By Philip Wood
Review of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Catherine Nixey. Pan Macmillan, 2017.
Published in the print edition as "Nostalgie de la Boue," Spring/Summer 2018, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 104-105.
“Christian triumph was not merely a victory: it was an annihilation.” This engaging popular history describes the dramatic changes in the Roman Empire in the course of its conversion to Christianity. Catherine Nixey represents the early Christians as moralists, censors and vandals. Using the writings of the church fathers and their opponents, she identifies the role of the church in the melting down of classical art and the condemnation of the sins of the flesh. Sex and literature, Nixey says, were now sinful; the ancient gods were demons and theatre a gateway to hell.
Nixey laments the loss of the world that the Christians sought to destroy. Christian monks are portrayed as the violent opponents of peaceful philosophers and religious pluralists. Roman elites do not really believe in their gods, she says. And, before the growth of Christianity, Roman society produces a rich, sexually-liberated literature.
There is a strong moral judgement that runs through the book. Nixey emphasizes that Christians could be repressive and intolerant, in an attempt to balance the tally against those who would emphasise the Christian contribution to culture or scholarship. We are encouraged to find parallels between the monks who vandalized a temple in Palmyra and the recent actions of ISIS. By contrast, the pagan Romans, whose cultural and intellectual world Christians are portrayed as destroying, are to be celebrated because they tacitly anticipate a liberated, post-Christian modernity. Indeed, Nixey clearly enjoys her repetition of Catullus’ “I’m going to f--- you in the mouth and bugger you” (which she describes simply as “brisk”).
Nixey is the product of a very unusual family background: brought up a Catholic, she is the daughter of a former monk and a former nun. Much of her book tries to set the record straight on monasticism: to illustrate the disciplinarian tendencies of monastic culture or to point out the role of monks in mob violence. She is also a former classics teacher turned journalist, and this may explain her idealization of the first century texts that are favourites for schoolchildren and undergraduates. Thus the book is strangely old-fashioned in that it imagines a classical golden age in the first century, followed by a decline. And, like Edward Gibbon, Nixey attributes this decline to Christianity. There were, she tells us, “no more Ovids or Catulluses after the first century.”
It is important to remember that we have been here before. Though she incorporates new archaeological material, most of the sources that Nixey employs have been used to make similar arguments for two hundred years. Moreover, since the 1970s, the work of Peter Brown and Averil Cameron and their students has done much to re-imagine the fourth century as a period of transformation rather than decline. Part of the genius of Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity was in bridging the domains of classics, Christian theology and even early Muslim sources to present a single integrated world that draws on a shared heritage.
The sources for ancient history are often polemical, and invested in the victory of one side and the defeat of the other. The fourth century sources are no different. Nixey does admit that her texts are the work of moralists, but we should follow Brown in recognizing that the roar of Christian triumph described by the ecclesiastical historians is not the whole story or the norm.
For instance, Nixey uses the church historian Eusebius to describe Constantine’s looting of the pagan temples and the transport of idols in triumph to his new city of Constantinople. But recent work has emphasized that Constantine appealed to different constituencies at the same time: when he placed the bronze serpents from the Temple of Delphi in the Hippodrome or the palladium, the wooden image of Athena taken by Aeneas from Troy, in the Forum this was not a triumph over false belief, but a recognition of classical tradition and its enduring power. In other words, it was not a past marked out as demonic, but a past to be shared by all Romans as secular, part of a common culture.
Towards the end of her book, Nixey gives an example of monastic violence from the 5th century Life of St. Shenute. Set in Middle Egypt, it describes how Shenute and his band of followers break into the home of a pagan notable, Gesios, to destroy his idols. It tells how a miracle caused the locked doors of the house to burst open, exonerating Shenute of the crime of burglary. Nixey is obviously correct to point to the rhetoric of the text, which presents actions that the state might see as criminal as acts of Christian piety. But we should be equally sceptical of the text’s representation of Gesios as a pagan idolater. We cannot know, but by the 5th century I suspect we are simply dealing with a notable who collected statues in the old style. Moreover, Gesios might have been a Christian: it is his rejection of monastic aesthetics that make him a pagan in the eyes of this hagiographer, rather than his own self-identification as a polytheist.
Nixey has written a work of popular history. Her book’s dust-jacket carries the praise of popular historians specializing in other periods. Her treatment of the evidence and the scholarship is highly selective. She knits her material together to tell a good story. But there is an obligation on authors writing about material that is not well-known to the general public — and this is to show their workings, to show the different ways that sources can be interpreted. The Christian triumph that Nixey describes through works of polemic is one viewpoint, but I do not think its noise and light reflects the reality of conversion. Christians were still Romans. The ancient way of life was not dying, but transforming into something new.
But why should a neo-Gibbonian vision seem so attractive to popular historians today? I suspect that her discussion of monastic violence as a species of monotheistic intolerance provides a means for post-Christian European liberals to express their disquiet about Islam. Christianity feels sufficiently “theirs” to be attacked in this way, whereas liberal attacks on Islam are vulnerable to criticisms of racism or Islamophobia.
Philip Wood is Tejpar Professor of Inter-religious studies at Aga Kahn University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, in London. He holds a DPhil in the history of late antiquity from Oxford University and has taught at Oxford, Cambridge and SOAS.