Many people in certain spheres of the internet world seem to think that Christianity was the destroyer of classical antiquity. And it is not just limited to a few internet circles. You can probably find this attitude in popular discourse and opinion, too. This article will hopefully convince you (or maybe not) that this is a very incoherent view, when you take into account the entire picture.
Christianity was, as a matter of fact, the great preserver of antiquity, with its knowledge, philosophy and literature. Christian monks and scribes kept on preserving Homer, the works of Greco-Roman philosophers and of course, the Latin Language, the very language of the Romans. They kept the literary tradition going in a new and christianized form, and kept transmitting the writings from their generation to the next. The Christian monks and scribes did not preserve everything, though. They did like most people, and copied what they liked and cast aside what they didn’t. This was of course influenced by their Christian religion.
Likewise, many Christian Nations looked towards Rome as the model to emulate. Almost seeing it as “The Divine Empire”, treating it as an almost sacred political ideal. We can see in Charlemagne, and many medieval German emperors, crowning themselves or being crowned Roman Emperor. Many European Christians and Christian nations had trouble connecting themselves to the ancients themselves, so they thus tried to connect themselves to antiquity by simply claiming, just like Rome, that they were descendants of the Trojans.
Another point we can touch on is the preservation of antique philosophy in Christianity, Integrating and adapting ancient philosophical schools into Christianity. This includes, but is not limited to, Neoplatonism and Aristotle, both of which have heavily influenced Christian thinking throughout the centuries. Neoplatonism is particularly obvious in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the medieval scholastics relied heavily on Aristotelianism.
But did the Christians destroy temples, statues & art? Yes. This is undeniable. And I think this was indeed a great tragedy. But destroying temples, statues & art is not the same as destroying the civilization itself. The decline of traditional Greco-Roman paganism did not mean the disappearance of Roman literature, philosophy, language, or political ideals. Much of this inheritance survived within the very Christian societies that had abandoned the old gods. Christian scholars continued to read ancient philosophers, Christian scribes copied ancient texts, and medieval rulers continued to look to Rome as a model of government.
What really destroyed the classical world was not Constantine’s conversion, nor was it his successors’ enforcement of the new state faith, but rather the fall of Rome itself, and the invasions of the mostly germanic barbarians, who then setup successor states in the former territories of the Empire, which then slowly, but surely, transitioned to the medieval world we all know and (hopefully) love. Of course, this was not the case in the east, where the Roman Empire survived up until 1453.