Catherine Nixey, “The Darkening Age”

 – e-book

Read from May 26^th to June 26^th 2019

My rating: 

I don’t know whether the beautiful province of Quebec, which has been my home for about fifteen years, now, has got the most places with saints’ names in North America, but it is sure you will see them on almost any plate on the road. Yet, Québec is also one of the less religious places I know of, despite (or because of) the fact that, until just some fifty years ago, the Catholic Church was maybe the most powerful instance in the country. And if you ask the Quebecers about that period, their smile fade and they reluctantly acknowledge some of the rules they had to obey were positively medieval. 

Was it this constraint they experienced that have made them so adamant that religion have not part in their lives anymore? Probably, and I would like to believe they closed, thus, the long period of abuse and persecutions Christianity is guilty of, but I know it is only wishful thinking. At the end of the day, this is a period that few have dared to denounce, and at their own risk, from Celsus in the second century, who was the first Greek intellectual to contest the new religion and whose work was afterwards destroyed (and whom we know only because Origen, a Christian apologist, wrote Contra Celsum, in which he polemically quoted from his On the True Doctrine some 80 years later) to the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon who, in his Decline and Fall, will blame the Christians’ indolence and disregard for the public welfare for the fall of the Roman Empire, and who will see his study banned by The Catholic Church and himself becoming a pariah in the English society.

Not even the twenty-first-century Catherine Nixey will escape totally unscathed after publishing her brilliant and disturbing book, The Darkening Age. The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, being accused for example by Richard Tada in his article “The Myth That ChristiansDestroyed the Classical World Dies Hard” of uneven research, shoddy work and confusion of some religious notions, although he knows very well that she is not only a Classic teacher but also the daughter of a former monk and nun. Moreover, an otherwise very appreciatively review, like the one published by Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian (and which considers the book an “exceptional account of murder and vandalism wrought by religious zealotry – and one that suggests modern parallels”) can’t help but reproach the author that she is biased in her perception of a benign and rational antiquity in opposition to a barbaric Christianity, when the Romans’ cruelty is well documented. 

For my part though, The Darkening Age has only reinforced my conviction that the distance between Church and God is even greater than between any atheist and God and that faith is a personal choice, never to be institutionalised, to be given the power to oppress. 

In fact, this is the theme of the book the author formulates, after emphasizing that everybody has talked about the things the Church preserved, but few about what it destroyed: to remind the modern world about an entire civilisation that had been lost, with its art and culture wiped out and its people reluctantly converted, deprived of their freedom and their past. 

No wonder the book opens and closes with the powerful image of the wisdom trampled down by the Christian feet during their triumphal march against paganism. The decapitated head of Athena in Palmyra marks its beginning and her torso used as a step in the former house of the last philosophers in Athena its completion. In between, the sorrow tale of two centuries (the 4^th and the 5^th) when the Christian Church “demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art”, burnt the last remnants of the library of Alexandria, hid under palimpsests precious manuscripts (Augustine wrote the Psalms over the last copy of Cicero’s De republica, an Old Testament covered a Seneca’s biographical work), eradicated the entire work of Democritus, almost the entire Latin literature, and so on. 

The bleak image the author offers is in open contradiction with the traditional narrative in which the Christians conquered a weakened and abusive empire, whose population was ready for a saviour. In fact, the slaves remained slaves (a priest who encouraged them to quit their masters was immediately excommunicated and there is even a saint, St. Theodore, whose speciality was hunting fugitive slaves), and the taxation remained as punitive as before, only the fonds were used now to support the Church (for example to pay the bishops five times as much as professors, and six times as much as doctors).

Barely did the Christians come to power when the offensive began: first against the traditional Gods that had become suddenly demonic, by smashing them down, and closing, robbing and destroying their temples; then against the “pagan” science, philosophy, literature, by burning the books and the objects of art and by forbidding their teaching; finally against the freedom of spirit, by forcing conversion and forbidding any other manifestation of faith. Isn’t this a familiar pattern to be repeated all along the following centuries: conquer, destroy, erase, convert? How many other civilisations would be made to feel like Palladas, who’d asked in a sad epigram: ‘Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we Greeks... Or are we alive and is life dead?’

 

There are two stories in the study, magnificently told, that show unequivocally the material and spiritual devastation Christianity inflicted: the destruction of the temple of Serapis (considered at its time more beautiful than the Parthenon) and the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the most famous figures of the 5^th century: a brilliant philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, tortured and killed in 415 by a mob of Christians: 

As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

Furthermore, the Christian Church was not built only on the ruins of the old world, but also on exaggerations and lies, maybe to prove that not only idols have feet of clay, but also martyrs and saints. It is arguable today that the number of martyrs was as great as we have been led to believe, since in the first three centuries there were fewer than thirteen persecutions, and in the first 250 years AD we know only about Nero’s, who “persecuted everyone”, anyway. Origen himself admitted that the number of martyrs was small, despite the proliferation of stories about them. 

It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable. The martyr stories, inspiring and entertaining though they may be, show what the scholar G. E. M. De Ste. Croix called ‘an increasing contempt for historicity’.

As for the saints (whom I’m familiar with mainly because of, as I’ve already told you, the name plates I see everywhere in Québec 😊), at a closer look most of them are fanatical, therefore cruel and abusive. St. Chrysostom encouraged Christians to denounce each other and his Discourses Against Judaizing Christians will be quoted with enthusiasm by the Nazi. The emperor Constantine, who boiled his wife in a bath because he suspected her of adultery with his son (whom he also killed), was seen by his contemporaries as a vicious, evil man. There is even a saint, Benedict of Nursia, who gained this distinction not only because he founded the Western monasticism, but also because he destroyed many antiquities. Another one, Shenoute, pretended that those ‘who had Christ’ could do anything unpunished, and he went and destroyed a private home in His name. 

The great St Augustine himself approved without reservations both the forced conversions and the destructions for they were commanded by God. When the temple of Caelestis was levelled in Carthage, he exulted: ‘No craftsman will ever again make the idols that Christ has smashed (…). ‘Consider what power this Caelestis used to enjoy here at Carthage. But where is the kingdom of this Caelestis now?’ (Expositions on the Psalms)

The final blow was Justinian’s Law 1.11.10.2, forbidding the teaching of any pagan doctrine.

It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.

I will end my review with a story, I didn’t know before reading the book, a story at the same time amusing and sad, which shows once again the abyss between a disinhibited, gay, open-minded culture and a sombre, pedantic, over moralistic one: the story of the first line of the Catullus’s ‘Carmen 16’ poem, ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo’. True to Basil’s stern recommendations that such words endanger the safety of the soul, editor after editor (the same will happen with some explicit poems by Martial) avoided to publish or to translate it until the end of the 20^th century. It was left out of the 1904 Cambridge University Press edition of his Collected Poems and in the 1966 Penguin edition was kept in Latin. Only in 1983, Richlin will translate it correctly, though “though such was the richness of Latin sexual slang that five English words were needed for that single Latin verb irrumabo”: ‘I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths’. The censorship has been in place for almost two millennia and there is no definite sign it will completely stop rearing its ugly head anytime soon. 


P.S. I feel like emphasizing, because of the long and a little bit angry replies Tim O'Neill gave to my review (see the comments below), that Catherine Nixey's book is not, nor it pretends to be, a historical study. Read it as it truly is: a polemic essay, which says from the beginning that it wants to present not what the Church preserved from antiquity (and she admits several times it preserved a lot) but what it destroyed.