The Darkening Age: Christianity's Impact on the Decline of the Classical World

Carlos Vivanco Pastore: Vale la pena cada página del libro.

Es una muy buena reseña sobre cómo la humanidad cayó en un abismo de vacío intelectual para iniciar una era conocida cómo la "Edad Media" ("edad oscura") en la que el cristianismo tuvo un papel protagónico.

Muy recomendable.

Spain on Nov 11, 2023

Proflizzie: I loved this book,it has such a different view of a very complex and difficult subject.

United States on Oct 18, 2023

Brian: Really enjoyed this book. Filled with lots of information that I didn't know and presented in a very readable way with great references. Lookikng forward to the author's next one in March.

United States on Oct 09, 2023

William: I think the people putting low starred reviews don’t get the joke. Catherine Nixey writes with the same gusto that Christians do when tearing down pagans and non-believers. Some have said this book is done in a very biased way, but that’s the point. She’s writing as the Christians have done since their inception. Ignoring alternative narratives, picking and choosing facts as it suits them, villianizing others, all without remorse and with an energy only comparable to religious zeal.

United States on Sep 10, 2023

Pflanzenfreund: This book is very nicely written and contains tons of historical, religious and other facts. As a former student of religious sciences I admit that I was gobsmacked by the sheer amount of names, context etc.
I recommend it to everybody who's eager to learn about early christianity, fanatism, church history etc.

The author really describes a darkening age from the heights of the Greek philosophers and polytheist religions to the dark and often enough disgusting depths of religious fanaticism. Some of what happened back then in the olden days seems sadly familiar, all to familiar. Early Christians weren't better than the IS or the Taliban of today, sometimes even worse. The only difference was their lack of modern weaponry.

After reading this book you will see all the televangelists, the manic street preachers and even the pastor from the church round the corner with different eyes.

Trigger warning: This book is nothing for people with a weak stomach. It contains a lot of atrocities, committed by the "religion of love".

Germany on Jul 04, 2023

Alexander L. Belikoff: Let's start with the elephant in the room - I mean, the claims of bias.

Surely, the book is focused on one side of the story but it is very upfront about it and lays its cards on the table from the very beginning. Indeed, we all heard the story of Christianity converting multitudes of people by mere appeal of love and compassion but nothing about force, threats, and fear of death.

We know about monasteries lovingly preserving gems of classical thought but struggle to explain, how it happened that only one percent of Latin literature has been preserved (despite the proliferation of libraries and collections and systematic copying of written word). And when it comes to works that debated or criticized Christianity (which at that time had been a standard philosophical practice for almost thousand years), hardly any have been preserved (we know about them mostly from references in other sources). We adore classical statues collected by generations of Popes in the Vatican Collection but forget that for each preserved statue hundreds of others were purposefully and systematically destroyed.

And this is exactly the side Mrs. Nixey's book is trying to unveil in a more...

United States on Feb 28, 2020

Djilly L.Djilly L.: I am interested to learn more about the spread of Christianity in Europe - not one of the most obvious or popular topics these days. But it is right up my historical alley as I, first of all, got an ever growing interest in classical history. And secondly I am quite fascinated by the early middle ages and so called European ‘dark ages’. So that's why I picked up this book, that I read with growing amazement.

This book is built on an interesting concept that is brought to you with passion, a lot of passion. And therefore it reads very well as it is full of colourful descriptions of events. However it only reads easily as long as you don’t start to question the writers’ narrative and arguments. It is immediately clear that the writer has a strong bias in favour of the pagans, which is reflected throughout the book.
Now, I have a fairly neutral opinion on Christians, and I’m more sceptical about religions in general. And indeed the early Christians weren’t the nicest bunch of people, they forced non-believers to accept their religion and convert or face torture and ultimately execution. This was enforced by spying on communities, even on bishops themselves. Ect...

United Kingdom on Jan 23, 2020

BookwormX: This is my interpretation of this thought-provoking book, in my words. Parentheses enclose my interpretations, which aren't explicitly stated in the book. The author is the daughter of a Catholic priest and nun. The book describes the mostly hidden history of Christianity's attainment of power over the collapsing 4th and 5th century Roman state and its violent destruction of classical polytheism (“paganism”) and most of the structures, art, culture and literature of the classical world of Greece and Rome. The author explains that objective evidence of the violence can be seen on most of the surviving classical statues, which show signs of battering that was done by Christian zealots who were led to believe that each statue contained a pagan demon which could be eliminated by beating it out of the statue with great force; thus, noses, ears, arms, genitals and legs are often missing, and often, only pieces remain of the classical sculptures we see in museums today (the cause of the damage is usually unexplained as Christianity is always the “elephant in the room”). The Christians destroyed most pagan temples or converted them into churches, closed all the libraries, and they...

United States on Jul 21, 2019

sean s.: Catherine Nixey is a journalist at the Times of London. She was trained as a classicist at Cambridge University, and taught classics for several years. The Darkening Age was honoured as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. Nixey writes:

‘For the first hundred-odd years of Christianity’s existence, there are no mentions of Christianity in Roman writings. Then, around the turn of the second century, it started to appear, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, in the writings of non-Christians. Then, about 50 years later, everything changed. Suddenly, in around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture – and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything – from the Creation to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection.
It is equally clear that he loathes it and in arch, sardonic and occasionally very earthy sentences, he vigorously rebuts it. The Virgin Birth? Nonsense, he writes; a Roman soldier had gotten Mary...

Canada on Apr 20, 2019

C. Baily: Palmyra, Syria. A horde of bearded, black-robed zealots comes out of the desert, armed, and fully equipped with the tools of destruction. An onslaught of violence terrorises the inhabitants, before a ‘purifying’ orgy of destruction and desecration is launched against the sacred buildings and images of an earlier civilisation. The newcomers are driven by a narrative of grievance and victimhood, some real, but largely imagined, and lured by a seductive vision of eternal bliss, in exchange for martyrdom. They hold their own lives, and those of others, as equally worthless.
But this is not ISIS, in 2016. It is the Year of Our Lord 385, and the horde is composed of Christian monks (the word has changed its connotations somewhat since). It is half a century since Constantine, for reasons which remain obscure, declared the Roman Empire a Christian state, and 30 years before the events portrayed in Agora, which we watched at a BH meeting a year or so back, which led to the burning of the library of Alexandria along with most of its contents, and the murder and dismemberment of Hypatia, the last director of the school of philosophy in the city, at the hands of a Christian mob under...

United Kingdom on Jul 11, 2018