Book review: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey
Statues were smashed, temples toppled and manuscripts burnt, as the early Christians tried to wipe out all traces of classical civilisation, claims this polemic.
Review by Peter Thonemann
The Sunday Times, September 17, 2017
Does Richard Dawkins take The Sunday Times? Richard, if you’re reading this, here is a book to gladden your heart. It is the story of a nightmare. In the two centuries between the conversion of Constantine (AD312) and the closure of the pagan philosophical schools at Athens (AD529), the worshippers of the old Greek and Roman gods saw “their religious liberties removed, their books burned, their temples destroyed and their ancient statues smashed by thugs with hammers”. A “fundamentally liberal” civilisation was deliberately and gleefully eradicated by “sinister groups of black-robed, chanting monks”, driven by “suspicion, prejudice, vindictiveness, ignorance and sheer stupidity”.
The Roman historian Tacitus claimed to write sine ira et studio (without anger or partiality). Catherine Nixey would have eaten Tacitus alive. The Darkening Age is a book of unabashed studium and ferocious ira. For Nixey, a Times journalist, the “triumph of Christianity” was an unmitigated cultural catastrophe, which laid “the intellectual foundations for 1,000 years of theocratic oppression”. With passion, wit and thunderous eloquence, she throws everything she has against the bishops, monks and Christian emperors of late antiquity.
Black-robed chanting monks were driven by ignorance and stupidity
In October 312, when Constantine looked to the heavens and saw a great cross of light shining in the sky, probably fewer than one in 10 inhabitants of the Roman Empire were Christians. By mid-century, Christians believed themselves (perhaps rightly) to be in the majority. The late fourth and fifth centuries AD saw strident imperial legislation against the rapidly dwindling pagan minority and increasingly violent vigilante action by Christian zealots. It is this persecution of pagans that Nixey has in her sights.
As the title suggests, one of the main themes of The Darkening Age is the utter worthlessness of the newly triumphant culture. The scientists of the “ebullient, argumentative classical world” subscribed to an enlightened atomic theory of nature; in the new Christian empire “ignorance was widely celebrated”, and the “terrified philosophers” of the old schools “were beaten, tortured, interrogated and exiled”. Worse, the “exuberant illiteracy” of the fourth-century church came with an inferiority complex: “It was painfully obvious to educated Christians that the intellectual achievements of the ‘insane’ pagans were vastly superior to their own.” Stupidity and envy led to mindless vandalism: “Some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them — and certainly too stupid to recreate them.”
Everything the Christians touched turned to dust. “Unlike the centuries before Constantine,” laments Nixey, “the centuries afterwards produced no rambunctious satires or racy novels or lucidly frank love poetry. The giants of fourth and fifth century literature are instead St Augustine, St Jerome and St John Chrysostom. All are Christian. None is easily confused with Catullus.”
The “sexually joyful” poetry of Catullus and Ovid had no place in a sexually repressive culture that prescribed “castration, torture and flogging” for suspected homosexuals. Jokes were banned; theatre was abhorred; even the art of ladder-making went into a precipitate decline (“many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for the Christians, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach them”).
Nixey’s hardest words are reserved for the monks of the Egyptian and Syrian desert, the “marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots” who served as the shock-troops of the new Christian empire. She is frankly baffled by the growth of asceticism in the fourth century. Perhaps some were duped into this unspeakable lifestyle by false advertising; the rest, she briskly concludes, “must have been profoundly depressed”. In her telling, it is hard to see why any sixth-century Greek would have preferred the totalitarian desert monasteries of the Sinai to the retro chic of Plato’s Academy at Athens.
It is easy to imagine the shade of Christopher Hitchens wriggling with pleasure at all this. Like every good polemic, The Darkening Age is sardonic, well-informed and quite properly lacking in sympathy for its hapless target. But the argument depends on quite a bit of nifty footwork. Nixey vividly evokes the fundamentalist bonfires that “blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames”. Inconveniently, we have no evidence for a single poem by Ovid or Catullus having been put to the flames: Christian book-burning was always directed at heretical Christian literature or “magical” writings (astrology and so forth) such as had repeatedly been suppressed by pagan emperors from Augustus onwards. Ovid, she grudgingly notes, continued to be copied and read enthusiastically during the medieval period.
Nixey dedicates many horrified pages to the destruction of the temple of Serapis, “the greatest building in the world”, by a Christian mob at Alexandria in AD392. Throughout the empire, we are told, “temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground”. Again, the truth is more complex. Common enough in triumphalist Christian hagiography, temple-destruction seems to have been exceptionally rare in real life. Of all the hundreds of pagan temples in Egypt, the Alexandrian Serapeum is the only one known to have been violently destroyed. Of some 700 known temples to the old gods in Roman Gaul, only 10 (1.4%) seem to have met a violent end in the fourth or fifth century (not certainly at the hands of Christians).
This should not surprise us. In the early fourth century, the Christian population was growing by perhaps 40% per decade, representing hundreds of thousands of lost pagan worshippers every year. (“A story of forced conversion,” says Nixey, with a wave of the hand.) Most temples withered quietly through neglect: think British rural churches, not Isis and Palmyra.
The Darkening Age rattles along at a tremendous pace, and Nixey brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world. Those losses were real enough. But by denying that anything of value or interest took their place, she ends up condemning the entire civilisation of the European Middle Ages as a collective fit of inexplicable narrow-minded idiocy. No doubt Augustine and Jerome are less in tune with 21st-century sexual mores than Catullus or Ovid. But intolerance comes in more than one flavour.
Brute force
It is often assumed that the damage to the Elgin Marbles was the fault of Lord Elgin’s clumsy workmen, but much was in fact done by zealous early Christians, Nixey asserts. The Parthenon’s East Pediment fared very badly, with heads, hands and feet smashed. The central figures, which showed the birth of Athena, were ‘pushed off…and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church’.
Peter Thonemann, Professor of Ancient History, University of Oxford
First published here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/darkening-age-catherine-nixey-review-crbc0n2np
Another review by Oxford scholar see here.
Christian Theology and History 