The transformation of the Roman Empire from the classical period to a Christian society has been well studied. One estimate is that ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian by AD 300, although what it meant to be a Christian at this date is impossible to ascertain. The communities were scattered and each had a different relationship with sacred texts and Judaism, while their understandings of Jesus Christ were diverse.

An unexpected turning point came in 312-13 when the emperor Constantine used state authority to privilege his own understanding of Christianity above others (this was at a time when the majority of his subjects still followed traditional beliefs). At a council held at Nicaea in 325, there was the first formulation of a creed (a preliminary version of the Nicene Creed), although it was only in the reign of Theodosius (ruled 379-395) that Christianity became the state religion based on a Trinitarian doctrine in which Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God were seen as one. In 380, Theodosius declared that those of other Christian beliefs were ‘demented and insane’ heretics. This was what the historian Peter Heather calls ‘the Romanization of Christianity’ and it made Christianity an authoritarian religion entwined with the authoritarian Roman state. Yet recent scholarship has confirmed the weakness of the state in enforcing compliance. It was all very well issuing fearsome imperial decrees but ‘pagan’ and ‘heretical’ cults survived for decades. Recent works by Heather (Christendom, 2022) and Edward Watts (The Final Pagan Generation, 2015) chart the transformation.

After AD 380, a hierarchy of orthodox bishops attempted to enforce a canon of texts and doctrines such as the Trinity. Independent reasoning waned as the structure of Christian authority gradually emerged. In this sense, there was a true Closing of the Western Mind (the title of my study, published in 2002), though Christian theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose, the formidable bishop of Milan, still drew on ‘pagan’ texts for support. Basil of Caesarea went so far in the 360s as to argue that ‘young men’ should master these texts before embarking on biblical studies. Platonism, rather than being suppressed, provided the intellectual backbone of theology. Christians adopted Plato’s Timaeus with its ‘craftsman god’.

The spread of Christianity through Europe was a complex process, with some Christianities infiltrating peacefully (Ireland) and others succeeding by violent coercion (Saxony at the hands of Charlemagne). The late Valerie Flint in her The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991) showed how Christianity was forced to compromise with traditional pre-Christian customs to become embedded. It might not have been until 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, that Christian uniformity was fully imposed on Europe.

In The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), Catherine Nixey provides a vivid and passionate narrative of this transformation. She has little time for the political transformation from above—there is hardly a mention of Theodosius, who imposed the Trinity and completed the ‘Romanization of Christianity’. She bypasses the links between traditional Roman authority and the coming of the new religion.

Instead, her Christians appear to come from nowhere, like some fanatical sect emerging from across the Steppes. (Chapter One is aptly titled ‘The Invisible Army’.)  These Christians are tormented by demons. They destroy statues, burn books, and dismantle temples. Nixey highlights the minority of those dedicated to this destruction. ‘Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers’.  Monks were ‘vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent’. In Chapters Fourteen to Fifteen, Nixey portrays the joyless and aggressive behaviour of monks as if they all shared a commitment to overthrow the classical world. There are several passages in which Saint Martin of Tours burns ‘pagan’ shrines. In contrast, the influential Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) gets no acknowledgement for his advice to sprinkle holy water on ‘pagan’ shrines and reuse them.

In true journalistic style, Nixey dwells emotively on the destruction of ‘paganism’, muddling Latin and Greek Christianities and pre-and post-Constantinian Christianity. (There are very few dates she provides to establish any context, but her examples range from the second to the sixth centuries and across a variety of Christianities.) She assumes that the empire with its longstanding traditions and structures of authority was fragile, so that, by the sixth century, ‘an entire religious system [‘paganism’] had been all but wiped from the face of the earth’. Violence was part of everyday life in the late empire, so the activities of the more obsessive Christians have to be seen within that context. Papyrus scrolls are vulnerable to dampness and fire but the loss of classical literature is attributed by Nixey largely to the Church: ‘What ensured the near total destruction of all [sic] Latin and Greek literature was a combination of ignorance, fear and idiocy.’  Nixey assumes the Christian destruction of the library at Alexandria, even though it is probably mythical.

Recent scholars of late antiquity have been disturbed by Nixey’s polemic. Yet The Darkening Age has also received rave reviews from those who enjoy feisty dissent from conventional views. The book is seen as challenging a still-rosy picture of Christianity spreading peacefully throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and some reviewers have drawn comparisons between Nixey’s Christians and religious fanatics of the twenty-first century. Yet, other than Julian, emperor for a short time (361-63), all emperors after Constantine were professed Christians and upheld Roman authority. As the works of Peter Brown have shown, a much more nuanced narrative of the narrowing of Western thought is possible.

To be sure, there were dour ascetics among the Christians, but others enjoyed married life and employed slaves. Fifth-century aristocrats such as Sidonius Apollinaris, later to be bishop of Clermont, decried the loss of Latin learning. There is very little of this in Nixey’s narrative and there is no distinctive treatment of the very different fate of the Greek East. I know many of the texts she quotes, and I used some of them in my The Closing of the Western Mind, but they ignore the gradual process by which most of the subjects of the empire accepted Christianity.

Emboldened by her success, Nixey has now written Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. This book is primarily an analysis of early tales about Jesus. As in The Darkening Age, Nixey too often assumes that she is breaking new ground, but I have a score of books on my shelves (notably those by Bart Ehrman) which contain similar, if less polemical, analyses.  (And, to give her credit, she does mention William Hone, who, in the nineteenth century, discovered many of the apocryphal gospels.) Despite her wide reading, Nixey has again failed to realise how Christianity was integrated within the Roman state. There is not a mention of Theodosius, who finalised and imposed the doctrine of the Trinity in 381 and attempted to ban ‘pagan’ practices in the 390s. Chapter Twelve, ‘On Laws’, discusses the late (438) Theodosian Code, a compilation of imperial laws since the reign of  Constantine over a hundred years earlier, but the relevance of this to her argument is unclear.

Without the impositions of emperors and the privileges it brought, Christianity was unlikely to have become as dominant as it did. Through councils over which they presided, the emperors brought order, and thus orthodoxy, to the religion. In fact, there were some previous attempts to consolidate the sacred texts, as in Irenaeus’ influential Adversus Haereses of c. 180 (which is mentioned by Nixey), which highlighted the four gospels as canonical, primarily because they were so early.  One cannot have it both ways. If Heresy is about the sheer variety of tales about Jesus and other ‘holy men’, one cannot complain about attempts to define which of these tales were orthodox and which were not. Nixey quotes Celsus’ second-century attacks on Christianity but she never mentions that these quotes are reproduced by the brilliant biblical scholar Origen, who also responds to many of them.

Nixey has a knack for evoking atmospheres and Heresy is full of lively images. She writes very well and many readers will enjoy her book. Heresy is more nuanced than The Darkening Age: there is a greater awareness of alternative views and she draws on more varied sources. However, this makes the book unstructured. Each chapter deals with a different theme. Rome, and Roman authors, are often described but there is little attempt to distinguish between the Greek world (of the New Testament texts) and the Latin West, where definitive translations of the scriptures had to wait until Jerome’s Vulgate in the fourth century. In Chapter Eight, ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, there is a well-written discussion of travel in the Roman Empire but, other than linking this diversion to the travels of Paul, it does not make any contribution to the argument. Chapter Nine, ‘Go into the World’, continues the theme with travel to the East. There are other diversions, too, for example with the historian and philosopher Plutarch’s account of the afterlife of Thespesius and the discovery by George Smith in the nineteenth century of part of The Epic of Gilgamesh in the cuneiform tablets he was deciphering. It often feels as if Nixey has exhausted her main theme and is resorting to padding.

In the final chapters of Heresy, Nixey returns to the main themes of The Darkening Age: Christians extirpating ‘paganism’ and committing violence between themselves. Her books are more journalistic than scholarly. They will appeal to those who have suffered an unhappy experience with Christianity but they risk being historically unbalanced, and even misleading. There were extremists who took delight in attacking the symbols of traditional Roman and Greek religion, but most conversions happened gradually and there were compromises with traditional values in which Christianity made little difference to social life—even to the continuing ownership of slaves (as Nixey acknowledges).

I felt that Heresy, in particular, failed to establish a coherent argument. If Jesus made an impact within the Greek world, it is not surprising that many sources elaborated on the legends that had accumulated around him. It was right that Irenaeus sought to establish orthodoxy from the earliest gospel texts, for Christianity would never have survived if it had not brought order to its theology—even if, to this writer at least, it also brought a closing of the Western mind. It is just that this narrowing was a much subtler process than Nixey would have it.

Related reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The post How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

On 26 October 2018, Ireland voted to remove the archaic criminal law of blasphemy from its constitution. Almost one million people (64.85 per cent of participants) voted, in what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called a ‘quiet revolution’, to remove the word ‘blasphemous’ from article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution. This had previously stated that ‘the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.’

The bill to remove blasphemy was signed into law by the president later that year. However, just three years later, the Irish government are introducing a new, even more authoritarian bill that will severely limit free speech, and has the potential to criminalise modern blasphemers. Barring amendment or rejection, this bill is set to become enshrined in Irish law.

Currently being debated in the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would update and expand Ireland’s hate speech laws to include incitement to violence or hatred against persons or groups on the basis of protected characteristics, including religion, race, disability and gender. 

The bill contains many provisions that will make the average liberal or civil libertarian’s blood run cold. Under this bill, existing crimes such as assault and vandalism could lead to longer prison sentences if hatred is found to be the motive. According to Section 7, the mere possession of material that the state deems ‘hateful’ could result in citizens being sent to prison for up to five years if their actions are held to be ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person with protected characteristics. Should the bill it find its way onto the statute books, then, despite the government’s insistence that it includes a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression’, there is little doubt that Ireland would become the ignominious holder of one of the most comprehensive ‘hate speech’ laws, if not the most totalitarian, in Western Europe. 

In April, the bill passed through the Dáil (Ireland’s equivalent of the House of Commons) relatively unscathed. Only 14 of the 160 Dáil members voted against the proposed amendments. Yet its provisions are comprehensive and authoritarian.

The Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who was responsible for the bill, argued that it was necessary in order to discourage the targeting of those with protected characteristics. Her comments were echoed by Pauline O’Reilly, a senator of the Green Party, who told the Seanad that restrictions on free speech were necessary to protect vulnerable people from ‘such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace’. The senator is also reported as saying, using highly emotive language, that ‘the dirty, filthy underbelly of hatred in Irish society’ necessitates ‘the restriction of freedom’.

On the face of it, these proposals may sound like a good idea. Few would oppose laws that protect the rights of individuals, especially if the individual belongs to a persecuted or marginalised group. No ordinary, sensible person would tolerate despicable acts such as racist or misogynistic violence. 

Except that words are not violence. Verbal abuse is not the same as physical abuse. According to those who support hate speech legislation, living in fear of being ‘attacked verbally’ is a restriction on one’s freedom. A rhetorical question commonly deployed by opponents of free speech in this debate is, ‘why is it acceptable to protect freedom of speech for everyone when doing so harms the right of some people, in particular, those with protected characteristics, to live in peace?’ The question is what conclusion should follow from this. Those who support the severe limitations on free speech proposed by the bill would say that it is justified by its alleged ability to protect vulnerable people’s right to ‘live in peace’. But the alternative conclusion would be that everyone has to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble, and that no one’s ideas are above criticism. Sometimes, words can even act as a bulwark against physical violence – against which every liberal democracy has numerous laws to protect people.

Clarification is essential when it comes to the application of laws, especially those relating to civil liberties. But tyranny likes grey areas. The bill’s current definition of hatred (clause 2(1)) is vague and tautological:

‘“Hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’

This non-definition – ‘“hatred” means hatred against’ – led Thomas Pringle, the Independent TD (MP) for Donegal, to criticise the bill. He noted in a debate in the Select Committee on Justice that one ‘remarkable’ feature of the bill was that ‘hate is not defined in it’. Fundamentally, it is difficult to see how ‘hatred’ or ‘hate speech’, where it does not cross the line into existing criminal offences, such as harassment, libel, death threats or incitement to violence, could really mean anything more than ‘offensiveness’. But whatever the Merseyside police or hardline progressives might think, the idea that being offensive might be worthy of criminalisation is well beyond the current laws of either England or Ireland, and would be an extraordinarily illiberal step. 

Failure to define a crime can potentially lead to anyone being found guilty. When such vague definitions serve as the basis for a conviction, courts often have to base their sentence not only on a person’s actions but also on their beliefs. 

Consider the idea brought forward in the UK by Stella Creasy to make misogyny a ‘hate crime’. For several years the Labour MP has sought to make being motivated by misogyny an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing—with a potential prison sentence of up to seven years if it was determined that the crime was committed by someone with a hatred of women. We already have laws that deal with the most serious of misogynistic crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Yet it is strange to think that a violent crime against a woman where the defendant was not motivated by misogyny should automatically be punished less severely than one where he or she was so motivated. If the harm done to the victim is the same in each case, there are real concerns with arguing that the law should categorise specific kinds of beliefs, when they motivate a crime, as making that crime liable to more severe punishment than it would be, had the defendant not been motivated by those kinds of beliefs.

McEntee and other supporters of the bill claim it is necessary to protect minority groups from actual verbal abuse. However a provision deeply buried in the bill indicates that its effects would reach much farther than that. Under Section 10 of the bill, the preparation or possession of material ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against people on account of their protected characteristics is a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, when such preparation or possession is ‘with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by [the defendant] or another person’, and ‘with intent’ to incite hatred or violence or ‘being reckless’ as to whether they are incited.  In other words, if you privately possess material that might incite, not even violence, but the more nebulous response of hatred, and you are ‘reckless’ about whether hatred is incited if the material is shared publicly, then you could be guilty of a criminal offence – regardless of whether the material actually results in anyone’s being abused.

An even more chilling provision is then introduced (clause 10(3)): where the defendant is found to have possessed such material, and ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for [his or her] personal use’, it is to be presumed ‘that the material [is] not intended for personal use’ unless he or she can prove otherwise. Thus, if the defendant is found to possess material likely to incite hatred, then, if it is reasonable to assume it was not for personal use, then they would be required to prove that it was, in order to escape conviction. In other words, this section, a little over 30 words long, effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence. The burden of proof will shift from the prosecutor to the defendant, on the grounds not of a proved intention, but of what it is ‘reasonable’ to assume the intention was.

As the ‘possession’ clause suggests, this bill, like other hate-speech laws around the world, such as Scotland’s infamous Hate Crime and Public Order Act, does not seek to protect vulnerable people from abstract definitions of hate, but rather is intended to limit what you can say or write. As such, it will curtail legitimate debate and pose a serious threat to free expression. Anything that prevents people from freely holding beliefs not sanctioned by the state, or viewed by the law as ‘dangerous’, is a threat to a free and liberal society. The idea of an informed citizenship is anathema to authoritarians.

As noble as they sound, laws against hate speech do not promote equality. They give victims an artificial sense of justice, but in reality, they do little to address the issues that have led to the supposed crime in the first place. If Irish lawmakers want to reduce prejudice against protected characteristics, they must abandon this bill and focus on education. Knowledge increases tolerance and acceptance. The irony is that this can only be achieved through the free exchange of ideas – which is exactly what this law is intended to prevent.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that people are unaware that they are complicit in acts of wrongdoing because dogmatic adherence to an ideology seems to justify their actions. In the case of Ireland, an ideology of identity that promises to protect minority groups from offence is allowing its adherents to hide their illiberal behaviour under the guise of moral righteousness. 

If Ireland is to remain a free country, it is essential that this bill be rejected in its entirety. A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s book should be left on the desk of every member of parliament. 

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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The post The return of blasphemy in Ireland appeared first on The Freethinker.