Home > Work > The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
141 " In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. "
― Catherine Nixey , The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
142 " Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames. "
143 " But although martyr stories have often made for arresting and compelling drama, very few, if any, of these tales are based on historical fact. There were simply not that many years of imperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen—in three whole centuries of Roman rule. These years may have loomed understandably large in Christian accounts but to allow them to dominate the narrative in the way that they have—and still do—is at best misleading and at worst a gross misrepresentation. "
144 " Only one percent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine percent was lost. One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity. "
145 " Less than a hundred years after the first Christian emperor, the intellectual landscape was changing. In the third century, there had been twenty-eight public libraries in Rome and many private ones.55 By the end of the fourth they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut.”56 Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? "
146 " Fervent Christians went into people’s houses and searched for books, statues and paintings that were considered demonic. This kind of obsessive attention was not cruelty. On the contrary: to restrain, to attack, to compel, even to beat a sinner was—if you turned them back to the path of righteousness—to save them. As Augustine, the master of the pious paradox, put it: “Oh, merciful savagery. "
147 " Many converted happily to Christianity, it is true. But many did not. Many Romans and Greeks did not smile as they saw their religious liberties removed, their books burned, their temples destroyed and their ancient statues shattered by thugs with hammers. This book tells their story; it is a book that unashamedly mourns the largest destruction of art that human history had ever seen. It is a book about the tragedies behind the “triumph” of Christianity. "
148 " The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up.61 Some writers were highly critical—even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had “destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city. "
149 " Even before Christianity, sophisticated Roman thinkers had poured scorn on such an idea. As Pliny the Elder had put it: “that [a] supreme being, whate’er it be, pays heed to man’s affairs is a ridiculous notion. Can we believe that it would not be defied by so gloomy and so multifarious a duty?”7 Didn’t a god have better things to do? "
150 " For the first hundred-odd years of Christianity’s existence, there are no mentions of Christianity in Roman writings. Then, around the turn of the second century, it started to appear, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, in the writings of non-Christians. In AD 111, there is a letter from Pliny, the Roman governor. Then a few years later come some tantalizingly brief references to it in Roman histories—a quick section in the historian Tacitus’s Annals and another mention in a history by Suetonius. And that was it. "
151 " In the 380s and 390s rulings started to be issued with increasing rapidity and ferocity against all non-Christian ritual. In AD 391, the fervently Christian emperor Theodosius passed a formidable law. “No person shall be granted the right to perform sacrifices; no person shall go around the temples; no person shall revere the shrines.” Nor could anyone “with secret wickedness” venerate his household gods, or burn lights to them, or put up wreaths to them, or burn incense to them.17 Then, in 399, a new and more terrible law came. It was announced that “if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed. "
152 " Suddenly, in around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture—and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything—from the Creation to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection. "
153 " The Creation is “absurd”; the books of Moses are garbage; while the idea of the resurrection of the body is “revolting” and, on a practical level, ridiculous: “simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted? "
154 " The Catholic Church and its “useless multitudes” were, in return, magnificently unimpressed by Gibbon’s arguments, and they promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books. "
155 " What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion—a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar—might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. "
156 " ARCHIMEDES PALIMPSEST, C. 10TH–13TH CENTURY A tenth-century copy of Archimedes’s Method of Mechanical Theorems. In it, Archimedes had ingeniously applied mechanical laws, such as the law of the lever, to find the volume and area of geometric shapes. Two thousand years before Newton, he had come tantalizingly close to deriving calculus. However, in the thirteenth century this work was scraped off and overwritten with a prayer book. "
157 " 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. "
158 " your statues, your busts, the instruments of your cult have all been overturned—they lie on the ground and everyone laughs at your deceptions.”36 "
159 " Local tradesmen were angry because this surge of Christian sentiment had led to a drop in the sales of sacrificial meat and their profits were suffering: anti-Christian sentiment caused less by Satan than by a slow trade in sausage meat. "
160 " Pliny, once again, is the perfect Roman: too well educated to indulge in fervent belief of the gods; too well bred to spurn them. "