Week Twelve

Saint Augustine, Confessions

What is the connection between God and Memory?

In our end, do we return to our beginning?

Under the emperor Caracalla, in A.D. 212, Roman citizenship was extended to every free male in the Empire. Even though the city of Rome (the origin of the Empire) would come to be displaced as imperial seat, throughout non-barbarian Europe, north Africa, and the non-Persian Near East, everyone was “Roman.” This Romanitas would be essential to the identity of people in both the “East” and the “West” of the Empire for centuries to come. There was a universalizing dynamic in the name of this once-obscure Latin civitas, still preserved in the term “Roman Catholic.” Adumbrated by Diocletian’s tetrarchic system (A.D. 293), marking the end of the Crisis of the Third Century, the Empire was administratively divided (though remaining a unitary state) into a western part and an eastern part in 395. The Western Roman Empire had its capital at Milan (later Ravenna), and the Eastern at Constantinople (“Nova Roma”). What was once a bilingual ruling class, began to revert to monolingualism: Latin and Greek, respectively. Aside from the superior culture, wealth, and urbanization of the East, the adoption of the Christian cause by Constantine (who reigned from 306-337) encouraged an eastward shift in the center of gravity, where all of the prime metropolitan episcopal sees were to be found, except for Rome: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The East was more Christianized. Nevertheless, when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, it was a devastating psychological blow across the Empire. The eternal city had been breached. The Empire was still spiritually rooted in this city. Here we have that civilizational tension between city and empire, which we first noted with Herodotus. Is order to be rooted in the polis, or the empire, or. . . the nation (an option provided by modernity)? Or in the individual soul’s relation to a transcendent source of order, implied in much classical philosophy and the world religions? Can one personalize the quest for order without losing the desire to realize more perfectly a universal solidarity?

- David Franks