The West’s primary threat still lies in the East. And yet, like the late Romans and Byzantines—and the Roman captives whom Saint Patrick encountered—we are poised to surrender people, churches, monuments, and lands rather than stand our ground.
Last Spring, I read a biographical novel about Saint Patrick. We do not have much firsthand information about Saint Patrick, of course, other than what he himself wrote in his Confessio and Epistola. We are not sure where in Britain the family villa that Patrick claims to have been the location of his kidnapping (Bannavem Taburniae) was. We are not sure of the name of the town in which his father was the Decurion. We are not sure of what happened to his family. We are not sure where in Ireland he was a slave. We are not sure when he was a slave or even exactly when he lived. The uncertainty should not surprise us. Patricius, as he called himself, was a fifth century Roman-Briton. He lived when the curtain began rapidly to fall on the ancient world: when the Romans could no longer hold on to their Empire, and the world lost so many many splendid texts with their calm wisdom.
What makes the biographical novel worth reading and reflecting upon is the author’s historical license, if such it can be called. John Beahn, the biographer, tells the story of Saint Patrick against and through the dramatic backdrop of the era in which he lived. Beahn has Patrick travel through continental Europe in search of his father. He has Patrick observe the Germanic incursions in Gaul. He has Patrick witness that sack of Rome (in 410) that Saint Augustine bemoaned. He has Patrick reflect upon the lack of Roman fight: upon the emptiness of the faith of many Romans, upon their sense of entitlement, upon their inability to embody Roman virtues, upon their moral weakness, upon their incapacity to defend themselves, their world, and their way of life. In many ways, Beahn’s biographical novel of Saint Patrick is more his reflection on the Western fifth century than it is a biography of the man through whom God converted Ireland.
The fifth century was a truly disastrous one for the Roman world, plagued as it was with internecine power struggles and the absence of capable leadership. I have often thought that more so than the Germanic tribes that hammered on the Empire’s borders in order to take possession of Roman wealth (the Franks, the Alani, the Suebi, the Vandals, the Visigoths, to mention a few), it was the vacuous fratricidal feuds and weak rulers—and the underlying lack of true and ordered belief in fifth century Romans (belief in the values that Rome upheld, in their universality, in their coherence, in their centrality in the lives of both individuals and society)—that were responsible for Rome’s fall. Rome committed moral suicide. I am not alone in this belief. Saint Augustine argues as much in De Civitate Dei (the City of God). It was moral corruption, he claims, that led to the sack of Rome. Romans, he argues, had become so intoxicated with pleasure that they had become incapable of seeing that the universe is sustained by a concrete, natural, and Providential order that they themselves were created in order to respect and sustain. It was ignoring that order that led to their fall.
Beahn describes Roman corruption in unforgettable scenes. One takes place in a forest in Gaul, where Patrick was taken captive by one of the Germanic tribes. He found himself bound and set alongside other prisoners: Roman Christians, who promptly informed him that they had no intention of fighting back or escaping. All they had to do, they said, was to wait to be ransomed by their families and the treasures of the Church. Beahn’s Patrick (a good Roman Briton) was horrified by their passiveness. His horror climaxed when one of the captives, a Roman Gallic Christian woman, was attacked by one of the Germans and none of the Roman men lifted a finger to defend her. Another scene takes place in Rome shortly before the sack of 410. The Romans knew that Alaric and his Visigoths were going to attack the city. They expected their army to defend them in Northern Italy. When their army was defeated, they took to hiding and waiting for the Visigoths to plunder the city. They hid in the churches.
Had the Romans had true and ordered belief, Beahn’s Patrick (whom the author explicitly has echo Saint Augustine) realizes, they would have understood that it was they themselves who were responsible for their own city, and would have organized a defense of Rome (and what it stood for) against the invaders. They didn’t, and the rest is history: the fall of the Roman empire, centuries and centuries of depopulation, fear, incursions, martyrs.
I do not know why Beahn chose to write his biographical novel of Saint Patrick, or to weave it as he did. I cannot but wonder, though, if he did so because he had understood the direction that our own society was taking back in 1959 and had foreseen where that direction would lead us in 2023.
We are living in times that are eerily similar to the fifth century of the Western Roman Empire. We too are intoxicated by pleasure. We too do not generally believe in the values that underlie our own great experiment, in their universality, in their coherence, in their centrality in the lives of both individuals and society. We too do not take responsibility for our city. It should come as no surprise, then, that we too are in the midst of massive and vacuous internecine power struggles and that we too seem curiously to be wanting in credible leaders.
One need look no further than our defense of the borders of the Western world, the world that was built upon those values that our own nation claims as its foundation (the sacrality of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) to see just how far we have sunk. By “borders” here, I do not primarily mean America’s Southern border, although that is presently both troubling and chaotic enough. What I am pointing to is the West’s vastly more important border: the Eastern one.
It is (and always has been) the Eastern border that has given the West the most trouble. It was from the East that the Germanic tribes that ran through Europe and toppled the Western Roman Empire came. It was from the East that the Turkomans, who beleaguered the Eastern Romans, the Byzantines, came. Genghis Khan and company also came from the East. The Mongols who invaded Russia, Poland, and so forth came from the East. The Saracens who raided the coasts of Italy, among other things, came from the East.
Our primary threat still lies in the East, as a recent balloon reminded us. And yet, like the late Romans and the Byzantines, we are not responding to the threat. Like the late Romans and Byzantines—and the Roman captives whom Beahn has Saint Patrick encounter—we are poised to surrender people, churches, monuments, and lands rather than stand our ground. Like the late Romans and Byzantines, we do not seem to realize that if we do not stand our ground, if we do not uphold our values, those very values that our nation claims as its foundation, we will lose our nation. Like the late Romans and Byzantines, we no longer seem to believe in our values. Like the late Romans and Byzantines we are morally corrupt.
There is an ongoing siege of Nagorno Karabakh, or Artsakh, as the locals call their land. 120,000 Armenian Christians, who are the descendants of those who have for the last three millennia called that land their home, are effectively prisoners of the Kleptocratic dictator of Azerbaijan, Ilhan Aliyev. The Azeris have blocked the Armenians’ only exit point, the Lachin Corridor, since December 12, 2022.
Our governments, our leaders have known about this for many months. They ought also to have expected it. They are all well aware of the siege’s direct antecedents: the terrible 44-Day war of the Fall of 2020 and the sickening ceasefire statement that Azerbaijan and Russia strong-armed Armenia into signing. And yet they have done nothing to lift the siege: to stand by the children of the first Christian nation.
To be sure, they have issued statements. The European Union, European Nations, our State Department, the ICJ all have, and repeatedly. But none of these Western powers has the moral fiber to do something about it. Like the Romans who were kidnapped by the Germanic tribes, or who hid in Churches, they prefer compromising with Kleptocrats to defending human life and the values that uphold it, even when the Kleptocrats blatantly violate basic human rights, when they applaud torture, break ceasefire agreements, destroy UNESCO protected stone crosses.
The compromise that our own State Department seems willing to make is to cede Artsakh and its 120,000 Christians to a dictator who has not hidden that he will do everything in his power to destroy the traces of the first Christian nation in Artsakh. He has already ordered the destruction of Churches in Shushi (that ancient Armenian capital in Artsakh) and other locations in Artsakh. That particular compromise, as Luis Moreno Ocampo indicated in the recent emergency hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on the dire situation in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), is tantamount to complicity in genocide.
In his letter to President Biden, Rep. Chris Smith R-NJ used even stronger words in order to try to stave off our State Department’s act of moral suicide. “By encouraging ‘compromise,’” he wrote, “the Secretary appears to facilitate Azerbaijan’s use of genocide as a negotiating tactic. Negotiation may be needed to solve the differences between Azerbaijan and the Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, but genocide is an abuse impossible to ignore.”
Let us pray that Rep. Smith’s words do not fall on deaf ears. If our government follows through on its planned compromise, the world will become bleaker for us. We know what came of late Roman and Byzantine compromises. Our future will be no brighter.
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This essay was first published here in September 2023.
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The featured image, uploaded by Marcin Konsek, is a photograph of Saint John the Baptist church. Gandzasar monastery. Nagorno-Karabakh. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.