The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

by Catherine Nixey

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

When modern histories describe this period, this time when all the old religions died away and Christianity finally became pre-eminent, they tend to call it the “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.

Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge. But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed.

One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity.

One consequence of the concept of demons was that wicked thoughts were the fault of the demon, not the man: an exculpatory quirk that meant even the most sinful thoughts could be—and were—freely admitted to.

In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the “error” of the pagan religions was demonically inspired.

The fathers of the early Church turned their full rhetorical force on religious lapses. Time and time again they insisted that Christians were not like other religions. Christians were saved; others were not. Christians were correct; other religions were wrong. More than that: they were sick, insane, evil, damned, inferior.

Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different. You were demonic.

Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind. Instead, they were attacking the Christians because they were under the control of Satan and his foot soldiers.

When Augustine told those people who had not yet converted that they should wake up and listen to the strepitus mundi it was, in part, an invitation to the Christian celebration. It was also, unmistakably, a threat.

Intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and, above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstrations. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.

in AD 386, a law was passed targeting those “who contend about religion” in public. Such people, this law warned, were the “disturbers of the peace of the Church” and they “shall pay the penalty of high treason with their lives and blood.”14

Augustine later marveled 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.