John Granger writes

A Heretical (Orthodox) History of the Parthenon

The goofy thing about classicists (to include too many Greeks and Italians, alas) is that, as children of the ‘Enlightenment,’ they forget the real glory of Greece was Christian Byzantium, not the childish and provincial poleis fighting in antiquity on the peninsula.

A great ‘for instance’ of this bizarre blindness is the building atop the Acropolis in Athens. It wasn’t a big deal in ancient times when its use was various and uncertain year to year but became a place of pilgrimage and. renown in the millennium that it was an Orthodox Church devoted to the Mother of God.

Really. This piece by a professor at Ohio State goes a long way to correcting the ‘simian’ or Gibbon perspective on this.

One of the many bitter fruits of the Endarkenment was the tendency to skip over the Age of Christian Europe as the “middle ages”. That meant, the “age between pagan Europe when things were cool, and now, when things are again becoming cool by becoming less Christian”. That prejudice remains with us today, which is why nobody thinks of the Parthenon as a great Christian Church or considers the possibility that there is anything interesting about the Greeks after Pericles. The snow job of the Endarkenment was extremely effective.