"Eternal Rome" — by these words a Roman named not merely the city but the very order of the inhabited world, which seemed indestructible. Everything that lay beyond that order was marked by a single word — "barbarian": not a man but a stranger from the edge of civilization, a shadow beyond the border of the light. The idol was built out of that very distinction: the boundary dividing living people into Romans and non-humans, and the imperial machine that fed on it. The Goths, admitted into the empire in 376 and driven by the conduct of imperial officials to famine and revolt, were the first to learn the price of that boundary — the road to Adrianople was paved with it.
The collapse stretched across almost a century. In 378 at Adrianople the Goths utterly routed the Roman army, and the emperor Valens himself perished in the battle — the eastern army was destroyed, and the weakness of the empire lay bared. In 410 the unthinkable came to pass: Alaric with his Visigoths took and sacked Rome itself — for the first time in nearly eight hundred years the Eternal City had fallen to an external foe. In 455 it was plundered again, this time by the Vandals. And in 476 the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last western emperor — the young Romulus Augustulus, whose name joined, in bitter mockery, the founder of Rome and the first Augustus. The Western Empire ceased to exist.
There followed the long captivity of disintegration. The united West crumbled into barbarian kingdoms, cities emptied, Latin schooling and learning fell into decay, and the threads that had bound the Mediterranean for centuries were torn. The world that had seemed indestructible lay in fragments; to those who lived through it, it seemed that the very fabric of creation was collapsing.
But it was precisely upon the ruins that the return took place — not of stone but of the spirit. Still under the impression of the sack of Rome, Augustine wrote his work "The City of God," in which he drew a line between the eternal City of God and the mortal earthly Rome: it was not God who had fallen, but a human power mistaken for eternity. And soon monasticism — above all the rule of Benedict of Nursia — began quietly to remelt the heritage of antiquity, preserving books and knowledge behind the walls of its houses. Thus the law was fulfilled: the spirit outlived the ruin of its forms of stone and, having mourned them, began to build anew — no longer from marble, but from the word and from prayer.