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261 reviews for:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Catherine Nixey
3.97 AVERAGE
261 reviews for:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Catherine Nixey
3.97 AVERAGE
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Readable, and yet devastating. A vital read.
Interesting. But, as most of pop-history books, one-sided ideologically.
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
challenging
dark
funny
informative
medium-paced
Read it in one day. It's written so seamlessly and keeps you hooked on all that it wants to teach you.
A finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics.
Early in the book, the author describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.
Early in the book, the author describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.
The genetic fallacy is one of my favorite!
Here are some wonderful highlights from this delightful read:
“No craftsman will ever again make the idols that Christ has smashed,” gloated Augustine.
For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art.
Before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was “pagan.” Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier. After Christianity, the soldiers in question were not Roman legionaries but those who had enlisted in Christ’s army. Later, Christian writers concocted false, unflattering etymologies for it: they said it was related to the word pagus, to the “peasants” and the field. It was not; but such slurs stuck and “paganism” acquired an unappealing whiff of the rustic and the backward—a taint it carries to this day.
The fathers of the early Church turned their full rhetorical force on religious lapses. Time and time again they insisted that Christians were not like other religions. Christians were saved; others were not. Christians were correct; other religions were wrong. More than that: they were sick, insane, evil, damned, inferior. A newly violent vocabulary of disgust started to be applied to all other religions and anything to do with them—which meant almost everything in Roman life. Religion ran through the Roman world like lines through marble. At that time, gladiatorial games were preceded by sacrifices; as were plays, athletic contests and even sessions of the Senate. But all, now, were demonic and to be avoided. One Christian soldier was obliged, in the course of military duty, to enter a temple to the old gods. As he went in, a drop of sacred water splashed onto his robe. Ostentatiously unable to bear it, he instantly slashed off that part of his cloak and flung it away. Christians, or so their preachers claimed, felt anxious when forced to inhale the smoke that drifted from altars in the Forum—the good Christian would rather spit on the altar of a pagan and blow out the incense than accidentally breathe in its fumes. The worship of the old gods began to be represented as a terrifying pollution and, like a miasma in Greek tragedy, one that might drag you to catastrophe. The old laissez-faire Roman ways, in which the worship of one god might simply be added to the worship of all the others, were, preachers told their congregations, no longer acceptable. Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different. You were demonic. Demons, said the clerics, dwelt in the minds of those who practiced the old religions. Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind. Instead, they were attacking the Christians because they were under the control of Satan and his foot soldiers. The “battleground” of these fearsome troops was nothing other than “your minds, which have been attuned to him by his secret insinuations.” Demons were able to “take possession of men’s souls and block up their hearts” and so stop them believing in Christ.
To oppose another man’s religion, to repress their worship—these were not, clerics told their congregations, wicked or intolerant acts. They were some of the most virtuous things a man might do. The Bible itself demanded it. As the uncompromising words of Deuteronomy instructed: “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.”
There was, however, one group of people who even the great Galen found himself unable to convince. This was a group who did not form their beliefs by basing them on experiments or on observations, but on faith alone—and who, worse still, were actually proud of this fact. These peculiar people were for Galen the epitome of intellectual dogmatism. When he wished to adequately convey the blockheadedness of another group of physicians, Galen used these people as an analogy to express the depths of his irritation. They were the Christians. To show the extent of some doctors’ dogmatism he used the phrase “one might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ.” Elsewhere, he disparaged physicians who offered views on the body without demonstration to back up their assertions, saying that to listen to them was “as if one had come into the school of Moses and Christ [and heard] talk of undemonstrated laws.” Galen had little time for Moses himself, either. “It is his method in his books,” wrote Galen, disapprovingly, “to write without offering proofs, saying ‘God commanded, God spake.’” To a proto-empiricist like Galen, this was a cardinal error. Intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and, above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstrations. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.
There was little interest in Hebrew writings by now. According to the hectoring sermons being preached by a new generation of intolerant Christian clerics, the Jews were not a people with an ancient wisdom to be learned from: they were instead, like the pagans, the hated enemies of the Church. A few years earlier, the preacher John Chrysostom had said that “the synagogue is not only a brothel . . . it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts . . . a dwelling of demons . . . a place of idolatry.” St. John Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.
Books had been burned under non-Christian emperors—the controlling Augustus alone had ordered the burning of over two thousand books of prophetic writings, and had exiled the misbehaving poet Ovid—but now it grew in scope and ambition. There is little evidence that Christians intentionally destroyed entire libraries; the damage that Christianity inflicted on books was achieved by subtler—but no less effective—means of censorship, intellectual hostility and pure fear. The existence of a sacred text, it was argued, demanded this. Before, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was “wrong” could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.
As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, “have no ground for boasting of their wisdom.” The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. Besides, he wrote with disapproval, ancient philosophers had disagreed all the time. Rohmann has drawn attention to a passage in which Augustine complains that no senate or power of “the impious city has ever taken care to judge between all [these] dissensions of the philosophers, approving and accepting some, and disapproving and rejecting others.” That philosophers should clamorously disagree with each other had been axiomatic to the Greeks: that was precisely how intellectual progress was made, by argumentation and competition. The very idea was anathema to Augustine. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.
Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases “whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature.” Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers.
There is no cruelty in regard for God’s honour. —St. Jerome,
As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled “to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently.”
Later, when Shenoute was criticized for breaking and entering into another man’s house, he was utterly intransigent. “There is no crime,” he declared, “for those who have Christ.”
Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as “the Giants” and the “Cyclops.” These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the maneating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men—they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite—and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: “There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.”
Here are some wonderful highlights from this delightful read:
“No craftsman will ever again make the idols that Christ has smashed,” gloated Augustine.
For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art.
Before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was “pagan.” Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier. After Christianity, the soldiers in question were not Roman legionaries but those who had enlisted in Christ’s army. Later, Christian writers concocted false, unflattering etymologies for it: they said it was related to the word pagus, to the “peasants” and the field. It was not; but such slurs stuck and “paganism” acquired an unappealing whiff of the rustic and the backward—a taint it carries to this day.
The fathers of the early Church turned their full rhetorical force on religious lapses. Time and time again they insisted that Christians were not like other religions. Christians were saved; others were not. Christians were correct; other religions were wrong. More than that: they were sick, insane, evil, damned, inferior. A newly violent vocabulary of disgust started to be applied to all other religions and anything to do with them—which meant almost everything in Roman life. Religion ran through the Roman world like lines through marble. At that time, gladiatorial games were preceded by sacrifices; as were plays, athletic contests and even sessions of the Senate. But all, now, were demonic and to be avoided. One Christian soldier was obliged, in the course of military duty, to enter a temple to the old gods. As he went in, a drop of sacred water splashed onto his robe. Ostentatiously unable to bear it, he instantly slashed off that part of his cloak and flung it away. Christians, or so their preachers claimed, felt anxious when forced to inhale the smoke that drifted from altars in the Forum—the good Christian would rather spit on the altar of a pagan and blow out the incense than accidentally breathe in its fumes. The worship of the old gods began to be represented as a terrifying pollution and, like a miasma in Greek tragedy, one that might drag you to catastrophe. The old laissez-faire Roman ways, in which the worship of one god might simply be added to the worship of all the others, were, preachers told their congregations, no longer acceptable. Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different. You were demonic. Demons, said the clerics, dwelt in the minds of those who practiced the old religions. Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind. Instead, they were attacking the Christians because they were under the control of Satan and his foot soldiers. The “battleground” of these fearsome troops was nothing other than “your minds, which have been attuned to him by his secret insinuations.” Demons were able to “take possession of men’s souls and block up their hearts” and so stop them believing in Christ.
To oppose another man’s religion, to repress their worship—these were not, clerics told their congregations, wicked or intolerant acts. They were some of the most virtuous things a man might do. The Bible itself demanded it. As the uncompromising words of Deuteronomy instructed: “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.”
There was, however, one group of people who even the great Galen found himself unable to convince. This was a group who did not form their beliefs by basing them on experiments or on observations, but on faith alone—and who, worse still, were actually proud of this fact. These peculiar people were for Galen the epitome of intellectual dogmatism. When he wished to adequately convey the blockheadedness of another group of physicians, Galen used these people as an analogy to express the depths of his irritation. They were the Christians. To show the extent of some doctors’ dogmatism he used the phrase “one might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ.” Elsewhere, he disparaged physicians who offered views on the body without demonstration to back up their assertions, saying that to listen to them was “as if one had come into the school of Moses and Christ [and heard] talk of undemonstrated laws.” Galen had little time for Moses himself, either. “It is his method in his books,” wrote Galen, disapprovingly, “to write without offering proofs, saying ‘God commanded, God spake.’” To a proto-empiricist like Galen, this was a cardinal error. Intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and, above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstrations. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.
There was little interest in Hebrew writings by now. According to the hectoring sermons being preached by a new generation of intolerant Christian clerics, the Jews were not a people with an ancient wisdom to be learned from: they were instead, like the pagans, the hated enemies of the Church. A few years earlier, the preacher John Chrysostom had said that “the synagogue is not only a brothel . . . it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts . . . a dwelling of demons . . . a place of idolatry.” St. John Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.
Books had been burned under non-Christian emperors—the controlling Augustus alone had ordered the burning of over two thousand books of prophetic writings, and had exiled the misbehaving poet Ovid—but now it grew in scope and ambition. There is little evidence that Christians intentionally destroyed entire libraries; the damage that Christianity inflicted on books was achieved by subtler—but no less effective—means of censorship, intellectual hostility and pure fear. The existence of a sacred text, it was argued, demanded this. Before, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was “wrong” could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.
As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, “have no ground for boasting of their wisdom.” The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. Besides, he wrote with disapproval, ancient philosophers had disagreed all the time. Rohmann has drawn attention to a passage in which Augustine complains that no senate or power of “the impious city has ever taken care to judge between all [these] dissensions of the philosophers, approving and accepting some, and disapproving and rejecting others.” That philosophers should clamorously disagree with each other had been axiomatic to the Greeks: that was precisely how intellectual progress was made, by argumentation and competition. The very idea was anathema to Augustine. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.
Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases “whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature.” Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers.
There is no cruelty in regard for God’s honour. —St. Jerome,
As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled “to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently.”
Later, when Shenoute was criticized for breaking and entering into another man’s house, he was utterly intransigent. “There is no crime,” he declared, “for those who have Christ.”
Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as “the Giants” and the “Cyclops.” These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the maneating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men—they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite—and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: “There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.”
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey was a truly brilliant and well-researched account of early Christianity’s destruction of the Classical World, taking us on a journey through an age often beset by narratives and outright lies.
Although I already knew certain facts, Late Antiquity would not be my usual area of expertise, so I found this to be a truly fascinating and tragic overview of the period. Nixey’s writing is engrossing and evocative, brought to vivid life by Lalla Ward’s beautiful narration. Although nonfiction history can sometimes be dry and dense, this book was wonderfully alive and very accessible to those coming from a nonacademic background.
The sheer sense of loss this account imparts is immense. I found myself feeling truly heartbroken for the horrifying loss of knowledge, tradition, and life under the axe of Christianity. That 90% of Ancient Greek literature is thought to have perished due in part to deliberate Christian destruction and neglect is genuinely sickening. They say that history is written by the victors, and Nixey proved this in shining a light on all the ways in which the Classical World did not fall quietly; people fought and died for their way of life and I think it is incredibly important that we are now acknowledging this after centuries of Christian propaganda pretending otherwise. What might the world have been had Christians been more accepting and tolerant?
My only gripe was that I felt this book would have benefited from a chronological structure as it could at times be a little all over the place. There also could have been a little less focus on the Christians and more on those resisting it. But otherwise this was a fantastic and important account of this era, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about it!
Although I already knew certain facts, Late Antiquity would not be my usual area of expertise, so I found this to be a truly fascinating and tragic overview of the period. Nixey’s writing is engrossing and evocative, brought to vivid life by Lalla Ward’s beautiful narration. Although nonfiction history can sometimes be dry and dense, this book was wonderfully alive and very accessible to those coming from a nonacademic background.
The sheer sense of loss this account imparts is immense. I found myself feeling truly heartbroken for the horrifying loss of knowledge, tradition, and life under the axe of Christianity. That 90% of Ancient Greek literature is thought to have perished due in part to deliberate Christian destruction and neglect is genuinely sickening. They say that history is written by the victors, and Nixey proved this in shining a light on all the ways in which the Classical World did not fall quietly; people fought and died for their way of life and I think it is incredibly important that we are now acknowledging this after centuries of Christian propaganda pretending otherwise. What might the world have been had Christians been more accepting and tolerant?
My only gripe was that I felt this book would have benefited from a chronological structure as it could at times be a little all over the place. There also could have been a little less focus on the Christians and more on those resisting it. But otherwise this was a fantastic and important account of this era, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about it!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Suicide, Violence, Religious bigotry
Minor: Murder