The Church and the Barbarians | Page 3

firm
solidity of the Church there could be no doubt. Heresies had torn from
her side tribes and even nations who had once belonged to her fold. But
still unity was triumphant in idea; and it was into the Catholic unity of

the visible Church that the new nations were to be invited to enter. S.
Augustine's grand idea of the City of God had really triumphed, before
the fifth century was half passed, over the heathen conceptions of
political rule. The Church, in spite of the tendency to separate already
visible in East and West, was truly one; and that unity was represented
also in the Christian Empire. "At the end of the fifth century the only
Christian countries outside the limits of the Empire were Ireland and
Armenia, and Armenia, maintaining a precarious existence beside the
great Persian monarchy of the Sassanid kings, had been for a long time
virtually dependent on the Roman power." [1] Politically, while tyrants
rise and fall, and barbarian hosts, the continuance of the Wandering of
the Nations, sweep across the stage, we are struck above all by the
significant fact which Mr. Freeman (Western Europe in the Fifth
Century) knew so well how to make emphatic:--"The wonderful thing
is how often the Empire came together again. What strikes us at every
step in the tangled history of these times is the wonderful life which the
Roman name and the Roman Power still kept when it was thus attacked
on every side from without and torn in pieces in every quarter from
within." And the reason for this indubitably was that the {4} Empire
had now another organisation to support it, based on the same idea of
central unity. One Church stood beside one Empire, and became year
by year even more certain, more perfect, as well as more strong. In the
West the papal power rose as the imperial decayed, and before long
came near to replacing it. In the East, where the name and tradition of
old Rome was always preserved in the imperial government, the
Church remained in that immemorial steadfastness to the orthodox faith
which was a bond of unity such as no other idea could possibly supply.
In the educational work which the emperor had to undertake in regard
to the tribes which one by one accepted their sway, the Christian
Church was their greatest support. In East as well as West, the bishops,
saints, and missionaries were the true leaders of the nations into the
unity of the Empire as well as the unity of the Church. [Sidenote: The
Church's conquest of barbarism.] The idea of Christian unity saved the
Empire and taught the nations. The idea of Christian unity was the
force which conquered barbarism and made the barbarians children of
the Catholic Church and fellow-citizens with the inheritors of the
Roman traditions.

If the dominant idea of the long period with which this book is to deal
is the unity of the Church, seen through the struggles to preserve, to
teach, or to attain it, the most important facts are those which belong to
the conversion, to Christ and to the full faith of the Catholic Church, of
races new to the Western world. The gradual extinction in Italy of the
Goths, the conversion of the Franks, of the English, of many races on
distant barbarian borderlands of civilisation, the acceptance of
Catholicism by the Lombards and {5} the Western Goths, do not
complete the historical tale, though they are a large part of it: there was
the falling back in Africa and for a long time in Europe of the
settlements of the Cross before the armies of the Crescent. There were
also two other important features of this long-extended age, to which
writers have given the name of dark. There was the survival of ancient
learning, which lived on through the flood of barbarian immigration
into the lands which had been its old home, yet was very largely
eclipsed by the predominance of theological interests in literature. And
there was the growth of a strong ecclesiastical power, based upon an
orthodox faith (though not without hesitations and lapses), and
gradually winning a formidable political dominion. That power was the
Roman Papacy.

[1] Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 13, ed. 1904.

{6}
CHAPTER II
THE EMPIRE AND THE EASTERN CHURCH
(461-628)
When the death of Leo the Great in 461 removed from the world of
religious progress a saintly and dominant figure whose words were
listened to in East and West as were those of no other man of his day,
the interest of Church history is seen to turn decisively to the East.

[Sidenote: Character of the Greek Church.]
The story of Eastern Christendom is unique. There is the fascinating
tale of the union