Way back in the early 4th century A.D., the West’s newly-birthed Christendom was having a difficult time. Although granted legal status in 313, Christianity would not be declared as the official state religion until 380, creating a kind of historical limbo. This was due in large part to the pressures put on the West by the various tribes migrating into Europe at the time – the Vandals and Lombards, Ostrogoths and Slavs.
Indeed, so much change was happening that a kind of social and provincial fragmentation was occurring, accompanied by a weakened central authority, the cause of which historians are still not in agreement.
Norman Davies writes about this in his monumental “Europe: A History”:
The fifth-century collapse of the Empire’s Western provinces came as the result of long decay. It is doubtful whether the barbarian invasions did more than catalyze a process which was already well advanced. Some, like Gibbon, have stressed the decadent luxury of the ruling class. Others have stressed socio-economic factors—monetary and price inflation, over-taxation, bureaucracy, agricultural decline, which in turn produced what Ferdinand Lot called ‘a regime of castes.’ Ossification of the social strata was accompanied by a ‘total transformation of human psychology.’ Here above all was the classic case of imperial ‘overstretch’: the Empire could not sustain the military effort indefinitely. The imperial armies were so saturated by the barbarian soldiers and ex-barbarian generals that the old distinction between Roman and non-Roman became increasingly irrelevant.
At any rate, it was a time when the future of our own civilization was hanging by a precarious thread and might have been given over to barbarian and Islamic factions had help not arrived from a somewhat unexpected source.
Gordon Kerr, in the book, “A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Lisbon,” tells of how the East was on the upswing, even as the West seemed in decline:
It had been the Emperor Theodosius (ruled 379-395) … who had made the fateful decision to split the empire in two…. As various invaders overran the Western half in the course of the next century, the Eastern Empire was left relatively unscathed.
This fact proved pivotal for many reasons, not the least of which is that it allowed for the birth of the Emperor Justinian, perhaps the West’s greatest hero.
Reigning from 527 to 565 A.D., Justinian the Great was known for his commitment to putting the West back together. He was born in Dardania – part of the Eastern Roman Empire – was schooled in Constantinople, and later ruled from there as emperor. Justinian was known for his preoccupations with the western half of the Empire, namely, recovering the provinces that were lost in recent past centuries. Through his general, Belisarius, he successfully defended Rome against a barbarian invasion in 537-8 A.D., and also reclaimed Italy from the hands of its enemies.
Davies writes:
In 553 the campaign of Narses, an ageing eunuch of the Palace, completed what Belisarius had begun: Italy was restored as an imperial province with a governor at Ravenna; the Ostrogoths and their horde were dispersed. In 554, the imperialists attacked Spain, driving the Visigoths into the central plateau and re-establishing a Roman province in the south.
Reflecting on this, I can’t help but think of the challenges faced in our own time. Might we ourselves not be saved by our own help from the East?
It isn’t difficult to see how such a thing might happen. Who has not read of the successes of Poland and Hungary? Sustained by a commitment to their historical and moral core, these countries have refused the trend toward secularism and open borders, thereby preserving themselves from much of the social upheaval taking place elsewhere in the West. One might, with some precautions, add Russia to this list as well, for the country seems to have learned from the West's errors the warnings of Solzhenitsyn, who said that a country that turns its back on God is ultimately doomed.
Justinian’s reclaiming of much of the western half of the empire faced its own challenges, as the hordes of invaders simply kept coming. But it did buy Europe time, so that, when the tribes were ultimately to have their day, the Christianity of both invader and defender would provide a bridge, a cultural continuity to see Europe into the next centuries.
We have this opportunity now, as well as a model via the countries mentioned above for how such a thing might be done. The East came to our rescue at least once before. Will our own Western leaders, by following these examples, allow it to do so again?
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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