Reviews tagging 'Death'

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

2 reviews

angorarabbit's review against another edition

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challenging sad slow-paced

3.0

Context: I grew up in a evangelical Christian community, and graduated from a Jesuit university.  I have read both the bible and the Life of Saint Anthony. I am not a christian.

TLDR: A good critique to Theology 101 but biased and over long.

While reading the Life of Saint Anthony for class I would think to myself, those demons sound more like hallucinations due to malnutrition than actual demons. It seems like the whole Mediterranean world was hallucinating in the 4th and 5th centuries. Ms Nixey relates the violent results of this in detail. Which was my problem. Half way through I was dragging my eyeballs across the pages. 

One detail that nibbled at my brain. Ms Nixey describes multiple times how a Christian would just have kiss the statue of some god in order to appease the Roman governor. But the Romans deified their emperors And Alexandria and Athens were occupied territories of the Romans. So that would be rather like asking a resident of Wounded Knee to kiss a statue of George A Custer.

Once I got the idea just how far Christians leaders and followers would go to rid their world of “demons” I wondered why and how. Ms Nixey didn’t answer that for me. I just can’t believe that an entire empire collapsed solely because some unwashed mobs destroyed temples and treated statues like serial killers do their victims. (Maybe I listen to to much true crime?) What was causing so much unrest and violence?

What was important to me was Ms Nixey’s depiction of how destroying statues and books turned into a darker more violent forced cleansing. And, of course, this is not the first or last time we humans have done this. Something to remember in this era of book banning and burning to protect the children from immoral authors.

Unfortunately I think that most Christians will find Ms Nixey’s book too biased to read or take lessons from. I may have thought that Saint Anthony or the author of his life was off his rocker, but most of my classmates thought it was gospel truth.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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informative sad medium-paced

5.0

In the version of fundamentalist Christianity I grew up in, we idolized the Early Church and Original Christianity. Somewhere between Jesus’resurrection and the formation of the evil polytheistic Catholic Church, there was a time where the Early Church did Christianity perfectly and modern Christians’ goal is to get back to that right way of Christian-ing that got lost when the Catholics got in charge. Despite this obsession with how Christianity was in this time period, though, we were never taught or encouraged to learn about actual church history. Probably to keep us from learning about this stuff, because Christians are not the good guys here.

Y’all, I am not joking when I tell you I grieved.

This book is a chronicle of how Christian attempts to eradicate “paganism” (a term that didn’t exist until they started using it to describe non-Christians) destroyed the classical world. Most of the Greek and Roman philosophy we know existed but have no copies of were lost to Christian book burnings. Some of the most beautiful specimens of statuary were smashed and defaced because they depicted “pagan gods” and were actually vessels of demons. Christians destroyed gorgeous architecture, killed prominent non-Christians, and were the ones to actually finish off the Library of Alexandria (which survived being burned).

Many proud traditions of modern Christians were evident even back then – anti-intellectualism, lust for temporal power, main goal of forcing everyone into conformity while claiming they’re just caring about their immortal souls. They destroyed so much history and literature and even an entire religious system. Hellenistic polytheism was completely eradicated, along with most documentation (if it existed in the first place) of how the religious system worked. We know the pantheon and many of the myths, but we know very little about how the actual day-to-day practice of the religion worked.

There’s so much more in this book – about martyrdom, the origins of monasticism, famous early church fathers – that I could mention in this review, but it would be easier to just read it. It’s worth it. Christians are very much not the good guys here, and that’s a narrative Christianity doesn’t want you to hear.
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