The founder of Rome is said to have been Romulus. The year was 753 B.C. After a series of kings who reigned for two and a half centuries came the Republic, which lasted until Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Augustus is counted as the first emperor. It was during his long rule (31 B.C. to A.D. 14) that Christ was born “in the fullness of time.”
The empire grew and eventually incorporated parts of Britain, the Iberian peninsula, and the entire circumference of the Mediterranean. In some ways its success brought on its collapse. Barbarian tribes, eager to share in the riches of the empire, repeatedly made incursions. At length the grandeur that was Rome went the way of the glory that was Greece.
The last emperor had the ironic name of Romulus Augustulus (“Little Augustus”). The imperial line ended in an ineffective youth who was named after the founder of Rome and the greatest emperor while having the attributes of neither. Then came the Dark Ages, which were full of light.
That light was the gospel. By the time the Roman Empire ended, Christianity not only was well established but had been the official religion for three generations. When the old gods no longer could sustain civilization, the Church of the real God built a new one.
We read this as history. Perhaps we should be reading it as current events. While nearly everyone in the last years of the Roman Empire understood that things were awry, few understood what really was happening. They did not see that they were at the “end of an age,” to use Catholic historian John Lukacs’s phrase.
Today we again are at the end of an age. Pope Benedict XVI has noted that “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as for certain and has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” This is political and moral narcissism. No civilization can live in such soil.
Augustine died half a century before Romulus Augustulus was overthrown, but he wrote The City of God because he recognized that the empire was expiring and that Christianity would have to be the thing that informed and nurtured what was to follow. A dark night was coming, but there would be a few candles to give light until the new sunrise.
We are entering a new dark night, but many people are oblivious to the fact, just as many were oblivious in the fourth century. No matter. As it did then, the Catholic Church will be the carrier of not only religious truth but civilization itself. Our modern Little Augustuses will fall—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough—and something else will follow. What that something will be will be determined largely by what we do now. Like Augustine, we may not live to see the new sunrise, but we can prepare for it by igniting candles of faith throughout the world.