I pointed a few months ago1 toward a (then) soon-to-be-published book by Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age. It was published in the United States in April, and is finally making it into the book review sections of newspapers.
Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and adhering to an ethos of “love thy neighbor,” the early church was in fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. This is a searingly passionate book. Nixey is transparent about the particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of postpagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the scales — as it were — falling from her eyes. She wears her righteous fury on her sleeve. This is scholarship as polemic.
The ancient world knew that the earth travels around the sun, that the moon travels around the earth, that species evolve and come and go, and had given considerable thought to what is ethical behavior.
When the Roman church seized control of the tottering remains of the Roman Empire, it attempted to systematically drive classical science and ethics off the earth — and nearly succeeded. It annoys Medievalists, but there is sound reason why the period between the collapse of Rome, and the beginning of the Renaissance, is known as the Dark Ages. When you reflect upon the Christian hostility today to evolution, and science’s growing understanding of sexuality, it becomes clear that nothing has changed — that today, as almost two millennia ago, religion is the enemy of the growth of knowledge.
How else could it be? All religions claim to possess Eternal Truth, and the progress of knowledge undermines that claim. Faith will always be the enemy of human progress.
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1 The book was published in Great Britain last year, and I ordered my copy from a British bookseller.