked by the warlord Alaric and his army of rampaging Goths. When a starving populace admitted the barbarian horde on that fateful August day, it was the first time in an astounding 800 years that enemy soldiers had ever breached the imperial capital’s defenses. Although their attackers were actually Arian Christians (deniers of Christ’s divinity) who spared churches and practiced some measure of clemency, the psychological impact of such a blow for the greater Roman world (some thirty million souls or more) is hard to underestimate. Rome was, after all “the light,” according to Jerome, and that is also how general Maximus characterizes it to an elderly Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the Academy award winning “Gladiator.” The battle-tested legionary has seen much of the rest of the world, and it is “brutish and dark.”
Not just modern film-makers, however, but modern historians, as well, beginning with Edward Gibbon in 1776, have tended to agree with both Jerome and the general. They have seen, starting with the reign of Marcus’ megalomaniacal son Commodus, in AD 180, a steady and almost inevitable decline of the greatest civilization man had yet produced, with the disasters of the fifth century fully emblematic of its final, fitful death throes. For Gibbon, “Christianity and barbarism,” were ultimately to blame for bringing down the Empire, and ushering in the “Dark Ages.”
Now it must be said there is much evidence for a genuine “Decline” and “Fall” in the historical record (whether Christianity is to blame is another matter). As Bryan Ward-Perkins recently recorded of material existence in Roman Britain at the fortress of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall:
…a plethora of objects, often dispatched from elsewhere, were in routine use by the soldiery and their families…socks, sandals, and underpants…bed boards…cart-axels. The shoes that have been recovered from the site range from standard but solid military boots…to a delicately shaped woman’s slipper…which is prominently stamped with its maker’s name—the equivalent, surely, in style and status to a modern Gucci shoe…In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared.[3]
Ward-Perkins remarks that in defending the northern frontiers of empire, the Romans brought not only soldiers with money in their belts, but “a tempting display of southern consumer culture.” Indeed, such ostentation is often blamed in part for triggering the waves of barbarian invasions in the first place. According to this view, the Germanic invaders sought not so much the destruction of Rome, but “a piece of the action.” As a matter of fact, Roman scholarship of the past four decades has tended to focus not so much on the devastation the migrations brought, but the continuity and adaptation that ensued. Largely thanks to the manifold and magisterial works of scholar Peter Brown, today’s academy no longer speaks in Gibbonian terms of a sharp “Decline and Fall,” but rather of a long, graded, construct (almost like a Roman aqueduct) called “Late Antiquity.” This approach has not been without its benefits, especially for historians of Catholicism, who were largely brushed aside by the older economic and political historians. Christopher Dawson, for instance, could complain in the 1930s:
To the secular historian the early Middle Ages must inevitably still appear as the Dark Ages, as ages of barbarism, without secular culture or literature, given up to unintelligible disputes on incomprehensible dogmas…But to the Catholic they are not dark as much as ages of dawn, for they witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of Christian civilisation, and the creation of Christian art and Catholic liturgy. Above all, they were the Age of the Monks… [4]
While contemporary scholarship has, indeed, concentrated on the religious aspects of the late antique world, today’s intelligentsia are woefully lacking in Dawson’s devotion. More than this, Ward-Perkin’s recounts their startling neglect of the even indispensably secular. As he writes of Harvard University Press’, Guide to Late Antiquity:
If we seek the peoples of the late antique world, we have already found Visigoths, Franks, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons to be absent. But ‘Demons’ and ‘Angels’ both get entries; just as there is an entry for ‘Hell’, and separate ones for ‘Heaven’ and ‘Paradise’. Secular officials get short shrift, whereas a host of different heretics and ascetics get individual entries. I looked in vain for one of the most powerful figures in late Roman politics and administration, the ‘Praetorian Prefect’, but found nothing between the entries for ‘Pornography’ and ‘Prayer’.[5]
This has led historians like Perkins and Adrian Goldsworthy, for example, to re-invoke the “Decline and Fall” approach to the conclusion of the classical world. The title of his recent work, How Rome Fell, certainly broadcasts Goldsworthy’s belief in a collapse, and brought on more by innumerable usurpers, than on the Germanic migrations themselves:
[F]rom 217 down to the collapse of the Western Empire there were only a handful of periods as long as ten years when a civil war did not break out…It was normal for an emperor to abandon a war against a foreign enemy to deal with a Roman rival.
Usurpers did not act alone. They needed supporters and the most important of these expected rewards including promotion and riches if the rebellion was successful. If a usurper was suppressed, then many of his backers were likely to suffer with him. Punishment was often extended to their families, especially those holding any office whose wealth made them appealing targets for informers. In this way even a localised rebellion could mean life, death, imprisonment or ruin to people in distant provinces who had not been involved in it in any direct way. This was a world of patronage, where the powerful exerted themselves to secure benefits for relatives and friends. Such webs of favour and gratitude could become very dangerous for all concerned at times of internal conflict.[6]
Having briefly perused the present state of scholarship, what are we to make of the much disputed “Decline and Fall of Rome”? And what lessons does it hold for America, that other “shining city on a hill,” especially on days when she suffers incredible setbacks? I believe much “light” may be shed, if we use the writings of St. Augustine for our lens.
The son of a devout Christian mother (St. Monica) and a prodigal pagan father, Augustine was raised in Roman North Africa. In the impetuosity of his youth he both fathered a child out of wedlock … [Read the entire article here]
