Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Catherine Nixey

Quote by Catherine Nixey

“Many treated his sudden conversion to Christianity with profound suspicion and more than a little distaste. This man of ‘evil disposition’ and ‘vicious inclinations’ had converted, wrote one non-Christian historian, not because of any burning heavenly crosses but because, having recently murdered his wife (he had – allegedly – boiled her in a bath because of a suspected affair with his son), he had been overcome by guilt. Yet the priests of the old gods were intransigent: Constantine was far too polluted, they said, to be purified of these crimes. No rites could cleanse him. At this moment of personal crisis Constantine happened to fall into conversation with a man who assured him that ‘the Christian doctrine would teach him how to cleanse himself from all his offences, and that they who received it were immediately absolved from all their sins’. Constantine, it was said, instantly believed.”

Quote by Catherine Nixey

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

Work

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Catherine Nixey

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Catherine Nixey. more

You May Also Like

“Today, in a world in which the very word ‘classical’ hints at something revered to the point of dullness, it is hard to understand quite how alarming many of these works were to the Christians. But to Christian eyes the classical canon had the power to horrify. It was replete with sins of every kind. Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite – and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that ‘the power of the gods is perishing’. Even works by the most stuffily august of authors were not without danger: open a work by the tediously virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm. Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder, vanity – every sin was there. That was what made them so enjoyable and, to the Christians, so damnable.”

SinChristianityRepressionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Create image

“Carpe diem, Horace had said. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be dead for eternity. The monks offered an alternative to this view: die today and you might live for eternity. This was a life lived in terror of its end. ‘Always keep your death in mind,’ was a common piece of advice: do not forget the eternal judgement. When one brother started to laugh during a meal, he was immediately reproached by a fellow monk: ‘What does this brother have in his heart, that he should laugh, when he ought to weep?’ How should one live well in this new and austere world? By constantly accusing yourself, said another monk, by ‘constantly reproaching myself to myself.’ Sit in your cell all day, advised another, weeping for your sins.”

SinChristianityEternityMonotheismEternal Judgement
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Create image

“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.”

SinChristianityPunishmentCurseMonotheismThought Crimes
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Create image

“Values are no longer the premise by which we shape our lives. Rather, they have become the pitifully abhorrent and wholly illegitimate obstacle to our desires. We have labeled them as some dusty set of antiquated ideals. These ideals served a generation that lived out its days in the backwaters of an ignorance fed comatose by intellectual stupor. Therefore, their value rests only in their removal so that hitherto unexplored horizons can be freely ascended. The problem is that we have yet to discern a horizon from a cliff.”

GodChristianValuesJesusSinPrinciplesEthicsGreedMoralsEntitlement
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
Create image