Tales from the Pagan Resistance
In the days of the Byzantine emperors, long after most of the empire had been converted—forcibly or otherwise—one little Anatolian town held resolute to the Old Ways. Despite repeated warnings to accept baptism or suffer the consequences, the entire community stood firm.
One day imperial forces marched into the city. After the massacre, they sawed the arms and legs off every man, woman, and child, and hung the severed limbs along the streets as a warning.
I regret to inform you that the above story is true. In Catherine Nixey's 2018 The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, you can read similarly grim stories on virtually every page. Be warned: this is no easy read.
I have to be careful reading books about the history of what we really must call the Christianities; reading too many tends to make me morbid. I get angry; I start making stupid and thoughtless generalizations; I fall into an “us and them” mode of thinking that, down the years, I have come to eschew as ultimately counterproductive.
But we are who we are because we remember, so I read on. Many times during the reading of Nixey's engagingly-written, but devastating, history of the horror show that was 4th- and 5th-century Christianity, I've found myself laying the book down because I simply couldn't bear to read any more. Each time, though, I find myself picking up the book once again, needing to know the rest.
Let me quote from Nixey's introduction:
As Samuel Johnson...put it, pithy as ever: “The heathens were easily converted, because they had nothing to give up.”
He was wrong. Many converted happily to Christianity, it is true. But many did not. Many Romans and Greeks did not smile as they saw their religious liberties removed, their books burned, their temples destroyed, and their ancient statues shattered by thugs with hammers. This book tells their story; it is a book that unashamedly mourns the largest destruction of art that human history has ever seen. It is a book about the tragedies behind the “triumph” of Christianity (Nixey xxiv).
I recently read an interview with a former Rodnover—a Russian neo-pagan—who had been converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Though much of the interview focused on Rodnovery itself (as pagans, we tend to forget just how interesting we are), the man talked repeatedly about how much pagans hate Christianity. (Perhaps this was true of the pagans that he knew; it certainly hasn't been my experience.) Though on the face of it this may seem damning, it strikes me, in context, as disingenuously hypocritical. Neither he nor his interlocutor could exactly be mistaken for pagan-lovers. If there's hatred here, there certainly seems to be plenty to go around.
Darkening Age is a harrowing but necessary read. Still, it's no excuse for throwing bricks through stained glass windows. This is history. No one now living has done these terrible things; those now living cannot reasonably be taxed with responsibility for them.
Still, we are the pagans, the people of longest memory. It's our responsibility to know, and we do not forget.
Forgive, possibly. Forget, never.
Catherine Nixey (2018) The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.