Our Darkened Age

"I've been through magic and through life's reality

I've lived a thousand years and it never bothered me

I've seen the future and I've left it behind"

 

Black Sabbath - Supernaut

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"demons may have been all but forgotten by modern historians, who tend to pass over demonologies with a silence that speaks eloquently of embarrassment, but such fiends obsessed, perhaps even possessed, some of the greatest minds of early Christianity.

[...]

Another monk was visited in his monastery by a particularly timeless apparition: a middle-ranking government official. The official then grabbed the monk, who started to wrestle him. As the struggle progressed, the monk realized that he was in the presence not of bureaucracy but (the distinction seems to have been a fine one) of pure evil. This, he realized, was a demon."

 

Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age, ch. 2: The Battleground of Demons

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"when you read a lot of ancient criticism of Christianity, it seems strikingly modern, because, I suppose that's a trick of events and of history [...] to see that it's all there right at the beginning, and that there were these, y'know, sophisticated people from a different culture, y'know, a non-Christian, a pre-Christian culture to be making those criticisms is eye-opening"

Andrew Copson interviewing Nixey for Humanists UK

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Historic recurrence has featured... recurrently, just to get the pun out of the way... here over this blog's many years, especially given the striking similarity between the mass manias of our own time and those of the previous turn of the century. And no, it's not because we're being carried on any mystical universal carousel, but because most humans are subhuman, too willfully ignorant and flat-out stupid to contextualize their latest rehashed fads. Religion, in particular, fathoms depths beyond even the reactionary by its mesolithic stagnation. Even nonsensical supernatural fabrications though can be diagnosed according to their degrees of virulence and lethality.

 

The Darkening Age meanders back and forth among such a decline from bad to worse, through Christianity's rise to power in the waning Roman Empire, and its contribution to said waning by vandalism and terror. In case you haven't been keeping up, it's very un-p.c. these days to refer to the Dark Ages as dark ages, because the decline from fumbling Greco-Roman attempts at reason and science into utterly unreasoned primitive superstition was not as absolute as historians of the 18th-19th centuries initially presented. But when even the few early medieval scientific advances were driven by, say, monks' desire to best pinpoint the numerous times of day to kneel and chant at their magic sky-daddy, you can safely point out the main restriction in thought. If the dark ages were a candle or two less dark than once imagined, even a passing glimpse at Roman religious imagination alone can shame those of us born sub crosa at our fabulistic impoverishment. The Darkening Age deals largely with the loss of this cultural, scientific, artistic and humanist wealth, not merely by pagans willingly converting because they've seen the light of dog and abandoning their old statues, as most of us have been raised to believe, but by deliberate destruction and general Christian thuggery.

Nixey's detractors (which could fill quite a few temples and spare) tend to ignore the central question of degrees. Of course belief in the supernatural is only one facet of human irrationalism and the old pantheons certainly had their dark side, but monotheism, by its totalizing proposition of a single absolute source of all good, carries the implicit moral imperative to erase all that is not of the one true god. Good vs. Evil: Fight! was baked into the pre-Christian formula from Zoroaster onward. Nixey's vignettes of late-Roman life do a wonderful job of illustrating the effect of endorsing crass, ignorant malice by absolute supernatural entitlement, and if you think for just a second you can probably picture it from examples of "Christian" values seen on a daily basis even now. Every form of paganism had its idiosyncratic sexual hangups, sure, but under monotheism physical pleasure itself was vilified. Paganism had its notions of blasphemy, of utterances which might offend the divine, but only with monotheism was blasphemy expanded to anything diverging from official doctrine. Pagans did occasionally burn books, but monotheism routinely fabricates the moral imperative to burn all but one book. Ignorance ran rampant through the empire, but the faithful of the new faith made a virtue of it. From the myriad invocations and depictions of monsters and gods glorious, amusing, beautiful, terrible or wondrous, Christianity reduced all culture to mindlessly regurgitating the same rabbi on a cross and the same "virgin" with child in the least imaginative or skillful ways possible... spiced up by pictures of saints best described as nondescript dudebros holding a couple of mundane objects as identifiers. The imagination does not boggle.

Though the author opens her book in a borderline apologetic tone for presenting historical events in narrative form, this necessity becomes apparent when you remember philosophy may be personal, but religion is a tool of social control. Religion manifests in our daily lives not by high-brow dialectics on the metaphysical being/rebeing of the not-being-being there being been, but in the unthinking masses surrounding us, willing to do anything in the name of the assuredly supreme being. What worth is the preacher's talk of peace and wisdom up at his pulpit when in the streets behind him, lurching to his rambling cadence, skitter rank and sanguine the better part of the worst of humanity, unconcerned with such vagaries of self-deception, wanting only the license he provides, knowing only that soon he will lift his hand... and point... and they will kill.

 

Overall though, Nixey's tone throughout the book is not one of moral outrage or even lamenting lamentable losses, but wonder and no small amount of exasperation, perhaps at our continued revisionism of this otherwise mundane sect's forceful rise to power. I'd say we should at least acknowledge our refusal to acknowledge that Christians' common modern manifestation of crass, anti-intellectual petty thugs is by no means incidental to our individual home towns. It has been observed all through their history, at any time the Christians themselves were not in a position to torture their observers to death. They were thus in the time of Pliny the Younger and Hypatia, of Galileo and Darwin, and they will continue to play such roles for the foreseeable future, if not directly then as the masterclass in rabblerousing to which other aspiring charlatans and demagogues pay the homage of imitation.

I've ranted quite often here about the religious bent of modern social movements, from economic creeds to snowflakes' myriad sects of woke-ism: their absolute good/evil dichotomies, their adherents' race to outstrip each other's fervor, their blind belief in the advent of some flavor of paradise/utopia once their arbitrary and impossible demands are finally met, their psalmic chanting of slogans and catchphrases. But religion itself remains the most abundant fountainhead of irrationality. Quite a few modern adherents imagine themselves to be wrestling with demons in human form whenever they meet unbelievers.

 

If the events described in The Darkening Age don't immediately sync up for you with modern fads, if you still doubt that the Christians of yesteryear are still very much the Christians of today, let me point out one of the more amusing recent cults, one so ludicrous I can't but see it as an elaborate practical joke played on its own followers, continually upping the stakes to test the depths of idiocy to which they'll sink. Everything from the deliberate improbability of its claims to its comically monosyllabic slogan approximating "woo-woo" in sound points to the sort of hoax that'll only grow into its humor after a century or so, like the Loch Ness monster. QAnon is among other things a Christian movement, making liberal use of messianic rhetoric, quite literally demonizing its preferred targets and even repurposing the old antisemitic baby-eating blood libel. I'd say the apple didn't fall far from the tree, but these imbeciles' ancestors obviously never visited that side of the primordial garden. If you find yourself exasperated with their antics, you might just find a kindred spirit in Pliny or Celsus.