The Dark Age, by Catherine Nixey

And when Jesus died on his cross, the day turned to night. Myth or eclipse? for reducing the matter to a humorous point. The point is that there can be no better metaphor to consider that the birth of Christianity, at the foot of the cross, acquired that same dark tone that overshadowed the work of the Messiah.

Because the expansion of Christianity advocated its unique truth with absolute virulence over all areas of beliefs and cultures. The wealth of the classical world ended up being extinguished from that religious insurgency that was gaining followers at the same time that it was conformed into a whip against the pagan that lashed for centuries everything that sounded minimally threatening to a current paradoxically officialized by Rome, in its usual condescension with the references of other peoples under his domain.

Neither better nor worse than other beliefs but more intense due to its impact. Any faith that is gaining weight generates fervent followers unable to live with other options. Since man is man and until today.

But Catherine Nixey focuses on Christianity and its consequences on the classical world, despite the fact that that age of darkness could be said to go from the time Christianity was consolidated as a mass religion rooted in its convulsive and minority origins until the Inquisition. Nixey recovers perspectives of the origins with a degree of verisimilitude that ends up tying up so many loose ends on gleams and cultural decays drawn from intransigence on an open world such as the Roman Empire. An empire capable of conquering and integrating to maintain and sustain its administration of the world in an intelligent and practical way, without forgetting that there is no conquest without prior war, of course.

Christian monotheism found in its biblical literature a new story that caught on with its growing followers, that it sought out and forced the arrival of new converts, and that stigmatized all that was profane. the classical world paled for the most part from aggressive Christian response. Fear as a form of imposition of faith, the first prospect of the dictatorship on the conscience of the people. All this from the dictates of a God made flesh, a pacifist perched on the most cruel punishment at the request of the people themselves.

Christianity sought revenge and executed it for centuries. But focusing on its origin, the worst thing is that in its eagerness to execute in the name of God, it swept away some of the greatest classical legacies, labeled as pagan and harshly persecuted.

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