Fall of Empire
Sir: Simon Raven's view of the causation of the fall of the West Roman Empire is entertaining and perceptive. However, it is also a little one-sided. Bureaucracy and Christianity were not confined to the Western part of the empire. Byzantium possessed both to a greater degree. Yet, as Simon Raven remarks, it survived to 1453—and some would argue that the essential features of the East Roman polity are preserved (though with a different faith) in the imposing imperium that stretches from the Elbe to Manchuria.
The more interesting question is why the West did not become another Byzantium. In the East, the state bureaucracy succeeded in taxing the senatorial aristocracy out of existence and subordinating the Christian church to civil authority. As a result, it coped with a barbarian challenge (from Goths and Huns) as serious as that which overwhelmed the West as well as the military threat of an equal super-power in Sassanid Persia (to which there was no Western equivalent).
My own suspicion is that the reason for Western failure was, partly, as Simon Raven suggests, social divisions in the West, but this is not the whole story. They could have been resolved, as in the East, by the combination of a strong Emperor and an independent bureaucracy (i.e. one of middle-class rather than aristocratic origins) dispossessing the non-functional senatorial aristocracy (as the barbarians did anyway in the end) and subordinating the Church. Unfortunately, the cities in the West were not large enough to engender an adequate middle class. The privileged groups, the aristocracy and the Church, transferred taxation to the peasants to the point where the independent peasantry, the principal source of soldiers and taxes, was destroyed. They then allowed the state to go bankrupt.
If there is a parallel in the recent history of the United Kingdom, it is in the effective cessation of taxation on large companies, with the consequent increase in the burdens borne by smaller firms and by working people. To the extent that British Socialists are comparable to Western Christians of the fifth century, it has not so far in my experience been in delight in heresyhunting. Rather, it has been in their desire to duck hard contemporary issues—like effective economic and industrial regenera tion—in favour of an emphasis on vague and, perhaps deliberately, unmeasurable aspirations. In one respect, they compare unfavourably with them. Saint Augustine of Hippo may have prayed that he should be given chastity, but not too soon. Anthony Crosland declared in a recent Fabian pamphlet that 'complete state collectivism is without question incompatible with liberty and democracy'. At least Saint Augustine did not presume to pronounce anathema against any who suggested chastity might have some value in appropriate circumstances.
Donald Roy 15 Rusholme Road, London SW15
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