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WORK TITLE: The Darkening Age
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Attended Cambridge University.
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Journalist. London Times, England, arts reporter. Previously, worked as a teacher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Catherine Nixey is a journalist based in London, England. She writes for the London Times, in its arts section. Previously, Nixey worked as a teacher.
Nixey’s first book is the 2018 volume, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. It focuses on the violence associated with the rise of Christianity and early Christians’ habit of destroying important art and architecture associated with other religions. Nixey also profiles individuals who were killed by Christian zealots.
The Darkening Age received mixed reviews. Writing in the Christian Century, Philip Jenkins commented: “Although The Darkening Age is harshly polemical and poorly connected to mainstream scholarship, it makes some valid points about violence, intolerance, and iconoclasm in Christian history. Assuredly, it will serve as a major weapon in the arsenal of antireligious polemic for years to come.” However, Jenkins added: “The book accomplishes far less than its author and publisher claim. Anyone with any knowledge of early Christian history already knows this story in broad outline. When Nixey says it’s a story nobody has ever told, she’s forgetting about Edward Gibbon—and a couple hundred more recent successors.” Jenkins concluded: “Some stereotypes are grounded in history. Others, like those that Nixey relies upon, are not.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described the volume as “a fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror.” Thomas W. Hodgkinson, reviewer in Spectator, called the volume a “clever, compelling book.” Hodgkinson added: “What should be presented as conjecture is styled as fact. And when conjecture is admitted, the reasons for uncertainty aren’t given or gone into. … Yet perhaps it’s not fair to attack an exceptionally well written book by a journalist for being insufficiently academic.”
In a favorable assessment of the book in the New Statesman, Emily Wilson suggested: “Nixey is a funny, lively, readable guide through this dark world of religious oppression. She wisely insists at the start of her book that this account of cultural violence should not be read as an attack on those who are ‘impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things’. It is instead a reminder that ‘monotheism’ (or, one could say, religion in general and Christianity in particular) can be used for ‘terrible ends’.” Wilson continued: “The book is also an essential reminder, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, that intolerance, ignorance and hostility to cultural diversity are sadly nothing new.” “Readers interested in unorthodox histories will appreciate this stimulating and iconoclastic work,” remarked Brian Sullivan in Xpress Reviews.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Ray Olson, review of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, p. 4.
Christian Century, April 25, 2018, Philip Jenkins, “Christian v. Pagan,” review of The Darkening Age, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of The Darkening Age.
New Statesman, November 3, 2017, Emily Wilson, “Killing the Old Gods: Christians Employed Brutal Methods to Win the Culture War against Rome,” review of The Darkening Age, p. 46.
Spectator, September 16, 2017, Thomas W. Hodgkinson, “Christianity Triumphant—and Destructive,” review of The Darkening Age, p. 34.
Xpress Reviews, January 26, 2018, Brian Sullivan, review of The Darkening Age.
Catherine Nixey studied Classics at Cambridge and subsequently worked as a Classics teacher for several years, before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at The Times, where she still works. She lives in London with her husband.
QUOTED: "Although The Darkening Age is harshly polemical and poorly connected to mainstream scholarship, it makes some valid points about violence, intolerance, and iconoclasm in Christian history. Assuredly, it will serve as a major weapon in the arsenal of antireligious polemic for years to come."
"The book accomplishes far less than its author and publisher claim. Anyone with any knowledge of early Christian history already knows this story in broad outline. When Nixey says it's a story nobody has ever told, she's forgetting about Edward Gibbon--and a couple hundred more recent successors."
"Some stereotypes are grounded in history. Others, like those that Nixey relies upon, are not."
Christian v. pagan
Philip Jenkins
The Christian Century. 135.9 (Apr. 25, 2018): p36+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
By Catherine Nixey
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $28.00
Gore Vidal's 1954 novel Messiah presented a grimly satirical perspective on Christian history. It imagined a near-future world in which Christianity is challenged and overthrown by a doomsday cult founded by John Cave ("JC"), whose fanatical followers establish their faith by ruthless acts of brutality against Christian people and their places of worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Christian violence against pagans in the Late Roman Empire, Vidal was asking, in effect, how would contemporary Christians like it if the same things happened to them?
A similar anger about historical Christian atrocities drives Catherine Nixey. Although The Darkening Age is harshly polemical and poorly connected to mainstream scholarship, it makes some valid points about violence, intolerance, and iconoclasm in Christian history. Assuredly, it will serve as a major weapon in the arsenal of antireligious polemic for years to come.
Nixey powerfully describes the ruthless destruction of pagan temples, shrines, and institutions in the century after Constantine's decision to tolerate the new faith. The perpetrators were often monks, a "marauding band of bearded black-robed zealots" who in Egypt and parts of the Levant acted as private militias, beyond the control of civil institutions. Many of their actions, such as their attack on the pagan remains of Palmyra, seem alarmingly familiar in light of the recent horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State. Monks then, like extreme Islamists today, saw temples and statues not as cultural heritage but as flagrant manifestations of polytheism and diabolism.
While their actions were not defensible, the monks were correct to see the pagan shrines as a major obstacle to Christianization. People would continue to believe in the power of the old gods and spirits until their sacred places were removed. The power of the old gods ended at the moment Christians wrecked their idols and survived unscathed. This same dynamic motivates contemporary Christian congregations in Africa, where paganism and animism are still vibrant forces, and where recently converted Christians ceremonially burn fetishes and pagan artifacts.
In focusing on historic acts, Nixey helps us recall the central role of iconoclasm in the Christian past. However often we tell the Reformation story in terms of books and learned controversies, the movement had its main popular impact only when mobs stormed the churches and cathedrals and purged the holy pictures and statues. Across faith traditions, tectonic religious shifts are repeatedly marked by a rejection of the material and a turn to more inward-directed perceptions of spiritual power. From the time of the biblical King Josiah onward, iconoclasm has been the foundation of reformations.
Nixey recounts horrible stories of mob violence not only against beautiful old buildings and precious manuscripts but, far more seriously, against pagan individuals. She discusses the ghastly mob murder of the philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria in 415, an atrocity that has become central to a modern-day secularist hagiography.
Having said that, the book accomplishes far less than its author and publisher claim. Anyone with any knowledge of early Christian history already knows this story in broad outline. When Nixey says it's a story nobody has ever told, she's forgetting about Edward Gibbon--and a couple hundred more recent successors.
More troubling is the rosy account she offers of the pagan world that Christians struggled against. She depicts classical paganism as a gloriously rich culture marked by almost limitless tolerance of other faiths, except where those were evidently criminal or seditious. She minimizes the experience of Christian martyrdom to trivial proportions. She stresses the astonishing scientific achievements of that ancient pagan world, drawing a stark contrast with Christian obscurantism. Paganism, Nixey implies, is simply a better way of living than monotheism.
But she is not comparing like with like. Her portrait of classical pagan culture draws heavily on the Golden and Silver Ages, from roughly the second century BC to the second century AD. But that older world of Ovid and Horace was in ruins by the time of Constantine--and Christianity had nothing to do with the collapse. For reasons that were variously social, political, and economic, classical culture and literature were already in terminal decline, and scientific innovation had slowed dramatically. The pagan religious thought of Late Antiquity was widely marked by pessimistic and world-denying attitudes that condemned the material creation. This was the intellectual paganism that Christians confronted.
When historians today use the term Dark Ages, we generally restrict it to specific and narrow eras that affected some limited regions, where civil society collapsed for decades or even centuries. Nixey, though, regards the Christian curse as poisoning Western history far beyond the immediate post-Roman centuries. She characterizes the Dark Ages of scientific repression as extending through "a thousand years of theocratic oppression," up to the Renaissance or even the Enlightenment. No serious academic historian is likely to support this view.
Further, any reasonable account of the decline of classical civilization would focus not on the time of Constantine and his successors but rather on the lengthy period between about 230 and 560 AD. It would address a variety of factors: climate change, due in part to some titanic volcanic eruptions; repeated plagues on a scale comparable to Europe's Black Death; and the collapse of Roman frontiers which permitted the mass incursion of pagan barbarians, whose depredations destroyed countless ancient cities and texts. Nixey mentions those factors briefly but only to dismiss them as minor in comparison to the malignant growth of the tumor that was Christianity (much as had Gibbon before her).
When contemplating Nixey's view of this era, we might remember the Christian monk Gildas, who around 540 attempted to reconstruct the history of his British homeland. He could find no written works, as all had perished under the pagan assaults on the old (Christian) Roman cities. Insofar as Dark Ages can be traced to particular times and places, they occurred for reasons quite unconnected with the spread of Christianity. In fact, the Christian role in such crises was to pick up the pieces of civilization.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the mighty Hellenistic city of Antioch dominated prosperous Syria and served as a transcontinental center of learning and scholarship. Antioch's cultural role was quite unaffected for two centuries after the coming of Christianity, until the city was successively devastated by the appalling earthquake of 526 and the invading Persians in 540. If by happenstance Antioch had retained its original glory for a few more years, many thousands of its citizens would have perished in the subsequent pandemic known as the Plague of Justinian.
The ruin of Antioch cast a long shadow across a once-flourishing region. Most of the other great cultural centers of the Middle East were crippled by the long Roman-Persian wars of the early seventh century, followed immediately by Islamic conquests. During this crisis era, the Syriac Church of the East and other churches preserved and transmitted the intellectual treasures of pagan antiquity, including philosophy, science, and medicine. Eastern Christian centers like Nisibis and Gundeshapur became the cultural treasure houses of the age. Christian monks and clergy then translated those works for their Islamic conquerors, who subsequently bequeathed them to Christian Europe, thereby making possible the intellectual triumphs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This story may sound a lot like the familiar stereotype of Christian monks keeping alive the guttering flames of ancient civilization, a narrative that Nixey repeatedly mocks as a self-serving Christian fable. She would not do so if she had any grasp of the millennium following the fifth century. Some stereotypes are grounded in history. Others, like those that Nixey relies upon, are not.
Philip Jenkins teaches at Baylor University and is the author of Crucible of Faith.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jenkins, Philip. "Christian v. pagan." The Christian Century, 25 Apr. 2018, p. 36+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539036103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f58d0b46. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539036103
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Ray Olson
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p4.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. By Catherine Nixey. Apr. 2018.352p. illus. HMH, $28 (9780544800885). 270.2.
The European Dark Ages, 350-1000 CE, are so-called because in them Greek and Latin philosophy, art, and historiography, the "lights" of learning, were all but extinguished. More than 90 percent of classical literature, art, and architecture was destroyed. "The barbarians," common knowledge has it, put out the lights. That, classicist turned journalist Nixey allows, isn't incorrect. But the barbarians weren't invading Goths and Vandals but marauding monks and legitimate soldiers within the Roman Empire, who were empowered by law after Christianity became the state religion. Nixey clearly but untendentiously summarizes phenomena that led up to the elimination of classical polytheism, such as imperial persecutions of Christians by emperors before Constantine and the intellectual refutation of Christianity by philosophers whose works were later expunged, and actual incidences and kinds of persecution, 385-532 CE--that is, between the destruction of Athena's temple in Palmyra and the expatriation of the last philosophers of the Athenian Academy, founded by Plato in 387 BCE. This history is too little known, she says, in an era, the present, that ill appreciates the dangers of monotheism.--Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250740/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8655fb2a. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250740
QUOTED: "a fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror."
Nixey, Catherine: THE DARKENING AGE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nixey, Catherine THE DARKENING AGE Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 4, 17 ISBN: 978-0-544-80088-5
"The destroyers came from out of the desert": a vigorous account of a vengeful early Christianity that burned temples and books--and dissenters.
Think today's fundamentalist Christianity is anti-science, anti-woman, and anti-diversity? Things were even more fraught in its early centuries, writes Times (U.K.) arts reporter and classicist Nixey. In the case of the great ancient Near Eastern city of Palmyra, ascetic religions targeted the temple of Athena for destruction forthwith, setting into motion what the author calls, with qualification, the "triumph of Christianity"--with qualification because in a zero-sum game, there can be no triumph without someone vanquished, and the vanquished included the philosophers, artists, and writers of the ancient world as well as people of ordinary belief, so the "triumph" came at considerable cost. Nixey suggests that Western philosophy as such ended in 529, when the last "pagan" thinkers were driven from Athens and St. Benedict destroyed the temple to Apollo at Monte Cassino. Many other events figure in these pages: the burning of the much-torched Library of Alexandria and the gruesome murder of the philosopher Hypatia, the torching of ivory statues in Rome, the suppression of divergent Christianities such as Arianism, and the beginnings of the systematic oppression of Jews, who, accordingly to the zealots at the head of the new Christian movement, "were not a people with an ancient wisdom to be learned from: they were instead, like the pagans, the hated enemies of the Church." Nixey paints with a wide brush, but her point is well-taken that even if it took hundreds of years for Christianity to sweep aside competing forms of belief in the ancient world, it was not universally well-received--though its narrative that it was greeted with open arms everywhere was accepted as truth after the fact, in a landscape of temples in rubble, mutilated statuary, and lost libraries.
A fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nixey, Catherine: THE DARKENING AGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461564/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d9e7d2d. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461564
QUOTED: "Nixey is a funny, lively, readable guide through this dark world of religious oppression. She wisely insists at the start of her book that this account of cultural violence should not be read as an attack on those who are 'impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things'. It is instead a reminder that 'monotheism' (or, one could say, religion in general and Christianity in particular) can be used for 'terrible ends'."
"The book is also an essential reminder, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, that intolerance, ignorance and hostility to cultural diversity are sadly nothing new. "
Killing the old gods: Christians employed brutal methods to win the culture war against Rome
Emily Wilson
New Statesman. 146.5391 (Nov. 3, 2017): p46+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Catherine Nixey
Macmillan, 305pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
In 312 CE, Constantine had a vision of the cross as the emblem that would lead him to military victory: "In hoc signo, vinces!" ("With this sign, you will win!") The story may be fake history: it is told only much later, in contradictory forms, by two authors with their own Christian axes to grind, and Constantine was probably never as fully and exclusively committed to the faith as the later hagiographers suggest. But officially, he did become the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. A small Jewish cult that had mostly been ignored by the ruling Roman elite had acquired the attention of the most powerful man in the world. A few decades later, in 380 CE, Theodosius made Christianity the sole authorised religion of the Roman empire.
Since Christianity was the historical winner against Roman polytheism, nonspecialists often have a distorted impression of how the new religion took cultural hold. There is a series of Wikipedia articles about the "persecutions of the Catholic Church", including an extensive account of Christian martyrdoms under Rome; but there is no corresponding series about the often violent suppression of the earlier Roman religion by the Church. As Catherine Nixey points out in her vivid and important new book, the idea of the widespread persecution of Christians is a product of the Church's marketing and recruitment techniques.
Like the later suicide bombers, Christians were often eager for a public death. As Nixey notes, "This was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex." But the execution of Christians for religious nonconformity was extremely rare, since most Roman rulers were smart enough to realise that there is nothing to be gained from making religious extremists into heroes. In 111 CE, Emperor Trajan insisted in a letter to Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, that he should punish only the most recalcitrant rebels; anyone willing to offer prayers to "our gods" could be pardoned, "however suspect his past conduct may be".
Christians could be seen as a threat to the Romans' ancestral traditions as well as their structures of political power, since they refused to worship in the ways favoured by the majority of their neighbours. But Romans such as Trajan and Pliny had no interest in conducting a searching investigation of their motives. "They must not be hunted," insisted Trajan--who had more important things to do than worry about the minds of a few oddballs. As long as they could perform a minimum of the normal rituals, they were unobjectionable. Traditional Roman religion was a capacious ragbag of beliefs and practices, which could accommodate the worship of many different deities--Romanised versions of the old Greek Olympians (such as Zeus/ Jupiter, or Ares/Mars) alongside multicultural additions (the Egyptian Osiris), as well as more utilitarian entities (Fortuna) and deified emperors. Religious correctness was in many ways a matter of practice or etiquette rather than belief (orthopraxy, not orthodoxy).
In Nixey's narrative, the new dominion of Christianity brought about the end of this largely tolerant society, since everybody was now forced to conform to the faith and its social, sexual, cultural and familial practices. Some prominent adherents to the old ways begged the authorities to tolerate religious difference in the newly Christianised empire. Nixey cites the orator Symmachus, who pleaded with the emperor Gratian to allow the Altar of Victory to remain in the Senate House of Rome in 382 CE. "Each person has their own custom, their own religious rite," Symmachus argued, and asked, "What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?" But his pleas were ignored. The altar was ripped out and, in 408 CE, a new law came into effect that all altars and images to the old gods must be destroyed.
The language of "persecution" and "martyrdom" has been claimed by only one side. Yet there were at least a handful of non-Christians who were persecuted and martyred for their refusal to adopt the new religion. Unlike Trajan and other polytheist authorities, the Christians did not offer their opponents an opportunity to escape punishment with a quick prayer to the correct God. Instead, they probed their homes and even their minds in search of secret sins against the one true deity.
Nixey tells the story of the sainted Egyptian monk Shenoute, who led a group of his fellow Christians to batter down the door of a citizen's house and barge in to discover his forbidden statues of the old pagan gods. Breaking and entering was, Shenoute insisted, entirely justifiable, since: "There is no crime for those who have Christ."
Violations of what we would now call human rights and civil liberties were allowed for the sake of religious conformity. In Alexandria in 415 CE, the philosopher and teacher Hypatia was mobbed, stoned, flayed, ripped to pieces and burned by a gang of Christians, who accused her of witchcraft. Classical learning, literature and philosophy were now all suspect. Being pious in the new faith meant not only participating in public religious practice but also a moulding of hearts, minds, art, architecture and reading matter to fit the new "reality".
Nixey emphasises above all the aesthetic and cultural violence of the shift from Roman paganism to Christianity. She writes somewhat predictably of the turn away from the relatively "body positive" world of antiquity, in which privileged elite men could wine and dine on imported luxury goods and enjoy a wide range of sexual activities with objectified women and boys, to the asceticism of late antiquity, in which the most pious monks and hermits deprived themselves of food, sex and washing, and often became obsessed with all three.
Nixey says nothing about whether any of the slaves, prostitutes, workmen and wives who catered to the pleasures of the Roman rich man might have been glad to move to a world where self-restraint took on new value. Not eating, not washing and not having sex are, like dying in agony, forms of heroism that are open to people from any walk of life; in that sense, Christianity provided certain advantages and correctives to the hierarchies and inequalities of the later Roman empire. It may have felt to some people like a way to drain the swamp.
Nixey's story is more shocking when she describes the widespread destruction of antiquities The vandalism evoked in this book--such as the demolition of the temple of Athena at Palmyra, one of the most impressive buildings in the world--is disturbingly reminiscent of the destruction of cultural heritage sites by Islamic State, although Nixey does not make the comparison. Radical Christian terrorism has a long history. As the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius wrote in the first century BCE, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum." ("Religion has persuaded people to so much evil.")
Why did the Roman empire become Christian? What caused this violence, pain and upheaval, when polytheism had apparently been working perfectly well for many centuries? Constantine, an ambitious, militaristic and ruthless emperor who had his wife and eldest son put to death in order to instil terror and consolidate his power, may not have been motivated only by religious piety. For those clutching at power over a fractious and unwieldy empire, the imposition of the new religion may have seemed like a welcome opportunity to brand diverse populations with their own cultural authority, united under one emperor and one God.
On the other hand, the move to a more private, more personal form of religion had a different psychological appeal for a population with little political or economic power and little reason to feel grateful to the old gods of Rome or the power structures that they were used to support. Religious extremism and religious obsession often serve as useful distractions and comforts for a disenfranchised people hoping to deny their own unimportance.
Nixey's central aim is not to explain or analyse the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the late Roman empire. She offers almost no discussion of the political, demographic, social, psychological and economic causes that might have led rulers and their subjects towards this vast and violent change, although she does hint at the sheer loutish thrill of knocking down big, expensive buildings and defacing sublime works of highbrow art.
Nixey is a funny, lively, readable guide through this dark world of religious oppression. She wisely insists at the start of her book that this account of cultural violence should not be read as an attack on those who are "impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things". It is instead a reminder that "monotheism" (or, one could say, religion in general and Christianity in particular) can be used for "terrible ends". The book is also an essential reminder, in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, that intolerance, ignorance and hostility to cultural diversity are sadly nothing new.
Emily Wibon's translation of "The Odyssey" is published by WW Norton in December
Caption: Divine intervention: Theodosius and Saint Ambrose by Peter Paul Rubens
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilson, Emily. "Killing the old gods: Christians employed brutal methods to win the culture war against Rome." New Statesman, 3 Nov. 2017, p. 46+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515795329/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=679e084c. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515795329
QUOTED: "clever, compelling book."
"What should be presented as conjecture is styled as fact. And when conjecture is admitted, the reasons for uncertainty aren't given or gone into. ... Yet perhaps it's not fair to attack an exceptionally well written book by a journalist for being insufficiently academic."
Christianity triumphant--and destructive
Thomas W. Hodgkinson
Spectator. 335.9864 (Sept. 16, 2017): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
by Catherine Nixey
Macmillan, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 352
In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn't wash for fear of being overcome by lust at the sight of their own bodies. Some concealed their nakedness in outfits woven from palm fronds. One designed a leather suit that also covered his head. There were holes for his mouth and nose, but not, apparently, his eyes.
There was a monk who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to remind him not to speak. Another wept so hard, his tears dug a hollow in his chest. There were those who went about on all fours. St Anthony, one of the founders of monasticism, chose to make his home in a pigsty. St Simeon Stylites stood on a pillar for 37 years until his feet burst open.
What are we to take away from all this? First, that you should think twice before becoming a monk. Make sure you know what you're getting yourself into. Second, that Christianity is a fundamentally masochistic religion. And third, that its self-punishing characteristics are a particular product of time and place: not only a reaction against Roman decadence but also, as Catherine Nixey points out in her clever, compelling book The Darkening Age, a response to the end of imperial persecution. The theory goes that, after the Empire adopted Christianity, some felt nostalgic for the enlivening fear of martyrdom, and compensated by metaphorically martyring themselves. This, then, is the essence of asceticism. It was a syndrome that St Jerome dubbed 'white martyrdom', to distinguish it from the red kind, which got you killed in front of a baying, paying crowd.
If there were persecution junkies who longed for a return to the good old days when Nero might set them on fire, there were also avenging angels. As its title suggests, Nixey's book presents the progress of Christianity as a triumph only in the military sense of a victory parade. Culturally, it was genocide: a kind of anti-Enlightenment, a darkening, during which, while annihilating the old religions, the rampaging evangelists carried out 'the largest destruction of art that human history had ever seen'. This certainly isn't the history we were taught in Sunday school. Readers raised in the milky Anglican tradition will be surprised to learn of the savagery of the early saints and their sledgehammer-swinging followers.
Here are some darkening dates: 312, the Emperor Constantine converts, after Christianity helps him defeat his enemies; 330, Christians begin desecrating pagan temples; 385, Christians sack the temple of Athena at Palmyra, decapitating the goddess's statue; 392, Bishop Theophilus destroys the temple of Serapis in Alexandria; 415, the Greek mathematician Hypatia is murdered by Christians; 529, the Emperor Justinian bans non-Christians from teaching; 529, the Academy in Athens closes its doors, concluding a 900-year philosophical tradition.
This gives some idea of the merit and remit of Nixey's book. Also its demerit. What should be presented as conjecture is styled as fact. And when conjecture is admitted, the reasons for uncertainty aren't given or gone into. Visit the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum and you'll see that the east pediment is particularly badly damaged --'almost certainly' by Christians, the author tells us. But that's about all she tells us, except to note that the marble was 'likely' ground down and used for mortar to build churches. This is a terrifically exciting aside: the greatest achievement in Greek art was pestled into cement for Christian construction work? How likely is this? How do we know? How could we know?
Yet perhaps it's not fair to attack an exceptionally well written book by a journalist for being insufficiently academic. I'm in danger of coming across as a literary Theophilus, the temple-trashing cleric who Edward Gibbon described as 'the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood'. Or will I seem like one of those sad, God-addled wretches who rounded on Hypatia, the female Socrates, a heartbreaking early example of a woman who was killed for being clever?
In one of many instances where Nixey alchemises an anecdote with a few well chosen words, she describes how, while working as a teacher in Alexandria, this extraordinary heroine learned that one of her students was in love with her. It was her beauty, he mumbled, that haunted him. Hypatia left the room. A moment later, she returned with a handful of sanitary towels, flung them on the floor, and declared, 'You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it!' As Nixey exquisitely observes, the relationship 'went no further'.
If you take home nothing else from this book, take home this: it's a tactic to bear in mind, the next time you find yourself the subject of unwanted romantic attention.
Caption: The Emperor Constantine renames Byzantium
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hodgkinson, Thomas W. "Christianity triumphant--and destructive." Spectator, 16 Sept. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525552013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4d8fff33. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525552013
QUOTED: "Readers interested in unorthodox histories will appreciate this stimulating and iconoclastic work."
Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Brian Sullivan
Xpress Reviews. (Jan. 26, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Houghton Harcourt. Apr. 2018. 384p. illus. maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780544800885. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780544800939. REL
In her debut, Times (UK) journalist Nixey boldly challenges the conventional narrative of the happy triumph of early Christianity by telling the story from the perspective of those whom the Church defeated. Her gripping, albeit sometimes sensationalistic, revisionist popular history calls into question the standard accounts of topics such as monasticism, the Roman persecution of Christians, and martyrdom while vividly portraying the tragedies of people such as Hypatia of Alexandria and Damascius of Athens. Nixey's overarching purpose is to provoke readers to consider the terrible cost of the rise of the Christian faith. Although medieval monasteries did indeed preserve a lot of classical knowledge, prior to that the Church demolished, vandalized, and destroyed art, statues, temples, and books and was an instrument of persecution, intolerance, and anti-intellectualism as it conquered its rivals across the Roman Empire.
Verdict While providing a valuable corrective and alternative to Christian-centric historical perspectives, Nixey is prone to push too far in the other direction, oversimplifying complex events, presenting speculation as fact, and offering limited evidence to support dramatic conclusions. Regardless, readers interested in unorthodox histories will appreciate this stimulating and iconoclastic work.--Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sullivan, Brian. "Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World." Xpress Reviews, 26 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528197437/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0a78a6e. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528197437