The darkening age The Christian destruction of the classical world

Review by New York Times Review

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. Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt. Christian monks in silent orders summoned up pagan texts from library stores with a gagging hand gesture. The destruction of the extraordinary, frankincense-heavy 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. Christians became known as those "who move that which should not be moved." Their laudable appeal to have-nots at the bottom of the pile, both free and unfree, meant that bishops had a citizen-army of pumped-up, undereducated young men ready to rid the world of sin. Enter the parabalini, sometime stretcher-bearers, sometime assassins, who viciously flayed alive the brilliant Alexandrian mathematician and 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. 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. 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. 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, maskwearing 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?" ? The early church was a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. behaný hughes is the author of "Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities." Her latest film, "Bacchus Uncovered," was recently broadcast on BBC World. She is currently making a documentary about the worship of war, "Mars Uncovered."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 17, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

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.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

"The destroyers came from out of the desert": a vigorous account of a vengeful early Christianity that burned temples and booksand 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-receivedthough 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Satan knew how to tempt St. Antony. One day, in a far corner of the Roman Empire, in Egypt, this prosperous young man caught the attention of the Evil One when he did something that was at the time very unusual. Aged about twenty, Antony walked out of his house, sold his possessions, gave all his land away and went to live in a pigsty. The Roman world of AD 270 was not one that usually cele­brated the simple life. Indeed, if he had looked out across this realm at this time then Satan might have allowed himself a satisfied glow that his work had been well done. The sins of lust, gluttony and avarice stalked the land. Where once the aristocrats of Rome had prided themselves on wearing simple home-woven tunics, now the wealthy strode about sweating under scarlet fabrics that gleamed with embroidered gold. Women were even worse, wearing jewel-encrusted sandals and expensive silk dresses so diaphanous that every curve of their bodies could be seen even when fully dressed. Where once upon a time Roman noblemen had boasted of enjoying fortifyingly cold swims in the swirling Tiber, this generation preferred to go to the baroquely decorated bathhouses, taking with them count­less rattling silver bottles of ointment. The behavior inside those steamy rooms was said to be wanton. Women stripped naked and allowed slaves, their fingers gleaming with oil, to rub every inch of their bodies. Men and women bathed together, each one "divesting themselves of their modesty," as one observer put it, "along with their tunic." That writer, in his embarrassment, only managed to mutter in abstract nouns about the "lust" and "licentious indulgence" that might brew in those humid rooms. The frescoes in Pompeian bathhouses were rather more precise. In one changing room, above a shelf where bathers left their clothes, was a small paint­ing of a man performing oral sex on a woman. Indeed, above each of the shelves in that room was a different image: a three­some above one, lesbian sex above another, and so on. A rather more memorable method, it has been speculated, of marking where you left your clothes than a locker number. Had Satan looked at the empire's dining tables then he might have concluded with satisfaction that the behavior here was little better. Centuries before, the emperor Augustus had (some­what ostentatiously) relished a simple diet of coarse bread and handmade cheese. Such parsimoniousness didn't last: soon, gourmands were supping one-hundred-year-old wines cooled with snow water out of jeweled goblets and sourcing their oys­ters from Abydos. All this, while many starved. Though not even those at the best tables could be sure of the best food and drink: in this showy, hierarchical world, hosts stratified the wine they served their guests, giving the worst wine to the least important diners, the mediocre wine to mediocre men and the best wine to the best men. The young Antony, before he set out to that pigsty, had been the sort of man who could, in time, have earned the finer wines at dinner. He was a provincial, true, but he was also youthful, handsome, fit and healthy; he had been offered a reasonable education (even if, in the time-honored way of privileged young men, he had declined to make the most of it), and he was wealthy: he had recently inherited hundreds of acres of enviably good farmland. He was at just the age when a man ought to start making his mark on the world. Instead, Antony abandoned it all. Not long after his parents' deaths, he had been in church when he heard a chapter from the Gospel of Matthew being read. "If thou wilt be perfect," it said, "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." And he had promptly done so. Fifteen years later, Antony ​-- ​soon he would become so famous that he could be known by this name alone ​-- ​decided to go even farther, setting out to live in a deserted Roman fort on the edge of the Egyptian desert where he stayed for twenty years. Later, he would go farther still, making his home on a mountain by the Red Sea. He would stay there until he died in AD 356. Antony was not one of the empire's gourmands. No Sicilian lampreys for him; instead he ate only bread, salt and water ​-- ​and precious little of that, eating only once a day, after sunset. It can't have been a meal to look forward to: while he was in the fort, bread was brought to him only twice a year. Little about his life would have whetted the appetite of an aesthete. Antony slept on a simple rush mat, covering himself with a goats'-hair blanket. Often he didn't sleep at all, preferring to spend the whole night awake in prayer. While other young men daubed themselves with expensive perfumes and ointments, and plucked their hair so assiduously that (the moralists muttered) it was impossible to tell the jawlines of young men from those of women, Antony scorned his body. He assaulted it on a daily basis, refusing to use oils to anoint and clean it, and instead wore a hair shirt and never washed. He only cleaned the mud from his feet when he hap­pened to cross a stream. It was said that no one saw his body naked until he died. His was a life devoted to isolation, humility (or, to give it a less Christian gloss, humiliation) and self-abnegation. Yet just a few decades after his death, Antony became a celebrity. The story of his life, written down by a bishop named Athanasius, was a literary sensation, devoured by readers from Egypt to Italy, and remained a bestseller for centuries. Young men read this account of punishing self-denial and, inspired, headed out into the desert in imitation. So many men went, it was said, that the desert was made a city by monks. Centuries later, Antony would be revered as the founding father of monasticism; one of the most influential men in the history of Christianity. A few years after his death, people had already started to recognize his importance. When St. Augustine heard the story of Antony's austere life he was apparently so moved by its power that he rushed out of the house into the garden, tore his hair and beat his head with his hands. Such simple men, he said, were rising up and taking "heaven by force." Not everyone was so delighted. According to Antony's biogra­pher, Athanasius, Satan looked on the hair shirt-wearing, sleepless saint and was revolted. This was intolerable virtue in one so young and so the Prince of Darkness had to act. He was in no doubt what form his attack should take: Antony was a man who scorned the pleasures of the flesh and so it was with the pleasures of the flesh that he would be tempted. Unclean thoughts were, Athanasius explains, Satan's standard weapon for tempting youths, and so he began sending seductive dreams to disturb the young innocent by night. Alas, the holy Antony was a match for this: he pushed them away with the power of con­stant prayer. The Devil was forced to move to a second-tier temptation. One night the thwarted Satan turned himself into the form of a beautiful young woman omitting, adds Athanasius ​-- ​a master of the intriguing aside ​-- ​"no detail that might provoke lascivious thoughts." Antony struggled but stood firm by calling to mind "the fiery punishment of hell and the torment inflicted by worms." Satan gnashed his teeth with fury; but he wasn't done yet. He decided to send his trump card: an apparition in the form of a young black boy who prostrated himself at Antony's feet. As he lay there the demon announced that he was the "friend of fornication" and bragged about how many chaste souls he had led astray. Antony responded by singing a psalm, an act that was, even then, so anaphrodisiac that the boy instantly vanished. Antony might have won these early battles but his war with evil was far from over. Over the following decades, as he moved about the emptiness of the desert, he faced repeated demonic onslaught. He was beaten so severely by demons that he was unable to speak.  Excerpted from The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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