> You should check out "The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey.
Please do not waste your time:
> Her publisher’s blurb informs us that Nixey’s book tells “the largely unknown – and deeply shocking – story” of how a militant Christianity “extinguished the teachings of the Classical world” and was “violent, ruthless and intolerant” in an orgy of destruction and oppression that was “an annihilation”. On the other hand, no less an authority than the esteemed historian of Late Antiquity, Dame Averil Cameron, calls Nixey’s book “a travesty”, roundly condemning it as “overstated and unbalanced”. And Dame Averil is correct – this is a book of biased polemic masquerading as historical analysis and easily the worst book I have read in years.
> For basic facts that Nixey lies about—she states that Aristotle was erased by Christian monks. Clearly, she has no knowledge of how Aristotle was incorporated into Catholic thinking from the first centuries of the church, visibly in St. Gregory’s Pastoral Rule (or the fact that it was monks in France who preserved copies of Aristotle in the Latin West long before he was “reintroduced” by Muslims either). […]
> Nixey also cherry picks her facts concerning supposed Christian iconoclasm and militancy. It was the Roman military, rather than Christian mobs, who were responsible for the destruction of the library at Antioch which Nixey paints as evidence of Christian iconoclastic and anti-intellectual mob violence. The Roman military was also one of the last institutions in the post-Constantinian settlement that was Christianized. […]
> Likewise, Nixey’s claim that Latin literature and literacy collapsed after the Christianization of the Roman Empire is the most egregious of cherry-picked examples. Barbarization and the internal moral decline of Roman society on its own accord were the more guilty culprits—especially considering the Gothic and Frankish tribes that settled into an already decadent Roman Empire didn’t speak Latin, didn’t write, and didn’t produce the same litany of great works preserved by Christianity that were already in decline by the 2nd century A.D. long before the rise of Christianity. […]
Please do not waste your time:
> Her publisher’s blurb informs us that Nixey’s book tells “the largely unknown – and deeply shocking – story” of how a militant Christianity “extinguished the teachings of the Classical world” and was “violent, ruthless and intolerant” in an orgy of destruction and oppression that was “an annihilation”. On the other hand, no less an authority than the esteemed historian of Late Antiquity, Dame Averil Cameron, calls Nixey’s book “a travesty”, roundly condemning it as “overstated and unbalanced”. And Dame Averil is correct – this is a book of biased polemic masquerading as historical analysis and easily the worst book I have read in years.
* https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixe...
It is all sorts of wrong on various topics:
> For basic facts that Nixey lies about—she states that Aristotle was erased by Christian monks. Clearly, she has no knowledge of how Aristotle was incorporated into Catholic thinking from the first centuries of the church, visibly in St. Gregory’s Pastoral Rule (or the fact that it was monks in France who preserved copies of Aristotle in the Latin West long before he was “reintroduced” by Muslims either). […]
> Nixey also cherry picks her facts concerning supposed Christian iconoclasm and militancy. It was the Roman military, rather than Christian mobs, who were responsible for the destruction of the library at Antioch which Nixey paints as evidence of Christian iconoclastic and anti-intellectual mob violence. The Roman military was also one of the last institutions in the post-Constantinian settlement that was Christianized. […]
> Likewise, Nixey’s claim that Latin literature and literacy collapsed after the Christianization of the Roman Empire is the most egregious of cherry-picked examples. Barbarization and the internal moral decline of Roman society on its own accord were the more guilty culprits—especially considering the Gothic and Frankish tribes that settled into an already decadent Roman Empire didn’t speak Latin, didn’t write, and didn’t produce the same litany of great works preserved by Christianity that were already in decline by the 2nd century A.D. long before the rise of Christianity. […]
* https://minervawisdom.com/2019/03/04/edward-gibbons-daughter...