The Murder of Socrates: How the Abrahamic Faiths Colonized Europe

Abrahamic religions are alien to European soil. They were not born from the rivers of the Rhine or the olive groves of Attica, but from the deserts of Judea. They spoke not the language of reason, but the dialect of revelation. They arrived not as philosophies, but as invasions — of thought, of culture, of spirit. Europe once produced gods, philosophies, and republics; after the Abrahamic conquest, it produced guilt, priesthood, and inquisitions. The continent that gave birth to Socrates, Pericles, and Lucretius was turned into a penitentiary of faith.

Before the Abrahamic intrusion, Europe had its own sacred landscape — a pantheon that mirrored its forests and seas. The Greeks built temples not to submission but to beauty. Their gods were flawed, human, passionate. Zeus was not omnipotent but powerful; Apollo was not infallible but radiant; Athena was not jealous but wise. These were gods who reflected humanity’s aspirations, not its self-hatred. They did not demand confession; they demanded excellence. The Delphic maxim “Know thyself” was a summons to reason, not repentance.

Socrates was the first casualty of the Semitic spirit on European soil. Though his prosecutors were technically Athenian, they spoke with the tone of later priests. He was accused of impiety — of corrupting the youth, of questioning the gods. His death prefigured the death of free inquiry. When Athens executed Socrates, it planted the seed of theological Europe. The trial of Jesus would later invert the event — turning the condemned philosopher into a divine martyr and turning philosophy itself into a heresy. Socrates died for reason; Jesus was divinized for faith.

Rome, too, began as a civilization of law and civic virtue, not revelation. The Romans worshiped household gods, practiced tolerance, and built a universal republic through jurisprudence and engineering, not prophecy. But once Christianity crept into the empire, the rational order collapsed. The conversion of Constantine in the fourth century was not a triumph of morality but a coup against reason. Pagan temples were razed; libraries were burned; philosophers were hounded into silence. The great library of Alexandria — the very symbol of human knowledge — was reduced to ashes by mobs inflamed by theology. The goddess Hypatia, the last light of Greek mathematics, was murdered by a Christian crowd under Bishop Cyril’s blessing. With her death, the night of dogma fell upon Europe.

The European soul was conquered not by sword but by scripture. When the Christian cross replaced the laurel wreath, it announced the triumph of desert monotheism over Mediterranean pluralism. A civilization that once celebrated ambiguity, multiplicity, and inquiry was shackled to a single book, a single god, a single truth. The word “heresy” entered Europe’s vocabulary, and with it came the extinction of disagreement. The ancient academies — places of dialogue and dialectic — were replaced by monasteries devoted to the memorization of dogma. Thought itself became an act of disobedience.

This was not religion in the Greek sense — not ritual, not art, not beauty. It was theology: an authoritarian system of cosmic obedience. The gods of Greece could be debated, mocked, or sculpted; the god of Abraham could only be feared. A Greek could argue with Zeus, as Prometheus did; a Christian could not argue with Yahweh without risking damnation. The difference is not between polytheism and monotheism but between imagination and intimidation. One culture saw the divine as a metaphor; the other saw it as a dictator.

The destruction of Europe’s native pantheon was not an act of conversion but of colonization. Christian missionaries destroyed altars, banned festivals, and outlawed ancestral worship. The gods of the forests — Odin, Thor, Freyja — were declared demons. The pagan tribes of Europe were forced to choose between baptism and death. Charlemagne’s Saxon wars were as much religious crusades as imperial conquests. By the tenth century, Europe was a continent of broken shrines and terrified believers. The very word “paganus,” meaning “of the countryside,” became a slur — a linguistic fossil of how Christianity equated rural wisdom with barbarism.

And yet, the spirit of Greece never fully died. It re-emerged in the Renaissance — a resurrection of reason from beneath the catacombs of theology. When Petrarch rediscovered Cicero’s letters, when Copernicus defied the Church’s cosmology, when Galileo looked through his telescope and saw a universe that did not need a biblical map, the ghost of Socrates smiled. Europe began to remember that it had once been free. The Renaissance was not a rebirth of faith but of doubt — the return of the pagan mind under Christian disguise.

The Enlightenment completed the revenge of Athens against Jerusalem. Voltaire’s satire, Spinoza’s reason, and Kant’s critique were philosophical exorcisms of Abrahamic superstition. Europe’s intellectual revolution was nothing less than the rediscovery of its pre-Abrahamic self. When Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” he was not founding modern philosophy; he was resurrecting Socratic self-awareness. When Newton found law in motion, he was continuing the Stoic search for order without revelation. When Darwin traced man’s ancestry to the ape, he delivered the final insult to the theology that claimed man was molded by divine whim. The Enlightenment was paganism reborn as science.

But the Abrahamic infection was not easily cured. Christianity had already seeped into Europe’s subconscious — moralized guilt, sexual repression, and apocalyptic thinking. Even secular ideologies like Marxism and Freudianism inherited its structure: sin and redemption, repression and release, paradise lost and paradise regained. Europe may have discarded God, but it retained the architecture of salvation. It became a godless Christianity. Nietzsche saw it clearly — that even atheism in Europe was haunted by Christ. When he declared “God is dead,” it was not triumph but diagnosis: Europe had killed God but kept his corpse.

The tragedy of Europe is that it never recovered its own pagan innocence. It is still ashamed of its gods, embarrassed by its myths, terrified of its body. The Abrahamic triad — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — imposed upon it a spiritual neurosis that centuries of science could not cure. It turned joy into guilt, pleasure into sin, freedom into heresy. And even in its secular age, Europe continues to export its moralism as human rights and humanitarian wars — a theocracy without theology.

The true liberation of Europe will begin not when it becomes post-Christian but when it becomes pre-Christian — when it reclaims the lost heritage of Dionysus and Socrates, of Athena and Prometheus. Only then will it remember that to be European once meant to question, to create, to doubt, to dance. Abrahamic religions may have conquered the continent, but they will never own its soul. For beneath the cathedrals and crusades lies an older Europe — one that still whispers through ruins, statues, and poems — the Europe that believed in thought, not revelation; in beauty, not guilt; in freedom, not faith.

The Abrahamic conquest of Europe did not end with the crucifix or the cathedral; it metastasized into empire. What began as the spiritual occupation of the Mediterranean mind became the geopolitical occupation of the planet. The same monotheistic arrogance that burned the Library of Alexandria now burned continents. When Europe’s rulers replaced Jupiter with Jehovah, they also replaced curiosity with conversion. The pagan instinct to trade was transformed into the priestly impulse to conquer. A religion that promised salvation for the soul found its secular twin in imperialism promising civilization for the savage. Both were missions of mercy performed with a sword.

The Crusades were the first global export of Europe’s internal theocracy. They were not spontaneous pilgrimages of faith but organized eruptions of monotheistic supremacy. Armies marched eastward shouting “Deus vult!” — “God wills it” — the most chilling slogan in the history of European conscience. Those campaigns slaughtered Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians alike; they also erased the last surviving Hellenic communities of the Levant. The Holy Land became a laboratory of fanaticism. Every later colonial expedition would borrow its moral grammar from the Crusades: divine mandate, moral superiority, and the myth of redeeming barbarians. The same Europe that once worshiped Pan and Poseidon now sanctified plunder as providence.

The Inquisition completed what the Crusades began. It turned Europe into an internal colony of its own faith. Spain, Portugal, and France were transformed into factories of suspicion. Thought became crime; silence became guilt. The instruments of torture — rack, wheel, stake — were the industrial machinery of theological control. When Galileo whispered “E pur si muove,” he was not defying science’s enemies but Europe’s oldest habit: obedience. The Inquisition was Europe’s self-crucifixion, the deliberate murder of its rational nerve. By the time it ended, the continent’s native gods were dust, and its philosophers had learned to think in code.

When Europe sailed out to sea, it carried not philosophy but theology disguised as destiny. Columbus did not cross the Atlantic as a geographer but as a missionary. The papal bulls that divided the New World between Spain and Portugal read like imperial editions of Genesis. Whole civilizations were condemned because they had not heard of Bethlehem. The Aztecs and Incas were slaughtered under the same logic that had once executed Socrates — for worshiping the wrong gods. The Christian cross, planted on American soil, was the final triumph of Abrahamic colonialism: the desert had conquered the jungle. Even the Enlightenment’s explorers — Cook, Livingstone, Stanley — were still crusaders of the secular kind, carrying microscopes instead of crosses but animated by the same missionary certainty that knowledge must dominate.

Islam, too, extended this theology of conquest across three continents. The Islamic caliphates were the eastern mirror of Christendom: both believed the world belonged to a single book. From the Umayyads in Spain to the Ottomans in the Balkans, the crescent advanced where the cross receded. Yet both creeds drank from the same well of revelation. They differed only in the language of their prophets. Europe’s wars with Islam were not clashes of civilizations but quarrels within the same theological family — a family that had already murdered its pagan ancestors. When the Crusaders sacked Constantinople, they destroyed Europe’s last bridge to its Greek self. When the Ottomans took the city two centuries later, they buried it under the minaret. Between them, Athens was erased twice.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the Abrahamic mind converted reason into empire. The Age of Discovery was an age of moral disaster wrapped in the vocabulary of virtue. Monotheism gave Europe a cosmic warrant to dominate; science gave it the tools. The theologian and the merchant became partners. The Church blessed the voyages; the crown funded them; the musket enforced them. Everywhere Europe went, it built cathedrals before schools. In Goa, in Mexico, in the Philippines, priests marched ahead of the soldiers, translating scripture into sovereignty. The pagan villages of Asia and Africa were subjected to the same fate as the pagan temples of Rome: demolition followed by catechism.

Even the Protestant Reformation, often hailed as Europe’s emancipation, was merely a rearrangement of the same desert furniture. Luther replaced the pope with the Bible, but he kept the logic of damnation. Calvin secularized predestination into capitalism. The Puritans who fled to America did not seek freedom — they sought a laboratory for theocracy. Salem was not an aberration but a seed. The United States would later translate Christian chosenness into Manifest Destiny. Every westward expansion was a sermon. The frontier was the new Holy Land, and the indigenous peoples the new pagans to be saved by annihilation. What Europe had done to itself, America perfected abroad.

By the nineteenth century, missionary zeal had merged with industrial power. The colonial soldier carried a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other. The rhetoric of empire — civilizing the heathen, saving the soul — was theological plagiarism. The conquest of Africa was framed as another chapter of Exodus. Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was simply Leviticus rewritten in verse. Even secular imperialists spoke with biblical cadence: progress became providence, reason became revelation, and history became salvation. The result was a world converted by force and educated in self-contempt.

Europe’s greatest sin was not colonizing others but forgetting itself. The continent that had once liberated humanity from superstition became the global evangelist of superstition in modern costume. Its missionaries and merchants destroyed the very diversity that had once made Greece and Rome immortal. The Abrahamic idea — that there is only one true god, one true book, one true way — mutated into the modern idea that there is only one correct civilization. The Enlightenment could measure planets but not its own hypocrisy. It replaced Christ with Commerce and called it progress.

Yet beneath the ruins of empires, the pagan pulse still beats. It beats in Europe’s art, where naked bodies still defy the shame of monotheism. It beats in its music, where polyphony echoes polytheism — many voices, one harmony. It beats in philosophy, every time a thinker dares to ask “Why?” without consulting a prophet. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, even socialism and existentialism are all attempts of Europe to remember its forgotten gods. They are Athens clawing its way out of Jerusalem’s shadow. Each new revolution — scientific, artistic, political — is a fragment of pagan resurrection.

But the recovery is incomplete. Europe still speaks in the vocabulary of guilt. Its modern ideologies — liberalism, nationalism, even environmentalism — often carry the same moral absolutism as the old faiths. The urge to save the planet echoes the urge to save the soul. The missionary impulse survives in humanitarian intervention and global governance. The Abrahamic virus has gone post-theological. What was once Church and Mosque has become NGO and NATO. The moral grammar is identical: the righteous West, the fallen world, the crusade of salvation by force. Theology has merely changed uniforms.

If Europe truly seeks redemption, it must reject redemption itself. It must rediscover the tragic wisdom of its ancestors — that life needs no salvation, that beauty justifies existence, that reason is sacred because it is human. The return to paganism is not a regression but a revolution: the reclamation of plurality, joy, and doubt. To de-Abrahamize the world is to re-Hellenize it — to replace dogma with dialogue, submission with curiosity, sin with responsibility. The gods of Greece were never jealous; they coexisted. That is the political theology the world needs.

The Abrahamic mind survives in Europe even after it buried its gods. Christianity may have been dethroned, but its moral architecture remains intact — invisible, unconscious, and omnipresent. The secular European believes he has escaped theology, yet he still thinks like a theologian. His categories are the same: sin and virtue, damnation and salvation, apocalypse and paradise, chosen and condemned. Only the names have changed. What was once God became History; what was once Heaven became Progress; what was once the Church became the State. Europe merely translated its theology into politics.

The Enlightenment dethroned the priest but enthroned the philosopher as a new prophet. Voltaire and Rousseau replaced Moses and Paul, yet they inherited their absolutism. Their republics were still moral churches. When Robespierre sent thousands to the guillotine in the name of Reason, he was conducting a secular Inquisition. The Jacobin altar to “Goddess Reason” was not the triumph of rationality but its parody — the same fanaticism in classical costume. The French Revolution replaced Christianity’s saints with “martyrs of liberty” and its paradise with the utopia of equality. The old sin became privilege, and the new salvation became revolution. Europe’s theology simply migrated from the pulpit to the guillotine.

Then came capitalism — Protestantism without prayer. Max Weber saw it clearly: the Reformation did not abolish the Church, it privatized it. The capitalist works not for grace but for growth, not to glorify God but to justify himself through labor. The moral ledger of the merchant replaced the confessional of the monk. “Time is money” is merely “time is salvation” rewritten for accountants. The factory became the new cathedral, the boss the new bishop, the market the new providence. The Protestant ethic secularized predestination: wealth became proof of divine favor, poverty became evidence of sin. Thus Europe moralized economics as it once moralized existence.

Communism, in turn, was Christianity’s heretical twin. Marx denounced religion as the opium of the people, but his own system replicated its structure. The proletariat replaced the chosen people, capital became the devil, revolution became the apocalypse, and the classless society became the Kingdom of Heaven. Marx, like every European visionary before him, could not think outside the moral geometry of salvation. He sought not to free man from guilt but to redistribute it. The bourgeoisie were the new sinners; the workers, the new saints. The communist catechism demanded confession, repentance, and sacrifice — in factories instead of churches. Lenin’s party discipline was monastic; Stalin’s purges were inquisitions. Atheism did not cure theology; it merely weaponized it.

Even liberalism, the gentlest of Europe’s faiths, bears the same Abrahamic DNA. It universalizes its creed, divides the world into civilized and backward, saved and unsaved. Its missionaries are diplomats, its sermons are treaties, its holy text is the Declaration of Human Rights. Liberal Europe preaches freedom but cannot tolerate difference. It tolerates only those who resemble itself — the baptized in secular language. To disagree is to blaspheme; to resist is to sin against reason. Its wars are crusades for democracy; its sanctions, instruments of penance. The liberal order is Christendom without Christ — a moral empire convinced it alone possesses truth.

Even the European conscience, that inner tribunal of guilt, is Abrahamic in origin. Paganism knew shame but not guilt. Shame was social, an awareness of failure before one’s peers; guilt is metaphysical, a disease of the soul. The Greeks erred and learned; the Christians sinned and repented. The pagan said, “I was wrong”; the Christian said, “I am evil.” Europe has never forgiven itself for existing. Its intellectuals oscillate between arrogance and self-loathing, between missionary zeal and suicidal remorse. The continent that once conquered the world now apologizes to it, yet in both gestures the same ego speaks — the ego of moral centrality.

Freud diagnosed it as repression; Nietzsche called it ressentiment. Both saw that Europe’s neurosis was theological. Freud’s superego is the secular name for the Christian God internalized; Nietzsche’s “slave morality” is the psychology of a people trained to kneel. The psychoanalyst and the philosopher were describing the same malady: the desert lodged inside the European mind. Even when Europe abandoned belief, it retained its structure of obedience. The priest became the therapist, the confessional became the clinic, sin became trauma. The moral universe remained unchanged; only the vocabulary evolved.

This is why Europe, despite its science, still speaks in the language of salvation. Climate change becomes apocalypse; technology becomes messiah; progress becomes eschatology. Every cause becomes crusade, every policy a sermon. The secular world still measures morality by suffering — the more you sacrifice, the holier you are. Pagan joy is still a sin. The medieval flagellant has become the modern activist, whipping himself with guilt for existing. Even Europe’s art, once an affirmation of beauty, often collapses into despair. The crucifixion still haunts its imagination — the belief that pain purifies, that pleasure corrupts.

What Europe calls “postmodernism” is merely the fatigue of faith. Having lost belief in universal truth, it now worships its fragments. It deconstructs everything except its own moral instinct to deconstruct. It calls this humility, but it is exhaustion. After centuries of theological absolutism, Europe has become allergic to conviction. It confuses doubt with depth, irony with wisdom, relativism with peace. Yet beneath that skepticism still beats the old monotheistic heart — the need to be right, even when denying the very idea of rightness. The desert never left; it merely put on academic robes.

Meanwhile, the pagan impulse that once made Europe luminous — its courage to affirm life without redemption — survives only in underground forms. In Nietzsche’s affirmation of the body, in Camus’s revolt against absurdity, in the atheist humanism of Russell and Sartre, we see brief flashes of Athens remembered. These thinkers are not heirs of Jerusalem but rebels against it. They stand in the lineage of Prometheus, not Paul. Each tried to re-ignite Europe’s extinguished flame — the flame that says existence itself is holy, not because God made it, but because man can understand it.

The tragedy is that Europe cannot forgive itself for knowledge. It still seeks to atone for reason, as if enlightenment were betrayal. It builds cathedrals to science but fills them with moral sermons. It teaches evolution but behaves as though humanity were fallen. It legislates equality but dreams of purity. It abolishes God but cannot stop searching for him in history, ideology, or identity. The European soul still kneels, even when it imagines itself standing.

The task of our century is therefore not to modernize Europe but to de-theologize it — to separate reason from revelation once and for all. Europe must remember that it once had gods who were metaphors, not masters; philosophers who questioned, not commanded; and citizens who lived without divine surveillance. The rebirth of reason will come not from the Church, the State, or the Academy, but from the rediscovery of that older inheritance: the right to think without fear.

The redemption of Europe lies not in the next ideology but in the recovery of memory. The continent’s future depends on its ability to recall what it was before the desert crossed the Mediterranean. The gods of Olympus were not superstitions to be mocked but metaphors for the powers of mind and nature that Europe once revered. Zeus symbolized cosmic order, Athena the intelligence of reason, Apollo the discipline of clarity, Dionysus the ecstasy of existence. These were not doctrines but dimensions of being. They taught that divinity is plural, that truth has tones, that morality is aesthetic before it is ethical. In killing those gods, Europe killed its own imagination.

Paganism was not ignorance; it was the first enlightenment. The Greeks did not fear the world; they questioned it. Their philosophy was empirical before science, logical before laboratories. They separated myth from mathematics, poetry from physics, and still found them harmonious. The pre-Socratic thinkers — Thales, Heraclitus, Democritus — spoke the first language of rational wonder. They believed nature was intelligible, not enchanted; lawful, not arbitrary. To return to them is not to regress into idol worship but to rediscover the roots of scientific humanism. The modern physicist is closer to the ancient pagan than to the medieval priest.

The Renaissance sensed this truth instinctively. When Botticelli painted Venus, when Michelangelo sculpted David, when Leonardo drew the proportions of man, Europe briefly remembered its forgotten creed: that beauty and reason are the same. Art was not decoration; it was theology liberated from fear. Humanism was not the rejection of God but the affirmation of man. The Renaissance was Athens rising from the tomb of Jerusalem — a civilization daring to see divinity in the human form. But the Counter-Reformation struck back, and the old guilt returned in new costumes. The Enlightenment continued the rebellion intellectually, yet even it could not fully de-theologize morality.

To complete what the Enlightenment began, Europe must re-Hellenize itself. It must replace salvation with understanding, revelation with investigation, faith with evidence. The true temple of the future is the laboratory; its priests are scientists, its scriptures are equations, its rituals are experiments. But this science must learn from art the reverence for wonder and from philosophy the discipline of doubt. A Europe that worships only data without meaning will remain half-Christian — still searching for redemption through progress. The pagan scientist studies the cosmos not to dominate it but to participate in its harmony. That is the difference between curiosity and conquest.

A new European humanism must therefore begin with pluralism — metaphysical, moral, and cultural. The Abrahamic mind cannot tolerate multiplicity; it must always divide the world into saved and damned. The pagan mind delights in contradiction because it knows that truth, like light, is refracted through many lenses. The Greeks invented dialectic to test ideas, not to exterminate them. The Socratic method is the political theology of freedom — dialogue as divinity. To be truly European again is to believe that the argument itself is sacred.

This pluralism extends beyond gods to ethics. Pagan morality was situational, not absolute. It judged actions by context, not commandments. Odysseus was not condemned for cunning; he was admired for it. Achilles was not damned for pride; he was tragic for it. Morality was aesthetic — measured by proportion, not obedience. The Abrahamic system replaced proportion with prohibition. It taught Europe to hate its own instincts, to divide the body from the soul, the world from the divine. A restored pagan humanism would heal this fracture. It would teach that virtue is balance, not submission — that moderation, not mortification, is the highest good.

Philosophically, this revival must blend three strands: the logical empiricism of modern science, the dialectical realism of Marx, and the aesthetic humanism of Greece. The first gives it method; the second gives it morality; the third gives it meaning. This trinity — reason, justice, beauty — can replace the Abrahamic trinity of faith, obedience, and salvation. It unites Socrates’ question, “What is the good life?”, with Marx’s demand, “How shall man liberate himself?”, and with Einstein’s wonder, “Why does the universe make sense at all?” That synthesis is the Europe that could have been — and must yet become.

Politically, this rebirth requires decolonization of the mind. Europe must admit that Christianity was its first colonizer, and that its later empires were merely extensions of that colonization. The habit of exporting salvation — whether through crusades or corporations — arises from theological conditioning. The cure is humility, not guilt: the recognition that no civilization has a monopoly on truth. The dialogue between Europe, India, China, and the secular world is not a clash of cultures but the resurrection of polytheism in thought. Europe can regain its soul only by learning to coexist intellectually, as its gods once did mythologically.

Culturally, Europe must cease apologizing for its pagan ancestry. The myths of Greece and Rome are not embarrassing relics but living metaphors for freedom. To teach Homer, Euripides, and Lucretius is not antiquarianism but therapy. Their stories remind humanity that divinity once had a human face and reason once had a moral heart. The task of modern Europe is to restore philosophy to the place once held by theology — to make education again the art of liberation, not indoctrination. Universities must become academies of dialogue, not bureaucracies of belief.

Theologically, Europe must have the courage to pronounce its own emancipation. The true “death of God,” as Nietzsche foresaw, was not a tragedy but an opportunity — the chance to live without metaphysical blackmail. A world without divine surveillance is a world of moral maturity. The gods are dead; long live responsibility. The pagan humanist does not need heaven to be good or hell to be just. He acts ethically because he understands causality, not because he fears punishment. This is the moral adulthood that monotheism prevented and science can restore.

Spiritually, Europe must rediscover celebration. Pagan festivals were not distractions; they were expressions of gratitude to existence itself. Dance, music, wine, and poetry were sacraments of joy, not sins of flesh. A civilization that can no longer celebrate will always seek salvation. To feast without guilt, to love without shame, to think without fear — that is the true resurrection. When a continent once again sees beauty as holiness, it will have no need for redemption.

Europe’s second renaissance will not come from popes, parliaments, or philosophers, but from a cultural revolution of reason and joy. It will arise from artists who paint again without theology, from scientists who inquire without arrogance, from citizens who debate without dogma. It will not demand belief but participation — the pagan ideal of belonging to a cosmos of laws, not decrees. Then, at last, Socrates will be avenged, Hypatia will be vindicated, and the gods of Europe will rise — not as idols, but as ideas.

The Abrahamic religions may have murdered ancient Greece and Rome, but they cannot kill eternity. For reason is immortal. It dies only in fear, and fear cannot live where thought is free. The deserts may have conquered Europe’s cathedrals, but they will never conquer its mind. Beneath every stone column of Athens and every ruined temple of Delphi still beats the first heartbeat of humanity’s freedom — the heartbeat of thought itself.

Citations

Plato, Apology; Xenophon, Memorabilia — Socrates’ trial and philosophical defiance of piety.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. XV–XXVII — Christianization and destruction of pagan institutions.
Hypatia’s death: John of Nikiu, Chronicle, ch. LXXXIV; Edward Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (2017).
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) and Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).
Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship (1903).
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).