Читать книгу The Church and the Barbarians - William Holden Hutton - Страница 6

[Sidenote: The task of the Church]

The year 461 saw the great organisation which had ruled and united Europe for so long trembling into decay. The history of the Empire in relation to Christianity is indeed a remarkable one. The imperial religion had been the necessary and deadly foe of the religion of Jesus Christ; it had fought and had been conquered. Gradually the Empire itself with all its institutions and laws had been transformed, at least outwardly, into a Christian power. Questions of Christian theology had become questions of imperial politics. A Roman of the second century would have wondered indeed at the transformation which had come over the world he knew: it seemed as if the kingdoms of the earth had become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. But also it seemed that the new wine had burst the old bottles. The boundaries of the Roman world had been outstepped: nations had come in from the East and from the West. The {2} system which had been supreme was not elastic: the new ideas, Christian and barbarian alike, pressed upon it till it gave way and collapsed. And so it came about that if Christianity had conquered the old world, it had still to conquer the new.

[Sidenote: The decaying Empire.]

Now before the Church in the fifth century there were set several powers, interests, duties, with which she was called upon to deal; and her dealing with them was the work of the next five centuries. They were—the Empire, Christian, but obsolescent; the new nations, still heathen, which were struggling for territory within the bounds of the Empire, and for sway over the imperial institutions; the distant tribes untouched by the message of Christ; and the growth, within the Church itself, of new and great organisations, which were destined in great measure to guide and direct her work. Politics, theology, organisation, missions, had all their share in the work of the Church from 461 to 1003. In each we shall find her influence: to harmonise them we must find a principle which runs through her relation to them all.

[Sidenote: The need of unity.]

The central idea of the period with which we are to deal is unity. Up till the fifth century, till the Council of Chalcedon (451) completed the primary definition of the orthodox Christian faith in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians were striving for conversion, organisation, definition. All these aims still remained, but in less prominence. The Church's order was completed, the Church's creed was practically fixed, and the dominant nations in Europe had owned the name of Christ. There remained a new and severe test. Would the {3} Church win the new barbarian conquerors as she had won the old imperial power? There was to be a great epoch of missionary energy. But of the firm solidity of the Church there could be no doubt. Heresies had torn from her side tribes and even nations who had once belonged to her fold. But still unity was triumphant in idea; and it was into the Catholic unity of the visible Church that the new nations were to be invited to enter. S. Augustine's grand idea of the City of God had really triumphed, before the fifth century was half passed, over the heathen conceptions of political rule. The Church, in spite of the tendency to separate already visible in East and West, was truly one; and that unity was represented also in the Christian Empire. "At the end of the fifth century the only Christian countries outside the limits of the Empire were Ireland and Armenia, and Armenia, maintaining a precarious existence beside the great Persian monarchy of the Sassanid kings, had been for a long time virtually dependent on the Roman power." [1] Politically, while tyrants rise and fall, and barbarian hosts, the continuance of the Wandering of the Nations, sweep across the stage, we are struck above all by the significant fact which Mr. Freeman (Western Europe in the Fifth Century) knew so well how to make emphatic:—"The wonderful thing is how often the Empire came together again. What strikes us at every step in the tangled history of these times is the wonderful life which the Roman name and the Roman Power still kept when it was thus attacked on every side from without and torn in pieces in every quarter from within." And the reason for this indubitably was that the {4} Empire had now another organisation to support it, based on the same idea of central unity. One Church stood beside one Empire, and became year by year even more certain, more perfect, as well as more strong. In the West the papal power rose as the imperial decayed, and before long came near to replacing it. In the East, where the name and tradition of old Rome was always preserved in the imperial government, the Church remained in that immemorial steadfastness to the orthodox faith which was a bond of unity such as no other idea could possibly supply. In the educational work which the emperor had to undertake in regard to the tribes which one by one accepted their sway, the Christian Church was their greatest support. In East as well as West, the bishops, saints, and missionaries were the true leaders of the nations into the unity of the Empire as well as the unity of the Church. [Sidenote: The Church's conquest of barbarism.] The idea of Christian unity saved the Empire and taught the nations. The idea of Christian unity was the force which conquered barbarism and made the barbarians children of the Catholic Church and fellow-citizens with the inheritors of the Roman traditions.

If the dominant idea of the long period with which this book is to deal is the unity of the Church, seen through the struggles to preserve, to teach, or to attain it, the most important facts are those which belong to the conversion, to Christ and to the full faith of the Catholic Church, of races new to the Western world. The gradual extinction in Italy of the Goths, the conversion of the Franks, of the English, of many races on distant barbarian borderlands of civilisation, the acceptance of Catholicism by the Lombards and {5} the Western Goths, do not complete the historical tale, though they are a large part of it: there was the falling back in Africa and for a long time in Europe of the settlements of the Cross before the armies of the Crescent. There were also two other important features of this long-extended age, to which writers have given the name of dark. There was the survival of ancient learning, which lived on through the flood of barbarian immigration into the lands which had been its old home, yet was very largely eclipsed by the predominance of theological interests in literature. And there was the growth of a strong ecclesiastical power, based upon an orthodox faith (though not without hesitations and lapses), and gradually winning a formidable political dominion. That power was the Roman Papacy.

[1] Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 13, ed. 1904.

{6}