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2018-06-10 10:34:52 UTC
CHRISTIANITY IS AS EVIL AS ISLAM
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html#click=https://t.co/8Z3TpW9AuL
How Christians Destroyed the Ancient World
June 8, 2018
THE DARKENING AGE
The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
By Catherine Nixey
Illustrated. 315 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
Vandalizing the Parthenon temple in Athens has been a tenacious
tradition. Most famously, Lord Elgin appropriated the “Elgin marbles” in
1801-5. But that was hardly the first example. In the Byzantine era,
when the temple had been turned into a church, two bishops — Marinos and
Theodosios — carved their names on its monumental columns. The Ottomans
used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine, hence its pockmarked masonry
— the result of an attack by Venetian forces in the 17th century. Now
Catherine Nixey, a classics teacher turned writer and journalist, takes
us back to earlier desecrations, the destruction of the premier artworks
of antiquity by Christian zealots (from the Greek zelos — ardor, eager
rivalry) in what she calls “The Darkening Age.”
Using the mutilation of faces, arms and genitals on the Parthenon’s
decoration as one of her many, thunderingly memorable case studies,
Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian
culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and
adhering to an ethos of “love thy neighbor,” the early church was in
fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice.
This is a searingly passionate book. Nixey is transparent about the
particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an
ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of
postpagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the
scales — as it were — falling from her eyes. She wears her righteous
fury on her sleeve. This is scholarship as polemic.
Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative,
felt. Christian monks in silent orders summoned up pagan texts from
library stores with a gagging hand gesture. The destruction of the
extraordinary, frankincense-heavy temple of Serapis in Alexandria is
described with empathetic detail; thousands of books from its library
vanished, and the temple’s gargantuan wooden statue of the god was
dismembered before being burned. One pagan eyewitness, Eunapius,
remarked flintily that the only ancient treasure left unlooted from the
temple was its floor.
Christians became known as those “who move that which should not be
moved.” Their laudable appeal to have-nots at the bottom of the pile,
both free and unfree, meant that bishops had a citizen-army of
pumped-up, undereducated young men ready to rid the world of sin. Enter
the parabalini, sometime stretcher-bearers, sometime assassins, who
viciously flayed alive the brilliant Alexandrian mathematician and pagan
philosopher Hypatia. Or the circumcellions (feared even by other
Christians), who invented a kind of chemical weapon using caustic lime
soda and vinegar so they could carry out acid attacks on priests who
didn’t share their beliefs.
Debate — philosophically and physiologically — makes us human, whereas
dogma cauterizes our potential as a species. Through the sharing of new
ideas the ancients identified the atom, measured the circumference of
the earth, grasped the environmental benefits of vegetarianism.
To be sure, Christians would not have a monopoly on orthodoxy, or indeed
on suppression: The history of the ancient world typically makes for
stomach-churning reading. Pagan philosophers too who flew in the face of
religious consensus risked persecution; Socrates, we must not forget,
was condemned to death on a religious charge.
But Christians did fetishize dogma. In A.D. 386 a law was passed
declaring that those “who contend about religion … shall pay with their
lives and blood.” Books were systematically burned. The doctrinal
opinions of one of the most celebrated early church fathers, St. John
Chrysostom — he of the Golden Mouth — were enthusiastically quoted in
Nazi Germany 1,500 years after his death: The synagogue “is a den of
robbers and a lodging for wild beasts … a dwelling of demons.”
Actions were extreme because paganism was considered not just a
psychological but a physical miasma. Christianity appeared on a planet
that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and
men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would
have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But
for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed
in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution
was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal
sacrifice. And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the
most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical
discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions
for purges and pugilism.
Still, contrary to Nixey, there was not utter but rather partial
destruction of the classical world. The vigorous debates in Byzantine
cultures about whether, for example, magical texts were demonic suggest
that these works continued to have influence in Christian Europe. The
material culture of the time also lends nuance to Nixey’s story:
Silverware and dining services in Byzantium were proudly decorated with
images of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” And while 90 percent of all ancient
literature has been lost, paganism still had a foothold on the streets.
In Constantinople, the spiritual headquarters of Eastern Christendom,
the seventh-century church was still frantically trying to ban the
Bacchanalian festivities that legitimized cross-dressing, mask-wearing
and Bacchic adulation. I read this book while tracing the historical
footprint of the Bacchic cult. On the tiny Greek island of Skyros, men
and children, even today, dress as half human, half animal; they wear
goat masks, and dance and drink on Bacchus’ festival days in honor of
the spirit of the god. It seems that off the page there was a little
more continuity than Christian authorities would like to admit.
But the spittle-flecked diatribes and enraging accounts of gruesome
martyrdoms and persecution by pagans were what the church chose to
preserve and promote. Christian dominance of academic institutions and
archives until the late 19th century ensured a messianic slant for
Western education (despite the fact that many pagan intellectuals were
disparaging about the boorish, ungrammatical nature of early Christian
works like the Gospels). As Nixey puts it, the triumph of Christianity
heralded the subjugation of the other.
And so she opens her book with a potent description of black-robed
zealots from 16 centuries ago taking iron bars to the beautiful statue
of Athena in the sanctuary of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria.
Intellectuals in Antioch (again in Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as
were the statues around them. The contemporary parallels glare. The
early medieval author known as Pseudo-Jerome wrote of Christian
extremists: “Because they love the name martyr and because they desire
human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves.” He would
have found shocking familiarity in the news of the 21st century.
Nixey closes her book with the description of another Athena, in the
city of her name, being decapitated around A.D. 529, her defiled body
used as a steppingstone into what was once a world-renowned school of
philosophy. Athena was the deity of wisdom. The words “wisdom” and
“historian” have a common ancestor, a proto-Indo-European word meaning
to see things clearly. 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. Her
sympathy, corruscatingly, compellingly, is with the Roman orator
Symmachus: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same
world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to
seek for the truth?”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html#click=https://t.co/8Z3TpW9AuL
How Christians Destroyed the Ancient World
June 8, 2018
THE DARKENING AGE
The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
By Catherine Nixey
Illustrated. 315 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
Vandalizing the Parthenon temple in Athens has been a tenacious
tradition. Most famously, Lord Elgin appropriated the “Elgin marbles” in
1801-5. But that was hardly the first example. In the Byzantine era,
when the temple had been turned into a church, two bishops — Marinos and
Theodosios — carved their names on its monumental columns. The Ottomans
used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine, hence its pockmarked masonry
— the result of an attack by Venetian forces in the 17th century. Now
Catherine Nixey, a classics teacher turned writer and journalist, takes
us back to earlier desecrations, the destruction of the premier artworks
of antiquity by Christian zealots (from the Greek zelos — ardor, eager
rivalry) in what she calls “The Darkening Age.”
Using the mutilation of faces, arms and genitals on the Parthenon’s
decoration as one of her many, thunderingly memorable case studies,
Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian
culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and
adhering to an ethos of “love thy neighbor,” the early church was in
fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice.
This is a searingly passionate book. Nixey is transparent about the
particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an
ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of
postpagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the
scales — as it were — falling from her eyes. She wears her righteous
fury on her sleeve. This is scholarship as polemic.
Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative,
felt. Christian monks in silent orders summoned up pagan texts from
library stores with a gagging hand gesture. The destruction of the
extraordinary, frankincense-heavy temple of Serapis in Alexandria is
described with empathetic detail; thousands of books from its library
vanished, and the temple’s gargantuan wooden statue of the god was
dismembered before being burned. One pagan eyewitness, Eunapius,
remarked flintily that the only ancient treasure left unlooted from the
temple was its floor.
Christians became known as those “who move that which should not be
moved.” Their laudable appeal to have-nots at the bottom of the pile,
both free and unfree, meant that bishops had a citizen-army of
pumped-up, undereducated young men ready to rid the world of sin. Enter
the parabalini, sometime stretcher-bearers, sometime assassins, who
viciously flayed alive the brilliant Alexandrian mathematician and pagan
philosopher Hypatia. Or the circumcellions (feared even by other
Christians), who invented a kind of chemical weapon using caustic lime
soda and vinegar so they could carry out acid attacks on priests who
didn’t share their beliefs.
Debate — philosophically and physiologically — makes us human, whereas
dogma cauterizes our potential as a species. Through the sharing of new
ideas the ancients identified the atom, measured the circumference of
the earth, grasped the environmental benefits of vegetarianism.
To be sure, Christians would not have a monopoly on orthodoxy, or indeed
on suppression: The history of the ancient world typically makes for
stomach-churning reading. Pagan philosophers too who flew in the face of
religious consensus risked persecution; Socrates, we must not forget,
was condemned to death on a religious charge.
But Christians did fetishize dogma. In A.D. 386 a law was passed
declaring that those “who contend about religion … shall pay with their
lives and blood.” Books were systematically burned. The doctrinal
opinions of one of the most celebrated early church fathers, St. John
Chrysostom — he of the Golden Mouth — were enthusiastically quoted in
Nazi Germany 1,500 years after his death: The synagogue “is a den of
robbers and a lodging for wild beasts … a dwelling of demons.”
Actions were extreme because paganism was considered not just a
psychological but a physical miasma. Christianity appeared on a planet
that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and
men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would
have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But
for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed
in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution
was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal
sacrifice. And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the
most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical
discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions
for purges and pugilism.
Still, contrary to Nixey, there was not utter but rather partial
destruction of the classical world. The vigorous debates in Byzantine
cultures about whether, for example, magical texts were demonic suggest
that these works continued to have influence in Christian Europe. The
material culture of the time also lends nuance to Nixey’s story:
Silverware and dining services in Byzantium were proudly decorated with
images of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” And while 90 percent of all ancient
literature has been lost, paganism still had a foothold on the streets.
In Constantinople, the spiritual headquarters of Eastern Christendom,
the seventh-century church was still frantically trying to ban the
Bacchanalian festivities that legitimized cross-dressing, mask-wearing
and Bacchic adulation. I read this book while tracing the historical
footprint of the Bacchic cult. On the tiny Greek island of Skyros, men
and children, even today, dress as half human, half animal; they wear
goat masks, and dance and drink on Bacchus’ festival days in honor of
the spirit of the god. It seems that off the page there was a little
more continuity than Christian authorities would like to admit.
But the spittle-flecked diatribes and enraging accounts of gruesome
martyrdoms and persecution by pagans were what the church chose to
preserve and promote. Christian dominance of academic institutions and
archives until the late 19th century ensured a messianic slant for
Western education (despite the fact that many pagan intellectuals were
disparaging about the boorish, ungrammatical nature of early Christian
works like the Gospels). As Nixey puts it, the triumph of Christianity
heralded the subjugation of the other.
And so she opens her book with a potent description of black-robed
zealots from 16 centuries ago taking iron bars to the beautiful statue
of Athena in the sanctuary of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria.
Intellectuals in Antioch (again in Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as
were the statues around them. The contemporary parallels glare. The
early medieval author known as Pseudo-Jerome wrote of Christian
extremists: “Because they love the name martyr and because they desire
human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves.” He would
have found shocking familiarity in the news of the 21st century.
Nixey closes her book with the description of another Athena, in the
city of her name, being decapitated around A.D. 529, her defiled body
used as a steppingstone into what was once a world-renowned school of
philosophy. Athena was the deity of wisdom. The words “wisdom” and
“historian” have a common ancestor, a proto-Indo-European word meaning
to see things clearly. 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. Her
sympathy, corruscatingly, compellingly, is with the Roman orator
Symmachus: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same
world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to
seek for the truth?”