Published in England last year, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age is likely to be greeted when it is published in the United States in April as Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution was: Rage from the pews, whose occupants know very little about Christian history besides sentimental nonsense — and yawns from bona fide historians, who will note that the book is merely a popularization of things they’ve known all along.
When the Roman church seized control of the western half of the failed Roman empire, it took to heart Augustine’s advice that it is a kindness to remove error from the view of the hoi polloi, lest they be led into temptation and burn forever. Thus began the systematic destruction of the classical world.
“Christianity cheated us out of the fruits of ancient culture, and later it cheated us a second time out of the fruits of Islamic culture.”
Nietzsche, 1889;
The Antichrist, §60
A few well-known examples:
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Epicurus knew that the earth travels around the sun, and that the moon travels around the earth, and had worked-out a theory of evolution. All that remains of Epicurus’ work is a handful of letters, however, and a brief collection of aphorisms found hidden in the Vatican library in the 14th-century. What we know of Epicurus comes chiefly from criticisms of him published by the early church fathers, especially Lactantius, and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (itself suppressed and discovered deep in the recesses of a monastery in southern Germany in the early 1400s).
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Democritus was an accomplished mathematician, believed that all matter was reducible to atoms, and his speculations on early civilization agree closely with modern anthropology.
Democritus was also a pioneer of mathematics and geometry in particular. We only know this through citations of his works (titled On Numbers, On Geometrics, On Tangencies, On Mapping, and On Irrationals) in other writings, since most of Democritus’s body of work did not survive the Middle Ages. Democritus was among the first to observe that a cone or pyramid has one-third the volume of a cylinder or prism respectively with the same base and height.
His work on nature is known through citations of his books on the subjects, On the Nature of Man, On Flesh (two books), On Mind, On the Senses, On Flavors, On Colors, Causes concerned with Seeds and Plants and Fruits, and Causes concerned with Animals (three books). He spent much of his life experimenting with and examining plants and minerals, and wrote at length on many scientific topics. Democritus thought that the first humans lived an anarchic and animal sort of life, going out to forage individually and living off the most palatable herbs and the fruit which grew wild on the trees. They were driven together into societies for fear of wild animals, he said. He believed that these early people had no language, but that they gradually began to articulate their expressions, establishing symbols for every sort of object, and in this manner came to understand each other. He says that the earliest men lived laboriously, having none of the utilities of life; clothing, houses, fire, domestication, and farming were unknown to them. Democritus presents the early period of mankind as one of learning by trial and error, and says that each step slowly led to more discoveries; they took refuge in the caves in winter, stored fruits that could be preserved, and through reason and keenness of mind came to build upon each new idea.
Democritus held that originally the universe was composed of nothing but tiny atoms churning in chaos, until they collided together to form larger units — including the earth and everything on it. He surmised that there are many worlds, some growing, some decaying; some with no sun or moon, some with several. He held that every world has a beginning and an end and that a world could be destroyed by collision with another world.
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Aristotle wrote extensively in both science and ethics, and also became the target of suppression. Happily, a set of his works was carried to Arab scholars early in the 6th-century; his work was unknown in the West for 700-years.
Ethical thought did not begin with Jesus, and science was not born in the Christian academy: they survived Christianity — accidentally.
Imagine a world in which the Classical Era’s gains in science, philosophy, and the arts were not driven nearly off the earth for almost a millennium, and you grasp an appalling fact: the Roman Church secured and maintained its power with an epochal crime against humanity — and the Loony Right, animated by the exact same teachings, means to reprise that crime, today, with its endless attacks on science.