Part 7 (1/2)

[Footnote 26: Sir F. Palgrave, 'Arabia,' vol. ii., p. 155. I gratefully adopt in the next paragraph his division of Asiatic nations, p. 160.]

18. This valley in ancient days formed the kingdom of a.s.syria, as the valley of the Nile formed that of Egypt. In the work now before us, we have nothing to do with its people, who were to the Jews merely a hostile power of captivity, inexorable as the clay of their walls, or the stones of their statues; and, after the birth of Christ, the marshy valley is no more than a field of battle between West and East.

Beyond the great river,--Persia, India, and China, form the southern 'Oriens.' Persia is properly to be conceived as reaching from the Persian Gulf to the mountain chains which flank and feed the Indus; and is the true vital power of the East in the days of Marathon: but it has no influence on Christian history except through Arabia; while, of the northern Asiatic tribes, Mede, Bactrian, Parthian, and Scythian, changing into Turk and Tartar, we need take no heed until they invade us in our own historic territory.

19. Using therefore the terms 'Gothic' and 'Cla.s.sic' for broad distinction of the northern and central zones of this our own territory, we may conveniently also use the word 'Arab'[27] for the whole southern zone. The influence of Egypt vanishes soon after the fourth century, while that of Arabia, powerful from the beginning, rises in the sixth into an empire whose end we have not seen. And you may most rightly conceive the religious principle which is the base of that empire, by remembering, that while the Jews forfeited their prophetic power by taking up the profession of usury over the whole earth, the Arabs returned to the simplicity of prophecy in its beginning by the well of Hagar, and are not opponents to Christianity; but only to the faults or follies of Christians. They keep still their faith in the one G.o.d who spoke to Abraham their father; and are His children in that simplicity, far more truly than the nominal Christians who lived, and live, only to dispute in vociferous council, or in frantic schism, the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

[Footnote 27: Gibbon's fifty-sixth chapter begins with a sentence which may be taken as the epitome of the entire history we have to investigate: ”The three great nations of the world, the Greeks, the Saracens, and the Franks, encountered each other on the theatre of Italy.” I use the more general word, Goths, instead of Franks; and the more accurate word, Arab, for Saracen; but otherwise, the reader will observe that the division is the same as mine. Gibbon does not recognize the Roman people as a nation--but only the Roman power as an empire.]

20. Trusting my reader then in future to retain in his mind without confusion the idea of the three zones, Gothic, Cla.s.sic, and Arab, each divided into four countries, clearly recognizable through all ages of remote or recent history;--I must farther, at once, simplify for him the idea of the Roman _Empire_ (see note to last paragraph,) in the manner of its affecting them. Its nominal extent, temporary conquests, civil dissensions, or internal vices, are scarcely of any historical moment at all; the real Empire is effectual only as an exponent of just law, military order, and mechanical art, to untrained races, and as a translation of Greek thought into less diffused and more tenable scheme for them. The Cla.s.sic zone, from the beginning to the end of its visible authority, is composed of these two elements--Greek imagination, with Roman order: and the divisions or dislocations of the third and fourth century are merely the natural apparitions of their differences, when the political system which concealed them was tested by Christianity. It seems almost wholly lost sight of by ordinary historians, that, in the wars of the last Romans with the Goths, the great Gothic captains were all Christians; and that the vigorous and nave form which the dawning faith took in their minds is a more important subject of investigation, by far, than the inevitable wars which followed the retirement of Diocletian, or the confused schisms and crimes of the lascivious court of Constantine. I am compelled, however, to notice the terms in which the last arbitrary dissolutions of the empire took place, that they may ill.u.s.trate, instead of confusing, the arrangement of the nations which I would fasten in your memory.

21. In the middle of the fourth century you have, politically, what Gibbon calls ”the final division of the _Eastern_ and _Western Empires_.” This really means only that the Emperor Valentinian, yielding, though not without hesitation, to the feeling now confirmed in the legions that the Empire was too vast to be held by a single person, takes his brother for his colleague, and divides, not, truly speaking, their authority, but their attention, between the east and the west. To his brother Valens he a.s.signs the extremely vague ”Praefecture of the East, from the lower Danube to the confines of Persia,” while for his own immediate government he reserves the ”warlike praefectures of Illyric.u.m, Italy, and Gaul, from the extremity of Greece to the Caledonian rampart, and from the rampart of Caledonia to the foot of Mount Atlas.” That is to say, in less poetical cadence, (Gibbon had better have put his history into hexameters at once,) Valentinian kept under his own watch the whole of Roman Europe and Africa, and left Lydia and Caucasus to his brother. Lydia and Caucasus never did, and never could, form an Eastern Empire,--they were merely outside dependencies, useful for taxation in peace, dangerous by their mult.i.tudes in war.

There never was, from the seventh century before Christ to the seventh after Christ, but _one_ Roman Empire, which meant, the power over humanity of such men as Cincinnatus and Agricola; it expires as the race and temper of these expire; the nominal extent of it, or brilliancy at any moment, is no more than the reflection, farther or nearer upon the clouds, of the flames of an altar whose fuel was of n.o.ble souls. There is no true date for its division; there is none for its destruction.

Whether Dacian Probus or Noric Odoacer be on the throne of it, the force of its living principle alone is to be watched--remaining, in arts, in laws, and in habits of thought, dominant still in Europe down to the twelfth century;--in language and example, dominant over all educated men to this hour.

22. But in the nominal division of it by Valentinian, let us note Gibbon's definition (I a.s.sume it to be his, not the Emperor's) of European Roman Empire into Illyric.u.m, Italy, and Gaul. I have already said you must hold everything south of the Danube for Greek. The two chief districts immediately south of the stream are upper and lower Moesia, consisting of the slope of the Thracian mountains northward to the river, with the plains between it and them. This district you must notice for its importance in forming the Moeso-Gothic alphabet, in which ”the Greek is by far the princ.i.p.al element”,[28] giving sixteen letters out of the twenty-four. The Gothic invasion under the reign of Valens is the first that establishes a Teutonic nation within the frontier of the empire; but they only thereby bring themselves more directly under its spiritual power. Their bishop, Ulphilas, adopts this Moesian alphabet, two-thirds Greek, for his translation of the Bible, and it is universally disseminated and perpetuated by that translation, until the extinction or absorption of the Gothic race.

[Footnote 28: Milman, 'Hist., of Christianity,' vol. iii. p. 36.]

23. South of the Thracian mountains you have Thrace herself, and the countries confusedly called Dalmatia and Illyria, forming the coast of the Adriatic, and reaching inwards and eastwards to the mountain watershed. I have never been able to form a clear notion myself of the real character of the people of these districts, in any given period; but they are all to be ma.s.sed together as northern Greek, having more or less of Greek blood and dialect according to their nearness to Greece proper; though neither sharing in her philosophy, nor submitting to her discipline. But it is of course far more accurate, in broad terms, to speak of these Illyrian, Moesian, and Macedonian districts as all Greek, than with Gibbon or Valentinian to speak of Greece and Macedonia as all Illyrian.[29]

[Footnote 29: I find the same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguis.h.i.+ng every ray and trace of past history at once.]

24. In the same imperial or poetical generalization, we find England ma.s.sed with France under the term Gaul, and bounded by the ”Caledonian rampart.” Whereas in our own division, Caledonia, Hibernia, and Wales, are from the first considered as essential parts of Britain,[30] and the link with the continent is to be conceived as formed by the settlement of Britons in Brittany, and not at all by Roman authority beyond the Humber.

[Footnote 30: Gibbon's more deliberate statement its clear enough.

”From the coast or the extremity of Caithness and Ulster, the memory of Celtic origin was distinctly preserved in the perpetual resemblance of languages, religion, and manners, and the peculiar character of the British tribes might be naturally ascribed to the influence of accidental and local circ.u.mstances.” The Lowland Scots, ”wheat eaters”

or Wanderers, and the Irish, are very positively identified by Gibbon at the time our own history begins. ”It is _certain_” (italics his, not mine) ”that in the declining age of the Roman Empire, Caledonia, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, were inhabited by the Scots.”--Chap. 25, vol. iv., p. 279.

The higher civilization and feebler courage of the Lowland _English_ rendered them either the victims of Scotland, or the grateful subjects of Rome. The mountaineers, Pict among the Grampians, or of their own colour in Cornwall and Wales, have never been either instructed or subdued, and remain to this day the artless and fearless strength of the British race.]

25. Thus, then, once more reviewing our order of countries, and noting only that the British Islands, though for the most part thrown by measured degree much north of the rest of the north zone, are brought by the influence of the Gulf stream into the same climate;--you have, at the time when our history of Christianity begins, the Gothic zone yet unconverted, and having not yet even heard of the new faith. You have the Cla.s.sic zone variously and increasingly conscious of it, disputing with it, striving to extinguish it--and your Arab zone, the ground and sustenance of it, encompa.s.sing the Holy Land with the warmth of its own wings, and cheris.h.i.+ng there--embers of phoenix fire over all the earth,--the hope of Resurrection.

26. What would have been the course, or issue, of Christianity, had it been orally preached only, and unsupported by its poetical literature, might be the subject of deeply instructive speculation--if a historian's duty were to reflect instead of record. The power of the Christian faith was however, in the fact of it, always founded on the written prophecies and histories of the Bible; and on the interpretations of their meaning, given by the example, far more than by the precept, of the great monastic orders. The poetry and history of the Syrian Testaments were put within their reach by St. Jerome, while the virtue and efficiency of monastic life are all expressed, and for the most part summed, in the rule of St. Benedict. To understand the relation of the work of these two men to the general order of the Church, is quite the first requirement for its farther intelligible history.

Gibbon's thirty-seventh chapter professes to give an account of the 'Inst.i.tution of the Monastic Life' in the third century. But the monastic life had been inst.i.tuted somewhat earlier, and by many prophets and kings. By Jacob, when he laid the stone for his pillow; by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before he had left ”those few sheep in the wilderness”; and by the prophet who ”was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel.” Its primary ”inst.i.tution,” for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of G.o.d, and practical wisdom dependent on His guidance.[31]

[Footnote 31: I should myself mark as the fatallest instant in the decline of the Roman Empire, Julian's rejection of the counsel of the Augurs. ”For the last time, the Etruscan Haruspices accompanied a Roman Emperor, but by a singular fatality their adverse interpretation by the signs of heaven was disdained, and Julian followed the advice of the philosophers, who coloured their predictions with the bright hues of the Emperor's ambition.” (Milman, Hist. of Christianity, chap.

vi.)]

The form which the monastic spirit took in later times depended far more on the corruption of the common world, from which it was forced to recoil either in indignation or terror, than on any change brought about by Christianity in the ideal of human virtue and happiness.

27. ”Egypt” (Mr. Gibbon thus begins to account for the new Inst.i.tution!), ”the fruitful parent of superst.i.tion, afforded the first example of monastic life.” Egypt had her superst.i.tions, like other countries; but was so little the _parent_ of superst.i.tion that perhaps no faith among the imaginative races of the world has been so feebly missionary as hers. She never prevailed on even the nearest of her neighbours to wors.h.i.+p cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superst.i.tion: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in its material and technic elements, the mistress of Literature, showing authors who before could only scratch on wax and wood, how to weave paper and engrave porphyry. She was the first exponent of the law of Judgment after Death for Sin. She was the Tutress of Moses; and the Hostess of Christ.

28. It is both probable and natural that, in such a country, the disciples of any new spiritual doctrine should bring it to closer trial than was possible among the illiterate warriors, or in the storm-vexed solitudes of the North; yet it is a thoughtless error to deduce the subsequent power of cloistered fraternity from the lonely pa.s.sions of Egyptian monachism. The anchorites of the first three centuries vanish like feverish spectres, when the rational, merciful, and laborious laws of Christian societies are established; and the clearly recognizable rewards of heavenly solitude are granted to those only who seek the Desert for its redemption.

29. 'The clearly _recognizable_ rewards,' I repeat, and with cautious emphasis. No man has any data for estimating, far less right of judging, the results of a life of resolute self-denial, until he has had the courage to try it himself, at least for a time: but I believe no reasonable person will wish, and no honest person dare, to deny the benefits he has occasionally felt both in mind and body, during periods of accidental privation from luxury, or exposure to danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the pa.s.sion, in which the mountain anchorites of Arabia and Palestine condemned themselves to lives of seclusion and suffering, which were comforted only by supernatural vision, or celestial hope. That phases of mental disease are the necessary consequence of exaggerated and independent emotion of any kind must, of course, be remembered in reading the legends of the wilderness; but neither physicians nor moralists have yet attempted to distinguish the morbid states of intellect[32] which are extremities of n.o.ble pa.s.sion, from those which are the punishments of ambition, avarice, or lasciviousness.

[Footnote 32: Gibbon's hypothetical conclusion respecting the effects of self-mortification, and his following historical statement, must be noted as in themselves containing the entire views of the modern philosophies and policies which have since changed the monasteries of Italy into barracks, and the churches of France into magazines. ”This voluntary martyrdom _must_ have gradually destroyed the sensibility, both of mind and body; nor _can it be presumed_ that the fanatics who torment themselves, are capable of any lively affection for the rest of mankind. _A cruel unfeeling temper has characterized the monks of every age and country._”