The Golden One - February 27, 2020


Book Review： The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

Topics
Temple of Serapis in Assassin's Creed
Hosted by
Marcus Follin
Mentioned
Creed Origins XXX XXX XXIX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XX Assassin Tips Pickle Haube Catherine Nixie Ancient Greece Christian Rome
Realistic Self-Defence For Women Wild Hunt March 2020. In Honour of Mars

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

141.74

Word count

1,642

Sentence count

122

Harmful content

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss The Darkening Age, a book written by Catherine Nixie about the early days of Christianity and the destruction of the ancient world, starting with the most magnificent building in the world, the Temple of Serapis.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:01.000 Greetings, my esteemed subscribers. I aim to make a book review every week or every other week.
00:00:08.180 I will see how well I can stick to this schedule, but I thought since I've read quite a few books I might as well talk about them.
00:00:16.080 It's always interesting and fun to share some interesting passages I find in the books.
00:00:22.760 So I'll start off by a book I've briefly mentioned before. It's The Darkening Age.
00:00:29.260 It has a bit of a provocative title, I'd say. It's called The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. 1.00
00:00:36.620 And it is a bit more, it's a bit clickbaity, you could say.
00:00:39.940 If this was a video, you would say it's a clickbait because it is much more measured than, you know, your usual stuff you hear.
00:00:48.080 So I was hesitant to make this video because I've seen a certain conflict over all of my years in the Metapolitical Crusade.
00:00:56.900 And that's been, you know, between pagans attacking Christianity, etc.
00:01:01.840 And I've always found it quite immature and quite bothersome.
00:01:07.160 But I thought to talk about this book anyway because it's an interesting historical depiction of the Roman Empire.
00:01:16.360 Well, or the early days of Christianity.
00:01:19.760 So before I begin to talk about the book, I would just like to say that I found it especially interesting since the author, Catherine Nixie, and I, we come from two completely different angles.
00:01:31.580 I come from an atheist Swedish household.
00:01:35.340 And, you know, during my upbringing in school and everything, Christianity has always been seen as something outdated and something that wasn't really good for much.
00:01:44.840 She, however, comes from a Catholic religious household in Wales.
00:01:50.660 So for her, she has come from the position that Christianity was something good.
00:01:55.520 Then she realized it also had some bad sides.
00:01:58.660 For me, however, it's been the opposite.
00:02:00.480 I've come from, yeah, again, atheist Sweden where Christianity has been under attack for a very long time.
00:02:07.040 And then I realized that, yeah, you know, Christianity wasn't the worst at all times.
00:02:12.200 It also had some good parts.
00:02:13.860 But what this book is and why I even talk about it is because it's an excellent argument against something I've seen from certain Christian scholars or authors, etc.
00:02:26.960 My daughter agrees exactly with what I'm saying, as you might hear.
00:02:31.060 But anyway, some Christian scholars will say Christianity created Europe.
00:02:37.020 It was barbaric and uncivilized and not particularly good at all before Christianity. 0.99
00:02:45.080 And this is obviously completely false.
00:02:47.720 And this book is an excellent counter-argument to it.
00:02:50.920 So, let's read a few passages in it.
00:02:54.020 But before I begin to do so, this is the video I mentioned I talked about briefly before because the Temple of Serapis actually appears in Assassin's Creed.
00:03:03.720 So I thought it was a really nice touch.
00:03:06.240 Really great game, by the way.
00:03:08.140 Assassin's Creed Origins.
00:03:09.760 The most magnificent building in the world.
00:03:14.440 And apparently we can actually go to this building in this day and age, even though it doesn't exist anymore.
00:03:22.020 And that is the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria.
00:03:27.240 So, let's head on into Alexandria in Assassin's Creed Origins.
00:03:33.560 So, here we see my aesthetic character being out and about in Alexandria.
00:03:40.140 So, we're actually at the reconstructed Temple of Serapis.
00:03:43.860 Now, in the book, The Autor, she describes how the Christians decided to tear down this Temple of False Worship. 1.00
00:03:57.500 And obviously quite a tragic thing when magnificent buildings are disappearing like this under religious intolerance.
00:04:09.140 So, anyway, I thought to just show this building here and now.
00:04:14.500 And I think it's really cool.
00:04:16.340 Tips Pickle Haube to Ubisoft for including it in the game.
00:04:20.840 I thought it was a really neat detail.
00:04:22.440 Especially since figuring out that this building was actually present in the game.
00:04:28.280 So, now you have hopefully learned something new.
00:04:30.740 That the most magnificent building and the author in the book, she elaborates quite a bit upon it.
00:04:37.300 So, now we know it existed, but it does not exist anymore.
00:04:42.780 And it might be prudent in this day and age when Notre Dame has just almost been destroyed.
00:04:50.520 That we can appreciate ancient and beautiful buildings.
00:04:55.300 And then lastly, since we are already in Assassin's Creed Origins, I thought to quickly recommend the game.
00:05:02.760 I think it is much better than Odyssey.
00:05:05.380 Even though I made the Let's Play series in Odyssey, but I played the whole game and I must say I'm not overly impressed.
00:05:12.340 Especially compared with how good Origins was.
00:05:15.540 So, definitely if you haven't played Assassin's Creed Origins, you should do so.
00:05:20.320 It captures the feel perfectly and it's a very beautiful game.
00:05:24.840 And additional points for including this fine temple.
00:05:29.640 So, one passage here in page 21 explains how Christianity, how Christ, could be added quite easily to the pantheon of the gods.
00:05:41.080 Same thing in Sweden, by the way, since we had many different gods.
00:05:45.360 Christianity, Christ was just one other god you could add into the pantheon.
00:05:50.500 So, the old laissez-faire Roman ways, in which the worship of one god might simply be added to the worship of all the others,
00:05:59.780 where preachers told their congregations no longer acceptable.
00:06:04.360 Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different, you were demonic.
00:06:11.320 Demons, said the clerics, dwelt in the minds of those who practiced the old religions.
00:06:16.540 So, yeah, that explains quite well the difference between tolerance versus intolerance.
00:06:27.300 So, you could, as I said in the old pagan religion, you know, add in different gods.
00:06:32.220 Because it was a bit more, they were a bit more libertarian in their views of the gods.
00:06:37.820 But when Christianity took over, you know, you can only have one god in Christianity, of course. 0.84
00:06:42.400 So, there you have the difference.
00:06:44.280 Then also, the book contains quite a few pictures of various statues, etc., that were defaced and destroyed by the early Christians.
00:06:57.280 Now, I'm not going to go all too much into detail about the actual destruction that took place in primarily the Middle East,
00:07:05.660 that part of the empire, the Roman Empire.
00:07:10.740 But there was such occurrence, at least, that the new religion took over in a violent way. 0.97
00:07:17.860 And what I really want to say with this video is that Western civilization, it began with this, basically.
00:07:24.500 Ancient Greece or, perhaps even more accurately, ancient Rome.
00:07:29.500 If you look at how our societies are built now, if you look at law practices, for example, we have gained so much, we have inherited so much from the Roman Empire.
00:07:40.020 And that was, of course, pre-Christian. 0.81
00:07:42.440 Then, of course, Christianity had certain roles.
00:07:45.640 I write about this in my book as well.
00:07:49.100 But we also need to be clear that Christianity did not create Europe.
00:07:53.260 Europe created Christianity. 0.98
00:07:55.060 Otherwise, you would have, you know, Christianity looking the same all over the world. 1.00
00:07:59.060 But it's influenced by bioculture.
00:08:01.760 And that's ultimately how we need to analyze Western civilization, how we need to analyze Europe in terms of biology.
00:08:09.740 It's biological Europeans that created the Roman Empire, ancient Greece, the Holy Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, whatever you... 0.99
00:08:20.960 Whichever main power in Europe, it's always been due to biology and not due to religion.
00:08:26.680 So that's something really important to keep in mind.
00:08:30.080 So if you want to trace the origins of Western civilization, yeah, you can start in, of course, pagan Greece, pagan Rome, then Christian Rome, and then Christian, the Frankish Empire, etc.
00:08:42.340 So religion is secondary to biology and bioculture.
00:08:47.660 Then also, as a note here, there is no such thing as Judeo-Christian.
00:08:51.820 That is a lie, and that's stolen valor, I would say.
00:08:55.720 So if someone says that Christianity created Europe, it's absolutely false.
00:09:00.120 It has no bearing in history at all.
00:09:02.720 Europeans created Europe.
00:09:04.800 Europeans created Christianity as we know it. 0.96
00:09:07.940 And the best argument for this is just to look at does Christianity look the same all over the world?
00:09:14.260 No, it doesn't.
00:09:15.120 It's because bioculture influences your religion.
00:09:18.040 And this is also why I show appreciation for churches, because it has nothing to do with religion as you knew it in the early days of Christianity in Jerusalem.
00:09:30.860 But it has to do with what our ancestors made out of it.
00:09:34.720 So if I see a beautiful building, I see a beautiful building built by our ancestors.
00:09:39.000 I don't necessarily think about Christianity per se.
00:09:43.660 So that was just my little review of the book.
00:09:46.420 I would say it's worthwhile reading.
00:09:49.160 I think it's a really good measured response to Christianity in the early days.
00:09:54.320 But it doesn't resort to this sort of un-nuanced attacks on Christianity here that, oh, Christianity came in and destroyed everything. 0.93
00:10:04.440 As I said, the title is a bit provocative.
00:10:06.840 The book is not that simple.
00:10:09.020 It is, again, nuanced and well-written and very interesting.
00:10:12.760 Then, of course, I'm also aware that there are plenty of good Christian things you could bring up in terms of, you know, monks continuing on the path of knowledge that the classical world brought to us.
00:10:29.320 So it is also false to view it as Christianity came in and destroyed everything. 0.69
00:10:33.500 Christianity also preserved a lot of things.
00:10:35.260 But the main point, main point for me making this video is that Western civilization is based on European bioculture and not on religion.
00:10:45.320 Religion is secondary to biology. 1.00
00:10:48.400 So anyway, if you want to know more about Christianity in Sweden, I made a video which you can find on my channel.
00:10:54.440 You can use search Swedish history, then it appears.
00:10:58.120 So anyway, thank you for watching.
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