A. D.

In the spring of 432, Laoghaire, ruler of a petty kingdom in northern Ireland, gathered his court near Tara to celebrate the annual rites of his pagan religion. The Christian missionary Patrick, appeared in the midst of the gathering, confounded the King’s magicians with a miracle of fire and — on Easter Sunday — converted Laoghaire. Patrick went on to strengthen the fledgling Christian Church in the Emerald Isle and to establish a religious tradition that was to endure for centuries. As Continental Europe slipped into the Dark Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was the monks of Ireland who kept alive the flame of faith and who as missionaries — brought that faith back to the lands where it had been lost. According to the annals of Ireland, St. Patrick arrived there in 432 and died three decades later, in 461. His mission to Ireland had been prompted by a series of dreams or visions, which strengthened an earlier resolve to dedicate himself to God’s service. His great work, the Confessio (written about 450), is his spiritual autobiography, his account of his dependence upon God for his ability to carry out this resolve. We gather from Patrick’s own words that the journey of 432 was made with a set purpose, the evangelization of Ireland. He recognized to the full, his natural disabilities, such as teaching and writing in a tongue not his own, but outweighing all these, was his unshakable belief that God had dedicated him to be a bishop to the Irish. An inscribed stone at County Kerry in Ireland, one of several examples of monuments of pagan Druidic ritual which have been adapted with Christian symbols by early Christian worshipers for their own use. When St. Patrick went to Ireland he knew very well, what …

The Arian threat occured in the fourth century, which opened with the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, closed with the beginning of the Dark Ages. Leaders of the barbarian tribes, massing outside the Empire’s frontiers, had already infiltrated their agents into the high places of imperial politics. The old order of Roman imperial administration, already severely weakened in the late third century and only partly restored by the reforms of Diocletian, was gradually disrupted during the years following Constantine’s death. Thus, the gulf between the East, where the imperial system continued and the West, where conditions of virtual anarchy came to prevail, can be clearly seen. The breakup of the West into a number of smaller units was already in prospect. The main subject of this passage will be events in Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire, but at the same time, things were happening outside Europe in some cases parallel to European history, in others, dramatically different from it. The World of the Orient In the Far East, the once-great empire of Han China had fallen apart in the early third century and China was long, to remain in a state of political turmoil. Then came the establishment of the Tsin dynasty in the year 265 and about this time, a new force was beginning to make itself felt in northern China. During the fourth and fifth centuries, meanwhile, the Tsin were to extend their power into the southeast and a new era, in Chinese social and cultural history, was inaugurated. Taoist stele; northern Wei period At first the Tsin power in the north had been severely curtailed by the incursion from beyond the frontiers of Hunnic tribes from central Asia. A number of warring barbarian dynasties were established in the north, but they were supplanted in …

Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, ensures the spread of Christianity, throughout the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire, at the end of the third century A.D., was at the point of collapse. Struggles amongst rival emperors brought frequent civil wars, while barbarian hordes threatened the borders. Early in the new century, a soldier named Constantine proclaimed himself Emperor and immediately set out to make good his claim in a series of campaigns that took him, by the summer of 312, to the edge of Rome. Constantine had a momentous vision — a vision in which he was told, that he would conquer in the sign of the Cross, the symbol of the despised young Christian religion. The warrior’s subsequent victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge won for Christianity, an end to persecution and recognition as a legal religion. The third century of the Christian era was a grim, squalid age. For centuries the Roman Empire had maintained peace and fostered prosperity throughout the Mediterranean world, but now it was in decline. Stable central power had collapsed, as a succession of would-be warlords marched their predatory armies up and down the Empire, striving to seize power or to hold it against their rivals. Sometimes the legions actually put the Empire up for auction. At one and the same time, there might be three or four self-styled emperors. None of them lasted long. An allegorical figure on the pediment beneath the colossal head of Constantine in Rome, representing one of the provinces of the Empire. Meanwhile, the lot of the common man became ever more miserable and uncertain as cities were sacked, the countryside ravaged and wealth confiscated to pay the rapacious soldiery. Debasement of the currency and interruption of trade routes led to galloping inflation. The urbane, sophisticated culture …

A. D. is not meant to imply a time when fires were burning continually from 312 A.D. to 1204 A.D. Yet fires there were: fires lit by zealous men that consumed the ancient gods, ancient cultures and eventually men themselves. The rise of Christianity, to its position as the official Church of Constantine’s Empire, was accompanied by fires, in which the temples and other treasures of ancient cultures were destroyed — for example, the library at Alexandria. Then the Islamic fires from the desert seemed to consume the gardens of late antiquity, where vases and statues had survived from the age of Hellenism. At the dawn of our own age, in 1204 A.D., the crusaders plundered and set fire to Constantinople and destroyed, for the time being at least, the Empire of the Romans. The Byzantine Empire and in particular Constantinople itself, with its glittering palaces, its baths, its art treasures and its luxury, was coveted as much by the tenth-century Ottonian Germans as by the Franks — the Latin Christians of 1204 A.D. The fires of faith, the bright lights of destruction, the explosions of fanaticism, the everlasting wars and feuds that filled this era — was there ever a year when there reigned a peace comparable to the pax romana that Augustus had envisaged, or the pax mongolica, that the great Mongolian khans created, at the height of their power ? All the undoubted devastation should not make us forget that the fires of faith brought life as well as destruction. The contents of this post demonstrate that the dynamic forces that created the western world had their origin in these troubled centuries, and that the foundations of European culture up to the present day were laid over a thousand years ago. We know both a great deal …