The Disunity of Mankind 1

Other civilisations, the Chinese with their belief that the Emperor was ruler of All that is under Heaven, the Hindus with their more shadowy belief in a Rajah Chakravartin – a universal ruler – have asserted a doctrine of the unity of mankind, but only in the form of a universal ruler over all mankind. It seems to be the West that originated the doctrine that mankind is a natural unity and not simply an imperial unity: that men form a community by virtue of their human character and not simply by virtue of their submission to a single ruler. But this doctrine, propounded perhaps by Alexander, developed by the Stoics, and given new force by St Paul, has repeatedly suffered shipwreck from two causes. One is the moral heterogeneity of mankind. The other is their social heterogeneity. Men incurably divide themselves into good and bad, wise and foolish, just as they divide themselves into Greeks and barbarians, Jews and Gentiles, French and Germans, Russians and Americans, Indians and Pakistanis.

It is a commonplace that neither Plato nor Aristotle envisaged the unity of mankind. ² Both of them saw a fundamental difference between Greeks and barbarians, and Aristotle advised Alexander to behave to the Greeks as a leader but to the barbarians as a master. ³ Plato however was capable of transcending this, in the splendid moment when he makes Socrates say that the ideally just state might exist, in the infinity of time past or future, or even now in some barbarian place far beyond our knowledge. ⁴ But being concerned above everything with the culture of the soul and righteousness, Plato then stumbled into the other dichotome [sic] between the virtuous and the impious, and in the Laws provided for their punishment. ⁵ This is the more ineradicable division. “God is the common father of all men”, said Alexander, “but he makes the best ones peculiarly his own”. ⁶

This may be a statement of disunity as much as of unity. The best are the natural enemy of the rest, and in political arrangements there will always be a tendency to pervert Alexander’s saying into the terrible dictum which Lucan puts into the mouth of Caesar: “Mankind exists for the sake of a few men”. ⁷ Plutarch observes that Alexander founded the kind of state proposed by Zeno, founder of the Stoics. Zeno put forward the ideal of a world-wide state, a cosmopolis. “We do not dwell on separate cities or demes, each group rounded off by its own rules of justice; but we consider that all men are fellow demesmen and fellow citizens and that life is one and the universe is one”. ⁸ But men are incurably stupid; and in his Republic Zeno spoke of the virtuous as the only citizens, friends, kinsmen and free men, so that even children and their parents might be enemies. The greatest and almost the last of Zeno’s spiritual descendants became Rajah Chakravartin, of the Western world, Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antonius Augustus. “For me as Antoninus my city and fatherland is Rome, but as man the world”, ⁹ he wrote in his Meditations. And again, “The poet has said, ‘Dear city of Cecrops’” (quoting apostrophe to Athens): “shall I not say, ‘Dear city of God’?”. ¹⁰ But for him the Christians were incomprehensibly unreasonable and undignified, and he died exhausted by frontier warfare against the barbarians, leaving the Empire to a foolish and incompetent son.

The difficulties in the notion of the unity of mankind had already been explored by the teaching of Jesus. There are sayings attributed to him which suggest a unity of mankind implied by his own universal claims: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself.” ¹¹ When he spoke of himself as the vine of which his followers were the branches, he was asserting an organic unity of a kind unparalleled in any religious teacher before or since. But there was a frightening ambiguity. The barren branches of the vine would be cut away and thrown into the fire. ¹² Who were the fruiting branches and who the barren? The true followers and the apostates or false disciples. But there are many more which assert the moral self-division of the human race: the just and the wicked, the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats. ¹³

It seems that Jesus had in this matter a double doctrine. The human race has a potential unity, to be fulfilled in relation to himself; and it depended on the individual’s choice whether he would join the human race, so to say, or opt out. Secondly, the results of these choices, and the degree in which the potential unity of mankind are fulfilled, are not known in history. But this ambiguity itself had a decisive influence on later history, when the freedom of the individual to acquit or condemn himself in the supreme spiritual test was erected into a dichotome[sic] in political theory.

The disagreeable and perplexing doctrine that Adam’s disobedience in paradise involved, by mystical solidarity of identity, the whole of the human race in sin, had its exact counterpart and corrective in the doctrine that Christ is the new Adam, involving the whole of the human race in his victory over sin. “God has consigned all men to disobedience, in order that he may have mercy upon all”. ¹⁴ Not only the unity of mankind, indeed, but the unity of all creation. “It was the purpose of His design so to order it in the fulness [sic] of the ages that all things in heaven and earth alike should be gathered up in Christ”. ¹⁵ Tous pantas – ta panta – the scope of the words may be debated. It was the tendency of the Greek Fathers to give them their widest scope. The notion that all creation would be summed up in Christ led to St Irenaeus’s doctrine of recapitulation. ¹⁶ The notion that all men might be saved, literally taken, led to the universalism of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, ¹⁷ projecting the unity of mankind into that eternity where the doctrine of everlasting punishment would suggest a final ineffaceable disunity. Thus creation is the living body of the Logos, and mankind is the microcosm of creation. The redemption is seen as Christ uniting himself ontologically to humanity. Aided by the tradition of Platonic realism, the Greek Fathers treated human nature as a generic whole. “We were all in Christ; the common person of humanity comes to life in him”. ¹⁸ And humanity seems to slide over from meaning the sum of the qualities which make up human nature to the sum of the individuals who comprise the human race.

Thus the Greek Church, and after it the Russian, tended to emphasise the corporate unity of mankind, while the Latin Church stressed the individuality and free will of men. Der Gedanke geht der Tat voraus, wie der Blitz dem Donner. “The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder”. And some historians have seen in the practice of the Eastern Church a greater tolerance towards both heretics and infidels than in the Western Church. ¹⁹

The Early Church spread outside as well as inside the Roman Empire, and the earliest government to embrace Christianity officially was that, not of Rome, but of Armenia. In the middle of the third century Origen could write that the Gospel “has overcome all sorts of men: and it is impossible to see any race of men which has avoided accepting the teaching of Jesus.” ²⁰ Elsewhere however he observes that the Gospel has not been preached in Eastern Asia or Northern Europe. Augustine argued that God gave man (unlike animals) a single origin in a single progenitor in order to produce concord and teach the unity of human society. ²¹ He saw the family, the state and the world as three concentric circles of human society, and with a noble freedom from Roman patriotism lamented the wars by which the imperial city had sought to extend its sway over subject nations. ²² But the disunity of the human race, not their unity, is the central theme, and with sublime realism he subordinated all social disunity to the cleavage between vicious and virtuous. “Though there are very many and great nations all over the earth, whose rites and customs, speech, arms and dress are distinguished by marked differences, yet there are no more than two kinds of human society… The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other of those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind.” ²³ The first compose the civitas terrena, formed by the love of self; the second the civitas Dei, formed by the love of God. ²⁴ Augustine did not identify the civitas Dei with any secular state, but there are ambiguous passages which might identify it with the Church: ²⁵ and when the Church had created out of the fragments of the Roman Empire and the crude vitality of the barbarian kingdoms a new Christian civilisation, it was easy to regard to republica Christiana as the embodiment on earth of the civitas Dei.

The identification was strengthened by the necessities of defence against invasion, by the Saracens in the south. It finds expression in Urban II’s famous speech at the Council of Clermont, which launched the first Crusade:

“The world is not evenly divided between us and the enemies of God. Who can endure this, except the slothful and those envious of Christ’s reputation? Of the three parts of the world, they occupy Asia as their hereditary home – which our ancestors rightly considered equal to the other two parts put together. There of old our religion first blossomed forth; there all the apostles except two met their deaths. But now the Christians there, if there are any left, eke out a miserable living from the soil, pay tribute to their wicked rulers, and look at our liberty with silent longing because they have lost their own. Africa too, the second part of the world, they have held by force for more than two hundred years; which I declare an affront to Christian prestige, because Africa once produced the greatest geniuses, whose writings will remain classics as long as there is anyone to read Latin literature. There remains Europe, the other third of the world. And we Christians occupy only a small part of it. For those barbarous peoples who lead a bestial life in remote islands on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, who regards them as Christians? And even this fraction of our world is under aggression by the Turks and Saracens. For three hundred years they have occupied Spain and the Balearics, and they hope to absorb the rest.” ²⁶