Was Christian Self-Sacrifice Meant for the Dark Age?

Augustine’s “City of God” as the paradigm of Catholic evasiveness

In The City of God, Augustine of Hippo expends an enormous amount of ink to avoid stating the obvious. That book is thus a cornerstone of Catholic casuistry, of using sophistry to distract from what your “lying” eyes are showing you and your “sinful” mind is telling you.

The Visigoths had sacked Rome in 410 CE, leaving many to blame Rome’s recent adoption of Christianity for the catastrophe. Evidently, the old gods had fled Rome’s defense because of the people’s lack of fealty to them.

Augustine rose to the challenge of defending Christianity against this supposed slur. On the contrary, he argued at great, telltale length, Romans had always been punished for worshipping false, pagan gods, by emulating them in their corruption and by suffering calamities throughout the empire’s history.

And Rome’s great success as an empire Augustine attributed not to that worship or corruption, but to the one true God whose will is inscrutable.

In any case, said Augustine, calamities happen to the good and the wicked alike, because of original sin.

Moreover, nothing in the City of Man matters compared to the coming City of God.

Augustine’s paradigmatic sophistry

You see, then, Augustine argued like a sophistical lawyer, contradicting himself at every turn to see what sticks for the jury. The aim is to build a giant rhetorical edifice, a self-reinforcing delusional belief system, a theology fit for the totalitarian purposes of running the absurdity of a “Christian” empire, and of soothing the nerves of Christians in what was actually approaching them, namely a dark age.

For instance, Augustine says to “ignorant” people who maintain that “Drought and Christianity go hand in hand,” that they should

call to mind with what various and repeated disasters the prosperity of Rome was blighted, before ever Christ had come in the flesh, and before His name had been blazoned among the nations with that glory which they vainly grudge. Let them, if they can, defend their gods in this article, since they maintain that they worship them in order to be preserved from these disasters, which they now impute to us if they suffer in the least degree.

Romans were being punished, then, for worshipping false gods. In the cosmic scheme, though, says Augustine,

that God, the author and giver of felicity, because He alone is the true God, Himself gives earthly kingdoms both to good and bad. Neither does He do this rashly, and, as it were, fortuitously — because He is God not fortune — but according to the order of things and times, which is hidden from us, but thoroughly known to Himself; which same order of times, however, He does not serve as subject to it, but Himself rules as lord and appoints as governor.

Moreover, says Augustine,

this seems to me to be one principal reason why the good are chastised along with the wicked, when God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal.

So, Augustine wants to have it both ways. There’s a moral order in the City of Man, that is in the material world, even though that order differs from the Kingdom of God. Thus, Augustine can emphasize apparent instances of justice when he likes, as when he celebrates the supposed punishment of pagans for their worship of false gods. Or when faced with apparent injustice, as in the overall spectacular success of the ungodly Roman Empire, Augustine can emphasize the departure of nature from Heaven, or the mysteries of an unnatural God who controls everything.

God is to be credited for all the goods in life, but never blamed for the evils. We’re responsible for our suffering because we all fall short of the standards set by the City of God. Nevertheless, our actions aren’t equal, so we still deserve different treatments in life. Thus, Romans were punished by the barbarians not because the Romans started to worship Christ, but because beforehand they’d been worshipping false gods. But Romans also enjoyed the benefits of their empire, not because of those very same gods, but again because of the mysterious largesse of the one true God of Christianity.

The rational merit of each argument is irrelevant to Augustine’s unstated purpose. What matters to the image he wants to project is that he seems to have an answer for everything because as a sophist he can speak out of both sides of his mouth.

You see this clearly in Augustine’s dealing with the fact that many Romans went without burial due to the viciousness of the barbarian attack. On the one hand, Augustine says, “godly confidence is not appalled by so ill-omened a circumstance; for the faithful bear in mind that assurance has been given that not a hair of their head shall perish, and that, therefore, though they even be devoured by beasts, their blessed resurrection will not hereby be hindered.” Thus, the denial of burial to Christians “does them no injury.” On the other hand, Augustine rushes to distinguish Christians from, say, certain Buddhists who perform sky burials, leaving the corpse to rot to prove their detachment from the material world:

Nevertheless the bodies of the dead are not on this account to be despised and left unburied; least of all the bodies of the righteous and faithful, which have been used by the Holy Spirit as His organs and instruments for all good works. For if the dress of a father, or his ring, or anything he wore, be precious to his children, in proportion to the love they bore him, with how much more reason ought we to care for the bodies of those we love, which they wore far more closely and intimately than any clothing! For the body is not an extraneous ornament or aid, but a part of man’s very nature.

So, when Christians aren’t buried because they’ve been slaughtered by Visigoths, it doesn’t matter because the material body is of no consequence to the resurrected body to come. But burial does matter, after all, because the material body is precious as part of our nature, being no mere “extraneous ornament or aid.”

This is the essence of Catholic “thinking,” a paradigm Augustine established, though as the Christ of casuistry, he’d been following the example of Paul, who served as Augustine’s John the Baptist, as it were. The Catholic policy is never to state the plain truth, but to present a towering, self-reinforcing edifice of half-truths, distractions, legalistic excuses, rhetorical evasions, myths, and absurdities. With Catholicism you can have it both ways and thus need never confront reality. You can live inside the theological edifice, this edifice being a model of the totalitarian approximation of the “City of God.”

Conflicting ethnic identities call for an incoherent mythic brand

Let’s address, though, the question of Christianity’s relation to the Roman Empire — and note the lack of casuistry or evasion in my answer. Did Rome suffer because of its Christianization, as Edward Gibbon argued in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Of course, deities have nothing to do with it except in the sense that a society’s mythos brands its ethos. Just as the military wears a customary uniform and holds up a flag bearing distinctive colours to distinguish itself from enemies on the battlefield, a society identifies itself by its chief myths and idols or sacred symbols and objectives.

Mythoi (sets of established myths) aren’t socially interchangeable since societies identify with different histories, traditions, geographic locations, and other collective characteristics, and the myths promote these identities. Whether a society succeeds or fails depends on lots of factors, including local circumstances and the national goals. The ancient Roman ethos built on the grandeur of Greek philosophy and religion, but distinguished itself with Romans’ ingenuity and imperial ambition.

Obviously, empires would face setbacks because you tend to make enemies when you ruthlessly expand your territory by invading neighboring lands. Rome justified its empire by holding out the prospect of a Pax Romana, a state of imposed peace not in an ethereal Never-Never Land, like Augustine’s City of God, but on earth.

And empires would face internal threats, too, because of the amorality of the methods needed to achieve their leaders’ ambitions. Regardless of how imperialism is popularized with grandiose dreams, the real-world techniques feature the waging of brutal wars and the enslaving of enemies and lower classes.

The real question for Augustine, then, would have been whether the Roman Empire could have sustained itself and flourished with the ill-fitting Christian mythos.

Jesus represented an uncompromising, anti-worldly counterculture, and his rivalry with mainstream imperialism was demonstrated by Rome’s execution of him. Even if a Christianized Roman Empire could have prospered, it would have done so only as a monstrous abomination, as a hodgepodge and as a deeply deluded society — which was in fact the state of Western medievalism.

The Visigoths attacked Rome not because Rome was Christian but because this targeted society was imperial: Rome subjugated foreigners, which provoked resentment, and Rome had ill-gotten wealth that could be plundered.

Now, a Christian empire would have refused to fight back against the barbarians, inviting further attacks, because Jesus’s ethos conflicts with worldly imperialism. But a Christian empire would dilute that subversive ethos to make it compatible with the imperial agenda. Despite Jesus’s pacifism, for instance, the mythos would include a just war theory.

Any assertion you like follows logically from a contradiction, which is why Augustine can always have it both ways with his unfalsifiable theology. The Christianized Roman Empire deserved to be both spared and punished, Augustine implied. Never mind the contradiction since sophistry can emphasize one side of it or the other, distracting the reader as though the text were a magic trick.

As uninspiring as such an incoherent, deluded worldview might seem, Christian soldiers are known for fighting as zealously as naturalistic pagans. The Christian crusaders, for example, fought fiercely against Muslims.

But it took centuries for the Church to develop the institutional edifice that Augustine foreshadowed with his masterful sophistry. Perhaps the early Christian imperialists were burdened by doubts about the imperial project because they couldn’t yet see how Jesus’s message could be reconciled with Rome’s imperial infrastructure, the two being obviously opposed to each other. Thus, the early Christian soldiers might have lacked the resolve to defeat the barbarians.

Harbinger of a dark age

Regardless, the lesson we should learn from Augustine’s labours is that the grotesquerie of a Christian empire could have been advocated only by the kind of sophistry he demonstrated in his writings. The contradiction at the heart of the imperial Church gave its theologians license to rationalize all possible events, to have a facile answer to any question, to have it both ways at any moment, and to avoid facing the reality that much of early Christian Europe had been plunged into a relative dark age.

As Peter Watson says in Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, historians still regard the centuries in Europe between 400 to 1000 CE as “dark” in a pejorative sense, despite the rise of political correctness. And historians still do so for two reasons: “One, because comparatively few documents survive to illumine them [i.e. those centuries]. Two, because so few of those monuments of art and literature as do survive can be considered as major achievements.”

Here begins Watson’s litany of examples:

Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor and the greatest of medieval rulers, was illiterate. By 1500 the old Roman roads were still the best in Europe. Most of Europe’s major harbours were unusable until at least the eighth century. Among the lost arts was bricklaying: “In all of Germany, England, Holland and Scandinavia,” says William Manchester, “virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries.” The horse collar, harness, and stirrup, all invented in China, much earlier, did not exist in Europe until around 900. Horses and oxen, though available, could hardly be used. The records of the English coroners show that homicides in the dark ages were twice as frequent as death by accident and that only one in a hundred murderers was ever brought to justice…Trade was hampered by widespread piracy, agriculture was so inefficient that the population was never fed adequately, the name exchequer emerged to describe the royal treasury because the officials were so deficient in arithmetic they were forced to use a chequered cloth as a kind of abacus when making calculations.

And on and on Watson goes. So, the sacking of Rome was only a harbinger of the darkness to come.

The introduction of organized Christianity was hardly more responsible for those collective barbarisms than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. On the contrary, the Christian principle of self-sacrifice in imitation of Jesus served the period well, tiding over the beleaguered Europeans until the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And Augustine excelled at making that theological fantasy self-sustaining by spelling out the subtleties.

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