The English Speaking Church: The three C's
The Holy Catholic Church and Christian Culture, From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,
The Holy Catholic Church and Christian Culture, From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,
We must begin by laying down as a historical fact not to be removed by affection one way or the other, that the conversion of the Roman Empire was a conversion to what was called by all our ancestry and what is still called by those with any historical sense The Catholic Church.
The Empire was not ‘converted’ to what modern men mean when they used the word ‘Christianity’.
The phrase is continually used and as continually corrupts the historical judgement of those who use it and those who hear it.
In the ears of modern youth, especially in societies which have lost the Catholic Culture, the word ‘Christianity’ means vaguely, “That which is common in various sects, opinions and moods inherited in diluted form from the Reformation”.
In England today, for instance ‘Christianity’ means a general feeling of kindliness, particularly to animals.
To some more precise in mind it may mean an appreciation of and even an attempt at copying, a Character which seems to them portrayed in the four Gospels (four out of the certainly more than fifty, which four they happened to inherited from the Catholic Church, although they do not know it).
To a much smaller number, with greater powers of definition and better historical instruction, the word ‘Christianity’ may have even so precise a meaning as ‘the acceptance of the doctrine that an historical Figure appeared in Palestine about two thousand years ago, and was in some way the Incarnation of God and that the main precepts, at least, of an original society calling itself after His name should be our guide for moral conduct
But all these uses of the word ‘Christianity’ from the vaguest to the most precise, do not apply the tremendous business with which we are here concerned.
The society of the ancient world was not changed from its antique attitude to that which it finally adopted in the 4th century (and continued thenceforward to spread throughout Europe) by any mod or opinion; it was transformed by adherence to the doctrine and discipline as well as the spirit and character of a certain institution; and that institution is historically known; it is a Personality which can be tested by certain indisputable attributes, practices and definitions.
It claimed and claims Divine authority to teach, to include in its membership by specific form of initiation those who approached it and were found worthy; to exclude those who would not accept that unity and supremacy.
It performed throughout the society of the Empire and even beyond its boundaries a certain liturgical act of sacrifice, the Eucharist, it affirmed its foundation by a Divine figure who was also a man, and a manifestation of God.
It further affirmed that its officers held their authority through appointment originally by this Founder, who gathered a small group for that purpose, it affirmed that from the members of this small original group, in unbroken succession, descended the spiritual powers which could be claimed by officers and by them alone, in particular manner, over the whole body of Christians, and in general fashion over the world at large.
In order to understand this very great thing which captured and transformed the old pagan world, we must grasp its nature. We must be able to answer the question, “what was it that spread so rapidly and so triumphantly throughout the Graeco-Roman world?’
Secondly, we must appreciate the “method’ by which this revolution was accomplished; lastly in order to understand both the nature and the method of the ‘thing’ we must discover why it met with so ‘intense a resistance’, for that resistance explains both its character and its ways of propagation and it was victory over that resistance which established the Catholic Faith and practice so firmly over our race for so many centuries and generations.
First then, as to the nature of the conquest. The great change did not come because ‘it met a need’; it did indeed meet needs that were universal. It filled up that aching void in the soul which was the prime malady of the dying ancient society; also it relieved and dissipated despair, the capital burden imposed by that void.
Yet the meeting of the need was not the essential character of the new ‘thing’; it was not the driving power behind the great change; it was only a result incidental thereof.
It was not merely in order to assuage such needs of the spirit that men turned towards the Catholic Church: had that been so, we should have been able to trace the steps whereby from vague groping and half-satisfied longings there should have crystallized this and that myth, this and that fulfillment of desire by imagination, until the system should have come into being long after the inception of the first influences.
That such a gradual process did take place is commonly affirmed by those who have not a sufficient acquaintance, even on the largest lines with the ‘thing’ historically but in fact nothing of the kind took place. You discover not a vague frame of mind, but a definite society from the first; no criticism of documents or of tradition can prevent any other conclusion.
A man appeared, gathered together a certain company and taught.
And not only so soon ass that company begins to act, but at the root of all memory with regard to its action, you have the specific claim of Divine revelation in the Teacher, of His Human and Divine nature; of His resurrection from the dead; of His establishing a central rite of Sacrifice, which was called the Eucharist (the Act of Gratitude); the claim to authority; the Apostolic organization of the tradition; the presence of a hierarchy and all the rest.
The Catholic Church visible was not an influence that spread; it was a ‘Thing’. It was a fixed Corporation, a Club, if you will; it was an organization with a form and members, a defined outline, and a discipline. Disputes arose within it, certain of its members would overemphasize this or that among the doctrines for which it stood and so warp the proportion of the whole.
But no innovator, even during the first enthusiasm when so many debates surrounded so intellectually vigorous a ‘thing’, would ever pretend that there was not one body to be preserved. He might claim to be the true continuator of that body, and protest (when he was excluded from it for dissent); but never did any of those at the origin propose that discord upon essentials could be permanent
This new and strict corporation had a name, a name associated in the minds of its contemporaries with the idea of a secret society possessed of mysteries; it called itself the Ekklesia. Now it is all-important to grasp this further fact, that the new Ekklesia with its mysteries, its initiation ceremonies (instruction in doctrine, solemn affirmation thereof, called “confession”, what we call a creed, and Baptism) was not one of many religions which happened to prove the winner in a sort of race.
That is an error which one finds in many of the textbooks and which has almost passed into popular acceptance. Any number of our general outlines of history and the rest talk of the Early Church in this fashion.
They say, for instance, that the earlier mysteries such as the mysteries of Eleusis, the latter mysteries of Mithras, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, etc. were of this sort and what they call “Christianity” (for they usually avoid the word “Catholic Church”) was but one of many.
This is not true, and the test that it is not true is simple and should be conclusive. The Catholic Church alone and from its origins proclaimed the Divinity of a real historical man and the objective truth of the doctrines which it affirmed. It proclaimed from the beginning the Resurrection of that real historic man from the dead; and the popular nickname “Christian” (which became, like so many nicknames, the general term) arose from that fact.
All the other popular worships with their mysteries and initiations and the rest of it were admittedly ‘myths’. They did not say, “This happened”; what they said was, “This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the nature and the possible fate of the human soul and its relation to the Divine.
Not one of them said, “I was founded by a real man whom other men met and knew, who lived in a particular place and time, one to whom there ‘a cloud of witnesses’”; not one of them said that they held revealed truth and that their officials held a Divine commission to explain that truth throughout the world.
In all this there was a violent contrast between the Catholic Church and the whole of the pagan world around; neither the intellectuals following Greek traditions nor the Roman Empire with its administrative sense of unity persecuted the other associations. It was not the doctrine of the Resurrection, still less the doctrine of Immortality which was found repulsive; it was the affirmation that the criminal who had been put to death in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and ignominious capital punishment of Crucifixion, where to no Roman citizen was liable, was Divine, spoke with Divine authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead, and could promise to his faithful followers eternal beatitude.
This was what shocked the intellectuals, but this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new society and so led, as we shall see in a moment to persecution.
Now, as to its method of expansion, how did it propagate itself? What was the machinery which proved so successful that in less than four long lifetimes the whole of that hostile society was officially Catholic and that within another two long lifetimes the whole of the population, West and East, of the known world between the Channel, the Rhine, the Danube and the desert followed its creed and accepted its doctrines?
It worked by the method which we have come to call “Cells,” a word rendered familiar today through the universal Communist agitation. If, as some think, that Communist movement is the final assault upon Catholic tradition and the Faith, if it be, as many think, the modern anti-Christ, the parallel is indeed striking.
All over the Graeco-Roman Empire there were founded rapidly a number of these small organizations, first connected with and later separated from local Jewish synagogues; fixed in the greater towns, but later scattered like seed also in the provincial centers, and then by missionary effort throughout the country sides.
We know this was the method, through ample documentary evidence; we have also a vast mass of tradition, largely legendary, of course, after such length of time, but containing its nucleus of truth, which tells us how in this place and in that these “Cells” were founded and established. Each was called individually a Church, just as the general organization was known as the Church as a whole. They were governed by a Hierarchy. At the head of one church would be one presiding officer, the Episkopos, a word of which we have made the English word “Bishop.”
He was nominated sometimes, apparently by the local clergy, sometimes by the acclamation of the community; but he held his title not from these, but from the Apostolical succession. This and that ancient local Church boasted that it had been founded by an Apostle, and soon in drawing up lists of Bishops the chain was traced to that Apostle who had first begun it by the laying on of hands.
Those thus ordained would lay on hands in their turn, and so the hierarchy or body of the clergy was formed. After some indeterminate time not the Bishop alone (who was the full priest), but subordinates bearing the titles of “elders,” in the Greek “presbuteros,” could function at the Holy Mysteries, having been ordained in their turn by the Bishops. These consecrated the elements of the Eucharist, and from them would commonly be drawn the Episcopate. Such was the original form of the Church. The Ekklesia
The Ekklesia had a body of writing which it preserved for the instruction of its members and the continuity of its doctrine; but it took a long time before these documents were sifted and before a certain proportion of them, a small portion of the whole, were affirmed to have special value as Scripture, that is, inspired and therefore authoritative. There were for instance in the way of records or pretended records of Our Lord’s life and teaching certainly more than fifty such documents, for we have fragments of at least that number.
Only four were admitted to the Canon that is the “regular” or “official” collection. In the same way letters were written by the missionaries of the Early Church, but in the same way only a certain number, under the name of “Epistles,” were admitted to the Canon, and one record of early Apostolic action, the Acts of the Apostles; one apocalyptical work, which we know as the Apocalypse.
This being the sequence whereby the Canon of what we call today the New Testament was gradually formed (by selection over a long space of time); it is exceedingly bad history to pretend that this collection of documents was the authority for the Faith. The authority for the Faith was the tradition of the Apostles; the living agreement of the faithful, especially as represented by their heads in the Apostolic succession. The Bishops.
Apart from this fundamental institution of the hierarchy, the sacred caste which alone had spiritual authority over the Church, there were four other elements which strengthened the new society and helped it to grow. There was the function of intercommunication by travel and by correspondence, along the Imperial roads.
All these Churches kept in touch and maintained a common doctrine alive. Councils of Bishops were held (at least, after the Emperors had accepted the Catholic Church and it had become the official religion). They would be summoned to represent the Church throughout the whole world, whence they derived their title, “ecumenical.”
The first of these, under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, was summoned at Nicea near Constantinople because Constantinople had become the capital of the Empire. It met to discuss and define the full doctrine of Our Lord’s Divinity, and to reject the heretical theses connected with it.
The function of getting into communication by travel and by letter supported and was called into being by the supreme principle of Unity; The idea that the Church was one, its doctrine one, its authority one, stood out vividly in the minds of all its members.
From the beginning, dissent was not tolerated; unity was of the essence of the thing, and in connection with this there was present at first more vaguely, later with greater definition, the conception of primacy. One of Our Lord’s Apostles, Peter, was the head of the Apostolic College; his See had a special, if at first less defined, position in Christendom; and Rome, where Peter was last settled, where he and Paul were martyred, became the permanent seat of this primacy as it developed.
The third activity which made for the growing strength of the Church was the use of what we now call Creeds (from the Latin word, “Credo,” “I believe”). They were called in the East where Greek was spoken “symbols,” from the Greek “symbolae,” which means things put together. They were originally called in the Latin-speaking West, “Confessiones.” They arose in order to make sure a new candidate for admission to the Ekklesia was not tainted with heresy. He or she was required before admission to recite truths which had been defined in order that such definition might combat false ideas.
These brief recitals did not pretend to cover the Faith; they were not a summary of all, nor even of the principal, belief; for instance, the great creed of the 4th century made no mention of the most important and fundamental mystery of the new society, the Eucharist and the Real presence of Christ therein. Of that doctrine there was ample evidence, going back to the beginning, but as it was not questioned its definition had never entered into these rebutting affirmations which the candidate was required to make.
The forth function making for unity and strength and permanence and growth was, of course that very Eucharist just mentioned. Bread and wine were consecrated after a method, and with words handed down traditionally as those of Our Lord Himself at the Last Supper. The mystic ceremony was performed by the celebrant hierarch, or hierarchs; on its performance the bread and wine over which the mystical formulae had been uttered were belived to be no longer bread and wine but the Body and Blood of Christ Himself.
As St. Justin himself wrote, at a time which was to the Crucifixion as our time is to the Declaration of Independence, and writing as on a matter accepted and long established, writing moreover for the instruction of readers who were not Christian, the bread was no longer “common bread” but “the flesh of Christ.”
All this gives us the external method and machinery whereby the Faith was established and spread with such astonishing success throughout a vast society which had begun by knowing it ill, had proceeded to hate it, and had at last accepted it for a universal religion.
But what was the internal force? How were men convinced? Why did they join this society in spite of the terrible risks communion with it involved? Often it meant ruin of fortune and thrusting out from the society of one’s fellows and sometimes torture and death. What drove men to it? The answer is that the Church was a person which men came to trust as they come to trust it today.
A man became a Christian because he found that the Church affirmed things which he recognized to be true in experience and holy in character. It was loved, witnessed to and defended to the death by those who thus felt it to be, when in contact with it, divine, and the only fixed and certain authority of their experience. As for doctrine, they took it from this society of which they had thus become enamored upon such firm grounds. It was not the society which proceeded from the doctrine, but the doctrine that came from the society.
To understand this point, which is fundamental to all comprehension of the Church’s triumph over and penetration throughout the old Roman world, we must also understand the character of the violent resistance which it excited.
As that resistance is too often presented, it seems incomprehensible, because it is represented wrongly. People would not have been thrown to wild beasts, tortured to death, condemned to imprisonment with hard labor in the mines, simply because they preached a general spirit of kindliness, or worshipped a particular ideal Character.
Nothing could have been more tolerant to opinion than the old Graeco-Roman Empire. It is not true that the Empire persecuted the Church because it was a secret society. Mystery societies of various sorts flourished among the citizens; why then did angry instinct for killing this particular one arise?
In some degree, no doubt, for that reason we find hundreds of years before suggested by a Greek philosopher filled with vision. He wrote that if humanity should come across a perfectly good man, his fellowmen would tear him to pieces. Holiness is a reproach.
It was also persecuted perhaps because its claims and affirmations upon itself were novel. It said, as nothing else had yet said, “I am the voice of God. You must accept what I say as truth. My code of morals is the path to eternal beatitude, and neglect or denial of them is the path to eternal despair.” That was challenge to all human custom, a sort of challenge not easily to be borne.
Allied to this was the hard, the angular quality of the new thing, with its strict definitions, is Hierarchy, its highly disciplined organization, standing thus as an alien body in the midst of a society that was dissolving. It was an alien thing, and, as it were, indigestible; or rather it was something which had to be accepted altogether or crushed altogether, if there were to be any peace.
But there was a last political reason, and a strong one, for the resistance. As this highly organized definite, enthusiastic body spread, it became more and more a state within a State; it was a society with its own authorities, its own discipline and spirit in the midst of that Imperial World which was inspired by a political desire for peace and unity. The government of the Empire reacted inevitably and violently against the presence of such an opponent and challenger. It has been noted by many that the Emperors best at government were often the worst persecutors.
This resistance to the spread of the Faith, this compulsion laid upon the Catholic body to fight for its life, was a chief element in its final triumph. Permanent work is done in hard material, “Greek sculpture is not fashioned in butter,” as a just critic said of a minor poet’s verses. The best carving is done in the closest grained wood, and against the grain.
This great united state, which included the whole of the known civilized world. The Graeco-Roman Empire, fell at first gradually then more rapidly into a material decline.
Meanwhile the Church was growing. The framework of the Empire stood; its laws, all its life moved on without a break.
There was no “fall of the Roman Empire”- the phrase is rhetorical and false; but there was a profound change proceeding in the texture of Society. The half-civilized tribes on the fringes of the Empire filtered in more and more into Graeco-Roman society acquired more power and introduced elements of disorder; the ruling class changed and largely lost its culture.
On the material side of life all seemed to be sinking slowly, even while on the spiritual side there was rising to triumph the mighty force of the Catholic Church.
Now since the rise of the one spiritual thing and the fall of the other material thing were coincident, may not they be related as cause and effect?
This is the capital question which we have to deal with on approaching the decline of the Roman Empire in material things. The Empire declined and The Church expanded.
The dates are sufficient proof in this natter. The old pagan civilization was in active decay long before the new small and struggling obscure group of Catholic congregations began to have any appreciable effect. The golden age of literature was passed; letters had become sterile, architecture coarsened, long before the Ekklesia was felt to be a menacing force to the natural Paganism of the Old World.
Already old age, corruption, greed, the preponderance of slaves and “Freed-men” side by side with the growth of vast fortunes overshadowing society and throwing it out of balance, had already been at work when the Catholic Church was still so insignificant that it is hardly mentioned by the mass of contemporary writers. There are one or two allusions here and there which have reference to this body, but no more.
Only when the Empire was already almost broken down, in the third century, does the Church begin to make strong appeal; and even then its members were as yet but a small minority, even in the East. They were a still smaller minority in the West.
Nor were Christians found in any of the principal palaces of authority; nor possessing power through wealth, still less through office. Tertullian had said at the beginning of the grave social crisis that all might be well if the Caesars could be Christian—but took it for granted that the Caesars could not be Christian.
It is more than a coincidence that the triumph of the Catholic Church came at last coincidently with the restoration of order. The reestablishment of Imperial administration, arms and general obedience in the later part of the third century, with the growing appeal of the Catholic lucidity and discipline, is not fortuitous.
The fact that when one man at last became the monarch of the world, Constantine, he also recognized and promoted what was to be the world-religion is not by accident; the two things were the fruit of one spirit running through Society. The Graeco-Roman world not only needed inspiration and vision which had died within it but needed also unity and the principle of certitude without which unity cannot be.
I repeat that central phrase, for it is fundamental to the whole story; so far from the Church causing the decline of Society under which the old Empire slipped into the Dark Ages, the Church saved all that could be saved
The old Roman State, be it remembered, was based on the Army; the Army was its cement, and, one might say, its principle of being.
Lastly, let it be remembered that though we must for the purposes of right history admit the continual material decline going on through those first five centuries during which the Empire turned from Pagan to Christian, the new religion brought with it invaluable compensations for evils which it had not caused, but at the advance of which it had been present.
The Catholic Church brought to the old ruined, dying, despairing Graeco-Roman world the quality of vision. It brought a motive for living and thence there came to it, sustaining all that could be sustained of that grievously weakened world, saner and more stable social arrangements.
The Catholic Church, having become the religion of the Graeco-Roman society, did among other things two capital things for the settlement of Europe on its political side, and for arresting the descent into chaos. It humanized slavery and it strengthened permanent marriage. Very slowly through the centuries, those two influences were to produce the stable civilization of the Middle Ages, wherein the slave was no longer a slave but a peasant; and everywhere the family was the well-rooted and established unit of Society
To sum up then, by the end of that great period, the first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which we suffered great damage: disorder, barbarism threatening our race, the fall of the arts, of great verse and of high unified administration, the worsening of roads, much loss of the knowledge inherited from the past (Greek, for instance, was dying out in the West, and legend was more and more intermixed with real history). But Europe at that time was spiritually consolidated so that it proved able to meet and overcome the strain to which it was about to be subjected.
That strain would have come anyhow, the violent attack under which Europe nearly broke down, “The Siege of Christendom,” was inevitable. But we survived it. Had it not been for the conversion of the world, we should have gone under.
The Siege of Christendom
In the formation of Christendom, its economic and social structure, under the influence of the Catholic Church, the next period after the first foundational one (of five hundred years) is another, also roughly five hundred years; from approximately the year 500 to about the year 1000.
It is a period of five centuries-the 6th,7th,8th,9th and 10th-which have been commonly called the “The Dark Ages,” but which may more properly be called “The Siege of Christendom.” It was the period during which the Graeco-Roman Empire, already transformed by Catholicism, fell into peril of destruction at the hands of exterior enemies. It was assaulted from the north, from the east, and from the southeast in two separate fashions. Hordes of wholly pagan barbarians, some issuing from Scandinavia, many Mongols, many Slavs, fiercely thrust at the boundaries of Christendom with the hope of looting it as their prey and therefore ruining it. These between them formed the eastern attack, coming from the districts we call today Sweden and Norway and Denmark, Poland and the Russian plains, Hungary and the Danube valley.
The struggle against these enemies of the Christian name and culture, who so nearly overwhelmed us, was at last successful. The siege was raised, we carried the influence of civilization outward among those who had been our savage opponents, and we ended by taming them until they were incorporated into a new and expanded Christian civilization. That was the work of the Christian Church in the West, the Church under the direct authority of the Western Patriarch at Rome (who is also universal primate) and of the Latin liturgy.
What happened on the southeast was quite different.There, that is, against the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, directly ruled from Constantinople, the attack took the strange form of a sudden enthusiastic movement, which was both religious and military.
It took the form of a swarm of light desert cavalry riding out from the sands of Arabia and swooping down on Greek-speaking and Greek-administered civilizations, Syria (including Palestine) and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and then, from Egypt, following up all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean between the sea and the Sahara. It reached the Atlantic itself in Morocco, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and passed northward, overran Spain and even crossed the Pyrenees.
To these mountains it was beaten back after its first northern extreme had been reached in the middle of France. This attack from the southeast was the Mohammedan attack, not pagan as was the other to the north, not savage, but from the beginning, incorporating in its conquest all the elements of civilization, developing a high literature of its own, and turning at last from a heresy, which it was in its beginnings, to what was virtually a new religion and a new type of Society-Islam.
The southeastern attack upon Christendom not only held its own, but progressed with the centuries. It was indeed somewhat thrust back in Spain after many generations had passed, but it continued very strong all over North Africa and Syria; it ultimately swamped Constantinople itself, and in quite modern times, less than a century before the Declaration of Independence, it threatened the capture of Vienna and the overwhelming of western Germany as well.
We have seen that the siege of Christendom on its southern sectors, that is, from Asia Minor to Syria, and Egypt, was of quite a different character from what it was in the north and center of Europe. We have seen that in the north and center it was an attack of savages by sea and land, without culture, letters or any system of government worthy of the name. The pressure was very heavy and lasted a long time, but the siege was raised, the attack was beaten back and Christendom itself triumphantly advanced over the populations and into the territories which had been those of the enemy.
In the south, however, the siege of Christendom by its enemies was successful. It was never raised.
It was undertaken at first by very small numbers, but under the inspiration of a religious zeal –Mohammedanism-and with the exceptional opportunity they had, the attackers took over that part of Christendom, the Greek part, which they attacked.
They took over its culture, its arts, its buildings, its general social structure, its land survey (on which the taxes were based) and all the rest of it. But the attackers imposed their new heresy which gradually became a new religion and which held power over government and society wherever the attack broke our eastern siege-line and occupied Christian territory.
The result was a complete transformation of society which rapidly grew into a violent contrast between the Orient and Europe. Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia eastward.
The opportunity for the attack on this sector was exceptional. The high Greek civilization centralized in Constantinople and its wealthy Imperial Court, defended by highly trained professional army, possessing great revenues as well, might have seemed superficially far better able to resists assaults than was Western Europe, with its conditions already half-barbaric through the long material decline, with its lack of regular armies and its divisions into half-independent local groups.
But as a fact the blow delivered against the Greeks, the Christendom of the southeast cracked the shell and had more immediate and more profound consequences than the mere raids of the east and north.)
The opportunities given for the attack from the southeast were fourfold. First, debt was universal (as it is with us today); secondly, taxes were very heavy; thirdly, a large proportion of the population were slaves (as it is with us today); fourthly, both law and theology, that is, both social practice and religious rules had become more complex than the masses could follow.
A new reforming enthusiasm invading the Empire could take advantage of all these four weaknesses: it could promise the indebted farmer, the indebted municipal authority, the wiping out of their debts; it could promise the heavily burdened small taxpayer relief from his burden; it could promise freedom to the slave and it could promise a simple-a far too simple-new set of rules for Society and a new set of practices in religion.
It was this forth appeal, the appeal to simplification, especially to simplification of religion and morals, which had the greatest force. It worked in Syria and Egypt at that moment just as it worked nine centuries later in the West during the Reformation.
This intense enthusiasm for reform arose almost wholly from the personal driving-power of one man, an Arab camel driver called Mohammed. Like all the Arabs around him in that desert region outside the jurisdiction of the Christian Empire under Constantinople, he was born a pagan.
But having wandered far afield he was deeply stirred by the religious systems, Christian and Jewish, which he came across in the civilized world. Certain main tenets appealed to him intensely; he summed them up in a body of doctrine which remained his own.
He became passionately attached to the idea of the personnel omnipotent God, the creator of all things, to His justice and His mercy, to the corresponding double fate of mankind, Heaven or Hell, to the reality of the world of good, as well as of evil, spirits, to the resurrection and immortality of human beings. All this group of simple fundamental Catholic doctrine he not only accepted but was permeated by. He was struck with awe at the contemplation of Christ and regarded Our Lord as the very first of the moral teachers and renovators of the spiritual life. And he paid deep veneration to Our Lady.
But a priesthood (which to his mind was a useless social complexity), the whole sacramental system which went with a priesthood, and that central essential pillar of Christendom, the Mass, he rejected altogether. He also rejected Baptism, retaining or accepting circumcision not only as a Jewish rite but as common among his own people. He allowed a relaxed sexual morality, concubinage and a plurality of legitimate wives, as also very easy divorce.
We must presume that this powerful zealot was sincere, that he felt vouchsafed within him a divine revelation and a mission to spread it by his burning enthusiasm. He felt himself to be in the line of the greater prophets, the last and the greatest of them all.
There may have been an element of the charlatan and deceiver about him, as his enemies’ believed in part. But for the main, for his right to his mission and his claim to be the supreme prophet of God we must believe that he was sincere. At any rate the band of men whom he convinced and gathered around him established a new heresy (for it was essentially a Christian heresy at first, though arising just outside the boundaries of Christendom) {and} fiercely propagated it by arms-a spirit which strongly appealed to the Arab temper.
The seed took vigorous root, and shortly after Mohammed’s death the band of mounted warriors, burning to spread the intense doctrine he had framed for them, burst through the confines of civilization where the desert meets the cultivated land east of Jordan.
Their success was amazing. They took Damascus, which is the key of all the Near East, and in the valley of the Yarmuk they defeated the regular Christian Byzantine Army sent against them, though it vastly exceeded them in numbers.
They swept over Syria and Mesopotamia, organizing their new power everywhere, offering freedom to the slaves and the debtors, and relief to the taxpayer wherever these would accept the religion of Mohammed. And the simplicity of the religion powerfully aided their effort. Men desiring freedom from thralldom and from debt and from the weight of the imposts joined them everywhere in great numbers.
There arose a governing Mohammedan nucleus which alone had armed power and which vastly exceeded in number the original cavalcade that had set out from the Arabian sands. The great majority of the population remained, of course, still attached more or less directly to their Catholic traditions or those of their local heresies. their practices of liturgy were tolerated by the new masters, but they no longer had any political power and all the armament was in the hands of those who were now their superiors.
The system of Mohammedan government over great regions of Christian culture spread with amazing rapidity; it swamped Egypt, using henceforth the revenues of the great wealth in the Delta and the Valley of the Nile. It passed over and dominated the Greek-speaking, Punic-speaking and Latin-speaking cities of the North African shore lying between the Mediterranean and the desert.
The triumphant invasion did not cease even when it reached the Atlantic; it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, it overran the Spanish peninsula, it crossed the Pyrenees and attempted to do to Western Christendom what it had done to Eastern.
The great wave broke when its crest had reached the center of Gaul. In a vast battle fought halfway between Tours and Poitiers the Christians under the leadership of one of the wealthiest and greatest of the Gallo-Roman families mixed with German blood-the family from which Charlemagne was to come- threw back the invasion to the Pyrenees. But beyond the Pyrenees this strange new Arabian thing, though a small minority in numbers was supreme over government and arms.
The pace of that expansion was so astonishing as to be still claimed by the Mohammedans as miraculous and as proof of their prophet’s divine mission. The original battle of Yarmuk, when the first Byzantine army had been astonished into sudden defeat at the hands of quite unexpected foes, took place in 634.
The battle between Tours and Poitiers in the heart of France was fought in 732. Not a hundred years, little more than a long lifetime, had sufficed for this prodigious expansion.
The siege of Christendom on this side, to the southeast and the south, had indeed succeeded; save Spain itself, it was never raised. On the contrary, the pressure against Christendom in the east was to remain continuous and at last to threaten all our civilization again. The Mohammedan was at the gates o Vienna less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Had he taken Vienna, he would have reached the Rhine. From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,
