The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church.

IN THE WEST, the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity have long served as historical paradigms. Battles have raged over the interpretation of these events, particularly among those who read Roman history as a duel to the death between pagan and Christian virtue. Certainly America's Founding Fathers looked to the Classical paradigms for guidance. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and others read Roman history as a warning, Hamilton denies, in Number 70 of The Federalist, that modern nations will learn much from "the dim light of historical research," but then turns to the history of the Roman Empire in search of support for his view that there should be no division of the Executive power. Burke, Adam Smith, and Tocqueville also drew sophisticated lessons about contemporary France, Britain, and America from Roman history. Even Karl Marx could not help admitting that in considering several facets of modern history, he was "reminded of Rome."

Jaroslav Pelikan, the distinguished professor of history at Yale, takes an original approach to the fall of the Roman Empire by alternating chapters on the two major forces in the interpretation of the subject: Edward Gibbon and several Fathers of the Church.

Gibbon more than anyone else is responsible for the common idea of the fall of Rome as the result of progressive decadence, "the triumph of barbarism and religion," as he put it. Although Pelikan hastens to point out that Gibbon was not quite sure if barbarism and religion were the same thing, and that his views of Rome's decline and fall took into account multiple factors, nonetheless, Gibbon's scorn for the intervening Christian centuries marks the high point of Enlightenment self-satisfaction. Today, even a Gibbon would be much less triumphalist about human virtue. In fact, human and religious virtue have come to seem more and more on the same side against large segments of modern opinion that deride the very concept of virtue.

In this, the modern secularist would find himself for the most part in agreement with several of the Church Fathers. Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and others had mixed feelings about the tremendous social upheavals they were witnessing. Although some Christians saw Rome's fall in apocalyptic terms, most were caught between an admiration for parts of the old Roman legacy and the Christian hope for something better. In the Eastern Empire, though, as Pelikan documents, the fall of the West dovetailed nicely with the wish to see the rise of Constantinople as the emergence of a new Christian Empire.

Pelikan also corrects the widespread impression that the history of the Church over the first centuries is one of decline from pristine purity and simplicity to corrupting contact with the larger society. As is already detectable in Paul's letters, party spirit and various excesses affected the Church from the very first. The shift from a largely Jewish to a mostly gentile Church, says Pelikan, was a key factor. By the time the Church "triumphed," it was ethnically as heterogeneous as the rest of Roman society. This fact and the new opportunities created by the conversion of Constantine confronted Christians with serious questions about the use of wealth and power. To apply Ernst Troeltsch's categories retroactively, they had to deal with being a church instead of a sect.

In the second century, the pagan Celsus could still be puzzled by Christianity. The pagan religions demanded purity, he said. The Church welcomed and forgave the corrupt: "Whosoever is a sinner, they say, whosoever is unwise, whosoever is a child, and, in a word, whosoever is a wretch, the kingdom of God will receive him." The implication, for Celsus as for Gibbon, was that the Church encouraged ignorance and foolishness. The Church Fathers rebutted this charge, and the subsequent history of Christian social responsibility has proved them right. Nevertheless, the unifying sweep of Gibbon's eighteenth-century confidence in human virtue and scorn for the vast stretches of human darkness that he associated with religion has a power that still outweighs the labors of numerous revisionist historians.

Pelikan weaves these and many other threads into a dazzling historical tapestry. While academic historians of his caliber continue to write, our universities cannot entirely lose their memories. But in spite of the historical imagination that Pelikan brings to this enterprise, we are left with the feeling that the book will probably have a very limited readership. Far from reflecting on the value of Pelikan's work, this signifies that both the Enlightenment project and Christian history seem to have lost sway over the American imagination.

Yet perhaps even in this there is a lesson to be drawn from the fall of Rome. And as in so much else about America, Tocqueville was the first to draw it. Noting the American propensity to stick to the practical and neglect the theoretical, he, too, was "reminded of Rome": "Because Roman civilization perished through barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too much inclined to think that this is the only way a civilization can die." But, he warned, unless we make a conscious choice to understand first principles, "if the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord."