THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 297

The Shared Religious Regard for the Eternal City

20.5. The Shared Religious Regard for the Eternal City

It is almost needless to say that Rutilius the Gaul shares the belief of Claudian the Egyptian in the destiny of Rome. The sight of the temples still shining in the sun after the Gothic invasion was to him an earnest of her perennial youth. "Allia did not keep back the punishment of Brennus." Rome will rise more glorious for her present discomfiture. Ordo renascendi est, crescere posse malis. This faith in Rome meant of course faith in the gods who had made her great, and good Romans all believed in them and were eager to maintain the national cult with which Rome's welfare was bound up. Roman worship was at all times directed mainly towards the attainment of material blessings, and the material disasters which, despite the optimism of Rutilius and his circle, lay heavy on the city, were attributed to the anger of forsaken deities. How, asked Symmachus, could Rome bring herself to abandon those under whose protection her conquests had been made and her power established?

The appeal to the gods was already more than two centuries old, and now the disaster seemed to justify it. In answer to it Augustine took up his pen and wrote The City of God.

It occupied the spare moments of his episcopal life for thirteen years (A.D. 413-426), and, with all its defects, it remains a noble example of the new philosophy of history, and sets in vivid contrast the two civilisations from whose fusion sprang the Middle Ages. He answers the heathen complaints one by one. Christianity was not responsible for Rome's disaster. The Christian enemy even tried to mitigate it, and Christian charity saved many pagans. Had Rome been really prosperous? Her history is dark with calamity. Had the gods really protected her? Remember Cannae and the Caudine Forks. These boasted gods have ever been but broken reeds, from the fall of Troy onwards. The glory of Rome (which he admits) is due, under the Christian's God, to Roman courage and patriotism. This God has a destiny for Rome and He means her to be the eternal city of a regenerate race. Such is the main subject of the first ten books. The next twelve develop the contrast between the city of men and the city of God, the one built upon love of self to the exclusion of God, the other built upon the love of God to the exclusion of self. The history of the world is briefly sketched, but the elaboration of the historical theme, on which he set great store, was entrusted to his disciple, Orosius, a young Spanish monk who came to Hippo in A.D. 414. Orosius's cue was this: the world, far from being more miserable than before the advent of Christianity, was really more prosperous and happy. Etna was less active than of old, the locusts consumed less, the barbarian invasions were no more than merciful warnings. Here is an optimism as false in its way as that of Rutilius; but it shews the spirit that carried Europe safe through the darkness that was coming.

Thirty years later the situation had changed; optimism was difficult, it could no longer be said with Orosius that the world was "only tickled with fleas," and none the worse for it. Under the almost universal dominion of the barbarian, the old complaints of the heathen against heaven were now heard on the lips of the Christians. Why had a special dispensation of suffering accompanied the triumph of the Cross? Salvian the Gaul takes up the theme and in his treatise On the Government of the World compares Roman vice with barbarian virtue. His brush is too heavily charged, he protests too much; but he undoubtedly helped his contemporaries to recover tone, to bear the burdens laid upon them with resignation, and to see the guiding hand of Providence in their misfortunes.

Salvian has not the faith of Augustine and Orosius in the future of the Empire; for him the future was with the new races. But Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 4 30-489), who perhaps saw them closer and at any rate describes them more minutely, is very loth to allow the ascendancy of the stinking savages over Rome. Thus even when Roman citizens are bowing their heads to fate, even seeking help and an emperor from the hated Greeks, the old love of Rome was strong, the sense of her greatness hardly dimmed. It is not difficult to see how a city which could command so much affection even from Christians served as a strong support to those who for her sake strove to uphold her gods.

Meanwhile the religion which men of letters and Roman patriots passed over in silent contempt or attacked with covert hatred had been gathering notions from the very sources which fostered opposition to it. "Spoil the Egyptians" was Augustine's advice, and not a few distinctive Neoplatonist tenets were borrowed by Christian theologians and lived on through the Middle Ages. The Church indeed rejected from her authoritative teaching the Pantheism and Nihilism to which those tenets lead if held consistently, and affirmed a personal triune God, intelligent and free; a world created out of nothing and to return to nothing; mankind redeemed from evil by one sole mediator; a future life to be enjoyed without the sacrifice of the soul's individual nature.

But the Neoplatonists supplied illustration of church doctrine and interpretation of Christian truth, and thinkers who saw danger in anthropomorphism found support for their metaphysic in the heathen school of Alexandria. The time is past when men spoke of fourth-century Christianity as a mere copy of Neoplatonism, but the object and principles of the two systems are so much alike that it is not surprising to find points of close resemblance in their presentment.

The resemblance is most marked in the writings of the Greek and Syrian fathers. The Eastern element in Neoplatonism could not but appeal to Eastern theologians; this appeal and its response explain the large welcome extended to the works of two supposed disciples of St Paul, "Hierotheus" and "Dionysius the Areopagite," whose rhapsodies were received as Pauline truth not only by their credulous contemporaries but by the mystics of the medieval Church.

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