The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

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. The East had won its spiritual battle against the physically victorious West, and would rule the Western soul for a thousand years.

It was then Saturday, and Arius was expecting to assemble with the congregation on the day following; but Divine retribution overtook his daring criminality. For going out from the imperial palace … and approaching the porphyry pillar in the Forum of Constantine, a terror seized him, accompanied by violent relaxation of his bowels. … Together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestine; moreover, portions of his spleen and his liver were eliminated in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.

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; and 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. “One could no more discover when myth was originally invented … than one could find out who was the first man that sneezed.”40 He resigned himself to mythology, and condoned the use of myths to instill morality into unlettered minds.

And I will assert, though it will seem paradoxical, that it would be a pious act to share our clothes and food even with the wicked. For it is to the humanity in a man that we give, and not to his moral character.

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 artificial syncretism that struck no roots in the hopes or fancies of men. Even before he died his failure had become evident; and the army that loved and mourned him named a Christian to succeed to his throne.

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

Julian, says Ammianus, lying in his tent, addressed his disconsolate and sorrowing companions: “Most opportunely, friends, has the time now come for me to leave this life, which I rejoice to restore to Nature at her demand.” … All present wept, whereupon, even then maintaining his authority, he chided them, saying that it was unbecoming for them to mourn for a prince who was called for a union with heaven and the stars. As this made them all silent, he engaged with the philosophers Maximus and Priscus in an intricate discussion about the nobility of the soul. Suddenly the wound in his side opened wide, the pressure of the blood checked his breath, and after a draught of cold water for which he had asked, he passed quietly away, in the thirty-second year of his age.55, II

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 celebrated with public rejoicings the death of the pagan Emperor.57 For the most part, however, the victorious Christian leaders preached to their congregations a generous forgetfulness of the injuries that Christianity had borne.58 Eleven centuries would pass before Hellenism would have another day.

tradition that speaks of these German tribes as barbarians. It is true that in calling them bar bari the Greeks and Romans meant no compliment. The word was probably brother to the Sanskrit var-vara, which meant a rough and letterless churl;1 it appears again in Berber. But it was not for nothing that for five centuries the Germans had touched Roman civilization in trade and war. By the fourth century they had long since adopted writing and a government of stable laws. If we except the Merovingian Franks, their sexual morals were superior to those of the Romans and the Greeks.I 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.3 They were individualistic to the point of chaos, while the Romans had now been tamed to sociability and peace. 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.4 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; and t...

The cue for the great invasion came from far-off Mongolian plains. The Hsiung-nu, or Hiung-nu, or Huns, a division of the Turanian stock, occupied in our third century the region north of Lake Balkash and the Aral Sea. According to Jordanes, their chief weapon was their physiognomy. By the terror of their features they inspired great fear in those whom perhaps they did not really surpass in war. They made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect was fearful, and they had … a shapeless lump instead of a head, with pinholes rather than eyes. They are cruel to their children on the very day of their birth. For they cut the cheeks of the males with a sword, so that before they receive the nourishment of milk, they must learn to endure wounds. Hence they grow old beardless, and with faces scarred by the sword. They are short in stature, quick in bodily movement, alert horsemen, ready in the use of bow and arrow, broad-shouldered, and with firm set necks always erect in pride.7

Paulinus of Pella complimented himself on the chastity of his youth, when “I restrained my desires … never accepted the love of a free woman … and contented myself with that of female slaves in my household.”20

The Vandal chieftain Gaiseric, on capturing Christian Carthage, was shocked to find a brothel at almost every corner; he closed these dens, and gave the prostitutes a choice between marriage and banishment. The Roman world is degenerating physically, has lost all moral valor, and leaves its defense to mercenary foreigners. How should such cowards deserve to survive? The Roman Empire, Salvian concludes, “is either dead, or drawing its last breath,” even at the height of its luxury and games. Moritur et ridet—it laughs and dies.24

Symmachus writes that he spent $900,000 on one celebration, and that the twenty-nine Saxon gladiators who were scheduled to fight in the arena cheated him by strangling one another in compact suicide before the games began.

Blood had begun to flow when an Oriental monk, Telemachus, leaped from the stands into the arena and demanded that the combats cease. The infuriated spectators stoned him to death; but the Emperor Honorius, moved by the scene, issued an edict abolishing gladiatorial games.II

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 Nibelungenlied’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).47 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; and within a few years the empire that had threatened to subdue the Greeks and the Romans, the Germans and the Gauls, and to put the stamp of Asia upon the face and soul of Europe, had broken to pieces and melted away.