No artificial force of serious value
was applied to production or transportation, and when society
developed itself so rapidly in political and social lines, it had
no other means of keeping its economy on the same level than to
extend its slave-system and its fetish-system to the utmost.
The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as
early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome
fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society
forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the
slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society
no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in
order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure.
For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached
perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed
only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.
At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden,
agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire -- the poorer and less
Christianized half -- went to pieces. Society, though terribly
shocked by the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply
the disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed
to protect its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so
loud among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop
Augustine of Hippo -- a town between Algiers and Tunis -- was led
to write a famous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar
still to every scholar, in which he defended feebly the
mechanical value of the symbol -- arguing only that pagan symbols
equally failed -- but insisted on its spiritual value in the
Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the Civitas Romae in
human interest.
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