What was not “of profit” could easily fade from view. The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up.61 Some writers were highly critical—even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had “destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.”62 The affected myopia of Christian historians could be magnificent: as the historian Ramsay MacMullen has put it, “Hostile writings and discarded views were not recopied or passed on, or they were actively suppressed.” The Church acted as a great and, at times, fierce filter on all written material, the centuries of its control as “a differentially permeable membrane” that “allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies.”63
Chapter Eleven
* * *
To Cleanse the Error of Demons
Stay clear of all pagan books!
—Apostolic Constitutions, 1.6.1
IN ALEXANDRIA, TOWARDS THE END of the fifth century, a Christian chronicler named Zachariah of Mytilene entered the house of a man and found that he was “sweating and depressed.” Zachariah instantly knew what was wrong: this man was struggling with demons. Zachariah knew too where these demons were coming from: the man had some documents containing pagan spells in his house. “If you want to get rid of the anxiety,” the man was now told, “burn these papers.” And so he did. He took his works and, in front of Zachariah, set light to them. The encounter concludes with a homily being read to the man who had now been cleansed of his “demons”—not to mention of part of his library.1 As the pious Zachariah makes very clear, he did not consider that he had harmed this man by forcing him to burn his papers. He had not bullied him, or acted cruelly towards him. Quite the reverse: he had saved him.
This was not a unique event. During the years and decades following Constantine’s conversion, in towns and cities across the empire, zealous officials again and again “saved” the souls of the erring from the dangers posed to them by books. Constantine had set the precedent early and emphatically for all of this when he had ordered the works of the heretic Arius to be burned and had condemned to death all who hid the heretic’s books. Works suspected of “heretical” or “magical” practices—whatever those terms meant—went up in smoke in public bonfires.
In Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, bonfires of books blazed and Christian officials looked on in satisfaction. Book-burning was approved of, even recommended, by Church authorities. “Search out the books of the heretics . . . in every place,” advised the fifth-century Syrian bishop Rabbula, and “wherever you can, either bring them to us or burn them in the fire.”2 In Egypt at around the same time, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books.3 The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these “shameful books” should be let go, “because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them.”4
Books had been burned under non-Christian emperors—the controlling Augustus alone had ordered the burning of over two thousand books of prophetic writings, and had exiled the misbehaving poet Ovid—but now it grew in scope and ambition. There is little evidence that Christians intentionally destroyed entire libraries; the damage that Christianity inflicted on books was achieved by subtler—but no less effective—means of censorship, intellectual hostility and pure fear. The existence of a sacred text, it was argued, demanded this. Before, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was “wrong” could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.
As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, “have no ground for boasting of their wisdom.”5 The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. Besides, he wrote with disapproval, ancient philosophers had disagreed all the time. Rohmann has drawn attention to a passage in which Augustine complains that no senate or power of “the impious city has ever taken care to judge between all [these] dissensions of the philosophers, approving and accepting some, and disapproving and rejecting others.”6 That philosophers should clamorously disagree with each other had been axiomatic to the Greeks: that was precisely how intellectual progress was made, by argumentation and competition. The very idea was anathema to Augustine. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.7
Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. “Stay clear of all pagan books!” the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. “For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?” If you wish to read about history, it continued, “you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord . . . Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!”8
Neoplatonic works—which were studied by the philosopher Damascius—enraged Christians for centuries. Neoplatonism was a philosophical school that, to modern eyes, is decidedly odd. Yes, Damascius and his fellow Athenian philosophers studied Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Physics—and some of these philosophers were very close to what we would call scientists. One colleague of Damascius, an excellent mathematician, was an early experimentalist, and spent his time trying to understand the properties of different dyes.9 Yet other Neoplatonists moved on from mathematics and physics into the realm of the metaphysical, blending astronomy with astrology and philosophy with theurgy.
Damascius himself is—to modern eyes—just such an odd combination. On the one hand, he is a highly trained rational scientist, an expert in mathematics who directs the school away from its more ritualistic leanings to hard philosophy. On the other, he is a man who lovingly retells fantastical tales in which human heads the size of a pea roar with the sound of a thousand men.10 The whiff—and more—of the supernatural in his work was enough to contaminate the whole in the eyes of many Christians. Plato, Edward Gibbon later sniffed, would have blushed to acknowledge these men.11 Perhaps worst of all, in Christian eyes, they dabbled in prophecy—an art that was particularly loathed by emperors who feared it might be used to prophesy their successors and hence sow dissent. Christianity would later absorb some of this philosophy—but it also turned on it with violence.
An accusation of “magic” was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the center of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and “barbarous and atheistic arrogance” of these books were condemned as “everybody” watched “the magic books and the demonic signs burn.”*12
As with the destruction of temples, there
was no shame in this. This was God’s good work and Christian hagiography hymned its virtue. The life of the sixth-century saint Simeon Stylites the Younger records what happened when an important official named Amantius arrived in Antioch. His appearance was much anticipated: on his way, as proof of his Christian determination, he had searched out, tortured and executed large numbers of local “idolaters.”
Once this alarming man was inside the city, St. Simeon then received a vision. “A decision,” Simeon reported, “has been made by God against the pagans and the heterodox that this chief shall search out the error concerning idolatry, to collect all their books and to burn these in the fire.” After hearing this, Amantius was overcome by zeal and promptly “conducted an inquisition [and] found that the majority of the first citizens of the city and many of its inhabitants had been involved in paganism, Manicheaism, astrology, [Epicureanism], and other gruesome heresies. These he had detained, thrown in prison, and having brought together all of their books, which were a great many, he had these burnt in the middle of the stadium.”13
What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain “magic”—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St. Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. “Paganism” appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.
Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were “hateful to God.” The Christians told him that they “wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul”; they wanted “liberation.” These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such “liberation” might involve—“fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law.” He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, “when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons.”14 One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.
Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city, a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it, “the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’”15 A noble of “remarkable literary attainments” was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded.16 Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw “swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling.”17
And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that “innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence.”18 Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and “throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts.”19 Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works. The Alexandrian poet Palladas, the writer who had described himself and other “pagans” as being reduced to ashes, burned what he called his “worrisome book-scrolls.”20
Even Christians in Antioch lived in fear that winter. One day, at the height of the terror, a young man named John happened to be walking through the city near the river with a friend. Suddenly, his friend noticed something floating in the water. “He thought it was a piece of cloth,” John remembered, “but on coming closer he saw it was a book and went down to fish it out . . . He opened it and saw magic signs. At the same time a soldier came by. My friend put the book in his cloak and moved away, petrified with fear. For who would believe that we had found that book in the river and pulled it out, when everybody was being arrested, even the least suspicious? We did not dare throw it away for fear of being seen, and were equally afraid to tear it up.” This John was John Chrysostom, a man who would go on to become one of the most important of all figures in the early Church, and a saint. Yet, at that moment, merely being near such a book petrified him.21 He got away—“God,” he concluded, had delivered him. Many others were not so lucky.
Just as houses were combed for unacceptable books, so during this period literature was combed for unacceptable phrases. One aggressively disapproving Christian asked St. Jerome why he chose to constantly “quote examples from secular literature and thus defile the whiteness of the church with the foulness of heathenism?” Jerome, ever the scholar, replied that he had good literary precedent for doing so: St. Paul had done the same. Besides, he added, he was not being conquered by the foulness of the heathens: on the contrary, he was conquering them. Like David, he was wrenching the sword from the enemy’s hand and using it to attack them.
Jerome concluded this letter with one of the most unappealing metaphors in the entire debate. Had not the Lord commanded in Deuteronomy that “when a captive woman had had her head shaved, her eyebrows and all her hair cut off, and her nails pared, she might then be taken to wife?” Well then, said Jerome, “Is it surprising that I too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my handmaid, a matron of the true Israel? Or that shaving off and cutting away all in her that is dead whether this be idolatry, pleasure, error, or lust, I take her to myself clean and pure and beget by her servants for the Lord of Sabaoth?”22 A Christian might take the defeated prisoner, enjoy them, rape them—so long as they mutilated them first. Their ornaments were to be pared away, ostensibly to allow the prisoner to “mourn” for what they had lost, but it was a clear humiliation, too.
The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective. It had little interest in copying out the writings of philosophers who contradicted them, in poets who described “perverted” acts or in rambunctious satires on the gods.
Far from wishing to protect classical texts, many within the Church were violently hostile to their “foulness” and actively wished them destroyed.23 Some “obscene” erotic works were simply not copied out. One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word “girl” seems to have been considered too racy to remain.24 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdleri
zing their editions of the classics.25 Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. “At this point in the book,” it records, “there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery . . . read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.”26
Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases “whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature.”27 Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers.28
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