The Age of Constantine the Great (1949) by Jacob Burckhardt

Author:Jacob Burckhardt [Burckhardt, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138602168
Google: j1hauQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-07-30T00:02:50.581523+00:00

VII

Senescence of Ancient Life and Its Culture

IF THE CRISIS in the life of the ancient world is anywhere clearly revealed, it is in the twilight of paganism which we have endeavored to present in its true colors. The question now arises whether Christianity might not have had the force to give new life to nationalities and new vigor to the state, whether it should not have refuted pagan complaint current as early as the third century that, after this new religion had begun to advance, the race of man was doomed. For the pagans were emphatic in their assertion that since Christianity the gods had forsaken the direction of human fate and that they had departed (extcrminatos) out of the wretched world, where now only pestilence, war, famine, drought, locusts, hail, and so forth prevailed, while barbarians were attacking the Empire from all sides. Christian apologists were constrained to undertake the circumstantial refutation of these charges. "How little credit," they said, "does such childish petulance do your pagan gods! Why do they not bestow health and happiness upon you and chastise us Christians alone? Nature has not altered; sun and moon shine as before, the harvest grows green, trees bloom, oil and wine are pressed, and civic life proceeds as it always has. There have always been wars from the clays of Ninus the Assyrian, and since Christ they have in fact diminished. The undeniable evils of the present are part of the necessary world process by which earthly things seek to renew themselves (rerum innovatio)."

But the hope of renewal, as this author understood it, was vain. Let us, for the moment, leave aside the one-sided direction taken by Christianity as soon as it became a state religion, a direction altogether unsuited for bringing new strength to the Empire. Indeed, the great advantage of the religion whose kingdom was not of this world was that it did not set itself the task of directing and guaranteeing any definite state and any definite culture, as the religions of paganism had done, and that it was rather in a position to reconcile with one another and mediate between diverse peoples and centuries, states and cultural stages. It was not Christianity, then, that could bestow a second youth upon the senescent Roman Empire; but it could so far prepare the Empire's Germanic conquerors that they did not wholly tread its culture underfoot. A century and a half later, when the decision was to be made on the Catalaunian Plains whether the Hun was to draw the death pall over Western life as later the Mongol did over Asiatic life, this preparation bore its fruit; Roman and Visigoth combined to ward off the attack.

For the senescence and corruption of conditions in the Empire, for which Christianity bears no responsibility, the entire history of this period bears eloquent testimony, and reference has been made to it on every page of the present work. But this is an appropriate place to bring together significant aspects of the old age of the ancient world.

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