HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
19
than the former. Did not Pericles think as Thucydides (II 41 ) tells us,
that the highest praise he could bestow upon Athens was to claim that
it no longer needed "a Homer or others of his craft," but that thanks
to the
polis
Athenians everywhere would leave "imperishable monu–
ments" behind them? What Homer had done was to immortalize
human deeds, and the
polis
could dispense with the service of "others
of his craft" because it offered each of its citizens that public-political
space that it assumed would confer immortality upon his acts. The
growing
a-politia
of the philosophers after Socrates' death, their de–
mand to be freed from political activities and their insistence on
performing a nonpractical, purely theoretical
athanatidzein
outside
the sphere of political life had philosophical as well as political causes,
but among the political ones was certainly the increasing decay of
polis
life, making even the permanence, let alone immortality, of
this particular body politic more and more doubtful.
The
a-politia
of ancient philosophy foreshadowed the much
more radical anti-political attitude of early Christianity which, how–
ever, in its very extremism survived only so long as the Roman
Empire provided a stable body politic for all nations and all religions.
During these early centuries of our era, the conviction that things
earthly are perishable remained a religious matter and was the belief
of those who wanted to have nothing to do with political affairs.
This changed decisively with the crucial experience of the fall of
Rome, the sacking of the Eternal City, after which no age ever
again believed that any human product, least of all a political struc–
ture, could endure forever.
As
far as Christian thought was concerned,
this was a mere reaffirmation of their beliefs. It was of no great
relevance, as Augustine pointed out. To Christians only individual
men were immortal, but nothing else of this world, neither mankind
as a whole nor the earth itself, least of all the human artifice. Only
by transcending this world could immortalizing activities be per–
formed, and the only institution that could be justified within the
secular realm was the Church, the
Civitas Dei
on earth, to which
had fallen the burden of political responsibility and into which all
genuinely political impulses could be drawn. That this transformation
of Christianity and its earlier anti-political impulses into a great and
stable political institution was possible at all without complete per–
version of the Gospel is almost wholly due to Augustine, who,
