The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey ISBN 9780544800885, 0544800885 instant download

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey ISBN 9780544800885, 0544800885 instant download

A New York Times **Notable Book of 2018

“Searingly passionate…Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt…[A] ballista-bolt of a book.” —**New York Times Book Review

In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town’s main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city’s greatest temple and razed it—smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.

Today, we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a “triumph.” But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. Just one percent of Latin literature would survive the purge; countless antiquities, artworks, and ancient traditions were lost forever.

As Catherine Nixey reveals, evidence of early Christians’ campaign of terror has been hiding in plain sight: in the palimpsests and shattered statues proudly displayed in churches and museums the world over. In The Darkening Age, Nixey resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.

A New York Times Notable Book, 2018
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Observer, and BBC History Magazine
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Nonfiction

“A searingly passionate book… Nixey writes up a storm. Each sentence is rich, textured, evocative, felt…. Nixey delivers this ballista-bolt of a book with her eyes wide open and in an attempt to bring light as well as heat to the sad story of intellectual monoculture and religious intolerance.”
— New York Times Book Review

"Nixey paints with a wide brush