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

The work of Democritus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and the father of atomic theory, was entirely lost. Only one percent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine percent was lost. One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity.

And it travels, in the end, to Athens, the city where Western philosophy may be said to have really begun and where, in AD 529, it ended.

Bishops were paid five times as much as professors, six times as much as doctors—as much even as a local governor.

Note that word “proved.” Galen knew vivisection was a good show, but it was not merely a show for him. It was utterly essential to understanding how bodies worked. As Galen wrote: “the anatomy of the dead teaches the position . . . of the parts. That of the living may reveal the functions.” His writing is littered with the phrases of empiricism: “then you can show . . . ,” he writes at one point; “you have seen all this publicly demonstrated,” he adds at another; “you observed . . . ,” he writes at a third.4 He was a dedicated empiricist* and had nothing but the deepest scorn for anyone who was not. After describing the experiment to show what arteries contain, Galen writes contemptuously that he never saw milk in them and “nor will anyone who chooses to make the experiment.”5

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.

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.

What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion—a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar—might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome.

Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one.

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a “Creation myth” was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory—an Epicurean one—stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos—“the uncuttable thing”: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space “in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that.”31 Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than “a haphazard union of elements.”

Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us—but on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called “an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity” and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein.

“God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.”

The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: “Gah. I think I’m turning into a god.”71

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

of these tales are based on historical fact. 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.

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. For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone.

‘Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be re-phrased: ‘Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?’”23

Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and, in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antoninus did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than dispatching the rest with pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millennia, sounds unmistakably like exasperation. “Oh you ghastly people,” he said. “If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hang yourself with.”12

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.

And nor should Pliny take it upon himself to root out Christians. In a line that should be far better known than it is, Trajan adds three simple but powerful words. “Conquirendi non sunt”—“These people must not be hunted out.”43

the world today, there are over two billion Christians. There is not one single, true “pagan.” Roman persecutions left a Christianity vigorous enough not only to survive but to thrive and to take control of an empire. By contrast, by the time the Christian persecutions had finally finished, an entire religious system had been all but wiped from the face of the earth.34

In the third century, there had been twenty-eight public libraries in Rome and many private ones.55 By the end of the fourth they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut.”

Let the girl with a pretty face lie supine, let the lady Who boasts a good back be viewed From behind . . . The petite should ride horse. —the Roman poet Ovid advises on positions for lovemaking, Ars Amatoria, 3

Sex, sexual desire and the consequences of sex were frankly discussed. Poets chastised their lovers when they had abortions, less for the abortion than for endangering their own health. Ovid professed himself furious with his lover Corinna for rashly attempting one—but less because she had committed this act than because she had taken “that risk, and she never told me!”

The sort of intimidation that zealous Christians indulged in was not, another writer protested, the way that crime and punishment should work in the Roman Empire. “Nobody draws his sword against the murderer and puts it to his throat, employing force in place of the forms of law,” said the orator Libanius. Instead, in a civilized society, “the place of swords is taken by impeachments and processes, civil and criminal.” The Christians, he wrote with disdain, seemed to have no time for that: “these people here were the only ones ever to judge the cases of those whom they accuse and, having passed judgement, themselves to play the hangman’s part.”

In a now-familiar paradox of punishment it was explained again and again that all these physical attacks were a kindness. The Church persecutes, Augustine said, in the spirit of love.

Read this law and, in comparison to some of Justinian’s other edicts, it sounds almost underwhelming. Filed under the usual dull bureaucratic subheading, it is now known as “Law 1.11.10.2.” “Moreover,” it reads, “we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism” so that they might not “corrupt the souls of their disciples.”21 The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it. Its consequences were formidable. This was the law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. 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.22 This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.