The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, Macmillan, £20
European Christians are perhaps tempted to think of the classical past as one which was gently absorbed into their own religious framework. Dante, supposedly in 1300, was guided by Virgil into the infernal realms. Renaissance poets invoked Apollo and the Muses. Titian painted Venus and Diana the Huntress. This excellent book reminds us that, in fact, we are lucky, thanks to the zeal of Christians from the 4th century onwards, to have any classical art at all.
In 392, the Bishop of Alexandria led a mob to the temple of Serapis, one of the wonders of the ancient world, and reduced it to rubble. The Parthenon in Athens was fortunate to escape quite such drastic treatment, though its statue of Athena was buried head downwards. John Chrysostom sent out bands of monks to destroy the shrines of Satan. St Benedict’s first act upon arrival at Monte Cassino was to smash a statue of Apollo.
I had always thought St Basil a friend to literature. One 20th-century editor of his essay on “The Right Use of Greek Literature” said his attitude was “that of an understanding friend, not blind to its worst qualities but by no means condemning the whole”. Not so, says Nixey: he ruthlessly censored the classical authors of which he disapproved, and said it was better to avoid pagan authors altogether than to be corrupted by them.
There will be many moments in Nixey’s story when you will come to share her wish that the persecution of the early Christians had been more effective. Then, perhaps, we should not have had menaces to the human race such as Cyril of Alexandria, “purifying” the synagogues – ie gutting them. Nor would the mob in the same city have flayed the mathematician-philosopher Hypatia in the year 415, accusing her of witchcraft.
Why was the persecution of the early Christians so ineffectual? Largely, Nixey says, because it did not take place on anything like the scale claimed by the Church propagandists. George Bernard Shaw (he lived before the age of the television chat show host) said that martyrdom was the only way a man can become famous without ability. Many Christians depicted in this book were morbidly in love with the idea of death. We meet the Circumcellions, itinerant farm workers who celebrated the anniversaries of the martyrs’ deaths with orgies of sex and drink, culminating sometimes in their own suicides.
Certainly any reasonable 21st-century Christian will sympathise with Damascius, the genial pagan philosopher who fled Alexandria to Athens and was the last principal of the Academy there. He was driven out by the new laws of the Emperor Justianian. In 532, after nearly a thousand years, the Academy closed.
Nixey, the child, as she tells us, of a former Catholic priest and a former nun, makes her readers long to press the fast-forward button so they can whizz on to the rediscovery of classical learning in Renaissance times. Does she make you wish that the Emperor Diocletian had successfully terminated the fanatical sect which followed the “pale Galilean”?
Almost, but not quite. Nixey rightly laments the amount of classical literature destroyed by vandalistic monks – the dozens of lost plays of Euripides, the untold wealth of Latin literature. But would we have wanted a world without the four Gospels? Their Greek, by the standards of Plato, is uneven, but their ragamuffin, topsy-turvy anarchism is unlike anything in the literature of the world, their injunction to die in order to live, to take up our cross daily, and to die to self – this surely needs to be weighed against the vandalism of the “fathers”?
Nixey chronicles Augustine’s intolerance, but not his flights of mysticism, his life-changing abandonment to the love of God. She depicts a Benedict smashing statues but omits nearly 1,500 years of Benedictine life in the world, and all the calm, wise stillness which that has brought with it.
She reminds us of the blindness to beauty of Christians, and is right to say that much of it was inspired, not just by poor old human nature but by Christian doctrine itself. But she entirely omits the sense preserved by the Church that this faith promised a new life in Christ, in which the fruits of the spirit – love, peace and kindness – could flourish, and in which a new vision of God, and a new unhierarchical vision of humanity was possible, in which there was neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free.
Of course, the great classical sculptors, poets, playwrights and philosophers were in every way more accomplished practitioners of their art than even the most accomplished early Christians. But in their appalling way, these fathers in faith handed on something for which I at least remain grateful, in spite of all the damage they did along the way.
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