The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
This month we’re looking at ancient history before rolling into our next president, making this weeks book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey.
Nixey opens at the end, describing the flight from Athens in 532 AD. of the last great philosopher, Damascius, who was fleeing from an edict enacted by the Emperor Justinian, Law 1.11.10.2, which reads “Moreover, we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism….so that they might not….corrupt the souls of their disiciples.” Basically, if you aren’t Christian, you can no longer teach. And this was the final nail in the coffin of the glory of Rome. All that the ancient world had achieved was destroyed in the centuries between Constantine converting to Christianity in 312 AD, and just 220 years later when Damascius fled Athens for Persia in 532 AD.
Now to be fair, when Constantine converted, he advocated freedom of religion. Within 70 years, Christians began rampaging against those who were not Christian and in 385AD, they smashed Athena’s temple in Palmyra… which would eventually be recovered and replaced, only to be smashed again in by Muslim fanatics in the 21st century.
But how do we get from the Christians being the absolute underdogs, sacrificed in the Roman coliseum during gladiatorial battles, to that same Coliseum becoming the heart of Catholicism….true story, the Vatican is built on the Roman Coliseum where Peter was martyred….or made into a saint, to the global powerhouse it is today, currently the largest global religion, with over 2 billion Christians of all different flavors worldwide?
One of the things I loved about this book, was that each chapter included a pithy quote directly related to what the chapter is about. So chapter one is The Invisible Army….and Nixey quotes Luke, chapter 10, verse 19: “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy.”
When Christianity first got started, there was much made of the martyr’s, those who died for keeping the faith. And it is truly remarkable because I definitely had an impression that Christians were being rounded up and fed to the lions en masse, an impression unquestionably helped along by Hollywood in the 20th century. As Nixey described it, early Christians were more or less lining up to die for the cause, knowing this would grant them glory in the kingdom of heaven. It seems Rome went out of their way to give Christians every possibly chance of avoiding death, like all they had to do was make a single offering to the Emperor, and they would be spared the arena or whatever other method of death was in vogue that day. And to a man, the early Christians declined, choosing instead to save their immortal souls.
Which…I mean I get it. That’s the point of faith. When I read A Storm of Witchcraft, and hell, if you’ve ever done any reading or watched any documentaries on the Salem Witch trials, you know that those who confessed were saved, those who refused to confess were executed for witchcraft. And I think I commented on my review of that book that why would you confess to something you didn’t do, to your eternal damnation? That’s not faith. So I get it. But, reference the above comment from St. Luke. Christians were taught that everyone not a Christian was Satan in disguise, and therefore, it was ok to hurt them. And all the statues were demonic art. And any text not written by Christians, was evil.
So the Christians did begin writing their own texts, one of the more notable ones being The City of God Against the Pagans by St. Augustine. Here we see the early list of what becomes the seven deadly sins. To start with there were eight: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. Eventually this morphs into pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. The demons embodied these, and they would fight back. But their most insidious power, was speech. Speech allows for alternate ideas to be heard, and those ideas might not align with: The Message.
Yeah…I inserted that on purpose. Cults all follow the same paradigm, and banning unapproved speech is pretty typical. Now, all of this is happening in the years between Christ’s death and Constantine’s conversion, so it is a slow, 300 year burn. At the time of Constantine’s conversion, only about 10% of the population of the Roman empire, which spread from Palmyra Syria in the east to Londinium Brittania, Gaul and Spain in the west, from Egypt and Mauritania in North Africa to the Danube river which cuts across the length of Europe. So it was a pretty large empire. And 90% of them still made offerings to any of the Roman pantheon, and all of them, who knew what was good for them, made offerings to the emperor, who pretty much always claimed to be a god himself.
And then came those pesky Christians, who refused to bow to any god but their God. And mostly Rome was ok with this…except for the not offering to the emperor. Like seriously, from what Nixey describes, the interrogators would be like, just burn a little incense for the emperor. And the Christians would refuse. And then be punished.
That makes a powerful statement, to those watching. Yet the Christians were so damn joyless…I mean, look at what they are NOT allowed to do. No lust…sex is out. Gluttony….some of the early Christians rarely ate for fear of violating that one. One of the questions early Christians had that was answered by the early Saints was if I’m starving, and the only food available is food that was offered to one of these non-existent pagan gods, is it ok if I eat THAT food…since those gods aren’t real. And the Saints said it’s better to starve then to touch something that had been defiled in a pagan temple. Don’t take pride in anything you accomplish, because that is God’s pride. You could not have done that without Him.
None of that fit with the Roman lifestyle. Neither did ceding rational thought. And yet the Christians had such loathing for anything not Christian, that as the winds shifted in their favor, they began destroying everything not Christian. Statues were defaced and marked with the cross. Text’s were burned. If you were caught with any text that was not Christian, you would be punished. And in Alexandria Egypt, which had become the beating heart of the intelligentsia of the Roman empire, with the blessings of Constantine, the Temple of Serapis, which housed a rather large branch of the famed library of Alexandria, was shut down and destroyed. The Ptolemy empire had made such a fetish out of collecting and storing knowledge that they were known to stop ships in harbor, raid them for their books and scrolls, copy those books and scrolls, then keep the original and return the copy to the ship.
The library at Alexandria had treatise from every philosophical school of thought, medical treatise, metaphysical treatise, literature, folklore, science…All the collective knowledge of humanity that had ever been written down, was stored at the Library of Alexandria. Books by Galen, the father of modern medicine, Galen whose knowledge of anatomy was so great that treatise of his that escaped the purge described functions of the brain that would be accurate until the late 19th century. Epicurus, who most people assume was only responsible for Epicureanism or Devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, especially to the enjoyment of good food and comfort. Epicurus is known for one other thing: he’s the father of atomic theory.
Now, the library at Alexandria burned several times, so it’s not necessarily fair to blame the loss of all that knowledge squarely on the shoulders of the Christians. What we CAN blame the Christians for is the methodical erasure by way of scraping over the vellum to “erase” what had been on there before, and then writing their treatise over it. What wasn’t burned, was erased, to make copies of Christian bibles. Some of this we know because modern archeology has figured out ways to restore some of that missing text. The book includes a picture of a treatise written by Archimedes, who may have discovered calculus two thousand years before Newton. In the 10th century it was scraped clean and written over by the Church.
Nixey tells the story of Hypatia, a quite famous female philosopher, who was a renowned beauty and a Neoplatonist, or someone who followed and furthered Plato’s teachings. When she declined to accept Christ into her heart, she was literally cut to shreds by marauding Christians. Damascius was also a Neoplatonist. And one very consistent theme running throughout is that all the philosophers of this time, all the thinkers, the ones who were advancing civilization, despised the Christians as fanatics. Kind of….well, think about how modern Christians describe fanatical Islam. It’s kind of like that.
While the build up was gradual, in just 500 years Christianity went from a fringe cult, to wiping out the last vestiges of civilized thought and the worst traits of tyranny, neighbors turning on neighbors and testifying against them for making offerings to the old gods, having books written by non-christian philosophers, statues and likenesses that were forbidden graven images. Damascius was in Alexandria in the 480’s when the schools there were shut down by Bishops. He went to Athens and spent the next 50 years building up the Neoplatonist school in Athens, before Justinian’s infamous law went into effect. Now…sitting from the comparatively safe distance of 1500 years later, and seeing some of what is being taught in modern schools and by who….you might be tempted to sympathize with Justinian and Law 1.11.10.2.
And it creates a paradox of tolerance. How can you claim to be for free speech while simultaneously shutting down the teachings of those you disagree with? Well, here’s the thing, Christianity learned early and well that shutting down dissenting speech keeps you in power. Which is one of the many reasons there has been massive push back against cancel culture. There’s recognition that silencing dissidents is a way to keep power, and those who push The Message are big on keeping what power they have managed to claw to themselves. And when Nixey points out how Christian’s outlawed pederasty…aka the buggering of young boys by grown men….you might pause and think “hmmm….maybe the Christians were on to something there.”
Or you might reflect on the infamous proverb that even a stopped watch is right twice a day. They can be right to outlaw pederasty, but wrong to outlaw what two consenting adults choose to engage in. It’s not impossible to think they made some good points, while also destroying a wealth of knowledge, that if we still had access to, might have been built on to cure cancer already. Rather than being an epidemic, AIDS might have been an anomalistic blip in time. If we had kept that knowledge, rather than letting it burn at the whim of fanatics.
Nixey ends her book in 529, with Damascius shutting down his school and heading to Persia where he had heard good things about the Persian king, Khosrow. Those rumors proved false, but the king wasn’t a bad guy all around. He negotiated on behalf of the Neoplatonists returning to Rome, demanding that “the philosophers should be allowed to return to their homes and to live out their lives in peace without being compelled to alter their traditional religious beliefs or to accept any view which did not coincide with them.” This would become the only declaration of ideological tolerance that Justinian would sign. Everyone else, was required to convert to Christianity. And the dark ages began.
This book was quite good. I don’t necessarily agree with everything she said, but it’s easy to see how detrimental to mankind was the advancement of fanatical Christianity. I mean, all the statues were destroyed by 529, and it would be 1000 years before an artist arose who could recapture those skills, with Michealangelo carving the Pieta 1498-1499, and the David between 1501 and 1504.
I find it interesting that if you Google Worst Year in History, 536…just seven years after Damascius returns to Athens under the umbrella protection of a treaty between a man who was not his king, who insisted he be protected, and a man who was his king, but sought to destroy everything Damascius held dear.
Why was 536 the worst year? Well, it was down right biblical, because of the volcanic winter of 536 caused by a volcanic eruption early in the year, causing average temperatures in Europe and China to decline and resulting in crop failures and famine for well over a year, which lead to a massive plague six years after that in 542. It’s almost like God did NOT approve of what his children had wrought on earth. But, like the pied piper leading rats through the street, the Church had established it’s supremacy on earth, and the people in power were loath to give that up with any level of self reflection. And the marionettes danced in their symphony of destruction.
