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“The philosophy they had lived for starts to die itself. Some strands of ancient philosophy live on, preserved by the hands of some Christian philosophers – but it is not the same. Works that have to agree with the pre-ordained doctrines of a church are theology, not philosophy. Free philosophy has gone. The great destruction of classical texts gathers pace. The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. 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. Centuries later, an Arab traveller would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum,’ he wrote – meaning the Roman and Byzantine Empire – ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum; this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced.”

PhilosophyChristianityKnowledgeLearningIgnoranceDestructionTheologyMonotheismAtomism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“For St Paul and other Christian preachers, the body and its urges were not to be celebrated but smothered. In tortuous and embarrassed circumlocutions, Paul raged at ‘this body of death’. The rewards of a virgin in heaven were said to be sixty times greater. Christian writers in this period recorded the stirrings of their sexuality with great distaste – perhaps none more influentially than Augustine. Sex was, he felt, permissible if children resulted from the union but even then the action itself was lustful, evil and ‘bestial’, while erections were ‘unseemly’. The West would reap a bitter harvest of sexual shame from the disgusted writings of these two men. In the earliest days of the religion, some Christians went further, arguing that there was no need for sex any more at all. A new form of creation, in the form of a great conflagration and rebirth of the godly, was imminent. What need for awkward, messy, inexact human reproduction? Eternal life rendered reproduction redundant.”

SexChristianityIgnoranceShameAfterlifeRepressionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“As the modern scholar Alan Cameron has put it: ‘In 529 the philosophers of Athens were threatened with the destruction of their entire way of life.’ The Christians were behind this – yet you will search almost in vain for the word ‘Christian’ in most of the writings of the philosophers. That is not to say that evidence of them is not there. It is. The miasmatic presence of the religion is keenly felt on countless pages: it is Christians who are driving persecutions, torturing their colleagues, pushing philosophers into exile. Damascius and his fellow scholars loathed the religion and its uncompromising leaders. Even Damascius’s famously mild and gentle teacher, Isidore, ‘found them absolutely repulsive’; he considered them ‘irreparably polluted, and nothing whatever could constrain him to accept their company’. But the actual word Christian is missing. As if the very syllables were too distasteful for them to pronounce, the philosophers resorted to elaborate circumlocutions. At times, the names they gave them were muted. With a masterful understatement, the present system of Christian rule, with its torture, murder and persecution, was referred to as ‘the present situation’ or ‘the prevailing circumstances’. At another time the Christians became – perhaps a reference to those stolen and desecrated statues – ‘the people who move the immovable’. At other times the names were blunter: the Christians were ‘the vultures’ or, more simply still, ‘the tyrant’. Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as ‘the Giants’ and the ‘Cyclops’. These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the man-eating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men – they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite – and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: ‘There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.”

ChristianityIgnoranceCivilizationDestructionPunishmentTyrannyRepressionBarbarismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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