Did Christianity destroy classical pagan culture?

Gore Vidal’s 1954 novel Messiah presented a grimly satirical perspective on Christian history. It imagined a near-future world in which Christianity is challenged and overthrown by a doomsday cult founded by John Cave (“JC”), whose fanatical followers establish their faith by ruthless acts of brutality against Chris­tian people and their places of worship. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Christian violence against pagans in the Late Roman Empire, Vidal was asking, in effect, how would contemporary Christians like it if the same things happened to them?

A similar anger about historical Chris­tian atrocities drives Catherine Nixey. Although The Darkening Age is harshly polemical and poorly connected to mainstream scholarship, it makes some valid points about violence, intolerance, and iconoclasm in Christian history. Assured­ly, it will serve as a major weapon in the arsenal of antireligious polemic for years to come.

Nixey powerfully describes the ruthless destruction of pagan temples, shrines, and institutions in the century after Constantine’s decision to tolerate the new faith. The perpetrators were often monks, a “marauding band of bearded black-robed zealots” who in Egypt and parts of the Levant acted as private militias, beyond the control of civil institutions. Many of their actions, such as their attack on the pagan remains of Palmyra, seem alarmingly familiar in light of the recent horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State. Monks then, like extreme Islamists today, saw temples and statues not as cultural heritage but as flagrant manifestations of polytheism and diabolism.