The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hypocrisy in Action

In my email today I received an invitation from a group called Developing a Christian Mind [DCM] to one of their programmes in Oxford entitled Seeking Wisdom. I am assured that essential issues relating to the “Humanities, Medical Sciences, Natural Sciences, Philosophy and Theology, and Social Sciences” will be addressed over a two day weekend by well-known academics. I will be informed, specifically, “How postgraduates, postdocs, and academics at the University of Oxford can approach their academic disciplines as Christians and what it means to respond to a Christian vocation and to honour God in university life?”

Such an invitation is not unusual. Oxford is a superficially religious place. Every college has its own chapel in which services, typically sung in English plain chant, are held several times a week if not daily. Every Christian, Jewish and Islamic denomination has their own ‘outreach’ to the ever-stressed student population and offers some sort of comfort that another kind of life which is neither meritocratic nor economically constrained is possible if not imminent. Most students aren’t bothered with this spiritual marketing and consider the vaguely medieval spirituality of the place as a sort of background aesthetic radiation left over from the thirteenth century. It goes with the architecture.

But some respond positively, even enthusiastically, to the aesthetic and ‘find themselves’, at least temporarily, in a personal religious awakening. These are the students, I imagine, who sign up for things like Developing a Christian Mind. But what is it, I ask myself, do they think constitutes a Christian Mind? Or I suppose the question should be what do the organizers think constitutes a Christian Mind.

The programme brochure provides some clues. In the Humanities ‘stream’ a Christian Mind is apparently formed through discussion of musicology and the reading of “inspirational poetry”. In the Medical Sciences, Christian wisdom is to be found in those parts of the gospels which advocate “personalized, precision medicine”(!). There is little to say, on the other hand, about Christianity and the Natural Sciences except for a short session on evolution. It is in the Social Sciences that the organizers believe that Christianity has most to impart to their audience. Christian ethics, of course, rates top billing, followed by discussions about treating others respectfully even when they disagree. All seemingly innocuous stuff.

So it is clear that the academics who are orchestrating and presenting the programme have a view on what kind of Christianity they are talking about. I would classify this as one of a rather moderate, soft, and inviting Anglicanism, an undogmatic Christianity of good fellowship and courteous discussion. The real purpose of the weekend, it appears to me, is to keep the students connected to the Anglican substrate of English society by implying that whatever it is they are studying is not incompatible with Christian belief. Hardly a fundamentalist hard sell therefore.

But is it honest? Certainly not according to Catherine Nixey’s account of the Christianity of the late classical period which did its utmost to destroy all traces of scientific and artistic accomplishment resulting from Greek and Roman civilization. And Nixey is somewhat sympathetic to the Christian position. Her narrative history hardly mentions the thesis of Edward Gibbon that Christian belief itself was the source of terminal decline of the classical world. She concentrates only on the systematic, savage, and unrelenting war that Christian activists waged on civil and intellectual society from the second through the sixth century.

This war was lead by fanatics who are functionally indistinguishable from today’s ISIS and Taliban. Augustine of Hippo, for example, the most prominent Latin churchman and theologian of his day, was unequivocal in his insistence that any resistance to forcible conversion to Christianity justified torture and even death. John Chrysostom, Augustine’s counterpart in the Eastern Christian Church, was equally radical in his denunciation of all non-Christians, particularly Jews, as less than human and subject to any penalties which could be devised by the state to force their submission, or face the ultimate punishment.

The Christianisation of the Roman state had a marked anti-intellectual component. Classical scientific as well as literary texts were destroyed systematically as a matter of policy from the fourth century onwards. The great library of Alexandria with its 700,000 volumes was destroyed by a Christian mob under the direction of the local bishop. The Athenian Academy, founded by Socrates, was progressively persecuted and finally banned by the emperor at the urging of zealous Christians. Thought itself was subject to the approval of ecclesiastical authorities like the biblicist Jerome who considered any disagreement with his own exegetical opinion as heresy, punishable in the usual way - by death.

Nixey tries to soften the blow of originary Christian anti-intellectualism by alluding to the perennial myth of the ‘saving’ of Western civilization within Christian monasteries during the disintegration of the empire and the so-called dark ages. Perhaps, but it is clear that any such salvation was largely incidental and accidental. Christianity destroyed far more than it preserved in its willful ascendancy to power. Christianity was the first religion to claim to know the entire truth of existence (it still does) and to insist that its truth is superior not just to the truth as perceived by others, but also superior to human life itself.

The fact that a very significant strain of Christianity continues to resist the results of intellectual activity - in evolutionary research, in sexual development, in human rights - around the world is not an aberration but a norm. Even here in Oxford, until recently, the hold of the Anglican Church on the curriculum of study and the mores of the intellectual life has been largely stifling. This is not to say that religiously minded folk in Oxford or elsewhere cannot have academic integrity. But it does signal for me that the proselytizers like those of DCM are at least practicing a conscious deceit in pretending they know what they mean by a Christian Mind, and that, whatever a Christian Mind is, it has some sort of material or spiritual superiority over the minds the rest of us might possess.

As far as the historical merit of Nixey’s narrative goes, I can only cite the perennial Oxford maxim: rely on the original texts. Nixey writes well but not necessarily with good professional judgment. Many of the historical characters she uses are of marginal importance and, despite the sub-title, Nixey doesn’t seem to quite know where she stands on the matter of Christian culpability. The book gives more than a hint that it was written in fits and starts by a part time author who loves her subject but can’t yet make a living out of it. Nonetheless, the DCM people would certainly benefit from a read if only to dampen their ardour for the arrogant fantasies they have concocted about the composition of the Christian Mind.

Postscript: Shortly after finishing the above review I received yet another invitation, this from my own Blackfriars Hall in conjunction with its American counterpart in Washington DC to attend a conference on Catholic Truth in the Contemporary World. So I now can look forward to some appropriate content for my Christian Mind. How exciting.

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