Knowledge And Decisions

Religious intellectuals in the later Roman Empire, after it became Christian, created a “systematic, active intolerance” that was “something hitherto unknown in the Mediterranean world.”¹³⁹ There had been “transient persecutions”¹⁴⁰ of early Christians, whose doctrinal abhorrence of “idolatry” had led them to disdain, insult, and even disrupt other religions.¹⁴¹ But it was only with the triumph of Christianity, and especially of theological intellectuals like Augustine, that intolerance and persecution became pervasive in the Roman Empire. Pagan sacred books were burned,¹⁴² pagan traditions persecuted,¹⁴³ and a “forced Christianization”¹⁴⁴ imposed on the Roman Empire, which had long had religious diversity and tolerance as a means of preserving political tranquility and unity. The attempt to impose a particular intellectual (religious) unity or orthodoxy created political disunity as “the bands of civil society were torn asunder by the fury of religious factions.”¹⁴⁵ A theoretical controversy among Christian intellectuals over the nature of the Trinity “successively penetrated into every part of the Christian world.”¹⁴⁶ In the wake of this and other theological disputes followed violence and atrocities by Christians on other Christians deemed heretical.¹⁴⁷ In many provinces, “towns and villages were laid waste and utterly destroyed.”¹⁴⁸ After a respite of tolerance under the Emperor Julian,¹⁴⁹ persecution was resumed under his successors.¹⁵⁰ The internecine violence among various denominations of Christians took far more lives than all the earlier persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire.¹⁵¹ Like later totalitarian persecutions in the twentieth century, the persecutions by the Christians produced the emigration of some of the “most industrious subjects” of the Roman Empire, taking with them “the arts both of peace and war.”¹⁵² Centuries later, the Reformation brought forth freedom — not by intention but systemically, from the new diversity of power sources. The Protestant Reformation was as intolerant and bloody as any Catholic inquisition.¹⁵³ Freedom “was the consequence rather than the design of the Reformation.”¹⁵⁴

In the Roman Empire, as with later persecutions, the abstruse issues involved were matters of moment only to intellectuals. Yet the rival intellectuals’ attempts to impose their own vision by force produced mass devastation and a divisiveness that contributed to the decline and fall of the empire.¹⁵⁵ Its immediate effect was to vastly expand the scope of government power into an area — religion — which had once been a realm of freedom.

Such patterns — intellectuals promoting government power and intolerant divisiveness — were not peculiar to the Roman Empire, nor even to Western civilization. In the later dynasties of the Chinese empire, intellectuals also rose to dominance, producing a similar pattern in a very different setting. Beginning with the Sung dynasty (960-1127 a.d.), “scholar-officials,” chosen by examinations, dominated the Chinese government and society.¹⁵⁶ Rulers became more autocratic, and government powers more centralized and pervasive in their scope, including “smothering government control of large scale business”¹⁵⁷ and a “secret police almost unfettered by legal restraints.”¹⁵⁸ Later, the “recurrent factional controversies” among the intellectuals running the government became “a major factor in the decline of the Ming dynasty.”¹⁵⁹ As in ancient Rome, so in the later Chinese empire, the military profession was downgraded¹⁶⁰ and the army “declined in strength and fighting ability.”¹⁶¹ As in ancient Rome, this was the prelude to the Chinese empire’s being overwhelmed militarily by foreign peoples once disdained as barbarians.