Chapter 11              Part C 

conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity (Rubens) 

            What followed, in the West, was the rise of the early Christian Church. Did Christianity grow strong because it offered a way out of the ennui of life in the late Roman Empire? Or did it just happen to coincide with that ennui? All that is certain is that the decline of the Romans' old beliefs and the rise of the monotheistic, compassionate Christian ones happened at the same time. To the Romans of Constantine's day, it all just seemed "right", as needed social changes do. All the peoples of the Empire began then to built a society based on a more spiritual view of the universe, a view under which material rewards and sensual pleasures were to be disregarded. Eternal salvation was what mattered.

               

       Under this worldview, Earth was the center of the universe, specially created by God to house man, His most beloved creation. But man’s role was not to enjoy life to whatever degree he could (as the ancients had) in this garden turned, by man's sin, to a barren plain. Man was here to praise God and gratefully accept all that God sent man’s way, all joy and all suffering. Getting ready for the next life after death was what mattered. This sounds like a backward step, and in many ways it was. 

               

         But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Each Christian was taught to act humanely toward all other people, to behave honestly and compassionately in his dealings with them, and to commit in a deeply personal way to Christ's kind of faith and his compassionate way of life. Christians learned to live most of the time as if being kind to all other humans was a desirable, moral way to be, even if any particular act of kindness might not get us any rewards in this lifetime. 

        This was a huge change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, sensual, militaristic, mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later got to be so cynical as to conduct wars and own property, while the individual serf was not to even contemplate such things, unless the pope told him to make war on the heathens, became vague. But the grip of Christianity's good ideas was so strong that the hypocritical authorities, for centuries, found ways to manage ordinary people's perceptions around the Church's inconsistencies.

For twelve centuries, the Church's explanations of the whole universe and human experience in it were adequate to develop and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed, which was all that mattered. Christian communities, over and over, enjoyed long terms of growing prosperity because they were stable, even though they were not very progressive by modern standards. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, stability meant a great deal.

               

         The behaviors these values produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. What was this "Crysteanism" that was stealing their children into its cult! The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers. But that system, which gave legal status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (aid during war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God was always watching!) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. More and more people, especially young people, became dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, one that offered material comfort, physical pleasure, and little else. Meaninglessness.

  Christianity offered something else, a more spiritual worldview, one that felt personal, and a way of life that made sense because it was what God had clearly said he wanted of us and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more inclusive society. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to the mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as Christians were fed to lions, it nevertheless assimilated the old Roman system under which it had arisen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people and hundreds of years, they worked.

               

       The loss of much of the Roman's practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, along with a lack of any strong form of humanism, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. Then these more worldly values were re-born due to a number of factors too familiar to scholars (i.e. the fall of Constantinople, the rise of Science, the discovery of the America’s, etc.) to need further description. Or perhaps, in another view, we could say that the Christian way, which asked every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society's levels of overall economic efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization called the “Renaissance” inevitable. The new hybrid values system worked. Greek knowledge, Roman practical skills, in a Christian social mileu.

Hanseatic League city of Lubeck 

               

         Western culture finally integrated its most fundamental values systems, Classical and Christian. It took over a thousand years for people who lived lives that focused on worldly matters, instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as moral citizens in the eyes of the community.

   To be clear, we should also say that the Renaissance artists, scientists, merchants, and explorers gradually came to see their own worldly achievements as ways of glorifying God. It just took them a long time to convince the majority of other citizens that making useful, profitable, and beautiful things in this material world could be a good way of living for a true Christian. 

   However, handling the physical world, by Commerce, Science and Art did gradually become acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views, values, morés and behavior patterns, i.e. the total culture package of Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being, was finally integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, abstract and practical, that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough unleashed a deluge. Individuals who defied convention began to prove that they could be unbelievably valuable to the greater community, even if, at first, they did upset people.