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

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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