How the darkness fell

The Darkening Age:  The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey (2017)

Most Western people are vaguely aware that the Classical Greco-Roman civilization was remarkably advanced in many areas, and that the well-named Dark Ages that followed marked a substantial retrogression.  Few have any real idea how magnificent that civilization truly was -- nor realize that its downfall was not an organic process but rather was brought about by a deliberate and systematic campaign of savage and brutal destruction from within, sustained over a period of generations.

Nixey tells the story, or much of it.  Her focus is on Greco-Roman art, literature, philosophy, and ways of life, not on science and technology, but what she describes is horrifying enough.  A 20-page bibliography and a further 24 pages of notes attest to the thoroughness of research and sourcing.

In the centuries before Constantine's reign, Christians were a small and only slowly-growing minority in the Roman Empire, hardly noticed at first, later mostly ignored or despised.  Persecution of Christians did occur, notably the genuinely ghastly atrocities of Nero -- but it was rare and sporadic, and the numbers of victims were very small, contrary to the impression given by the lurid Christian literature of martyrdom that focuses on that period.  By the year 312, when Constantine suddenly decided to impose Christianity as the Empire's official religion, it's estimated that only 7% to 10% of the total population was Christian.  That is, Christianity never won its dominant position in the Mediterranean world by persuasion.  It won out only after Constantine hijacked the power of the Roman state on its behalf and imposed it with increasingly ruthless force.

Nixey documents this process as an ever-escalating campaign of cruelty, destruction, and mob violence.  Successively harsher laws to discourage paganism and heretical ideas (a concept which steadily expanded to cover more and more of Greek philosophy and free thought) were accompanied by a descent of civil society into violent chaos, as great cities became infested with menacing mobs of robed Christian thugs who invaded temples and even private homes with impunity to root out and destroy anything hinting at forbidden ideas.  The loss to art alone was beyond calculation, as countless statues and mosaics of magnificent quality were defaced or smashed.  Mass book-burnings, too, were staged to expunge forbidden thought.

The Greeks and Romans had always found it normal for conflicting ideas, even religious ideas, to co-exist and contend with each other.  The various pagan religions of the diverse peoples of the Empire borrowed gods and practices from each other, and generally coexisted peacefully; since the dawn of Greek philosophy conflicting ideas had inspired debate, not violence, amid a general recognition that many questions could not be answered with certainty and that valuable insights might arise from unexpected sources.  The Greco-Roman mind was ill-prepared to confront a mentality of absolute certainty that a single, frozen, immutable truth had been revealed and that all other ideas were of the Devil and should be mercilessly eradicated.

Nixey also spends some page space on another source of conflict -- Greco-Roman sexual culture.  Homosexuality in either gender was unremarkable; indeed, in traditional Greek culture, male bisexuality had been practically a social norm.  Some prejudices did exist, but in general, sexuality was openly celebrated as one of the great pleasures life had to offer, in a way utterly alien to the taboo-clotted repression of the Abrahamic religions.  As Christian dominance grew, one of the highest-priority targets was sexually-oriented art and literature.  To an almost unbelievable degree, the early Christians explicitly condemned and rejected beauty and pleasure, feverishly embracing ugliness, misery, and deprivation in their place.

The excavation of Pompeii, which had been buried under ash by Vesuvius in the first century and thus escaped the campaigns of systematic Christian vandalism, revealed just how thoroughly sexualized the public space in Roman culture had been.  The horrified Victorian archaeologists largely hid the evidence away, and most modern Westerners still have little awareness of this aspect of Classical life.  Eventually the enforcement of Christian taboos escalated to butchery of human beings, with males who engaged in homosexual relations having their genitalia chopped off as punishment.

Towards the end, the Christian state grew increasingly totalitarian, forcing ordinary citizens to act as informers and spies on their neighbors, and enacting draconian laws to stamp out the last vestiges of pagan religious practices.  Finally, even refusal by any pagan to proactively present himself for baptism -- that is, for formal conversion to Christianity -- was made a crime subject to ruthless punishment.

The Greco-Roman civilization was dead.  The Christians had reduced a glorious world of light and color with a vigorous life of the mind to a grey wasteland shrouded with belief in place of thought.  Not until a thousand years later would the Renaissance revive some vestiges of Classical culture and begin to revive the West from its living death.

Reading this book was a somewhat painful experience for me, as watching the film Agora was.  The decline of a great civilization into barbarism is a tragic spectacle, especially this civilization, for which I feel such a powerful attachment and sense of identity.  But it forcefully affirmed my rejection of the lie that the West has "Christian roots" in any sense.  Christianity is an alien contaminant, a poison, utterly antithetical to the true Greco-Roman roots of who and what we are.  I will never forgive the Christian religion, and I will never accept it as a legitimate part of our culture.

Nixey's book has predictably received many negative reviews from Christians, in line with the historical-revisionist "late antiquity" lie which struggles to argue that the Dark Ages weren't really so bad.  Ignore them.  Read this book to learn something of your true heritage -- and who stole it from you long before you were born.

[Second image: The Serapeum of Alexandria in Egypt, built during the Hellenistic period and showing the mix of Greek and Middle Eastern (in this case, Egyptian) influences typical of Hellenistic architecture.  It is believed that in late Roman times it held the last remnants of the Library of Alexandria.  It was destroyed by a Christian mob in the late fourth century.]