The Vampire of the Empire

Nietzsche compared the early Christians to the anarchists of his time: “both are decadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future. … Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum” (The Antichrist §58).

Nietzsche may have borrowed the vampire metaphor from Ernest Renan, who had used it a few years earlier: “During the third century, Christianity sucked like a vampire on ancient society, draining all its strength and bringing about a general unrest against which the patriotic emperors fought in vain.” The Church, he wrote, “exhausted civil society, and bled it dry.”[1]

The point that Christianity was draining Roman society of its energy and its self-esteem, was already made by Celsus in the late 2nd century, and in the early 5th century by the Roman pagans to whom Augustine responded in the first book of his City of God. The idea became taboo until the new freedom of speech of the Renaissance, when Machiavelli expressed it again, with due reserve, in his Discourses on Livy (II,2): Christianity, he wrote, had eroded the Roman’s love of Liberty (by which he meant not individual freedom, but national sovereignty): “Our Religion has glorified more humble and contemplative men rather than men of action. It also places the highest good in humility, lowliness, and contempt of human things,” whereas the religion of the ancients “places it in the greatness of soul, the strength of body, and all the other things which make men very brave.”

Then came the Enlightenment, when Voltaire stated, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) : “Le christianisme ouvrait le ciel, mais il perdait l’empire.” Then came Edward Gibbon and his monumental History of the Decline and Fall on the Roman Empire (1819):

This indolent, or even criminal disregard to the public welfare, exposed [the Christians] to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans who very frequently asked, what must be the fate of the empire, attacked on every side by the barbarians, if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect. To this insulting question the Christian apologists returned obscure and ambiguous answers, as they were unwilling to reveal the secret cause of their security; the expectation that, before the conversion of mankind was accomplished, war, government, the Roman empire, and the world itself, would be no more.[2]

More recently, a thorough argument to that effect has been made by French scholar Louis Rougier, a student of Renan, in a passionate essay on Celsus published in 1925 (my translation):

Christians were certainly not rebels conspiring to establish a separate kingdom here on earth. ... But by their detachment from public affairs, they formed a party of deserters. The homeland and civil laws are the mother and father that the true gnostic, according to Clement of Alexandria, must despise in order to sit at the right hand of God (Stomata 4.4). “For us,” Tertullian wrote, “nothing is so foreign as the republic... one must live, they say, for the homeland, for the Empire, for one’s own people. That was the opinion of old. No one is born for others, since we die for ourselves alone” (Apology 38.3). To proclaim that only one thing is necessary, that of ensuring one’s personal salvation, is an individualistic principle, antisocial in the first place, which transforms the worldview and the economy of society. There is more: Christians must wish for and call for the end of this world, the great catastrophe that will bring down the Urbs and the Empire, to make way for “a Jerusalem from above, made by God and coming from heaven.” The sooner the hour of Rome’s fall comes, the happier Christians should consider themselves. “We must desire the coming of our reign and not the prolongation of our slavery,” Tertullian writes. “Lord, may Your reign come as soon as possible! Such is the wish of Christians, such is the confusion of the Gentiles, such is the triumph of the angels. It is for Your reign that we suffer, it is for Your reign that we pray” (De Corona 13). Public disasters do not affect Christians in any way; they see them as a confirmation of the prophecies that condemn the world to perish by the barbarians and by fire. The City of God, formed by the communion of the faithful and the elect, takes man away from his earthly homeland, whose passions and interests he ceases to embrace.

However, the political realities, which Christians disregard as foreign matters of no importance to salvation, are, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, after forty years of Roman peace, on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, the formidable pressure of the Barbarians who are pushing as far as Aquileia, while in the East the borders are buckling under the pressure of the Parthians. A duty imposed itself on all clear-sighted minds: to contain the Barbarians, whose threat was growing daily. This was not only a matter of ensuring the material security of the Empire, but also of preserving humanity’s most precious heritage from irreparable disaster. ... Around the great emperors of the 2nd century, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, and later around Diocletian, all intellectuals and patricians banded together to ward off the common peril. ...

To ward off the danger to civilization, the Empire needed the active dedication of all citizens, magistrates, and soldiers, not idealists “above the fray.” But who, according to Tertullian, responded to the emperor’s urgent call at a time when barbarians, slaves, and brigands were being enlisted in the army? “The help we give to the state when necessary is divine help, being equipped with all the weapons of God... The more pious we are, the more we help our sovereign with our prayers; and this support is much more effective than that of soldiers who go to war and kill as many enemies as possible. Is it not right that, when other men take up arms, Christians should take them up only as ministers and servants of God? When our prayers put to flight the demons who stir up wars and incite the violation of treaties, we render much greater service to princes than the troops who seem to wage war for them” (De Oratione 5). ...

Celsus was not wrong in discerning in Christianity a ferment of dissolution of the Empire and seeing in the possibility of its triumph the signal for great invasions and the collapse of civilization: “If everyone imitated you, the emperor would soon be left alone and abandoned, so that the whole Empire would fall into the hands of ferocious and savage barbarians, and the worship of your religion, like the glory of true wisdom, would disappear from the earth.”[3]

As we see, the thesis that the Romans were first defeated by Christianity has never lacked supporters. Yet, if the argument is a psychological one—the loss of motivation to fight for the Empire—, it remains questionable and inconclusive. It also faces the objection that the eastern half of the Empire outlasted the western half by one millennium, despite being more thoroughly Christianized.

What can be argued on the basis of historical facts, however, is that the fall of the Western Empire was primarily a consequence of the civil wars of the 4th and 5th centuries, which were, to a great extent, religious wars waged by the Christianizing emperors against the pagan resistance. Since I have defended this theory in a previous post, I have found that Peter Brown, the most widely acclaimed historian of Late Antiquity, laid great emphasis on the devastation of the civil wars, in The Rise of Western Christendom:

Again and again—indeed nine times in 83 years (from 312 to 395)—Roman soldiers had butchered their colleagues in murderous civil wars. Emperors wept (or, at least, made sure that everybody believed that they had wept) as they viewed the piles of Roman corpses that strewed the battlefield after such engagements. As Brent Shaw has shown [in Sacred Violence], the true “killing fields” of the fourth century were not along the frontiers. They were in northern Italy and the Balkans, where sanguinary battles were regularly fought between rival emperors.

What happened in the fifth century was that civil war expanded to include “proxy war” through the use of barbarian groups. Careful studies of the chronology and logistics of the civil wars of the early fifth century have shown that all the major breakthroughs by the barbarians either were part of maneuvers directly connected with civil wars, or at least were made possible by the distraction caused by civil wars. Far from rushing headlong from the woods of Germany to the heart of the Mediterranean, most barbarians were as good as “bussed” there by rival Roman usurpers—first to southwest Gaul and then across the Pyrenees into Spain. It was not the barbarian invasions in themselves that changed the face of Europe. It was the synergy between barbarian groups, the long Roman practice of civil war, and the opportunism with which local Romans exploited both barbarians and civil war conditions for their own purposes.[4]

As Brown sees it, the massive influx of barbarian warriors in the Empire was a consequence, and not a cause, of the civil wars.

The emperors always needed troops to fight the bitter civil wars which characterized the third and fourth centuries. This need for soldiers to fight in civil wars sucked Germans across the frontier into wars where, at regular intervals, Romans set about killing Romans, in the deadly clash of fully professional armies, in far greater numbers than they ever expected to kill or to be killed when fighting “barbarians.”[5]

I have also discovered an additional argument that the civil wars of the 4th century were religious wars from the very first one fought by Constantine against Maxentius. Modern historians generally ignore the religious factor in that war, because they believe that Constantine had not yet made his Christian coming-out, and because Maxentius was not a persecutor of Christians. But in 312, when Constantine and Licinius made common cause, Maxentius allied himself with Maximinus Daza, another member of the Tetrarchy, who was a committed traditionalist, that is a “pagan”, who issued a rescript against the Christians who, he declared, “with their ignorant and futile beliefs, have come to afflict almost the entire world with their shameful practices.”[6] Maximinus summoned an army of 70,000 men but, six months after Maxentius’s defeat at the Milvian Bridge, sustained a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tzirallum by Licinius’s army. A little more than a month later, the victorious Licinius and Constantine co-signed the Edict of Milan that legalized Christianity.

If, as I think can be established, the civil wars of the 4th and 5th centuries were primarily the religious wars of the Christianization, then it can be said that the Christianization caused the structural failure of the Empire, and the breaches that allowed the barbarians to flood in. The Christianization did not make Romans too weak to fight, but made them fight for God instead of Rome. Rather than fighting for the city of men, Christian emperors started fighting more and more obsessively for the city of God, turning the legions away from the frontiers, against the enemies of “the Truth” within, mobilizing even barbarians against Romans in the process.

Wars of religion—unknown in the pagan world—are programmed in the genetic makeup of Christianity, because they are the essence of the Jealous God. Although having a Son may have softened the biblical God’s character in some ways, His jealousy was not tamed—quite the opposite. That is why, as soon as Christians ran out of pagan enemies, they turned their wrath against each other, in civil wars between Christians of different creeds (as discussed before here). This culminated in the 6th century, when the fanatical Justinian ravaged Italy and caused the real collapse of Roman order in the West, as new historians are now arguing (and as discussed before here). The reason why Justinian is commonly regarded as the restorer of the Empire’s unity, rather than as its destroyer is simply that the victor gets to write history. The unity of the Church, which Constantine had tried (but failed) to achieve for the sake of the Empire, had become an end in itself, at the expense of the Empire, and of Roman civilization. The Church killed the Empire.

The day the prefect of Rome, Gregorius Anicius, became Pope Gregory I (590-604), marks the beginning of the papacy as “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, chapter 47). Under Gregory’s successor Honorius (625-638), the Senate House was turned into a church, the imperial residence of the Lateran became the seat of the papacy, and all imperial buildings became Church property.[7] Thus began what Renaissance historians would call the medium ævum, our “Middle Ages”. During this period, the papacy held firmly to the imperial mantle it had captured, while preventing its competitor, the Germanic Roman Empire, from achieving the political unification of Europe, thereby leading to the fragmentation of Europe in nation-states constantly at war with each other. This is the story told in my book The Papal Curse, a completely revised edition of the previous The Pope’s Curse, now published by Arktos with a foreword by Alain de Benoist.

Conclusion

Christianity is praised for being the foundation of Western civilization, although I fail to grasp what Western civilization owes it in terms of science, philosophy, art, and political tradition (read my article “The Renaissance Genius”). People often tell me: what about the cathedrals? I answer: Do you mean those built by churchmen, or those built by the guilds of free masons, for I have never heard of the former? One person recently pointed to Gregorian chant. Certainly, I replied: Gregorian chant is the best you can do when the Church bans instruments and forbid polyphony. Scholasticism? The most sterile intellectual experiment ever, as Louis Rougier argued in one of his books.

In my view, the most important legacy of Christianity to European civilization is religious wars.

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[1] Ernest Renan, Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (Histoire des origines du christianisme, livre VII), 4^ème éd., Calmann Lévy, 1882, pp. 589-590.

[2] Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall on the Roman Empire, 1819, volume I, Chapter XV, part V, Grand Rapids, pp. 480-481.

[3] Louis Rougier, Celse contre les Chrétiens, 1925, Le Labyrinthe, 1997, pp. 96-99.

[4] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, p. XXXIII.

[5] Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, op. cit., p. 49.

[6] Richard Gordon, “The Roman Imperial Cult and the Question of Power”, in J.A. North and S.R.F. Price, The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 37-70 (p. 50).

[7] Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 321-1308, Princeton UP, 1980, pp. 71-72.