The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

But as civilisation affords more opportunity for leisure, it is inevitable that woman ceases to be merely the household slave. She becomes, for example, the hostess – and we have seen the god Augustus hurrying his hostess off to the bedroom under the eyes of her husband. As soon as women are ‘on show’, men can watch them moving around, wait for the charming glimpse of thigh or naked breast, and lick their lips. ‘Women’s Lib’ began in imperial Rome; Tiberius had to pass edicts against patrician women who expressed their boredom with domesticity by going ‘on the game’. A series of empresses wound the emperor around their little fingers – from Augustus’s Livia, Claudius’s Messalina, Nero’s Poppaea, Marcus Aurelius’s Fausta, to the empress Theodora, a nymphomaniac prostitute who dominated the later emperor Justinian.

So in the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D., the image of woman had become exciting, disturbing, voluptuous. She had still not become the ideal creature of Dante and Petrarch and the troubadours; but she had reached the halfway stage. Courtesans such as Thais of Alexandria could become wealthy because men had learned to dream about women instead of about pretty slave boys or handsome youths.

So the Christian rejection of sexual pleasure was more than a reaction against Roman sensuality. It was a recognition that when man idealises woman, he also creates a false image of her. This masculine distortion can be seen in any piece of cheap pornography; the seduction is described in minute physical detail, and the final coupling made to sound like the climax of a symphony. But missing from all this is the interaction of two personalities. It is two persons who find themselves in bed together when the excitement has died down, and their future relationship will depend on whether they like each other.

In woman, the sexual delusion usually takes a less impersonal form. Her instinct is directed at finding a husband and protector; so while the male sexual delusion tends towards promiscuity, the female tends towards monogamy. Her problem is that she may fall in love with a completely unsuitable male because she finds him ‘dashing’ and exciting, and find herself in conflict with his male instinct for promiscuity. In the sense that it is more personal, the female sexual delusion is more realistic than the male version.

The Christian attitude to sex was based upon a recognition of this element of unreality in the sexual relation, the ‘baited hook’. So the Christian view of sex is that it is primarily a personal relationship whose aim is monogamy and the raising of a family.

When we consider the mechanism of the sexual delusion, we can see that it depends on the tendency of the human imagination to exaggerate the importance of the ‘forbidden’. And this same obsession with the forbidden is – as we have seen – the basis of criminality. Which means that the ideals of these early Christians were basically an attempt to combat the sexual delusion and the criminal delusion. They saw man as a spirit who has become entangled in a prison of matter – light entangled in darkness. (Some even went so far as to accept the teaching of the Persian prophet Mani, who said that all matter is evil.) The great theologian Origen asserted that God originally created a realm of pure spirit inhabited by angels, but that because there was nothing to struggle against, the angels became bored and turned away from God. So God created matter to provide the fallen angels with something to struggle against – a kind of gymnasium in which man can be trained and educated. The ascetic is not really dedicated to self-torment, but to learning to use the gymnasium to struggle back towards the realm of pure spirit. And this is why, for all its drawbacks, Christianity was one of the most important milestones in human history. Paganism was a kind of lowest common multiple. If you were a citizen of Rome around 100 A.D., it made no real difference whether you worshipped Osiris or Tammuz, Mithras or the emperor; in fact, many pagan gods had conveniently amalgamated so that a Celt, an Egyptian or a Babylonian could go and make his sacrifice in a Roman temple. There were no great pagan scriptures to rival the dialogues of Plato or the New Testament. We have seen that, at its popular level, Christianity was no better than paganism. But it had its saints, its ascetics, its great thinkers; and these poured their insights into the repository of the Church. Plato said that the perfect state would be governed by a philosopher-king. Christianity was a state within a state, and if it was not governed by philosophers and saints at least the philosophers and saints played a vital role in its development. After the murderous chaos of the Roman Empire, it was one of the greatest steps mankind had so far taken.

Before we can complete the story of the downfall of Rome, it is necessary to look at the rest of the vast landmass that surrounded the Roman Empire. Most of the earth was still covered with forest, jungle and desert. The Mediterranean itself had once been an immense desert with a few lakes and pools until, around five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic ocean managed to burst through the wall of mountains that ran from present-day Spain to north Africa; the giant waterfall turned the area into the tideless sea that later nurtured the Greeks and Romans. At the time the Sumerians invented writing, the Sahara was covered with forests and grass; elephants and hippopotamuses cooled themselves in its lakes. But the climate had been slowly changing for the past seven thousand years, and by the time of Sargon the Great it was turning into a desert – aided by nomads whose flocks trampled and chewed the last of the grassland.

To the south there was the unknown land of Africa, still peopled by men of the stone age. To the north there was Germany, with its great dark forests, which continued on into Russia. To the south-east lay the unknown continent of India, with its religion of peace and contemplation. The Indians also civilised their neighbours in Burma, Malaya, Siam, as far as Indochina, but with missionaries and merchants, not armies and tax collectors.

To the east lay the vast and totally unknown continent of China. Although it had also had its share of local wars, that immense land had turned into an empire rather more peacefully than its western neighbour. The Chou dynasty had conquered around 1000 B.C.; they were barbarian warriors who absorbed the best of what their predecessors – the Shang dynasty – had to offer. After 500 B.C. great canals brought prosperity to the land; small farms were replaced by huge fields like the prairies of Canada and America. After seven hundred years, the Chou Empire was fragmented in a power struggle, and Shih Huang-ti, the ‘Great Lord of Ch’in’, finally became master.

Unlike the Roman Empire, this immense continent was not under constant stress from internal revolts and enemy nations. There were enemies along the northern boundaries – horse nomads of the steppes – but China itself (named after the province of Ch’in) was too vast for nomads to penetrate very far; besides, the men of these northern borders – like the Ch’in – were as tough and hardy as the nomads. So while the Roman Empire was convulsed with warfare, most of China – like its neighbour Japan – lay in a kind of sleep. With its canals and rice fields, the landowners grew rich. Of course, they squabbled among themselves, like medieval barons – in fact, before the coming of the Great Lord of Ch’in, China was very like England or France in the Middle Ages.

Shih Huang set out to forge a Chinese Empire; and he ordered the building of the Great Wall to keep out the nomads; it extended for nearly two thousand miles. He built roads and started a postal system. He decreed a standardised writing. He persuaded feudal barons to move to the capital. He was, in fact, a kind of Chinese Augustus or Constantine. And because he believed that the emperor’s will should prevail over all others, he objected to the Confucian classics, which insisted that the king rules by the will of heaven, and ordered the books to be burned. When he died in 207 B.C. there was a revolt, and the ruthless Ch’in were replaced by the milder and gentler Han dynasty. But for all their moderation as rulers, the Han emperors proved to be formidable conquerors. Instead of merely trying to keep out the wild horsemen of the northern steppes, Wu, the ‘Martial Emperor’ (140-87 A.D.) went out and attacked them. These barbarians were known to the Chinese as the Hsiung-nu. In the west, they became known as the Huns.

In earlier centuries, when these wild horsemen had been driven west by war or starvation, they had encountered the west’s own equivalent of Huns – the Scythians. These savages lived to the north of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Don (in what is now the Ukraine), and Herodotus was so fascinated by tales of their cruelty and brutality that he made a special trip to find out all he could about them. He described a people who skinned their enemies and made coats of the skins; who sawed off the tops of their skulls and used them as drinking vessels, and who sometimes drank the blood of their enemies from these gruesome relics; who put out the eyes of their slaves to prevent their running away, and who regarded it as manly to take at least one human life every year. They terrorised the Persians, and an expedition against them by King Darius had no success whatever. In due course, the Scythians were driven south by an enemy from over the Danube, the Sarmatians, defeated by Philip of Macedon and finally crushed by Rome’s old enemy Mithridates. (But a closely related people, the Parthians, continued to give as much trouble as ever.) And with this race of fierce warriors finally out of the way, the slit-eyed Huns from Mongolia could move westward. So it was the more-or-less peaceful expansion of China that finally caused the break-up of the Roman Empire.