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Famous Catherine Nixey Quotes

“In a now-familiar paradox of punishment it was explained again and again that all these physical attacks were a kindness. The Church persecutes, Augustine said, in the spirit of love. Jerome, the biblical scholar and saint, concurred: it was not cruel to defend God’s honour – in the Bible sinners suffer punishments up to and including death. Chrysostom agreed: if he were to punish your earthly body, he reassured his listeners, it was only to protect your eternal one so that ‘you may be saved, and we may rejoice, and God may be glorified now and always, for ever and ever without end. Amen.’ Those receiving such salvation might, not unreasonably, have felt otherwise. One monk in Shenoute’s care was saved with beatings so savage that he died of his injuries. And what if people, disinclined to rejoice, became frightened by the fact that their neighbours were spying on them, reporting on them, hounding them in their homes? Well, fear too had its benefits. Better to be scared than to sin. ‘Where there is terror,’ said Augustine, ‘there is salvation . . . Oh, merciful savagery!’ The intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.”

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Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Once a monk had given himself to his new monastic master he had to obey him – or face the consequences. Numerous rules begin with the formulation ‘Cursed be . . .’. Cursed were those who didn’t give all their wealth to the monastery; cursed were those who shaved without having been ordered to; cursed were those who looked at another monk with desire. If a monk ate, say, the forbidden fruit of cucumber at the wrong time then, the law informed him, ‘he sins’. At least sixty of the rules were devoted to sexual transgressions. Looking desirously at the nakedness of your neighbour while he washed was wrong; as was staring ‘with desirous feeling’ at your own nakedness; those who sat ‘close to one’s neighbour with a filthy desire in their heart’ were also ‘cursed’. Note that last one: ‘with a filthy desire in their heart’. No sin had been committed. The mere intention of sin was now a sin in itself. In Shenoute’s monastery even thoughts were policed. ‘Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him?’ the Lord had asked. The answer from the White Monastery at least was a resounding no. As this new generation of hard-line Christian preachers constantly reminded their congregations in fierce, hectoring speeches, there was nowhere to hide from the all-seeing eyes of the Lord.”

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Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“[W]hat befell the philosophers in AD 529 was not just one single law but a staccato burst of legal aggression issued by Justinian. ‘Your Clemency . . . the Glorious and Indulgent’ Justinian is how laws of this period referred to him. Justinian’s reverence, the legal code of the time announced, shone out ‘as a specially pure light, like that of a star’, while Justinian himself was referred to as ‘Your Holiness’; the ‘Glorious emperor’. There was little glorious or indulgent about what was coming. And there was certainly nothing that was clement. This was the end. The ‘impious and wicked pagans’ were to be allowed to continue in their ‘insane error’ no longer. Anyone who refused salvation in the next life would, from now on, be all but damned in this one. A series of legal hammer blows fell: anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. Anyone who was baptized – but who then continued to sacrifice – they, too, would be executed. The laws went further. This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single, sinful pagan in the empire. The roads to error were being closed, forcefully. Everyone now had to become Christian. Every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’. Those who refused would be stripped of all their property, movable and immovable, lose their civil rights, be left in penury and, ‘in addition’ – as if what had gone before was not punishment but mere preamble, they would be ‘subject to the proper punishment’. If any man did not immediately hurry to the ‘holy churches’ with his family and force them also to be baptized, then he would suffer all of the above – and then he would be exiled. The ‘insane error’ of paganism was to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

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Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Out of all the froth and fury that was being issued from the government at the time, one law would become infamous for the next 1,500 years. Read this law and, in comparison to some of Justinian’s other edicts, it sounds almost underwhelming. Filed under the usual dull bureaucratic subheading, it is now known as ‘Law 1.11.10.2’. ‘Moreover,’ it reads, ‘we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not ‘corrupt the souls of their disciples.’ The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it. Its consequences were formidable. This was this law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.”

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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.”

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Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Many Romans didn’t like the Christians. They found their reclusive behaviour offensive; their teachings foolish; their fervour irritating and their refusal to sacrifice to the emperor insulting. But for the first 250 years after the birth of Christ, the imperial policy towards them was first to ignore them and then to declare that they must not be hounded. In the encounter between the Christians and the Romans it is the former who are almost without fail remembered as the oppressed and the latter as the oppressors. Yet, apart from Nero, it was almost two and a half centuries before emperors became involved in prosecutions of Christians – and even then, as we have seen, these prosecutions were brief. This was a grace and liberty that the Christians would decline to show to other religions when they finally gained control. A little over ten years after the newly Christian Constantine took power, it is said that laws began to be passed restricting ‘the pollutions of idolatry’. During Constantine’s own reign it seems to have been decreed that ‘no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practise divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all’. Less than fifty years after Constantine, the death penalty was announced for any who dared to sacrifice. A little over a century later, in AD 423, the Christian government announced that any pagans who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently – and ominously: ‘We now believe that there are none.”

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