CHRISTENDOM
700
CHRISTENDOM
the days of Theodosius seemed almost the ideal
Christian polity. Yet there was about it much that
fell short of the ideal of Christendom. In many
ways, as a contemporary bishop expressed it, "the
church was in the empire, not the empire in the
church". The traditions of Roman imperialism
were too strong to be easily mitigated. Constantine,
though not even a catechumen, in a sense, at least,
presided over the Council of Nica>a and the " Divinity "
of his son Constantius, though formally observing
the rule that decisions of faitli belonged to the bishops,
was able to exert such pressure upon them that at
one time not a single strictly orthodox bishop was left
in the occupation of his see. The officious interfer-
ence of a theologian emperor was more dangerous to
the Church than the hostility of Julian, his successor.
But the wish to dominate in every sphere was not
the only relic of pagan Rome. Though the emperor
was no longer pontifex maximus and the statue of
Victory was removed from the senate house, though
Theodosius decreed the final closing of the temples
and put an end to pagan public worship, the ancient
world was not really converted, it was hardly a
catechumen. In philosophy, literature, and art it
clung to the old models and reproduced them in a
debased form. Pagan civilization had not been
renewed in Christ. Such a rebirth demanded
Christians of a simpler character and a more sponta-
neous vigour than the inhabitants of the degenerate
empire. The formation of Christendom was to be
the work of a new generation of nations, baptized in
their infancy and receiving even the message of the
ancient world from the lips of Christian teachers.
But it was to be long before the great future hidden in the Barbarian invasions was to become manifest. At their first irruption the influence of the Teutonic tribes was only destructive; the Christian polity seemed to be perishing with the empire. The Church, however, as a spiritual power survived and mitigated even the fury of the Barbarian, for the helpless popu- lation of Rome found a refuge in the churches during the sack of the city by Alaric in 410. The distinction between Church and empire, which this disaster illus- trated, was emphasized by the accusations brought against the patriotism of the Christians and by St. Augustine's reply in his "De Civitate Dei". He de- velops in this encyclopaedic treatise the idea of the two kingdoms or societies (city, except in a very metaphorical sense, is too narrow to be an adequate translation of civitas), the Kingdom of God consisting of His friends in this world and the next, whether men or angels, while the earthly kingdom is that of His enemies. These two kingdoms have existed since the fall of the angels, but in a more limited sense and in relation to the Christian dispensation, the Church is spoken of as God's kingdom on earth while the Roman Empire is all but identified with the civitas terrena; not altogether, however, because the civil power, in securing peace for that part of the heavenly kingdom which is on its earthly pilgrimage, receives some kind of Divine sanction. We might, perhaps, have ex- pected, now that the empire was Christian, that St. Augustine would have looked forward to a new civitas terrena reconciled and united to the civitas Dei; but this prophetic vision of the future was prevented, it may be, by the prevalent opinion, that the world was near its end. The "De Civitate", however, which had a commanding influence in the Middle Ages, helped to form the ideal of Christendom by the de- velopment which it gave to the idea of the kingdom of God upon earth, its past history, its dignity, and universality.
From the fifth century till the days of Charles the Great (see Charlemagne) there was no effectual political unity in the West, and the Church had no civil counterpart. But Charles' dominions ex- tended from the Elbe to the Ebro and from Brit-
tany to Belgrade; there was but little of Western
Christendom which they did not include. Ire-
land and the South of Italy were the only parts
of it which his power or his influence did not
reach. Over the territories actually comprised in
his empire he exercised a real control, administra-
tive and legislative, as well as military. But thts
Carlovingian empire was far more than a mere politi-
cal federation: it was a period of renewal and reor-
ganization in nearly every sphere of social life. It
was spiritual, perhaps, even more than political.
In war conversion went hand in hand with victory;
in peace Charles ruled through bishops as effect-
ively as through counts; his active solicitude ex-
tended to the reform and education of the clergy,
the promotion of learning, the revival of the Bene-
dictine Rule, to the arts, to the liturgy and even
the doctrines of the Church. In the West Chris-
tendom became a temporal polity and a society as
well as a Church, and the empire of Charles, brief
though its existence proved to be, remained for many
centuries an ideal and therefore a power. Yet the
Carlovingian civilization was in most cases a return to
late Roman models. Originality is not its character-
istic. Charles' favourite church at Aachen is sup-
ported on the columns which he sent for from the
ruined temples of Italy. Even in his relations with
the Church he would have found the closest precedents
for his policy in the attitude of Constantine or even
perhaps of Justinian. Great as was his respect for
the successor of St. Peter, he claimed for himself a
masterful share in the administration of matters
ecclesiastical: he could write, even before his corona-
tion as emperor, to Pope Leo III, "My part is to
defend the Church by force of arms from external
attacks and to secure her internally through the estab-
lishment of the Catholic faith ; your part is to render
us the assistance of prayer". Still every step for-
ward has usually begun with a return to the past ;
it is thus that the artist or the statesman learns his
craft. If the Carlovingian system had lasted, no doubt
much that was new would have been developed, and
even under Charles's successor the spiritual and tem-
poral powers were placed on a more equal and more
appropriate footing. But Charles was too great for
his age; his work was premature. The political bond
was too weak to prevail over tribal loyalty and Teu-
tonic particularism. Disorder and disruption would
have broken up Carlovingian civilization even if North-
man, Saracen, and Hungarian had not come to plunge
Europe once more into anarchy.
During the tenth century the work of moral and political reconstruction was slowly carried on by the Church and feudalism; in the eleventh came that struggle between these two creative factors of the new Europe which saved the Church from absorption into feudalism. This century opened with what was. perhaps, the most hopeful attempt, after Charles the Great, to give the medieval empire a really universal character. The revived empire of Otto I in the mid- dle of the tenth century had been but an imperfect copy of its Carlovingian model. It was much more limited geographically, as it included only Germany, its dependent states to the east, and Italy; it was limited also in its interests, for ( Itto Kit to the ( hureh nearly all those spheres of ecclesiastical, educational, literary, and artistic activity for which Charles had done so much. But Otto's grandson, the hoy-em- peror Otto III, "magnum quoddam el improbabile cogitans", as a contemporary expressed it . attempted to make the empire less German, less military, more Roman, more universal, and more of a Spiritual force. He was in intimate alliance with tin- Holy See, and
with almost startling originality he established in Rome the first < Icrman and then the tir>t I'rench pope He seems to have realized the truth that it was only by leaning on and developing the religious aspect of
