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The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, by Catherine Nixey
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Review
A New York Times Notable Book, 2018 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Observer, and BBC History MagazineWinner of the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Nonfiction “A searingly passionate book… Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt…. 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.” —New York Times Book Review "Nixey paints with a wide brush...a fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror."—Kirkus Reviews"Nixey clearly but untendentiously summarizes phenomena that led up to the elimination of classical polytheism."—Booklist “Captivating and compelling, The Darkening Age challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed. A remarkable fusion of riveting narrative and acute scholarly judgment, this book marks the debut of a formidable classicist and historian.”—Dan Jones, best-selling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars "Catherine Nixey has written a bold, dazzling and provocative book that challenges ideas about early Christianity and both how – and why – it spread so far and fast in its early days. Nixey is a witty and iconoclastic guide to a world that will be unfamiliar, surprising and troubling to many."—Peter Frankopan, best-selling author of The Silk Roads “Engaging and erudite, Catherine Nixey's book offers both a compelling argument and a wonderful eye for vivid detail. It shines a searching spotlight onto some of the murkiest aspects of the early medieval mindset. A triumph.”—Edith Hall, author of Introducing the Ancient Greeks “A devastating book, written in vivid yet playful prose. Catherine Nixey reveals a level of intolerance and anti-intellectualism which echoes today’s headlines but is centuries old.”—Anita Anand, author of Sophia and coauthor (with William Dalrymple) of Koh-i-Noor “Nixey’s elegant and ferocious text paints a dark but riveting picture of life at the time of the ‘triumph’ of Christianity, reminding us not just of the realities of our own past, but also of the sad echoes of that past in our present.”—Michael Scott, author of Ancient Worlds “[An] impassioned account… Nixey acutely and thunderously reminds us that many used the Christian project as an excuse to destroy rather than to love.”—BBC History Magazine, "Books of the Year" "A book for the 21st century...Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would expect from a distinguished journalist, every page is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an expert eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill...A finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics...[The Darkening Age] succeeds brilliantly."—Tim Whitmarsh, Guardian(UK) "A vigorous account...Nixey paints with a wide brush, but her point is well-taken...A fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror." —Kirkus Reviews "The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey looks at the rise of Christianity, showing how its early radical followers ravaged vast swathes of classical culture, sending the West into an era of dogma and intellectual decline."—Publishers Weekly, "Spring 2018 Announcements: History" “[A] vivid and important new book… Nixey is a funny, lively, readable guide through this dark world of religious oppression…. 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.”—The New Statesman (UK) “Exceptionally well written...[a] clever, compelling book.”—Thomas W. Hodgkinson, The Spectator (UK) “Sardonic, well-informed and quite properly lacking in sympathy for its hapless target ... The Darkening Age rattles along at a tremendous pace, and Nixey brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world.”—Peter Thonemann, The Sunday Times (UK) "Nixey has done an impressive job of illuminating an important aspect of late-antique Christianity.”—Levi Roach, Literary Review (UK) “A delightful book about destruction and despair. Nixey 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. Comfortable assumptions about Christian progress come tumbling down.”—Gerard de Groot, The Times (UK)
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About the Author
CATHERINE NIXEY studied classics at Cambridge and taught the subject for several years before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at the Times (UK), where she still works.
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Product details
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (April 17, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0544800885
ISBN-13: 978-0544800885
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars
124 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#38,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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.â€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.
A most enjoyable history. Not a scholarly work, but a commendable work of reporting. The subject is the triumph of Christianity, with an understanding that triumph entails a great deal of violence and destruction. The writing is exceptionally engaging for what I understand is the author's first published book.
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