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January 8, 2025
‘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?’ The ‘pagan’ author Symmachus
As one influential Christian speaker put it, his congregation should hunt down sinners and drive them into the way of salvation as relentlessly as a hunter pursues his prey into nets.
The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity. From almost the very first years that a Christian emperor had ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded. And then, in AD 529, a final blow had fallen. It was decreed that all those who laboured ‘under the insanity of paganism’ – in other words Damascius and his fellow philosophers – would no longer be allowed to teach.
‘Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we Greeks . . . Or are we alive and is life dead?’8
‘triumph of Christianity’. It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word ‘triumph’. A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner.9 It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated. A triumph was not merely a ‘victory’. It was an annihilation.
Only one per cent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine per cent was lost. One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity.
The attacks didn’t stop at culture. Everything from the food on one’s plate (which should be plain and certainly not involve spices), through to what one got up to in bed (which should be likewise plain, and unspicy) began, for the first time, to come under the control of religion.
Male homosexuality was out-lawed; hair-plucking was despised, as too were make-up, music, suggestive dancing, rich food, purple bedsheets, silk clothes . . . The list went on.
Hilary Mantel once said that ‘history is not the past . . . It is what is left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it.’
Dress up and play your part; Put every serious thought away Or risk a broken heart.
To allow another person to remain outside the Christian faith was not to show praiseworthy tolerance. It was to damn them.
His skill as a healer would later be rivalled only by his talent as an irritant.
It would take centuries for many of Galen’s observations to be bettered. His understanding of neuroanatomy would not be superseded until the seventeenth century; his understanding of certain functions of the brain would not be surpassed until the nineteenth.
There was, however, one group of people who even the great Galen found himself unable to convince. This was a group who did not form their beliefs by basing them on experiments or on observations, but on faith alone – and who, worse still, were actually proud of this fact. These peculiar people were for Galen the epitome of intellectual dogmatism. When he wished to adequately convey the blockheadedness of another group of physicians, Galen used these people as an analogy to express the depths of his irritation. They were the Christians.
‘How can a dead man be immortal?’
Christians, Celsus wrote, ‘do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as “Do not ask questions; just believe”, and “Thy faith will save thee”.’44 To men as educated as Celsus and Galen this was unfathomable: in Greek philosophy, faith was the lowest form of cognition.
‘Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good’
When one man asked a Greek philosopher to go with him to a shrine to pray, the friend replied that he must think the god was very deaf if he couldn’t hear them from where they were.
Augustine later marvelled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions.
‘Don’t you see the beauty of this pleasant weather? There will be no pleasure to come your way if you kill your own self,’ a Roman official addresses a would-be martyr
There were simply not that many years of imperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen – in three whole centuries of Roman rule.
During these first centuries of the new religion, local persecutions of Christians occurred. But we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero’s – and Nero, with even-handed lunacy, persecuted everyone.
As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
‘Because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves,’ Pseudo Jerome
Roman emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs. They had absolutely no wish to open windows into men’s souls or to control what went on there. That would be a Christian innovation.
‘The dead used to leave the city alive behind them, but we living now carry the city to her grave.’
The pages of history might overlook this destruction, but stone is less forgetful.
But while some evidence remains, much has gone entirely. The point of destruction is, after all, that it destroys.
Read Euclid today, and you are reading, in part, the work of Hypatia’s father.
Hypatia had established herself as one of the most respected figures in Alexandria. The entire city, as one later admirer gushed, ‘naturally loved her and held her in exceptional esteem’.23 It was not true.
John Chrysostom had said that: ‘the synagogue is not only a brothel . . . it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts . . . a dwelling of demons . . . a place of idolatry’.25 St Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.
‘We, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest,’ St Basil, Address, IV
A monastery without books is like a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves.
It is a far less glorious tale of how some philosophers were beaten, tortured, interrogated and exiled and their beliefs forbidden; it is a story of how intellectuals set light to their own libraries in fear. And it is above all a story that is told by absences: of how literature lost its liberty; how certain topics dropped from philosophical debate – and then started to vanish from the pages of history. It is a story of silence.
Marcus Aurelius, with queasy precision, described sexual intercourse as ‘the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus’.
The last of the pagan historians, Ammianus Marcellinus, struggled to achieve it: posterity, he wrote, ought to be an ‘impartial judge of the past’.
‘Quam minimum credula postero’ – trust as little as possible in tomorrow
In the fourth and fifth centuries, the now-ancient tradition of monasticism was only in its infancy and its ways were still being formed.
Christian preachers had been glad of the circumcellions’ violence and cultivated it: in the attacks against the temples such freelance destroyers had been eminently useful and were drafted in to do the strong-arm work of pulling these buildings down. Schooled and encouraged in violence and thuggery, the group suddenly became, to the dismay of those who had once encouraged them, much less biddable.32
‘Nothing human is worth as much as a clear conscience,’
‘A man should [never] give greater importance to anything other than truth – not the danger of an impending struggle, nor a difficult task from which one turns away in fear.’
