Using the mutilation of faces, arms and genitals on the Parthenon’s decoration as one of her many, thunderingly memorable case studies, Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and adhering to an ethos of 'love thy neighbor,' the early church was in fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. This is a searingly passionate book ... Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt ... Nixey delivers this ballista-bolt of a book with her eyes wide open and in an attempt to bring light as well as heat to the sad story of intellectual monoculture and religious intolerance.
If you have wondered why so many classical statues are missing heads, arms, noses and genitalia, now you know ... The Darkening Age is a delightful book about destruction and despair. Nixey combines the authority of a serious academic with the expressive style of a good journalist. She’s not afraid to throw in the odd joke amid sombre tales of desecration. With considerable courage, she challenges the wisdom of history and manages to prevail. Comfortable assumptions about Christian progress come tumbling down.
Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would expect from a distinguished journalist, every page is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an expert eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill. Writing critically about Christian history is doubly difficult: not only are the ancient sources complex, scattered and disputed, but also there are legions of modern readers waiting to pounce on the tiniest perceived error, infelicity or offense ... a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianization of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.
Christianity is seen as a brutal force for philistinism and iconoclasm. The Dark Ages are depicted as running the full length of the Middle Ages, only ending with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Her consequently dim view of the entire medieval period does not bear examination, since she does not enlarge on it ... Nixey’s account, for all its readable, rumbustious energy, gives no credit to Christianity for its radically transforming message of agape, which counselled not physical destruction but the bringing down of walls of division—between the free and enslaved, men and women, Greek and Roman, Jew and gentile ... To condemn Christianity at its foundations is a counsel of despair as well as poor historical judgment.
Like every good polemic, The Darkening Age is sardonic, well-informed and quite properly lacking in sympathy for its hapless target. But the argument depends on quite a bit of nifty footwork. Nixey vividly evokes the fundamentalist bonfires that 'blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.' Inconveniently, we have no evidence for a single poem by Ovid or Catullus having been put to the flames: Christian book-burning was always directed at heretical Christian literature or 'magical' writings ... The Darkening Age rattles along at a tremendous pace, and Nixey brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world. Those losses were real enough. But by denying that anything of value or interest took their place, she ends up condemning the entire civilization of the European Middle Ages as a collective fit of inexplicable narrow-minded idiocy.
Though The Darkening Age is not a difficult read, I found it to be overbroad. It did not persuade me Romans were so much better than early Christians, nor did I come to agree the murder of Christians for entertainment was not as bad as later religious murders by Christians, as both were horrible.
Nixey clearly but untendentiously summarizes phenomena that led up to the elimination of classical polytheism, such as imperial persecutions of Christians by emperors before Constantine and the intellectual refutation of Christianity by philosophers whose works were later expunged, and actual incidences and kinds of persecution, 385–532 CE—that is, between the destruction of Athena’s temple in Palmyra and the expatriation of the last philosophers of the Athenian Academy, founded by Plato in 387 BCE. This history is too little known, she says, in an era, the present, that ill appreciates the dangers of monotheism.
Her gripping, albeit sometimes sensationalistic, revisionist popular history calls into question the standard accounts of topics such as monasticism, the Roman persecution of Christians, and martyrdom while vividly portraying the tragedies of people such as Hypatia of Alexandria and Damascius of Athens ... While providing a valuable corrective and alternative to Christian-centric historical perspectives, Nixey is prone to push too far in the other direction, oversimplifying complex events, presenting speculation as fact, and offering limited evidence to support dramatic conclusions. Regardless, readers interested in unorthodox histories will appreciate this stimulating and iconoclastic work.
Nixey paints with a wide brush, but her point is well-taken that even if it took hundreds of years for Christianity to sweep aside competing forms of belief in the ancient world, it was not universally well-received—though its narrative that it was greeted with open arms everywhere was accepted as truth after the fact, in a landscape of temples in rubble, mutilated statuary, and lost libraries. A fine history that is surely controversial in its view of how victims become victimizers and how professions of love turn to terror.
