The City of GodIt is true that the identification of Christendom with empire was not entirely without its problems. A certain degree of awkwardness arose whenever the Romaioi were obliged to have dealings with Christians beyond their frontiers. Imperial lawyers had initially spun the optimistic formulation that all of Rome’s former provinces, from Britain to the furthest reaches of Spain, remained subject to the emperor. In the earliest days of their foundation, some of the barbarian kingdoms established in the West had been perfectly content to play along with this fiction – and even those that did not had on occasion been flattered into accepting certain tokens of subordination. After all, trinkets and titles from a Roman emperor were never readily to be sniffed at.In AD 507, for instance, a confederation of Germanic tribes known collectively as the Franks, axe-throwing pagans who had seized control of much of northern Gaul, had won a great victory that extended their sway southwards as far as the Mediterranean – and Byzantine agents, hurrying to congratulate them, had awarded Clovis, their king, the sonorous if wholly empty title of consul. A year later, and Clovis had shown himself even more an enthusiast for things imperial by accepting baptism.* What precise role the ambassadors from Constantinople might have played in this decision we do not know; but it must surely have struck them as a development rich in promise. For, by their own lights, to be a Christian was to be a Roman.Not by the lights of the Franks, however. Although Clovis’s people had plunged after their king into the waters of baptism, and although, a century later, missionaries dispatched from Rome would begin persuading the pagan English too to bow their necks before Christ, no submission to a mortal power was implied by these conversions. Just the opposite, in fact. Kings who accepted baptism did so primarily to win for their own purposes the backing of an intimidatingly powerful god: so it was, for instance, that Clovis, as a symbol of his newly Christian status, had taken to sporting “a salvation-giving warhelmet.”
23 The very notion of tolerating an earthly overlord was anathema to such a man. Neither Clovis nor his successors had any wish to see a global empire re-established.And already, by the seventh century, memories of Rome in the West were fading into oblivion. Massive still, beyond fields returned to scrub or marsh or forest, or above the huddled huts of peasants long since freed of imperial exactions, or framing perhaps even the high gabled hall of a chieftain and his carousing warriors, Roman buildings continued to loom against the sky – but as the wardens now of an order gone for ever, slowly crumbling before the passage of suns and rains. All the complex apparatus of bureaucracy, the same that in Constantinople still served to feed the emperor, his armies and his taxes, had collapsed utterly into ruin, leaving, amid the rubble, only a single structure standing. The Church in the West, had it followed the course of its eastern counterpart and insisted that Christendom was indeed synonymous with the rule of Rome, would surely have shared in the general ruin. As it was, it endured; and by enduring, preserved something of the imperious spirit of what had otherwise been left a corpse.“To rejoice in the vast extent of an earthly kingdom is behaviour that no Christians should ever indulge in.”24 So had pronounced Augustine, a bishop from north Africa, during the calamitous final century of the Western Empire’s existence. But what of God’s kingdom? That was quite a different matter. Bishops in the West, no longer able to rely upon a universal empire to shield their flocks from danger, could find in the writings of Augustine a theology infinitely better suited to their tattered circumstances than anything originating from the palmier days of the pax Romana. The great division in the affairs of the world, Augustine had argued, lay not between civilised and savage, Roman and barbarian, but between those earthly dominions of which Rome had been merely the most prominent example and a dominion incalculably greater and more glorious: the City of God. Within the infinite walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, all might hope to dwell, no matter what their origin; and the entrance way to this city, its portal, was the Church.A glorious role indeed. Great empires, borne upon the surging flood tides of human sinfulness, might rise and conquer and fall; “but the Heavenly City, journeying on pilgrimage throughout our fallen world, summons people from every nation, speakers of every language, taking no account of how they may differ in their institutions, their customs, or their laws.”25 Here, for all Christians in the West, whether in the old imperial provinces of southern Gaul, where bishops descended from senators still sat proudly amid the carcasses of Roman towns, or upon the mist-swept fringes of the world, where Irish hermits raised prayers to the Almighty above the ocean’s roar, was a message of mission and hope. Everywhere, across the whole, wide span of the fragmented, tormented world, was the City of God.And as evidence for this, Augustine had turned, as had so many questers after divine secrets before him, to the vision of St. John. Specifically, he had turned to a passage controversial even by the vertiginous standards of Revelation. “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven,” St. John had written, “holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended.”