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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Category Archives: Book Review

India and the Bomb

01 Mon Oct 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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China, India, nuclear, Pakistan, United States

Harsh PantPant, Harsh, Yogesh Joshi. Indian Nuclear Policy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018. 193 pp.

They are indeed murky waters in which the contours of Indian nuclear (weapons) policy lie, yet the field of research is fast becoming a tiny cottage industry of its own as more and more scholars are turning their attention to India’s quest to militarise the atom. In a unique trajectory of development, India is perhaps the only country to develop nuclear weapons from what was initially an energy programme and also the only country to have a long and public debate over the matter; even more astonishingly, the military had little to no say in India’s nuclear decision-making.

Harsh Pant and Yogesh Joshi have addressed this complex thread in the history of modern India in the pithily titled Indian Nuclear Policy, an impressively succinct introduction to the subject. The authors lay out the basic framework of the argument with the help of four causal variables – status, security, domestic politics, and the role of individuals – and proceed to expand on each into the book. This is a clever organisation that allows neophytes to quickly grasp the salient features of the narrative.

The four causal variables mentioned are not unique to India – they influence the actions of all powers, the varying degrees and different manners of which are the hotly contested among scholars. Debates also focus on how some of these terms are to be interpreted – status, for example, may imply to realists something intangible and therefore an indication that the nuclear programme is not serious. These scholars do not deny that the conquest of the technical difficulties in assembling a nuclear device is difficult and therefore accrues status but this is seen as a byproduct rather than a motivator.

Indian Nuclear Policy emphasises a layer of nuance that is often overlooked or forgotten in discussions of security – although the motivation for the peaceful nuclear explosion at Pokhran in 1974 was most certainly China, the journey down the path to nuclearisation was in response to the threat from Pakistan. This periodisation provides a worthy explanation as to why the Indian nuclear establishment remained inert for 24 years after its first test rather than weaponise and perfect its nuclear arsenal, although economic factors certainly do contribute to the picture.

Domestic politics is a critical input in any policy formulation, particularly in democracies with a relatively free press. Indian Nuclear Policy highlights the pertinent trends in the Indian public sphere that influenced the thinking about nuclear policy such as India’s principled stance against nuclear weapons, its idealist vision of international relations, and its vaunted non-alignment. In addition, bureaucratic differences of opinion between various ministries such as Defence and Finance, for example, added to the hubbub on domestic bickering.

It is presently not popular to credit individuals with much influence over the affairs of states but Pant and Joshi buck this trend, it is heartening to see. Despite the fairly public nature of Indian nuclear decision-making, actual power resided in the hands of very few individuals and everything, from information to construction, was tightly controlled. It is not implausible then, that the prime minister and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission commanded greater influence in the country’s atomic quest.

For a short introduction, as Oxford University Press advertises the book, Pant and Joshi have produced an excellent manuscript that narrates the history of India’s nuclear efforts from independence until the five nuclear tests of 1998. The brevity of the final product should not deceive the reader into thinking that the argument has not been sufficiently researched – indeed, as the bibliography reveals, prodigious use of primary source material at the National Archives of India and the document collection at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library have been made. The secondary material also spans the major works in the field.

In thinking beyond the scope of this particular text, a provocative thought experiment would be to challenge the hagiographic coverage India’s leaders have usually received at the hands of academics. There is some merit to the argument that the moralist and “preachy” complexion of Indian foreign policy did little more than annoy the Great Powers with little for Delhi to show for it in return. In a costly error, India timed itself out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty; nor could Delhi secure the desired security guarantees from the United States and the Soviet Union against nuclear blackmail. India’s efforts at the United Nations were also for naught. India’s weak economy and military simply did not give its idealism the political heft required to influence world affairs. In retrospect, a pertinent observation from Henry Kissinger comes to mind: moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

While one might not be able to guess from Indian Nuclear Policy, there is still plenty that is not known about decision-making in Delhi. The Indian government seems to have an aversion to transparency, easy access, documentation, and declassification; it has been suggested by some retired bureaucrats that paranoia in the top echelons of the political class meant that notes were sometimes not kept on crucial meetings relating to Indian nuclear security. Pant and Joshi do a fabulous job of weaving together a coherent narrative from the material available but some of the several debates that remain unresolved could perhaps be quelled with further release of information.

Given Oxford’s stated objective, Indian Nuclear Policy is an essential quick guide to the history of Indian nuclear weapons policy for rookies. By cutting through the details of India’s energy programme and maintaining focus on the weapons themselves rather than strategy, Pant and Joshi do yeoman service to the public who are mildly curious about how, when, and why India acquired nuclear weapons.

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Nationalism Restored

01 Sat Sep 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

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Aristotle, Catholicism, Christianity, clan, family, halakha, imperialism, Islam, Judaism, liberalism, loyalty, Marxism, milkhemet hareshut, milkhemet mitzva, nationalism, Protestantism, The Virtue of Nationalism, tribe, Yoram Hazony

Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 304 pp.

Ever since the cultural turn in academia in the early 1970s, it has become de rigueur to disparage nationalism as a volatile and dangerous sentiment susceptible to extreme violence and prejudice. Nationalism was cast as an imagined community with the implication that it was a simulacrum whose substance came wholly from fabricated myths, rituals, and symbols. In this echo chamber, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism comes as a rare and welcome breath of fresh air that revives the idea and places it in context with other alternatives that have been offered over the ages.

Hazony looks to the Bible, specifically Devarim, to find his definition of nationalism. The scriptures actively promote the feeling of brotherhood among all members of the Jewish nation and Mosaic law would serve as their constitution; the king of the Jewish state, its priests, and prophets would all be drawn from among the brotherhood and each would have a role in preserving the traditions, customs, and laws of the community. Geographically, the boundaries of Israel are set by Moses as he expressly forbids the expansion of the nation-state into the neighbouring lands of Esau, Moav, Lot, and Ammon.

The ambitions of nationalism are clearly limited and not inherently expansionist or committed to world domination as critics are prone to hyperventilate. Hazony does not deny that there has been great violence in the past in the name of nationalism but that is also true of any other theory of mass organisation, ethics, and governance. This is an interesting proposition put forth by the author, that nationalism is not merely a feeling of cultural connectedness between people who do not know each other but properly seen, it also includes a system of ethics.

According to Hazony, the roots of nationalism are to be found in the structure of the family – individuals are biologically related in a family and share a sense of rights and duties, blood and belonging, vis-a-vis one another; the prosperity of one member is the success of them all. As families band together into clans, clans into tribes, and tribes into nations to provide better security and accomplish greater tasks, the loyalty commanded by the heads is transferred upwards towards common characteristics the members share, such as language, faith, or ethnicity.

Using the family as a model of organisation for the state is certainly not peculiar to the Bible – similar notions are found as far apart as China and Greece. Confucius clings to the metaphor a little too closely with the result that the ideal Chinese state tends towards authoritarianism; Aristotle sees the polis – state – as the full flowering of the family life but does not carry the analogy too far as he recognises that there is a difference in the nature of power within states and families, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.

The Virtue of Nationalism juxtaposes a localised nationalism with universalist ideologies such as imperialism, Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism. Nations are inherently anti-imperial and therefore more stable, the argument runs, because its members are connected to each other through bonds not mediated by institutions of state. Nations are particular to geography, language, faith, ethnicity, or some other criterion that defines the community whereas the universalist aspirations of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Liberalism fall to the temptation of conquest and subjugation of the entire world to the one “true” doctrine of choice.

Hazony’s depiction of nationalism as limited may be true in the Jewish tradition but it has had a very different history in Europe and Asia, at least. Halakha distinguishes between milkhemet mitzva – war of obligation – and milkhemet hareshut – optional war. In the first category fall, for example, the wars of Joshua against the seven nations while David’s campaigns of expansion come under the latter classification. In fact, G-d prohibits David from building the Temple because he was “a man of battles and [had] shed blood.”

It is also problematic to portray imperialism as a universalist principle. Although imperialists have no bounds to their geographic ambitions, it is usually also true that the imperial quest is usually carried out in the name of a nation; the various nations that fall to a growing empire are neither treated nor seen as equals. We see this again and again from the Roman Empire to the pink-tainted map of British expansion. Rome expanded its citizen base only in the latter years to stave off a fiscal crisis brought on by decades of decadent emperors but ties by birth or marriage to the Italian peninsula and preferably Rome were favourable traits to possess well into the second century. Similarly, London scoffed at Mohandas Gandhi’s idea that Britain welcome all inhabitants of its dominions as equal citizens of their empire. Hazony accepts this at one point, but not before an unnecessary discourse on the universalist instincts of imperialism.

The difficulty of sustaining nations on abstractions such as liberalism stems from the inability to justify loyalty to the principle. The likelihood of changing our minds as we experience life and are exposed to more information means that any belonging to an ideal remains unstable at best. Hazony takes help from psychology to make the case that humans are social animals who have a need to belong to networks and believe in something greater than than the mere material of life. Here, he brings up a word not often seen in nationalism studies these days – loyalty – which is the crux of the debate. It is not easy, if at all possible, to have loyalty to an idea in the same manner one feels ties to a sibling or parent.

Hazony reworks several historical events to lend support to his hypothesis, in many cases problematically. For example, rather than see the Thirty Years’ War from the traditional perspective of a conflagration between Protestants and Catholics, Hazony casts it as being primarily motivated by universalist impulses against local inclinations. While most historians would agree that the religious element ceased to animate the conflict as the years passed, the war remained an old-fashioned struggle for geopolitical dominance between France and the Habsburgs.

Perhaps the most jarring incongruity in The Virtue of Nationalism is how the second Christian schism is repackaged as a contest between universalism and particularism. At a certain level, it is undeniable that Catholic allegiance to their Pope made way for dual loyalties. However, it is hardly the case that Protestantism was a particularist creed any more than Christianity a sub-sect of Judaism. While the theological reorganisation gave monarchs their independence from Rome, the faith itself still believed it possessed a universal message. The recent Evangelical movement has strongly underscored this conviction.

The largest empire in the modern era was put together by Britain and it was Prussian militarism that sank Europe into the first of its cataclysmic convulsions of the 20th century. The United States began its expansionist project with Manifest Destiny and then eyed territories beyond; none of these countries were Catholic. What is disappointing is that these ill-considered examples are unnecessary and distract from Hazony’s already persuasive defence of nationalism.

These weak digressions may conceal the real import of The Virtue of Nationalism, which is an assault on the cult of the solitary individual. Hazony traces the roots of this ideology to at least one of its origins, John Locke. Hazony finds the English philosopher’s initial assumption that all people are rational and his utilitarian methodology in assessing rationality flawed. Contrary to Locke, Hazony argues that the fundamental unit of existence is not the individual or even the family but the community. Our ethics arise from our communal interactions as does our sense of self; in turn, these inform all our other beliefs and relations, such as liberty or nationalism.

This is at the root of the conservative world view, that the community and family are prior to the individual. Ever since the early Liberals recast society as a collective of individuals, the idea has taken hold and grown to a point where it is not even questioned any more. The few who reject this modern normal have usually done so on theological grounds and have been easy to ignore in an increasingly profane world. By reviving a classical framework, The Virtue of Nationalism fires a broadside at not just the critics of nationalism but the entire Liberal project. Not only are the dangers of a universalist mindset compared against nationalism and found to be as dangerous if not worse, but individual liberty is argued to be mere license if not exercised within the bounds of community and morality. Thus, this is as much a work of political philosophy as it is about nationalism.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not pay much heed to the silly distinction between patriotism and nationalism – Vidura counters this best in the Udyoga Parva in India’s treasured epic, the Mahabharata, when he says, “[t]hose prone to get drunk get drunk on knowledge, wealth, and good birth; but the same are triumphs of the strict.”

The Virtue of Nationalism is a short book and not written in a solemn academic tone despite boasting an impressive bibliography. Hazony would do well to realise, however, that his understanding of nationalism is peculiar to Judaism and not characteristic of all politico-cultural movements. The inadvertent contradistinction, however, should be most interesting to scholars of nationalism. Readers should beware that the chatty affectation of the book belies a profound sociopolitical weltanshauung and a powerful critique of Liberalism in all its guises. There may be some historical quibbles but they do not, oddly, take away from the overall argument and to narrowly focus on those would be to miss the forest for the trees. In an era of Liberal activist academia, Hazony’s efforts to take us back to first principles and rethink our implicit assumptions is a welcome intellectual challenge.

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The Death of Civilisation

14 Thu Jun 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Catherine Nixey, Celsus, Chi-Ro, Christianity, conquirendi non sunt, Constantine, Cyril, Eusebius, George Bernard Shaw, Hypatia, ISIS, jihad, liberalism, Maxentius, Milvian Bridge, Origen, pagan, Pliny the Elder, pluralism, secularism, Silvio Ferrari, St Augustine, St Basil, St Benedict, St John Chrysostom, St Marcellus, St Martin, Tertullian, The Darkening Age, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, Trajan

Darkening AgeNixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 2017. 352 pp.

“The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra’s Temple of Athena must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots…had been terrorising the region. Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective.” Utter destruction followed in their wake. “Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues that had stood for half a millennium had their faces mutilated in a moment; temples that had seen the rise of the Roman Empire fell in a single day. This was violent work, but it was by no means solemn. The zealots roared with laughter as they smashed the ‘evil, ‘idolatrous’ statues; the faithful jeered as they tore down temples, stripped roofs and defaced tombs. Chants appeared, immortalizing these glorious moments.”

“When the men entered the temple they took a weapon and smashed the back of Athena’s head with a single blow so hard that it decapitated the goddess. The head fell to the floor, slicing off that nose, crushing the once-smooth cheeks. Athena’s eyes, untouched, looked out over a now-disfigured face. Mere decapitation wasn’t enough. More blows fell, scalping Athena, striking the helmet from the goddess’s head, smashing it into pieces. Further blows followed. The statue fell from its pedestal, then the arms and shoulders were chopped off. The body was left on its front in the dirt; the nearby altar was sliced off just above its base… On the floor, the head of Athena slowly started to be covered by the sands of the Syrian desert.”

You might be thinking that I am describing ISIS’ destruction of classical era structures in Syria in February 2017 but you would be mistaken. This was the destruction wrought by Christians in circa 385. For over half a millennium since the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and the Edict of Milan in 312, Christianity aggressively destroyed all signs of paganism as it spread across Europe. Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World does not quite chronicle the tragedy – that would be too long a book – but gives an excellent glimpse into the tumultuous years of Late Antiquity and the savage birth of Christian Europe.

The Darkening Age jumps back and forth as it weaves its narrative – with each chapter and theme, the historical era is begun afresh. After a historical overview of Late Antiquity, Nixey elaborates on the brutal influence of Christianity on the law, the fine arts, and religion. In doing so, she dispels several powerful myths in the Christian tradition that have survived for centuries and are now cemented in the mainstream historical memory. In doing so, the reputations of several Church leaders are severely tarnished – by 21st century sensitivities, we might call them terrorists and mass murderers. Yet Nixey is too good a scholar to allow such crude, ahistorical judgments to creep in. Instead, she lets the values and mores of the era serve as a template and allows contemporaries of these Christian saints and martyrs evaluate their vandalism and philosophy – or lack thereof.

The rise of Christianity spelled not just the death of pluralism and tolerance around the Mediterranean but also a fundamental reworking of epistemic categories. Before the ascendance of Christianity, despite the long presence of Judaism, few people considered religion to be a marker of identity. The fluidity of primary religions maintained an easy permeability between the various sects and the state did not care to interfere as long as these cults did not upset the law and order. It was Christianity that introduced a rigidity that plagues the world to this day – Christians were correct, and others were not just wrong but sick, insane, evil, damned, disgusting, and inferior.

The new cult observed its difference aggressively: in a letter to one of his faithful, Augustine advised the man that even if a Christian is starving and on the point of death, food that had been contaminated by pagan sacrifice was to be rejected with fortitude. In a pattern that is now all too familiar to those who have observed the effects of exclusivist monotheism on societies, Christians first held themselves apart and then assaulted others.

For a faction with a humble founder, Christians saw themselves as soldiers in an army (of Christ) and applied the word “pagan” – which had originally meant civilian – to the pluralistic religions of the region. To these militants, allowing someone to remain outside the Christian faith was not to show tolerance but to damn them. As Augustine railed, to allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.

Constantine saw the sign of the cross in October 312, and his soldiers, their shields painted with Chi-Ro, defeated Maxentius shortly. One of the new emperor’s first edicts was to give Christianity official recognition as equal to the faiths of Rome. It would prove to be a tipping point in world history: in less than a century, Christianity would ruthlessly root out Rome’s indigenous religions and destroy its temples, libraries, and customs. Before Constantine had come to power, Rome had 28 public libraries and many private ones; by the end of the 4th century, there were none.

In 325, a law was passed to restrict the “pollutions of idolatry” and December 25, until then celebrated the birth of the Mesopotamian god of shepherds, Dumuzid, became the birthday of Jesus. Similarly, other pagan rituals and festivals were either banned or usurped. In 341, Constantine’s son, Constantius, banned sacrifices; by 356, it had become illegal – on pain of death – to worship images. A law passed in 388 forbade any discussion of religion in public, and in 399, pagan temples were all ordered to be torn down.

A law in 407 banned the old merry ceremonies and in 529, the year the Academy finally closed its doors, the Christian State decreed that “every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’. ‘We forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not ‘corrupt the souls of their disciples.’”

Although it was Constantine himself who first and publicly moved against the pagan temples, it was not just the new Christian state that perpetrated this cultural genocide – Christian mobs went about in an orgy of vandalism. Moreover, the men leading these campaigns of violence were not the over-zealous fringe elements of a new faith. St Benedict, St Martin, St John Chrysostom, St Marcellus – these were figures at the very heart of the Church.

The statues in the public parks and temples were the first to go; the beautiful statue of Athena at the Acropolis, for example, was mutilated, beheaded, and finally placed face down in the courtyard to be trampled upon by Christians for eternity. It was clearly not enough to pull down a statue: the tradition it represented had to be humiliated, disgraced, and tortured. The destruction did not stop at public property. Christian mobs began to enter houses to remove any signs of pagan culture from them which, when found, would be publicly burned. As Nixey insightfully comments, today, the destruction of Michelangelo’s Pietà would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism – but it wouldn’t be sacrilege because Christians do not hold the statue to be sacred. Statues in pagan temples, on the other hand, were.

It is not that there were no contemporary critiques of Christianity, and many modern ones echo the same objections. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? many wondered. If so, then who is wrong – Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus, had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses? Celsus, for example, found the new cult stupid, pernicious and vulgar; he worried that it would spread and bring ruin to Rome. Pliny the Elder described Christianity as nothing more than a “degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.” What the philosophers could not understand is how anyone could revel in their own ignorance. “Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good,” taught Corinthians. Critics’ arguments were usually replied with clubs, quietly at first and then more boldly after Constantine.

Priests were frequently attacked and beaten. Christians took to throwing a concoction of caustic lime powder and vinegar – the earliest acid attacks – into the eyes of unsuspecting prominent pagans in the marketplace, thereby blinding them. Judges who dared to uphold the law against Christians were also beaten and killed. So severe was the Christian reign of terror that even the very Christian emperor, Theodosius, had to quietly admit that his monks commit many crimes. The Church, however, defended these acts, comparing them to a gangrene that had to be cut away or cauterised, advising people to turn a deaf ear, like surgeons, to the cries, out of compassion.

People watched in stunned inaction as the culture which they had followed for over a thousand years was dismantled. The Empire suffered far more at the hands of Christians than it did in all the waves of barbarian invasions. Libraries closed, books were severely censored or burned, and the entire edifice of academia was suspect. As Tertullian was fond of saying, What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”” implying that Christians did not need philosophy because they had God. Philosophy went from having different schools of thought to having the wrong view and the correct, Christian view.

Literature suffered similarly – works that praised the old gods or were considered too prurient were destroyed. What little survived was because the iota of civilisation in some of the Church leaders won out and a few works were imaginatively reinterpreted in service of Christ rather than burned. Even then, translations were deliberately timid and their authority accrued the weight of the ages – some poems had to wait until the late 20th century to be accurately translated! It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.

In an attempt to divert attention from their own crimes and justify their actions, Christians have also claimed victimhood at the hands of Romans. Nixey demolishes these claims, arguing that of the three waves of repression in which Christians found themselves caught, not one was directed exclusively at Christians. “we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity,” Nixey claims. “There were simply not that many years of imperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen – in three whole centuries of Roman rule.” Furthermore, The Darkening Age delves into contemporary sources to argue that Rome’s only problem with Christianity was one of law and order. Many of the Christians who found themselves afoul of the law were actively seeking martyrdom rather than being oppressed for their faith.

Again reminiscent of jihadists, tempting celestial terms were offered to martyrs: scripture was supposed to have promised them “multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes.” The emperor Trajan explicitly ordered, conquirendi non sunt – these people must not be hunted out. When Emperor Julian refused to execute Christians for their crimes, he was begrudged by the Church for denying Christian ‘combatants’ martyrdom! Even Origen had to admit, the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable and Christians had died for their faith only occasionally. George Bernard Shaw is said to have acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability! As the author remarks, Rome clearly did not wish to exterminate Christianity; if it did, it would have succeeded without much effort.

Rome wanted obedience, not martyrs. Nixey cites several documents in which Romans are shown pleading with Christians to make just the token gesture to escape punishment. In one tale a Roman prefect named Probus asks the Christian on trial before him no fewer than nine times to even lie to escape execution; the prefect begs the Christian to think of his weeping family, to spare himself pain, to go free. Such grace and liberalism would never be on offer to pagans in Christian courts barely a century later.

Of particular importance in The Darkening Age is Nixey’s argument that the establishment of Christianity in all spheres of Western existence is so complete that Western views cannot help but be biased without even the realisation. For over a millennium and a half, theologians and scholars packaged and repackaged Christian values, smoothing its edges each time, that the Church could eventually speak in a secular accent. Silvio Ferrari, of the University of Milan, has argued that the modern secular state owes its origins to Christianity and is not culturally neutral but rather draws inspiration from Christian theology; Ferrari even warns against its transplantation to cultures with different intellectual development.

The whitewashing of Christianity’s cultural genocide is particularly noticeable in academia. Historians, for example, have recently discarded the term, ‘Dark Ages’ to describe the centuries immediately after the fall of Rome. They argue that there was much development going on if not necessarily of a grand nature. Christopher de Hamel has even gone on to suggest that under pressure from barbarian attack, Rome ‘saved its identity by reinventing itself as a Christian empire’! In what one only hopes was a misjudged sense of humour, the 1965 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints remarks with amusement that Martin of Tours ‘was not averse to the forcible destruction of heathen shrines.’

As Nixey points out, modern histories rarely describe Christian acts violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely zealous, pious, or enthusiastic. John Pollini, from the University of Southern California, agrees that “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”

But these are not just 20th century sensitivities – one 19th century scholar defended the vicious censorship by Basil of Greek and Latin literature by passing it off as the “educational theory of a cultured man” rather than the “anxious admonition of a bigoted ecclesiastic.” Johannes Geffcken, another influential 19th century scholar, considered it absurd that the rise of Christianity and the destruction of paganism were related in any way. Chrysostom’s condemnation of the Jewish canon was eagerly reprinted by the Nazis.

Not only have Christian excesses been dismissed, many have not even made it into the history books. As Eusebius explained the role of history and historians, it was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read. These views were then sustained by institutional support – until 1871 the University of Oxford required that all students were members of the Church of England, while in most cases to be given a fellowship in an Oxford college one had to be ordained.

The Darkening Age is not written in the typical turgid academic prose one is accustomed to from scholars, nor do its end notes run for almost as long as the manuscript itself (though the book is well-documented). In fact, there is the uncommon – and evocative – presence of a strand of emotion in the narrative. The purpose of writing this book, the author tells us, is to make more people aware of the history of early Christianity and the damage it wrought to the pagan world that came before it. Nixey makes a strange claim – that much of what transpired in the remaking of Europe in the Christian mould is not well known. At first glance, this comes as a surprise to any lover of the Classics, yet Nixey may well be correct in that the Classics have gone underappreciated or molested by critical theory since the postmodern turn. That is what makes The Darkening Age an even more important work.

It is not just lovers of the Classical World who might not be surprised by Nixey’s arguments: the author’s focus is on Europe when she claims that there are no true pagans left but there are plenty remaining in other parts of the world such as India. The experience of these pagans is not much different, though separated by over a dozen centuries, from those of their Roman brethren. Whenever it came up against a foreign culture, Christianity has found it disturbingly easy to tap into its reservoir of primordial fervour and zealotry to fight it. The Crusades and the Age of Imperialism are the most obvious examples of this but so is the post-Enlightenment secular world order. Though beaten to it by others, some Christian armies did despoil Indian temples and architecture; moreover, rhetoric of conversion still rhymes with the angry frothing at the mouth of Marcellus or the early 5th century Alexandrian bishop Cyril (the one responsible for the murder of the famous mathematician Hypatia).

The Darkening Age is an informative book for those not well versed in the Classics but it is also a gentle goad to inquire epistemologically at the webs of meaning that bind us. It is this second order of thinking that makes this book invaluable to everyone, even those who could not care less for the city of marble that Agrippa left behind. The internet has made it easy to import ideas from one part of the globe to another but without context and a dab of reckless politics, it could be deeply destabilising and extend the cultural genocide begun circa Constantine. Nixey exposes secularism for a simulacrum though in all fairness, that was probably not her intent; regardless, the easiest way to know whom the simulacrum benefits is to challenge it.


July 05, 2018: An addendum as a result of discussions on Twitter.

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