Christianity broke the spirit of the empire

The argument

From Constantine I onwards Rome became increasingly Christian. The Emperor Theodosius I effectively banned paganism, and the Catholic church became an increasingly powerful institution. Theodosius I is widely believed to have been entirely under the influence of St Ambrose, the then Bishop of Milan — which, on this argument, illustrates the direction the change had taken: imperial policy answering to a churchman rather than the church answering to the emperor. The significance of that change lies in what paganism had been doing for the Roman state. Paganism was intimately tied up with civic duties such as the building of public buildings. Religious observance and public service were not separate spheres; honouring the gods was something a citizen did through the city, so that the upkeep of its public fabric and the practice of its religion belonged to a single obligation. Paganism was also related to the martial spirit of the Empire, supplying the framework within which military service was understood as something owed. By removing the framework of pagan belief, and awarding power to the Catholic church, whose concerns were more otherworldly in nature, the Roman state was undermined. The institution that increasingly commanded the loyalty of Romans directed that loyalty somewhere other than the city and the legion. The cultural shift towards Christianity created a preoccupation with death, dying, and the next life — a reorientation which, whatever its spiritual merits, gave a citizen less reason to invest in the earthly order and less reason to risk himself defending it. Rome's success as an Empire came in part from its earthy, pagan value system, and on this account that system was not replaced by an equivalent but by something pointed in a different direction entirely. The catholic church became a rival to civic institutions rather than a support to them. Christianity, this argument holds, broke the spirit of the empire, and that cultural cause belongs among the reasons the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument that Christianity caused the fall of Rome mostly comes from Edward Gibbon's very influential history. He was writing during the enlightenment, a period of anti-religious backlash. Gibbon also dismisses the survival of the also Christian Eastern Roman Empire. This is likely due to prejudice against what was seen as an “Eastern” civilization. The Byzantine Empire was frequently the wealthiest, most civilized and successful civilization of the Middle Ages. For much of Western history, many historians have acted as if the Byzantine Empire did not even exist. The move towards more other-worldly introspective religions was not confined to just Christianity in the Late Roman period. There were many pagan rivals to Christianity which had an impractical transcendental focus. Nobody has yet proven that an abstract set of values had any effect on the myriad economic and military causes of the fall of the West, which are better attributed to mismanagement and catastrophe. Rome fell for many reasons. Christianity did not prevent the Eastern Empire from suriving.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That paganism produced Rome's martial spirit is asserted rather than shown. Military expansion and traditional religious practice coincided for centuries, and the argument never establishes which produced which. [Rejecting P2] The turn toward otherworldly religion was not confined to Christianity, as the counter-argument notes, and the decisive objection is the Eastern Empire: at least as Christian, it survived for another thousand years. The thesis traces to Gibbon, writing in a period of anti-clerical reaction, and no one has connected an abstract shift in values to the fiscal, military and administrative failures the rival positions identify.