The Darkening Age Read online

  When modern histories describe this period, this time when all the old religions died away and Christianity finally became pre-eminent, they tend to call it the “triumph of Christianity.” It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word “triumph.” A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner.9 It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated.

  A triumph was not merely a “victory.” It was an annihilation.

  Little of what is covered by this book is well known outside academic circles. Certainly it was not well known by me when I grew up in Wales, the daughter of a former nun and a former monk. My childhood was, as you might expect, a fairly religious one. We went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and I said my prayers (or at any rate the list of requests which I considered to be the same thing) every night. When Catholic relatives arrived we play-acted not films but First Holy Communion and, at times, even actual communion. A terrible sin (and not a wonderful game, either), this was at least an opportunity to glean extra blackcurrant juice from adults.

  So there was a lot of God, or at any rate of Catholicism, in my childhood. But despite having spent a combined twenty-six years inside monastic walls, my parents’ faith was never dogmatic. If I asked about the origins of the world, I was more likely to be told about the Big Bang than about Genesis. If I asked where humans came from, I would have been told about evolution rather than Adam. I don’t remember, as a child, ever questioning that God existed—but equally as a teenager I remember being fairly confident that He did not. What faith I had had died, and my parents either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. I suspect that, somewhere between monastery and world, their faith had died too.

  What never, ever died in our family, however, was my parents’ faith in the educative power of the Church. As children, both had been taught by monks and nuns; and as a monk and a nun they had both taught. They believed as an article of faith that the Church that had enlightened their minds was what had enlightened, in distant history, the whole of Europe. It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. On holidays, we would visit museums and libraries where the same point was made. As a young child, I looked at the glowing gold of the illuminated manuscripts and believed in a more metaphorical illumination in ages of intellectual darkness.

  And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge.

  But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

  Dramatic though all this was, far more destruction was achieved through sheer neglect. In their silent copying-houses the monks preserved much, but they lost far more. The atmosphere could be viciously hostile to non-Christian authors. In the silence in which monks worked, gestures were used to request certain books: outstretched palms and the mimed turning of pages signified that a monk wished a psalter to be passed over to him, and so on. Pagan books were requested by making a gagging gesture.10

  Unsurprisingly, the works of these despised authors suffered. At a time in which parchment was scarce, many ancient writers were simply erased, scrubbed away so that their pages could be reused for more elevated themes. Palimpsests—manuscripts in which one manuscript has been scraped (psao) again (palin)—provide glimpses of the moments at which these ancient works vanished. A last copy of Cicero’s De re publica was written over by Augustine on the Psalms. A biographical work by Seneca disappeared beneath yet another Old Testament. A codex of Sallust’s histories was scrubbed away to make room for more St. Jerome. Other ancient texts were lost through ignorance. Despised and ignored, over the years, they simply crumbled into dust, food for bookworms but not for thought. The work of Democritus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and the father of atomic theory, was entirely lost. Only one percent of Latin literature survived the centuries. Ninety-nine percent was lost. One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity.

  The violent assaults of this period were not the preserve of cranks and eccentrics. Attacks against the monuments of the “mad,” “damnable” and “insane” pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the Catholic Church.11 The great St. Augustine himself declared to a congregation in Carthage “that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!”12 St. Martin, still one of the most popular French saints, rampaged across the Gaulish countryside leveling temples and dismaying locals as he went. In Egypt, St. Theophilus razed one of the most beautiful buildings in the ancient world. In Italy, St. Benedict overturned a shrine to Apollo. In Syria, ruthless bands of monks terrorized the countryside, smashing down statues and tearing the roofs from temples.

  The attacks didn’t stop at culture. Everything from the food on one’s plate (which should be plain and certainly not involve spices), through to what one got up to in bed (which should be likewise plain, and unspicy), began, for the first time, to come under the control of religion. Male homosexuality was outlawed; hair-plucking was despised, as too were makeup, music, suggestive dancing, rich food, purple bedsheets, silk clothes . . . The list went on.

  Achieving this was not a simple matter. While the omniscient God had no trouble seeing not only into men’s hearts but into their homes, Christian priests had a little more difficulty in doing the same. A solution was found: St. John Chrysostom encouraged his congregations to spy on each other. Enter each other’s homes, he said. Pry into each other’s affairs. Shun those who don’t comply. Then report all sinners to him and he would punish them accordingly. And if you didn’t report them then he would punish you too. “Just as hunters chase wild animals . . . not from one direction but from everywhere, and cast them into the net, so too together let’s chase those who’ve become wild animals and cast them immediately into the net of salvation, we from this side, you from that.”13 Fervent Christians went into people’s houses and searched for books, statues and paintings that were considered demonic. This kind of obsessive attention was not cruelty. On the contrary: to restrain, to attack, to compel, even to beat a sinner was—if you turned them back to the path of righteousness—to save them. As Augustine, the master of the pious paradox, put it: “Oh, merciful savagery.”14

  The results of all of this were shocking and, to non-Christians, terrifying. Townspeople rushed to watch as internationally famous temples were destroyed. Intellectuals looked on in despair as volumes of supposedly unchristian books—often in reality texts on the liberal arts—went up i
n flames. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them—and certainly too stupid to recreate them. The Christians could often not even destroy effectively: many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for them, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach.

  I had originally conceived of this book as a travelogue: it would be interesting, I thought, to follow Damascius as he zigzagged across the Mediterranean—a pagan St. Paul. Syria, Damascus, Baghdad, parts of Egypt and the southern border of Turkey, all places that he had traveled to, were by no means easy to reach but they were, just about, achievable. However, in the years between coming up with that idea, and writing this book, the reality of doing so became impossible.

  Since then, and as I write, the Syrian civil war has left parts of Syria under the control of a new Islamic caliphate. In 2014, within certain areas of Syria, music was banned and books were burned. The British Foreign Office advised against all travel to the north of the Sinai Peninsula. In 2015, Islamic State militants started bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, just south of Mosul in Iraq, because it was “idolatrous.” Images went around the world showing Islamic militants toppling statues around three millennia old from their plinths, then taking hammers to them. “False idols” must be destroyed. In Palmyra, the remnants of the great statue of Athena that had been carefully repaired by archaeologists was attacked yet again. Once again, Athena was beheaded; once again, her arm was sheared off.

  My imagined journey had become impossible. As a result, this book has become a sort of historical travelogue instead. It travels throughout the Roman Empire, pausing at certain places and certain times that are significant. As with any travelogue, each of the places I have focused on is a personal choice and, in a sense, an arguable one. I have chosen Palmyra as a beginning, as it was in the east of the empire, in the mid-380s, that sporadic violence against the old gods and their temples escalated into something far more serious. But equally I could have chosen an attack on an earlier temple, or a later one. That is why it is a beginning, not the beginning. I have chosen Athens in the years around AD 529 as an ending—but again, I could equally have chosen a city farther east whose inhabitants, when they failed to convert to Christianity, were massacred and their arms and legs cut off and strung up in the streets as a warning to others.

  This is a book about the Christian destruction of the classical world. The Christian assault was not the only one—fire, flood, invasion and time itself all played their part—but this book focuses on Christianity’s assault in particular. This is not to say that the Church didn’t also preserve things: it did. But the story of Christianity’s good works in this period has been told again and again; such books proliferate in libraries and bookshops. The history and the sufferings of those whom Christianity defeated have not been. This book concentrates on them.

  The area covered is vast and so this is a piecemeal history that darts about through geography and time. It makes no apology for that. The period covered is too long for a linear crawl through the past and the resulting narrative would be, quite simply, too dull. This is also narrative history: I have tried to give a sense of what it felt like to stand before an ancient temple, what it smelled like to enter one; of how pleasing the afternoon light was as it fell through the steam in an ancient bathhouse. Again, I make no apology for that, either. This approach has its problems—who can really know what an ancient temple smelled like, without visiting one? But not to try to recreate the world is an untruthfulness of another kind: the ancients did not move through a world delineated merely by clean historical periods and battle dates. They lived in a world where the billowing smoke of sacrifices filled the streets on feast days; where people defecated behind statues in the center of Rome; where the light glistened on the wet, naked bodies of young “nymphs” in theaters. Both dates—and bodies—are essential to understanding people of this period.

  Any attempt to write about ancient history is fraught with difficulty. Hilary Mantel once said that “history is not the past . . . It is what is left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it.” Late antiquity offers slimmer pickings in the sieve than most. The little that does remain there is therefore often hotly contested, and some of it has been argued over by scholars for centuries. Something as simple-sounding as an edict can attract years of disagreement between those who consider it seminal and those who relegate it to the status of a mere letter. I have footnoted some of the most significant controversies but not every one: it would have been impossible—not to mention unreadable.

  What remains—whether quarreled over or not—should be treated with caution. As with all ancient history, the writers I quote had limited viewpoints and their own agendas. When St. John Chrysostom gloated that the writings of the Greeks had been obliterated, he was more voicing a hope than stating a fact. When St. Martin’s biographer wrote glowingly of how Martin had violently burned and demolished temples throughout Gaul, the aim was less to report than to inspire. Propaganda, we would call such writings now. Every point these authors make is arguable, every writer I quote is fallible. They were, in short, human—and we should read them with caution. But we should still read them, as their tales are still worth telling.

  My narrative opens in Egypt, as monasticism is born, then moves to Rome as this new religion is beginning to make an appearance there. It then travels to northern Turkey, to Bithynia, where the very first record of the Christians by a non-Christian was written. It goes to Alexandria in Egypt, where some of the worst desecration of all took place; and it goes far into the deserts of Syria, where some of the strangest players in this story existed: monks who, for the love of God, lived out their entire lives standing on pillars, or in trees, or in cages. And it travels, in the end, to Athens, the city where Western philosophy may be said to have really begun and where, in AD 529, it ended.

  The destruction chronicled in this book is immense—and yet it has been all but forgotten by the modern world. One of the most influential Church historians would describe the moment when Christianity took control as the moment at which all oppression ceased, a time when “men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes.”15 Later historians would join in a chorus of agreement. Why would the Romans not have been happy to convert? They were, runs this argument, sensible people and had never really believed their own religion anyway, with its undignified priapic Jupiters and lustful Venuses. No, runs this argument: the Romans had been Christians-in-waiting, ready and willing to give up their absurd and confusing polytheistic rituals as soon as a sensible (for which read “monotheistic”) religion appeared on the scene. As Samuel Johnson would put it, pithy as ever: “The heathens were easily converted, because they had nothing to give up.”16

  He was wrong. Many converted happily to Christianity, it is true. But many did not. Many Romans and Greeks did not smile as they saw their religious liberties removed, their books burned, their temples destroyed and their ancient statues shattered by thugs with hammers. This book tells their story; it is a book that unashamedly mourns the largest destruction of art that human history had ever seen. It is a book about the tragedies behind the “triumph” of Christianity.

  A note on vocabulary: I have tried to avoid using the word “pagan” throughout, except when conveying the thoughts or deeds of a Christian protagonist. It was a pejorative and insulting word and was not one that any non-Christian at the time would have willingly used of themselves. It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was “pagan.” Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier. After Christianity, the soldiers in question were not Roman legionaries but those who had en
listed in Christ’s army. Later, Christian writers concocted false, unflattering etymologies for it: they said it was related to the word pagus, to the “peasants” and the field. It was not; but such slurs stuck and “paganism” acquired an unappealing whiff of the rustic and the backward—a taint it carries to this day.

  I have also, where possible, generally avoided ascribing modern nationalities to ancient characters and have instead described them by the language they chiefly wrote in. Thus the orator Libanius, though he was born and lived in Syria, I describe not as “Syrian” but as Greek. This was a cosmopolitan world where anyone, anywhere from Alexandria to Athens, might consider themselves to be a “Hellene”—a Greek—and I have tried to reflect that.

  I have, at times, for sheer ease of reading, used the word “religion” to refer to the broad spectrum of cults worshipped by Greco-Roman society prior to the introduction of Christianization. This word has its problems—not least the fact that it implies a more centralized and coherent structure than what, in practice, existed. It is, however, more elegant than many of the cumbersome alternatives.

  One final note: many, many good people are impelled by their Christian faith to do many, many good things. I know because I am an almost daily beneficiary of such goodness myself. This book is not intended as an attack on these people and I hope they will not see it as such. But it is undeniable that there have been—that there still are—those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends. Christianity is a greater and a stronger religion when it admits this—and challenges it.