Title: The Darkening Age Pdf The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
“Searingly passionate…Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt…[A] ballista-bolt of a book.” —New York Times Book Review
In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town’s main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city’s greatest temple and razed it—smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.
Today, we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a “triumph.” But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. Just one percent of Latin literature would survive the purge; countless antiquities, artworks, and ancient traditions were lost forever.
As Catherine Nixey reveals, evidence of early Christians’ campaign of terror has been hiding in plain sight: in the palimpsests and shattered statues proudly displayed in churches and museums the world over. In The Darkening Age, Nixey resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.
The "Triumph" of Christianity Catherie Nixey's book, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, studies what St. Augustine called “merciful savagery,” the destruction of classical philosophy by the Christians who inherited the Roman Empire. The book is a compelling narrative, full of facts, and an antidote to two thousand years of Christian propaganda about how one culture replaced the other.It's not the particular beliefs the Christians espoused, or the nature of monotheism as opposed to polytheism that made the Christians a threat to freedom of thought, it was the intolerance they showed to any other religion.It's a common belief in modern societies that the pagan Romans persecuted the Christian martyrs. Catherine Nixey shows it's not that simple.The author analyzes at length correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan about the way to deal with recalcitrant Christians. The emperor was willing to give Christians any excuse to practice their religion as long as they didn't simply refuse to acknowledge the authority of the state. The author quotes Trajan: Conquirendi non sunt. “These people must not be hunted out.”It's ironic that barely a generation later it would be Christian Roman officials who would be investigating the thoughts and religious practices of citizens.Some of the martyrs were would-be suicides, itinerant farm workers called circumcellions.In AD 392 clerics in Alexandria destroyed what was considered the most beautiful building on earth—the temple of Serapis, a god that linked Egypt to Rome, thereby typifying one of the strengths of polytheism. Besides the temple, books in the Great Library were also destroyed.Nixey analyzes the main reasons that historians have given over the centuries for why Christianity replaced the old religion.Polytheism was just ridiculous, goes one version.Of course people didn't believe that stories about Zeus's adultery and Hera's jealousy were “true,” but doesn't that make the old culture more sophisticated instead of less? People recognized that the meaning of Greco-Roman mythology wasn't literal. That's why Albert Camus was able to use the myth of Sisyphus to illustrate a philosophical idea millennia after the gods first appeared.Another theory about why the empire changed from one religion to another is that people were living through an anxious time. The barbarians were at the gates, and Christianity unified the empire.Statistics make Catherine Nixey doubt this, though. She estimates less than ten percent of the empire's population were Christian when Constantine declared Rome a Christian empire. That left fifty million to be converted.But the church wrote the histories, and therefore Christ's victory was inevitable. However, history is never inevitable.By the late 400s monks came out of the desert to destroy what temples were left, such as the one dedicated to Caelestis in Carthage. The Christians were proud of the destruction they committed, and of the conversions that resulted from the violence. Non-Christians pointed out that these were not true conversions, but the Christians didn't care.In the year 415, Hypatia, a philosopher in Alexandria who taught and tried to learn from everyone, including Christians, was taken by a Christian mob who flayed her alive, gouged out her eyes, and then burned her.Nixey blames the disappearance of most Greek and Roman literature as much on simple ignorance as on conscious actions. For instance, St. Antony was proud that he never learned to read.The author points out that only about one percent of Latin literature has been saved. The monks who get credit for recopying classical literature often ignored rare ancient texts and made unnecessary copies of Christian authors.You could make a martyrology of philosophers whose actions, not just words, put them in danger.Nixey tells the story of the philosopher Damascius, who escaped the Christian mobs in Alexandria after Hypatia's murder and returned to Athens.For a while, Athens was relatively safe for philosophers. Damascius became the head of the Academy, the school that had seen Plato and other brilliant minds of the ancient world. But by this time Christianity was entrenched in the empire. A law against teaching “pagan” philosophies under penalty of death drove the seven remaining Academicians briefly to Persia, but life there was no better.They returned to the empire. Their former refuge in Athens had been turned over to Christians who beheaded the statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to show the primacy faith over reason.It would be centuries until man was again the measure of all things.St. Augustine's merciful savagery was complete.
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