PDF The Darkening Age The Christian Destruction of the Classical World Catherine Nixey 9781328589286 Books

Product details Paperback 368 pages Publisher Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 16, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 1328589285

The Darkening Age The Christian Destruction of the Classical World Catherine Nixey 9781328589286 Books Reviews

• What a sad and disturbing story. Nixey mourns not only the destruction of classical culture, but also that of a nearly thousand year old, intellectual tradition that came ever so close to becoming, and defining, modern science. Had the philosopher's Academy, it's teachers and it's libraries not been destroyed by the fanatical mobs of christian converts we would not now have probes around the nearest planets, we would have ships around the nearest stars.
  No doubt Christians won't like you reading this book. It spells out all too clear, from all the remaining evidence, the horrible truth. We have long known about the wave after wave of attacks on and destruction of classical culture, as the evidence has been left behind everywhere. However, we can not regain what is gone forever. Perhaps now we can learn to see the crimes for what they really were, and dispel the lies that still support them and their legacy.
  In our own time we can see the Christian conquest of the classical world played out again, this time in the form of Islamic State, who would repeat it all again to serve their own Prophet of the Faith. To lift the darkness, we must rid ourselves of religious fundamentalism, Christian or otherwise.
• 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.
• when I ordered this book, I admit I wasn't familiar with Catherine Nixey. I was hoping the book wouldn't read like a text book and be filled with opinions. I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by how great this book is. Another author who knows how to tell a great story that is rarely talked about. I'll be looking forward to reading more from her.
• The negative reviews of this book are strained, strident, and snarky, in spite of the reviewers' posturing as more-academic-than-thou. Pay the negative reviews no mind. It's just the inevitable Christian apologetics and denial, disguised as elite criticism. Many people are irked to have stories told that they wish to be forgotten. This book is not a polemic, and it is not one-sided. Nor is this an angry book. This book is about stuff that people, including Christians, very much ought to know.
  
  Is this an academic book? No. It doesn't pretend to be. But with 21 pages of notes, you're free to check up on Nixey's sources all you wish. Nixey says right at the beginning that the stories she's about to tell are not well known outside of academia. That is true. So a popular history on this subject fills a great need. Might we wish that a book with this title had been written by an academic such as, say, Kyle Harper? Of course we do. But Kyle Harper has touched on these issues in his other books. Academics already know. Most people don't.
  
  Alas, the destruction of the classical world, which is the subject of this book, was only half of the horror attributable to the early church. Caesar's crushing of Gaul occurred before the Christian era. But the church finished the job of Celtic genocide in the years after 529 AD, when this book ends. The church destroyed not only the classical world, but also the tribes of northwestern Europe. For a mere glimpse of what was destroyed, consult, say, the British Museum's recent exhibition on the lost civilization of the Celts.
  
  The job of correcting and revising the historical record from Christian propaganda has only just begun, really. Archeology continues to fill in the enormous gaps in the written record. The job of exposing the crimes and lies of the church is by no means finished.