This reading of God’s purposes, grim though it might seem to Paulinus, was no less derived from an attentive reading of the gospels than his own had been. Those who proclaimed it made sure to cite their Saviour. ‘Christ did not say, “Woe to you who are the evil rich”, but simply, “Woe to you who are rich.”’27 Yet radicals, in the troubled decade that witnessed the sack of Rome, did not confine themselves to quoting scripture. In their ambition to fathom what Christ’s teachings on wealth and poverty might mean for a society dominated by billionaires, and how the differences between the rich and the poor might be erased, they turned for inspiration to the most fashionable ascetic of the age. Pelagius, a burly and intellectually brilliant Briton, had made such a name for himself after settling in Rome that he had become the toast of high society. His teachings, though, had an appeal that extended far beyond exclusive salons. Man, Pelagius believed, had been created free. Whether he lived in obedience to God’s instructions or not, the decision was his own. Sin was merely a habit – which meant that perfection might be achieved. ‘There is no reason why we should not do good, other than that we have become accustomed to doing wrong from our childhood.’28 Pelagius, in formulating this maxim, had in mind the life of the individual Christian; but there were some among his followers who applied it to the entire sweep of history. Expelled from Eden, they argued, humanity had fallen into the fatal habit of greed. The strong, stealing from the weak, had monopolised the sources of wealth. Land, livestock and gold had become the property of the few, not the many. The possibility that riches might ever have been a blessing bestowed by God, untainted by exploitation, was a grotesque self-deception. There was no coin dropped into a beggar’s shrivelled palm that had not ultimately been won by criminal means: lead-tipped whips, and cudgels, and branding irons. Yet if, as Pelagius argued, individual sinners could cleanse themselves of their sin, and win perfection by obedience to God’s commands, then so too could all of humanity. Evidence for what this might mean in practical terms was to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, the book written by Luke in which he had described Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, and which had come to be incorporated into the New Testament. There, preserved for the edification of all, it was recorded that the first generation of Christ’s followers had held everything in common. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.’29 A just and equal society was, then, an ambition for which there existed the direct sanction of scripture itself. Only achieve it, and there would be no need for charity. Grandstanding philanthropists like Paulinus would become one with the beggars who thronged his churches. ‘Get rid of the rich, and where will the poor be then?’30
In practice, of course, as a manifesto, this was barely less implausible than Gregory of Nyssa’s urging that slavery be abolished. Indeed, in the years that followed the sack of Rome, the western half of the empire became ever more a playground for the strong. The sinews that had long held it together were starting to snap. The mighty bulk of it was falling apart. A century on from Paulinus’ great gesture of renunciation, and the complex infrastructure that had sustained the existence of the super-rich was gone for good. In place of a single Roman order extending from the Sahara to northern Britain, there was instead a patchwork of rival kingdoms, spear-won by an array of barbarous peoples: Visigoths, Vandals, Franks. In this new world, those among the Christian nobility who had managed to avoid utter impoverishment were rarely inclined to feel guilty about it. The poverty embraced by Martin and Paulinus was more liable to appear to them now as a fate to be avoided at all costs than an example to be followed. What they wanted from bishops and holy men was not admonishment on the inherent evil of riches, but something very different: an assurance that wealth might indeed be a gift from God. And this, sure enough, in the various barbarian kingdoms of the West, was precisely what churchmen had come to provide.
Behind them lay the massive authority of a man who, back when Paulinus had still been the talk of the empire, and Pelagius the toast of Rome, was serving as the bishop of an isolated port on the African coast – and yet whose influence had far outshone them both. To Augustine of Hippo, it was precisely the diversity of the Christian people, the joining together of every social class, that constituted its chief glory. ‘All are astonished to see the entire human race converging on the Crucified One, from emperors down to beggars in their rags.’31 Augustine himself had known what it was to be brought to Christ. His conversion had come when he was already in his thirties. Had he not turned to a passage in Paul, after hearing, as though in a hallucination, a child chant ‘Pick it up and read’ in a neighbouring garden, perhaps he would never have become a Christian at all. Certainly, Augustine had led a restless life. Prior to his baptism, he had clawed his way up from provincial obscurity to the margins of the imperial court; he had moved from city to city, from Carthage to Rome to Milan; he had dabbled in a whole range of cults and philosophies; he had picked up women in churches. Such a man knew perfectly well just how various humanity was. Nevertheless, returning from Italy to his native Africa, and in due course to election as the bishop of Hippo, he had dared to dream of a Christianity that was properly catholic – universal – in practice as well as name. ‘It is high time for all and sundry to be inside the Church.’32 Yet this conviction had not – as it had the more radical followers of Pelagius – encouraged Augustine to claim that divisions of class and wealth might be erased, and all goods be held in common. Quite the contrary. The bishop of Hippo was far too sombre, far too pessimistic, in his view of human nature to imagine that charity could ever not be needed. ‘The poor you will always have with you.’33 So Christ himself had warned. The wealthy and the wretched: both were destined to exist for as long as the world endured.
Augustine’s mistrust of where social upheaval might lead had been bred in part of personal experience. In Hippo, as in the rest of Africa, the schism in the church had remained something violent and raw. Ambushes on the roads beyond the city were a constant danger; acid attacks a particular risk. Augustine, as a Catholic bishop, had always known himself a potential target. Donatist radicals, he had charged, were rebels not just against his own authority, but against everything that made for order. Attacking villas, they would seize the owners, ‘well-educated men of superior birth’, and chain them to gristmills, ‘forcing them by the whip to turn it in a circle as if they were the lowest kind of draught animal’.34 Not for Augustine the conviction that the poor were purer in heart than the rich. All were equally fallen. Divisions of class were as nothing compared to the condition of sinfulness that all of humanity shared in common. This meant that a billionaire who, like Paulinus, gave away his entire fortune could be no more certain of salvation than the destitute widow who, according to the gospels, had been watched by Jesus donating to the Temple treasury all that she had: two tiny copper coins. It meant as well that any dream of establishing an earthly society in which the extremes of wealth and poverty were banished, and all rendered equal, was just that: a dream.