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

                                                                                 Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity, by Raphael

  

What followed, in the West, was the rise of the early Christian Church. Did Christianity grow strong because it offered 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? My position is that values coincide with social change because values lead to patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive.

Christianity told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to was not citizenship. It was a state of grace, that is, peace with God. This was much easier to achieve in a monastery or nunnery. Renounce the world in all of its tempting forms; focus on eternity. The balance between Christian values and Roman ones was hard to strike. When the Visigoth barbarian invaders’ challenge came, the old-style citizens had let their virtues and the behaviors attached to them slide for too long. The Christian community, in the meantime, had been taught to shut it all out. People who had integrated the two value sets, who could be passionately loyal to Rome and also to Christianity, were too few to stop the barbarian tide. Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the challenge was bound to come. One hundred fifty years in evolution is six generations, in evolutionary terms, almost nothing. For Europe to find the balance between the ideals of democratic citizenship and those of Christian spirituality took another thousand years. More on that as we proceed.

Under the Christian world view, the 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 as much as he could (as the ancients had) in this garden turned, by human’s sin, to a barren plain. Humans were here to praise God and gratefully accept all that God sent their 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. Christians were taught to act humanely toward all other people, not just other Romans, to behave honestly and compassionately in their dealings with others, and to commit in a deeply personal way to Christ’s kind of faith and his honest and compassionate way of life. Christians were programmed to live as if being kind to all was a desirable, moral way to be, even if the kindness might not get rewards for its doer in this lifetime.

This was a huge change from the ways of the slave-owning, gladiator-loving, militaristic, sensual, mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later became 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 and the social utility of Christianity’s good ideas was so strong that for centuries the hypocritical authorities found ways to successfully steer ordinary followers’ thoughts and perceptions past the Church’s inconsistencies.

For ten centuries, the Church’s explanations of the entirety of the universe and human experience were enough to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed. The values, in turn, made communities that worked. In evolutionary terms, that was all that mattered. Christian communities began to enjoy long periods of growing prosperity because they were internally stable, even though by modern standards, they were not very progressive. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, stability was everything.

  

                                    Christians made into human torches (artist: Siemiradzki) 

The behaviors these values produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. What was this “Chrestus”? What system had he proposed 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 (mutual aid in war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God was watching!) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, a life filled with material comforts and pleasures but devoid of ideals, more and more people became converts.

Christianity offered something else—a spiritual worldview that felt personal and a way of life that made sense to them because they believed it was what God had said he wanted of humans and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more inclusive community. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to many of 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 risen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; over millions of people and hundreds of years, they worked.