How Christians Destroyed the Ancient World

[theworldismine13]

How Christians Destroyed the Ancient World
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html

Vandalizing the Parthenon temple in Athens has been a tenacious tradition. Most famously, Lord Elgin appropriated the “Elgin marbles” in 1801-5. But that was hardly the first example. In the Byzantine era, when the temple had been turned into a church, two bishops — Marinos and Theodosios — carved their names on its monumental columns. The Ottomans used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine, hence its pockmarked masonry — the result of an attack by Venetian forces in the 17th century. Now Catherine Nixey, a classics teacher turned writer and journalist, takes us back to earlier desecrations, the destruction of the premier artworks of antiquity by Christian zealots (from the Greek zelos— ardor, eager rivalry) in what she calls “The Darkening Age.”

Using the mutilation of faces, arms and genitals on the Parthenon’s decoration as one of her many, thunderingly memorable case studies, Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and adhering to an ethos of “love thy neighbor,” the early church was in fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. This is a searingly passionate book. Nixey is transparent about the particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of postpagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the scales — as it were — falling from her eyes. She wears her righteous fury on her sleeve. This is scholarship as polemic.

temple of Serapis in Alexandria is described with empathetic detail; thousands of books from its library vanished, and the temple’s gargantuan wooden statue of the god was dismembered before being burned. One pagan eyewitness, Eunapius, remarked flintily that the only ancient treasure left unlooted from the temple was its floor.

pagan philosopher Hypatia. Or the circumcellions (feared even by other Christians), who invented a kind of chemical weapon using caustic lime soda and vinegar so they could carry out acid attacks on priests who didn’t share their beliefs.


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Debate — philosophically and physiologically — makes us human, whereas dogma cauterizes our potential as a species. Through the sharing of new ideas the ancients identified the atom, measured the circumference of the earth, grasped the environmental benefits of vegetarianism.

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To be sure, Christians would not have a monopoly on orthodoxy, or indeed on suppression: The history of the ancient world typically makes for stomach-churning reading. Pagan philosophers too who flew in the face of religious consensus risked persecution; Socrates, we must not forget, was condemned to death on a religious charge.

But Christians did fetishize dogma. In A.D. 386 a law was passed declaring that those “who contend about religion … shall pay with their lives and blood.” Books were systematically burned. The doctrinal opinions of one of the most celebrated early church fathers, St. John Chrysostom — he of the Golden Mouth — were enthusiastically quoted in Nazi Germany 1,500 years after his death: The synagogue “is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts … a dwelling of demons.”

Actions were extreme because paganism was considered not just a psychological but a physical miasma. Christianity appeared on a planet that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal sacrifice. And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions for purges and pugilism.

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Triumph Of Faith Christian Martyrs In The Time Of Nero by Eugene Romain ThirionCreditPrivate collection/Photo © Bonhams, London, via Bridgeman Images
Still, contrary to Nixey, there was not utter but rather partial destruction of the classical world. The vigorous debates in Byzantine cultures about whether, for example, magical texts were demonic suggest that these works continued to have influence in Christian Europe. The material culture of the time also lends nuance to Nixey’s story: Silverware and dining services in Byzantium were proudly decorated with images of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” And while 90 percent of all ancient literature has been lost, paganism still had a foothold on the streets.

In Constantinople, the spiritual headquarters of Eastern Christendom, the seventh-century church was still frantically trying to ban the Bacchanalian festivities that legitimized cross-dressing, mask-wearing and Bacchic adulation. I read this book while tracing the historical footprint of the Bacchic cult. On the tiny Greek island of Skyros, men and children, even today, dress as half human, half animal; they wear goat masks, and dance and drink on Bacchus’ festival days in honor of the spirit of the god. It seems that off the page there was a little more continuity than Christian authorities would like to admit.

But the spittle-flecked diatribes and enraging accounts of gruesome martyrdoms and persecution by pagans were what the church chose to preserve and promote. Christian dominance of academic institutions and archives until the late 19th century ensured a messianic slant for Western education (despite the fact that many pagan intellectuals were disparaging about the boorish, ungrammatical nature of early Christian works like the Gospels). As Nixey puts it, the triumph of Christianity heralded the subjugation of the other.

And so she opens her book with a potent description of black-robed zealots from 16 centuries ago taking iron bars to the beautiful statue of Athena in the sanctuary of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria. Intellectuals in Antioch (again in Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as were the statues around them. The contemporary parallels glare. The early medieval author known as Pseudo-Jerome wrote of Christian extremists: “Because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves.” He would have found shocking familiarity in the news of the 21st century.

Nixey closes her book with the description of another Athena, in the city of her name, being decapitated around A.D. 529, her defiled body used as a steppingstone into what was once a world-renowned school of philosophy. Athena was the deity of wisdom. The words “wisdom” and “historian” have a common ancestor, a proto-Indo-European word meaning to see things clearly. Nixey delivers this ballista-bolt of a book with her eyes wide open and in an attempt to bring light as well as heat to the sad story of intellectual monoculture and religious intolerance. Her sympathy, corruscatingly, compellingly, is with the Roman orator Symmachus: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?”

 

[Hood Critic]

I wonder if this will ever make its way to the free Prime book of the month.

Anyways I'm going to have to check this out.

 

[jj23]

Thanks for that. Will order.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The Roman Empire was a bloodthirsty, destructive empire for its entire existence. It was much less destructive in its Christian era than it had been during its pre-Christian era, so to blame the destructiveness of empire on "Christianity" is pretty disingenuous.

The Library of Alexandria was first destroyed in 48 B.C. in a fire set by Julius Caesar, according to Plutarch and confirmed by pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (as well as several Christian historians).

All surviving contents of the library that made it out of the initial fire were later destroyed by Aurelian in 270 A.D. when he went to war against Queen Zenobia. Aurelian was a pagan who persecuted Christians.

It is true that Theophilus destroyed the temple in Alexandria in 391 A.D., but there's no evidence that any books were destroyed at the time, the books were already long gone. And Theophilus was a violent hack who fought with everyone. He led a violent campaign against the Originist monks (also Christians) and banished John Chrysostom from Egypt. But I'm interested to know if Nixey admits that the destruction of the temple was instigated by a pagan attack on Christians which came first (though the pagan attack on Christians was itself instigated by the Christians having offensively mocked the temple artifacts).

So to blame the destruction of the book of the Library of Alexandria on Christianity is simply disingenuous. The library was first destroyed by pagans, then the rest of the books were wiped out by pagans, and then the temple was finally destroyed by Christians only in response to an attack by pagans.

If she's playing the game that way regarding an incident I know something about, I'm guessing she's equally cherry-picking and distorting evidence regarding the other incidents as well.

The truth is, there were a lot of ruthless wars in that era. People who try to attack one religion by pointing out some of those wars live in glass houses, because any group of people from the time period can have just as much or more ruthlessness pinned to them. Some anti-Muslim authors try to dish out the same sort of bs for their captive audiences, who lap it up just like the anti-Christian authors will lap up this.


Edit: Looks like Nixey deleted her Twitter account after being confronted with a fake quote she had published in the book. Write a "historical" work and fail to even check primary sources to see if your quotes are real brehs.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I'm checking out the reviews now, and they're as expected - very well written, entertaining, but fundamentally an attack-style book that pays loose with the facts.

Here's Thomas Hodgekinson writing for The Spectator:

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?

Some more reviews, all making the same points or even more negative, from Peter Thonemann, Levi Roach, Josh Herring, Tim O'Neill, and Averil Cameron.

Even the positive review in The Guardian (written by Tim Whitmarsh, an atheist activist himself) admits that the book is a polemic, not an unbiased work of history, and she idealizes and hides the brutality of pagan Rome in order to push her narrative of destructive Christianity.

This is, fundamentally, a restatement of the Enlightenment view that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilisation’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). Nixey studied classics, and her affection for classical culture runs deep: she writes with great affection about the sophisticated philosophies of the stoics and epicureans, the buoyantly sexual (and not infrequently sexist) poetry of Catullus and Ovid, the bluff bonhomie of Horace and the unsentimental pragmatism of men of affairs such as Cicero and Pliny. When she speaks of classical culture and religion she tends to use such descriptions as “fundamentally liberal and generous” and “ebullient”. How, then, do we explain the Romans’ unfortunate habit of killing Christians? Nixey thinks, like Gibbon, that they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the civic order that the unruly Christians imperilled. Ancient accounts, she argues, show imperial officials who “simply do not want to execute”; rather, they are forced into it by the Christians’ perverse lust for martyrdom. Now, martyrdom certainly has a strangely magnetic allure, as we know from our own era, but the Romans were hardly bemused, passive bystanders in all of this. There is something of the zero-sum game at work here: in seeking to expose the error and corruption of the early Christian world, Nixey comes close to veiling the pre-Christian Romans’ own barbarous qualities.

But this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to judge it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics.

For those who prefer the cloud to official "reviewers", the top review for the book on Amazon doesn't pull any punches.

This is a polarized and polarizing book. I've appended a list of specific issues below, but the basic appeal and problems of the book can be seen briefly in two reactions to it.

The Times (London) reviewer, a Professor of Modern History, wrote, "The Darkening Age is a delightful book about destruction and despair." Nixey (pronounced NICKS-ee), he continued, "combines the authority of a serious academic with the expressive style of a good journalist. She’s not afraid to throw in the odd joke amid sombre tales of desecration. With considerable courage, she challenges the wisdom of history and manages to prevail." As the book invites us to do, he concluded that some ancient Christians were like ISIS, and perhaps going further than Nixey intended, that St. Shenoute, or St. John Chrysostom (he mixes them up), was like Pol Pot.

24 hours later, the Sunday Times reviewer, a Professor of Greek and Roman History, wrote, "The Darkening Age rattles along at a tremendous pace, and Nixey brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world. ... But ... 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." He complained of distortions of facts.

Reactions to the book have tended to divide that way: many who don't know the period well and who share the modern boundaries of the author's sensibilities enjoy it, while those familiar with the period and more empathetic to a now-alien culture tend to find it intolerant and ill-informed, which is how it strikes me too.

A central thesis of the book is simple and unsurprising: ancient Christians destroyed art, architecture and literature they believed was harmful. Most of the literary destruction wasn't direct, Nixey says, it was from Christians not recopying what they opposed or weren't interested in.

The bulk of the book, though, is a more diffuse argument that Christians were too dull to appreciate the higher, livelier Pagan world, and violent enough to destroy it. (Pagans include not only lusty poets and Dionysian revelers but Homer, Plato and Cicero.) Nixey sees ancient Christianity as about war, about God vs Satan, and not about, as she puts it, "a balm for anxiety" or the triumph of life over death.

Nixey's mission is to portray these things in a moving, entertaining way. The book is full of imaginative narrative portraying events that actually happened, might possibly have happened, and never happened alike.

Her approach is opposite that of the general flow of scholarship, which she believes is biased. While scholars increasingly move away from simplistic, binary views and work to understand the continuities and complexities of relations between ancient Pagans and Christians, Nixey minimizes or barely hints at such things and paints largely in moralistic black and white. More problematically, the book shows the signs of prejudice. Facts are selected, exaggerated, discolored, sometimes entirely mistaken, to fit. Rhetoric is inflamed; there's sometimes a palpable anger and disgust. Things repeatedly mocked and condemned for one side are ignored, excused or even admired for the other.

If you aren't familiar with the material, you can learn many interesting things from it, for which I give it two enthusiastic stars. But unless you check the facts--for almost every page--you won't have any way to know which parts of what you've learned are true, unknown, false, or just misleading. The balance falls too much with the last two to recommend the book.

As for entertainment value, there's much sarcasm and mockery, which some find delightful, even about Christians being tortured and killed. Pagans being tortured and killed aren't amusing that way; their suffering is presented with more reverence, sometimes in over-the-top heroic terms, which some may also find entertaining.

Maybe I should add that I'm not a Christian, and I may have more in common with the Pagans, but I prefer more empathy, fairness and accuracy in a book.

 

[the cac mamba]

christians

 

[Shogun]

Violence and destruction are a constant of nearly all human societies. Pin pointing one to serve a political purpose seems a-historical.