We need a new religion

Sunday, June 19th, 2016

We need a new religion, Spandrell suggests:

We sorely need one. And we will likely get one. But we might not like how it turns out.

In 200 AD, the Roman Empire was the largest, richest and most powerful empire on Earth. Roman civilization extended from Britain to Mesopotamia. Vast trade networks allowed for large and advanced industries that provided a very high standard of living, far above anything in the past. Rome was so great it seemed it would last forever.

Then a couple of substandard emperors, a military setback and a mutiny suddenly saw the Empire fracture into 3 parts, hundreds of thousands of barbarians entering the borders, plundering and murdering as they pleased. It took 50 whole years until Aurelian rebuilt the army, expelled the barbarians, and reunified the realm. But it was never the same. Too many people had died. Cities now had to build high walls to defend themselves, trade routes had been destroyed, the whole administrative apparatus had to be rebuilt from scratch.

All that was taken care of, especially by Docletian, who was very much interested in how to run a government. But still, as much as Roman emperors reformed the army and the administration, the virtue of the empire, the real power of Rome, the roman people, that was over. Any Roman of learning knew that. And they all wanted to do something to get it back. To fix Rome, to bring it back to its golden era. Romans used to be virtuous, strong, hard-working, just men. Not anymore. The Romans of the late empire were a fickle bunch, interested in frivolous sex, in sodomy, in spectator sports. We have almost no literary works from the late Empire; the Romans appeared to be uninterested in learning. Nor they cared to breed and form families. The whole society was a wreck.

The few virtuous Romans who noticed that must have wanted to fix this desperately, to use the power of the state to bring the Romans back to their virtuous, frugal and wise past, when men fought for their country, cared to learn about the mysteries of human existence, and took care of their wives and children. But none of those efforts worked.

What happened? A weird cult from the obscure province of Judaea, where people worshipped some countryside carpenter son of an old man with a teenager, who apparently got pregnant without having sex. Then the man started to preach about loving your enemies, rescued whores from stoning, made wine from water, told the poor that after death they’d lord over the rich; and other absurd stuff. The guy was justly executed by the Roman governor as an agitator but his followers believe he then came back to life and ascended to heaven with his mother.

The cult grew by preaching to women, to the poor, to slaves, to all manner of disaffected people. They formed local communities where they read this weird compendium of miracles of this Jewish lord of them. The Roman authorities killed some of them ever now and then but the guys appeared to like it! They called the dead “martyrs”, and some of them appeared to actively seek martyrdom, as they believe it would pay off with privileges after dead. Bunch of provincial weirdos. Even weirder than the Jews they splintered from. That the Empire has declined to such an extent has much to do with this and other weird sects who are fooling the commoners, and even some women of good families! Scandalous.

No offense intended, early Christianity was in many ways a superior lifestyle compared to mainstream Roman life, which had plenty of weird stuff in it. But to any good old Roman patrician, the growth of Christianity, Manicheism and other assorted sects must have looked incredibly weird and threatening. As much as the Empire needed reform, nobody desired this kind of reform. To replace the classics of Greece and Rome with the made up history of some desert goat herders, to give rights to women and slaves, to encourage death and meekness instead of the classical warrior ethos going back for millennia. This is madness.Rome has to wake up. We can’t let this happen.

But it happened. Rome never woke up. Classical civilization kept on with its decline, and eventually Constantine, a pragmatic man who just wanted a stable empire that obeyed his commands, made Christianity into the state religion. It replaced Roman civilization, little by little. Half the Empire died on the process, by the way. The invaders became Christians too, but never Romans.

The Romans of its golden age often said that the secret of Roman success was its religio, by which they mean their piousness, how their discipline was so tight they followed the old religious practices of paganism to the letter, no matter how useless they might have seemed. Worried Romans of the late empire must have thought all the time that Rome needed its religion back. They never got it back. They got a new religion. A pretty horrible one, for anyone who appreciated old Classical civilization. But a religion they got, and it wasn’t that bad. Most of the Western empire still speaks Latin to this day. The Eastern half even kept calling himself the Roman Empire for a thousand years.

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