The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [455]
In the early years of the fourth century AD, just after the emperor Diocletian had made a last ruthless but forlorn effort to re-establish the status of the old GraecoRoman gods, came the dramatic moment in 312 when, on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge which was finally to confirm him as sole ruler of the Roman empire, Constantine had a dream of the cross of Christ, accompanied by the legend `In hoc vinces': `in this sign you shall conquer'. The following year, in his Edict of Milan, for the first time Christians were given full civil rights throughout the empire which had put the founder of their religion to death three centuries before. In 324 Constantine declared Christianity to be its official religion, and six years later established his `city of Constantine, Constantinople, as its new capital. In one mighty bound, Christianity had finally moved from `below the line' to being so `above the line' that it was to shape the ruling consciousness of European civilisation for much of the next 2000 years.
Heaven, hell and judgement
Even in the century before Constantine, the Roman empire had already been under attack from that other presence which the Roman world viewed as `below the line': those troublesome tribes of Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alemanni and Huns who inhabited the `badlands' of central and eastern Europe beyond its frontiers. A century later the great secular power which had dominated the Mediterranean world and half of Europe for seven centuries was in terminal disintegration. The city of Rome itself was repeatedly sacked and pillaged by the `barbarian hordes', until in 476 the last western emperor, tellingly named after the city's founder Romulus, was deposed. In the west the only ghostly legacy of Rome's imperium was the Papacy, which remained the ruling power of the Christian church. The eastern empire, centred on Constantinople, lived on to enjoy a last sunset moment of glory in the early sixth century, in the reign of Justinian, before beginning its long fade into that twilight which would only end 900 years later.
From the deserts of the Arabian peninsula to the south, the seventh century saw the sudden meteoric rise of the world's last great new monotheistic religion. Islam (meaning `submission' of the individual ego to the will of God) took on elements of both Judaism and Christianity, while omitting others. Born in the harsh world of the desert, the new religion shared the overtly `masculine' character of Judaism, with its emphasis on obedience, rituals, law and discipline. It thus had little place for that emphasis on love and compassion by which Christianity had softened and `feminised' the Judaism from which it originally sprang. But, unlike Judaism, Islam did not see itself as the religion just of one tribal group. It shared with Christianity a missionary zeal to convert the whole of mankind. Indeed, such was the power of the explosive new spiritual force unleashed by the prophet Mohammed that, within a century of his death, his armed followers had not only swept through North Africa and Spain but seemed on the verge of taking over much of western Europe, until in 732 their advance was halted by the Franks at Tours. But in many ways, with its intellectual vitality, its art, architecture and mathematics and its preservation of Greek learning, the consciousness of this new southern civilisation was to outshine the rest of the western world for 300 years.
Bereft of that unifying power which for so long had brought it order and civilisation, western Europe was now firmly plunged into what became known as the Dark Ages. The remains of the Roman cultural inheritance rapidly crumbled before the expansionism of those Germanic and Norse peoples who had never been part of the Roman empire: the Franks, who gave their name to France; the Angles and Saxons who occupied much of the island of Britain; Jutes, Danes, Swedes and Vikings from Scandinavia. But even in these dark and confused times, Christianity continued to make its own advances, as when in the seventh century