4. The Rise of Christianity¶
Core Argument¶
The rise of Christianity unfolded during the terminal crisis of the slave-based mode of production, a period in which the old morality, philosophy, and religion of antiquity had fallen into utter decay. The Roman proletariat, unlike the modern industrial working class, was a parasitic and non-productive class that lived off the state’s largesse. Slave uprisings were doomed to fail because this lumpenproletariat consistently sided with the slave owners against the slaves. Into this vacuum stepped the early Christians, a genuinely revolutionary movement of the poor and oppressed. They practised primitive communism and equality, waging a conscious struggle against the existing order. Engels explained that for these diverse groups, with no common earthly path to emancipation, the only conceivable escape was religious: Christianity promised recompense in the world beyond.
State repression failing to crush the movement, the ruling class shifted strategy under Constantine. The bishops were co-opted. Once recognised as the state religion, the Church was transformed into its opposite, becoming a weapon for the rich. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Constantine imposed orthodoxy through intimidation, violence, and murder, purging the scriptures of their revolutionary content. The Bible was locked away in Latin, interpretable only by priests. Under Emperor Theodosius (392–395 AD), Christianity was imposed as the sole state religion, and pagan worship was outlawed as a religio illicita. Fanatical monks, enlisted by the emperor, systematically smashed statues and ruined temples across Greece. Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age documents this campaign of destruction: black-robed zealots demolishing the statue of Athena at Palmyra, and the torture and beheading of philosophers in Antioch.
The climax of this intellectual suppression came in Alexandria in March 415 AD. The philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, a leading Neoplatonist, was murdered by a Christian mob of parabalani monks acting under Bishop Cyril. She was stripped, flayed with oyster shells, dismembered, and her remains burned. Her death marked the final suppression of pagan philosophy; the destruction of the Serapeum by Bishop Theophilus had already finished the Library of Alexandria. This Christian violence, the text argues, plunged Europe into a thousand years of darkness, ignorance, and superstition, enforcing blind faith over reason.