“Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience — a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.”
The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)
Context: Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the emperor’s pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in the fervent age of its conversion the empire employed its refined civilization, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of the Jewish, the pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience — a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression, had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilization, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West.
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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton 112
British politician and historian 1834–1902Related quotes
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
Source: Phenomenology of Perception
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 60
Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 56
Source: The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian ex-Chancellor’s account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, 1971, p. 209-210
Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 262)
Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 215 from Frederick to Voltaire (1776-03-19)
in Samuel Levenson, James Connolly (Martin, Brian and O'Keeffe, London, 1973), p. 56.