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Review - Catherine Nixey "The Darkening Age" - History for Atheists
Nov 08, · New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White. Publication date New Dark Age Cover 1 download. K download 1 file. KINDLE download. download 1 file. PDF download. download 1 file. SINGLE PAGE PROCESSED JP2 ZIP download. download 1 file. TORRENT download Format: Ebook/DAISY A home for your books. Enter what you’re reading or your whole library. It’s an easy, library-quality catalog. A community of 2,, book lovers. Nov 29, · Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, ) blogger.com publisher’s blurb informs us that Nixey’s book tells “the largely unknown – and deeply shocking – story” of how a militant Christianity “extinguished the teachings of the Classical world” and was “violent, ruthless and intolerant” in an orgy of destruction and.
The darkening age pdf download
And Dame Averil is correct — this is a book of biased polemic masquerading as historical analysis the darkening age pdf download easily the worst book I have read in years. Others who really should know better have joined the chorus of praise. De Groot is a specialist in modern history, Jones focuses on late medieval England and, as a pop history celebrity, Snow is something of a jack-of-all-trades; though both his questions and his comments in his interview show clearly that he has a limited grasp of the relevant topics in the history of Late Antiquity.
But the argument depends on quite a bit of nifty footwork. She drives it through with a steely-eyed determination, unrelieved by nuance or counter-argument. Nixey is not exactly shy about her fairly unusual Catholic upbringing. Nixey also makes no secret about her upbringing in the preface to her book, and in doing so gives some insights into a childhood that she reports was happy, but also seems decidedly strange, the darkening age pdf download.
She notes that her family, unsurprisingly, were devout practitioners of their faith; attending Mass, saying grace before meals and praying regularly. If I asked where humans come from, I would have been told about evolution rather than Adam. If her parents were not Biblical literalists, they certainly had some peculiar ideas about other things.
In her The Times Magazine article she talks about how she only began wearing lipstick at university because of parental disapproval and the surreptitious thrill of hearing pop music on the radio in the cars of the parents of childhood friends, because this was forbidden at home.
Her parents may have left their respective vows behind, but seem to have practised a lay asceticism well beyond anything found in most Catholic households. Early in her book she describes the lifestyle of the desert hermit Anthony and the ascetics he inspired, effectively establishing the long Christian tradition of monasticism in the process. Their beliefs are described in tones bordering on overt mockery, particularly the ones about how the world was a battleground between demonic forces and the forces of good.
So we are not given similar portraits of the asceticism of some pagan philosophers or many anecdotes about, the darkening age pdf download, for example, the pious celibacy of some neo-Platonists, Cynic mendicants barking at passers by like dogs or Diogenes masturbating in public to make a philosophical point.
In one of her more lurid the darkening age pdf download, Nixey does not exactly restrain her feelings:. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them — and certainly too stupid to recreate them.
The Christians could not even destroy effectively: many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for them, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach. It is very hard to take this kind of ham-fisted rhetoric seriously, but the book is full of stuff like this. Nixey is at least aware of her biases to some extent.
Her preface contains something of an apologia :. The history and the sufferings of those whom Christianity defeated have not been. This book concentrates on them. After all, they have argued, if she states outright that she is writing to redress the balance then surely she cannot be condemned for giving her book her intended slant.
So before telling her story of repression and persecution by Christians, Nixey works to downplay the persecution that preceded: the persecution of Christians by the Romans.
Nixey, like Moss, argues that the later hagiographies of the various martyrs greatly exaggerated the size, duration and nature of the Roman persecution of Christians. This is not exactly controversial, as scholars have long recognised that many or even most of the later martyr stories were little more than pious legends and some of the alleged martyrs did not actually exist. And she goes to remarkable lengths to downplay the death toll in the Great Persecution of Diocletian.
Only slightly less dusty is her citation of anti-Christian polemicist Edward Gibbon writing back in !! A little later she at least manages to find an authority from within the darkening age pdf download last fifty years or so, this time quoting W.
Nixey is also keen to emphasise the actually fairly unsurprising fact that the Roman governors who were responsible for periodically persecuting Christians were not the leering cartoonish villains of later pious Christian legends. She depicts them as urbane administrators who found Christians puzzling and vaguely annoying and who could not understand why they did not just sacrifice to the emperor and avoid torture and death.
This is all fairly accurate and even — to us, at a safe distance of one thousand seven hundred years — perhaps slightly amusing. In her telling, the governors are perfectly reasonable chaps who are just getting on with the business of keeping order, by Jove, whereas the Christians are absolute pests who essentially volunteer to be killed. So the Circumcellions of North Africa are used as an example of fanatical zealots who sought out martyrdom and, despite some caveats about how Augustine and others condemned them as lunatics, her heavy implication is that these people represented a much wider sentiment.
She describes Pliny, as governor of Bithynia, writing to Trajan to ask advice on how to deal with the Christians he had found in his province.
He is not writing to ask if he should kill them, but rather how many of them exactly he should kill — all of them or just some? He is beheaded. There is absolutely nothing wrong with presenting the perspectives of both sides of a clash of ideas so that the reader can understand the past better; in fact, a good, objective historian should strive to do just that.
She says that, unlike their Christian successors, the pagan Romans had little interest in what people believed and only required certain, often quite minimal, actions to satisfy their sense of religious propriety — they enforced orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. When these required actions violated the deeply held beliefs of Christians, the darkening age pdf download, however, she is making a distinction without difference.
So British Celts could still worship their goddess Brigantia or Arabs could worship Al-Lat because, to the Romans, they were actually Victoria and Minerva respectively. But deities and forms of worship that were too far from Roman conceptions or offended Roman propriety were the darkening age pdf download, often with great savagery. Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should hate and punish, not only for the sake of the gods … but also because such people, by bringing in new divinities, persuade many folks to adopt foreign practices, which lead to conspiracies, revolts, and factions, which are entirely unsuitable for monarch.
For some, such as the cults of Cybele and Attis, initial hostility, suppression and restrictions eventually softened and they came to be accepted. Others were savagely repressed. In BC the Bacchanalian sect was considered too foreign and uncontrolled to be allowed and the Senate launched an investigation, arrested several thousand people and had many of them imprisoned or executed.
The other key point to note here is that the parameters of what the Romans would tolerate in the religious sphere could and did change over time. Sometimes this the darkening age pdf download cults that were previously disapproved of could come to be accepted. Or sometimes it meant the opposite.
After the upheavals of the third century AD, with its years of military anarchy, rebellions, the darkening age pdf download, usurpers and barbarian invasions, the Roman government took on more of the character of a military junta and emperors and their administrators became more obsessed with rigid, the darkening age pdf download, central control.
It is in this context that the Great Persecution of Diocletian and Galerius took place, but this was part of a growing tendency for imperial control reaching into new places. So far from being some radical new departure, the increasing attempted imperial control over religious affairs that we see in the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries were actually in a tradition of narrowing Roman tolerance and increasing imperial control.
Nixey is an art critic, and so it is not surprising that her book really hits its stride in the chapters about the Christian destruction of beautiful temples and iconic works of classical art. Here she gives a catalogue of ancient and venerable sites being literally desecrated and beautiful statues being torn down, decapitated or crudely carved with the cross symbol of the barbaric new Christian faith.
These include references to vandalism of buildings very familiar to modern readers, such as the Parthenon in Athens, and detailed accounts of the destruction of ones less well-known now but famed through the ancient world, such as the Serapeum in Alexandria.
Her account is full of assurances that the examples she details are just part of an Empire-wide frenzy of destruction. Hodgkinson reflected on a ruined temple:.
Its beautiful surviving pillars stand out against the brilliant blue backdrop of sky, in defiance of … what? Not time. It was Christians who trashed the temple, on the the darkening age pdf download of the Emperor Arcadius. But was the temple in question really destroyed by Christians? Despite the increasing attempts by later emperors to control affairs across their domains more closely, the Roman Empire was still rather ramshackle in its administration of laws compared to later states, the darkening age pdf download.
Laws of this kind usually began as a suggestio : a report or statement of a situation needing attention. Officials in the Imperial consistory would then meet and frame a response and, if this response was acceptable to various counsellors and advisers, it would be submitted to the emperor for approval. It would then be distributed to the praetorian prefects, who often added amendments and additions, and then distributed by them to regional governors, who in turn could add to it or amend it to fit local conditions.
Finally, it was up to these local officials to see the edict implemented and to enforce it as much as they could. And even if he was, many of these broad statements were very difficult to enforce with any uniformity. As a result, what various laws and decrees said and what actually happened on the ground were often two very different things. The fact that some laws of this kind had to be repeated several or even many times shows that subsequent emperors recognised that previous decrees had gone essentially unenforced and there was often little they could do about this.
These were often written long after the time of the saint in question and were expressions of idealism rather than straight the darkening age pdf download narratives. The same can be said for some of the triumphal statements of Christians like Eusebius and Theodoret, which certainly reflect what these enthusiasts would like to have been the case, but are not reliable guides to what actually happened.
Even the laments of pagan writers have to be taken with a grain of salt, given that they too had an interest in exaggerating the extent of the destruction and no rhetorician of the time could be accused of restraint when it came to hammering home their point. Lavan and Michael Mulryan, eds. So it is decidedly odd that Nixey makes no reference to the darkening age pdf download, given the emphasis she puts on archaeological evidence in key parts of her argument.
In his Empire-wide study, Bayliss located only 43 cases [of desacralisation or active architectural destruction of temples] of which a mere 4 were archaeologically confirmed. Goodman, Richard Bayliss and several others, Lavan shows that the tales of widespread, systematic destruction and desacralisation are artefacts of rhetoric and not reflected in the hard archaeological evidence.
The picture is the same elsewhere: only a few examples are to be found in Africa, all in the city of Cyrene, only one example in the whole of Asia Minor and just one in Greece and that is the temple destroyed by the Visigoths mentioned above. The darkening age pdf download so it goes on: just one example in Italy, three in Britain and just seven in Egypt — including the Serapeum, to which Nixey devotes a whole chapter.
Several laws were decreed to protect art works C. Despite the selected examples Nixey emphasises and the rhetoric of both Christian and pagan sources, temple destruction was generally rare. What seems to have happened is that over the course of three to four generations from the conversion of Constantine, the elite sponsorship of pagan cults and therefore of pagan temples declined sharply. At the same time, conversion to the newly imperially-endorsed Christian faith became increasingly necessary for political advancement and this was given greater force by growing restrictions on the public practice of paganism by courtiers and administrators, further reducing the financial support for temple sites.
At the same time, common people began to convert in the darkening age pdf download numbers over this period, though almost certainly not as fully or in the vast numbers as Christian commentators of the time hopefully declared. As a result of all this, we see a decline in the active use of temples which is, as Lavan suggests, analogous to the decline in the use of British country churches today. Like those churches, the temples first saw dwindling numbers of congregants, then were closed but maintained by locals, then were, usually much later, either used as sources of building materials or converted to other uses over time.
Not all of this was purely due to the conversion to Christianity. Bagnall, Egypt in Late AntiquityPrinceton,pp. We also see a marked decline in the building of new temples, beginning in the second century, with even fewer built in the third century.
Alongside all this we have clear evidence that religion was already changing in nature and focus and moving away from blood sacrifice as its central ritual. Sacrifice had always been largely an elite expression of piety, the darkening age pdf download, as it was expensive and required large temple staffs of priests, attendants, haruspices to read the entrails and slaves to cook and distribute the sacrificed flesh.
This made sacrificing cults expensive to maintain and, the darkening age pdf download, for most the darkening age pdf download — i. In the two centuries before the conversion of Constantine, more and more people were making do with smaller, the darkening age pdf download, more private devotions, such as votive offerings before a small idol or the darkening age pdf download in a grove or spring.
The elite came to turn to spiritual exercises and mystery rituals and some prominent intellectuals such as Porphyry and Philostratus actively preached against blood sacrifice as primitive, vain and wasteful.
When all of this evidence is considered a very different picture to that presented by Nixey emerges. Yes, there were some eruptions of violence against pagan statues and temples, but they were the exception, not the rule.
Temples closed and then crumbled or were converted to other uses churches, meeting halls, even museums over a very long period of time. Inon the eve of his ill-fated Persian war, the enthusiastically pagan emperor was in Antioch and decided to visit the famous sacred grove of Apollo at Daphne.
In his book Misopogon he describes what he thought he would find there:.
S2, Ep 18 Hypatia and The Darkening Age: Catherine Nixey (415)
, time: 44:50The darkening age pdf download
Dec 28, · • The Darkening Age is published by Macmillan. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to blogger.com or call Free UK p&p over Author: Tim Whitmarsh. A home for your books. Enter what you’re reading or your whole library. It’s an easy, library-quality catalog. A community of 2,, book lovers. Jul 06, · The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World [Catherine Nixey] on blogger.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A New York Times Notable Book of “Searingly passionate Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich/5().
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