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The darkening age : the Christian destruction of the classical world / Catherine Nixey.

by Nixey, Catherine.

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.

Rome -- Civilization -- Christian influences.

Greece -- Civilization -- Christian influences.

9780544800885 (hc.)

xxxv, 315 p. : ill. (some color), map ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-303) and index.

Prologue: A beginning -- Introduction: An ending -- The invisible army -- The battleground of demons -- Wisdom is foolishness -- "On the small number of martyrs" -- These deranged men -- The most magnificent building in the world -- To despise the temples -- How to destroy a demon -- The reckless ones -- To drink from the cup of devils -- To cleanse the error of demons -- Carpe diem -- They that forsake the way of God -- To obliterate the tyranny of joy -- "Merciful savagery" -- "A time of tyranny and crisis"

Offers a history of the rise of Christianity in the classical world that focuses on its terrible cost, in terms of violence and dogmatic intolerance, that helped bring upon the dark ages.

"A bold new history of the rise of Christianity, showing how its radical followers ravaged vast swathes of classical culture, plunging the world into an era of intellectual darkness. In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town's main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city's greatest temple and razed it--smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria's Great Library. Today, we refer to Christianity's conquest of the West as a triumph. But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus's followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. Just one percent of Latin literature would survive the purge; countless antiquities, artworks, and ancient traditions were lost forever. As Catherine Nixey reveals, evidence of early Christians' campaigns of terror has been hiding in plain sight: in the palimpsests and shattered statues proudly displayed in churches and museums the world over. In The Darkening Age, Nixey resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost."--Dust jacket.

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