The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  Drop-outs against Society

  Furthermore, considerable sections of the population of the later Roman Empire decided to opt out altogether. In the first place, a large number of people, finding the social system intolerable, went underground and became its enemies. But a second movement consisted of numerous men and women who merely abandoned the company of their fellow human beings and divorced themselves from the community.

  They became hermits or monks and nuns. But the monks and nuns of ancient times are in some ways less comparable to modern monks and nuns than to modern drop-outs, supporters of gurus, or others - not necessarily with any religious motivation - who abandon the conventional world and sometimes leave their houses for the streets or the mountains or deserts. For the numerous monastic recluses of the Roman Empire, too, often shook the dust of the social, financial and political system off their feet as completely as it they had never belonged to it at all. And so, as the final political and military reckoning rapidly approached, this substantial number of men and women was no longer available to contribute either to the actual defence of the Empire or to the revenue needed to pay for the defenders.

  For two centuries past, ascetic withdrawal and solitary contemplation had increasingly become regarded as a desirable ideal. There are many traces of this viewpoint in the Meditations of the second-century Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although his Imperial

  and military responsibilities totally denied him the possibility of putting it into practice himself. Such tendencies were also prominent among Manichaeans and other dualists, who detached the evil world entirely from the divine creation and tried to slough off the material dross in their daily existence.

  Extreme puritanism likewise dominated important sections of the Christian community. They justified this attitude by the contempt for the human flesh and condition displayed by John the Baptist in his chosen way of living, reiterated by St Paul, and ascribed by the Gospels to Jesus himself, who was said to have departed to a solitary place and gone up into the mountain where he devoted himself to prayer.

  Then, in the third century AD, the monastic movement originated, in the depths of the wastes of Egypt. Its origins are shrouded in legends, centring upon the figure of Paul the Hermit of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Jerome, who wrote his biography, declared him to be the first of the Christian hermits; but that distinction is more often attributed to the better documented St Antony. Abandoning his worldly property in about 270, Antony entered, fifteen years later, upon a life of total isolation, dwelling in an empty grave upon a desert hill-top. Many people flocked to follow his example and join him, and before long he began to organize them into groups, which resided in separate and scattered cells and came together only for common worship. Another Egyptian, Pachomius, brought his followers into a fully communal existence by establishing monasteries at nine Egyptian centres, comprising 7,000 monks and nuns. Then the monastic life spread to Palestine. Before long, it was ripe for extension to the West.

  The motives which caused monks and hermits to withdraw to this anti-social seclusion were varied. Many of Antony's recruits came to him during the last great persecutions of Christians at the start of the fourth century. Yet after the Empire had been converted to Christianity, the influx still did not diminish. Some came to get away from the oppressive demands of taxation, conscription, and regimentation in all its various forms. Others had purely private problems to flee from - lawsuits, for example, or family quarrels. Others, again, were prompted by a pious devotion which found the official church too worldly.

  For self-denial was a potent motive, and so were feelings of guilt, and a sheer, total distaste for humanity and the flesh. Often these feelings assumed extreme forms, including acute physical mortification and even castration (forbidden by law at this time). For these were the self-disciplinary measures felt to be needed in order to escape the eternal punishment earned by those who succumbed to worldly temptations.

  It came as a terrible shock to the cultured, classically minded poet Ausonius when his great friend Paulinus of Nola, a scholarly, middle-aged fellow-Senator and fellow-poet from Burdigala (Bordeaux), decided to make a complete break with the worldly and civilized life. Ausonius' anguished and perplexed complaints, symbolic of a clash between two mutually incomprehensible ways of life, have come down to us. But they were all uttered in vain, for Paulinus abandoned his political career and went with his wife to Spain, where they renounced all their possessions. Then later, after Paulinus had taken holy orders, they settled at Nola in south Italy to live lives of austerity.

  Paulinus wrote to a friend defending the secluded existence.

  . . . So, as your letter says, you visit cities infrequently, and have grown to love the intimate remoteness of the silent countryside. It is not that you put leisure before activity, and you do not withdraw yourself from what is useful to the church. But you avoid the noisy councils and the bustle of the churches which almost rival the crowds of the Forum.

  And I think that you are laying the foundation of greater services to the church by wisely deciding to devote yourself wholly to religious instruction. By concentrating on spiritual studies, to which solitude is conducive, you are fashioning and strengthening Christ within you every day. . . .

  Let us strive for the kingdom of God as we strove for position in the world. In short, let us attend to heavenly goods as carefully as we attend to earthly ones.

  Paulinus himself, like the friend he was writing to, did not abandon the world completely, for he became a bishop and cared for his congregation and the sick. But public opinion lavished its greatest admiration on a more uncompromising puritanical sort of figure, the hermit in his desolate solitude.

  Jerome wrote from personal knowledge about the hardships and hallucinations of the hermit life.

  . . . My unkempt limbs were covered in shapeless sackcloth; my skin through long neglect had become as rough and black as an Ethiopian's. Tears and groans were every day my portion. And if sleep ever overcame my resistance and fell upon my eyes, I bruised my restless bones against the naked earth. Of food and drink I will not speak. . . .

  But though in fear of hell I had condemned myself to this prison-house, where my only companions were scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself surrounded by bands of dancing girls. My face was pale with fasting. But though my limbs were cold as ice my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead.

  Such were the tormented words that have prompted hundreds of European painters to depict Jerome's experience - masterpieces which reveal the hold this austere idealist has exercised upon the imagination of the world. His passionate withdrawal seems strangely incompatible with his anxieties about the disasters that were befalling Rome, and his assertions that patriotism was a normal instinct. However, 'the world, in its material sense', as he declared in 412, 'belongs to the violent'. And so he abandoned it. Such a course was utterly deplored by Gibbon in the rational tones of the eighteenth-century Western world.

  The Western world of ancient times was introduced to the movement by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who played a dominant part in the theological disputes of his age. During the second of five periods of exile from his diocese, in about 341, he arrived in Rome, accompanied by two Egyptian monks, the first to be seen in the West; and he was able to tell the Romans about his devotion and respect for the way of life entailed by the monastic vocation. Fourteen years later, during another period of exile, he took refuge in Egyptian monasteries, and soon afterwards his Life of Antony appeared in Greek. Judiciously mingling fact and fancy, it became a bestseller, and when translated into Latin made a profound impression throughout the whole of the Western Empire.

  Nevertheless, the monastic way of life itself was slow to be adopted in those regions. The first regular Western monastery was at Liguge, near Pictavi (formerly Limonum, now Poitiers) in France, established in about 360 by a former peasant and soldier, St Martin, who came from Savaria (
Szombathely) in Pannonia Prima (Hungary). Later, Martin established another monastic foundation Majus Monasterium (Marmoutier), to which he liked to withdraw from his bishopric of Turoni (formerly Caesarodunum, now Tours) as often as he was able to get away.

  Martin followed the Antonian ideal of a life that was partly hermit-like and partly communal. His eighty monks at Marmoutier lived in caves and tents, met each other only for services and meals, and fasted with rigour. Work was discouraged, except the transcription of manuscripts - the monastic task which handed down so many of its greatest achievements to the modern world.

  Sulpicius Severus, who came from south-western Gaul, wrote a skilful life of St Martin, describing his supposed miracles and his death. The biography was designed to show that the West could produce a saint superior to any Egyptian ascetic. Sulpicius, a wealthy Senator, who organized a sort of monkish life on his own estates, was writing for his own friends and equals, and the cult of St Martin among his class lent supernatural sanction to the dominance of the great landowner bishops.

  It remained for Jerome, whose account of the hermit life was so dramatic, to complete the popularization of such ideals. In 370-73 he established his first society of ascetics at Aquileia in north-east Italy, and later he left for Palestine to found a monastery at Bethlehem in about 389. He also wrote extensively on the life the monks lived, and translated the rules that had been drawn up for their Eastern institutions. Meanwhile Augustine too, in North Africa, had gathered around himself a group of clergy, to live a regulated communal life. His treatise, On the Works of Monks, insisted that they should earn their own living by manual labour rather than begging. Yet he was also eager to develop the link between monasticism and learning.

  Then, shortly after 400, it was on Gallic soil once again that these various endeavours bore significant fruit, when a more ambitious monastery was established by Honoratus on one of the Lerins Islands (S. Honorat), opposite Cannes, and the neighbouring islands were populated by monks shortly afterwards. Lerins served as a model for the future; and very shortly afterwards John Cassian, an ascetic from Scythia Minor (on the

  Rumanian Black Sea Coast), founded a monastery and a nunnery at Massilia (Marseille) (c. 415). He also wrote the Institutes and Conferences, which dominated the monastic thought of medieval Europe. Meanwhile Cassian's guidance induced many a Senator, naturally inclined to devoutness or ruined by German invasions, to make the transition to monk and then bishop.

  The former character of the monks as drop-outs had thus become considerably modified. In Ireland, it is true, the old semi-solitary Antonian tradition remained dominant. However, it was the more organized movement of Gaul which spread widely in the West during the fifth century AD. Captured by an articulate section of the aristocracy, it had become a highly respectable institution. It only remained for St Benedict, in the following century, to forge its peculiar, stable, permanent shape. But by that time the Western Roman world had fallen.

  During the previous, decisive years of the Empire's gradual collapse, monasticism had not been a stabilizing but a disintegrating element. When society needed all the manpower and revenue that it could muster in order not to succumb to invasions, the monks had withdrawn both, and had encouraged others to withdraw them as well. That they had made this contribution to the disunities which brought the Empire down was widely appreciated by contemporaries. Some, admittedly, praised the monks for trying to better the lot of the local inhabitants, often by opposing the civil authorities. But their detractors were numerous and determined.

  Jerome himself, though a determined pioneer of what he regarded as the right sort of monasticism, had the sharpest possible eye for the insincerity of many of its practitioners. His letters sparkle with onslaughts upon their conceit, lechery, gluttony and avarice. He can understand, he says, why many people prefer to live with wild beasts rather than with Christians of such a kind. But whereas he limited his criticism to bad monks, he was well aware that many others loathed them all indiscriminately, pointing out with a finger of scorn their black robes and shaven hair.

  Non-Christians, too, found that monks provided much fuel for their attacks on the Christian faith. An Alexandrian epigrammatist, Palladas, could not understand why such well-organized pressure groups described themselves romantically as 'solitaries'; and Eunapius described how the pagan shrines were desecrated by these 'tyrants, who live like swine, accounting it piety'. They were also widely attacked for their idleness and begging, which Augustine, among others, greatly deplored.

  The pagan historian Zosimus remarked that what they meant by 'sharing with the poor' was the reduction of everyone else to their own degraded level. But what was especially to the point was his emphasis on their uselessness to the state, to which they refused to make any contribution whatever.

  Perhaps the general feeling was best summed up by Rutilius Namatianus, who, as his ship sailed up the west coast of Italy, passed a monastery on the island of Capraria, the modern Capraia:

  ... a dreary place, where

  There are men who shun the light and call themselves monks . . .

  They fear fortune, whether good or evil.

  Would a man live in misery to escape it?

  Because of their fear, they shun what is good.

  Such reasoning is the raving of a madman;

  Whatever their reasons, I find them strange.

  The attitude of official churchmen towards monks and hermits was more ambivalent. Lip-service was often paid to the spiritual ideals of the monastic life, and bishops were sometimes ready enough to egg monks on to destroy pagan temples. Yet for a long time the church felt itself considerably weakened by their activities, since they deliberately defied its representatives, saw no reason to accept its universal claims, and deplored its alliance with the state.

  In retaliation, an ecclesiastical synod of about 340, held in Asia Minor, deplored the infrequency of the monks' attendance at church services. Under Valens, Bishop Lucius of Alexandria even sent men to launch violent attacks on the monasteries, and a number of their occupants were put to death. Pope Siricius, likewise, declared roundly that numerous monks were impostors. Emperors, too, in their edicts, declared the inmates of the monasteries to be fanatical, unruly and rebellious, and only too ready to infiltrate the towns and exacerbate religious and social discontents.

  These varying viewpoints were echoed by official pronouncements. A favourable attitude was apparent in 361, when Constantius n confirmed the exemption of monks from all public obligations. But then Julian compared them to his ragged . itinerant fellow-pagans known as the Cynics, seeing both alike as 'troublesome, insolent, and vagabonds'.

  Valentinian I and Valens were among the Christian rulers who similarly denounced monks for bad citizenship, and for hypocrisy into the bargain. Theodosius I, also, appealed to Ambrose in exasperation: 'What am I to do with those fanatical monks?' In 390 Theodosius still hoped to keep them away from the towns, commanding them to stay in 'desert places and vast solitudes'. But two years later, under pressure, he cancelled the order. Subsequently, Valentinian III forbade men to leave country estates to embrace monasticism, unless they had first obtained the landowner's permission. Yet none of these restrictive measures could keep the movement down.

  On a long-term view, what was particularly perilous to the future of the Empire was the celibacy the monastic career involved, since it meant that the population, already scarcely large enough to provide the men and money needed for national defence, would diminish still further. Moreover, this urge towards the celibate life extended far outside the monastic movement, since the widespread fashion for chastity produced an enormous enthusiasm for abstinence from sexual relations.

  This was declared to be a most desirable social ideal, because of the unworthiness of human beings and their bodies. For Jesus himself, according to the Gospel attributed to St Matthew, was said to have proposed celibacy as an example of superior virtue, and St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, had offered a similar reco
mmendation. Thereafter, as the taste for self-denial rapidly increased, exhortations to total continence became increasingly numerous, and third-century puritans, like the fervent Tertullian, were tireless in their advocacy of this virtue. Treatises praising virginity soon began to appear in great abundance.

  Augustine was one of the men who wrote vigorously and frequently in defence of such ideals. In his earlier days, he said that 'a whole frying-pan of abominable loves had crackled around him and on every side', and he had offered up the famous prayer,

  'Give me chastity and continence - but not yet.' But he was utterly convinced that sex must be done away with: it was the punishment for Adam's sin. Jerome strongly felt the same:

  . . . Our adversary the devil goeth about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. ... As long as we are held down by this frail body, as long as we keep our treasure in earthen vessels, and the flesh lusteth against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh: so long can there be no sure victory.

  Sometimes Jerome descends from this lofty height to advise women not to marry on simple grounds of prudence, because of the troubled character of the times. But more often he was pursuing a principle, notably in a letter directing the upbringing of Paula, a girl of aristocratic family who had been dedicated to a nunnery from her birth - and now the most stringently rigorous education was prescribed for her by Jerome.

  His insistence upon such views, while he was secretary to Pope Damasus, contributed largely to his expulsion from Rome in 385 after Damasus' death. For when Paula's aunt Blaesilla died, her end was believed to have been accelerated by the extreme asceticism urged on her by Jerome. At her funeral there were cries of 'The monks into the Tiber!', whereupon Jerome hastily left Rome, never to return. The new Pope, Siricius, who suspected him of aiming at the papacy for himself, was by no means sorry to see him go.

  This episode reveals the extraordinary involvement of Jerome with Roman upper-class women - an interest he had shared with Damasus, who was known as 'the ladies' ear-tickler'. Such women, whatever the formal deficiencies of their status by modern standards - for example, their continued exclusion from all official and legal posts, and from public higher education -were far ahead of their menfolk in pressing forward towards Christian austerity. Jerome devotes a letter to the defence of his female friendships. 'Did I’, he asked, 'ever enter the house of any woman who was inclined to wantonness? Was I ever attracted by silk dresses, flashing jewels, painted faces, display of gold? No other matron in Rome could win my approval but one who mourned and fasted, who was squalid with dirt, almost blinded with weeping!'