The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World QUOTES

181 " The Greek writer Eunapius felt the destruction was done less from reverence for the Lord than out of pure greed. In his account the Christians weren’t virtuous warriors: they were hoodlums and thieves. The only thing that they didn’t steal, he observed acidly, was the floor—and that was left “simply because of the weight of the stones which were not easy to move from their place.” As he wrote with scorn, “these warlike and honourable men” had destroyed this beautiful temple out of “greed,” yet once they had finished their vandalism they “boasted that they had overcome the gods, and reckoned their sacrilege and impiety a thing to glory in. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

182 " People saw earthquakes and floods and storms and lightning and assumed, in the absence of any other explanation, that they are “done by divine power.”37 The consequence of this was that people tried to propitiate these temperamental gods. Writers such as Lucretius argued that atomism, correctly applied, could blast this fear into tiny pieces. If there was no Creator—if lightning, earthquakes and storms were not the actions of irate deities but simply of moving particles of matter—then there was nothing to fear, nothing to propitiate and nothing to worship.38 Including no Christian God. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

183 " To punish a sinner violently, to flog them, beat them, make them bleed—this was not to harm them but to help them, by saving them from worse punishments to come. Shenoute worried that if he didn’t beat the monks in his care then he was offending God. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

184 " To oppose another man’s religion, to repress their worship – these were not, clerics told their congregations, wicked or intolerant acts. They were some of the most virtuous things a man might do. The Bible itself demanded it. As the uncompromising words of Deuteronomy instructed: ‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

185 " Jesus may have told his followers that they should, when struck by an aggressor on their right cheek, offer him the other, but his fourth- and fifth-century followers were less forgiving. As John Chrysostom explained, if a Christian happens to hear someone blaspheme, then, far from turning their own cheek, they should “go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so. Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

186 " Murder committed for the sake of God, argued one writer, was not a crime but actually “a prayer. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

187 " Celsus did not soften his attack either. This first assault on Christianity was vicious, powerful and, like Gibbon, immensely readable. Yet unlike Gibbon, today almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work. Because Celsus’s fears came true. Christianity continued to spread, and not just among the lower classes. Within 150 years of Celsus’s attack, even the Emperor of Rome professed himself a follower of the religion. What happened next was far more serious than anything Celsus could ever have imagined. Christianity not only gained adherents, it forbade people from worshipping the old Roman and Greek gods. Eventually, it simply forbade anyone to dissent from what Celsus considered its idiotic teachings. To pick just one example from many, in AD 386, a law was passed targeting those ‘who contend about religion’ in public. Such people, this law warned, were the ‘disturbers of the peace of the Church’ and they ‘shall pay the penalty of high treason with their lives and blood’. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

188 " By mixing together caustic lime powder and vinegar they created a solution strong enough to burn human skin. This they took to throwing into the eyes of priests, blinding them. Nowhere was safe: if a “traitor”—as they called those who didn’t share their beliefs—was known to be at home, the circumcellions would go into their house, drag them out and then attack them. The more unexpected the attack, the more glorious the effect. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

189 " To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a ‘Creation myth’ was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory – an Epicurean one – stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos – ‘the uncuttable thing’: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space ‘in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that’. Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than ‘a haphazard union of elements’.
The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics – the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligence – survived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these ‘lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit . . . until nature brought that race to destruction’. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

190 " There is a strong strain of relativism in Celsus’s work. At another point he states: “even if something seems to you to be evil, it is not yet clear whether it really is evil; for you do not know what is expedient either for you or for someone else or for the universe.”77 It was clear to Celsus that a person’s religious affiliation was based less on any rational analysis of competing religious ideologies than on the geography of their birth. Every nation always, he points out, thinks its way of doing things is “by far the best.”78 He quotes Herodotus approvingly: “if anyone were to propose to call men and to tell them to choose which of all laws were the best, on consideration each would choose his own. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

191 " Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine later marvelled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions. Indeed, many pagans like Celsus seemed to actively praise plurality. To the Christians, this was anathema. Christ was the way, the truth and the light and everything else was not merely wrong but plunged the believer into a demonic darkness. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.
Augustine, despite being impressed by the harmony of his neighbours, was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a good Christian to convert heretics – by force, if necessary. This was a theme to which he returned again and again. Far better a little compulsion in this life, than eternal damnation in the next. People could not always be trusted to know what was good for them. The good and caring Christian would therefore remove the means of sinning from the uncertain reach of the sinner. ‘For in most cases we serve others best by not giving, and would injure them by giving, what they desire,’ he explained. Do not put a sword in a child’s hand. ‘For the more we love any one, the more are we bound to avoid entrusting to him things which are the occasion of very dangerous faults. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

192 " A new era was opening. To worship another god was no longer to be merely different. It was to err. And those who erred were to be seized, struck and – if necessary – wounded. Above all, they were to be stopped. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

193 " The arguments went further: those punishing errant Christians were not brutes; on the contrary, Augustine said that they were like a doctor tending to a sick patient. “When surgeons see that a gangrene must be cut away or cauterized, they often, out of compassion, turn a deaf ear to many cries. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

194 " Where there is terror,” said Augustine, “there is salvation . . . Oh, merciful savagery!”42 The intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

195 " I have tried to avoid using the word “pagan” throughout, except when conveying the thoughts or deeds of a Christian protagonist. It was a pejorative and insulting word and was not one that any non-Christian at the time would have willingly used of themselves. It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

196 " Gaunt from constant fasting, his skin seemed to cling too closely to his bones. His deep-socketed eyes were as dark and sunken as holes in a stone wall—it was said that he did not sleep all night until daybreak, and only then for a moment. When he was awake, people said he wept constantly, tears as sweet as honey falling from his eyes, turning them black with his holy sorrow. This was Shenoute. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

197 " Before, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was “wrong” could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

198 " Everyone now had to become Christian. Every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and “entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism.” Those who refused would be stripped of all their property, movable and immovable, lose their civil rights, be left in penury and, “in addition”—as if what had gone before was not punishment but mere preamble—they would be “subject to the proper punishment.” If any man did not immediately hurry to the “holy churches” with his family and force them also to be baptized, then he would suffer all of the above—and then he would be exiled. The “insane error” of paganism was to be wiped from the face of the earth. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

199 " Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more ‘easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein’. And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a religious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods. If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

200 " Filed under the usual dull bureaucratic subheading, it is now known as “Law 1.11.10.2.” “Moreover,” it reads, “we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism” so that they might not “corrupt the souls of their disciples.”21 The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it. Its consequences were formidable. This was the law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was.22 This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe. "

― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World