The Roman Empire in AD 395
A seat of empire, to be sure – but hardly a monument to Christian humility. The leaders of the Church were unperturbed. Scarcely able as they were to credit the miracle that had transformed them so unexpectedly from a persecuted minority into an imperial elite, they raised few eyebrows at the spectacle of their emperor’s magnificence. Since, as St. John had seen in his vision, the New Jerusalem would not be descending to earth until the very end of days, it struck most of them as a waste of time to preach revolution. Far more meritorious, the world’s fallen state being what it was, to labour at the task of redeeming it from chaos. It was order, not egalitarianism, that the mirror of heaven showed back to earth.What were the saints, the angels and the archangels if not the very model of a court, ranked in an exquisite hierarchy amid the pomp of the World Beyond, with Christ Himself, victorious in His great battle over death and darkness, presiding over them, and over the monarchy of the universe, in a blaze of celestial light? A Christian emperor, ruling as the sponsor and protector of the Church, could serve not merely as Christ’s ally in the great war against evil, but as His representative on earth, “directing, in imitation of God Himself, the administration of this world’s affairs.”17 In the bejewelled and perfumed splendours of Constantinople might be glimpsed a reflection of the beauties of paradise; in the armies that marched to war against the foes of the Christian order an image of the angelic hosts. What had once been the very proofs of the empire’s depravity – its wealth, its splendour, its terrifying military might – now seemed to mark it out as a replica of heaven.Naturally, the Christ to whom Constantine and his successors compared themselves bore little resemblance to the Jesus who had died in excruciating and blood-streaked agony upon a rough-hewn cross. Indeed, whether in the meditations of theologians or in the mosaics of artisans, He began to resemble nothing so much as a Roman emperor. Whereas the faithful had once looked to their Messiah to sit in awful judgement over Rome, now bishops publicly implored Him to turn His “heavenly weapons” against the enemies of the empire, “so that the peace of the Church might be untroubled by storms of war.”18 By the fifth Christian century, prayers such as these were turning shrill and desperate – for increasingly, the storms of war appeared to be darkening all the world. Savages from the barbarous wilds beyond the Christian order, no longer content to respect the frontiers that had for so long been circumscribed by Roman might, were starting to sweep across the empire, threatening to despoil it of its fairest territories, and to dismember a dominion only lately consecrated to the service of God. Was this the end of days come at last? Christians might have been forgiven for thinking so. In AD 410, Rome herself was sacked, and men cried out, just as St. John had foreseen that they would, “‘Alas, alas for the great city!’”
19 Still waves of migrants continued to flood through the breached frontiers, into Gaul and Britain, Spain and Africa, the Balkans and Italy; and this too, it struck many, St. John had prophesied. For the end time, he had written, would see Satan gather to himself nations from the far ends of the world; and their numbers would be like “the sand of the sea.”20 And their names, St. John had written, would be Gog and Magog.To emperors struggling to hold together their disintegrating patrimony, such talk was pure sedition. To their servants in the Church as well, desperate to see the imperial centre hold, the strident anti-Roman sentiments of St. John’s Revelation had long been an embarrassment. In 338, a council of bishops had sought to drop it altogether from the canon of Holy Scripture. In the East, where the more prosperous half of Rome’s empire was at length, and with colossal effort, shored up against collapse, the Book of Revelation would not be restored to the Bible for centuries. Even as the western half of the empire crumbled away into ruin, an emperor remained sufficiently secure behind the massive battlements of Constantinople to proclaim that God had granted him authority over the affairs of all humankind – and to believe it. Whatever the barbarians might be who had overwhelmed the provinces of the West, they were self-evidently not Gog and Magog – for the end of days was yet to come, and the Roman Empire still endured.This conviction, simultaneously vaunting and defiant, would remain constant throughout the succeeding centuries, even in the face of renewed calamities, and the dawning recognition, hard for any people calling themselves Romans to accept, that the empire was no longer the world’s greatest power. Smoke rising from the passage of barbarian war bands might repeatedly be glimpsed from the walls of the very capital; enemy fleets might churn the waters of the Bosphorus; frontiers and horizons might progressively contract, as Syria too, and Egypt, and Cyprus, were lost to the New Rome: and yet the citizens of Constantinople, no matter what the tides of disaster lapping at them, still trusted to their destiny. Like the Jews, they presented themselves as God’s elect, both afflicted and favoured on that account – and, like the Jews, they looked to the future for their ultimate deliverance.So it was, some time in the seventh century, and amid an unprecedented series of defeats, that startling prophecies began to circulate. Written, it was claimed, by Methodius, a saint who had been martyred some three hundred years previously, these appeared to lift the veil, just as St. John’s vision had done, from the end days of the world. No matter that Methodius himself had been executed on the orders of a Caesar, the writings attributed to him endowed the Roman Empire with an altogether more glorious role than it had been granted in Revelation. Teeming although its pagan enemies already were, Methodius warned, its greatest test was still to come. The hour of Gog and Magog, long dreaded, would come at last. Imprisoned for aeons on the edge of the world behind great walls of brass, these were barbarians of unspeakable savagery, devourers of “the vermin of the earth, mice and dogs and kittens, and of aborted foetuses, which they eat as though gorging on the rarest delicacies.”21 Against the eruption of such monstrous foes, only the emperor in Constantinople – the last Roman emperor of them all – would stand firm; and in the end he would bring Gog and Magog to defeat. That great victory achieved, he would then travel to Jerusalem; and in Jerusalem, the Son of Perdition, Antichrist himself, would be revealed.And then the last emperor, Methodius prophesied, would “go up and stand on the hill of Golgotha, and he would find there the Holy Cross, set up just as it had been when it carried Christ.” He would place his diadem on the top of the Cross and then raise up his hands in prayer, delivering his monarchy into the hands of God. “And the Holy Cross on which Christ was crucified will be raised to heaven, and the crown of kingship with it”22 – leaving the last emperor dead on Golgotha, and all the kingdoms of the earth subject to Antichrist, steeped in that profoundest darkness that would precede the dawn of Christ’s return.So it was to come: the last great battle of the world. Small wonder that Methodius’s prognostications should have attracted attention even in imperial circles. They may have been lurid and intemperate, yet they could offer a hard-pressed emperor precisely what St. John, in Revelation, had so signally withheld: reassurance that the Roman Empire would continue in heaven’s favour until the very end of days. More flatteringly, indeed – that the death of its last emperor would serve to precipitate the end of days. Had not St. Paul, when he spoke of Rome “restraining” Antichrist, implied as much? No matter how shrunken the dominion ruled from Constantinople, its rulers needed desperately to believe that it remained the fulcrum of God’s plans for the universe. What in more prosperous times had been taken for granted was now clung to with a grim resolution: the conviction that to be Christian was synonymous with being Roman.Posterity, as though in mockery of Constantine’s pretensions, has christened the empire ruled from his foundation “Byzantium,” but this was not a name that the “Byzantines” ever applied to it themselves. * Even as Latin, the ancient language of the Caesars, gradually faded from the imperial chanceries, then from the law courts, and finally from the coinage, the citizens of Constantinople continued to call themselves Roman – albeit in their native Greek. Here was no faddish antiquarianism. Rather, the prickliness with which the Byzantines, the “Romaioi,” guarded their name went to the very heart of their self-image. It offered them reassurance that they had a future as well as a past. A jealous concern with tradition was precisely what marked them out as a Chosen People. It served, in short, to define their covenant with God.