A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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 southeast
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