The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

by Catherine Nixey

NEAR THE BEGINNING of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, an erudite medieval abbot turns to a monk who has just arrived in his monastery in Italy. “Monasterium sine libris,” he declaims, in Latin, naturally, “est sicut . . . hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis.” A monastery without books is like a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves. The abbot continues this explanation (or, less charitably, exposition) of monastic life in the vernacular. His order of monks, the Benedictines, he explains, “growing up under the double command of work and prayer, was light to the whole known world, depository of knowledge, salvation of an ancient learning that threatened to disappear in fires, sacks, earthquakes, forge of new writing and increase of the ancient.”1

This is the religion that, inside the walls of the Vatican, even now keeps Latin going as a living language, translating such words as “computer,” “video game” and “heavy metal” into Latin, over a millennium after the language ought to have died a natural death.

Aitches in Latin, as in Victorian England (and indeed modern Britain), were often a giveaway of class, and the ability to know where to put them was the mark of a gentleman. The upper-class Catullus had sneered mercilessly at a man who, anxious to sound more aristocratic than he was, managed to misplace his aitch.46 In this aspirational world the language of the Bible was deeply embarrassing.