On the Christian Revolution

  In the late 18th-Century,  Edward Gibbon, one of that century's greatest intellectuals published  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Dramatically narrating Rome's history from its rise as a conservative, masculine, and idealistic power to its maturation, over-reach, decadence, and death, he was perhaps the first modern historians to describe the natural life-cycle of Empires. This in itself was not unique, the great 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khalud also argued that all great empires enjoyed a life-cycle that damned them to decline and death. Another great modern historian of the "declinist" position than Arnold Toynbee wrote of Ibn Khalud: "He conceived and created a philosophy of history that was undoubtedly the greatest work ever created by a man of intelligence….”  (https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200605/ibn.khaldun.and.the.rise.and.fall.of.empires.htm)

 However, what was somewhat new about Gibbon's interpretation of Roman history was his emphasis on the role of revolt--and organized religion in bringing about its downfall. Besieged, by fanatical Christian radicals drawn from the urban mob and the slave masses, the Roman aristocracy, already fallen into decadence on account of its own hubris, saw its power and values slowly undermined, and the Empire hollowed out until it was a shadow of itself. The result was that the Roman political structure was unable to cope with the effects of the Barbarian invasions of the late Empire and collapsed ignominiously, bringing about a dark age from which Europe was only now recovering. For, one reason or another, historians of all different specialties and shades of the political spectrum have taken exception to this account of Roman history. Some historians have even suggested that Gibbon's visions of Christian radicals and Germanic barbarians undermining the great Empire was drawn more from contemporary threats, such as slave rebellions, and the American and French Revolutions (which broke out as Gibbon's last volumes were published) rather than the age itself. Critics before and since have opposed the notion that Christianity contributed to the fall of the Empire; contemporaries especially attacked his negative view of organized religion. But there were two gigantic figures from opposite ends of the political spectrum who never doubted this account: Frederich Engels and Frederich Nietzsche. For Engels, the Christian Revolution was: "one of the greatest revolutions of the mind in human history" it was the ultimate culmination of a cultural revolution made by Roman slaves that fundamentally changed human history, bringing the world's greatest empire to it's knees and sounding the death-knell of the slave system. Nietzsche thought similarly, which is why he denounced Christianity as a religion of revenge, even if Nietzsche's romanticization of pagan elites is excepted, what emerges clearly from his work is a vision of the Christian Revolution crippling and enslaving mankind. For Engels, this cultural/social revolution was necessity; for Nietzsche it was an aberration from a healthy sense of morality that allegedly emanated from the pagan master-class. In the final sense, it was the revenge of colonized Jewish zealots against pagan Rome and its collaborators, the visions of retribution and apocalypse spread across the Empire by these defeated and resentful zealots inflamed the slave class and the Roman mob bringing down the World Empire and its Ancient Regime.

A post-modern historian might argue that this was simply a case of the radical extremes of politics misinterpreting history in the light of modernism. After, all slavery didn't actually end in Europe until the post-Caroliginian age and the new testament (at least the one preached by the Roman Catholic Church) doesn't explicitly condemn slavery. As always according to a post-modern critic (this is said without saying it) the correct epistemology is rooted in the prejudices of the radical center. That aside, the great science fiction author and phenomenologist of fascism, Philip K. Dick believed that the Empire never really fell. He authored the VALIS trilogy of novels where Rome never fell and the last 2,000 years have been a kind of collective delusion suffered by mankind. There is some truth to this view, when the Empire formally collapsed, the informal institution of the Catholic church slowly built it's hegemony throughout Europe. Likewise, the bastard of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, which attempted to reconstruct the Empire through the military force of newly christianized German tribes, began 962 A.D. and did not formally fall until 1806. The Byzantine Empire, a regime directly descendent from Rome did not fall until 1453. Czarist Russia and the Second Reich made claims on the Imperial inheritance of Rome; they both fell in 1918. The last regime openly claiming this imperial inheritance, The Third Reich fell in 1945. The real point is not whether Roman intellectual baggage and cultural baggage continued to weigh down the brains of the living; that is indisputable; but rather, whether the true essence of the Empire and it's classical world survived. Few will claim that is so. The political unity of the regime did not even survive. What the Christian radicals did was to radically alter the essence of the Roman Empire, they radically undermined and altered nearly every European pagan culture they came in contact with.

From a Marxist perspective, I have many questions of what this meant for the means of production that prevailed in Europe. Firstly, as Marx and Engels pointed out, and as Chris Harman also pointed out in his  A People's History of the World  the main social basis of the Christian Revolution was a combination of urban artisans, the urban underclass (or proletarii) and oppressed slaves. As Christopher Wickham has pointed out in his book The Inheritance of Rome  slavery in the late Christian  Empire had for the most part become akin to serfdom. Engels argued that overcoming the vastly diffuse social groups of the Empire required putting forth an escape from life into death, to place man's salvation in the beyond. The Christian notion of equality of souls and life in the late Empire coexisted with a society based on hierarchy and even served to reinforce it. But this Christian notion contained within it a preference for an ordered feudal society, in a word, by accepting the equality of souls in the beyond, all were to accept slavery in this life, that is slavery by degrees, slavery to God and Christ. This notion of slavery and submission to the supreme being is made much more explicit in Christianity's cousin Islam. Like Christianity, Islam was a religion of the poor and excluded, this is the real origin of so-called Islamic terrorism. Mitterauer has written at length at the role of the Church in organizing property relations in Medieval Europe, as the prime organizer of these relations. And what this reveals is a preference for Feudal relationships, which slowly crowded out even the thriving slave-trade of the Carolingian Empire, the Eastern European trade which gave slavery its original ethnic connotations, "slave" deriving from slav. What this speaks to is the long-range coexistence and resistance of differing modes of production against each other. Eventually, the industrialization of grain-grinding, rather the replacement of slave-labor with water and wind power led to the fall of the remnants of slavery in Europe. Ironically, it was the "Dark Ages" in which the mechanization and true style of European agriculture truly emerged. The People of the Empire responded to the crisis of Rome and their civilization by investing their energies in new crops, new technologies, in redoubling their commitment to their crafts. Gradually, the High Middle Ages brought about an unparalleled industrialization, emerging from a triad of an apocalyptic spiritual belief in deliverance through technology or "spiritual machines" , colonization, and radical resistance and popular revolt. This led to the conjoined emergence of mercantile colonial capital and industrial mining capitalism (based primarily on water-energy) within Europe, these new forces served the feudal economy and its market place. The industrialization of Europe is to be partially sought in the peculiar need for Iron in European feudal agriculture. Eventually, agriculture and finance began their transition to modern capitalist forms, in the former emblemized in the capitalist estate of England and the rich wage-based peasant economy of the Netherlands. The latter was embodied in the proscription of feudal modes of usury in favor of modern banking and money lending practices, in particular the conjoined institutions of the republican bank and the public debt, both unique innovations of the middle ages.

Now a new heresy took hold which precedes protestantism and informs it, that of a new paradise of equality existing within this world. Although the several massive revolutions tried (and failed) to bring this new sense of equality based on the world-view and class consciousness of rich peasants, it eventually succeeded in coming to power in Early Modern and Modern Europe. Even the secular revolutionaries and reformers of the 19th century were informed by what were in reality deep scriptural roots of the coming millennium, of heaven on earth and technological transcendence. The equality of the beyond, that informed the feudalization of Europe, came more and more to represent an equality in the here and now as Europe began to be capitalized.  However, equality in the market, even more than the notion of equality of all souls in the beyond, leads inevitably to the terrorization and oppression of the vast majority, as this equality based in contractual theory in exchange tramples and oppresses others forced to engage with it. As the capitalist and the worker share theoretically equal rights, the capitalist is free to use his means of production and social power in the realm of law, to pressure the worker to work harder. Defense of the rights of all, when viewed through the prism of the market, which by its nature is an unequal method of social distribution, leads to the terrorization and usurpation of the rights of the majority. This is because the wealthy and rapacious minority lays claim to the exact same rights the majority are theoretically entitled to. To usurp their rights, as so many liberals have argued, is to throw out the entire notion of "equal right" furthermore, as long as the masses have symbolic representation according to many liberals this order does not represent tyranny.  So it would seem that the Christian Revolution was instrumental in pioneering two shifts in the mode of production, even if the theologization of public discourse inhibited clear articulation of scientific discourse and its role in inspiring revolts turn even conservative elites against religion for a brief time.

 As the French Revolution came galloping through Europe, overturning centuries, even millennia of history, enlightenment ideologues (the origin of this word is traced to counter-revolutionary secular centrists who celebrated thermidor) turned against the very revolutions they helped inspire, denouncing it as Christianity in dress and disguise. As Gibbon's apocalyptic portrait of Christianity and Roman collapse shows, this may have been truer than even they themselves claimed to know.