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The Darkening Age : The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, by Catherine Nixey
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Détails sur le produit
Broché: 352 pages
Editeur : Pan Books (12 juin 2018)
Langue : Anglais
ISBN-10: 1509816070
ISBN-13: 978-1509816071
Dimensions du produit:
13 x 2,4 x 19,7 cm
Moyenne des commentaires client :
4.5 étoiles sur 5
2 commentaires client
Classement des meilleures ventes d'Amazon:
97.848 en Livres (Voir les 100 premiers en Livres)
Very well written book, thoroughly researched plus captivating story telling, about the damage done to the classical world by Christians. It definitely adds perspective to current intolerance by Evangelical Christians as well as Islamists, Buddhist extremists, etc.
Well argued, and well researched. Better for showing us in current jihadists what the early Christians would habebeen like . And how unreasonable and dogmatics.
What a sad and disturbing story. Nixey mourns not only the destruction of classical culture, but also that of a nearly thousand year old, intellectual tradition that came ever so close to becoming, and defining, modern science. Had the philosopher's Academy, it's teachers and it's libraries not been destroyed by the fanatical mobs of christian converts we would not now have probes around the nearest planets, we would have ships around the nearest stars.No doubt Christians won't like you reading this book. It spells out all too clear, from all the remaining evidence, the horrible truth. We have long known about the wave after wave of attacks on and destruction of classical culture, as the evidence has been left behind everywhere. However, we can not regain what is gone forever. Perhaps now we can learn to see the crimes for what they really were, and dispel the lies that still support them and their legacy. In our own time we can see the Christian conquest of the classical world played out again, this time in the form of Islamic State, who would repeat it all again to serve their own Prophet of the Faith. To lift the darkness, we must rid ourselves of religious fundamentalism, Christian or otherwise.
Catherie Nixey's book, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, studies what St. Augustine called “merciful savagery,†the destruction of classical philosophy by the Christians who inherited the Roman Empire. The book is a compelling narrative, full of facts, and an antidote to two thousand years of Christian propaganda about how one culture replaced the other.It's not the particular beliefs the Christians espoused, or the nature of monotheism as opposed to polytheism that made the Christians a threat to freedom of thought, it was the intolerance they showed to any other religion.It's a common belief in modern societies that the pagan Romans persecuted the Christian martyrs. Catherine Nixey shows it's not that simple.The author analyzes at length correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan about the way to deal with recalcitrant Christians. The emperor was willing to give Christians any excuse to practice their religion as long as they didn't simply refuse to acknowledge the authority of the state. The author quotes Trajan: Conquirendi non sunt. “These people must not be hunted out.â€It's ironic that barely a generation later it would be Christian Roman officials who would be investigating the thoughts and religious practices of citizens.Some of the martyrs were would-be suicides, itinerant farm workers called circumcellions.In AD 392 clerics in Alexandria destroyed what was considered the most beautiful building on earth—the temple of Serapis, a god that linked Egypt to Rome, thereby typifying one of the strengths of polytheism. Besides the temple, books in the Great Library were also destroyed.Nixey analyzes the main reasons that historians have given over the centuries for why Christianity replaced the old religion.Polytheism was just ridiculous, goes one version.Of course people didn't believe that stories about Zeus's adultery and Hera's jealousy were “true,†but doesn't that make the old culture more sophisticated instead of less? People recognized that the meaning of Greco-Roman mythology wasn't literal. That's why Albert Camus was able to use the myth of Sisyphus to illustrate a philosophical idea millennia after the gods first appeared.Another theory about why the empire changed from one religion to another is that people were living through an anxious time. The barbarians were at the gates, and Christianity unified the empire.Statistics make Catherine Nixey doubt this, though. She estimates less than ten percent of the empire's population were Christian when Constantine declared Rome a Christian empire. That left fifty million to be converted.But the church wrote the histories, and therefore Christ's victory was inevitable. However, history is never inevitable.By the late 400s monks came out of the desert to destroy what temples were left, such as the one dedicated to Caelestis in Carthage. The Christians were proud of the destruction they committed, and of the conversions that resulted from the violence. Non-Christians pointed out that these were not true conversions, but the Christians didn't care.In the year 415, Hypatia, a philosopher in Alexandria who taught and tried to learn from everyone, including Christians, was taken by a Christian mob who flayed her alive, gouged out her eyes, and then burned her.Nixey blames the disappearance of most Greek and Roman literature as much on simple ignorance as on conscious actions. For instance, St. Antony was proud that he never learned to read.The author points out that only about one percent of Latin literature has been saved. The monks who get credit for recopying classical literature often ignored rare ancient texts and made unnecessary copies of Christian authors.You could make a martyrology of philosophers whose actions, not just words, put them in danger.Nixey tells the story of the philosopher Damascius, who escaped the Christian mobs in Alexandria after Hypatia's murder and returned to Athens.For a while, Athens was relatively safe for philosophers. Damascius became the head of the Academy, the school that had seen Plato and other brilliant minds of the ancient world. But by this time Christianity was entrenched in the empire. A law against teaching “pagan†philosophies under penalty of death drove the seven remaining Academicians briefly to Persia, but life there was no better.They returned to the empire. Their former refuge in Athens had been turned over to Christians who beheaded the statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to show the primacy faith over reason.It would be centuries until man was again the measure of all things.St. Augustine's merciful savagery was complete.
The “Darkening Age†is nothing new and is just the latest iteration of the now tired and decrepit Whig “Myth of Progress†which presents Antiquity in some amazing light, the “Christian Era†as the dark age, and that the light of Antiquity was rekindled in the Enlightenment. Anyone with even a elementary knowledge of philosophy, literature, and social history would not have made the same mistakes of Catherine Nixey, who simply joins the ranks of the latest writers trying to revive the current liberal project which is as much a rejection of antiquity as Christianity subsumed antiquity.For basic facts that Nixey lies about—she states that Aristotle was erased by Christian monks. Clearly she has no knowledge of how Aristotle was incorporated into Catholic thinking from the first centuries of the church, visibly in St. Gregory’s "Pastoral Rule" (or the fact that it was monks in France who preserved copies of Aristotle in the Latin West long before he was "reintroduced" by Muslims either). And certainly the erasure of Aristotle would have been news to the Aristotelian revivalists among the Scholastics and St. Thomas Aquinas who didn’t “rediscover†Aristotle but elevated his hylormorphic philosophy to advance new church teachings and codifying doctrines. Christian neo-Platonism, and neo-Platonism already contained an extensive appropriation of Aristotle thanks to Plotinus and then picked up into Christianity because of St. Augustine, ensured that Aristotle was never erased from history but actually saved thanks to Christianity. Aristotle is more important than ever for those who have any basic familiarity with Christian philosophy.Nixey also cherry picks her facts concerning supposed Christian iconoclasm and militancy. It was the Roman military, rather than Christian mobs, who were responsible for the destruction of the library at Antioch which Nixey paints as evidence of Christian iconoclastic and anti-intellectual mob violence. The Roman military was also one of the last institutions in the post-Constantinian settlement that was Christianized. (Hint, read through Nixey's screeds of ignorant Christian mobs of yesteryear - which evidence of is actually scant - to contemporary religious zealots of today.)Likewise, Nixey’s claim that Latin literature and literacy collapsed after the Christianization of the Roman Empire is the most egregious of cherry-picked examples. Barbarization and the internal moral decline of Roman society on its own accord were the more guilty culprits—especially considering the Gothic and Frankish tribes that settled into an already decadent Roman Empire didn’t speak Latin, didn’t write, and didn’t produce the same litany of great works preserved by Christianity that were already in decline by the 2nd century CE long before the rise of Christianity.Latin literature was not killed by Christianity as all professors of Latin literature know. Apuleius was the last great pagan Latin literati but the history of the reception of Latin literature and the growing scoffing toward the Latin literary tradition was at the hands of “pagans†and not Christians who saw much good and truth in pagan literature and reinvigorated the Latin literary tradition with Christianized interpretations to be sure, but pumped life into the old Latin epics and stories that Latin speaking "pagans" rejected as backward and wortheless. The old myths of Latin literature and religion were already in decline by profligate sons of Latin pagan culture who turned their back and began mocking their own history and literary tradition before Christianity rose to reinvigorate the Latin language and literary tradition by writing new Latin language myths and works of literature. But why bother with these facts rather than cherry picking and writing seductively deceptive statements as if the claim that classical Latin literature plummeted after the Christianization of the empire as if it was causality. Any first year statistician in Stats 101 knows that the association of two “stats†(in Nixey’s case, dates) don’t prove causality.While Nixey tries to cast Christians as the brutalistic animals of antiquity, the far superior historian of antiquity Tom Holland has acknowledged the opposite. It was bloodthirsty and death-obsessed Greeks and Romans who were tamed by mild-manner and life-affirming Christians. Holland, like Nixey, is an atheist. But Holland, without Nixey’s hubris or ignorance, proudly declares himself to be an ethical Christian who loathes the ethics of ancient Greece and Rome as a dog-eat-dog world reminiscent of Thrasymachus’s presentation of justice in Plato’s “Republic.†And Plato’s corpus was preserved because Plato was baptized by Christianity as even Nietzsche knew.Nixey, furthermore, has no knowledge of the Christians she berates. Augustine, for instance, wrote in “De Doctrina Christiania†that “truth wherever it is found belongs to [God]†and that Christians shouldn’t be ashamed from learning the truths of classical culture. It was Augustine who also acknowledged Virgil and Cicero as having led him to belief in God that prepared him for his infamous conversion moment in the gardens of Milan. St. Justin Martyr wrote glowingly of Socrates and Plato in his “Apologies.†Boethius, a Christian, is evidently more familiar with the classics than Nixey is despite Nixey crying over the apparent loss of classical literature and philosophy.Moreover, Nixey’s attempt to re-indoctrinate the world of the “Dark Age†completely steps over the fact that the modern academy has finally pitched this otherwise uniquely English-speaking (read: Whig and anti-Catholic) worldview begun by the likes of Edward Gibbon whose “History of the Decline of Fall of the Roman Empire†is generally dismissed as little more than, in the words of James J, O’Donnell, the bloated imaginary screed of a “little fat man.†(And O’Donnell, like Holland, is another atheist who doesn’t let his atheism distort the facts of history as Nixey’s atheism does.) Nixey’s want to reintroduce the concept of a dark age was pulverized by the most eminent historian of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown. Ever since Brown’s “The World of Late Antiquity†(1971) a revolution in “Dark Age†scholarship began with the emergence of the historical epoch of Late Antiquity (distinct from preceding Antiquity) and then the Medieval Age. A litany of works refute Nixey’s screed like Peter Wells’ “Barbarians to Angels,†Peter Heather’s “Empires and Barbarians†and “Restoration of Rome,†Roger Collins’ “Early Medieval Europe,†Peter Brown’s aforementioned “The World of Late Antiquity†and magisterial “The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity,†and Averil Cameron’s “The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity.â€There is also little evidence to suggest the mass cleansing of art and imagery as Nixey portrays either. My first academic article was on the Eastern Roman and early Christian inheritance of Mesopotamian religious symbolism and iconography. For example, the Mesopotamian god of the moon, Nanna-Sin, was considered the chief deity in the Ur period of the Mesopotamian golden age and knew and decreed the fates of all persons. The earliest icons of Jesus in the eastern church often show him flanked by the crescent moon that was also used in the iconography of Nanna-Sin.Moreover, most pagan shrines and temples were simply rededicated to the Christian God as a myriad of Christian letters between bishops and the Papacy testify to. Archeological evidence discovered going back to the 1930s equally affirmed this as the discoveries of Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann made manifestly clear. When Protestants accused Catholics during the Reformation of being pagans there is a reason why they did so—Catholicism had subsumed classical paganism in many respects and took over pagan feasts days, festivals, and temples and simply “converted†them into Christian holidays, celebrations, and houses of worship.While I could go on I’ll spare Nixey’s cutting down to size and deservedly so by simply quoting from actual historians of antiquity reviewing Nixey’s pathetic screed. There is a reason why “journalistic†screeds sell well over academic tomes, but when it comes to actually learning about facts, history, and truth, journalists always fall short of the mark for obvious reasons.Professor Averil Cameron, in her review, remarked, “Hearts will sink among historians of early Christianity and late antiquity, as well as medievalists and, needless to say, Byzantinists, when they see the title of this pugnacious and energetically written book…The words ‘darkening age’ evoke everything they have been trying for years to overturn, implying as they do the notion of the ‘dark ages’, when the glories of classical civilisation were supposedly obliterated for centuries, until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment made possible the triumph of Western European liberalism and secularism.â€I should note as a published philosopher that the stereotypical depiction of the Enlightenment recovering Greek philosophy to be demonstrably untrue. “Enlightenment†philosophy rejected Greek philosophy outright. Modern philosophy, beginning with Francis Bacon, and carried onward by his devotees, had nothing but contempt for Platonic rationalism and Aristotelian pluralism. Their god was nothing short of monistic materialism, a return to the sophists of old who had been displaced by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus—those venerable souls of antiquity inherited and whose thoughts were continually developed in Christianity. But hey, facts don’t matter nowadays as long as you could produce an entertaining work which Nixey has certainly done at the expense of anything of scholarly substance.Professor J. van Oort (from Holland) wrote, “Nixey overwhelms her hand with her fierce tone and gross exaggeration…Nixey’s book lacks any historical structure and thus becomes, chapter after chapter, a long, but random (and ultimately exhausting), requisition against Christianity.â€Professor Josh Herring equally remarked, “[Nixey’s] arguments, however, are not sound. She bases her conclusions on faulty premises which illustrate a lack of awareness in three areas: Christianity, history, and logic...The scholars she assembles are uniformly opposed to Christianity, presenting it as a destructive force that ended the “merry, jolly days†of pagan festivity. The prose she uses is filled with judgmental adjectives, indicating that she does not trust readers to draw their conclusion from the evidence; we must be told how to feel about the person she describes. Her book was several years in the making, but it does not reflect a clear understanding of Christianity, the complexities of Late Antiquity, or the nuances of historical craft. While this book is sold under the guise of popular history, treat it instead as an insight into how a secular journalist views Christianity.â€And Professor Peter Thonemann stated, “Like every good polemic, The Darkening Age is sardonic, well-informed and quite properly lacking in sympathy for its hapless target. But the argument depends on quite a bit of nifty footwork. Nixey vividly evokes the fundamentalist bonfires that 'blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.' Inconveniently, we have no evidence for a single poem by Ovid or Catullus having been put to the flames: Christian book-burning was always directed at heretical Christian literature or 'magical' writings.â€Long before moving into the realm of philosophy and political philosophy, I anticipated Late Antiquity to be my destined field of study. As mentioned, my first academic article was in the field and points to evidence contrary to Nixey’s polemical and unfounded thesis. Histories of Late Antiquity have a soft spot in my heart and I eagerly look forward to works in the era. This work from Catherine Nixey, however, is nothing short of a pathetic, disheveled, unscholarly, screed from a journalist who hates Christianity and, as such, allows her hatred to obscure facts, distort history, and be rightly panned by professional historians of Antiquity and Late Antiquity with a far greater command of the material than her. I admit I didn’t have high expectations for this book, but entertaining popular histories certainly a room in the historical genre—sans the works that deliberately distort already well-known facts and evidence to fit a predisposed ideological agenda which is what Nixey managed to accomplish.If you’re looking for a journalistic screed to satisfy your anti-religious sentiment then this is the book you’ve been waiting for. If you’re actually interested in the era of Late Antiquity, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the death of classical Latin literature, and the rise of Christianity, go elsewhere. Of course, in our infotainment and consumeristic age, this book will likely be swallowed by gullible and shallow “lay†or “armchair†historians and wannabes; or the militant atheists already convinced that everything wrong in the world can be traced back to religion.
when I ordered this book, I admit I wasn't familiar with Catherine Nixey. I was hoping the book wouldn't read like a text book and be filled with opinions. I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by how great this book is. Another author who knows how to tell a great story that is rarely talked about. I'll be looking forward to reading more from her.
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