The End of the Western Empire
Symbol of St. Mark within a geometrical design: from the Echternach Gospels (c. 690). Manuscripts were an important medium for the preservation of learning and for the artistic representation of Christian faith. Between 600-800, Irish monasteries produced the finest works, incorporating Germanic elements into an individual style, now known as Hiberno-Saxon. The Irish artists achieved highly complex schemes of decoration, the origins of which go back to the pre-Christian art of the Germanic tribes. The simpler "maze" in the above decoration is combined with one of the few representational images their art endorsed: the symbols of the four evangelists taken over from early Christian manuscripts.
"Barbarian" admiration for Roman style and artistry is evident in this ivory casket found in the tomb of a wealthy Lombard woman. The C7th casket is decorated with biblical scenes: Abraham's sacrifice and Daniel in the lion's den.
Augustine and the Sack of Rome
Between 413 and 426, Augustine worked on the City of God, a lengthy vindication of Christianity over against the gods of pagan Rome. The work was initially inspired by Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 and it is from his theological interpretation of this event that Augustine derives the theme of the two cities: the City of God - consisting of those "who live according to God's will" making their pilgrimmage through the world, their wills ordered to the demands of love - and the earthly city, whose inhabitants "live by human standards," whose love is selfish and whose destiny is hell. The City of God responds to the theological challenge posed by devastation to a cultural world which Augustine's contemporaries - Christian and pagan - believed central to history and possessed of an eternal foundation. Augustine makes a crucial contribution to the theology and philosophy of history by releasing the meaning of history from dependence on a particular culture - in his case, that of Rome. The significance of history transcends any particular human culture or complex of institutions: the truth of history lies in its wayfaring toward the completion of God's creative and redemptive work. Meaning or unmeaning is decided in the ordering of things toward the love of God, though, within history no human culture, work, institution, or action is unambiguous in its expression of this reconciling desire. In the extracts that follow, Augustine interprets the sack of Rome as a demonstration of the impotence of the Roman gods. Furthermore, the unexpected mercy shown by the Goths to those who took refuge in Christian churches was, for Augustine, Christ's intervention, subduing the Goths to his merciful will. This intervention, the blessing of which fell upon the good and ill alike, constituted a moment of historical transcendence: an unprecendented occurence establishing a "new custom" in which a limit was set to human savagery. In fact, Augustine is overstating his case here as pagan authors could point to precedents such as that of Alexander during the capture of Tyre.
from City of God, Book I
From this world's city [i.e. Rome and her Empire] there arise enemies against whom the City of God has to be defended, though many of these correct their godless errors arid become useful citizens of that City. But many are inflamed with hate against it and feel no gratitude for the benefits offered by its Redeemer. The benefits are unmistakable; those enemies would not today be able to utter a word against the City if, when fleeing from the sword of their enemy, they had not found, in the City's holy places, the safety on which they now congratulate themselves. The barbarians spared them for Christ's sake; and now these Romans assail Christ's name. The sacred places of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles bear witness to this, for in the sack of Rome they afforded shelter to fugitives, both Christian and pagan. The bloodthirsty enemy raged thus far, but here the frenzy of butchery was checked; to these refuges the merciful among the enemy conveyed those whom they had spared outside, to save them from encountering foes who had no such pity. Even men who elsewhere raged with all the savagery an enemy can show, arrived at places where practices generally allowed by laws of war were forbidden and their monstrous passion for violence was brought to a sudden halt; their lust for taking captives was subdued.
In this way many escaped who now complain of this Christian era, and hold Christ responsible for the disasters which their city endured. But they do not make Christ responsible for the benefits they received out of respect for Christ, to which they owed their lives. They attribute their deliverance to their own destiny; whereas if they had any right judgement they ought rather to attribute the harsh cruelty they suffered at the hands of their enemies to the providence of God. For God's providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind, as it also uses such afflictions to train men in a righteous and laudable way of life, removing to a better state those whose life is approved, or else keeping them in this world for further service.
Moreover, they should give credit to this Christian era for the fact that these savage barbarians showed mercy beyond the custom of war whether they so acted in general in honor of the name of Christ, or in places specially dedicated to Christ's name, buildings of such size and capacity as to give mercy a wider range. For this clemency our detractors ought rather to give thanks to God; they should have recourse to his name in all sincerity, so as to escape the penalty of everlasting fire, seeing that so many of them assumed his name dishonestly, to escape the penalty of immediate destruction. Among those whom you see insulting Christ's servants with such wanton insolence there are very many who came unscathed through that terrible time of massacre only by passing themselves off as Christ's servants. And now with ungrateful pride and impious madness they oppose his name in the perversity of their hearts, so that they may incur the punishment of eternal darkness; but then they took refuge in that name, though with deceitful lips, so that they might continue to enjoy this transitory light.
That victors should spare the vanquished out of respect for their gods, is something unexampled in history:
We have the records of many wars, both before the foundation of Rome and after its rise to power. Let our enemies read their history, and then produce instances of the capture of any city by foreign enemies when those enemies spared any whom they found taking refuge in the temples of their gods. Let them quote any barbarian general who gave instructions, at the storming of a town, that no one should be treated with violence who was discovered in this temple or that. Aeneas saw Priam at the altar: "polluting with his blood the fire which he had consecrated."
And Diomedes and Ulysses:
"Slew all the warders of the citadel / And snatched with bloody hands the sacred image; / Nor shrank to touch the chaplets virginal / Of the dread goddess."
And there is no truth in the statement that comes after, the Grecian hopes then failed, and ebbed away. For what in fact followed was the Greek victory, the destruction of Troy by fire and sword, the slaughter of Priam at the altar.
And it was not because Troy lost Minerva that Troy perished. What loss did Minerva herself first incur, that led to her own disappearance? Was it, perhaps, the loss of her guards? There can be no doubt that their death made her removal possible - the image did not preserve the men; the men were preserving the image. Why then did they worship her, to secure her protection for their country and its citizens? She could not guard her own keepers.
The folly of the Romans in confiding their safety to the household gods who had failed to protect Troy:
There you see the sort of gods to whom the Romans gladly entrusted the preservation of their city. Pitiable folly! Yet the Romans are enraged by such criticisms from us, while they are not incensed at the authors of such quotations; in fact they pay money to become acquainted with their works, and they consider that those who merely instruct them in these works merit an official salary and an honored position in the community. Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age - they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks, "New vessels will for long retain the taste / Of what is first poured into them."
Now in Virgil Juno is introduced as hostile to the Trojans, and when she urges Aeolus, king of the winds, against them, she says,
A race I hate sails the Etruscan sea / Bringing to Italy Troy's vanquished gods, / And Troy itself.
Ought the Romans, as prudent men, to have entrusted the defense of Rome to gods unable to defend themselves? Juno no doubt spoke like a woman in anger, heedless of what she was saying. But consider what is said by Aeneas himself, who is so often called 'the pious'.
Panthus, the priest of Phoebus and the citadel, / Snatching his conquered gods and his young grandson / Rushes in frenzy to the door.
He does not shrink from calling the gods 'conquered', and he speaks of them as being entrusted to him, rather than the other way round, when he is told, 'To thee, Troy now entrusts her native gods.'
If Virgil speaks of such gods as 'vanquished', and tells how, after their overthrow, they only succeeded in escaping because they were committed to the care of a man, what folly it is to see any wisdom in committing Rome to such guardians, and in supposing that it could not be sacked while it retained possession of them. To worship 'vanquished' gods as protectors and defenders is to rely not on divinities but on defaulters. It is not sensible to assume that Rome would have escaped this disaster had these gods not first perished; the sensible belief is that those gods would have perished long before, had not Rome made every effort to preserve them. Anyone who gives his mind to it can see that it is utter folly to count on invincibility by virtue of the possession of defenders who have been conquered and to attribute destruction to the loss of such guardian deities as these. In fact, the only possible cause of destruction was the choice of such perishable defenders. When the poets wrote and sang of 'vanquished gods', it was not because it suited their whim to lie - they were men of sense, and truth compelled them to admit the facts.
But I must deal with this subject in fuller detail in a more convenient place. For the present I will return to the ingratitude of those who blasphemously blame Christ for the disasters which their moral perversity deservedly brought upon them, and I will deal with the subject as briefly as I can. They were spared for Christ's sake, pagans though they were; yet they scorn to acknowledge this. With the madness of sacrilegious perversity they use their tongues against the name of Christ; yet with those same tongues they dishonestly claimed that name in order to save their lives, or else, in places sacred to him, they held their tongues through fear. They were kept safe and protected there where his name stood between them and the enemy's violence. And so they issue from that shelter to assail him with curses of hate.
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In the sack of Rome, the cruelties conformed to the conventions of war; the acts of clemency were due to the power of Christ's name:
All the devastation, the butchery, the plundering, the conflagrations, and all the anguish which accompanied the recent disaster at Rome were in accordance with the general practice of warfare. But there was something which established a new custom, something which changed the whole aspect of the scene; the savagery of the barbarians took on such an aspect of gentleness that the largest basilicas were selected and set aside to be filled with people to be spared by the enemy. No one was to be violently used there, no one snatched away.
Many were to be brought there for liberation by merciful foes; none were to be taken from there into captivity even by cruel enemies. This is to be attributed to the name of Christ and the influence of Christianity. Anyone who fails to see this is blind; anyone who sees it and fails to give praise for it is thankless; anyone who tries to stop another from giving praise is a madman. Let us hope that no one with any sense will ascribe the credit for this to the brutal nature of the barbarians. Their fierce and savage minds were terrified, restrained, and miraculously controlled by him who long ago said, through his prophet, 'I will visit their iniquities with a rod, and their sins with scourges: but I will not disperse my mercy from them.'
Blessings and disasters often shared by good and bad:
No doubt this question will be asked, 'Why does the divine mercy extend even to the godless and ungrateful?' The only explanation is that it is the mercy of one 'who makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad, and sends rain alike on the righteous and the unrighteous'.' Some of the wicked are brought to penitence by considering these facts, and amend their impiety, while others, in the words of the Apostle, 'despise the riches of God's goodness and forbearance, in the hardness and impenitence of their hearts, and lay up for themselves a store of wrath in the day of God's anger and of the revelation of the just judgement of God, who will repay every man according to his actions'. Yet the patience of God still invites the wicked to penitence, just as God's chastisement trains the good in patient endurance. God's mercy embraces the good for their cherishing, just as his severity chastens the wicked for their punishment. God, in his providence, decided to prepare future blessings for the righteous, which the unrighteous will not enjoy, and sorrows for the ungodly, with which the good will not be tormented. But he has willed that these temporal goods and temporal evils should befall good and bad alike, so that the good things should not be too eagerly coveted, when it is seen that the wicked also enjoy them, and that the evils should not be discreditably shunned, when it is apparent that the good are often afflicted with them.
The most important question is this: What use is made of the things thought to be blessings, and of the things reputed evil? The good man is not exalted by this world's goods; nor is he overwhelmed by this world's ills. The bad man is punished by misfortune of this kind just because he is corrupted by good fortune.
However, it often happens that God shows more clearly his manner of working in the distribution of good and bad fortune. For if punishment were obviously inflicted on every wrongdoing in this life, it would be supposed that nothing was reserved for the last judgement; on the other hand, if God's power never openly punished any sin in this world, there would be an end to belief in providence. Similarly in respect of good fortune; if God did not grant it to some petitioners with manifest generosity, we should not suppose that these temporal blessings were his concern, while if he bestowed prosperity on all just for the asking we might think that God was to be served merely for the sake of those rewards, and any service of him would prove us not godly but rather greedy and covetous.
This being so, when the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same, even if they undergo the same torment. The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke; the same flail breaks up the straw, and clears the grain; and oil is not mistaken for lees because both are forced out by the same press. In the same way, the violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under pressure of affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir a perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.
Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with the eyes of faith.
Frankish glass drinking horn.