82
" For St Paul and other Christian preachers, the body and its urges were not to be celebrated but smothered. In tortuous and embarrassed circumlocutions, Paul raged at ‘this body of death’. The rewards of a virgin in heaven were said to be sixty times greater. Christian writers in this period recorded the stirrings of their sexuality with great distaste – perhaps none more influentially than Augustine. Sex was, he felt, permissible if children resulted from the union but even then the action itself was lustful, evil and ‘bestial’, while erections were ‘unseemly’. The West would reap a bitter harvest of sexual shame from the disgusted writings of these two men. In the earliest days of the religion, some Christians went further, arguing that there was no need for sex any more at all. A new form of creation, in the form of a great conflagration and rebirth of the godly, was imminent. What need for awkward, messy, inexact human reproduction? Eternal life rendered reproduction redundant. "
― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
96
" Ovid had offered his opinion in the spirit of a connoisseur advising a novice. In Ovid’s writings, if you get your dress wrong or drink too much at dinner, you will suffer the consequences in this life: you won’t get your man, or people will think you uncouth. In the writings of the new Christian texts, it was not the taste of any man – even an expert – that mattered. It was the taste of God. ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ Protagoras had said. No longer. Now God was, and He was not only weighing and measuring man, He would, if he was found wanting, punish him. "
― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
97
" Carpe diem, Horace had said. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be dead for eternity. The monks offered an alternative to this view: die today and you might live for eternity. This was a life lived in terror of its end. ‘Always keep your death in mind,’ was a common piece of advice: do not forget the eternal judgement. When one brother started to laugh during a meal, he was immediately reproached by a fellow monk: ‘What does this brother have in his heart, that he should laugh, when he ought to weep?’ How should one live well in this new and austere world? By constantly accusing yourself, said another monk, by ‘constantly reproaching myself to myself.’ Sit in your cell all day, advised another, weeping for your sins. "
― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
98
" It had all seemed so simple: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Render unto God what is God’s. As the fourth century drew to its close and the fifth century opened, caveats were added, complications brought to bear. What, asked some of the most powerful preachers, if God and Caesar both laid claim to the same thing? Well, said the great thinkers of the first Christian century, in that case God took precedence. As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled ‘to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently’. Everything – man, law, and even bureaucracy – was now to give way to God. Or rather, to His Church. And if this meant some sticky moments on earth then so be it, for, argued another aggressive Christian cleric, the greatest wrong that one could do was not to disobey the law but to disobey God. "
― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World