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Originally Posted by Richard Meyer
I’m not familiar with Nixey’s book The Darkening Age, and A. M. Juster’s assessment of its faults in both content and writing may be justified.
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They are. Those of us who have actually read Nixey's book and have a detailed knowledge of the relevant period of history (third to sixth centuries AD) find it laughable nonsense and overblown polemic of the worst kind. Unfortunately it keeps getting reviewed by people with no specialist knowledge of the relevant period and defended by people who just like the idea of its biased misrepresentations because they don't like Christianity.
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Whatever the demerits of the book, I do find in Juster’s review a soft-pedaling of the immense destruction and eradication of Greco/Roman culture that was intentionally caused by early Christianity. If Nixey’s book is, as Juster asserts, a fusion of “venomous anti-Cathlolicism” and “today’s more extreme identity politics,” Juster’s review itself smacks of typical Christian apologetics.
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Then feel free to read my critique, which Michael links to both in his review and in this thread. I don't "downplay" the incidences of Christian destruction of pagan art etc, I acknowledge it. But as a rationalist who believes in the accurate depiction of history, I - like Michael- condemn Nixey's inaccurate, distorted and rather hysterical
exaggeration of it. And before anyone tries to smear that as "Christian apologetics", I am an atheist.
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Juster’s critique takes Nixey to task for shoddy historical research, poor-quality writing, and a sophomoric, biased viewpoint; however, while doing so he likewise underplays or glosses over the intentional and systematic obliteration of “the glory that was Greece, /And the grandeur that was Rome” by early Christianity. The Christians did in fact perpetrate a cultural crime of monstrous proportions.
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Sorry, but this is total nonsense. It was not "systematic", there was no "obliteration" and it was not "catastrophic". Words have meanings. This kind of hysterical overstatement is precisely what is wrong with Nixey's silly book. But it's perpetuated by people who don't bother to research the period properly, have no grasp of the details and who get their grasp of it from non--historians, dated polemic and popular culture. Speaking of which ...
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I’ll end this post with a passage from Carl Sagan’s book COSMOS:
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And there's a great illustration of why so many people's grasp of this subject is warped - they treat stuff like this as authoritative and accurate. Sagan was an astronomer. He was not a historian. Worse, Sagan was an astronomer who thought he could dabble in history in that book, largely by reading secondary popular sources of a highly dated kind, and mainly ones which fitted his simplistic understanding of history
and his rather gormless acceptance of the
Conflict Thesis - something actual historians of science had long since rejected even when he was writing in 1980. As a historian, Sagan makes a great astronomer. He should have stuck to science.
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“The last scientist who worked in the Library [of Alexandria] was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy … Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370. … The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. … In the year 415, on her way to work, she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s [Archbishop of Alexandria] parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.”[/i]
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Yes, and here we get the standard Gibbonian myth of Hypatia, the noble martyr for science at the hands of Dark Age religious fanatics. Except this fairy tale is rejected by modern historians. Sagan's bungled account is full of errors of fact. She was not the "last scientist who worked in the Library [of Alexandria]", largely because the Library had ceased to exist long before she was born - its last remnants were destroyed in Diocletian's sack of the city in 295 AD. Sagan is being a little tricksy here, because he seems to know enough about the history to know that the "Great Library" he is referring to here is actually the library of the Serapeum, a daughter library of the original which did indeed survive into the fourth century. Except it almost certainly no longer existed by the time Hypatia was teaching and we have absolutely zero references connecting her with it in any way. I detail the myths and the actual facts about the Great Library and its successors
HERE, because it forms a central part of the hoary Positivist fairy tales that get repeated about this subject, largely thanks to incompetent and biased non-historians like Sagan and Nixey.
Hypatia was certainly a Neoplatonic teacher of renown and thus a mathematician, since mathematics (oddly, to us) played a role in that rather mystical philosophical tradition. So she was an "astronomer" mainly because astronomy was, at this time, a branch of mathematics but also because it served astrological purposes, and astrology was also central to many Neoplatonic ideas. Though Sagan glosses over that. As for her being a "physicist", there is nothing in the information we have about her works to indicate this and Sagan consistently mistakes the highly metaphysical physics of the ancients with the modern empirical discipline, mainly because he keeps simplistically conflating ancient Greek natural philosophy with modern science - he basically doesn't understand the history of western science.
Then we get Gibbon's outraged moral fable about wicked Christians tearing apart the nice scientist because they hate her learning and thus ushering in the "Dark Ages" etc. Except actual modern historians who specialise in this period reject all that as an eighteenth century myth. There is nothing in the sources of the time that suggests that Hypatia was anything but revered for her learning, by both Christians and pagans alike. Several of her most prominent pupils where Christians, as was her political ally the prefect of the city, Orestes. Likewise, nothing in the contemporary sources suggests her learning had anything to do with her assassination.
She was actually killed in a tit-for-tat series of political outbursts of the kind for which Alexandria was renowned. There was a power struggle for political precedence going on in the city between the bishop Cyril and the prefect Orestes, both of whom were Christians and both of whom had large factions of Christians on their side, which isn't surprising given that Alexandria was, by this stage, a majority Christian city. Cyril's supporters, who were mostly from the surrounding countryside, had started a riot in which someone threw a stone at Orestes' head. He had the man arrested and tortured and he died. Outraged, Cyril's faction seized one of Orestes supporters - Hypatia - and killed her in revenge. The fact that she was a scholar (or a pagan, or, for that matter, a woman) had nothing to do with it.
Her murder had nothing at all to do with any Christian suppression of pagan learning - the fact she was a scholar was completely incidental. Nor was her death the precursor to the destruction of "the Great Library", as Sagan's garbled account claims, given the that actual Great Library had long since ceased to exist before her time, as had the Serapeum library. And her death didn't somehow extinguish learning in Alexandria, which continued to flourish until the Muslim conquest, as evidenced by the work of Hierocles, Asclepius of Tralles, Olympiodorus the Younger, Ammonius Hermiae and Hermias in the following century. We even find another female, pagan scholar of renown - Aedisia - working, unmolested by Christian mobs, in the city in the decades after Hypatia's time. Unlike Hypatia, she did not get involved in the vicious politics of the city and stuck to philosophy.
So the story Sagan bungles is a complete fiction, created largely by Gibbon and repeated endlessly, with its heroine being variously a martyr for paganism, science, free thought, feminism or some combination of all of the above. And, of course, it gets given maximum possible spin by Nixey, despite the fact she cites scholarly works on Hypatia (by Maria Dzielka, and more recently, Edward J. Watts) who actually
debunk the fairy tale version of her death. So Nixey knows what she is presenting is crap, but she presents it anyway. And she does that kind of thing repeatedly in her book.
But this subject is riddled with outdated fairy tales. Take this other comment from earlier in this thread:
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Originally Posted by John Isbell
It's also worth remembering the role of Islam, not Christianity, in preserving the Greek Classics, notably Aristotle, over the centuries. This despite what an Arab army famously did to the Library of Alexandria.
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Unfortunately, "what an Arab army famously did to the Library of Alexandria" is another myth. Again the Great Library ceased to exist in the third century and its main daughter library had vanished by the mid fourth century. That famous "Arab army" didn't turn up until 642 AD. So there was no "Library of Alexandria" for it to do anything "famously" to in the seventh century. The later
legend that Caliph Omar ordered his troops to use the Library's books to heat his bath-house comes from centuries later and is so unreliable that even Gibbon rejected it as an obvious fiction.
The role of Muslim scholars in preserving ancient learning and passing lost works back to the western Europe certainly should be acknowledged. But the claim that it was "Islam, not Christianity" that did this makes no sense and displays more ignorance of the subject. Yes, many great works were indeed preserved (and expanded on) by Muslim scholars and so returned to western Europe where they had been lost with the decline in Greek literacy from the third century AD. But where did these Muslim scholars get these texts in the first place? Did they fall from the skies? No, they got them from
other Christian scholars in the east - Byzantine, Coptic and Nestorian - who,
contra Nixey et. al. - had continued to preserve and study them. This "Islam, not Christianity" stuff is another example of history being half-understood, largely due to irrational biases and general ignorance of the details. Which makes comments like this one ironic:
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Originally Posted by Orwn Acra
Juster's review would have been better if he had, like John says, acknowledged that so much of what we consider to be classics of the Western canon are available to us only because Islamic scholars considered it important and worth saving. I think this is essential to note because it throws into question any simple East/West division.
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There are certainly some simple "East/West divisions" going on here, but they don't seem to be in Michael's critique. There is also a lot of simplistic, outdated and just plain wrong pseudo history being peddled, based largely on perceptions from popular culture, not on scholarship. And that never ends well.
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