In short: The book has an engaging writing style and is a quick, easy read. However, it is too short to do the subject justice and suffers from oversimplification and insufficient information.
My first impression of this book, with its 188 pages of text, was that it was too short to do its subject justice. It is also my final impression. It seems, at times, hastily written, and the author is selective in what material she chooses to present. The entire book, including a perusal of its notes and bibliography, could be read over a rainy weekend.
The book contains eleven chapters, ten covering a particular period of the history of Christianity and the eleventh a conclusion: “Seeds of Tyranny,” “Political Maneuvering: Making Christianity Palatable to the Romans,” “Deciding Upon Doctrine: Sex, Free Will, Reincarnation and the Use of Force,” “The Church Takes Over: The Dark Ages,” “The Church Fights Change: The Middle Ages,” “Controlling the Human Spirit: The Inquisition and Slavery,” “The Reformation: Converting the Populace,” “The Witch Hunts: The End of Magic and Miracles,” “Alienation from Nature,” “A World Without God,” and the conclusion.
The preface opens with a quote from Pope John Paul II about the millennium being a good time for the Roman Catholic Church to reflect on its “dark history.” Barely a paragraph below it, the author writes about an acquaintance who spoke of the Christian church as embodying all that is best in Western civilization and seemed entirely unaware of the history of violence and oppression committed by not only individual Christians but by Christian institutions. That the author, as well as the Pope, was attempting to remedy this ignorance seemed to me a good and hopeful sign and was actually the reason I decided to read the book.
The title is a fair warning that the author is not about to present an unbiased history of the church, which is certainly not required for either an interesting or informative read. Her main thesis is stated early and repeated often: The belief in one supreme being leads to oppression because it demands hierarchy and conformity.
“The dark side of Christian history was not an unavoidable result of human nature,” Ellerbe concludes, “It was the result of a very specific ideology and belief structure.”
*WARNING* A BIT OF GROUSING AND PEDANTRY TO FOLLOW *WARNING*
While she does not argue that polytheism leads to egalitarianism, she does posit that seeing the many aspects or faces of god(s) can bring about social justice, sexual and racial equality, and peace with one’s neighbors because such a system is more open to power sharing. In this, she ignores the many hierarchical polytheistic societies past and present. For example, the classical polytheistic societies of Greece. Even classical Athens, the putative cradle of Western democracy, practiced slavery and sequestered (respectable) women.
The belief in a single supreme being may be responsible for some of the woes we humans tend to inflict on each other but viewing how widespread the practice of human sacrifice has been through time and across geography—Aztecs slaughtering prisoners of war to feed the sun with their hearts, for example—I don’t see that belief in many gods does much better.
Quotes from people as diverse as sharp-tongued Tertullian, the “Father of the Latin church,” and physicist Stephen Hawking fill The Dark Side of Christian History. It makes for delicious reading at times.
However, I got the impression that Ellerbe probably has read few of the passages in their original context. To my dismay, I noticed a quote attributed to St. Cyril of Alexandria (the learned Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered during his bishopric, possibly with his—at least—tacit consent) sourced in contemporary writer Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler was born in 1931. I doubt she has had any conversations with a 4th-century CE North African bishop lately. I would have dug out Eisler’s book to check, but I lent it to a friend who didn’t see fit to return it. So, what is the ultimate source of the Cyril quote?
When Ellerbe deals with any historical person, she presents only one side of them. For instance, she portrays Isaac Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity, who deprived the world of magic (so her argument goes), which in turn alienated Europeans from nature. This simplification overlooks that Newton was a mystic and an alchemist who held a heretical view of the nature of god. Such information would apparently—complicate things.
Another huge omission is the history of the Eastern Orthodox church. The few paragraphs devoted to Byzantium note that the Crusaders decided to sack the city between home and the “holy land.” The author does not deal with Orthodox religious issues.
The writing is clear and straightforward, avoiding purple passages even when recounting the horrors of the Inquisitions and witch-finding. However, the author recounts large numbers of victims in those horrors without qualification or hesitation.
On page 95, she cites the number of Protestants (Huguenots) killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572 unequivocally as 10,000. The Catholic Encyclopedia (granted, not an unbiased source) numbers the dead in Paris as 2000 but states, “The number of victims in the provinces is unknown, the figures varying between 2000 and 100,000.” While Ellerbe put her figure toward the low end of the possible total, the problem is—IMseldomHO—that she pretends certainty where there is none. I’m sure this is for the sake of simplicity, but as a reader, I’ve handled reading about the suffering of people being tortured, burned alive, or drowned. I can handle a little uncertainty, particularly when it speaks to careful research on the part of the author.
END OF MOST OF THE GROUSING AND PEDANTRY
Finally, at the end of this extremely long review (for which I ask the reader’s forgiveness, assuming any have made it this far), I can only marginally recommend this book. It is perhaps a good starting place, but there is so much left out and so much sacrificed for simplicity that I felt cheated. As for the author’s thesis (polytheism leads to harmony; monotheism to hierarchy and patriarchy), I didn’t buy it for a moment, but the subjects she brings up bear some study. The millennium is twenty-five years old now and her book about thirty, but it’s always a good time to reflect on the past to learn from mistakes made before us in order to work on creating a world where, as Ellerbe puts it, “we can embrace the hope and pursue the dream that humanity can be free to act humanely.”
Bio: I could find little info on the author. She was raised in the Episcopalian tradition. At the time of the book’s publication, she was a researcher, writer, and public speaker living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Title: The Dark Side of Christian History
Author: Helen Ellerbe
First published: 1995
Length: non-fiction book
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 