Before the Dark Ages

The Lord, it was reported, had said, 'let there be light' and there was light and in due course the magi followed the guiding light of a star to find the new-born Christ who became 'the light of the world'. That is the Christian side of the story but Catherine Nixey, in The Darkening Age, the book before her recent Heresy, catalogues the other side.

She puts in her caveats early, in her introduction, that she is,

an almost daily beneficiary of such goodness 

as that performed by many, many good people impelled by their Christian faith. And I might add that Christianity has not been the only movement in history to do untold damage to our wider cultural heritage in the interests of its mania. Pol Pot's 'year zero', the Soviet rewriting of history, Donald Trump's fake news and all sorts of fanaticism have done similar things to establish their supremacy and delete all opposition but if Vandals gave their name to vandalism they owe a huge debt to Christianity who set them a paragon example to follow.

Having been brought up on stories and hymns about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', which Heresy cast considerable doubt on, it takes a lifetime to recover from the sort of 'education' instilled in one at a formative age and not thinking that piety and devotion are somehow to be admired. Whatever goodness or faults Jesus Christ had in him it is unlikely that he would have condoned quite the levels of tyranny, cruelty and barbarism carried out in his name in the centuries after he had once and for all departed this earthly life.

Catherine Nixey accepts that there were periods of persecution of Christians by Romans but while we've heard all about that, we hear much less about righteousness persecuting anything pagan once the conversion of Constantine turns the balance of power in its favour.

The non-sequiturs of faith, the omniscient God and all that the doctrine brought with it had been pointed out by contemporary philosophers like Celsus but thought was of little interest to orthodox Christians,

they actually celebrated ignorance. They declare [Celsus wrote] that 'Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good' - an almost precise quotation from Corinthians.

Rather than engage in debate, Christians preferred faith, doctrine, uniformity of thought, obedience and intimidation. Not to mention murder, networks of informers and all the devices used by C20th tyrannies carried forward into the C21st because, having nothing but faith and doctrine, they had no answers. The Sociology departments of late 1970's universities were run on similar lines if we believe Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man and I tend to, not least because it was filmed on the campus of the university I went to where it was the campus orthodoxy. 

But it is the destructions of libraries and the desecration of temples and statues that is perhaps the main point of The Darkening Age, the systematic obliteration of previous cultures that wrote over such texts as those of Aristotle. Ovid and Catullus would not have been on their poetry reading list. Enjoyment was frowned upon unless it was smashing up art they didn't agree with and Christianity can take much of the credit for less than 10% of classical literature having survived. It was marauding monks that did it. Yes, we understand that the prayerful monks of Lindisfarne were slaughtered by invading Vikings in their turn but their predecessors were the foot soldiers of the campaign that made Christianity so oddly the dominant force in Western culture.

It is a lurid book but that is because it reports lurid stories. Of course it could be seen as one-sided but that is because it is an attempt to balance that which was instilled in us from an early age which, as ever, was history written by the winners. And then some.

There are some good hymns and I don't mind a bit of a sing myself given the chance but not so much Onward Christians Soldiers, Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might or When a Knight Won His Spurs, that's all supremacist machismo.

My favourite is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive Our Foolish Ways.

That is a lot to expect, though, of a God who wasn't forgiving in many of the available accounts of him and who has provided precious little evidence of being there unless, as Celsus wrote, one is one of the 'foolish, dishonourable and stupid' that were the only people Christians were able to convince.

However, it's not as much the relentless, headlong commitment to her cause that makes Catherine Nixey so readable. She's funny at regular intervals and though one wonders at her rigour, research and scholarship it is by her implacable ironies and sardonic wit that one will remember her books because evidence is one thing but the presentation of it is what makes it not only convincing but entertaining, too.