Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World Book Review
"The theologian," wrote Edward Gibbon in his classic The History of the Turn down and Fall of the Roman Empire , "may indulge the pleasing task of describing Organized religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must observe the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, amid a weak and degenerate race of beings." Gibbon was a child of the European Enlightenment, and he viewed his job every bit a historian of early on Christianity as a dispassionate, scientific one: to encounter things as they are, rather than equally the pious would desire them to be. The conclusions he reached were, possibly inevitably, controversial in his twenty-four hour period. The pre-Christian Roman empire, he believed, was characterised by "religious harmony", and the Romans were interested more in good governance than in imposing religious orthodoxy on their many subjects. A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its "exclusive zeal for the truth of religion", a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a grade of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty.
This spirit permeates Catherine Nixey's book. In her view, the standard modernistic motion picture of the Roman empire'southward conversion remains, fifty-fifty 200 years after Gibbon, glossed by Christian triumphalism. History, she believes, has given the Church building an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined equally cruel, arbitrary and castigating; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, "a chilly, nihilistic world". Christianity, conversely, is painted every bit brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The job she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the mistake and corruption of the early on Church.
This is also, nevertheless, a volume for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash betwixt organized religion and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her encompass displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its brow. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyra in the late fourth century, when some of the oasis urban center'due south magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her pick to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by "bearded, blackness-robed zealots", the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. "There have been," she writes, and "in that location even so are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends." What is revealing most that final sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic Land merely the phrase "monotheism and its weapons". Many modern commentators similar to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger.
The story of the destruction of Athena is the amuse-bouche for a feast of tales of murder, vandalism, wilful devastation of cultural heritage and general joylessness. Nosotros hear of the brutal end of Hypatia, the Alexandrian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a Christian crowd in the early fifth century (an result dramatised in the Spanish movie Agora). Less well known, in the anglophone world at whatever rate, is the case of Shenoute. A gimmicky of Hypatia's, he lived further s, in rural Egypt, where he became the abbot of the circuitous now known as the White Monastery (which however stands in today'south town of Sohag). Shenoute is at present considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a peculiarly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would pause into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and blast up whatsoever property they objected to on religious grounds.
Even more than the physical violence, it is the cultural destruction that draws Nixey's middle. Early in the book, she describes how she was brought upwardly in her youth to call up of late-antiquarian and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages and so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over fourth dimension. In this book, early on Christians are much more likely to shut downward the academies, close temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.
Where did this appetite for destruction come from? Nixey's brusk reply is a elementary one: demons. Many ancient Christians believed that the earth we inhabit is a perilous identify, crowded with malevolent supernatural beings, who sometimes manifest themselves in the form of imitation gods. It is the Christian's duty to root these out. Destroying a "pagan" statue or burning a book, then, is a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb: yous salvage the healthy whole by preventing the spread of the infection. If you remember that a marble statue is possessed past a demon, then information technology makes a kind of sense to dig out its eyes and score a cross in its forehead. If yous think, forth with the N-African theologian Tertullian, that "Satan and his angels have filled the whole globe" and laid traps for the virtuous in the form of sensual pleasures, then avoiding the Romans' bathhouses, dinners and glasses is perfectly rational – as is a disdain for sexuality. The early Christian world was in a state of perpetual metaphysical war, and choosing sides inevitably meant knowing your enemies.
But demons are merely one-half of the story. The real arraign, for Nixey, lies at the door of the church fathers, whose spine-tingling sermons ramped up the polarising rhetoric of vehement difference. They wove "a rich tapestry of metaphor", construing theological opponents of all kinds as bestial, verminous, diseased and – naturally – demonic. It was language itself – the forceful, pulp language of a handful of aristocracy males – that stoked the fires of Christian rage against its enemies, fires that blazed for a millennium: "the intellectual foundations for a yard years of theocratic oppression were being laid."
Nixey has a dandy story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would look from a distinguished journalist, every folio is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an skilful eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill. Writing critically about Christian history is doubly difficult: not only are the aboriginal sources complex, scattered and disputed, merely also there are legions of mod readers waiting to pounce on the tiniest perceived error, infelicity or offence.
If in that location is a weakness in this book, it stems precisely from its Gibbonian roots. This is, fundamentally, a restatement of the Enlightenment view that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilisation's plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). Nixey studied classics, and her affection for classical civilization runs deep: she writes with dandy amore about the sophisticated philosophies of the stoics and epicureans, the buoyantly sexual (and not infrequently sexist) poetry of Catullus and Ovid, the bluff bonhomie of Horace and the unsentimental pragmatism of men of affairs such every bit Cicero and Pliny. When she speaks of classical culture and religion she tends to use such descriptions as "fundamentally liberal and generous" and "ebullient". How, then, do nosotros explain the Romans' unfortunate habit of killing Christians? Nixey thinks, like Gibbon, that they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the borough club that the unruly Christians imperilled. Ancient accounts, she argues, prove regal officials who "simply do not want to execute"; rather, they are forced into it by the Christians' perverse lust for martyrdom. Now, martyrdom certainly has a strangely magnetic allure, equally nosotros know from our ain era, but the Romans were inappreciably bemused, passive bystanders in all of this. There is something of the null-sum game at work here: in seeking to betrayal the error and corruption of the early Christian globe, Nixey comes close to veiling the pre-Christian Romans' own vicious qualities.
Just this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early on Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to approximate it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic confronting the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/28/the-darkening-age-the-christian-destruction-of-the-classical-world-by-catherine-nixey
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