The author writes that in the fourth and fifth centuries, in Alexandria, Athens, Rome and elsewhere, “the Christian church demolished, vandalised 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 burned to the ground . . . many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked . . . monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ — and brilliant — ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away.”
I wrote a less "insider" version below and am editing it in here. Thanks to /u/king_kong123 for the idea.
Since the mid-14th centuries, some people in Europe have thought that ancient Rome was the high point of civilization; since the 15th, some people have thought in their time and going forwards, some of the glory of Rome was revived. During the 18th century, this view of a "middle age" between Rome and Rebirth (d.h. the Renaissance) was absorbed into Enlightenment ideology. Coming from a standpoint of the division of reason and fairth, instead of its union, they saw a clear relatio ship between pagan philosophy of Rome and Roman Republic/Empire flourishing; "middle age" lack of Rome, essentially, with Christianity.
Edward Gibbon, one of the modt important and influential historians of all time, wrote a wonderful, insanely well researched, and very responsible examination of "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire" that saw said decline as the result of, relevant here, a moral decay within Rome.
In popular narrative, the nuances and other factors of Gibbon's story were lost. "Christianity caused the fall of Rome, killed science, and caused the Dark Ages" has become an endemic belief. This is exceptionally well illustrated by the ubiquitous "The Chart".
For the past 100+ years, scholars have been investigating the "decline and fall of the Roman Empire". They have shown a variety of ways in which:
None of this means there was not very real and brutal violence, including sectarian violence carried out by Christians and in the name of Christianity. It means that violence is one part of a complicated story where individual people make all sorts of actions and integrate different aspects of religion for all sorts of reasons.
In other words: it's complicated.
Enter Nixey. Nixey has an axe to grind with three things: (1) fundamentalist religious violence (2) irrational fear of people Different Than Us that essentially turns them into quasi-demons (3) a supposed idea that Christianity made the Roman Empire a kinder, gentler place. Her book repackages the "TIL" version of Gibbon into a highly charged, catchy, very readable, and very of the moment story that religious fundamentalism caused the collapse of Rome and the loss of scientific knowledge.
It's not a new story that scholars have to respond to as historians, with historical evidence--they've been doing that for literal centuries, and will continue to do so. It's an old story rebooted for a modern audience with modern priorities and concerns.
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Original post
This is not precisely "her" argument--it's a glitzy, angry new package for old historiography, including on AH:
These threads don't address this book specifically, or the presentism implicit in Nixey's assumption that Rome strove for "progress" and "improvement" as a civilization, but I think you'll find that its arguments are not original to the field--nor are criticisms thereof.
In point of fact: when the gradual dissolution of the imperial bureaucracy and central governance structure in the west shifted the necessary priorities of the ruling/leisure classes, maintenance of a high literary and rhetorical tradition was a value that likewise disintegrated--people didn't need the skills of the ars rhetorica to wheel and deal in senate-level society anymore. Reading, writing, record-keeping declined among the secular elite class. It was primarily the Church, including educated clerics sought for employment by secular courts, nuns, monks, and the papal administration, that preserved those traditions. (In fact, the medieval Church valued Cicero enough that they falsely attributed to him texts that he didn't write!)
If I might offer a parallel to a different popular examination of history:
Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a wildly popular, eminently readable trip through the violent, deadly, cataclysmic several decades of the fourteenth century in a narrow swathe of France and England. But Tuchman, as she herself says in the preface, isn't just or isn't really writing about the Middle Ages. She calls the book a Mirror not to reflect the medieval tradition of calling behavioral manuals "Mirrors for [group of people]", but because she wants to see in the 14C a reflection of her own era, drenched in the horrors of modern warfare and crisis. (Tuchman is also famous for The Guns of August, her World War I book). She uses medieval evidence, essentially, to interpret the modern era, and winds up with an image through a mirror--but darkly. Nixey similarly repackages long-standing ideas of Christianity at the root of Rome's decline (Augustine was already arguing against this in 400) as a way to write about some concerns of today--religious violence and irrational, overriding fear of a quasi-demonic Other.
If you're interested in reading an entertaining but historically responsible examination of Christian mob violence against pagans in late antiquity, I'd actually recommend Edward J. Watts' "biography of an era" Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Without excusing Christians or Christianity, or whitewashing destruction and violence, Watts shows how the turmoil in Alexandria that led to Hypatia's murder arose from a complicated matrix of social and political upheaval, of which religion became a pathway for expression--instead of an intellectual unifier that people like Hypatia and her students hoped it could be.
I've been reading a Short History of Byzantium by Norwhich, and in the picture he paints the fall of the West is much more due to incompetent emperors and the divide of East and West (itself a consequence of diving the Emperorship up between 2 Augusts and 2 co-augusts, which I'm assuming was due to the sheer size of the empire).
If Christianity was responsible for the depravity and corruption at court, then if anything it was a symptom of the times, not a cause. This is demonstrated by Julian the Apostate, a famous Pagan emperor who believed Constantine's reforms of the Empire's religion were the cause for the decline. He tried with all his might to undo the changes (and is argued by Norwich to have been quite competent), yet he failed to revert the natural progression of the times. Christianity had taken root and was there to stay.
Furthermore, the destruction and sack of Rome was carried out under Alaric, who while himself a christian was a leader of the Visigoths and the defender of migrating tribes (many of them pagans), looking to settle in the Empire, and he was forced to this sack by the incompetent Emperor Honorius (whose only real interest was tending poultry). In fact, Alaric tried to reign in the worst aspects of the sack because of his christian tendencies.
I'm interested in how Nixey claims that monasteries were responsible for destroying classical literature... it was my impression that they were actually the sole force copying these manuscripts and keeping them in tact. Priestly scholar praised Aristotle, though he was a Pagan, as evidenced in Dante's Divine Comedy.
