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RADICAL THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES

Postsecular History
Political Theology and the Politics of Time
Maxwell Kennel
Radical Theologies and Philosophies

Series Editors
Michael Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA

Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies is a call for transformational ideas
that break out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic ethos
of the series, reflected in its title, enables it to engage with an ever-­
expanding radical expression and critique of theologies and philosophies
that have entered or seek to enter the public sphere. This engagement
arises from the continued turn to religion and ideology, especially radical
thought in politics, social sciences, philosophy, theory, cultural, and literary
studies. The post-theistic thought both driving and emerging from these
intersections is the focus of this series.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14521
 Maxwell Kennel

Postsecular History
Political Theology and the Politics of Time
Maxwell Kennel
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2634-663X     ISSN 2634-6648 (electronic)

Radical Theologies and Philosophies
ISBN 978-3-030-85757-8    ISBN 978-3-030-85758-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85758-5

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 Acknowledgements

While writing this book I benefitted from the support and insights of sev-
eral teachers, the most important of whom is Travis Kroeker. Several sec-
tions of this book were drafted in his seminars and influenced by his
approach to close reading and figural interpretation. Travis’s messianic
political theology—one that builds up the secular from below and is “nei-
ther Catholic nor Protestant, neither Mennonite nor secularist, neither
orthodox nor heterodox”1—continues to inspire me as I develop my own
interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to the study of religion. Much of
my methodological orientation has been further influenced by the critical
and charitable approaches to texts and traditions that I was taught during
my time as a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies at
McMaster University, and I am grateful for the friends and colleagues who
made my time there so enjoyable.
Parts of Postsecular History have been revised and reworked from previ-
ously published material. Earlier versions of Chaps. 3, 5, and 6 appeared
in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 46 (2017), Telos 188 (2019),
and rhizomes 34 (2018), respectively. I am grateful to the editors of these
journals for granting me permission to reproduce updated and expanded
versions of these texts here.

1
P. Travis Kroeker, “Foreword” in A. James Reimer, Toward an Anabaptist Political
Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society. Ed. Paul G. Doerksen (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014),
ix–x. See also P. Travis Kroeker, Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics: Essays in
Exile (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017).

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am also grateful to those who have responded to my work over the

past several years. Parts of Chap. 2 were first presented at the November
2019 meetings of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego on a
panel discussing the work of Adam Kotsko, and I am thankful for the com-
ments and questions of the organizers and respondents. For comments on
the manuscript, collegial support, and a kind endorsement, I am grateful
to David Newheiser. I also want to thank Daniel Colucciello Barber—
whose work on the postsecular is foundational for this project—for his
careful and critical questions about the manuscript. For encouraging me as
I developed the argument of the book, I want to thank Steven Shakespeare
and Ward Blanton. But most importantly, for their essential work in bring-
ing this book to publication in the Palgrave Macmillan Radical Theologies
and Philosophies series, I will be forever grateful to Mike Grimshaw and
Phil Getz.
This book was conceived of and written concurrently with my disserta-
tion on ontologies of violence in the works of Jacques Derrida, Mennonite
philosophical theologians, and Grace Jantzen. The critical approach to the
theopolitical periodization of time and history that I develop herein is
connected to my dissertation’s critique of theopolitical configurations of
origins, essences, and ends that justify the use of violent and coercive
means. In some ways, the two texts can be read together as a pair. While
“Ontologies of Violence” analyses how various uses of the term ‘violence’
reflect value-laden metanarratives, Postsecular History develops a critical
approach to the periodizing strategies that underpin such orderings.
However, one open thread at the conclusion of both works is that many
persuasive periodizations and figural fulfilments that connect past, present,
and future in postsecular ways remain open to the anachronistic distor-
tions and epistemological violences of conspiratorial thinking. I will
address these problems in a third book project called Critique of
Conspiracism. In the project I aim to show how violent epistemologies
and instrumental uses of history combine in conspiratorial thinking, while
also exploring the confluences of secularity and religiosity that motivate
and structure conspiracism. For the opportunity to pursue this project as
a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion
at the University of Toronto I am deeply grateful to Pamela Klassen,
whose timing and support have made an immeasurable difference in my
work and life.
In the spirit of the postsecular entanglement of secularity and religion,
I want to acknowledge my profound debt to several friends who are
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

uncapturable by such distinctions. For supporting me throughout my

graduate studies I am grateful for Charlie Roth and the exceptional envi-
ronment of the Rainham Mennonite Church. I am also very thankful for
the home and work provided for me by the Steinmann Mennonite Church
at the conclusion of my degree. For showing me less dissociative and more
connective ways of living, I want to thank my friends Seija Grant, Liz Foo,
Carlyn Hopkins, Jorian van den Helm, Jenn Neufeld, Rachael Lake, Jess
del Rosso, Traci Dow, Jeremy Cohen, Anna Phipps-Burton, and Kyle and
Rob Jones. I am also deeply indebted to the professional work of SB.
For support from afar and so many memorable visits I am thankful for
the abiding friendships of Tyler and Chalsi Campbell (and Cy and K!). My
family has worked tirelessly to support me during my graduate education,
and for their love and care I will always be deeply grateful. Without the
years of formative conversations with my parents Shirley and Steve, and
my brother Reid, I would never have found my love for this work or
stayed with it.
Edmond Jabès writes that “Little by little the book will finish me,”2 and
for saving me from being finished off by this book, I am grateful for the
familial accompaniments of Luna and Atlas—animal companions who
teach me so much about what it means to be both human and posthuman.
Lastly—because promising and fulfilling movements between beginnings,
interims, and ends underpin the postsecular history that these chapters
develop—I want to thank Amy, most especially for our conversations and
the shared history and future we are always renarrating, rewriting, unwork-
ing, and processing together. uxori omnia mea.

2
Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing
and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65.
 Note on the Cover Art

The choice of cover art—George Frederic Watts’s painting “The All-­

Pervading” (1887–c.1893)—reflects the orientation of this book in ten-
sions between religiosity, Christianity, and secularity. The catalogue
description for its exhibition at the New Gallery in 1896 describes “The
All-Pervading” as a “Spirit of the universe represented as a winged figure,
seated, holding in her lap the ‘Globe of Systems.’”1 Watts associated the
figure of the All-Pervading with Michelangelo’s Sibyls who look onward
into the future, while at the same time its crystal ball reflects Watts’s inter-
ests in the science and spiritualism of his day. Barbara Bryant writes that
“Watts was far too much of a doubter to have fallen completely with any
one religion” and she highlights his consistent interest in “mystical and
other-worldly matters.”2 Watts himself, using symbolist language and con-
sidering the painting of ideas, writes of “the density of the veil that covers
the mystery of our being, at all times impenetrable, and to be
impenetrable, in spite of which conviction we ever passionately yearn to
pierce it.”3 Although these words challenge the rage for order that imposes
categories and divisions upon mysterious and complex realities—also

1
Quoted in The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910. Ed.
Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone (Paris: Flammarion/Tate Gallery, 1997), 268.
2
Barbara Bryant, “G.F. Watts and the Symbolist Vision” in The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones
& Watts, 72.
3
George Frederic Watts “The Present Conditions of Art,” quoted in Bryant, “G.F. Watts
and the Symbolist Vision,” 73.

ix
x Note on the Cover Art

manifested in certain possessive acts of periodization that I will explore

below—Watts’s legacy and the tensions between his deconstructive and
imperialist inclinations are far more complex than I can account for here.4
Part of Watts’s ‘history of the cosmos,’ “The All-Pervading” further reso-
nates with the mysteries of creation and light in his painting “The Sower
of the Systems” (c. 1902), and is close to his work “The Recording Angel”
(c. 1890) which features a scroll laid out over the globe that rests in the
hands of a golden incarnation of the All-Pervading.

4
See David Stewart, “Deconstruction or Reconstruction? The Victorian Paintings of
George Frederic Watts” SECAC Review 12.3 (December 1993): 181–186.
 Praise for Postsecular History

“We moderns are accustomed to thinking in terms of linear time, often progress-
ing from ‘pre’ to ‘post,’ but the political significance of this gesture is rarely
acknowledged. In this wide-ranging book, Maxwell Kennel explores the theologi-
cal sources of this understanding of time and underlines its limitations. Whereas
many theopolitical periodizations promise novelty and control, Kennel takes up a
posture of patient anticipation oriented by a future that remains mysterious.”
—David Newheiser, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical
Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, Australia

“Postsecular History offers invaluable insights into an issue that is crucial not only
for political theology, but for redefining temporal periodization in the contempo-
rary world. Kennel’s work focuses on western theopolitical concepts of time and
history and fundamentally critiques the aspiration to value-neutrality within secu-
lar and postsecular concepts.”
—Elettra Stimilli, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Sapienza University of
Rome, Italy

“Postsecular History is a deeply researched scholarly work addressing an important

topic: the meaning of history and experience of time, analyzed under the perspec-
tive of its theological signature. The book challenges theopolitical periodizations
of history by questioning the periodizing gesture of the ‘postsecular.’ Kennel
undertakes this task by analyzing historians of the Radical Reformation, the poli-
tics of periodization in Nietzsche and Augustine, and the emancipatory potential
of neglected groups such as the Collegiants and Anabaptists.”
—Montserrat Herrero, Professor of Political Philosophy, Universidad de
Navarra, Spain
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Political Theology and the Politics of Time 25

3 Postsecular History and the Seventeenth-­Century Dutch

Collegiants 55

4 Fanaticism, Anachronism, and Melville’s Intervals 85

5 Periodization and Providence Between Nietzsche and

Augustine121

6 The Regulation of the Subject by the Technology of Time149

7 Dorothee Sölle’s Postsecular Political Theology of Waiting171

8 Conclusion191

Bibliography203

Index217

xiii
 About the Author

Maxwell Kennel is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the
University of Toronto where he is working on a book project called
Critique of Conspiracism. He received his PhD in May 2021 from the
Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University where he has
taught courses on religion and violence and approaches to the study of
religion. His dissertation “Ontologies of Violence” uses violence as a diag-
nostic concept to analyse Jacques Derrida’s essay “Violence and
Metaphysics,” Mennonite pacifist epistemologies, and Grace M. Jantzen’s
trilogy Death and the Displacement of Beauty. He has published articles on
time and history in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Political
Theology, rhizomes, and Telos, and articles on Mennonite topics in Literature
and Theology, The Mennonite Quarterly Review, the Journal of Mennonite
Studies, and Hamilton Arts & Letters. In 2017 he edited Mennonite his-
torian Robert Friedmann’s manuscript Design for Living: Regard, Concern,
Service, and Love, and in 2021 he served as a guest editor for a special issue
of Political Theology focusing on interdisciplinary expressions of Mennonite
Political Theology.

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The concept of the ‘postsecular’ presents both its users and critics with
several problems that this book will explore, not least of which is the inad-
equacy of the distinction between religion and the secular. Because of its
prefix, and when it is used to describe the present, the term seems to sug-
gest that we have definitively surpassed secular ways of thinking and now
come to a new place where religion and theology are once again justified
and sufficient. There are many scholars who use the term in this way, but
I argue that the term ‘postsecular’ need not be confined to or by these
uses. Instead, it is far more honest and defensible to use the term ‘post-
secular’ to refer to complex entanglements and mediations between con-
flicting normative orders, not least of which are Christianity and secularity.
In their introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, Justin
Beaumont and Klaus Elder use the term ‘postsecular’ in a similar way, sug-
gesting that it names both a “complementarity of discourses” and a “con-
frontation of normativities.”1 Amidst the continuities and discontinuities
between secular and religious values that characterize postsecular
thinking, my argument is that problems of time and history are always at
issue. As the place of religion in the public sphere continues to transform,

1
Justin Beaumont and Klaus Elder, “Introduction: Concepts, Processes, and Antagonisms
of Postsecularity” in The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity. Ed. Justin Beaumont
(London: Routledge, 2019), 3.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Kennel, Postsecular History, Radical Theologies and
Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85758-5_1
2 M. KENNEL

the concept of the postsecular will likely be used to serve various interests.
This book responds to the inherent normativity of the concept by showing
how the term ‘postsecular’ is intimately related to how we divide time and
history into periods, and how we ascribe meaning and value to those peri-
ods in both political and theological ways.
In her recent book On the Judgment of History, Joan Wallach Scott
challenges the notion that history is a judge that could either absolve or
condemn present actions.2 Writing as an historian, Scott connects histo-
ry’s judgement with religious and theological ways of thinking and sug-
gests that the very idea that we will be judged by history is a secularized
concept drawn from biblical eschatology. Indeed, contemporary
approaches to the meaning of history and the experience of passing time
continue to follow patterns that are simultaneously theological and politi-
cal, and the idea that ostensibly secular ideas have a religious provenance
has long been discussed by both philosophers of history and those in the
discourse on political theology.
In the words of Karl Löwith, the philosophy of history—when under-
stood as “a systematic interpretation of universal history” defined by
movements of succession towards “ultimate meaning”—is “entirely
dependent on theology of history, [and] in particular on the theological
concept of history as a history of fulfilment and salvation.”3 However,
much has changed since Löwith wrote his landmark book Meaning in
History, and the connections he identified between modernity and theo-
logical structures of succession and salvation remain controversial. Hans
Blumenberg, for example, resisted the notion that modern progress is a
secularized version of Christian eschatology, arguing instead that the tem-
poral and historical characteristics of modernity are legitimately distinct
from theology.4 But the secularization of concepts in the philosophy of
history is a great deal more complex than can be communicated by linear
or causal attributions of meaning to abstract terms like progress or moder-
nity, and the complex tensions between the works of Löwith and
Blumenberg continue to be debated.5

2
Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History (New York: Columbia University Press,
2020), x–xi.
3
Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 1.
4
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace (London:
MIT Press, 1983).
5
For recent re-interpretations of the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg see the
essays collected in Stijn Latré, Walter van Herck, and Guido Vanheeswijck (Eds.), Radical
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

The position of this book is that although secular modern concepts of

time and history are not reducible to theological concepts, this need not
prevent us from seeing that specific religious ideas—from Christian apoca-
lypse to Jewish messianism—are persistent and influential within temporal
and historical concepts that often have a secular appearance. However, the
context has changed significantly since philosophers of history began
debating the secularizing character of modernity. We are now in postmod-
ern, postsecular, and posthuman times that are defined by their succession
from the secularities and humanisms of the modern period. Of these
terms, this book concerns itself with the concept of the postsecular and its
relationship with time and history. The partitioning of history into periods
from the ancient to the postmodern, and the division of lived time into
past, present, and future, have both received significant attention within
the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.6 However, these
powerful ways of periodizing time and history also involve and invoke the
complex confluences of theological and political ideas that the discourse
on political theology concerns itself with.7
Accordingly, in the chapters below I will read the works of historio-
graphical thinkers together with those in the field of political theology. In
light of the aforementioned affinities, I will both bring together and show
existing connections between political theology and the politics of time by
examining the theological structures that so often underpin ostensibly
secular temporal orders. Rather than attributing meaning to history by
decisively claiming either its theological or secular status, and rather than
solely relying upon theological narratives of providence, teleology, and
linear succession, I will instead focus on mediations, configurations, and
manipulations of time and history by theopolitical means. In the present

Secularization? An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture (London: Bloomsbury,
2014). See also the argument that all clean and linear secularization narratives are “short cuts
to significance” in Charles Turner, Secularization (London: Routledge, 2020), 84.
6
See Berber Bevernage, Chris Lorenz (eds.), Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders
Between Present, Past and Future (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), Jacques Le
Goff, History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), and Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).
7
For two anthologies that cover many aspects of political theology (with the notable
exception of secular and non-confessional political theologies) see the Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Political Theology. Ed. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott. 2nd Ed.
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019) and the T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology. Ed.
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez (London: T&T Clark, 2020).
4 M. KENNEL

postsecular situation—in which the categories of Christianity, religion,

and secularity overlap and entangle in their ever-partial attempts to name
social realities—the strategies by which we make sense of time and history
are undergoing fundamental changes, including both the acceleration of
time and the loss of its measures. In response to these problems, I develop
a critique of theopolitical periodization that examines how postsecular
entanglements underpin powerful divisions of time and history.
In keeping with the goals of the Radical Theologies and Philosophies
series, the chapters below range across several disciplines and discourses
while using a variety of methodologies and interpretive paradigms. Each
chapter provides close readings of important historical, philosophical,
theological, political, and literary texts. The underlying thread that ties
together each chapter is the question of what it means to be ‘post’ in the
first instance, and the related question of how this prefix is configured and
used in theopolitical ways. This book is primarily concerned with the spe-
cific prefix ‘post’ that precedes the term ‘postsecular,’ but its conclusions
may also be relevant to postmodern, posthuman, and postcolonial catego-
ries and realities.
In short, this book critiques limited and problematic ways of dividing
and attributing meaning to time and history. Drawing from the field of
political theology, I am concerned with how theological and political ideas
combine to form powerful legitimation strategies; and drawing from
thinkers who approach the politics of time, I am concerned with how
temporal and historical terms are periodized in value-laden ways. Between
these two discourses, my critique of theopolitical periodization poses a
challenge to how the prefix ‘post’ that precedes the postsecular implies
relationships of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality with
what it modifies. Some users of the term ‘postsecular’ imply that to be
postsecular means to possess or fix upon the secular in order to surpass it.
Other definitions of the term suggest a linear and progressive succession
away from a secular age towards new religious futures, and some imply
that to be postsecular means to finally be free of the bonds of past secular-
ity. Still other uses of the term ‘postsecular’ use the prefix ‘post’ as an
instrumental and technical means to modify, craft, and utilize what it pre-
cedes. Below I attempt to dispute and question the idea that the ‘post-
secular’ ought to be conceived of in these ways. Instead, I will suggest that
the prefix ‘post’ is best used to name complex and contextual mediations.
Later in this introduction I will situate some of the problems of concep-
tualizing time and history after the postsecular turn, while focusing on the
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

question: how, after both the postsecular turn and the identification of
secularized concepts in and by political theology, can one still divide time
and history into periods and tell stories about the past in anticipation of
the future? But before exploring how both the postsecular turn and the
discourse of political theology give answers to this question, some defini-
tions are in order, beginning with the key question: what is the postsecular?

What Is the Postsecular?

Like many abstract and technical terms, the ‘postsecular’ has no univer-
sally recognized definition, and users of the term do not always provide a
specific definition of the secular or a precise account of what it means to
be after it. As the editors of a recent anthology on the topic warn,

Amid the proliferation of “post-” terms in recent academic discourse, it is

important to consider whether the concept of the post-secular refers to an
actual shift in the social world, or whether its growing deployment results,
instead, from a zealous need to detect epochal turning points in every minor
twist of the historical road.8

It is indeed difficult to tell the difference between a return of religion

that would warrant using the term ‘postsecular’ to describe a cultural
change, and the desire to mark a period divide that would overdetermine
the social world by forcing a concept upon it. It is perhaps even more dif-
ficult to conceive of the postsecular in a way that would dignify the com-
plexity of the social world it attempts to name while clearly conceptualizing
the relationship between that social world and the concept of the post-
secular that is used to name it. Given these difficulties, below I will focus
only on certain problematic ways that the concept of the postsecular is
used as an abstract name or category, in the hopes that this critique will be
helpful for those who use the term more directly in studies of social and
political phenomena.
I understand the postsecular to be a category that is defined by the
periodizing gesture performed by its prefix. Pointing forward and back-
ward simultaneously by proclaiming a new time that is ‘after’ (post) a

8
“The Post-Secular in Question” by (Eds.) Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John
Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary
Society (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1.
6 M. KENNEL

‘before’ time (secular), the postsecular is an abstract concept that funda-

mentally relies upon the act of periodization. While the postsecular is a
concept that initially seems to initiate a temporal break from a definitively
secular past—by implying that we have newly succeeded the secular or are
now free from it—upon further investigation it reveals itself to be a highly
unstable name for a confluence of religious and political concepts that are
never fully adequate to the social and political realities they attempt to
name, and never free from their secular and religious histories.
In her essay ‘Interrogating the Postsecular,’ Elaine Graham provides a
helpful typology that delineates three meanings of the prefix ‘post’ that
precedes the postsecular. Asking “What is achieved, if anything, by the
category?,” Graham suggests that in addition to its dual implication that
religion is returning but also never left, the postsecular refers to: the
empirically evident return of the visibility of religion “after” the secular, a
critical and genealogical critique that positions itself “against” the secular,
and a phenomenological rejection of simplistic accounts of religion that
seeks to move “beyond” the category of secularity.9 In addition to
Graham’s suggestion that postsecular ways of thinking imply relations that
are ‘after,’ ‘against,’ and ‘beyond’ the secular, I want to make several
related definitional suggestions. I observe that the term postsecular can
also imply: a possessive grasp upon the secular that implies we would know
what it means to surpass it, the addition of something novel that would
exceed a secular past, the desire to be free from the bonds of secularity, an
aporetic clash of meaningfulness and meaninglessness, and an instrumen-
tal use of the prefix ‘post’ to shape and craft the term it precedes and
implies procession from. In various ways the chapters below will challenge
each of these implications by arguing that, although it is a rich and useful
term, we should not think of the postsecular as a name for a time that has
successfully situated itself after, against, or beyond the secular by overcom-
ing, supplanting, or superseding it.
In some ways, the concept of the postsecular is doubly temporal because
both the prefix ‘post’ and the root of the term ‘secular’ are terms that lay
hold of time and history, with the latter being traceable to the word saecu-
lum, which in ancient Rome referred to lifetimes and generations, but
which transformed during the rule of the emperor Constantine and

9
Elaine Graham, “Interrogating the Postsecular” in The Routledge Handbook of
Postsecularity. Ed. Justin Beaumont (London: Routledge, 2019).
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

became “a central figure in the establishment of a Christian age.”10 Given

this double character of the term, it bears considering what the history of
the postsecular might be or become, and how the term might still be use-
ful for the study of religion, the philosophy of history, and the discourse
on political theology. A postsecular history, however, cannot be pursued
by taking up a position outside of the confluence of theopolitical forces
named by the term, for part of the insight of the postsecular turn is that
this very exit from normativity is impossible. Working under the assump-
tion that religion, or at least attention to religion, is returning in the pres-
ent, the concept of the postsecular is often accompanied by the notion
that we cannot escape conflicts of values and problems of normativity
because, for many postsecular thinkers, secular reason no longer serves as
a stable foundation.11
Instead, the postsecular is a name for thinking amidst normative entan-
glements, and it is a term that can assist us in questioning the powerful
categories (like religion and secularity) that we use to divide the world. In
her study of literary secularization narratives, Tracy Fessenden writes that
“the term postsecular describes an environment in which the categories of
the religious and the secular no longer divide the world cleanly between
them, and signals the need for new ones.”12 For Fessenden, the postsecu-
lar highlights the definitional problems that we encounter when the ade-
quacy of the categories of religion and secularity are called into question
in the present. At the same time, however, Fessenden suggests that the
simple division of the world into the religious and the secular is not some-
thing that historical groups and ideas have ever strictly conformed to, writ-
ing that “To be post- in this sense is to have achieved a more dexterous
footing in relation to materials assumed to have brought our predecessors
to deadlock.”13 Given that the division between secularity and religion is
not only inadequate to the present but also to the past, I suggest that it is
time to work against the forward facing implications of its prefix and turn
the postsecular towards the past while asking what a postsecular history
might entail.

10
Susan Bilynskyj Dunning, saeculum in The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th Ed. Simon
Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (London: Oxford University Press, 2012).
11
See Josef Bengtson, Explorations in Post-Secular Metaphysics (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 13–18.
12
Tracy Fessenden, “The Problem of the Postsecular,” American Literary History 26.1
(2014), 156.
13
Ibid., 157.
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Nor was the Emperor successful in stamping out the private
thaumaturgist. Human nature was too strong for him. Sileat perpetuo
divinandi curiositas, ordered one of his successors in 358. But the
curiosity to divine the future continued to defy both civil and
ecclesiastical law.
A much bolder act, however, than the closing of a few temples on
the score of public decency or the forbidding of private divination
was the edict of 325, in which Constantine ordered the abolition of
the gladiatorial shows. “Such blood-stained spectacles,” he said, “in
the midst of civil peace and domestic quiet are repugnant to our
taste.” He ordained, therefore, that in future all criminals who were
usually condemned to be gladiators should be sent to work in the
mines, that they might expiate their offences without shedding of
blood. But it was one thing to issue an edict and another to enforce
it. Whether Constantine insisted on the observance of this particular
edict, we cannot say, but his successors certainly did not, for the
gladiatorial spectacles at Rome were in full swing in the days of
Symmachus, who ransacked the world for good swordsmen and
strange animals. The “cruenta spectacula” as Constantine called
them, were not finally abolished until the reign of Honorius.
To sum up. The only reasonable view to take of the religious
character of Constantine is that he was a sincere and convinced
Christian. This is borne out alike by his passionate professions of
faith and by the clear testimony of his actions. There are, it is true,
many historians who hold that he was really indifferent to religion,
and others who credit him with an easy capacity for finding truth in all
religions alike. Professor Bury, for example, says that “the evidence
seems to shew that his religion was a syncretistic monotheism; that
he was content to see the deity in the Sun, in Mithras, or in the God
of the Hebrews.” Such a description would suit the character of
Constantius Chlorus perfectly, and it may very well have suited
Constantine himself before the overthrow of Maxentius. There is a
passage in the Ninth Panegyric which seems to have been uttered
by one holding these views, and it is worth quotation, for it is an
invocation to the supreme deity to bless the Emperor Constantine. It
runs as follows:
 Wherefore we pray and beseech thee to keep our Prince safe for
all eternity, thee, the supreme creator of all things, whose names are
as manifold as it has been thy will that nations should have tongues.
We cannot tell by what title it is thy pleasure that we should address
thee, whether thou art a divine force and mind permeating the whole
world and mingled with all the elements, and moving of thine own
motive power without impulse from without, or whether thou art some
Power above all Heaven who lookest down upon this thy handiwork
from some loftier arch of Nature.

Such a deity may have satisfied the philosophers, but it certainly

was not the deity whom Constantine worshipped throughout his
reign. Had he been indifferent to religion, or indifferent to Christianity,
had he even been anxious only to hold the balance between the rival
creeds, he would never have surrounded himself by episcopal
advisers; never have set his hand to such edicts as those we have
quoted; never have abolished the use of the cross for the execution
of criminals or have forbidden Jews to own Christian slaves; never
have called the whole world time and again to witness his zeal for
Christ; never have lavished the resources of the Empire upon the
building of sumptuous churches; never have listened with such
extraordinary forbearance to the wranglings of the Donatists and the
subtleties of Arians and Athanasians; never have summoned or
presided at the Council of Nicæa; and certainly never have made the
welfare of non-Roman Christians the subject of entreaty with the
King of Persia. Constantine was prone to superstition. He was
grossly material in his religious views, and his own worldly success
remained still in his eyes the crowning proof of the Christian verities.
But the sincerity of his convictions is none the less apparent, and
even the atrocious crimes with which he sullied his fair fame cannot
rob him of the name of Christian. It was a name, says St. Augustine,
[145]
in which he manifestly delighted to boast, mindful of the hope
which he reposed in Christ (Plane Christiano nomine gloriosus,
memor spei quam gerebat in Christo).
 CHAPTER XVI
THE EMPIRE AND CHRISTIANITY

The reorganisation of the Empire, begun by Diocletian, had been

continued along the same lines by Constantine the Great. There
were still further developments under their successors, but these two
were the real founders of the Imperial system which was to subsist in
the eastern half of the Empire for more than eleven hundred years.
In other words, Diocletian and Constantine gave the Empire, if not a
new lease of life, at least a new impetus and a new start, and we
may here present a brief sketch of the reforms which they introduced
into practically every sphere of governmental activity.
We have already seen how profoundly changed was the position
of the Emperor himself. He was no longer essentially a Roman
Imperator, a supreme War-Lord, a soldier Chief of State. He had
become a King in a palace, secluded from the gaze of the vulgar,
surrounded with all the attributes and ornaments of an eastern
monarch, and robed in gorgeous vestments stiff with gold and
jewels. Men were taught to speak and think of him as superhuman
and sacrosanct, to approach him with genuflexion and adoration, to
regard every office, however menial, attached to his person, as
sacred. In speaking of the Emperor language was strained to the
pitch of the ridiculous; flattery became so grotesque that it must have
ceased to flatter. When Nazarius, for example, speaks of the
Emperor’s heart as “the stupendous shrine of mighty virtues”
(ingentium virtutum stupenda penetralia), and such language as this
became the recognised mode of addressing the reigning Sovereign,
we see how far we have travelled not only from Republican
simplicity, but even from the times of Domitian. The Emperor, in brief,
was absolute monarch, autocrat of the entire Roman world, and his
will and nod were law.
He stood at the head of a hierarchy of court and administrative
officials, most minutely organised from the highest to the lowest. For
purposes of Imperial administration, those next to the throne were
the four Prætorian præfects, each one supreme, under the Emperor,
in his quarter of the world. The Empire had been divided by
Diocletian into twelve dioceses and these again into ninety-six
provinces; Constantine accepted this division but apportioned the
twelve dioceses into four præfectures, those of the Orient, Illyria,
Italy, and Gaul. The four Prætorian præfects stood in relation to the
Emperor—so Eusebius tells us—as God the Son stood in relation to
God the Father. They wore—though not perhaps in the days of
Constantine—robes of purple reaching to the knee; they rode in lofty
chariots, and among the insignia of their office were a colossal silver
inkstand and gold pen-cases of a hundred pounds in weight. Their
functions were practically unlimited, save for the all-important
exception that they exercised no military command. They had an
exchequer of their own, through which passed all the Imperial taxes
from their provinces; they had absolute control over the vicars of the
dioceses beneath them, whom, if they did not actually appoint they
at least recommended for appointment to the Emperor. In their own
præfectures they formed the final court of appeal, and Constantine
expressly enacted that there should be no appeal from them to the
throne. They even had a limited power of issuing edicts. Thus in all
administrative, financial, and judicial matters the four Prætorian
præfects were supreme, occupying a position very similar to that of
the Viceroys of the great provinces of China, save that they had no
control over the troops within their territories.
Below these four præfects came the vicars of the twelve dioceses
of the Oriens, Pontica, Asiana, Thracia, Mœsia, Pannonia,
Britanniæ, Galliæ, Viennenses, Italia, Hispaniæ, and Africa. Egypt
continued to hold an unique position; its governor was almost
independent of the præfect of the Orient, and was always a direct
nominee of the Emperor. Then, below the twelve vicars came the
governors of the provinces, the number of which constantly tended
to increase, but by further subdivision rather than by conquest of
new territory. Various names were given to these governors; they
were rectores and correctores in some provinces, præsides in many
more, consulares in a few of the more important ones, such as Africa
and Italia. Each had his own entourage of minor officials, and the
hierarchical principle was observed as rigidly on the lowest rungs of
the ladder as on the topmost. Autocrats are obliged to rule through a
bureaucracy, a broad-based pyramid of officialdom which usually
weighs heavily upon the unfortunate taxpayer who has to support the
entire structure.

AUREUS OF CARAUSIUS.

AUREUS OF ALLECTUS.
 SOLIDUS OF HELENA.

SOLIDUS OF GALERIUS.

SOLIDUS OF SEVERUS II.

A similar hierarchy of officials prevailed in the palace and the

court, from the grand chamberlain down through a host of Imperial
secretaries to the head scullion. The tendency of each was to
magnify his office into a department, and to be the master of a set of
underlings. And it was the policy of Constantine, as it had been the
policy of Augustus, to invent new offices in order to increase the
number of officials who looked to the Emperor as their benefactor.[146]
In the conduct of State affairs the Emperor was assisted by an
Imperial council, known as the consistorium principis. It included the
four Prætorian præfects of whom we have spoken; the quæstor of
the palace, a kind of general secretary of state; the master of the
offices (magister officiorum), one of whose principal duties was to act
as minister of police; the grand chamberlain (præpositus sacri
cubiculi); two ministers of finance, and two ministers for war. One of
the finance ministers was dignified with the title of count of the
sacred largesses (comes sacrarum largitionum); the other was count
of the private purse (comes rerum privatarum). The distinction was
similar to the old one between the ærarium and the fiscus, between,
that is to say, the State treasury and the Emperor’s privy purse. One
of the two ministers for war had supreme charge of the infantry of the
Empire; the other was responsible for the cavalry. Both also
exercised judicial functions and sat as a court of appeal in all military
cases wherein the State was interested, either as plaintiff or
defendant.
There were still consuls in Rome, who continued to give their
names to the year. All their political power had vanished, but their
dignity remained unimpaired, though it was now derived not from the
intrinsic importance of their office so much as from its extrinsic
ornaments. To be consul had become the ambition not of the boldest
but of the vainest. (In consulatu honos sine labore suscipitur.) The
prætorship had similarly fallen, but it still entailed upon the holder the
expensive and sometimes ruinous privilege of providing shows for
the amusement of the Roman populace. The number of prætors had
fallen to two in Constantine’s day: he raised it to eight, in accordance
with his general regardlessness of expense, so long as there was
outward magnificence. It is doubtful whether, during the reign of
Constantine, there were consuls and prætors in Constantinople.
Certainly there was no urban præfect appointed in that city until
twenty years after his death, and it seems probable that the Emperor
did not set up in his new capital quite such a pedantically perfect
imitation of the official machinery of Rome as has sometimes been
supposed. His successors, however, were not long in completing
what he had begun.
We pass to the senate and the senatorial order, with their various
degrees of dignity, which Constantine and those who came after him
delighted to elaborate. Every member of the senate was naturally a
member of the senatorial order, but it by no means followed that
every member of the order had a seat in the senate. The new senate
of Constantinople, like its prototype at Rome, had little or no political
power. It merely registered the decrees of the Emperor, and its
function seems to have been one principally of dignity and
ceremony. Membership of the senatorial order was a social
distinction that might be held by a man living in any part of the
Empire and was gained by virtue of having held office. The order
was an aristocracy of officials and ex-officials, distinguished by
resplendent titles, involving additional burdens in the way of taxation
—the price of added dignity. A few of these titles are worth brief
consideration. To the Emperor there were reserved the grandiloquent
names of Your Majesty, Your Eternity, Your Divinity. Members of the
reigning house were Most Noble (Nobilissimi). To the members of
the senate, including the officials of the very highest rank, viz., the
consuls, proconsuls, and præfects, there was reserved the title of
Most Distinguished (Clarissimi), while officers of lower rank,
members of the senatorial order but not of the senate, were Most
Perfect (Perfectissimi) and Egregious (Egregii), the former being of a
higher class than the latter. Such was the order of precedence in
Constantine’s reign, but there was a constant tendency for these
honourable orders to expand, due, no doubt, entirely to the
exigencies of the treasury. Thus the high rank of Clarissimi was
bestowed on those who previously had been only Perfectissimi and
Egregii, and two still higher orders of Illustres and Spectabiles were
created for the old Clarissimi and Perfectissimi. The two topmost
classes were thus given an upward step.
Such was the new official aristocracy, while a rigid line of division,
quite unknown to Republican and early Imperial Rome, was drawn
between the civil and the military officers of the Empire. The military
forces themselves were organised into two great divisions, (1) the
troops kept permanently upon the frontiers, and (2) the soldiers of
the line. The first were known as Limitanei (Borderers) or
Riparienses (Guardians of the Shore), the second name being
specially applied to the soldiers of the Rhine and the Danube. All
these troops were stationed in permanent camps and forts, which
often developed into townships, and it was a rare thing for a legion to
be moved to another quarter of the Empire. Boys grew up and
followed their fathers in the profession of arms in the same camp,
and were themselves succeeded by their own sons. The term of
service was twenty-four years, and these Limitanei were not only
soldiers but tillers of the soil, playing a part precisely similar to the
soldier colonists of Russia in her Far Eastern provinces. The soldiers
of the line (Numeri), on the other hand, served for the shorter period
of twenty years. They included the Palatini,—practically the
successors of the old Prætorian Guard,—the crack corps of the
army, who were divided into regiments bearing such titles as
Scholares, Protectores, and Domestici, and enjoyed the privilege of
guarding the Emperor’s person. Most of the legions of the line were
known as the Comitatenses. These were employed in the interior
garrisons of the Empire, and Zosimus—whether justly or not, it is
impossible to say—accuses Constantine of having dangerously
weakened the frontier garrisons and withdrawn too many troops into
the interior. The control of the army, under the Emperor and his two
ministers for war, was vested by the end of the fourth century in
thirty-five commanders bearing the titles of dukes and counts,—the
latter being the higher of the two. Three of these were stationed in
Britain, six in Gaul, one each in Spain and Italy, four in Africa, three
in Egypt, eight in Asia and Syria, and nine along the upper and lower
reaches of the Danube.
Such was the structure which rested upon the purse of the
taxpayer and upon a system of finance inherently vicious and
wasteful. The main support of the treasury was still, as it had always
been, the land tax, known as the capitatio terrena, the old tributum
soli. It was the landed proprietor (possessor) who found the
wherewithal to keep the Empire on its feet. Diocletian had
reorganised the census, and, in the interests of the treasury, had
caused a new survey and inventory to be made of practically every
acre of land in every province. By an ingenious device he had
established a system of taxable units (jugum or caput), each of
which paid the round sum of 100,000 sesterces or 1000 aurei. The
unit might be made up of all sorts of land—arable, pasture, or forest
—the value of each being estimated on a regular scale. Thus five
acres of vineyard constituted a unit and were held to be equivalent to
twenty acres of the best arable land, forty acres of second-class
land, and sixty of third-class. Nothing escaped: even the roughest
woodland or moorland was assessed at the rate of four hundred and
fifty acres to the unit. The Emperor and his finance ministers
estimated every year how much was required for the current
expenses of the Empire. When the amount was fixed, they sent word
throughout the provinces, and the various municipal curiæ, or town
senates, knew what their share would be, for each town and district
was assessed at so many thousand units, and each curia or senate
was responsible for the money being raised. The curia was
composed of a number of the richest landowners, who had to collect
the tax from themselves and their neighbours as best they could. If,
therefore, any possessor became bankrupt, the others had to make
up the shortage between them. Those who were solvent had to pay
for the insolvent. All loopholes of evasion were carefully closed.
Landowners were not permitted to quit their district without special
leave from the governor; they could not join the army or enter the
civil service. When it was found that large numbers were becoming
ordained in the Christian Church to escape their obligations, an edict
was issued forbidding it. Once a decurion always a decurion.
The provincial country landowner and the small farmer were
almost taxed out of existence by this monstrous system. Every ten or
fifteen years, it is true, a revision of the assessments took place, and
there were certain officials, with the significant name of defensores,
whose duty it was to prevent the provincials from being fleeced too
flagrantly. But a man might easily be reduced to beggary by a
succession of bad harvests before the year of revision came round,
and the defensor’s office was a sinecure except in the rare
occasions when he knew that he would be backed at the
headquarters of the diocese. During Constantine’s reign, or at least
during its closing years, there is overpowering evidence that the
provincial governors were allowed to plunder at discretion. They
imitated the reckless prodigality of their sovereign, who, in 331, was
compelled to issue an edict to restrain the peculation of his officers.
There is a very striking phrase in Ammianus Marcellinus who says
that while Constantine started the practice of opening the greedy
jaws of his favourites, his son, Constantius, fattened them up on the
very marrow of the provinces.[147] Evidently, the incidence of this land
tax inflicted great hardships and had the mischievous result of
draining the province of capital, and of dragging down to ruin the
independent cultivator of the land. Hence districts were constantly in
arrears of payment, and the remission of outstanding debt to the
treasury was usually the first step taken by an Emperor to court
popularity with his subjects.
In short, the fiscal system of the Empire, so far as its most
important item, the land tax, was concerned, seemed expressly
designed to exhaust the wealth of the provinces. It helped to
introduce a system of caste, which became more rigid and cramping
as the years passed by and the necessities of the treasury became
more urgent. It also powerfully contributed to crush out of existence
the yeoman farmer, whose insolvency was followed, if not by slavery,
at any rate by a serfdom which just as effectually robbed him of
freedom of movement. The colonus having lost the title-deeds of his
own land became the hireling of another, paying in kind a fixed
proportion of his stock and crops, and obliged to give personal
service for so many days on that part of the estate where his master
resided. The position of the poor colonus, in fact, became precisely
similar to that of a slave who had not obtained full freedom but had
reached the intermediate state of serfdom, in which he was
permanently attached to a certain estate as, so to speak, part of the
fixtures. He was said to be “ascribed to the land” (ascripticius), and
he had no opportunity of bettering his social position or enabling his
sons to better theirs, unless they were recruited for the legions.
SOLIDUS OF MAXIMIN DAZA.

SOLIDUS OF LICINIUS I.

SOLIDUS OF LICINIUS II.

 DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.

The land tax, of course, was not the only one, for the theory of
Imperial finance was that everybody and everything should pay.
Constantine did not spare his new aristocracy. Every member of the
senatorial order paid a property tax known as “the senatorial purse”
(follis senatoria), and another imposition bearing the name of aurum
oblaticium, which was none the more palatable because it was
supposed to be a voluntary offering. Any senator, moreover, might
be summoned to the capital to serve as prætor and provide a costly
entertainment—a convenient weapon in the hands of autocracy to
clip the wings of an obnoxious ex-official. Another ostensibly
voluntary contribution to the Emperor was the aurum coronarium, or
its equivalent of a thousand or two thousand pieces of gold, which
each city of importance was obliged to offer to the sovereign on
festival occasions, such as the celebration of five or ten complete
years of rule. Every five years, also, there was a lustralis collatio to
be paid by all shopkeepers and usurers, according to their means.
This was usually spoken of as “the gold-silver” (chrysargyrum), and,
like “the senatorial purse,” is said by some authorities to have been
the invention of Constantine himself. Zosimus, in a very bitter attack
on the fiscal measures of the Emperor, declares that even the
courtesans and the beggars were not exempt from the extortion of
the treasury officials, and that whenever the tribute had to be paid,
nothing was heard but groaning and lamentation. The scourge was
brought into play for the persuasion of reluctant taxpayers; women
were driven to sell their sons, and fathers their daughters. Then
there were the capitatio humana, a sort of poll-tax on all labourers;
the old five per cent. succession duty; an elaborate system of octroi
(portoria), and many other indirect taxes. We need not, perhaps,
believe the very worst pictures of human misery drawn by the
historians, for, in fairness to the Emperors, we must take some note
of the roseate accounts of the official rhetoricians. Nazarius, for
example, explicitly declares that Constantine had given the Empire
“peace abroad, prosperity at home, abundant harvests, and cheap
food.”[148] Eusebius again and again conjures up a vision of
prosperous and contented peoples, living not in fear of the tax-
collector, but in the enjoyment of their sovereign’s bounty. But we
fear that the sombre view is nearer the truth than the radiant one,
and that the subsequent financial ruin, which overtook the western
even more than the eastern provinces, was largely due to the
oppressive and wasteful fiscal system introduced and developed by
Diocletian and Constantine, and to the old standing defect of Roman
administration, that the civil governor was also the judge, and thus
administrative and judicial functions were combined in the same
hands.
Here, indeed, lay one of the strongest elements of disintegration in
the reorganised Empire, but there were other powerful solvents at
work, at which we may briefly glance. One was slavery, the evil
results of which had been steadily accumulating for centuries, and if
these were mitigated to some extent by the increasing scarcity of
slaves, the degradation of the poor freeman to the position of a
colonus more than counterbalanced the resultant good. Population,
so far from increasing, was going back, and, in order to fill the gaps,
the authorities had recourse to the dangerous expedient of inviting in
the barbarian. The land was starving for want of capital and labour,
and the barbarian colonus was introduced, as we have seen in an
earlier chapter, not, if the authorities are to be trusted, by tens, but by
hundreds of thousands, “to lighten the tribute by the fruits of his toil
and to relieve the Roman citizens of military service.” This was the
principal and certainly the original reason why recourse was had to
the barbarian; the idea that the German or the Goth was less
dangerous inside than outside the frontier, and would help to bear
the brunt of the pressure from his kinsmen, came later. The result,
however, of importing a strong Germanic and Gothic element into the
Empire was one of active disintegration. Though they occupied but a
humble position industrially, as tillers of the soil, they formed the best
troops in the Imperial armies. The boast which Tacitus put into the
mouth of a Gallic soldier in the first century, that the alien trooper
was the backbone of the Roman army,[149] was now an undoubted
truth, and the spirit which these strangers brought with them was that
of freedom, quite antagonistic to the absolutism of the Empire.
There was yet another great solvent at work,—in its cumulative
effects the greatest of them all,—the solvent of Christianity,
dissociating, as it did, spiritual from temporal authority, and
introducing the absolutely novel idea of a divine law that in every
particular took precedence of mundane law. The growth of the power
of the Church, as a body entirely distinct from the State and claiming
a superior moral sanction, was a new force introduced into the
Roman Empire, which, beyond question, weakened its powers of
resistance to outside enemies, inasmuch as it caused internal
dissensions and divisions. The furious hatreds between Christianity
and paganism which lasted in the West down to the fall of Rome,
and the equally furious hatreds within the Church which continued
both in East and West for long centuries, can only be considered a
source of serious weakness. No one disputes that the desperate and
murderous struggle between Catholic and Huguenot retarded the
development of France and weakened her in the face of the enemy,
and it stands to reason that a nation which is torn by intestinal
quarrel cannot present an effective front to foreign aggression. It
wastes against members of its own household part of the energy
which should be infused into the blows which it delivers at its foe.
Christianity has always tended to break down distinctions and
prejudices of race. It has never done so wholly and never will, but
the tendency is forever at work, and, as such, in the days of the
Empire, it was opposed both to the Roman and to the Greek spirit.
For though there had already sprung up a feeling of cosmopolitanism
within the Empire, it cannot be said to have extended to those
without the Empire, who were still barbarians in the eyes not only of
Greek or Roman, but of the Romanised Celt and Iberian, whose
civilisation was no longer a thin veneer. When we say that
Christianity was a disintegrating element in this respect, the term is
by no means wholly one of reproach. For it also implies that
Christianity assisted the partial fusion which took place when at
length the frontier barriers gave way and the West was rushed by the
Germanic races. These races were themselves Christianised to a
certain extent. They, too, worshipped the Cross and the Christ, and
this circumstance alone must, to a very considerable degree, have
mitigated for the Roman provinces the terrors and disasters of
invasion. It is true that the invaders were for the most part Arians,—
though it is a manifest absurdity to suppose that the free Germans
from beyond the Rhine understood even the elements of a
controversy so metaphysical and so purely Greek,—and, when Arian
and Catholic fought, they tipped their barbs with poison. “I never yet,”
said Ammianus Marcellinus, “found wild beasts so savagely hostile
to men, as most of the Christians are to one another.”[150] But the fact
remains that the German and Gothic conquerors, who settled where
they had conquered, accepted the civilisation of the vanquished
even though they modified it to their own needs; they did not wipe it
out and substitute their own, as did the Turk and the Moor when they
appeared, later on, at the head of their devastating hordes. If,
therefore, Christianity tended to weaken, it also tended to assimilate,
and we are not sure that the latter process was not fully as important
as the former. The Roman Empire, as a universal power, had long
been doomed; Christianity, in this respect, simply accelerated its
pace down the slippery slope.
But other and more specific charges have been brought against
Christianity. One is that it contributed largely to the depopulation of
the Empire, which, from the point of view of the State, was an evil of
the very greatest magnitude. The indictment cannot be refuted
wholly. In the name of Christianity extravagant and pernicious
doctrines were preached of which it would be difficult to speak with
patience, did we not remember that violent disorders need violent
remedies. No one can doubt the unutterable depravity and
viciousness which were rampant and unashamed in the Roman
Empire, especially in the East. If there was a public conscience at all,
it was silent. Decent, clean-living people held fastidiously aloof and
tolerated the existence of evils which they did nothing to combat. A
strong protest was needed; it was supplied by Christianity. But many
of those who took upon themselves to denounce the sins of the age
felt compelled to school themselves to a rigid asceticism which made
few allowances not only for the weaknesses but even for the natural
instincts of human nature. The more fanatical among them
grudgingly admitted that marriage was honourable, but rose to
enthusiastic frenzy in the contemplation of virginity, which, if they
dared not command, they could and did commend with all the
eloquence of which they were capable. One cannot think without pity
of all the self-torture and agonising which this new asceticism—new,
at least, in this aggravated form—brought upon hundreds and
thousands of men and women, whose services the State needed
and would have done well to possess, but who cut themselves off
from mundane affairs, and withdrew into solitudes, not to learn there
how to help their fellowmen but consumed only with a selfish anxiety
to escape from the wrath to come. They thought of nothing but the
salvation of their own souls. It is impossible to see how these wild
hermits, who peopled the Libyan deserts, were acceptable in the
sight either of themselves, their fellows, or their God. Simon Stylites,
starving sleepless on his pillar in the posture of prayer for weeks,
remains for all time as a monument of grotesque futility. If charity
regards him with pity, it can only regard with contempt those who
imputed his insane endurance unto him for righteousness. No one
can estimate the amount of unnecessary misery and sufferings
caused by these extreme fanatics, who broke up homes without
remorse, played on the fears and harrowed the minds of
impressionable men and women, and debased the human soul in
their frantic endeavour to fit it for the presence of its Maker. They
stand in the same category as the gaunt skeletons who drag
themselves on their knees from end to end of India in the hope of
placating a mild but irresponsive god. Man’s first duty may be
towards God; but not to the exclusion of his duty towards the State.
It is not to be supposed, of course, that the majority of Christians
were led to renounce the world and family life. The weaker brethren
are always in a majority, and we do not doubt that most of the
Christian priests were of like mind with their flock in taking a less
heroic but far more common-sense view. It is also to be noted that
the practical Roman temper speedily modified the extravagances of
the eastern fanatics, and the asceticism of monks and nuns living in
religious communities in the midst of their fellow-citizens, and
working to heal their bodies as well as to save their souls, stands on
a very different plane from the entirely self-centred eremitism
associated with Egypt. By doing the work of good Samaritans the
members of these communities acted the part of good citizens.
Succeeding Emperors, whose Christianity was unimpeachable,
looked with cold suspicion on the recluses of the deserts. Valens, for
example, regarding their retirement as an evasion of their civic
duties, published an edict ordering that they should be brought back;
Theodosius with cynical wisdom said that as they had deliberately
chosen to dwell in the desert, he would take care that they stopped
there. But it is easy to exaggerate the influence wielded by extreme
men, whose doctrines and professions only emerge from obscurity
because of their extravagances. We must not, therefore, lay too
much stress on the constant exhortations to celibacy and virginity
which we find even in the writings of such men as Jerome and
Ambrose. However zealously they plied the pitchfork, human nature
just as persistently came back, and the extraordinary outspokenness
of Jerome, for example, in his letters to girls who had pledged
themselves to virginity—an outspokenness based on the confident
assumption that human, and more especially womanly, nature is
weak and liable to err—shews that he was profoundly diffident of the
success of his preaching. Nevertheless, when the counsel of
perfection offered by the Church was the avoidance of marriage, it is
a just charge against Christianity that it was in this respect anti-civic
and anti-social.
DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.

DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF FAUSTA.

DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CRISPUS.

DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CONSTANTIUS II. AS

CÆSAR.