Enquiries into Religion and Culture (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

XII St. Augustine and His Age

xii St. Augustine and His Age i: tHE dying World The world itself now bears witness to its approaching end by the evidence of its failing powers. There is not so much rain in winter for fertilising the seeds, nor in summer is there so much warmth for ripening them. The springtime is no longer so mild, nor the autumn so rich in fruit. Less marble is quarried from the exhausted mountains, and the dwindling supplies of gold and silver show that the mines are worked out and the impoverished veins of metal diminish from day to day. The peasant is failing and disappearing from the fields, the sailor at sea, the soldier in the camp, uprightness in the forum, justice in the court, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals. Can anything that is old preserve the same powers that it had in the prime and vigour of its youth? It is inevitable that whatever is tending downwards to decay and approaches its end must decrease in strength, like the setting sun and the waning moon, and the dying tree and the failing stream. This is the sentence passed on the world; this is God’s law: that all that has risen should fall and that all that has grown should wax old, and that strong things should become weak and great things should become small, and that when they have been weakened and diminished they should come to an end. st. Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, c iii. St. augustine has often been regarded as standing outside his own age—as the inaugurator of a new world and the first mediaeval man, while others, on the contrary, have seen in him rather the heir of the old classical culture and one of the last representatives of antiquity. there is an element of truth in both these views, but for all that he belongs neither to the mediaeval nor to the classical world. He is essentially a man of his own age—that strange age of the Christian Empire 164 St. Augustine and His Age 165 which has been so despised by the historians, but which nevertheless marks one of the vital moments in the history of the world. it witnessed the fall of rome, the passing of that great order which had controlled the fortunes of the world for five centuries and more, and the laying of the foundations of a new world. and augustine was no mere passive spectator of the crisis. He was, to a far greater degree than any emperor or general or barbarian war-lord, a maker of history and a builder of the bridge which was to lead from the old world to the new. unfortunately, although there is no lack of historical evidence, the real importance of this period is seldom appreciated. Ever since the renaissance the teaching of ancient history has been treated as part of the study of the classics and consequently comes to an end with the age of the antonines , while the teaching of modern history is equally bound up with the nationalist idea and begins with the rise of the existing European peoples. Consequently there is a gap of some five hundred years from the third to the seventh century in the knowledge of the ordinary educated person. it lasts from the collapse of the old Empire in the third century a.d. to the breakup of the reconstituted Eastern Empire in the seventh century under the stress of the Mohammedan invasions. this is the period of the Christian Empire, the Empire of Constantine and Justinian, the age of the Fathers and of the great Councils. it deserves to be studied as a whole and for its own sake, instead of piecemeal and from conflicting points of view. Hitherto the secular historians have confined themselves to one side of the evidence and the ecclesiastical historians to the other, without paying much attention to each other’s results. We have to go back to the days of tillemont to find an historian that was equally competent in both fields. the modern historians of the period have shown themselves notably unsympathetic to its religious achievements. the greatest of them—gibbon and the late Professor Bury—were freethinkers with a strong bias against Christianity, while the remainder, from the days of Finlay and Burckhardt and gregorovius to seeck and stein and rostovtzeff in our time, all write from a secularist point of view. this is peculiarly unfortunate, not only...