The darkening age pdf download

Anselm to Homer? Whatever each person worships, it is reasonable to think of them as one. 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? Augustine, and the coming age of darkness and superstition One day I would like to rebuild the Temple of Artemis. The destruction wreaked by the early Christians needs to be immortalized—not pushed to the sidelines of history and supplanted by grossly exaggerated stories of Christian martyrdom.

If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased. May 04, Matthew Bargas rated it it was amazing.

She certainly has her opinions that she supports with quotes from her sources. View all 6 comments. Jan 12, Emma Sea rated it it was amazing Shelves: history , i-own-it , paperback , non-fiction.

Heartbreaking, vivid, and wonderfully researched If you're wondering if this book is for you, check out Josephine's excellent roundup of critiques in her review. View all 7 comments.

Jan 21, Galina Krasskova rated it really liked it. It is so good to read a scholarly book that presents the monotheistic destruction of the classical world accurately: as religious and cultural genocide though she's not quite so blunt.

This is an excellent book challenging all too often unquestioned ideas of christianity in general and monotheism in particular as "inevitable" and most especially as "progress. Mar 06, David Wineberg rated it it was amazing. It was not their defining characteristic. Christians imposed their beliefs on everyone else, and required everyone to identify as Christian.

That is the essence of The Darkening Age. It shows how the free-for-all that was life in the Roman Empire became the dour, sullen austerity of Christendom. The Roman Empire was about living life to the fullest. Sex was celebrated Marc "With our faith, we desire no further belief" Before Christianity, no one identified by their religion, says Catherine Nixey.

Shame was not in the culture. Fine food and wine were exalted. Every religion from the vast expanse of the Empire was tolerated. It was actually very Christian of them. Christians were all about suicide and martyrdom, because eternal life after death was the promise and the goal. Homosexuality and lesbianism were banned, slavery was upheld, and death sentences became routine. He exempted the church from taxes, paid bishops five times the rate for professors, and set about converting his entire Roman Empire.

To do this, he literally demonized all other religions, claiming all of them were really demons among the good people of the empire. By it was a capital crime to even criticize Christianity. Up to that point, Christianity had been considered an eastern cult with absurd myths at its center.

The empire went from multi-faith to one single faith, as Christians, far from loving their neighbors, destroyed all vestiges of previous civilization, including the largest repository of knowledge and history — the library at Alexandria — and forced their religion on one and all, or face execution.

They implemented spying by neighbors, required bishops to monitor each other for their faith, and instituted gruesome torture and murder for anyone suspected of lack of enthusiasm for Christianity. Throughout the book there is a heartbreaking refugee, a philosopher named Damascius. He fled Alexandria because philosophy was destroyed by Christianity. He made it to Athens, where he resurrected the Academy of ancient Greece, and it thrived once again -until the Christians took over.

He fled again, this time to Persia, which was so vulgar and ignorant, he and his last seven philosophers fled back to the Roman Empire, where they faded from history. Christians were proud of their ignorance and despised learning. They dragged the most honored mathematician in the world to a temple, stripped her and flayed her skin off with pottery shards.

They managed to burn books to the point where entire centuries show no evidence of non-religious writing at all. Monks scraped parchments clean and made copies of the bible on them instead. Statues were defaced, temples destroyed and the stones used to make churches. They hammered nipples, carved crosses in foreheads, and smashed limbs. Essentially, any and every evidence of past learning or religion was removed from the Roman Empire as 60 million were cowed into allowing it to go on.

Reading The Darkening Age is very familiar. It is exactly what Islam is going through today. Killing apostates, blowing up statuary, destroying museums, demonizing sex and regulating every movement of every resident. The fierceness and intolerance of the Islamic fundamentalists has all been seen before. There are many lessons in The Darkening Age, but mostly it is a fiendishly uncomfortable and gripping read.

David Wineberg View 2 comments. A lively and highly accessible book that challenges the view that Christian society was a benign, accepting and accepted religion during its first few centuries.

Temples, statuary, books and other art was destroyed, vandalised, hidden and in many cases crudely "Christianised" by defacement. On the face of it, this isn't a surprise as it's a simple human trait seen throughout our history that the "good and right" will erase or change the "bad and wrong" to suit the narrative needed to "progress" a A lively and highly accessible book that challenges the view that Christian society was a benign, accepting and accepted religion during its first few centuries.

On the face of it, this isn't a surprise as it's a simple human trait seen throughout our history that the "good and right" will erase or change the "bad and wrong" to suit the narrative needed to "progress" and keep aims and populations in line.

What however becomes clear in this well-written book is the means, methods and indeed sheer damage done by a religion that tells others it is or rather was at the time this book covers the accepting and forgiving religion. There are countless examples in the early Christian period in Greece and Rome as well as later with Crusades, Inquisitions, civil and therefore often religious wars across Europe and the middle East, but what the author does so well is to peel away the impact on the treasures, arts and also the people of ancient Greece and Rome and wider where Christianity took hold and flourished - after reading this book one might say it strangled and covered these ancient pagan societies like a creeping ivy or dense grass.

In the pages we read of edicts, laws and commandments - many more than 10 if you're anywhere near Shenoute, who frankly we learn is a very bad, unforgiving and murderous man - as well as demons, temptation and enemies of God.

In brief alongside love of God these are all used as ways to theologise and physically create the belief in God and His power as well as the overarching righteousness and legal waiver to kill and destroy God's enemies and those who were unbelievers.

Elsewhere in the book we meet Pliny, Cicero, Ovid, Hypatia and more. These are quoted or used to highlight aspects of the story, the beliefs and writings they had as well as the loss of their works or writings because of Christian anger and destruction. The book is not a comprehensive history; the author states this and also provides much in sources and in further reading for the interested reader or new student of this era and area.

It does however show the considerable and large scale destruction and why this was wrought. It is also a hugely enjoyable book to read. View all 5 comments. Jan 13, Kevin rated it really liked it. Devoured this book in a few days. A wonderful antidote to the 'persecuted church' narrative so prevalent in today's society. I'm conflicted after reading The Darkening Age , having subsequently fallen down an online rabbit hole of critical reviews, particularly this one by Tim O'Neill for his blog History for Atheists.

Catherine Nixey is an excellent writer, and her prose is a delight to read. She has set out to detail the Christian destruction of classical art and thought from the institutionalized Christianity of Constantine through the early 6th century. The question is whether that destructive force is overstated a I'm conflicted after reading The Darkening Age , having subsequently fallen down an online rabbit hole of critical reviews, particularly this one by Tim O'Neill for his blog History for Atheists.

The question is whether that destructive force is overstated and whether the book misrepresents key historical facts. To the first question, Nixey offers this reasonable caveat in the opening pages: This is a book about the Christian destruction of the classical world. The Christian assault was not the only one — fire, flood, invasion and time itself all played their part — but this book focuses on Christianity's assault in particular. This is not to say that the Church didn't also preserve things: it did.

But the story of Christianity's good works in this period has been told again and again …. The history and the sufferings of those whom Christianity defeated have not been. This book concentrates on them. Nothing wrong with having a focus, right? It's a focus that plays to my biases, however, so I have to be a bit on guard. As I read the book, I kept in mind that these acts of murder, vandalism and censorship were not practiced by all Christians and were not committed all at once, yet small acts especially such indelible ones can accumulate to shape history.

The Christian desire to destroy "pagan" an imprecise and almost meaningless word on Christian tongues art and thought certainly exists, and has a long history. God reserves one of his ten commandments for the [we assume important] purpose of forbidding graven images. Deuteronomy exemplifies a common directive: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.

In my particular Christian upbringing, we were regularly taught about how important it still is to destroy idols; however, graven images are pretty hard to come by in California, so these were transmuted into metaphorical idols such as money, food or sex. As I read Nixey's descriptions of monks tearing down or defacing "pagan" statuary, I could easily imagine many of my Christian teachers proudly leading similar endeavors, had the opportunity presented itself.

The Christians would, however, incorporate teachings that were useful or could be easily converted to Christian themes. They lacked a sense of humor and poetry. They also regularly discouraged intellectual development and pursuit. Certainly many of these factors are real and have played a role in the destruction of a lamentable amount of art, architecture and literature.

The question becomes one of degree, and critics like O'Neill argue that Nixey has exaggerated the destructive role of Christianity, ignored mitigating factors and similar actions on the part of the "pagans", and outright misrepresented certain events from outdated or unreliable sources. I'm out of my depth to judge the specifics, but it sounds like they have the facts on their side when offering these correctives.

I think an important takeaway is that reality is complex and multifaceted, without any easy conclusions or clear villains and heroes, and Nixey was shooting for a streamlined work that smoothed over details to create a clear narrative. Feb 15, Andy Lake rated it really liked it.

First off, I enjoyed The Darkening Age. And it redresses as it were a historical injustice, or at the very least a negligent oversight — and that is the coercive and persecuting side of Christianity in the first centuries after it became the religion of the Roman empire.

But — this is polemical history rather than objective history. Catherine Nixey picks up on an old theme of the greatness and glory of classical antiquity and how i First off, I enjoyed The Darkening Age.

First, it is highly selective in its sources. For me, having studied this period and the growth of Christianity, it seems strange to see thinkers such as Origen and Augustine cherry-picked to find the lines that support narrow-minded thinking and oppression, when these are not characteristic of their thought as a whole.

And that selectivity is evident in contrasting the deep intellectualism of the most eminent of pagan philosophers with most boorish and thuggish manifestations of Christianity and they are indeed truly boorish and thuggish. It would have been quite possible to write a book the other way round, up to a point. She regards the statues that were desecrated and the temples that were pulled down as priceless antiquities and historic monuments. At the time, of course, they mostly were not.

They were living centres of rival cults in competition with Christianity. So the events could be treated with more objectivity, or a more rounded creative involvement that sees both sides. After all, the Romans were hardly averse to looting, burning and torture, or building their shrines on top of the shrines of others — as all ancient cultures tended to do.

Rome, like Greece before it — did not hang back when it came to cultural imperialism. The story told is of Christianity in the space of less than three centuries erasing the old pagan culture.

But Christianity, like Judaism before it, was highly syncretistic. The Catholic and Byzantine Christianity that emerged were infused with Graeco-Roman culture and political organisation. Church architecture, iconography and the statues of saints owe much to the former pagan cults, and the organisation of the church owes much to the secular structures of power in Rome. Christian philosophy and theology to a large extent has foundations borrowed from Greek and Roman pagan intellectuals.

BTW, the impact of eastern religious thought on Hellenistic and Roman thought including Christian thought in this period is almost absent from the book.

Christians just took it over, and left the reliefs intact. The old myths and legends survived in the popular imagination and in literature, right through to Shakespeare and into the 20th century even. But even in the latter, the old tales of Greece and Rome emerge in new guise. It does what it aims to do very well.

There are indeed historic misperceptions to correct, and that is the target of the polemic. And in an age where fundamentalism is growing and religious and other ideologues seek to erase contrary viewpoints, it is a timely reminder of the intolerance of Christianity from the moment when it gained the power to persecute rather than be persecuted.

And we can wind that forward through crusades against heretics, the Inquisitions and religious wars, rolling on through the centuries. It would have been a better book, though, with a little more balance and some nuance about the interplay and cultural appropriation between the competing religions and worldviews. Sep 17, Chaitra rated it it was amazing. They not only despised pagans but also atheism, science and philosophy.

They not only jeered at the indigenous rituals but hated even the idea of bathing! This wasn't just the spread of a world's largest religion in Europe but also the massacre of the non believers, suppression of individualism, pluralism and the silencing the very first western philosophers.

It wasn't just women like Hypatia who were skinned to death but also the massive book burning and wiping out of the philosophical writings They not only despised pagans but also atheism, science and philosophy.

It wasn't just women like Hypatia who were skinned to death but also the massive book burning and wiping out of the philosophical writings. In short, once the land of pantheism and philosophy stood no more the same but the mere rule of one God and one faith Of course around the earlier centuries there were revolts and resistance. There was a making of Christian martyrs who rather chose to be sacrificed for their cause rather than sacrifice to the gods that were worshipped. The author does acknowledge it but I felt like it was more of a justification through the minimum number.

But the author proved me wrong in the coming chapters where things began getting darker and scarier when the Roman king converted to Christianity. The beautiful temples were brought down to rubbles, the gods statues especially the goddesses had the worst kind of ill treatment.

While the non believers celebrated life through festivals and art forms, openly discussed the matters of intercourses and encouraged the balance in their performances the monks who rather chose to live in caves found it too intolerable than they'd sometimes sneak into the pagans houses and smash their idols. Idolatry they claimed, was nothing but the way into the Satanic cult.

As the times progressed the rules and regulations were getting suffocating. People were forced to leave their rituals and went through horrible consequences if caught sacrificing offerings to their gods. Heaps of books were snatched out of the houses and the philosophical aspects of Cicero and others were scraped off. Unsurprisingly, the critical writings of this new religion by Celsus and Libanus were also burnt. These philosophers not only celebrated the pantheism but also took sides with atheism.

There were writings which were proselyted by these 'saviours of the sinners' which somewhat shared their perspectives, rest became the feast to the fire. After the cold murder of Hypatia, once land of intelligence and philosophy, Alexandria began casting dark shadows upon all the free thinkers and philosophers that they had to flee the lands.

Some watched their works being lapped up by the fire and some burnt their own works who were too philosophical and open for the new constricted cult. That doesn't mean they didn't resist back. They of course did! While they questioned why weren't this cult pleased with the fact that the pagans were ready to accept their One True Lord as one of the gods they raked through their minds at the murder of the ideology where one could choose his own path to the divine, if there's any.

This classical world gave emphasis to liberal thinking, freedom in their theism, had a vast opening into the science and astronomy. They wrestled with the new ideas, they sat in the cool marble buildings spending hours discussing philosophy.

Sadly, this kind of lifestyle was snatched from the ideology that rose in the East. Some of the philosophers sought refugee even in the lands of Persians only to come back to their lands and scatter slowly disappearing out of the name and fame.

All the while, Athena, the goddess of Knowledge and Wisdom, who once stood with her head high with greatness, served her last days as a mere step into the prayer halls of the now triumphing believers of One Lord. This book wasn't what I had expected. But it gave me everything I needed. Someone who always had a liking and a weird connection with past and ancient stuff especially of Greeks and Roman civilization this book threw me into the plethora of feelings. I am left with more questions than answers.

I was unsure to read this book but the assurance of some readers regarding the references finally made me pick this book up. The author doesn't have a bit of hesitancy in her writings, even I felt that she was being hard. But one thing is for sure. The so called pagans celebrated and romanticised the lives you presently experience than the idea of a exuberant life after the so called sacrifice to the cause.

People made their choices and as it was same with the Mayans, Incas and Sanatanis the ones who pointed out at their rights to follow their lifestyles were pushed to the horrors of intolerance and hate while the ones who were at the other end have passed down the same constricted stand which can be so visible and is being carried forward grandly even today.

About the writing style it was more poetic and figuritive. The Chapters and crisp and short and the author doesn't fail to transport to the places she writes about. Some concepts were too hard to believe and there were some chapters where I ashamedly hollered because the new cult's thinking and reasons to do what they did were belly aching hilarious.

Comedy apart, this book moved my heart. I didn't know these ancient civilizations were put through so much to finally drift away from their roots.

For someone who loved these civilizations, now I'm ensured, that there is so much I'm supposed to learn and understand. Millions of people have been massacred, the works of architects and writers are wiped out of the earth only because some people who failed to realise that we all live under the same sun and extract the soothing coldness of the same moon.

And if you ask the Quebecers about that period, their smile fade and they reluctantly acknowledge some of the rules they had to obey were positively medieval. Was it this constraint they experienced that have made them so adamant that religion have not part in their lives anymore?

Probably, and I would like to believe they closed, thus, the long period of abuse and persecutions Christianity is guilty of, but I know it is only wishful thinking. Not even the twenty-first-century Catherine Nixey will escape totally unscathed after publishing her brilliant and disturbing book, The Darkening Age.

For my part though, The Darkening Age has only reinforced my conviction that the distance between Church and God is even greater than between any atheist and God and that faith is a personal choice, never to be institutionalised, to be given the power to oppress. In fact, this is the theme of the book the author formulates, after emphasizing that everybody has talked about the things the Church preserved, but few about what it destroyed: to remind the modern world about an entire civilisation that had been lost, with its art and culture wiped out and its people reluctantly converted, deprived of their freedom and their past.

No wonder the book opens and closes with the powerful image of the wisdom trampled down by the Christian feet during their triumphal march against paganism. The decapitated head of Athena in Palmyra marks its beginning and her torso used as a step in the former house of the last philosophers in Athena its completion. The bleak image the author offers is in open contradiction with the traditional narrative in which the Christians conquered a weakened and abusive empire, whose population was ready for a saviour.

In fact, the slaves remained slaves a priest who encouraged them to quit their masters was immediately excommunicated and there is even a saint, St. Theodore, whose speciality was hunting fugitive slaves , and the taxation remained as punitive as before, only the fonds were used now to support the Church for example to pay the bishops five times as much as professors, and six times as much as doctors. Or are we alive and is life dead? Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh.

Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Furthermore, the Christian Church was not built only on the ruins of the old world, but also on exaggerations and lies, maybe to prove that not only idols have feet of clay, but also martyrs and saints.

Origen himself admitted that the number of martyrs was small, despite the proliferation of stories about them. It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable. The martyr stories, inspiring and entertaining though they may be, show what the scholar G. De Ste. Chrysostom encouraged Christians to denounce each other and his Discourses Against Judaizing Christians will be quoted with enthusiasm by the Nazi.

The emperor Constantine, who boiled his wife in a bath because he suspected her of adultery with his son whom he also killed , was seen by his contemporaries as a vicious, evil man. There is even a saint, Benedict of Nursia, who gained this distinction not either because he founded the Western monasticism, and because he destroyed many antiquities.

The great St Augustine himself approved without reservations both the forced conversions and the destructions for they were commanded by God. But where is the kingdom of this Caelestis now? It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was.

It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe. It was left out of the Cambridge University Press edition of his Collected Poems and in the Penguin edition was kept in Latin. The censorship has been in place for almost two millennia and there is no definite sign it will completely stop rearing its ugly head anytime soon.

Constantine set up the first major church council the Council of Nicaea in CE. The fact that this Council was convened by the Emperor is also significant, establishing that the Church was subject to the Emperor. The theological arguments and disputations of the time were so conflicting and rancorous that Constantine insisted that they use the Council to get their act together, or else… The result was the first draft of the Nicene Creed refined later and while this did not stop the haggling by theologians I doubt whether there has ever been total consensus between them ever since!

From this time on, the only light Reason was required to provide was to bolster up the mono-theistic mindset of the State Religion. This, together with the then recent technological accomplishments especially of the printing press and its power to communicate all things directly to individuals, resulted in the blazing forth of knowledge and enterprise throughout Europe in the 17thth centuries which we call The European Enlightenment.

I would argue that the core of Christianity is its emphasis on love and peace: the principles of the Sermon on the Mount; love one another; love your neighbour; love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that persecute and calumniate you; and never cease in forgiving people their transgressions.

One would think that, with Christianity being declared the absolute and unopposed State Religion of the Roman Empire, the ruling body of the Church would seize the opportunity to embrace and enshrine these wonderful principles and ensure their incorporation in all matters dealing with the Faith, right?

Her writing is not heavy at all, but lightly, though unrelentingly, sets out the increasingly ruthless and merciless activities of often murderous antipathy by the Church and by individuals and associated sects and rabid groups, either in thought or in deed, towards its perceived pagan enemies over the next years.

Emperors, Archbishops, and Bishops became both prescriptive and proscriptive through their leadership. Martin of Tours apparently had a great time overseeing and participating in the destruction of pagan temples wherever he went.

The inherent anti-semitism of the New Testament is given full throat in the fiery sermons of John Chrysostom. And so it goes. Hypocrisy, corruption, ambition, ruthlessness and intolerance are always found in all great monolithic organisations, and are still to be found there today. Lest we forget Jan 10, Murtaza rated it liked it. One simple thing that is of enduring interest to me is the fact that the world was very different in the past. The transition from the classical to the Christian world was one of the greatest moral revaluations of all time.

It was a change not of mere material circumstance but in the inner lives of mankind. This book is a highly partisan, unnuanced account of this shift. It is polemically anti-Christian and almost feels as thought it was directly written by an indignant classical "pagan," or at One simple thing that is of enduring interest to me is the fact that the world was very different in the past.

It is polemically anti-Christian and almost feels as thought it was directly written by an indignant classical "pagan," or at least one of their representatives. While it purports to be a historical account, it's more like someone had an axe to grind and did not care to be bothered with counterarguments.

I found this a bit insulting as a reader. But while the book cannot be taken as a definitive word on this subject, it still has merits. Nixey is a brisk writer. She provides translations from many key classical and Christian writers who were living through this epochal shift in values.

You do get a feel of how the world was changing and how it might have looked from the perspective of those who did not welcome such change. The strepitus mundi , the roar of the world, was announcing a new set of values, what Nietzsche would later deride as "slave morality," while the voices of those who saw things differently were being stilled. There were some stunning differences in moral and sexual values that Nixey touches on but doesn't go into great detail, other than suggesting that things were much better before the Christians arrived.

Their monotheistic idol smashing reminded me a lot of early Islam. The book is structured as a number of episodes, usually relating to some key Christian outrage. Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Nikki K Rollason. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF.

A dramatic dive into ancient Christianity, well-written but lacking nuance. This provocative book focuses on a series of events during the period known as Late Antiquity c. Overwhelming her audience with the level of destruction, Nixey leaves the reader to conclude that little of cultural value or anyone of non-Christian religious practice was left by the end of the s CE.

By Catherine Nixey. Be the first to write a review! A gripping account of how the early Christians annihilated the art and teachings of the Classical world from a brilliant young historian. Scholar critiques book that argues Christians destroyed the classical Scholar critiques book that argues Christians destroyed the classical world.