CHRISTIAN TOTATALITARIANISM A Review of The Darkening Age. The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. By Catherine Nixey

 I 

For all its great claims Christianity has been far more of a curse than a blessing to civilisation. The world it destroyed was more tolerant and open. Of course, we can never know what might have been had Constantine not chosen to embrace a small religious sect. What can be known is that because of that embrace Christianity came to dominate western culture and all aspects of daily life. It was this all-encompassing aspect, supported by a framework of enforcement, the church, the state, informal spies, and informers, which gave Christianity its totalitarian quality. Long before Nazi Germany books were confined to the flames. Long before Stalin and the NKVD heretics were hunted, tortured, and killed.

 No violence, no cruelty, no exercise of imaginative sadism, was too great to protect the faith. In such an atmosphere free thought, outside the privacy of one’s own home, or confined to the pages of a diary, proved impossible. Even this privacy often failed to provide safety, for over a thousand years before Orwell the Thought Police were active. Above all there was an omnipresent Big Brother in the sky, you saw everything you did and even could see what you thought. 

 Women, in particular, were subject to the violence and oppression of the church. Wholly subservient to men, with little more autonomy than slaves. Female sexuality produced a climate that could boil over into hysteria in men hopelessly struggling with their sexual desires. 

 This reached a grotesque height during the trials that ravaged Europe when it is estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 ‘were executed in Europe for witchcraft, between 1450 and 1750, of which 75% to 80% were women. Women tortured and killed., whilst the church looked on approvingly. 

The destruction of monuments and places of worship, such as the renowned Serapeum in Alexandria, the murder of non-Christian intellectuals and more generally the persecution of ‘pagans’ are the foundation on which the Roman state religion of Christianity was built. With this history one might assume a degree of circumspection, of embarrassment, shame, and remorse. Not a bit of it, instead the church has resorted to that other totalitarian trick, the rewriting of history.

 II 

The stories of Christian martyrdom are largely mythical and refer almost exclusively to a period of about 11 years during the reign of Nero. 

Throughout the initial stages of the Christian church the Roman State bent over backwards to avoid killing Christians, most would be spared in exchange for a small gesture of compliance. The refusal to make this minimal gesture might be interpreted as noble, except for the fact that something perverse was also going on, that was an active hunger to be killed. Nixey points to a specific instant when a local Roman official became so exasperated by the growing crowd of Christians demanding to be put to death that he ordered them to disperse, making it clear he had no intention of obliging them. This led to one desert sage returning disgruntled to his cave after travelling some distance in the hope of being disembowelled. Who needs Monty Python? It is also difficult to call such realities as persecution. 

When it was the Christina’s who, often literally, held the whip hand their victims were not so fortunate. For every Daniel entering the lions cage, there were mountains of pagan corpses slaughtered for either refusing to renounce their faith or to convert. The age of Christian martyrs was as nothing to the age of Christian persecution, the age of mass destruction, carnage, intolerance, bigotry, prudish frigidity, and murder that was heralded as the triumph of Christianity. 

The other strand of Christian rewriting of history has been the propaganda of the scholarly monastic tradition. Ancient Greek and Latin texts saved for posterity by monks working in dimly lit monasteries. 

 Well, up to a point, for if this desire to preserve did exist at all it, was absent in the early Church. A desire for manuscript burning and taking sledgehammers to statues and temples was more the defining feature of this age. For every manuscript preserved thousands were destroyed. It is estimated that less than 10% of ancient Greek manuscripts survived, even less non-Christian Latin poetry, philosophy and historical writings made the cut. If it had not been for Arabic scholarship the amount of surviving material would be even less. Moreover, what has survived had to be filtered through Christian morality, and Christian censorship. Most erotic writing in poetry or prose stood no chance. Thus, if the Church wants credit for preserving Aristotle, Plato, and other ancient writing, and it deserves some, then it also must take responsibility for destroying so much more than it preserved. 

Christian pornography, the pornography of sadism and cruelty survived by being both revered and as a pedagogical tool. Describing, for example, in The Apocalypse of Peter, in graphic detail men being hung by their testacies, dangling by their toungs, babies, ‘born out of time’ writhing in eternal damnation. It is difficult not to think of contemporary ‘born again’ Christian fundamentalists in the US bible belt railing against homosexuality whilst wallowing in the glories of the killing power of semi-automatic weapons. 

 Prior to their ascendency the ancient Rome that Christians eventually came to dominate was no paradise of tolerance and free thinking, though it was much more so than the Christians who followed. What it was, as writers from Gibbon on have observed, was much more grown up, rooted in the demand of organising affairs on Earth, in the here and now. It was grown up about sex and sexuality, of the relationship between open civil discourse and debate within civilised society.

 Had Christians not made claims for the divinity of Jesus, making him an attractive ally for an emperor on the up, Christianity would have remained a small, primarily Jewish sect, and the world would be a vastly different place. I believe a compelling case can be made that it would be a better place. Instead, we entered the dark ages of Christian dominance.

 Two millennium have passed, and we have still yet to recover from the awful legacy of Christian totalitarianism.