Chapter 11.                       Part D

         Note how the decline of the Romans' values system, the laziness of the later Romans about ideals of citizenship and honesty, augured the Empire's fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles that values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of the state that they are citizens of. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, we say, the collapse of their state became inevitable. (This idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.) (3.)   

        But values and their consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society's moral values and its vigor, performance, and survival has eluded analysis for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better.

                     

                                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 disillusioned Romans a way out of the cynical ennui of life in the late Roman Empire? Or did it just happen to coincide with that ennui, but bear no causal relationship to it? I think the causal connection is real. This is part of my point in this whole book: values yield behavior patterns, each of which has a survival index associated with it. Rome's old values were fading from the minds of the citizens; Christianity gave Romans, and the Empire a renewed vigor for about another 150 years. But the balance, or rather, the synthesis, of practical, Roman values and spiritual Christian ones was difficult to achieve, and too many lazy Romans kept sliding toward ease and sloth. The serious Romans, in the meantime, were giving up on citizenship and what was left of their democracy. Withdrawal from earthly matters was beckoning to them. Forgetting about the state and focusing on family and, perhaps, congregation was enough and more than enough. 

         When some aggressive barbarian invaders arrived, Rome had become a society of factions. Too few citizens really cared about both God and Rome to fend off the Visigoths with the kind of energy and sacrifice that was needed. Rome fell in an agony that today we have nothing to compare to.    

         What is certain is that the decline of the Romans' old beliefs and the rise of the monotheistic, compassionate Christian ones happened pretty much simultaneously. To the Romans of Constantine's day, his making Christianity the state's official religion just seemed "right", as needed social changes do. People in more and more of the Empire then began to built a society based on a more spiritual view of the universe, a view under which the rewards and pleasures of this world were to be disregarded. Eternal salvation was what mattered, and it was won by good deeds of honesty, forgiveness, and compassion.

               

            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 earthly life counted for little against the backdrop of eternity. Scholars for centuries kept a skull on their desks on a plaster base inscribed with the Latin words "memento mori". Remember death. Thus, the spread of Christianity sounds like a backward step, and in many ways it was.