The Turning

Some time near the end of the fourth century CE, the oracle at Delphi, which had spoken for the Greek world for more than a thousand years, fell silent for good, shut by imperial decree. At Eleusis, the sacred mysteries that had promised initiates a better hope beyond death for nearly two millennia were celebrated for the last time and then forbidden. In Alexandria, a Christian mob destroyed the Serapeum, the great temple that housed the last daughter-collection of the famous Library. Within a single lifetime, the ancient world closed its temples, silenced its oracles, and turned out the lamps of its philosophies. Something enormous was turning, and it is worth understanding clearly, because the world it produced is, in large part, still ours.

The turning was the triumph of monotheism, and above all of Christianity. A faith that had begun as a persecuted sect on the edge of the Roman Empire, preaching a crucified carpenter and a kingdom not of this world, was adopted by the emperor Constantine, and within a century had gone from hunted to imperial, from the catacombs to the throne. In 325, at the Council of Nicaea, bishops gathered under imperial authority to define, for the first time, exactly what a Christian must believe, and in doing so they drew a hard new line between orthodoxy and heresy, between the sanctioned truth and the forbidden error. We should be fair about what this new order gave the world, because it was real and vast: a moral universalism that dignified the poor and the slave, a fierce insistence that every soul mattered equally before God, a machinery of monasteries that would, through the coming storms, copy and preserve a portion of the very learning the age was otherwise losing. Billions of human beings have found meaning, comfort, and moral seriousness in the faiths that took their lasting shape in this turning, and this book will not sneer at that.

But we have been tracing a pattern for two chapters now, and here it comes fully into the daylight of recorded history. To define the one truth is to forbid the others, and the newly empowered orthodoxy set about forbidding with a will. The rich, strange, questioning traditions we call Gnostic, which taught that salvation came through secret knowledge, gnosis, and that the god of this flawed world might not be the highest god at all, were branded heretical, their books hunted and burned so thoroughly that we knew them for centuries only through the writings of those who condemned them, until a jar of their scriptures was dug by accident out of the Egyptian sand in 1945 and let them, at last, speak for themselves. The old mystery schools were closed, the old gods rebranded as demons, the old images smashed. And here the thread of the serpent, which we followed across the whole world in an earlier chapter, is knotted tight and codified for the West: in the sacred text of the new order, the Hebrew word for the serpent of the garden, once ambiguous and even wise, is fixed forever as the deceiver, and by the end of this age that serpent has become fully identified with Satan himself, the adversary, the enemy of God. The knowledge-bringer of a hundred older traditions completes his long fall into the Devil.

There is a particular casualty of this turning that captures the whole of it, and it is a book. In the centuries around the turn of the era, one of the most influential texts in circulation was the Book of Enoch, which told in vivid detail how a company of angels called the Watchers had descended to earth and taught humankind the forbidden arts, metalworking and weaponry, cosmetics and enchantment and the reading of the stars, and how for this crime of giving knowledge they were cast down and bound. It is, once again, the same story: knowledge comes from beyond, its givers are punished, and the knowledge itself is marked as dangerous and illicit. And the Book of Enoch met the fate of its own Watchers. As the canon hardened, it was cast out, excluded from the accepted scriptures of the new orthodoxy, and it survived complete only on the far margin of the Christian world, in the mountains of Ethiopia, forgotten by the West for a thousand years. The book about forbidden knowledge became forbidden knowledge.

If the turning needs a single human face, it has one, and her name was Hypatia. She was a mathematician and philosopher of Alexandria around the year 400, the head of the city's Neoplatonist school and a celebrated teacher of astronomy and geometry, by every surviving account among the most learned people of her age, and a woman, which in that time and place mattered greatly. In 415 she was dragged from her carriage by a mob swept up in the city's poisonous tangle of religious and political faction, hauled into a church, and murdered, her body torn apart and burned. It would be too simple, and some have done it, to cast her as the pure martyr of reason slain by faith itself; the truth was a squalid local power struggle in which she was partly a pawn. But the image endures for a reason, because it marks with terrible clarity the closing of an age: the most learned person in what had been the greatest city of learning in the classical world, torn apart by a crowd, in a city whose great Library was already gone. The lamps were not only going out on their own. In places, they were being put out.

We should be careful and honest about the larger frame, because the cartoon version, in which noble science is crushed by wicked religion, is false and lazy. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and the real loss of knowledge that followed, owed more to invasion, plague, and economic collapse than to any council of bishops; the formula for Roman concrete was not suppressed but simply forgotten, as the trade that made it unraveled. And the impulse to define, to gatekeep, to protect the community's truth by silencing its doubters is not the special vice of any one faith. It is, as we will see again and again, something closer to an immune response, a thing that institutions of knowledge and power do almost reflexively when they feel an anomaly threatening the body of accepted belief, whether that institution is a fourth-century church or, much later, a modern academy. The mechanism is older and more universal than any of its particular victims.

But the fact of the turning stands. The classical world, for all its cruelty and slavery, had been plural, argumentative, and open in its search for what was true. The world that replaced it in the West was singular, and it held the map of reality in a single authorized hand. For roughly a thousand years, to know would in large part mean to be told. The lamps of Alexandria and Athens and Eleusis were out.

They were not out everywhere, though, and this is the crucial thing the standard story forgets. As the West darkened, other lamps across the world were only beginning to blaze, in Arabia and Persia and Constantinople, in Tang China and the temple-cities of the Maya, in the trading kingdoms of Africa. The next age was not a dark age. It was a global age, lit in parallel, all around a world that did not yet know itself whole.