by Tom Holland
So it was to come: the last great battle of the world. Small wonder that Methodius’s prognostications should have attracted attention even in imperial circles. They may have been lurid and intemperate, yet they could offer a hard-pressed emperor precisely what St. John, in Revelation, had so signally withheld: reassurance that the Roman Empire would continue in heaven’s favour until the very end of days. More flatteringly, indeed – that the death of its last emperor would serve to precipitate the end of days. Had not St. Paul, when he spoke of Rome “restraining” Antichrist, implied as much? No matter how shrunken the dominion ruled from Constantinople, its rulers needed desperately to believe that it remained the fulcrum of God’s plans for the universe. What in more prosperous times had been taken for granted was now clung to with a grim resolution: the conviction that to be Christian was synonymous with being Roman.
Posterity, as though in mockery of Constantine’s pretensions, has christened the empire ruled from his foundation “Byzantium,” but this was not a name that the “Byzantines” ever applied to it themselves. * Even as Latin, the ancient language of the Caesars, gradually faded from the imperial chanceries, then from the law courts, and finally from the coinage, the citizens of Constantinople continued to call themselves Roman – albeit in their native Greek. Here was no faddish antiquarianism. Rather, the prickliness with which the Byzantines, the “Romaioi,” guarded their name went to the very heart of their self-image. It offered them reassurance that they had a future as well as a past. A jealous concern with tradition was precisely what marked them out as a Chosen People. It served, in short, to define their covenant with God.
The City of God
It is true that the identification of Christendom with empire was not entirely without its problems. A certain degree of awkwardness arose whenever the Romaioi were obliged to have dealings with Christians beyond their frontiers. Imperial lawyers had initially spun the optimistic formulation that all of Rome’s former provinces, from Britain to the furthest reaches of Spain, remained subject to the emperor. In the earliest days of their foundation, some of the barbarian kingdoms established in the West had been perfectly content to play along with this fiction – and even those that did not had on occasion been flattered into accepting certain tokens of subordination. After all, trinkets and titles from a Roman emperor were never readily to be sniffed at.
In AD 507, for instance, a confederation of Germanic tribes known collectively as the Franks, axe-throwing pagans who had seized control of much of northern Gaul, had won a great victory that extended their sway southwards as far as the Mediterranean – and Byzantine agents, hurrying to congratulate them, had awarded Clovis, their king, the sonorous if wholly empty title of consul. A year later, and Clovis had shown himself even more an enthusiast for things imperial by accepting baptism.* What precise role the ambassadors from Constantinople might have played in this decision we do not know; but it must surely have struck them as a development rich in promise. For, by their own lights, to be a Christian was to be a Roman.
Not by the lights of the Franks, however. Although Clovis’s people had plunged after their king into the waters of baptism, and although, a century later, missionaries dispatched from Rome would begin persuading the pagan English too to bow their necks before Christ, no submission to a mortal power was implied by these conversions. Just the opposite, in fact. Kings who accepted baptism did so primarily to win for their own purposes the backing of an intimidatingly powerful god: so it was, for instance, that Clovis, as a symbol of his newly Christian status, had taken to sporting “a salvation-giving warhelmet.”23 The very notion of tolerating an earthly overlord was anathema to such a man. Neither Clovis nor his successors had any wish to see a global empire re-established.
And already, by the seventh century, memories of Rome in the West were fading into oblivion. Massive still, beyond fields returned to scrub or marsh or forest, or above the huddled huts of peasants long since freed of imperial exactions, or framing perhaps even the high gabled hall of a chieftain and his carousing warriors, Roman buildings continued to loom against the sky – but as the wardens now of an order gone for ever, slowly crumbling before the passage of suns and rains. All the complex apparatus of bureaucracy, the same that in Constantinople still served to feed the emperor, his armies and his taxes, had collapsed utterly into ruin, leaving, amid the rubble, only a single structure standing. The Church in the West, had it followed the course of its eastern counterpart and insisted that Christendom was indeed synonymous with the rule of Rome, would surely have shared in the general ruin. As it was, it endured; and by enduring, preserved something of the imperious spirit of what had otherwise been left a corpse.
“To rejoice in the vast extent of an earthly kingdom is behaviour that no Christians should ever indulge in.”24 So had pronounced Augustine, a bishop from north Africa, during the calamitous final century of the Western Empire’s existence. But what of God’s kingdom? That was quite a different matter. Bishops in the West, no longer able to rely upon a universal empire to shield their flocks from danger, could find in the writings of Augustine a theology infinitely better suited to their tattered circumstances than anything originating from the palmier days of the pax Romana. The great division in the affairs of the world, Augustine had argued, lay not between civilised and savage, Roman and barbarian, but between those earthly dominions of which Rome had been merely the most prominent example and a dominion incalculably greater and more glorious: the City of God. Within the infinite walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, all might hope to dwell, no matter what their origin; and the entrance way to this city, its portal, was the Church.
A glorious role indeed. Great empires, borne upon the surging flood tides of human sinfulness, might rise and conquer and fall; “but the Heavenly City, journeying on pilgrimage throughout our fallen world, summons people from every nation, speakers of every language, taking no account of how they may differ in their institutions, their customs, or their laws.”25 Here, for all Christians in the West, whether in the old imperial provinces of southern Gaul, where bishops descended from senators still sat proudly amid the carcasses of Roman towns, or upon the mist-swept fringes of the world, where Irish hermits raised prayers to the Almighty above the ocean’s roar, was a message of mission and hope. Everywhere, across the whole, wide span of the fragmented, tormented world, was the City of God.
And as evidence for this, Augustine had turned, as had so many questers after divine secrets before him, to the vision of St. John. Specifically, he had turned to a passage controversial even by the vertiginous standards of Revelation. “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven,” St. John had written, “holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.”26 And for the thousand years of Satan’s imprisonment, until he should again “be loosed for a little while,” to fight the last battle that would see evil defeated once and for all, there would be a rule of saints. But when? Theories as to that, over the centuries, had come thick and fast. Most, feverish with mingled dread and hope, had proclaimed the start of the Millennium imminent. Augustine, however, in a typically innovative manoeuvre, had looked, not to the future, but to the past for the true solution. The rule of saints, he had argued, was already begun. It had been inaugurated by Christ Himself, after His death upon the Cross, when He had descended into the depths of hell and there bound up Satan, in witness of His victory over sin. Within the City of God, where Christ had ascended to reign in splendour, the saints and the martyrs already sat about Him upon their thrones. The Church too, earthly though it was, and therefore unavoidably tainted, was shot through with the radiance of their glory.
St. John’s vision, Augustine had argued, contained no road map of what was to come. Rather, it offered guidance on what it
meant to be a Christian in the here and now. To speculate when the world would end on the basis of Revelation was pointless. Why, not even St. John’s allusions to a millennium were to be taken literally. “For he intended his mention of ‘a thousand years’ to stand for the whole span of our world’s history. How else, after all, is one to convey an immensity of time save by deploying a perfectly round number?”27
The centuries passed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Christians who marked the times felt themselves to be living in an age of shadow. “Cities are destroyed, proud strongholds stormed, fair provinces emptied of people, and the whole earth become a solitude.”28 Yet though they mourned, those content to submit themselves to the inscrutable will of God did not despair: for still, proof against the breaking of the world, and illumined, however flickeringly, by the splendour of Christ in His undimmed glory, the Church continued to prosper. And so it seemed increasingly to its leaders that Augustine had been right: that the Millennium spoken of by St. John had indeed begun. Those who disagreed, turning to Revelation in the hunt for their own answers, were deluding themselves – or worse. Wild talk of saints ruling upon earth could not help but undermine those already charged with the task of “governing souls – which is the art to end all arts.”29 What bishops in Constantinople claimed for their embattled empire, a role as the vehicle for divine providence, even to the very end of days, when Christ would at last return to rule the living and the dead, bishops in the West claimed for themselves. A sense of urgency gnawed at them. “Once the world held us by its delights,” wrote one, gazing mournfully about him at the desolation of an emptied and crumbling Rome. “Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.”30 Yet precisely for that reason – precisely because the end of times did indeed appear close at hand – so was it all the more essential that the Church not speculate as to the date. Those entrusted with the shepherding of fallen humanity could not risk infecting their flocks with extravagant terrors and enthusiasms. The sheep who in nervous anticipation of the Second Coming broke free of the fold might prove sheep forever lost. Only through the Church could the New Jerusalem be attained. Only through the Church could there be found a path to the rapture of Christ’s return.
No wonder, then, that its leaders should have felt, often to a dizzying degree, a sense of their own elevation above the common run of things. Some bishops, man’s sinful nature being what it was, duly succumbed to the temptations of pride and greed; others, burdened by the cares of office, found themselves gazing anxiously into their souls and yearning for solitude; but not one ever doubted that he was possessed of a sacred charge. Those same blessed hands that Roman soldiers had centuries earlier nailed to the Cross had once touched the heads of the apostles; and the apostles in turn had laid their hands upon the heads of their successors; and so it had continued, without break, down to the present. A bishop at his consecration, in witness of the awful trust being placed upon him, would be anointed with an unguent of prodigious holiness, blended of oil and a fabulously sweet smelling, fabulously expensive resin, balsam. Chrism, this concoction was called: a mixture of such remarkable power that it needed only to be sprinkled on a sea to purge its depths of demons, and on a field to bless its soil with fertility. Upon flesh and blood too, its effects were transformative: for as it passed through a man’s pores, penetrating his body, seeping deep into his soul, so did it serve to suffuse him with an eerie and numinous potency. A bishop adorned upon his head and hands with holy oil could know himself fitted to handle the very profoundest mysteries of his faith: to officiate at a Mass, transforming bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; to confront and banish demons; to intercede with God. Anointed of the Lord, he was touched by the divine.
And even the humblest priest, consecrated in his own turn by a bishop, could be brought to share in the magic. Once, before the Church had begun its great labour of erecting a boundary between the sacred and the profane, the two had seemed interfused. Streams and trees had been celebrated as holy; laymen had laid claim to visions; prophets had read the future in ox dung; mourners had brought offerings of food and drink to tombs. Increasingly, however, the clergy had succeeded in identifying the dimensions of the supernatural as exclusively their own. By the eighth century, Christians uninitiated into the priesthood were losing confidence in their ability to communicate with the invisible. It was not only over the splendours of the City of God, after all, that the Church claimed to stand guard. Just as awesomely, its clergy patrolled the gateway that opened up to the realm of the dead, where angels or demons, heaven or hell, awaited the soul. No longer did people trust themselves to aid their departed kin as they embarked on this last dread journey. Only through the celebration of the Holy Mass, the Church had pronounced, could there be any hope of helping souls in the other world – and only a priest could conduct a Holy Mass.
Why, even the words he spoke while performing this miraculous ritual served to elevate him as a man apart; for in the West, unlike the East, whose missionaries thought nothing of translating their holy texts into any number of barbarous tongues, there was but a single sacred language. This was Latin; and its use was no less incumbent upon the clergy in Ireland or in the lands beyond the Rhine, where Roman rule had never penetrated, than it was upon their brethren in the former heartlands of the empire. For all the babel of jabberings spoken on the outer limits of forest or ocean, yet even Northumbrians or Thuringians or Frisians, if they had been properly consecrated to the service of Christ, could share in the common language that marked them out as priests.
Indeed, scholars from England who crossed the Channel were shocked to discover that the Latin spoken in Gaul appeared vulgar and decayed compared with the exquisitely frozen language that they had imbibed with such care from their school books. Even to those who had always fancied themselves native speakers of the “Roman tongue,” the antique Latin penned by Church fathers such as Augustine was becoming something dead. This, among priests who had the opportunity to learn it, only added to its appeal. A tongue unmangled by laymen could be reckoned all the more satisfyingly holy. As a result, even as the use of Latin as a spoken language declined in Italy, in Gaul, in Spain, to be replaced by bastard dialects, so the study of it by churchmen continued to flourish and spread. For the first time since the fall of Rome, an elite deployed across a vast extent of Europe could share in a common vocabulary of power. The Church in the West was be coming a Latin Church.
But not by any means a Roman one. True, Christian lands were formed of an immense patchwork of dioceses – and the boundaries of these dioceses, in the old imperial heartlands at any rate, dated all the way back to the time of the Caesars. It was true as well that when bishoprics were established in newly converted territories, beyond the borders of the ancient empire, it had become the custom to look to Rome for permission to establish supremos – “arch-bishops” – capable of co-ordinating them. Yet the Bishop of Rome himself, although widely acknowledged as the most senior churchman in the West, was no Constantine. He might command the respect of kings, but not their obedience; he might send them letters of guidance or advice or solace, but not instruction. Even had he aspired to impose his authority on Christendom, he lacked the means. “When all things are good,” Augustine had once written, “the question of order does not arise.”31 But shadow lay everywhere across the fallen world, even across dominions ruled by Christian kings – and so the question of order was one that the Church could hardly avoid. Chaos in a soul and chaos in a kingdom both sprang from the same self-evident cause: human evil. Robbery and oppression of the weak were bred of anarchy; and anarchy was bred of Satan, whose other name was Belial, a word which meant, learned doctors taught, “without a yoke.”32 Only at sword point, in a society collapsing into violence, could Satan be restrained, and the yoke of the law be restored.
Beyond all doubt, then, the trampling down of malefactors was to be reckoned a Christian duty – and yet it was still, even so, one hardly befitting a man of Go
d. A bishop presided over his diocese as its father, not its constable. That role had to be shouldered instead by another, one better qualified to handle sword and spear – as indeed had been the case since the very earliest days of the Church. That Rome’s empire had splintered into nothingness did not diminish this regrettable truth. If anything, indeed, it made it more pressing. For centuries, the Church had been obliged to accommodate itself to a bewildering array of warlords. The more rulers it had converted, the more it had mutated in response to their various styles of rule. Though it claimed to be universal, it was the very opposite of a monolith. Like the West itself, it constituted instead a kaleidoscope of differing peoples, traditions and beliefs.
Even in Rome herself, the very mother of the Church, the pressures of worldly circumstance never ceased to weigh upon the city’s bishop. Back in the sixth century, armies dispatched from Constantinople had invaded Italy and restored to the empire its ancestral heartland. “The ancient and lesser Rome” had been incorporated into the dominion of “the later, more powerful city,”33 and her bishop had humbly acknowledged himself the subject of the far-off emperor. A Byzantine governor had moved into the city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, administering as a province the emperor’s conquests in northern Italy, the Eternal City included; Byzantine titles and gewgaws had been lavished upon the Roman aristocracy; Byzantine fashions had become all the rage. The bishop himself, every time he celebrated a Mass, would pray for his absent master in Constantinople. Every time he wrote a letter, he would date it by an emperor’s regnal year.