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Philip Sherrard
The conversion of Constantine the Great and the occupation of the imperial throne by a Christian Emperor are momentous and crucial events in the history of Europe. This is recognized not only by later generations, but even by contemporaries, or near contemporaries. There is, for instance, the famous passage from Eusebius:
Thus was Licinius cast down prostrate. But Constantine, the most mighty victor, adorned with every virtue of piety, together with his son Crispus, a prince most dear to God and in all respects like his father, recovered the East which belonged to them; and they formed the Roman Empire, as in the days of old, into a single united whole, bringing all of it, from the rising sun round in a circle, north as well as south, to the opposite limits of the declining day, under their peaceful rule. Then men lost all fear of those who had formerly oppressed them and they celebrated brilliant days of festival. All things were filled with light, and those who before were downcast looked at each other with smiling countenances and glad eyes; with dances and hymns in city and country alike they gave honour first of all to God the universal King (for this they had been taught to do) and then to the pious Emperor with his God-beloved sons. Old ills were forgotten and oblivion cast on every deed of impiety; present good things were enjoyed and there was expectation of those yet to come. In every place the victorious Emperor issued edicts full of clemency and magnanimous and truly pious laws. Thus, when all tyranny had been purged away, the kingdom that belonged to them was preserved steadfast and undisputed for Constantine and his sons alone. And they, having obliterated the godlessness of their predecessors, and conscious of the good things given to them by God, revealed their love of God, their piety and gratitude to the Deity, by the deeds which they performed in the sight of all men. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, x. 9. 6-9.
Eusebius was of course a biased observer, and had his own particular axe to grind. Nevertheless, his eulogy does indicate a reaction which must have been more or less general. There was a sense of great relief. The long death-throes of the old Roman Empire were over. Society stood on the threshold of a new age. The Empire itself, discarding the outworn and corrupt rags of its old religion and culture, was to be reborn in the pure and splendid robes of Christianity. A great transformation was at hand, one which would vitally affect every aspect of life. If we are to get an idea of the nature of this transformation, we must first of all try to discern the nature of the form which was to be discarded and left behind. We must first examine something of the ideas and assumptions which underlay the structure of the old Roman Empire.
The unity of a culture is determined in the first place and above all by a certain common intellectual framework, by a common religious and moral attitude, by a shared scale of values, and by a certain common way of regarding the universe, the nature of man and of human life, and their mutual relationships; and it is this common framework of ideas and values which is reflected in the social, political, linguistic, and juridical structure of that culture. It follows that a prerequisite of understanding, as opposed to describing from an external and superficial point of view, any such structure is a grasp precisely of that framework of ideas and values which it reflects.
The boundaries of the Roman Empire provided the geographical setting of one such cultural unity. This is not to say that the whole area within the Empire was characterized by a uniformity of life, belief, institution, and so on; but it is to say that it was the scene on which a certain drama of human thought was played out, and that its very raison d'être, and the fact that it was this scene, relates it to a common cultural centre, and one whose influences would necessarily affect it. In fact, so much was this the case that it is not too much to say that its whole destiny was intimately linked to a dominant mental and moral attitude—was the embodiment of a particular ideology.
The Pax Augusta is no doubt the final, definitive, and fullest expression of this ideology. Briefly, one may call this ideology that of classical antiquity. That, however, is to beg the question. There is obviously an enormous gulf separating, for instance, the philosophy
behind the poetry of Homer and that of Horace, behind the works of Plato and those of Seneca. One can go further and say that there is obviously an enormous gulf separating the spirit that informed the culture of ancient pre-Socratic Greece and that which informed the Rome of, say, the period in which Heliogabalus deposed Iuppiter Optimus Maximus in favour of the Emesan Baal. There has been, until recently, a tendency to treat pre-Christian Greek and Roman culture as a single unity, to describe it as pagan
, and to assume that that term covers a common spiritual orientation dating from, say, Minoan times down to those of the last non-Christian Emperor. This is so clearly a falsification of the true state of affairs that it hardly calls for any further comment. That, however, there is a certain lineal descent to be traced between the conceptions of the later philosophers of ancient Greece—one may specify Aristotle—and those of Roman thinkers such as Cicero cannot be denied. One might perhaps say that a certain exteriorization of thought took place with the later Greek philosophers, and that it was in its exterior form that, generally speaking, Rome inherited from Greece the main structure of her philosophy.
What is meant by this can be made more clear if a few words are said about the nature of the break in Greek thought itself which led to this development. For this purpose, it is enough to recall the familiar distinction between Plato and Aristotle. To begin with, however, it must be remembered that Plato himself stood at the end, rather than at the beginning, of a tradition of religious thought, and that, from this point of view, his work represents an attempt to express in as full a manner as possible in philosophical terms truths which in themselves are beyond such formulation. In other words, there is already implicit in the method of Plato a danger that the very ideas he sought to express will be falsified; and this, indeed, actually happened as soon as what for Plato had been a method became an end in itself, and the categories of logical thought were regarded as capable of embracing the whole realm of truth, the whole of reality. It is with this in mind that the distinction between the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle may be approached.
This distinction can, perhaps, best be indicated in a summary of the two philosophers' respective views of the relationships between, and the value and significance of, form and formless matter. In the Platonic view, sensible existence is the outcome of the interaction between the principle of form and formless matter. But, although on the plane of sensible existence there may appear to be an opposition or duality between form and matter, this opposition or duality is not absolute. For, first, the principle of form, what Plato calls the Demiurge, is not the supreme reality, the Good; it is a determination of the Good, while the Good itself transcends all formal characteristics. Then, second, Plato's formless matter (χώρα) is not the substance out of which things are made, the Aristotelian ὕλη: it is something which precedes this, the receptacle
in which sensible things come to be; nor, unlike the Aristotelian ὕλη is it said to pre-exist
: it originates and (although in a most obscure way
) participates in that same pre-formal and undetermined
reality from which the principle of form itself derives. Plato, Timaeus, 50 C, D, E, 51 A, B. Thus, both form and formless matter possess a value and significance which does not depend ultimately on their relationship to each other, or on the subordination of the one to the other, but on the fact that both have their origin in that supreme reality in which their apparent opposition or duality is transcended and absorbed.
Further, the multiple forms themselves, or Ideas, as Plato calls them, synthetically contained, or gathered together, within the being of the formal creative Principle, are not merely transcendent and ideal
in relation to the multiplicity of sensible objects which they determine; on the contrary, they are also present, or immanent, within their objects themselves: the creature possesses its own intelligible nature through actual participation in the creative cause which brought it into being. At the same time, these Ideas, or principial forms, have an objective reality of their own, quite independent both of their corresponding sensible objects and of the mind of any individual thinking subject. Thus, on the one hand, as determinations of the absolute nature of the Divine they may be distinguished from it; and, on the other hand, although they condition, and are present in, their corresponding sensible objects, they are yet independent of them.
The change in this Platonic view of things introduced by Aristotle, that which we have said amounts to an exteriorization of thought, focuses precisely round the latter's rejection of the objective reality of these creative forms, or Ideas. In effect, Aristotle was unable to visualize the existence of such forms apart from their sensible objects. This, in its turn, had its counterpart in his inability to visualize a creative principle, not merely of sensible objects, but of their creative forms themselves. Aristotle's supreme principle, the First Mover, is neither the pre-formal and undetermined reality of which the principle of cosmic form, and the creative Ideas, are themselves determinations, nor is it really even the creative principle of actual sensible objects. Rather is it the ideal and immutable perfection of all those forms whose actual existence is dependent on their sensible objects. Moreover, there is no direct relationship between this First Mover and the forms which exist in material objects, nor can these latter participate in, though they may be, and are, attracted towards, the former. At the same time, matter, that in which these forms have existence, but which in itself is formless, cannot have its own origin, or principle, in the Divine, for the simple reason that the latter, being now identified exclusively with the perfection of form, cannot produce what is formless. Matter must therefore be regarded as pre-existent and nondivine, and as, in fact, the opposite to the Divine. In so far as the absolute Reality is identified with a formal perfection, what possesses form will to a corresponding degree possess reality, while what does not possess form, formless matter, is on that account unreal. In other words, there is an absolute, and not merely relative, dualism between form and formless matter; and what the exteriorization of thought amounts to is a failure to recognize, and realize, any principle superior to, and embracing, both.
The consequences of this exteriorization in anthropological terms were somewhat as follows. From the Platonic point of view, man achieves his highest purpose through the contemplation of, and participation in, the realities of a supraindividual and supernatural order, and this is only to be achieved by those who, through an initiatory process likened by Plato to a kind of dying and spiritual rebirth, surpass all individual, and natural, limitations.Plato, Phaedo, 67 D, E. What this presupposes is, first, the existence of such a supernatural order in which man may consciously participate, and, second, the recognition of some faculty in man through which such conscious participation may be realized. As to the first, this is precisely the world of ontological Ideas after the pattern of which all that is, is created; as to the second, we have noted that these Ideas, although independent of their sensible objects, are yet present in the latter, either in a passive or an active sense. The animal creation participates in the intelligible order in a passive sense; man, on the other hand, while, in so far as he is also animal, he participates in a similarly passive sense, is yet, as well, the last of the intelligible creations, and as such may participate in the intelligible order in an active sense. The actualization
of the creative and divine principle in man is the purpose of the initiatory process. What it implies is the awakening
of that faculty through which man may contemplate and know the divine realities, not as they exist in material objects, but in themselves. In other words, Plato recognizes two faculties in man corresponding to two orders, or modes, of knowing. The first is the natural and individual faculty of the reason (διάνοια), which achieves its knowledge by deducing it from the observation of sensible things, this being but a relative and changing knowledge; while the second is the intellect (νόησις) which, itself divine, is, through initiation, realized
, and hence able to know in an absolute way through the direct intuition of the divine and supernatural realities themselves.
Once, however, it was denied that the creative forms of things, their divine Ideas, have any objective reality apart from their existence in sensible objects or in the individual mind of a thinking subject, the type of spiritual realization envisaged by Plato, and the mode of knowledge proper to it, is, of course, also considered impossible. Man cannot intuit the divine and supernatural realities apart from their corporeal forms if they are not there to be intuited. Nor, correspondingly, can man possess a supernatural and supra-individual faculty, which is as it were a ray of his own divine ontological Idea present in himself, if the Good, being but the principle of a formal and immutable perfection, can have no direct creative relationship with what is created. On the contrary, as the forms of things exist only in their sensible objects, and as man's faculty of knowing is now said to be limited to the natural and individual order, all knowledge of the forms he can acquire is that which he deduces, or abstracts, from the observation of sensible things, this being a rational and natural knowledge. Such abstractions, reduced to their most general form, constitute what Aristotle calls the universals
, and are in fact no more than concepts deduced by a reasoning process from the data of the senses. At the same time they are, in this view of things, the most complete knowledge man can have of the Divine: the latter is the perfection of form free from all matter, and as these abstractions are what on the human plane is the furthest removed from matter, they are on that account the nearest man can approach to divine knowledge. Hence, not only is what possesses the perfection of form alone absolutely real; but, on the human plane, the supreme arbiter of form is the reason, what constitutes form being such rational and logical characteristics as the reason can discern and conceptualize. Thus, still on the human plane, to the degree to which something possesses rational and logical characteristics will it also be thought to possess perfection and reality, for to that extent will it be considered to be analogous to the transcendent principle of all perfection and reality. The more rationality an object possesses, the greater is its degree of reality, and hence its value, and this whether the object in question is an institution, a work of art, or the conduct of human life; and, of course, the converse is true as well.
Moreover, the fact that man's highest knowledge is now regarded as limited to what he can abstract with the reason from the observation of sensible things—such abstractions, even in their most general and universal
form, having no self-subsisting, objective reality apart from the mind of the individual thinking subject—means also that there can be no question of man's supreme purpose being achieved through surpassing rational and individual categories in the intuition of what is supra-rational and supra-individual. The reason is a purely individual faculty, and hence its perfection does not lead one beyond the limits of individuality. Thus, the supreme purpose of man can now only be recognized in the fulfilment of a purely human and individual ideal, and this conceived in the light, or darkness, of a philosophy that tends to see everything in terms of an absolute dualism between the formal and the formless, the rational and the irrational, mind and matter, and to value in each case the former at the expense of the latter. The divine pattern laid up in heaven
is regarded as one of a rational perfection; it is this that has to be imitated on earth; and such imitation, the conformity of human life, whether public or private, to a fabricated ideal of a static cosmic order conceived of as a series of purely abstract and general laws, is now thought to condition value and reality. What is chaotic
or irrational
is at the same time unreal
and valueless
, and can only become real
and valuable
on condition that it conforms to a rational order. Where man is concerned, the human psyche is placed between that of the gods and heroes on the one hand, and beasts on the other; it is linked to the former by the reason, and to the latter by the affections; by the affections it is sometimes so corrupted as to produce the semblance of a beast; through the perfection of the reason it can occasionally attain the status of that of the gods and heroes, and in so doing deserve to be called divine. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, vii. 1145a. 15 ff
Nor is this all. The ideal of a purely human excellence, realizable within the limits of individuality, has its counterpart on the social level in the ideal of the secular and civil perfection of mankind. Indeed, the one ideal implied the other to such an extent that they came to be identified, the realization of a purely human excellence being regarded as impossible outside the social order : according to Aristotle, for instance, man is an animal whose potentialities are only realized within the polis.Aristotle, Politics, i. 2. 1253a Nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. In the Platonic view, there is still present the metaphysical idea of grades of reality, proceeding from the highest to the lowest of things, so that while not everything partakes of form, or even of being, it will none the less partake to some degree of the Divine, for this, as we said, transcends both the formal principle and that of being. In other words, there is a process of incarnation of the divine Reality which links the spiritual world to the sensible world, and extends even to what is formless and irrational. The world is a sensible God made in the image of the Intelligible
;εἰκὼν τοῦ νοητοῦ θεὸς αἰσθητός; Plato, Timaeus, 92 C.
2 and the true philosopher will say neither that all Reality is changeless, nor that it is everywhere changing, but that it is both at once all that is unchangeable and all that is in change.Plato, Sophist, 249 C, D.
As soon, however, as this principle embracing both the formal and the formless, the rational and the irrational, was lost sight of, and the Divine came to be regarded as a static and abstract order, essentially rational in its nature, it followed that what was formless, in movement, and irrational was felt to a corresponding degree to lack divine qualities; it was felt to lack reality and even to be entirely negative and evil. Plutarch, for instance, goes as far as to say that unadorned and formless matter prior to the generation of the world possesses an evil soul and it is this evil soul which is the principle of movement and irrationality in created things chaos has a soul, and since chaos is the opposite to the cosmos (κόσμος), which is good, this soul must be bad.Plutarch, De Virtute morali, 3; De Animae procreation, 28. Hence, there was a radical depreciation of all that is changing and irrational, and this applied particularly not only to the affections of man, but also to the whole natural and sensible world. In other words, just as man's natural affections are felt to be outside the sphere of the Divine, and hence unreal
, and even dominated by the evil soul of matter, so also, and to a greater extent, is the whole natural and sensible world; and both are considered only to achieve positive value and to partake of reality to the degree to which they are subjected to the reason and to rational, and static, form. It is in the imposition of, and obedience to, such a form that the perfection of human nature is thought to be achieved, and for this reason it is considered that only in a rational, man-made society, through social institutions and laws that embody, so to speak, the general and universal
laws of the cosmic order, are, as Aristotle says, human potentialities to be realized. The realization of the ideal of a purely human and rational excellence necessarily implies, therefore, the civilization of man, for only the civil and social order can reflect the norms of rational order which alone can both satisfy the demands of individual human nature and allow the secular, and only, perfection possible to mankind. Again as Aristotle remarked, the man who first invented the state was the greatest of benefactors
.Aristotle, Politics, i. 2. 1253 a.
It was, then, in this exterior form that Rome inherited from Greece the dominant conceptions of her own philosophy, and it was these, and all the consequences which issue from them, that underlay the historical life of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the Roman Empire of, particularly, the Antonines, represented a conscious effort to construct, not merely on the level of the polis, but on the imperial level, a world adequate to the demands of civilized man, for only in such a world could the ideals of this philosophy be realized. It is thus that Vergil, for instance, expressing the common Augustan view, conceived things. Relating the Roman Empire to a vast background of human history and giving it a cosmic setting, he saw the Pax Augusta as the culmination of a process which began at the dawn of time and culture on the shores of the Mediterranean. This process represented the effort to erect a stable and lasting civilization on the ruins of the discredited and outworn systems of the past, and it was this that the Augustan settlement had finally achieved in realizing the ancient ideals of civil peace and classical humanism. What Rome was accomplishing was, in fact, precisely that work of emancipation—the subduing of nature by man, through his effort and virtue and organization, in order to make it serve his own purposes—which had been left unfinished by the Greeks. Rome was to succeed, where Greece had failed, in extending the rational order over the whole imperial world.
But if Vergil was to provide the dynamic myth of the Augustan settlement through consecrating the ideals of classical humanism, not as a step to religion, but as a religion itself, and through justifying the Roman methods for realizing these ideals, he did so by basing his work firmly on, and elevating to a poetic pitch, what was the fullest expression of these ideals and methods : the academic liberalism of Ciceronian philosophy. Cicero, as far as any single person could be, was the embodiment of, and medium of propagation for, the complete ideology which informed the life, laws, and institutions of the Empire. Indeed, his prestige and influence as an intellectual and moral standard penetrated not only the Empire, but to a considerable degree the whole subsequent history of Europe. Those as far apart in time as St. Jerome, with his lament Ciceronianus non Christianus sum
, and Erasmus, for whom Cicero's Essay on Duties was all a young man needed as a guide to conduct and life, testify to that prestige and influence. And if, as it has been said, modern liberalism, in its effort to combat the sinister and chaotic forces with which contemporary life is menaced, holds up the ideal of a world society founded on justice, freedom, and humanity, calling for a united effort to release mankind from the obstacles which prevent a realization of that ideal, its purpose and methods must alike be understood, if not as a direct legacy from Cicero, at least in close affinity with his way of thought.C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1944), p. 39.
As Lucretius, so Cicero was anxious to combat the moral bankruptcy with which he saw the Empire threatened, the anarchy and immorality that expressed itself in savage competition for domination and power and resulted from an uncontrolled release of the so-called expansive emotions
(afectiones animi) ; and like Lucretius also he looked to the reason, the principle of order, as the answer to the problem. Unlike Lucretius, however, who ascribed these evils of society to a belief in the traditional gods of popular worship—to the whole unreason
of religio that provided a refuge for irrational hopes and fears and whose antidote was Epicurean science which revealed nature as nothing but atoms moving in the void and therefore religio as illusion—Cicero rejected Epicureanism: it seemed to him to avoid the problem of human freedom and responsibility, and at the same time to remove the moral props of society, man's obligation to the good and obedience to the social virtues which must have a religious basis.Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 2. 4 He thus distinguished between religion and superstition which both Epicurus and Lucretius had identified, and, as a good representative of Greek enlightenment, looked to a religion purified and illuminated by a knowledge of nature.Cicero, De Divinatione, ii. 72, 148 To the question how this distinction and purification were to be achieved, Cicero's answer was typical. While on the one hand he maintained the principle of suspended judgement and philosophic doubt,Academicorum dubitatio, suspensio assensionis. For Cicero's scepticism, see his Academica Priora, esp. ii. 17, 18, 32-36, 99, 103. on the other hand he saw in this the reason for accepting the intellectual and moral standards established by antiquity and sanctioned by time. Such acceptance, however, did not preclude fresh advances in knowledge, for the power of reason and conjecture would always produce such knowledge, and as long as this was efficacious in helping to rescue man from the irrational grip of circumstances, its validity could be held to be proved. Indeed, the extension of such knowledge was imperative to man's success in triumphing over the forces of chaos and in limiting the scope of blind hazard (fortuna) to which primitive life was only too greatly exposed; and its possession was in fact indispensable for the realization of the supreme end of man, to be civilized.Cicero, De Divinatione, i. 49-50, 109-12. Here lies the reason for that extraordinary regard manifested by Cicero, as by all such representatives of enlightened humanism, for education, for it is thought that only through education—in the academic, not religious, sense of the word—can man acquire the knowledge necessary to live the civilized life and, thus, fulfil the ideal.
As, from the Ciceronian point of view, it is the reason alone which is capable of realizing that knowledge by revealing the divine
order of nature, the law of which is identical with that of right reason
, it follows that there is nothing in the universe which is above reason; it is the reason, in fact, which is the link between man and man, and man and God.Cicero, De Legibus, i. 7. 23 ff. At this point, Cicero seems to forget his principle of suspended judgement, for he declares that there is a fundamental distinction in nature between truth and error, right and wrong, and that this can be discerned by the reason. Indeed, since this distinction corresponds to an objective standard rooted in the nature of things, it is in its light that the reason must legislate and judge. The dictates of the reason, therefore, constitute a kind of categorical imperative, since they provide the law for man: man is born for justice
, which exists not by convention, but by nature
, and it is in natural justice, revealed by, and at one with, right reason
, that is to be found the ratio or principle of human association, the bond of community in human life.Cicero, De Officiis, i. 7. 20. Freedom is the submission to this divine
justice, as it is embodied in the State. In this way, Cicero opposes Lucretius's gospel of freedom from the State with freedom in the State; it is in the bene honesteque vivendi societas that are embodied the highest values of civilized man.
What we are witnessing, in short, in the philosophy of Cicero, as in the common Roman ideology, is a logical development of the consequences implicit in that exteriorization of thought of which we have spoken. And nowhere is this more clear than in the matter of religion. We have already seen that, as a consequence of denying the objective reality of the world of creative Ideas, it is now considered that man's knowledge is limited to the rational and natural order. From our point of view, there are two important, and interrelated, consequences of this. On the one hand, the gods
can now be regarded, not as self-subsisting principles, but only as illusory beings created in the image of man, mere fabrications of his thought: and on the other hand, religion resolves itself entirely into a matter of form: what represents the Roman mind are the cults authorized by the college of pontiffs (religions licitae), and not anything of which they might once have been indicative, for that is no longer credited with reality. Hence, an orgy of confusion in the type and number of cults is permitted and even encouraged, since, no longer representing what is real, their intermixture can have no ill effects: Alexander Severus, for instance, felt, apparently, no incongruity in including Christ among the gods to be worshipped in his private chapel. What is a danger is, in fact, precisely the attempt to penetrate too deeply into the meaning of the cults, and CiceroCicero, De Legibus, ii. 8. 19 quotes with approval the provision of the XII Tables, under the legislation of which astrology or mathematics
, with other forms of illegitimate curiosity
, are outlawed; even Judaism, though tolerated prava superstitio appropriate to the Jewish race, is under a ban.
Moreover, the justification for even this formal religion and formal worship of the gods
is that they provide the moral basis on which the order of society is supposed to rest. Gods
, Cicero wrote, are needed for the maintenance of the social system; without them, society would be a chaos (magna confusio) ; fides, iustitia, societas generis humani would all go to pieces.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 2, 3, 4. The gods must be kept in existence and fostered through official action because they have the function of holding the State together: that is their raison d'être, and it is one of major importance, since only through the State can the classical humanist ideal be, as we have seen, realized. The gods are man-created, officially sponsored inhabitants of the City State, maintaining its life, protecting its armies and institutions, presiding over its order. The Roman mind thought of the universe and the deity in terms of the State and human society, and, given the premisses of which we have spoken, it was impossible for it to do otherwise.
That this should result in the cult of the Caesars is likewise implicit in those premisses; in fact, it would not be going too far to say that this cult was far more the outcome of the dualism we have noted—that of the formal (rational) and the formless (irrational)—than it was something transplanted into Rome from the Hellenistic world, as it is often thought to be. How this is so can be understood if we consider another aspect of that dualism. We saw that one of the effects of regarding the Divine as a static and abstract order, essentially rational in its nature, was the tendency to look upon what was formless, in movement, and irrational, as unreal
and even as evil. Where the individual was concerned, this formless and irrational element was identified with man's affections, whose subjection to the reason and to a rational control was a condition of the realization of the ideal of human excellence. Hence, what was important in the individual was not his changing and irrational nature, but only the extent to which he had conformed that nature to the rational type which represented the ideal. The type, qua type, does not change: it merely renews itself through individuals, while the individual achieves his fulfilment through realizing the type, and is only significant in so far as he does realize it.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, x. 7 ff.
What this represents is a remoulding, in accordance with the new rationalistic notions, of the theory—admitted, for instance, in the life and thought of ancient Greece—which recognizes the highest fulfilment in those who, transcending the common measure of humanity, and through an ability to hit the mark (τυχεῖν) and through a development of their potentialities, achieve a superhuman and divine stature. What has now changed is the type regarded as ideal and the way it was thought to be realized. For the former could only be conceived on condition that the best part of man, what was divine
in him, was regarded as his rational faculty, while the latter required the pursuit of moral virtue in the service of the State and society; man could attain to divine
stature in and through service to his fellow citizens: The fact
, wrote Cicero, that the law commands us to worship certain of the human race who have been consecrated, like Hercules and others, indicates that, while, indeed, the minds of all men are immortal, those of the brave and good are intrinsically divine.
Cicero, De Legibus, ii. 11. 27. These are the rulers and saviours of states
, the patriots to whom the barriers of heaven are lowered
.Cicero, De Republica, vi. 24, 26. Here, indeed, is the potential justification of Augustus Caesar as a political god.
But there is more than this. For just as the human ideal is said to be achieved through realizing the formal type, so the political counterpart is achieved in realizing the formal order of the State: indeed, as we have pointed out, the one ideal involved, and was interchangeable with, the other. It was of course impossible not to admit the existence of change and irrationality, but, since they were regarded as the consequence of the negative and evil
material principle, the ideal was always to adapt the formal order to whatever change occurred. Here, then, lay the task of the man-god, and one which was particularly urgent as the forces of dissolution threatened the Empire. Romulus
, wrote Sallust,Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 6. 2. adjusting history in order to prepare the way for the acceptance of the final consequence of Roman ideology, took over a population of rustics utterly devoid of law and authority. After they had come together within one fortification, notwithstanding differences of race, language, and custom, it is marvellous how quickly they coalesced. Thus, within a brief period, a loose and amorphous multitude was transformed into a civil society.
This transforming of irrational and formless material into a rational and formal civil society was the condition of the existence of the Roman Empire; and it presupposed a conscious and deliberate act of organization and statecraft impossible except for one endowed with exceptional qualities, a degree of right reason and constancy which must be deemed superhuman and attributed to a god
.Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 13. 34. This act, attributed now to a hero-founder and lawgiver who is given the status of a god, consists in welding diverse and centrifugal elements into the form of a polis or civitas; thus will society resemble the universe pictured by Cicero as a great civitas, or constitution, under the government of an almighty deity, who holds together all grades of human association.Cicero, De Legibus, i. 23 By Livy's day, if not already in Cicero's day, the disruption of the Empire was so great that its only hope of salvation lay in the emergence of one who would repeat the act, and reoccupy the status, that panic and despair had, through such as Sallust, Cicero, or Livy, caused to be attributed to the founder. Augustus Caesar was the logical, and necessary, outcome of the fundamental concepts underlying the historical life of ancient Rome. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the ideals of classical humanism, those of equality and natural justice, the pedantic day-dream of human perfectibility and brotherhood within the State, intended to be realized in the Augustan settlement, should issue in absolute tyranny and in the deification
of the tyrant; nor that what has been called, by one of its apologists, the immense majesty of the Augustan peace
should collapse into the lavish debauchery of a Nero.
For what lay at the root of the failure of the Empire was an inadequate, and false, picture of the universe and of man's life in it. By dividing reality into two parts between which there could be no proper relationship because there was no common principle through which they could be related; by attributing to the one part, that identified with rational order, a superiority which was, with regard to the other part, formless materiality, practically speaking absolute; and by acting on the assumption that this represented a true estimation of things, the Roman mind exposed itself to one of those judgements of God
that all erratic ideologies, and the activities based on them, bring in their train. For in fact the aspect of reality which is accessible to the direct grasp of the reason is a negligible part of the whole, and the consequence of regarding it as if it were the whole, or at least the only part of the whole that had positive and divine
significance, was ultimately to provoke, in the mind itself, a growing sense of helplessness, to the point of hysteria, in the face of all that it could not submit to rational categories and thus civilize
. It is this that explains, and not only ironically, the enormous prestige acquired by the goddess Fortuna in the Roman pantheon. She was, indeed, the necessary counterpart of, and linked by a principle of polarity to, her opposite, the virtue
of the rational capacities held to be inherent in human nature. No one can fail to see
, wrote Cicero, how much it depends on fortune [or, as we should say,
Cicero, De Officiis, ii. 6. 19. And later, Pliny, when it had become obvious to all that the great effort to extend human control over the whole of nature had failed, and that in fact if man sets up as his ideal a merely human excellence to be achieved through his own natural powers, he ends by being the impotent and blind plaything of forces beyond his scope: conditions
] whether we are to experience prosperity or adversity.Throughout the whole world, in every place, at all times, Fortune alone is named and invoked by the voices of all: she alone is accused and put in the dock, she is the sole object of our thought, our praise, and our abuse.
Pliny, Natural History, ii. 7. 22.
It is a confession of despair and failure as inevitable as it is poignant. Yet it would be a mistake on that account to see the great effort which the Roman Empire represents only in negative terms. If man's integral nature cannot be realized within the limits of society, and to that extent is independent of the social order, at least it may be maintained that without the stability of society the task of fulfilling that nature is made immensely more difficult. Or, to put it another way: if man cannot live by bread alone, he certainly cannot live without it, and it may be just as disastrous to regard him as pure spirit as it is to regard him as determined uniquely by his psychophysical self. Man is both inner and outer, and in so far as he is outer he is also the ζῷον πολιτικόν, the equilibrium of whose nature requires the equilibrium of a formal and exterior order. It was such an equilibrium and order that the Roman Empire was an attempt to provide, and in this respect it is not merely in a token sense that the authority through whose exercise they were to be realized, that of the Emperor, was called divine. But, at the same time, man cannot live by bread alone; and the search to achieve, on the social and human plane, an ideal of stability and perfection—of, in short, civilization—to the point of subordinating the whole inner and spiritual side of life to that ideal, could only result in the despair and failure of which we have spoken. And if there was, as Eusebius indicates, an overwhelming sense of relief on the triumph of Constantine the Great, and the feeling that society stood on the threshold of a new age, not the least of the reasons for this may, surely, have been that the Emperor, through his conversion, had made himself the representative of a religion which promised to restore the integrity of that inner and spiritual side of life, and to release the human mind from the bondage in which it was enclosed.
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