In the ruins of Rome

On lamps and empires

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836)

Rome had been besieged and its citizens had been forced to buy their lives with gold. Then thus despoiled they had been besieged again so as to lose not their substance only but their lives. My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay more famine was beforehand with the sword and but few citizens were left to be made captives. In their frenzy the starving people had recourse to hideous food; and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat.^[1]

Two years after the Visigoths had sacked the eternal city, the memory of those fateful days still brought tears to the eyes of St Jerome. In 409, with the Visigoths on the rampage, he had foretold the coming cataclysm in a prophetic adaptation of Lucan’s words: ‘If Rome be lost, where shall we look for help?’^[2] And, true enough, when the time came, helplessness was all he felt: wondering at the collapse of Christian civilisation, the massacre of innocents, the shaking of the very foundations of Christendom. Rome would limp on, of course. It was not until 476 that her last (western) emperor, the puppet Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic warlord Odoacer. But in 410 she had been dealt the fatal psychological and spiritual blow of defeat at the hands of marauding pagans, the very pagans who were meant to have been subjugated by the coming of Christ’s kingdom, embodied in the conversion of once-persecutory Rome—or so much Christian thinking went. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the aftermath of Visigothic violence, hurried to disentangle the earthly city, Rome, from the heavenly city, in his magisterial De civitate Dei. He needed to. Just twenty years after the sack of Rome, the Vandals, another Germanic tribe, arrived to besiege Hippo. The great saint died with invaders at the gates.

At her funeral in 1901, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, ruler of the world’s largest empire, selected a hymn more commonly sung at vespers: ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’, penned by the Anglican hymnodist John Ellerton. Ellerton’s final verse must have carried peculiar weight, sung amidst the quiet stalls of a millennium-old abbey at the heart of the world’s great empire:

So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,
Like earth’s proud empires, pass away;
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

119 years later, on Monday 19^th September 2022, it was the first hymn sung at the state funeral of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II: whose life and reign, for all its undoubted vibrancy, had reflected the fading glory of earth’s proud empires, the prophetic force of Ellerton’s hymn, and Queen Victoria’s courageous choice of it.

Empires come and go. Regimes change. The proud forces of this earth are not eternal, for all their pomp and show. Only the kingdom of God is:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
does its successive journeys run,
his kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
till moons shall wax and wane no more.

And yet these processes happen in the longue durée. Collapse might be swift, and usually far more imminent than the denizens of comfortable civilisations ever care to think—but often it is the result of long processes, of forces spanning decades and centuries, compounded of complexities that no single generation can reckon with.

That, I believe, is the mistake of many commentators on the right today, who lament the apparent decline of western civilisation and propose hearty remedies. When the American right, somewhat self-servingly, sees the United Kingdom as a civilisation in disarray and terminal decline, pointing to unchecked immigration, progressive self-effacement, or declining literacy; or when the British right herald one or another political leader or movement as the solution to Make Britain Great Again—we are, usually, viewing recent events with a starkly foreshortened horizon of understanding. Not that I am condemning action, or indeed hope; I am definitely hopeful, and pious refusal to dirty one’s hands in the name of the purity of one’s political hopes is not a stance that should garner much respect. But we need to grasp that our current woes are not the product, at least in the first instance, of recent events, seismic though they may appear: the crash, the advent of social media, the Arab spring, war in Ukraine, etc. They belong instead to far more deep-seated historical causes, to the aching (and irrevocable) movements of cultural tectonic plates, to decisions made and causes pressed by men forgotten long ago.

European society certainly stands on a knife-edge: that much is clear for all to see. Things could collapse. When they do, it is not normally pretty. But these are, in many senses, the downpayments of long-dead events. Europe in particular stands in the shadow of her bloody wars, the new Dark Age of the first half of the twentieth century. These were cataclysms from which European society—the society that created almost all the cultural goods we hold so dear—has never recovered. We have recovered economically, of course, to some extent, though the predominance of the United States was pretty much assured by the two World Wars; but the loss of cultural confidence that the wars precipitated has never been reversed.

We went into the First World War as the most advanced societies history has ever known. These societies, built over long centuries in the shadow of Rome, were shaped above all by Christianity. Their lived commitment to Christian tenets variously waned and waxed, of course, but the cultural pillars of the dominant European societies—scientific curiosity and technological advancement; the rule of law; care for human life; a keen sense of justice; toleration—these emerged from a decidedly Christian view of things. The Church was central to the life of our nations. And from these principles had emerged, for better or worse—and never without its contradictions—world-conquering capabilities, capabilities exploited in ruthless competition for imperial expansion between Europe’s great powers.

It was an inherently unstable situation. In part because the seeds of the demise of Christian empires are sown in their very basic framework; but also because of the peculiar geopolitical reality of vast, world-spanning empires all concentrated in a narrow corner of the Eurasian landmass, with near-neighbours (culturally and geographically) competing for far-flung territories. Tensions, naturally, ran high. But so too—and also quite naturally—did cultural confidence, manifested most wonderfully in the rich outpouring of literary and artistic advancements, and more sinisterly in the jingoistic anthems and brutal territorial expansions of the imperial powers. And, most darkly of all, in war: a European land war of savage scale and brutal violence, when the very cultural blessings that had fuelled Europe’s sense of societal and political pre-eminence—technological advancements, educational and intellectual attainment—were meted out with cruel exactitude on the killing fields of Flanders.

The cataclysm—which really I view as a single drawn-out event, from 1914 to 1945—was not one that the ancien régime of European Christendom could ever recover from. The old order, and its cultural confidence, could not survive the earthquake of a global industrial war of its own making. It had destroyed itself. But what would replace it? At various points the alternatives to Christian Europe have seemed rather confident—the lofty ideals of Lennon’s universal brotherhood of man, the radical re-thinking of women in society pioneered by Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, the novel autonomy of the sexual revolution. But that confidence is specious. These were little more than parasitic ideologies, dependent on the cultural achievements of the ancien régime, having at their core the urge to tear down, to atomise, to cast asunder the thick social ontology of the old societies; but without a coherent vision of what to replace them with, and certainly without due recognition of the cultural achievements of the older age. The current concern of the young for tradition, sobriety—and, yes, religion—speaks to the vacuousness of this post-war iconoclasm.

We cannot roll back the clock. There is a mystery to all these forces, and anyone who thinks to understand them—or worse, control them—should not be taken seriously. In America, never embroiled in the causes of European war in quite the same way, and enjoying a continental, rather than transnational, empire, the situation is rather different: and there the continued currency of the Christian church, and a kind of cultural confidence, suggest a different future trajectory. I wish them well.

But I fear that Sir Edward Grey, England’s longest-serving foreign secretary, and would-be saviour of pre-war Europe, was all too right in his prognosis of the bleak future then lumbering into view in August 1914. As dusk settled on London on the evening of Tuesday 4^th August, 1914, he looked out the windows of his Foreign Office rooms at St James’ Park. Lamps were being lit on the street. To him they seemed a parable. So he remarked to J.A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, in words that now ring prophetic: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our own life-time.’

I fear we still have not seen them lit. But that, of course, is the way things go. Earth’s proud empires pass away. Civilisations fade into obsolescence. They do so, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly; but always with a certain mystery, one that defies simple commentary.

And yet, lamps are being lit: lit all round the globe, in places of which our journalists rarely speak, and of which they hardly know. There is one kingdom that grows—always grows—and lasts forever. We regularly sing of it. We would do well to remember it.

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^[1] St Jerome, Letter 127 (A.D. 412).

^[2] St Jerome, Letter 123, (A.D. 409).