The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Nixey Catherine

Author:Nixey, Catherine [Nixey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2018-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

* * *

To Cleanse the Error of Demons

Stay clear of all pagan books!

—Apostolic Constitutions, 1.6.1

IN ALEXANDRIA, TOWARDS THE END of the fifth century, a Christian chronicler named Zachariah of Mytilene entered the house of a man and found that he was “sweating and depressed.” Zachariah instantly knew what was wrong: this man was struggling with demons. Zachariah knew too where these demons were coming from: the man had some documents containing pagan spells in his house. “If you want to get rid of the anxiety,” the man was now told, “burn these papers.” And so he did. He took his works and, in front of Zachariah, set light to them. The encounter concludes with a homily being read to the man who had now been cleansed of his “demons”—not to mention of part of his library.1 As the pious Zachariah makes very clear, he did not consider that he had harmed this man by forcing him to burn his papers. He had not bullied him, or acted cruelly towards him. Quite the reverse: he had saved him.

This was not a unique event. During the years and decades following Constantine’s conversion, in towns and cities across the empire, zealous officials again and again “saved” the souls of the erring from the dangers posed to them by books. Constantine had set the precedent early and emphatically for all of this when he had ordered the works of the heretic Arius to be burned and had condemned to death all who hid the heretic’s books. Works suspected of “heretical” or “magical” practices—whatever those terms meant—went up in smoke in public bonfires.

In Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, bonfires of books blazed and Christian officials looked on in satisfaction. Book-burning was approved of, even recommended, by Church authorities. “Search out the books of the heretics . . . in every place,” advised the fifth-century Syrian bishop Rabbula, and “wherever you can, either bring them to us or burn them in the fire.”2 In Egypt at around the same time, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books.3 The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these “shameful books” should be let go, “because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them.”4

Books had been burned under non-Christian emperors—the controlling Augustus alone had ordered the burning of over two thousand books of prophetic writings, and had exiled the misbehaving poet Ovid—but now it grew in scope and ambition. There is little evidence that Christians intentionally destroyed entire libraries; the damage that Christianity inflicted on books was achieved by subtler—but no less effective—means of censorship, intellectual hostility and pure fear. The existence of a sacred text, it was argued, demanded this. Before, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable.

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