"He brought in -- 'in obedience to the command of God' -- thousands of workmen and artists to raise city walls, fortifications, administrative buildings, palaces, and homes. He adorned the squares and streets with fountains and porticoes, and with famous sculptures conscripted impartially from a hundred cities in his realm. And to divert the turbulence of the populace he provided an ornate and spacious hippodrome where the public passion for games and gambling might vent itself on a scale paralleled only in degenerating Rome.

"The New Rome was dedicated as capital of the Eastern Empire on May 11, 330 -- a day that was thereafter annually celebrated with imposing ceremony. Paganism was officially ended. The Middle Ages of triumphant faith were, so to speak, officially begun.

"An official document (c.450) lists five imperial palaces, six palaces for the ladies of the court, three for high dignitaries, 4388 mansions, 322 streets, 52 porticoes. Add to these a thousand shops, a hundred places of amusement, sumptuous baths, brilliantly ornamented churches, and magnificent squares that were veritable museums of the art of the classic world.

"On the second of the hills that lifted the city above its encompassing waters lay the Forum of Constantine, an elliptical space entered under a triumphal arch at either end. Porticoes and statuary formed its circumference. On the north side stood a stately senate house. At the center rose a famous porphyry pillar, 120 feet high, crowned with the figure of Apollo, and ascribed to Pheidias himself.

"From the Forum a broad Mese or Middle Way, lined with palaces and shops, and shaded with colonnades, led westward through the city to the Augusteum, a plaza a thousand by three hundred feet, named after Constantine's mother Helena as Augusta.

"At the north end of this square rose the first form of St. Sophia -- Church of the Holy Wisdom. On the east side was a second senate chamber. On the south stood the main palace of the emperor, and the gigantic public Baths of Zeuxippus, containing hundreds of statues in marble or bronze. At the west end a vaulted monument -- the Milion or Milestone -- marked the point from which radiated the many magnificent roads (some still functioning) that bound the provinces to the capital.

"Here, too, on the west of Augusteum, lay the great Hippodrome. Between this and St. Sophia the imperial or Sacred Palace spread, a complex structure of marble surrounded by 150 acres of gardens and porticoes. Here and there and in the suburbs were the mansions of the aristocracy. In the narrow, crooked, congested side streets were the shops of the tradesmen, and the homes or tenements of the populace. At its western terminus the Middle Way opened through the 'Golden Gate' -- in the Wall of Constantine -- upon the Sea of Marmora.

"Below the great officials and the senators was an aristocracy of landowners dwelling now in the city, now on their country estates. Scorned by these, but rivaling them in wealth, were the merchants, who exchanged the goods of Constantinople and its hinterland for those of the world. Below these, a swelling bureaucracy of governmental employees.

"Below these the shopkeepers and master workmen of a hundred trades. Below these a mass of formally free labor, voteless and riotous, normally disciplined by hunger and police, and bribed to peace by races, games, and a daily dole totaling 80,000 measures of grain or loaves of bread.

"At the bottom, as everywhere in the Empire, were slaves, less numerous than in Caesar's Rome, and more humanely treated through the legislation of Constantine and the mitigating influence of the Church.

"Periodically the free population rose from its toil to crowd the Hippodrome. There, in an amphitheater 560 feet long and 380 wide, seats accommodated from 30,000 to 70,000 spectators. These were protected from the arena by an elliptical moat.

"Between the games they might walk under a shaded and marble-railed promenade 2766 feet long. Statuary lined the spina or backbone of the course -- a low wall that ran along the middle length of the arena from goal to goal. At the center of the spina stood an obelisk of Thothmes III, brought from Egypt. To the south rose a pillar of three intertwinded bronze serpents, originally raised at Delphi to commemorate the victory of Plataea (479B.C.). These two monuments still stand.

"The emperor's box, the Kathisma, was adorned in the fifth century with four horses in gilded bronze, an ancient work of Lysippus. In this Hippodrome the great national festivals were celebrated with processions, athletic contests, acrobatics, animal hunts and fights, and exhibitions of exotic beasts and birds. Greek tradition and Christian sentiment combined to make the amusements of Constantinole less cruel than those of Rome. We hear of no gladiatorial combats in the new capital. Nevertheless, the twenty-four horse and chariot races that usually dominated the program provided all the excitement that had marked a Roman holiday.

"Jockeys and charioteers were divided into Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites, according to their employers and their garb. The spectators -- and indeed the whole population of the city -- divided likewise. The principal fashions -- the Blues and Greens -- fought with throats in the Hippodrome and occasionally with knives in the streets.

"In Constantinople a similar contest raged. When Constantius ordered the replacement of the orthodox patriot Paul by the Arian Macedonius, a crowd of Paul's supporters resisted the soldiery, and three thousand persons lost their lives.

"Probably more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in these two years (342-3) than by all the persecutions of Christians by pagans in the history of Rome.

"Christians divided on almost every point but one -- that the pagan temples should be closed, their property confiscated, and the same weapons of the state used against them and their worshipers that had formerly assailed Christianity. Constantine had discouraged, but not forbidden, pagan sacrifices and ceremonies. Constans forbade them on pain of death. Constantius ordered all pagan temples in the Empire closed, and all pagan rituals to cease. Those who disobeyed were to forfeit thgeir property and their lives. These penalties were extended to provncial governors neglecting to enforce the decree.

"Nevertheless, pagan isles remained in the spreading Christian sea. The older cities -- Athens, Antioch, Smyrna, Alexandria, Rome -- had a large sprinkling of pagans, above all among the aristocracy and in the schools.

"In Olympia the games continued until Theodosius I (379-95). In Eleusis the Mysteries were celebrated until Alaric destroyed the temple there in 396. The schools of Athens continued to transmit, with mollifying interpretations, the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. (Epicurus was outlawed, and became a synonym for atheist.)

"Constantine and his son continued the salaries of the scholarchs and professors who loosely constituted the University of Athens. Lawyers and orators still flocked there to learn the tricks of rhetoric. Pagan sophists -- teachers of wisdom -- offered their wares to any who could pay.

"Those doctrines to which Plotinus had given a shadowy form -- of a triune spirit binding all reality -- of a Logos or intermediary deity who had done the work of creation -- of soul as divine and matter as flesh and evil -- of spheres of existence along whose invisible stairs the soul had fallen from God to man and might ascend from man to God -- these mystic ideas left their mark on the apostles Paul and John, had many imitators among the Christians, and molded many Christian heresies.

"In Iamblichus of Syrian Chalcis, miracle was added to mystery in Neoplatonic philsophy -- the mystic not only saw things unseen by sense, but -- by touching God in ecstasy -- he acquired divine powers of magic and divination. Iamblichus' disciple, Maximus of Tyre, combined the claim to mystic faculties with a devout and eloquent paganism that conquered Julian.

"Defending against Christian scorn the use of idols in pagan worship, Maximus said:--

'God the father and the fashioner of all that is, older than the sun or sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnamable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, torrents and mountain peaks, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming after His nature all that is beautiful in this world. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, or an Egyptian by worshiping animals, or another man by a river or a fire, I have no anger for the divergences. Only let them note, let them remember, let them love.'

"It was in part the eloquence of Libanius and Maximus that won Julian from Christianity to paganism. When their pupil reached the throne, Maximus rushed to Constantinople, and Libanius raised in Antioch a song of triumph and joy:--

"In 341, for reasons now unknown, Julian and his brother Gallus were banished to Cappadocia, and were for six years practially imprisoned in the castle of Macellum. Released, Julian was for a time allowed to live in Constantinople. But his youthful vivacity, sincerity, and wit made him too popular for the Emperor's peace of mind. He was again sent to Nicomedia, where he took up the study of philosophy.

"In 351 Gallus was created Caesar -- i.e. heir apparent to the throne -- and took up the task of government at Antioch. Safe for a while from imperial suspicion, Julian wandered from Nicomedia to Pergamum to Ephesus, studying philosophy under Edesius, Maximus, and Chrysanthius.

"Suddenly in 354 Constantius summoned both Gallus and Julian to Milan, where he was holding court. Gallus had overreached his authority, and had ruled the Asiatic provinces with a despotic cruelty that shocked even Constantius. Tried before the emperor, he was convicted of various offenses, and was summarily beheaded. Julian was kept under guard for several months in Italy. At last he convinced a suspicious monarch that poliics had never entered his head, and that his one interest was in philosophy. Relieved to find that he had only a philosopher to deal with, Constantius banished him to Athens (355).

"Having expected death, Julian easily reconciled himself to an exile that placed him at the fountainhead of pagan learning, religion, and thought.

"It was probably at this time that in cautious privacy he accepted initiation into the Mysteries at Eleusis. The morals of paganism condoned the dissembling of his apostasy. His friends and teachers, who shared his secret, could hardly consent to his revealing it. They knew that Constantius would crown him with inopportune martyrdom, and they looked forward to the time when their protege would inherit the throne, and restore their emoluments and their gods.

"Amid all this apprehensive concealment a second summons came to present himself before the Emperor at Milan. He hardly dared go but word was conveyed to him from the Empress Eusebia that she had promoted his cause at court, and that he had nothing to fear.

"To his astonishment, Constantius gave him his sister Helena in marrige, conferred upon him the title of Caesar, and assigned to him the government of Gaul (355). The shy young celibate, who had come dressed in the cloak of a philospher, adopted uncomfortably the uniform of a general and the duties of matrimony

"Moving south, he met the main army of the Alemanni near Strasbourg, formed his men into a crescent wedge, and with brilliant tactics and personal bravery led them to a decisive victory over forces far outhumbering his own. Gaul breathed more freely but in the north the Salian Franks still ravaged the valley of the Meuse. Julian marched against them, defeated them, forced them back over the Rhine, and returned in triumph to Paris, the provincial capital.

"The grateful Gauls hailed the young Caesar as another Julius, and his soldiers already voiced their hopes that he would soon be emperor.

"He remained five years in Gaul -- repeopling devastatd lands -- reorganizing the Rhine defenses -- checking economic exploitation and political corruption -- restoring the prosperity of the province and solvency of the government -- and at the same time reducing taxes.

"Men marveled that this meditative youth, so lately torn from his books, had transformed himself as if by magic into a general, a statesman, and a just but humane judge. He established the principle that an accused person should be accounted innocent until proved guilty.

"His reforms made him enemies. Officials who feared his scrutiny, or envied his popularity, sent to Constantius secret accusations to the effect that Julian was planning to seize the imperial throne. Julian countered by writing a fulsome panegyric of the Emperor. Constantius, still suspicious, recalled the Gallic prefect Sallus, who had co-operated loyally with Julian.

"Constantius was not unjustified. Shapur II had demanded the return of Mesopotamia and Armenia (358). When Constantius refused, Shapur besieged and captured Amida (now Diyarbekir in Turkish Kurdistan).

"Constantius took the field against him and ordered Julian to turn over to the imperial legates, for the campaign in Asia, 300 men from each Gallic regiment. Julian protested that these troops had enlisted on the understanding that they would not be asked to serve beyond the Alps. He warned that Gaul would not be safe should her army be so depleted. (Six years later the Germans successfully invaded Gaul.)

"Nevertheless, he ordered his soldiers to obey the legates. The soldiers refused, surrounded Julian's palace, acclaimed him Augustus -- i.e. Emperor -- and begged him to keep them in Gaul. He again counseled obedience. They persisted. Julian, feeling, like an earlier Caesar, that the die was cast, accepted the imperial title, and prepared to fight for the Empire and his life.

"The army that had refused to leave Gaul now pledged itself to march to Constantinople and seat Julian on the throne.

"Constantius was in Cilicia when news reached him of the revolt. For another year he fought Persia, risking his throne to protect his country. Then, having signed a truce with Shapur, he marched his legions westward to meet his cousin.

"Julian advanced with a small force. He stopped for a while at Sirmium (near Belgrade), and there at last proclaimed his paganism to the world. Good fortune rescued him from a precarious position. In November 361 Constantius died of a fever near Tarsus, in the forty-fifth year of his age.

'of medium height. His hair lay smooth as if it had been combed. His beard was shaggy and trained to a point. His eyes were bright and full of fire, bespeaking the keenness of his mind. His eyebrows fine, his nose perfectly straight, his mouth a bit large, with full lower lip. His neck thick and bent, his shoulders large and broad. From his head to his fingerteps he was well proportioned, and therefore was strong and a good runner.'

His self-portrait is not so flattering:--

"Though nature did not make my face any too handsome, nor give it the bloom of youth, I myself out of sheer perversity added to it this long beard. I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts. My head is disheveled. I seldom cut my hair or my nails, and my fingers are nearly always black with ink.'

"He prided himself on maintaining the simplicity of a philosopher amid the luxuries of the court. He rid himself at once of the eunuchs, barbers, and spies that had served Constantius. His young wife having died, he resolved not to marry again, and so needed no eunuch. One barber, he felt, could take care of the whole palace staff. As for cooks, he ate only the plainest foods, which anyone could prepare.

"This pagan lived and dressed like a monk. Apparently he knew no woman carnally after the death of his wife. He slept on a hard pallet in an unheated room. He kept all his chambers unheated throughout the winter 'to accustom myself to bear the cold.' He had no taste for amusements. He shunned the theater with its libidinous pantomimes, and offended the populace by staying away from the Hippodrome. On solemn festivals he attended for a while, but finding one race like another, he soon withdrew.

"At first the people were impressed by his virtues, his asceticism, his devotion to the chores and crises of government. They compared him to Trajan as a general, to Antoninus Pius as a saint, to Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher-king.

"We are surprised to see how readily this young pagan was accepted by a city and an Empire that for a generation had known none but Christian emperors.

"He pleased the Byzantine Senate by his modest observance of its traditions and prerogatives. He rose from his seat to greet the consuls, and in general played the Augustan game of holding himself as a servant and delegate of the senators and the people. When, inadvertently, he infringed a senatorial privilege, he fined himself ten pounds of gold, and declared that he was subject like his fellow citizens to the laws and forms of the republic.

"From morn until night he toiled at the tasks of government, except for an intermission in the afternoon, which he reserved for study. His light diet, we are told, gave his body and mind a nervous agility that passed swiftly from one business or visitor to another, and exhausted three secretaries every day. He performed with assiduity and interest the functions of a judge -- exposed the sophistry of advocates -- yielded with grace to the sustained opinions of judges against his own -- and impressed everyone with the righteousness of his decisions.

"He reduced the taxes levied upon the poor -- refused the gift of golden crowns traditionally offered by each province to a new emperor -- excused Africa from accumulated arrears -- and remitted the excessive tribute heretofore exacted from the Jews He made stricter, and strictly enforced, the requirements for a license to practice medicine.

"He loved books, carried a library with him on his campaigns, vastly enlarged the library that Constantine had founded, and established others. In a 'Hymn to a King's Son,' he gave his reasons for abandoning Christianity. The Gospels, he writes, in a preview of Higher Criticism, contradict one another, and agree chiefly in their incredibility.

"When Julian sought to restore paganism, he found it not only irreconcilably diverse in practice and creed, but far more permeated with incredible miracle and myth than Christianity. He realized that no religion can hope to win and move the common soul unless it clothes its moral doctrine in a splendor of marvel, legend, and ritual.

"He was impressed by the antiquity and universality of myths. He resigned himself to mythology, and condoned the use of mnyths to instill morality into unlettered minds. He discovered the need of sensory symbolism to convey spiritual ideas, and adopted the Mithraic worship of the sun as a religious counterpart among the people, of the philosopher's devotion to reason and light.

"It was not difficult for this poet-king to pen a hymn to Helios King Sun, source of all life, author of countless blessings to mankind. This, he suggested, was the real Logos, or Divine Word, that had created, and now sustained, the world. To this Supreme Principle and First Cause Julian added the innumerable deities and genii of the old pagan creeds. A tolerant philosopher, he thought, would not strain at swallowng them all.

"It would be a mistake to picture Julian as a freeethinker replacing myth with reason. He denounced atheism as bestial, and taught doctrines as supernatural as can be found in any creed. Seldom has a man composed such nonsense as in Julian's hymn to the sun.

"He accepted the Neoplatonist trinity, identified Plato's creative archetypal Ideas with the mind of God, considered them as the intermediary Logos or Wisdom by which all things had been made, and looked upon the world of matter and body as devilish impediment to the virtue and liberation of the imprisoned soul. Through piety, goodness, and philosohy, the soul might free itself, rise to the contemplation of spiritual realities and laws, and so be absorbed in the Logos, perhaps in the ultimate God Himself.

"The deities of polytheism were in Julian's belief impersonal forces. He could not accept them in their popular anthropomorphic forms. But he knew that the people would seldom mount to the absractions of the philospher, or the mystic visions of the saint. In public and private he practiced the old ritusls, and sacrificed so many animals to the gods that even his admirers blushed for the holocausts.

"According to Libarius, 'he wished rather to be called a priest than an emperor.' He envied the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Christianity -- its devoted priests and women -- the communalism of its worship -- the binding persuasiveness of its charity.

"He was not above imitating the better aspects of a religion which he hoped to supplant and destroy. He called new blood into the pagan priesthood, organized a pagan Church with himself as its head, and importuned his clergy to rival and surpass the Christian ministry in providing instruction to the people -- distributing alms to the poor -- offering hospitality to strangers -- and giving examples of the good life. He established in every town schools for lectures and expositions of the pagan faith.

"This pagan was a Christian in everything but creed. As we read him, and discount his dead mythology, we suspect that he owed many lovable developments of his character to the Christian ethic which had been poured into him in childhood and early youth.

"How, then, did he behave to the religion in which he had been reared? He allowed Christianity full freedom of preaching, worship, and practice, and recalled the orthodox bishops exiled by Constantius.

"He withdrew from the Christian Church all state subsidies, and closed to Christians the chairs of rhetoric, philosophy, and literature in the universities, on the ground that these subjects could be taught with sympathy only by pagans.

"He ended the exemption of the Christian clergy from taxation and burdenshome civic duties, and the free use by the bishops of the facilities suppled for the public post.

"He forbade legacies to churches -- made Christians ineligible to governmental offices -- ordered the Christians of each community to make full reparation for any damage that they hd inflicted upon pagan temples during preceding reigns -- and permitted the demolition of Christian churches that had been built upon the illegally seized lands of pagan shrines.

"When confusion, injustice, and riots resulted from this precipitate logic, Julian sought to protect the Christians, but he refused to change the laws. He was capable of sarcasm hardly becoming a philosopher when he reminded certain Christians who had suffered violence that 'their Scriptures exhort them to support their misfortunes with patience.' Christians who reacted to these laws with insults or violence were severely punished. Pagans who took to violence or insults in dealing with Christians were handled with leniency.

"In the end Julian's passionate perseverance defeated his program. Those whom he injured fought him with subtle pertinacity. Those whom he favored responded with indifference. Paganism was spiritually dead. It no longer had in it any stimulus to youth, any solace to sorrow, any hope beyond the grave.

"Some converts came to it, but mostly in expectation of political advancement or inmperial gold. Some cities restored the official sacrifices, but only in payment for favors.

"Many pagans interpreted paganism to mean a good conscience in pleasure. They were disappointed to find Julian more puritan than Christ. This supposed freethinker was the most pious man in the state, and even his friends felt it a nuisance to keep pace with his devotions. or they were skeptics who not privately smiled at his outmoded deities and solicitous hecatombs.

"The custom of sacrificing animals on altars had almost died out in the East and in the West outside of Italy. People had come to think of it as a disgrace or a mess.

"Julian called his movement Hellenism, but the word repelled the pagans of Italy who scorned anything Greek that was not dead. He relied too much on philosophical argument, which never reached to the emotional bases of faith. His works were intelligible only to the educated, who were too educated to accept them. His creed was an artifical syncretism that struck no roots in the hopes or fancies of men.

"In the fall of 362 he came to Antioch, and gathered his troops. The merchants of the city took advantage of the influx to raise prices. Julian called in the economic leaders and pled with them to restrain their profit seeking. They promised, but did not perform. He had 400,000 modii (pecks) of corn brought in from other cities in Syria and Egypt. The merchants protested that his prices made profit impossible. They secretly bought up the imported corn, took it and their goods to other towns, and Antioch found itself with much money and no food.

"Soon the populace denounced Julaian for his interference. The wits of Antioch made fun of his beard and of his laborious attendance upon dead gods. The famous park called Daphne, once a sacred shrine of Apollo, had been changed into an amusement resort. Julian ordered the amusements ended and the shrine restored. This had hardly been completed when a fire consumed it. Suspecting Christian incendiarism, Julian closed the cathedral of Anbtioch and confiscated its wealth.

"The Emperor's one consolation in Antioch was his 'feast of reason' with Libanius.

"At last the army was ready, and in March 363 Julian began his campaign. He led his forces across the Euphrates, then across the Tigris, pursued the retreating Persians, but was harassed and almost frustrated by their 'scorched earth' policy of burning all crops in their wake. Time and again his soldiers were near starvation. Persian women of youth and beauty were among his captives. He never disturbed their privacy, and allowed no one to dishonor them.

Under his able generalship, his troops advanced to the very gates of Cresiphon, and laid siege to it but the inability to get food compelled retreat. Shapur II chose two Persian nobles, cut off their noses, and bade them go to Julian in the guise of men who had deserted because of this cruel indignity, and lead him into a desert. They obeyed. Julian trusted them, and followed them, with his army, for twenty miles into a waterless waste.

"While he was extricating his men from this snare they were attacked by a force of Persians. The attack was repulsed and the Persians fled. Julian, careless of his lack of armor, was foremost in their pursuit. A javelin entered his side and pierced his liver. He fell from his horse and was carried to a tent, where his physicians warned him that he had but a few hours to live. Libanius alleged that the weapon came from a Christian hand, and it was noted that no Persian claimed the reward that Shapur had promised for the slaying of the Emperor.

"Some Christians, like Sozomen, agreed with Libanius' account, and praised the assassin 'who for the sake of God and religion had performed so bold a deed.'

"The army, still in peril, required a commander. Its leaders chose Jovian, captain of the imperial guard. The new emperor made peace with Persia by surrendering four of the five satrapies that Diocletian had seizd some seventy years before.

"Jovian persecuted no one but he promptly transferred state support from the pagan temples to the Church. The Christians of Antioch celebratd with public rejoicings the death of the pagan Emperor. For the most part, however, the victorious Christian leaders preached to their congregations a generous forgetfulness of the injuries that Christianity had borne.

"If we except the Merovingian Franks, their sexual morals were superior to those of the Romans and the Greeks. Though they lacked the civility and graces of a cultured people, they often shamed the Romans by their courage, hospitality, and honesty. They were cruel, but hardly more so than the Romans. They were probably shocked to find that Roman law permitted the torturing of freemen to extort confessions or testimony.

"They were individualistic to the point of chaos, while the Romans had now been tamed to sociability and pace. In their higher ranks they showed some appreciation of literature and art. Stilicho, Ricimer, and other Germans entered fully into the cultural life of Rome, and wrote a Latin that Symmachus professed to enjoy.

"In general the invaders -- above all, the Goths -- were civilized enough to admire Roman civilization as higher than their own, and to aim rather at acquiring it than at destroying it. For two centuries they asked little more than admission to the Empire and its unused lands. They shared actively in its defense.

"He refortified the frontiers of Italy and Gaul, built up the army to strength and discipline, and again drove the encroaching Germans back across the Rhine. From his capital at Milan he issued enlightened legislation forbidding infanticide -- founding colleges -- extending state medicine in Rome -- reducing taxes -- reforming a debased coinage -- checking political corruption -- and proclaiming freedom of creed and worship for all.

"He legalized bigamy to sanction his marriage with Justina, whose beauty had been too generously described to him by his wife. Nevertheless, it was a tragedy for Rome that he died so soon (375).

"His son Gratian succeeded to his power in the West, lived up to his father for a year or two, then abandoned himself to amusements and the chase, and left the government to corrupt officials who put every office and judgment up for sale. The general Maximus overthrew him and invaded Italy. But the new Emperor of the East, Theodosius I the Great, marched westward, defeated the usurper, and set the young Valentinian firmly on his Milan throne (388).

"Theodosius was a Spaniard. He had distinguished himself as a general in Spain, Britain, and Thrace. He had persuaded the victorious Goths to join his army instead of fighting it. He had ruled the Eatern provinces with every wisdom except tolerance. Half the world looked in awe at his astonishing assemblage of handsome features and majestic presence, ready anger and readier mercvy, humane legislation and sternly orthodox theology.

"While he was wintering at Milan a disturbance characteristic of the times broke out in Thessalonica. The imperial governor there, Botheric, had imprisoned for scandalous immorality a charioteer popular with the citizens. The crowd overcame his garrison, killed him and his aides, tore their bodies to pieces, and paraded the streets displaying the severed limbs as emblems of victory.

"The news of this outburst stirred Theodosius to fury. He sent secret orders that the entire population of Thessalonica should be punished. The people were invited into the hippodrome for games. Hidden soldiery fell upon them there, and massacred 7000 men, women, and children (390).

"Ambrose, who administered with stoic Christianity the see of Milan, wrote to the Emperor that he, the Bishop, could not again celebrate Mass in the imperial presence until Theodosius should have atoned before all the people for his crime. The Emperor was reluctant to lower the prestige of his office by so public a humiliation. He tried to enter the cathedral, but Ambrose himself barred the way. After weeks of vain efforts Theodosius yielded, stripped himself of all the insignia of empire, entered the cathedral as a humble penitent, and begged heaven to forgive his sins (390).

"It was an historic triumph and defeat in the war between Church and state.

"Theodosius marched westward again, to restore legitimacy and orthodoxy with an army of Goths, Alani, Caucasians, Iberians, and Huns. Among its generals were the Goth Gainas who would seize Constantinople, the Vandal Stilicho who would defend Rome, and the Goth Alaric who would sack it.

"In a two-day battle near Aquileia, Arbogast and Eugenius were defeated (394). Eugenius was surrendered by his soldiers and slain. Arbogast died by his own hand. Theodosius summoned his eleven-year-old son Honorius to be Emperor of the West, and named his eighteen-year-old son Arcadius as co-Emperor of the East. Then, exhausted by his campaigns, he died at Milan (395) in the fiftieth year of his age.

"He proposed an end of luxury and ease and the enlistment or conscription of a citizen army aroused to fight for country and freedom. He called upon Arcadius and Honorius to rise and smite the insolent barbarian hosts within the empire, and to drive them back to their lairs behind the Black Sea, the Danube, and Rhine. The court applauded Synesius' address as an elegant oratorical exercise, and returned to its feasts.

"Meanwhile Alaric compelled the armorers of Epirus to make for his Goths a full supply of pikes, swords, helmets, and shields.

"In 401 he invaded Italy, plundering as he came. Thousands of refugees poured into Milan and Ravenna, and then fled to Rome. Farmers took shelter within the walled towns, while the rich gathered whatever of their wealth they could move, and frantically sought passage to Corsica, Sardinia, or Sicily.

"Stilicho denuded the provinces of their garrisons to raise an army capable of stemming the Gothic flood. At Pollentia, on Easter morning of 402, he pounded upon the Goths, who had interrupted pillage for prayer.

"Alaric retreated, but ominously toward unprotected Rome, and only a massive bribe from Honorius persuaded him to leave Italy.

"The timid Emperor, on Alaric's approach to Milan, had thought of transferring his capital to Gaul. Now he cast about for some safer place, and found it in Ravenna, whose marshes and lagoons made it impregnable by land, and its shoals by sea.

"But the new capital trembled like the old when the barbarian Radagaisus led a host of 200,000 Alani, Quadi, Ostrogoths, and Vandals over the Alps, and attcked the growing city of Florentia. Stilicho once more proved his generalship, defeated the motley horde with a relatively small army, and brought Radagaisus to Honorius in chains.

"Italy breathed again, and the imperial court of patricians, princesses, bishops, cunuchs, poultry, and generals resumed its routine of luxury, corruption and intrigue.

"Olympius, the chancellor, envied and distrusted Stilicho. He resented the great general's apparent connivance at Alaric's repeated escapes, and thought he detected in him the secret sympathy of a German with German invaders. He protested against the bribes that on Stilicho's prompting had been paid or pledged to Alaric.

"Honorius hestitated to depose the man who for twenty-three years had led Rome's armies to victory and had saved the West. But when Olympius pesuaded him that Stilicho was plotting to put his son on the throne, the timid youth consented to his general's death. Olumpius at once sent a squad of soldiers to carry out the decree. Stilicho's friends wished to resist. He forbade them, and offered his neck to the sword (408).

"Rome itself since 100 A.D. had been ethnically an Oriental city. Once Rome had lived on the East, as modern Europe lived on its conquests and colonies until the middle of the twentieth century. The legions had sucked the products and precious metals of a dozen provinces into the mansions and coffers of the victors.

"Now conquest was ended and retreat had begun. Italy was forced to depend upon its own human and material resources. These had been dangerously reduced by family limitation, famine, epidemics, taxation, waste, and war. Industry had never flourished in the parasitic peninsula. Now that its markets were being lost in the East and Gaul, it could no longer support the urban population that had eked out doles by laboring in shops and homes. The collegia or guilds suffered from inability to sell their votes in a monarchy whre voting was rare.

"Slavery was slowly declining. In a developed civilization nothing can equal the free man's varying wage, salary, or profit as an economic stimulus. Slave labor had paid only when slaves were abundant and cheap. Their cost had risen since the legions had ceased to bring home the human fruits of victory. Escape was easy for the slaves now that government was weak. As the cost of slaves mounted, the owner protected his investment in them by more considerate treatment.

"The majority of the rich now lived in their country villas, shunning the turmoil and rabble of the towns. Nevertheless, most of Italy's wealth was still drawn to Rome. The great city was no longer a capital, and seldom saw an emperor, but it remained the social and intellectual focus of the West. Here was the summit of the new Italian aristocracy -- not as of old an hereditary caste, but periodically recruited by the emperors on the basis of landed wealth.

"A priest of Marseille, in the fifth century, painted a less attractive picture of conditions in Italy and Gaul. Salvian's book On the Government of God (c.450) addressed itself to the same problem that generated Augustine's City of God and Orosius' History Against the Pagans -- how could the evils of the barbarian invasions be reconciled with a divine and beneficent Providence? These sufferings, Salvian, answered, were a just punishment for the economic exploitation, political corruption, and moral debauchery of the Roman world.

"No such ruthless oppression of poor by rich, he assures us, could be found among the barbarians. The barbarian heart is softer than the Roman's. If the poor could find vehicles they would migrate en masse to live under barbarian rule.

"It is a terrible picture, obviously exaggerated. Eloquence is seldom accurate. Doubtless then, as now, virtue modestly hid its head, and yielded the front page to vice, misfortune, politics, and crime.

"Augustine paints almost as dark a picure for a like moralizing end. He complains that the churches are often emptied by the competition of dancing girls displaying in the theaters their disencumbered charms. The public games still saw the slaughter of conficts and captives to make a holiday.

"Culturally, Rome had not seen so busy an age since Pliny and Tacitus. Music was the rage. Ammianus complains that it had displaced philosophy, and had 'turned the libraries into tombs.' He describes gigantic hydraulic organs, and lyres as large as chariots.

"Schools were numerous. The 'universities' of professors paid by the state taught grammar, rhetoric, literature, and philosophy to students drawn from all the Western provinces, while the encompassing barbarians patiently studed the arts of war.

"He was a frank pagan, an admirer of Julian, a scorner of the luxury that he ascribed to the bishops of Rome. For all that he was generally impartial, praised many aspects of Christianity, and condemned Julian's restriction of academic freedom as a fault 'to be overwhelmed with eternal silence.'

"He was as well educatd as a soldier can find time to be. He believed in demons and theurgy, and quoted in favor of divination its archopponent Cicero. But he was, by and large, a blunt and honest man, just to all factions and men. He hated oppression, extravagance, and display, and spoke his mind about them wherever found.

"He was the last of the classic historians. After him, in the Rome world, there were only chroniclers.

"In that same Rome whose manners seemed to Ammianus snobbish and corrupt, Macrobius found a society of men who graced their wealth with courtesy, culture, and philanthropy. He was primarily a scholar, loving books and a quiet life. In 390, however, we find him serving as vicarius, or imperial legate, in Spain.

"His chef d'oeuvre, quoted by almost every historian these last 1500 years, was the Saturnalia, or Feast of Saturn, a 'Curiosities of Literature' in which the author gathered the heterogenous harvest of his studious days and bookish nights.

"It was some such circle as this that, about 394, welcomed into its number a poet destined to sing the swan song of Rome's magnificence. Claudius Claudianus, like Ammianus, was born in the East, and spoke Greek as a mother tongue. But he must have learned Latin at an early age to write it so fluently well. After a short stay in Rome he went to Milan, found a place on Stilicho's staff, became unofficial poet laureate to the Emperor Honorius, and married a lady of birth and wealth. Claudian had an eye to the main chance, and did not propose to be buried in Potter's Field. He served Stilicho with melodious panegyrics and with savagely vituperative poems against Stilicho's rivals.

For this reason, it will be impossible to participate in this forum without discussing "religion" from time to time.

"The following guidelines will be enforced by the Discussion Leader to avoid confrontations and digressions about personal religious views.

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"In 380 the emperor Gratian, won to a passionate orthodoxy by the eloquent Ambrose, proclaimed the Nicene Creed as compulsory 'on all the peoples subject to the governments of our clemency,' and denounced as 'mad and insane' the followers of other faiths. In 382 he ordered an end to payments by the imperial or municipal trwasuries for pagan ceremonies, vestal virgins, or priests -- confiscated all lands belonging to temples and priestly colleges -- and bade his agents remove from the Senate House in Rome that statue of the goddess Victory which Augustus had placed there in 29B.C., and before which twelve tenerations of senators had taken their vows of allegiance to the emperor.

"The speech of Symmachus before Valentinian II was acclaimed as a masterpiece of eloquent pleading. It was not expedient, he argued, to end so abruptly religious practices that had through a millennium been associated with the stability of social order and prestige of the state.

"The young Valentinian was moved. Ambrose tells us that even the Christians in the imperial council advised the restoration of the statue of Victory. But Ambrose, who had been absent on a diplomatic mission for the state, overruled the council with an imperious letter to the Emperor. He took up one by one the argumetns of Symmachus, and countered them with characteristic force. In effect he threatened to excommunicate the ruler if the plea should be granted. 'You may enter the churches, but you will find no priest there to receive you, or you will them them there to forbid you entrance.'

"Valentinian denied the Senate's appeal.

"The pagans of Italy made a last effort in 393, risking all on revolution. The half-pagan emperor Eugenius, refused recognition by Theodosius, and hoping to enlist the pagans of the West in his defense, restored the statue of Victory, and boasted that after defeating Theodosius he would stable his horses in Christian basilicas.

"Nicomachus Flavianus, son-in-law of Syummachus, led an army to support Eugenius, shared in the defeat, and killed himself. Theodosius marched into Rome, and compelled the Senate to decree the abolition of paganism in all its forms (394). When Alaric sacked Rome the pagans saw in the humiliation of the once lordly city the anger of their neglected gods.

"For three days Rome was subjected to a discriminate pillage that left the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul untouched, and spared the refugees who sought sanctuary in them. But the Huns and slaves in the army of 40,000 men could not be controlled. Hundreds of rich men were slaughtered, their women were raped and killed. It was found almost impossible to bury all the corpses that littered the streets. Thousands of prisoners were taken, among them Honorius' half sister Galla Placidia.

"Gold and silver were seized wherever found. Works of art were melted down for the prcious metals they contained. Many masterpieces of sculpture and pottery were joyously destroyed by former slaves who could not forgive the poverty and toil that had generted this beauty and wealth.

"Alaric restored discipline, and led his troops southward to conquer Sicily. But in that same year he was stricken with fever, and died at Cosenza. Slaves diverted the flow of the river Busento to bare a secure and spacious grave for him. The stream was then brought back to its course. To conceal the spot the slaves who had performed these labors were slain.

"Ataulf (Adolph), Alaric's brother-in-law, was chosen to succeed him as king. He agreed to withdraw his army from Italy on condition that he should be given Placidia in marriage, and that his Visigoths, as foederati of Rome, should receive southern Gaul, including Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, for their self-govverned realm.

"Honorius refused the marriage. Placedia consented. The Gothic chieftain proclaimed that his ambition was not to destroy the Romn Empire but to preserve and strengthen it. He marched his army out of Italy, and by a judicious mixture of diplomacy and force founded the Visigothic kingdome of Gaul, theoretically subject to the empire, and with its capital at Toulouse (414). A year later he was assassinated. Placidia, who loved him, wished to remain a perpetual widow, but was awarded by Honorius to the general Constantius.

"In any case the Vandal king was quite capable of originating the plan. Gaiseric was the proud bastard son of a slave -- lame but strong -- ascetic in regimen -- undaunted in conflict -- furious in anger -- cruel in enmity -- but with an unbeaten genius for both negotiation and war.

"Arrived in Africa, his 80,000 Vandal and Alani warriors, women, and children were joined by the savage Moors, long resentful of Roman domination, and the Donatist heretics, who had been persecuted by the orthodox Christians, and now welcomed a new rule.

"Out of a population of some 8,000,000 souls in Roman North Africa, Boniface could muster only a negligible number to help his small regular army. Overwhelmingly defeated by Gaiseric's horde, he retreated to Hippo, where the aged St. Augustine aroused the population to heroic resistance.

"For fourteen months the city stood siege (430-1). Gaiseric then withdrew to meet another Roman force, and so overwhelmed it that Valentinian's ambassador signed a truce recognizing the Vandal conquest in Africa. Gaiseric observed the truce until the Romans were off their guards. Then he pounced upon rich Carthage and took it without a blow (439).

"The nobles and the Catholic clergy were dispossessed of their property, and were banished or enserfed. Lay and ecclesiastical property was seized wherever found, and torunre was not spared to discover its hiding place.

"Gaiseric was still young. Although a capable administrator, who reorganized Africa into a lucrative state, he was happiest when engaged in war. Building a great fleet, he ravaged with it the coasts of Spain, Italy, and Greece. No one could tell where his cavalry-laden ships would land next. Never in Roman history had such unhindered piracy prevailed in the western Mediterranean. At last the Emperor, as the price of the African corn on which Ravenna as well as Rome lived, made peace with the barbarian king, and even pldged him an imperial daughter in marriage.

"About the year 433 the Hun king Rua died, and left his throne to his nephews Bleda and Attila. Bleda was slain -- some said by Attila -- about 444, and Attila (i.e. in Gothic, 'Little Father') ruled divers tribes north of the Danube from the Don to the Rhine.

"He differed from the other barbarian conquerors in trusting to cunning more than to force. He ruled by using the heathen superstitions of his people to sanctify his majesty. His victories were prepared by the exaggerated stories of his cruelty which perhaps he had himself originated. At last even his Christian enemies called him the 'scourge of God' and were so terrified by his cunning that only the Goths could save them.

"He was not a savage. He had a sense of honor and justice, and often proved himself more magnanimous than the Romans. He lived and dressed simply, ate and drank moderately, and left luxury to his inferiors, who loved to display their gold and silver utensils, harness, and swords, and the delicate embroidery that arrested the skillful fingers of their wives.

"Attila had many wives but scorned that mixture of monogamy and debauchery which was popular in some circles of Ravenna and Rome. His palace was a huge loghouse floored and walled with planed planks, but adorned with elegantly carved or polished wood, and reinforced with carpets and skins to keep out the cold.

"His capital was a large village probably on the site of the present Buda -- a city which until our century was by some Hungarians called Erzelnburg, the City of Attila.

"He was now (444) the most powerful man in Europe. Theodosius II of the Eastern Empire and Valentinian of the Western, both paid him tribute as a bribe to peace, disguising it among their peoples as payments for services rendered by a client king. Able to put into the field an army of 500,000 men, Attila saw no reason why he should not make himself master of all Europe and the Near East.

"In 441 his generals and troops crossed the Danube, captured Sirmium, Singidunnum (Belgrade), Naissus (Nish) and Sardica (Sofia), and threatened Constantinople itself. Theodosius II sent an army against them. It was defeated, and the Eastern Empire won peace only by raising its yearly tribute from 700 to 1100 pounds of gold.

"In 447 the Huns entered Thrace, Thessaly, and Scythia (southern Russia), sacked seventy towns, and took thousands into slavery. The captured women were added to the wives of the captors, and so began generations of blood mixture that left traces of Mongol features as far west as Bavaria. These Hun raids ruined the Balkans for four centuries.

"In this crisis Theodoric I, aged King of the Visigoths, came to the rescue of the Empire. He joined the Romans under Aetius, and the enormous armies met on the Catalaunian Fields, near Troyes, in one of the bloodiest battles of history:--162,000 men are said to have died there, including the heroic Gothic King. The victory of the West was indecisive. Attila retreated in good order, and the victors were too exhausted, or too divided in policy, to pursue him.

"In the following year he invaded Italy.

"The first city to fall in his path was Aquileia. The Huns destroyed it so completely that it never rose again. Verona and Vicenza were more leniently treated. Pavia and Milan bought off the conqueror by surrendering their movable wealth.

"The road to Rome was not open to Attila. Aetus had too small an army to offer substantial resistance. But Attila tarried at the Po. Valentinian III fled to Rome, and thence sent to the Hun King a delegation composed of Pope Leo I and two senators. No one knows what happened at the ensuring conference. Leo was an impsng figure, and received most credit for the bloodless victory. History only records that Attila now retreated.

"Plague had broken out in his army, food was running short, and Marcian was sending reinforcements from the East (452).

"Attila marched his horde back over the Alps to his Hungarian capital, threatening to return to Italy in the next spring unless Honoria should be sent him as his bride. Meanwhile he consoled himself by adding to his harem a young lady named Ildico, the frail historic basis of the Nibelyngenlied's Kriemhild.

"He celebrated the wedding with an unusual indulgence in food and drink. On the morrow he was found dead in bed beside his young wife. He had burst a blood vessel, and the blood in his throat had choked him to death (453).

"His realm was divided among his sons, who proved incompetent to preserve it. Jealousies broke out among them. The subject tribes refused their allegiance to a disordered leadership.

"Valentinian had no son and resented the desire of Aetius to espouse his son to Valentinian's daughter Endocia. In a mad seizure of alarm the Emperor sent for Aetius and slew him with his own hand (454). Said a member of the court:-'Sire, you have cut off your right hand with your left.'

"A few months later Petronius induced two of Aetius' followers to kill Valentinian. No one bothered to punish the assassins. Murder had long since become the accepted substitute for election. Petronius elected himself to the throne, compelled Eudoxia, Valentinian's widow to marry him, and forced Eudocia to take as her husband his son Palladius.

"If we may believe Procopius, Endoxia appealed to Gaiseric as Honoria had appealed to Attila. Gaiseric had reasons for responding. Rome was rich again despite Alaric and the Roman army was in no condition to defend Italy. The Vandal King set sail with an invincible armada (455). Only an unarmed Pope, accompanied by his local elergy, barred his way between Ostia and Rome. Leo was not able this time to dissuade the conqueror but he secured a pledge against massacre, torture, and fire.

"For four days the city was surrendered to pillage. Christian churches were spared, but all the surviving treasures of the temples were taken to the Vandal galleys. The gold tables, seven branched candlesticks, and other sacred vessels of Solomon's Temple brought to Rome by Titus four centuries before, were included in these spoils. All precious metals, ornaments, and furniture in the imperial palace were removed, and whatever remained of value in the homes of the rich.

"Thousands of captives were enslaved, husbands were separated from wives, parents from children. Gaiseric took the Empress Endoxia and her two daughters with him to Carthage, married Eudocia to his son Huneric, and sent the Empress and Placidia (the younger) to Constantinople at the requst of the Emperor Leo I. All in all, this sack of Rome was no indiscriminate vandalism, but quite in accord with the ancient laws of war.

"St. Ambrose (c.420) mourned the devastation and depopulation of Bologna, Modena, Piacenza. Pope Gelasus (c.480) described great regions of northern Italy as almost denuded of the human species. Rome itself had shrunk from 1,500,000 souls to some 300,000 in one century. All the great cities of the Empire were now in the East.

"The Campagna around Rome, once rich in villas and fertile farms, had been abandoned for the security of walled towns. The towns themselves had been contracted to some forty acres as a means of economically walling them for defense. In many cases the walls were improvised from the debris of theaters, basilicas, and temples that had once adorned the municipal splendor of Italy.

"In Rome some wealthy still remained even after Gaiseric, and Rome and other Italian cities would recover under Theodoric and the Lombards. But in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cyncicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the resonsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task.

"Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay. Aristocrats who could administer but cold not rule. Businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula. Generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms. A bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt.

"The Goths of Gaul proclaimed one of their generals, Avitus, emperor (455). The Senate refused to confirm him, and he was transformed into a bishop. Majorian (456-61) labored bravely to restore order, but was deposed by his patricius or prime minister, the Visigoth Ricimer.

"Severus (461-5) was an inefficient tool of Ricimer. Anthemius (467-72) was a half-pagan philosopher, unacceptable to the Christian West. Ricimer besieged and captured him and had him killed.

"Olybrius, by grace of Ricimer, ruled for two months (472) and surprised himself by dying a natural death. Glycerius (473) was soon deposed, and for two years Rome was ruled by Julius Nepos.

"At this juncture a new conglomeration of barbarians swept down into Italy -- Heruli, Sciti, Rugii, and other tribes that had once acknowledged the rule of Attila. At the same time a Pannonian general, Orestes, deposed Nepos, and established his son Romulus (nicknamed Augustulus) on the throne (475). The new invaders demanded from Orestes a third of Italy. When he refused they slew him and replaced Romulus with their general Odoacer (476).

"This son of Attila's minister Edecon was not without ability. He convened the cowed Senate, and through it he offered to Zeno, the new Emperor of the East, sovereignty over all the Empire, provided that Odoacer might as his patricius govern Italy.

"Zeno consented, and the line of Western emperors came to an end.

"No one appears to have seen in this event the 'fall of Rome.' On the contrary, it seemed to be a blessed unification of the Empire, as formerly under Constantine. The Roman Senate saw the matter so, and raised a statue to Zeno in Rome.

"The Germanization of the Italian army, government, and peasantry, and the natural multiplication of the Germans in Italy, had proceeded so long that the political consequences seemed to be negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene. Actually, however, Odoacer ruled Italy as a king, with small regard for Zeno. In effect the Germans had conquered Italy as Gaiseric had conquered Africa -- as the Visigoths had conquered Spain -- as the Angles and Saxons were conquering Britain -- as the Franks were conquering Gaul.

"In the West the great Empire was no more.

"Ethnically the migrations brought a new mingling of racial elements -- a substantial infusion of Germanic blood into Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and of Asiatic blood into Russia, the Balkans, and Hungary. What happened was the elimination of weak individuals and strains through war and other forms of competition.

"Politically the conquest replaced a higher with a lower form of monarchy. It augmented the authority of persons, and reduced the power and protection of laws.

"Individualism and violence increased.

"Historically, the conquest destroyed the outward form of what had already inwardly decayed. It cleared away with regrettable brutality and thoroughness a system of life which, with all its gifts of order, culture, and law, had worn itself into senile debiility, and had lost the powers of regeneration and growth.

"A new beginning was now possible. The Empire in the West faded, but the states of modern Europe were born. A thousand years before Christ northern invaders had entered Italy, subdued and mingled with its inhabitants, borrowed civilization from them, and with them, through eight centuries, had buiilt a new civilization.

"Four hundred years after Christ the process was repeated. The wheel of history came full turn. The beginning and the end were the same.

"Like most societies, the Church was harassed with extremists. In reaction against the sexual license of pagan morals, some Christian enthusiasts concluded from a passage in St. Paul that any commerce between the sexes was sinful. They denounced all marriage, and trembled at the abomination of a married priest. The provincial council of Gengra (c.362) condemned these views as heretical, but the Church increasingly demanded celibacy in her priests.

"Property was being left in rising amounts to individual churches. Now and then a married priest had the bequest written in his name and transmitted it to his children. Clerical marriage sometimes led to adultery or other scandal, and lowered the respect of the people for the priest. A Roman synod of 386 advised the complete continence of the clergy. A year later Pope Siricius ordered the unfrocking of any priest who married, or continud to live with his wife.

"Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine supported this decree with their triple power. After a generation of sporadic resistance it was enforced with transient success in the West.

"The gravest problem of the Church, next to reconciling her ideas with her continuance, was to find a way of living with the state. The rise of an ecclesiastical organization side by side with the officials of the government created a strugle for power in which the accepted subjection of one to the other was the prerequisite of peace.

"In the East the Church became subordinate to the state. In the West she fought for independence, then for mastery. In either case the union of Church and state involved a profound modification of Christian ethics.

"Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius had taught that war is always unlawful. The Church, how protected by the state, resigned herself to such wars as she deemed necessary to protect either the state or the Church. She had not in herself the means of force. But when force seemed desirable, she could appeal to the 'secular arm' to implement her will. She received from the state, and from individuals, splendid gifts of money, temples, or lands. She grew rich, and needed the state to protect her in all the rights of property. Even when the state fell she kept her wealth. The barbarian conquerors, however, heretical, seldom robbed the Church.

"Neither the Church nor the heretics thought of heresy in purely theological terms. The heresy was in many cases the ideological flag of a rebellious locality seeking liberation from the imperial power. So the Monophysites wished to free Syria and Egypt from Constantinople. The Donatists hoped to free Africa from Rome. As Church and state were now united, the rebellion was against both.

"Orthodoxy opposed nationalism, heresy defended it. The Church labored for centralization and unity, the heretics for local independence and liberty.

"Arianism, overcome within the Empire, won a peculiar victory among the barbarians. Christianity had been first carried to the Teutonic tribes by Roman captives, taken in the Bothic invasions of Asia Minor in the third century.

"We cannot interest ourelves today in the many winds of doctrine that agitated the Church in this period -- Eunomians, Anomeans, Apollinarians, Macedonians, Sabellians, Massalians, Novatians, Priscillianists. We can only mourn over the absurdities for which men have died, and will.

"Manicheism was not so much a Christian heresy as a Persian dualism of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. It ghought to reconcile Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and was bitterly buffeted by both. It faced with unusual candor the problem of evil, the strange abundance of apparently unmerited suffering in a world providentially ruled, and felt compelled to postulate an Evil Spirit coeternal with the Good.

"During the fourth century Maniecheism made many converts in East and West. Several of the emperors used ruthless measuress against it. Justinian made it a capital crime. Gradually it faded out.

"While meting all these assailants the Church found herself almost overwhelmed by the Donatist heresy in Africa. Donatus, Bishop of Carthage (315), had denied the efficacy of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin. The Church, unwilling to risk so much on the virtues of the clergy, wisely repudiated the idea. The heresy nevertheless spread rapidly in North Africa. It enlisted the enthusiasm of the poor, and the theological aberration grew into a social revolt.

"Emperors fulminated against the movement. Heavy fines and confiscations were decreed for persistence in it. The power of buying, selling, or bequeathing property was denied to the Donatists. They were driven from their churches by imperial soldiery and the churches were turned over to orthodox priests.

"Bands of revolutionaries, at once Christian and communist, took form under the name of Circumcelliones, or prowlers. They condemned poverty and slavery, canceled debts and liberated slaves, and proposed to restore the mythical equality of primitive man.

"The monk appealed to the bishops of Alexandria and Rome. Dioscoras, who had succeeded Cyril, persuaded the Emperor Theodosius to call another council at Ephesus (449). Religion was subordinated to politics. The Alexandrian see continued its war upon the see of Constantinople.

"Eutyches was exonerated, and Flavian was assailed with such oratorical violence that he died. The council issued anathemas against any man who should hold that there were two natures in Christ. Pope Leo I had not attended the council, but had sent it several letters ('Leo's tome') supporting Flavian.

"Shocked by the report of his delegates, Leo branded the council as the 'Robber Synod' and refused to recognize its decrees. A later council, at Chalcedon in 451, acclaimed Leo's letters, condemned Eutyches, and reaffirmed the double nature of Christ. But the twenty-eighth canon of this council affired the equal authority of the bishop of Constantinople with that of Rome. Leo, who had fought for the supremacy of his office as indispensable to the unity and authority of the Church, rejected this canon.

"This world brought with it both a great longing, which the Church had to satisfy, and a great pride, which the Church had to subdue. The classical world was reborn and be came part of the Church but only after a period of confusion and struggle. A spiritual excitement gripped not just ecclesiastical circles but all of society, from the top to the bottom. The calculations of rulers and politicians, personal ambitions, and tribal dissensions all found their way into the religious upheaval.

"This time of great and victorious triumph was also a time of trial and sorrow for the Church. During this epoch Orthodox believers frequently had to make their way in bonds and fetters, scorned and persecuted, and often reached the end of their path by accepting the crown of martyrdom. The lives of Athanasius and Chrysostom are typical.

"It was too early to speak of a definite victory, for the world still remained "outside" the Church, and paganism continued to flourish immediately beyond the Church's confines. Pagan temples were still open and pagan teachers were still arguing against Christianity. Culture and domestic life were filled with survivals of heathenism and remained pagan.

"It is not surprising that the monastic movement and the attraction of flight to the desert were so strong. These were motivated by more than a desire for seclusion and solitude. The life of a Christian in that world was truly difficult.

"The restoration of paganism under Julian cannot be considered fortuitous. On the contrary, it clearly demonstrates that the old world had not yet died. Pagan culture experienced a revival in the fourth and even in the fifth centuries, which culminated in lamblichus and the Athenian school of Neoplatonism.

"The quarrel about the Altar of Victory during the reign of Gratian shows that the same thing was happening in the West. During the collision between the two worlds of Hellenism and Christianity the Church never rejected classical culture but the Hellenes refused to accept the Church. A similar situation had existed earlier during the era of the Gnostic school of Plotinus and Porphyry, when Porphyry had resolutely opposed Christianity. (We know of his objections from the refutations of Macarius of Magnesia).

"Now the resistance became even stronger. The significance of this struggle is not in the external or political events of the period. The internal struggle was even more painful and more tragic because every Hellene had to experience and overcome this division within himself. Some became reconciled too early. Synesius of Ptolemais (also known as Synesius of Cyrene) is typical in this respect, for, although he was made a bishop, he remained a Neoplatonist and maintained his faith in dreams and divination.

"The spiritual regeneration of classical society began in the fourth century when the majority of men were still living in a spiritual environment made up of two distinct cultures. The spiritual temperament of classical man was transformed very slowly and this process was not completed until much later when a new Byzantine culture was born. The fourth century is significant as a time of transition. It was the end of a previous age, not the beginning of a new period.

"The whole of the fourth century was an era of continuous theological debate, which primarily centered around the Church's struggle against Arianism. The Arian movement was not homogeneous and it is necessary to distinguish the problem of the origin of Arius' teaching from the reasons for the positive response which his theology drew from different sides.

"Thereafter Monophysitism became the national religion of Christian Egypt and Abyssinia, and by the sixth century predominated in western Syria and Armenia, while Nestorianism grew in Mesopotamia and eastern Syria.

"A brilliant society took form, in which elegant prelates mingled happily with ornate women, and helped them to make their wills.

"While the Christian populace joined the surviving pagans at the theater, the races, and the games, a minority of Christians strove to live a life in harmony with the Gospels. Athanasius had brought to Rome two Egyptian monks. He had written a life of Anthony, and Rufinus had published for the West a history of monasticism in the East.

"Pious minds were influenced by the reported holiness of Anthony, Schnoudi, and Pachomius. Monasteries were established in Rome by Sixtus III (432-440) and Leo I. Several families, while still living in their homes, acceptd the monastic rule of chastity and poverty.

"Roman ladies of wealth, like Marcella, Paula, and three generations of the Melanias, gave most of their funds to charity, founded hospitals and convents, made pilgrimages to the monks of the East, and maintained so ascetic a regimen that some of them died of self-denbial.

"Pagan circles in Rome complained that this kind of Christianity was hostile to family life, the institution of marriage, and the vigor of the state. Polemics fell heavily upon the head of the leading advocate of asceticism -- one of the greatest scholars and most brilliant writers ever produced by the Christian Church.

"St. Jerome was born about 340 at Strido, ner Aquileia, probably of Dalmatian stock, and was promisingly named Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius -- 'the reverend, holy-named sage.' He received a good education at Trier and Rome, learned the Latin classics well, and loved them, he thought, to the point of sin.

"Nevertheless, he was a positive and passionate Christian. He joined with Rufinus and other friends to found an ascetic brotherhood in Aquileia, and preached such counsels of perfection that his bishop reproved him for undue impatience with the natural frailties of man. He replied by calling the bishop ignorant, brutal, wicked, well matched with the worldly flock that he led, the unskllful pilot of a crazy bark.

"Leaving Aquileia to its sins, Jerome and some fellow devotees went to the Near East and entered a monastery in the Chalcis desert near Antioch (374). The unhealthy climate was too much for them. Two died, and Jerome himself was for a time on the verge of death. Undeterred, he left the monastery to live as an anchorite in a desert heritage, with occasional relapses into Virgil and Cicero. He had brought his library with him, and could not quite turn away from verse and prose whose beauty lured him like some girlish loveliness.

"In 379 he returned to Antioch, and was ordained a priest. In 382 we find him in Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus, and commissioned by him to make an improved Latin translation of the New Testament. He continued to wear the brown robe and the tunic of an anchorite, and lived an ascetic life amid a luxurious papal court.

"He quarreled at pen's point with Chrysostom, Ambrose, Pelagius, and Augustine. He wrote with dogmatic force half a hundred works on questions of casuistry and Biblical interpreteation, and his writings were eagerly read even by his enemies.

"He opened a school in Bethlehem, where he humbly and freely taught children a variety of subjects, including Latin and Greek. Now a confirmed saint, he felt that he could read again the classic authors whom he had forsworn in his youth.

"He resumed the study of Hebrew, which he had begun in his first sojourn in the East. In eighteen years of patient scholarship he achieved that magnificent and sonorous translation of the Bible into Latin which is known to us as the Vulgate, and remains as the greatest and most influential literary accomplishment of the fourth century.

"There were errors in the translation as in any work so vast, and some 'barbarisms' of common speech which offended the purists. Its Latin formed the language of theology and letters through out the Middle Ages, poured Hebraic emotion and imagery into Latin molds, and gave to literature a thousand noble phrases of compact eloquence and force.

"The Latin world became acquainted with the Bible as never before.

"Jerome was a saint only in the sense that he lived an ascetic life devoted to the Church. He was hardly a saint in character or speech. It is sad to find in so great a man so many violent outbursts of hatred, misrepresentation, and controversial ferocity.

"He calls John, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a Judas, a Satan, for whom hell can never provide adequate punishment. He describss the majestic Ambrose as 'a deformed crow.' To make trouble for his old friend Rufinus he pursues the dead Origen with such heresy-hunting fury as to force the condemnation of Origen by Pope Anastasius (400).

"We might rather have pardoned some sins of the flesh than these ascerbities of the soul!

"His critics punished him without delay. When he taught the Greek and Latin classics they denounced him as a pagan. When he studied Hebrew with a Jew they accused him of being a convert to Judaism. When he dedicated his works to women they described his motives as financial or worse.

"His old age was not happy. Barbarians came down into the Near East and overran Syria and Palestine (395). He concluded sadly:-'The Roman world is falling.' While he lived, his beloved Paula, Marcella, and Eustochium died. Almost voiceless and fleshless with austerities, and bent with age, he toiled day after day on work after work. He was writing a commentary on Jeremiah when death came.

"Throughout one Lent he stood upright night and day, and ate nothing except, once a week, a few cabbage leaves. During this time he continued to work at his basket-weaving trade. For six months he slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to poisonous flies.

"Some monks excelled in fears of solitude. So Serapion inhabited a cave at the bottom of an abyss into which few pilgrims had the hardihood to descend. When Jerome and Paula reached his lair, they found a man almost composed of bones, dressed only in a loincloth, face and shoulders covered by uncut hair. His cell was barely large enough for a bed of leaves and a plank. Yet this man had lived among the aristocracy of Rome.

"Some, like Bessarion for forty, Pachomius for fifty, years, never lay down while they slept. Some specialized in silence, and went many years without uttering a word. Others carried heavy weights wherever they went, or bound their limbs with iron bracelets, greaves, or chains. Many proudly recorded the number of years since they had looked upon a woman's face.

"Nearly all anchorites lived -- some to a great age -- on a narrow range of food. Jerome tells of monks who subsisted exclusively on figs or on barley bread. When Macarius was ill, someone brought him grapes. Unwilling so to indulge himself, he sent them to another hermit, who sent them to another. So they made the rounds of the desert (Rufinius assures us) until they came back intact to Macarius.

"The pilgrims who flocked from all quarters of the Christian world to see the monks of the East credited them with miracles as remarkable as those of Christ. They could cure diseases or repel demons by a touch or a word, tame serpents or lions with a look or a prayer, and cross the Nile on the back of a crocodile.

"The records of these ascetics abound in sexual visions and dreams. Their cells resounded with their moans as they struggled with imaginary temptations and erotic thoghts. They believed that the air about them was full of demons assailing hem. The monks seem to have found it harder to be virtuous in solitude than if they had lived among all the opportunities of the town.

"It was not unusual for anchorites to go mad. Rufinus tells of a young monk whose cell was entered by a beautiful woman. He succumbed to her charms, after which she disappeared, he thought, into the air. The monk ran out wildly to the nearest village and leaped into the furnace of a public bath to cool his fire.

"In another case a young woman begged admission to a monk's cell on the plea that wild beasts were pursuing her. He consented to take her in briefly but in that hour she happened to touch him, and the flame of desire sprang up in him as if all his years of austerity had left it undimmed. He tried to grasp her but she vanished from his arms and his sight and a chorus of demons, we are told, exulted with loud laughter over his fall. This monk, says Rufinus, could no longer bear the monastic life. Like Paphnuce in Anatole France's Thais, he could not exorcise the vision of beauty that he had imagined or seen. He left his cell, plunged into the life of the city, and followed that vision at last into hell

"The organized Church had at first no control over the monks who rarely took any degree of holy orders. Yet she felt responsibility for their excesses since she shared in the glory of their deeds. She could not afford to agree completely with monastic ideals. She praised celibacy, virginity, and poverty but could not condemn marriage or parentage or property as sins. She had now a stake in the continuance of the race.

"Some monks left their cells or monasteries at will and troubled the populace with their begging. Some went from town to town preaching asceticism, selling real or bogus relics, terrorizing synods and exciting impressionable people to destroy pagan temples or statuary or, now and then, to kill an Hyparia. The Church could not tolerate these independent actions.

"Ninety Egyptian bishops acknowledged the authority of the patriarch in Alexandria who almost rivaled the power of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. Some of these patriarchs were ecclesiastical politicians of no lovable type, like the Theophilus who burned to the ground the pagan temple and library of Serapis (389).

"More pleasing is the modest bishop of Ptolemais, Synetius. Born in Cyrene (c.365), he studied mathematics and philosophy at Alexandria under Hypatia. To the end of his life he remained her devoted friend, calling her 'the true exponent of the true philosophy.' He visited Athens and was there confirmed in his paganism. But in 403 he married a Christian lady and gallantly accepted Christianity. He found it a simple courtesy to transform his Neoplatonic trinity of the One, the nous, and the Soul into the Father, Spirit, and the Son.

"He wrote many delightful letters, and some minor philosophical works of which none is of value to anyone today except his essay In Praise of Baldness.

"In 410 Theophilus offered him the bishopric of Ptolemais. He was now a country gentleman with more money than ambition. He protested that he was unfit -- that he did not (as the Nicene Creed required) believe in the resurrection of the body -- that he was married -- and had no intention of abandoning his wife.

<"Theophilus, to whom dogmas were instruments, winked at these errors, and transforemd Synesius into a bishop before the philosopher could make up his mind. It was typical of him that his last letter was to Hypatia, and his last prayer to Christ.

"In Syria the pagan temples were disposed of in the manner of Theophilus. Imperial edicts ordered them closed. The surviving pagans resisted the order but resigned themselves to defeat on noting the indifference with which their gods accepted destruction.

"Asiatic Christianity had saner leaders than those of Egypt. In a short life of fifty years (329?-379) the great Basil learned rhetoric under Libanius in Constantinople -- studied philosophy in Athens -- visited the anchorites of Egypt and Syria -- and rejected their introverted asceticism. He became bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia -- organized Christianity in his country -- revised its ritual -- introeduced self-supporting cenobitic monasticism -- and drew up a monastic rule that still governs the monasteries of the Greco-Slavonic world. He advised his followers to avoid the theatrical severities of the Egyptian anchorites, but rather to serve God, health, and sanity by useful work. Tilling the fields, he thought, was an excellent prayer.

"Donatian challenged orthodoxy. Manicheism challenged both, and apparently the majority of the people were still pagan.

"Augustine's birthplace was Tagaste in Numidia. His mother, St. Monica, was a devoted Christian, whose life was almost consumed in caring and praying for her wayward son. His father was a man of narrow means and broad principles, whose infidelities were patiently accepted by Monica in the firm belief that they could not last forever.

"At twelve the boy was sent to school at Madaura and at seventeen to higher studies at Carthage. Salvian would soon describe Africa as 'the cesspool of the world' and Carthage as 'the cesspool of Africa' -- hence Monica's parting advice to her son:-

'She commanded me, and with much earnestness forewarned me, that I should not commit fornication, and especially that I should never defile any man's wife. These seemed to me no better than women's counsels, which it would be a shame for me to follow. I ran headlong with such blindness that I was ashamed among my equals to be guilty of less impudency than they were whom I heard brag mightily of their naughtiness. Yes, and so much the more boasting by how much more they had been beastly. And I took pleasure to do it, not for the pleasure of the act only, but for the praise of it also. And when I lacked opportunity to commit a wickedness that should make me as bad as the lost, I would feign myself to have done what I never did.'

"He proved an apt pupil in Latin also and in rhetoric, mathematics, music, and philosophy. He disliked Greek and never mastered it or learned its literature. But he was so fascinated by Plato that he called him a 'demigod' and did not cease to be a Platonist when he became a Christian. His pagan training in logic and philosophy prepared him to be the most subtle theologian of the church.

"Having graduated, he taught grammar at Tagaste, and then rhetoric as Carthage. Since he was now sixteen 'there was much ado to get me a wife.' However, he preferred a concubine -- a convenience sanctioned by pagan morals and Roman law. Still unbaptized, Augustine could take his morals where he pleased. Concuinage was for him a moral advance.

"At Rome he taught rhetoric for a year but the students cheated him of his fees and he applied for a professorship at Milan. Symmachus examined him, approved, and sent him to Milan by state post. There his brave mother overtook him and persuaded him to listen with her to the sermons of Ambrose.

"He was moved by them but even more by the hymns the congregation sang. At the same time Monica won him over to the idea of marriage and, in effect betrothed him, now thirty-two, to a girl with more money than years. Augustine agreed to wait two years until she should be twelve. As a preliminary he sent his mistress back to Africa where she buried her grief in a nunnery.

"A few weeks of continence unnerved him and instead of marrying he took another concubine. He prayed;-'Give me chastity, but not yet!'

"Amid these diversions he found time for theology. He had begun with his mother's simple faith but had cast it off proudly at school. For nine years (374-83) he accepted Manichean dualism as the most satisfactory explanation of a world so indifferently compounded of evil and good. For a time he flirted with the skepticism of the later Academy but he was too emotional to remain long in suspended judgement.

"At Rome and Milan he studied Plato and Plotinus. Neoplatonism entered deeply into his philosophy and, through him, dominated Christian theology until Abelard. It became for Augustine the vestibule to Christianity.

"Ambrose had recommended him to read the Bible in the light of Paul's statement that 'the letter killeth but the spirit maketh to live.' Augustine found that a symbolic interpretation removed what had seemed to him the puerilities of Genesis. He read Paul's epistles, and felt that here was a man who, like himself, had passed through a thousand deoubts. In Paul's final faith there had been no mere abstract Platonic Logos but a Divine Word that had become man.

"One day as Augustne sat in a Milan garden with his friend Alypius, a voice seemed to keep ringing in his ears:-'Take up and read. Take up and read.' He opened Paul again and read:-'Not in rioting and drunkennessm, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.'

"The passage completed for Augustine a long evolution of feeling and thought. There was something infinitely warmer and deeper in this strange faith than in all the logic of philosophy.

"Christianity came to him as a profound emotional satisfaction. Surrendering the skeptism of the intellect, he found, for the first time in his life, moral stimulus and mental peace. Monica melted her heart out in grateful prayer.

"On Easter Sunday of 387 Augustine, Alypius, and Adeodatus were baptized by Ambrose with Monica standing happily by. All four resolved to go to africa and live a monastic life.

"At Ostia Monica died, confident of reunion in paradise. Arrived in Africa, Augustine sold his modest patrimony and gave the proceeds to the poor. Then he and Alypius and some friends formed a religious community and lived at Tagaste in poverty, celibacy, study, and prayer.

"In 391 Valerius, Bishop of near-by Hippo (now Bone), asked his aid in administering the diocese, and for this purpose ordained him a priest. Valerius often yelded the pulpit to him, and Augustine's eloquence impressed the congregation even when they could not understand him. Hippo was a seaport of some 40,000 population. The Catholics had one church there, the Donatists another. The remainder of the people were Manicheans or pagans.

"The Manichean bishop, Fortunatus, had hitherto dominated the theological scene. Donatists joined Catholics in urging Augustine to meet him in debate. He consented and for two days these novel gladiators crossed words before a crowd that filled the Baths of Sosius.

"Augustine won. Fortunatus left Hippo and never returned (392).

"Four years later Valerius, alleging his age, asked the congregation to choose his successor. Augustine was unanimously elected. Though he protested and wept and begged the privilege of returning to his monastery, he was prevailed upon, and for the remaining thirty-four years of his life he was Bishop of Hippo. From this foot of earth he moved the world.

"He chose one or two deacons and brought two monks from his monastery to help him. They lived monastically and communistically in the episcopal rectory. Augustine was a bit puzzled to understand how one of his aides, at death, could leave a tidy legacy.

"All subsisted on a vegetarian diet, reserving meat for guests and the sick.

"Augustine himself is described as short and thin and never strong. He complained of a lung disorder and suffered unduly from the cold. He was a man of sensitive nerves, easily excited, of keen and somewhat morbid imagination, of subtle, and flexible intellect.

"Despite a tenacious dogmatism and some occasional intolerance, he must have had many lovable qualities. Several men who came to learn rhetoric from him accepted his lead into Christianity and Alypius followed him to the end.

"He had hardly taken his seat as bishop when he began a lifelong war against the Donatists. He challenged their leaders to public debate but few cared to accept. He invited them to friendly conferences but was met first with silence, then with insult, then with violence.

"Several Catholic bishops in North Africa were assaulted and some attempts seem to have been made upon the life of Augustine himself. However, we do not have the Donatist side of this story.

"In 411 a council called by the Emperor Honorius met at Carthage to quiet the Donatist dispute. The Donatists sent 279 bishops, the Catholics 286 -- but bishop in Africa meant little more than parish priest.

"The Emperor's legate, Marcellinus, after hearing both sides, decreed that the Donatists must hold no further meetings and must hand over all their churches to the Catholics. The Donatists replied with acts of desperate violence including, we are told, the murder of Restitutus, a priest of Hippo, and the mutilation of another member of Augustine's staff.

"Augustine urged the government to enforce its decree vigorously. He retracted his earlier view that 'no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ -- that we must fight only by arguments, and prevail only by force of reason.'

"He concluded that the Church, being the spiritual father of all, should have a parent's right to chastise an unruly son for his own good. It seemed to him better that a few Donatists should suffer 'than that all should be damned for want of coercion.'

"His busy mind, trained in the logic of the schools, could not be confined within the issues of his parish. In treatise after treatise he labored to reconcile with reason the doctrines of the Church that he had come to revere as the one pillar of order and decency in a ruined and riotous world.

"He knew that the Trinity was a stumbling block to the intellect. For fifteen years he worked on his most sysematic production -- The Trinitare -- struggling to find analogies in human experience for three persons in one God.

"More puzzling still -- filling all Augustine's life with wonder and debate -- was the problem of harmonizing the free will of man with the foreknowledge of God. If God is omnicient He sees the future in all details. Since God is immutable, this picture that He has of all coming events lays upon them the necessity of occurring as He has foreseen them. They are irrevocably predestined.

"Then how can man be free? Must he not do what God has foreseen? And if God has foreseen all things, He has known from all eternity the final fate of every soul that He creates.

"Faith must precede understanding. 'Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand' -- crede ut intelligas. The authority of the Scriptures is higher than all the efforts of the human intelligence.

"The Bible, however, need not always be taken literally. It was written to be intelligible to simple minds and had to use corporeal terms for spiritual realities.

"When interpretations differ we must rest in the decision of the Church councils, in the collective wisdom of her wisest men.

"But even faith is not enough for understanding. There must be a clean heart to let in the rays of the divinity that surrounds us. So humbled and cleansed, one may, after many years, rise to the real end and essence of religion, which is 'the possession of the living God.' 'I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing whatever.'

"Oriental Christianity spoke mostly of Christ. Augustine's theology is 'of the First Person.' It is of and to God the Father that he speaks and writes. He gives no description of God, for only God can know God fully. Probably 'the true God has neither sex, age, nor body.' But we can know God, in a sense intimately, through creation. Everything in the world is an infinite marvel in its organization and functioning, and would be impossible without a creative intelligence.

"The order, symmetry, and rhythm of living things proclaims a kind of Platoniuc deity, in whom beauty and wisdom are one.

"We need not believe, says Augustine, that the world was created in six days. Probably God in the beginning created only a nebulous mass (nebulosa species). But in this mass lay the seminal order, or productive capacities (radiones seminales), from which all things would develop by natural causes.

"He discussed with diffidence and subtlety the nature of time. He anticipated Descartes' 'Cogito, ergo sum'. To refute the Academics, who denied that man can be certain of anything, he argued:-'Who doubts that he lives and thinks? For if he doubts, he lives.'

"He presaged Bergson's complaint that the intellect, through long dealing with corporeal things, is a constitutional materialist. He proclaimed, like Kant, that the soul is the most directly known of all realities, and clearly stated the idealistic position -- that since matter is known only through mind, we cannot logically reduce mind to matter.

"He suggested the Schopenhauerian thesis that will, not intellect, is fundamental in man. He agreed with Schopenhauer that the world would be improved if all reproduction should cease.

"Two of his works belong to the classics of the world's literature. The Confessions (c.400) is the first and most famous of all autobiographies. It is addressed directly to God, as a 100,000-word act of contrition. It begins with the sins of his youth, tells vividly the story of his conversion, and occasionally bursts into a rhaposody of prayer.

"All confessions are camouflage, but there was in this one a sincerity that shocked the world. Even as Augustine wrote it -- forty-six and a bishop -- the old carnal ideas 'still live in my memory and rush into my thoughts; in sleep they come upon me not to delight only, but even so far as consent, and more like to the deed.' Bishops are not always so psychoanalytically frank.

"His masterpiece is the moving story of how one soul came to faith and peace and its first lines are its summary:-'Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our hearts know no rest until they repose in Thee.'

"The Confessions is poetry in prose. The City of God (413-26) is philosophy in history. When the news of Alaric's sack of Rome reached Africa, followed by thousands of desolate refugees, Augustine was stirred, like Jerome and others, by what seemed an irrational and Satanic calamity. Why should the city whose beauty and power men had built and reverenced through centuries, and now the citadel of Christendom, be surrendered by a benevolent deity to the ravages of barbarians?

"Pagans everywhere attributed the disaster to Christianity -- the ancient gods, plundered, dethroned, and proscribed, had withdrawn their protection from the Rome that under their guidance had grown and prospered for a thousand years. Many Christians were shaken in their faith.

"Augustine felt the challenge deeply. All his vast temple of theology threatened to collapse if this panic of fear were not allayed. He resolved to devote all the powers of his genius to convincing the Roman world that such catastrophes did not for a moment impugn Christianity.

"For thirteen years he labored on his book, amid a press of obligations and distrctions. He published it in piecemeal installments. The middle of it forgot the beginning and did not foresee the end. Inevitably its 1200 pages became a confused concatenation of essays on everything from the First Sin to the Last Judgment.

"An intimate and trustful worship of saints replaced the cult of the pagan gods and satisfied the congenial polytheism of simple or poetic minds. Statues of Isis and Horus were renamed Mary and Jesus. The Roman Lupercalia and the feast of the purification of Isis became the Feast of the Nativity. The Saturnalia were replaced by Christmas celebrations, the Floralia by Pentecost, an ancient festival of the dead by All Souls' day, the resurrection of Attis by the resurrection of Christ.

"Pagan altars were rededicated to Christian heroes. Incense, lights, flowers, processions, vestments, hymns, which had pleased the people in older cults were domesticated and cleansed in the ritual of the Church. The harsh slaughter of a living victim was sublimated in the spiritual sacrifice of the Mass.

"Augustine had protested against the adoration of saints and in terms that Voltaire might have used in dedicating his chapel at Ferney:-'Let us not treat the saints as gods. We do not wish to imitate those pagans who adore the dead. Let us not build them temples, nor raise altars to them, but with their relics let us raise an altar to the one God.'

"The Church, however, wisely acceptd the inevitable anthropomorphism of popular theology. She resisted, then used, then abused, the cult of martyrs and relics. She opposed the worship of images and icons, and warned her faithful that these should be reverenced only as symbols. But the ardor of public feeling overcame these cautions, and led to the excesses that aroused the Byzantine iconoclasts.

"The Church denounced magic, astrology, and divination, but medieval, like ancient literature, was full of them. Soon people and priests would use the sign of the cross as a magic incantation to expel or drive away demons. Exorcisms were pronounced over the candidate for baptism and total nude immerseion was required lest a devil should hide in some clothing or ornament.

"The dream cures once sought in the temples of Aesculapius could now be obtained in the sanctuary of Sts. Coismas and Damian in Rome and would soon be available at a hundred shrines. In such matters it was not the priests who corrupted the people, but the people who persuaded the priests.

"The soul of the simple man can be moved only through the senses and the imagination, by ceremony, and miracle, by myth and fear and hope. He will reject or transform any religion that does not give him these.

"She did not quite succeed. She raisd the morals of the home but prostitution remained, driven into stealth and degradation. Perhaps to counterbalance a sexual instinct that had run wild, the new morality exaggerated chastity into an obsession and subordinated marriage and parentage to a lifelong virginity or celibacy as an ideal. It took the Fathers of the Church some time to realize that no society could survive on such sterile principles.

"But this puritanic reaction can be understood if we recall the licentiousness of the Roman stage --the schools of prostitution in some Greek and Oriental temples -- the widespread abortion and infanticide -- the obscene paintings on Pompeian walls -- the unnatural vice so popular in Greece and Rome -- the excesses of the early emperors -- the sensuality of the upper classes as revealed in Catullus and Martial, Tacitus and Juvenal.

"The Church finally reached a healthier view, and indeed came in time to take a lenient attitude to sins of the flesh. Meanwhile some injury was done to the conception of parentage and the family. Too many Christians of these early centuries thought that they could serve God best -- or, rather, most easily escape hell -- by abandoning their parents, mates, or children, and fleeing from the responsibilities of life in the frightened pursuit of a selfishly individual salvation.

"In paganism the family had been the social and religious unit. It was a loss tht in medieval Christianity this unit became the individual.

"Nevertheless the Church strengthened the family by surrounding marriage with solemn ceremony, and exalting it from a contract to a sacrament. By making matrimony indissoluble she raised the security and dignity of the wife and encouraged the patience that comes from hopelessness.

"For a time the status of woman was hurt by the doctrine of some Christian Fathers that woman was the origin of sin and the instrument of Satan. But some amends were made by the honors paid to the Mother of God. Having accepted marriage, the Church blessed abundant motherhood and sternly forbade abortion or infanticide. Perhaps it was to discourage these practices that her theologians damned to a limbo of eternal darkness any child that died without baptism.

"The legislation of the Christian emperors in this matter does not compare favorably with the laws of Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius. Pagan laws condemned to slavery any free woman who married a slave. The laws of Constantine ordered the woman to be executed, and the slave to be burned alive. The Emperor Gratian decreed that a slave who accused his master of any offense except high treason to the state should be burned alive at once, without inquiry into the justice of the charge.

"But although the Church accepted slavery as part of the law of war, she did more than any other institution of the time to mitigate the evils of servitude. She proclaimed, through the Fathers, the principle that all men are by nature equal -- presumably meaning in legal and moral rights. She practiced the principle in so far as she received into her communion all ranks and classes. Although no slave could be ordained to the priesthood, the porest freedman could rise to high places in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

"The Church repudiated the distinction made in pagan law between wrongs done to a freeman and those done to a slave. She encourged manumission, made emancipation of slaves a mode of expiating sins, or of celebrating some good fortune, or of approaching the judgment seat of God. She spent great sums freeing from slavery Christians captured in war.

"Nevertheless slavery continued throghout the Middle Ages, and died without benefit of clergy.

"The outstanding moral distinction of the Church was her extensive provision of charity. The pagan emperors had provided state funds for poor families and pagan magnates had done something for their 'clients' and the poor. But never had the world seen such a dispensation of alms as was now organized by the Church. She encouraged bequests to the poor, to be administered by her. Some abuses and malversation crept in, but that the Church carried out her obligations abundantly is attested by the jealous emulation of Julian.

"She helped widows, orphans, the sick or inform, prisoners, victims of natural catastrophes. And she frequently intervened to protect the lower orders from unusual exploitation or excessive taxation. In many cases priests, on attaining the episcopacy, gave all their property to the poor. Christian women, like Fabiola, Paula, and Melania devoted fortunes to charitable work.

"Following the example of pagan valetudinaria, the Church or her rich laymen founded public hospitals on a scale never known before. Basil established a famous hospital and the first asylum for lepers, as Caesarea in Cappadocia. Xenodochia -- refuges for wayfarers -- rose along pilgrim routes. The Council of Nicaea ordered that one should be provided in every city. Widows were enlisted to distribute charity and found in this work a new significance for their lonely lives.

"Convinced that survival demanded organization -- that organization required agreement on basic principles and beliefs and that the vast majority of her adherents longed for authoritatively established beliefs. the Church defined her creed in unchangeable dogmas, made doubt a sin, and entered upon an unending conflict with the fluent intellect and changeable ideas of men.

"She claimed that through divine revelation she had found the answers to the old problems of origin, nature, and destiny. Wrote Lactantius (307):-'We who are instructed in the knowledge of truth by the Holy Scriptures know the beginning of the world and its end.' Tertullian had said as much a century before (197) and had suggested a cloture on philosophy. Having displaced the axis of man's concern from this world to the next, Christianity offered supernatural explanations for historical events and thereby passively discouraged the investigation of natural causes.

"Many of the advances made by Greek science through seven centuries were sacrificed to the cosmology and biology of Genesis.

"Did Christianity bring literary decline? Most of the Fathers were hostile to pagan literature as permeated with a demonic polytheism and a degrading immorality. But the greatest of the Fathers loved the classics notwithstanding and Christians like Fortunatus, Prudentius, Jerome, Sidonius, and Ansonius aspired to write verse like Virgil's or prose like Cicero's. Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysotom, Amnbrose, Jerome, and Augustine outweigh, even in a literary sense, their pagan contemporaries -- Ammianus, Symmachus, Claudian, Julian.

"After Augustine prose style decayed. Written Latin took over the rough vocabulary and careless syntax of the popular speech. Latin verse for a time deteriorated into doggerel before molding new forms into majestic hymns.

"The basic cause of cultural retrogression was not Christianity but barbarism -- not religion but war. The human inundations ruined or impoverished cities, monasteries, libraries, schools, and made impossible the life of the scholar or the scientist.

"The Roman Empire had raised science, prosperity, and power to their ancient peaks. The decay of the Empire in the West, the growth of poverty and the spread of violence, necessitated some new ideal and hope to give men consolation in their suffering and courage in their toil. An age of power gave way to an age of faith.

"St. Gildas, a Welsh monk, in a strange book, half history and half sermon, On the Destruction of Britain (546?), mentions a 'siege of Mons Badonicus' in these wars.

"Nennius, a later British historian (c.796), tells of twelve battles that Arthur fought, the last at Mt. Badon near Bath.

'When Vortimer (Vortigern's brother) died, the strength of the Britons decayed. They would soon have perished altogether had not Ambrosius, the sole survivor of the Romans quelled the presmptuous barbarians with the powerful aid of the warlike Arthur. Arthur long upheld the sinking state and roused the broken spirit of his countrymen to war. Finally, at Mt. Badon, relying on an image of the Virgin which he had affixed to his armor, he engaged 900 of the enemy single-handed, and dispersed them with incredible slaughter.'

"Let us agree that it is incredible. We must be content with accepting Arthur as in essentials a vague but historical figure of the sixth century, probably not a saint, probably not a king.

"King Niall (c.358) invaded Wales and carried off immense booty, raided Gaul, and was killed (by an Irishman) on the river Loire.

"From him descended most of the later Irish kings (O'Neills). In the fifth year of the reign of his son Laeghaire (Leary), St. Patrick came to Ireland. Before this time the Irish had developed an alphabet of straight lines in various combinations. They had an extensive literature of poetry and legend, transmitted orally. They had done good work in pottery, bronze, and gold.

"Their religion was an animistic polytheism, which worshiped sun and moon and divers natural objects, and peopled a thousand spots in Ireland with fairies, demons, and elves. A priestly clan of white-robed druids practiced divination -- ruled sun and winds with magic wands and wheels -- caused magic showers and fires -- memorized and handed down the chronicles and poetry of the tribe -- studied the stars -- educated the young -- counseled the kings -- acted as judges -- formulated laws -- and sacrificed to the gods from altars in the open air.

"Among the sacred idols was a gold-covered image called the Crom Cruach. This was the god of all the Irish clans. To him, appaarently, sacrifice was offered of the first-born child in every family -- perhaps as a check on excessive population. The people believed in reincarnation, but they also dreamed of a heavenly isle across the sea, 'where there is no wailing or treachery, nothing rough or harsh, but sweet music striking upon the ear -- a beauty of a wondrous land, whose view is a fair country, incomparable in its haze.'

"Palladius, however, died within the year. The honor of making Ireland unalterably Catholic fell to her patron saint.

"He was born in the village of Bonnaventa in western England, of a middle class family, about 389. As the son of a Roman citizen, he was given a Roman name, Patricius. He received only a modest education, and apologized for his rusticitas, but he studied the Bible so faithfully that he could quote it from memory to almost any purpose.

"At sixteen he was captured by 'Scot' (Irish) raiders and taken to Ireland, where for six years he served as a herder of pigs. In those lonely hours 'conversion' came to him. He passed from religious indifference to intense piety. He describes himself as rising every day before dawn to go out and pray in whatever weather -- hail or rain or snow.

"At last he escaped, found his way to the sea, was picked up, desolate, by sailors and was carried to Gaul, perhaps to Italy. He worked his way back to England, rejoined his parents, and lived with them a few years.

"But something called him back to Ireland -- perhaps some memory of its rural loveliness, or the hearty kindliness of its people. He interpreted the feeling as a divine message, a call to convert the Irish to Christianity. He went to Lerins and Auxerre, studied for the priesthood, and was ordained.

"With Ausonius and Sidonius, Gaul took over the literary leadership of Europe.

"Decimus Magnus Ausonius was the poet and embodiment of this Gallic Silver Age. He was born at Bordeaux about 310, son of its leading physician. He received his education there and later told the world, in generous hexameters, the virtues of his teachers, remembering their smiles and forgetting their blows.

"In the even tenor of his years he too became a professor at Bordeaux, taught 'grammar' (i.e. literature) and 'rhetoric' (i.e. oratory and philosophy) for a generation, and tutored the future Emperor Gratian.

"The sincere affection with which he writes of his parents,uncles, wife, children, and pupils suggests a home and a life like that of a nineteenth-century university town in the United States. He describes pleasantly the house and fields that he inherited from his father and where he hopes to spend his declining years. He says to his wife, in the early years of their marriage:- 'Let us live always as we live now, and let us not abandon the names that we have given each other in our first love. You and I must always remain young and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.'

"Soon, however, they lost the first child that she gave him. Years later he commemorated it lovingly:- 'I will not leave you unwept, my first-born child, called by my name. Just as you were practicing to change your babbling into the first words of childhood, we had to mourn your death. You lie on your great-grandfather's bosom, sharing his grave.'

"His wife died early in their happy marrige, after giving him a daughter and a son. He was so deeply bound to her that he never married again.

"In his old age he described with fresh grief, the pain of his loss, and the somber silence of the house that had known the care of her hands and the cadence of her feet.

"His poems pleased his time by their tender sentiment, their rural pictures, the purity of their Latin, the almost Virgilian smoothness of their verse. Paulinus, the future saint, compared his prose with Cicero's, and Symmachus could not find in Virgil anything lovelier than Ausonius' Mosella. The poet had grown fond of that river while with Gratian at Trier, he describes it as running through a very Eden of vineyards, orchards, villas, and prospering farms. For a time he makes us feel the verdure of its banks and the music of its flow. Then, with all-embracing bathos, he indites a litany to the amiable fish to be found in the stream.

"The Whitmanesque passion for cataloguing relatives, teachers, pupils, fish is not redeemed by Whitman's omnivorous feeling and lusty philosohy. Ausonius, after thirty years of grammar, could hardly burn with more than literary passions. His poems are rosaries of friendship, litanies of praise.