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2006-10-19 21:54:32 · 6 answers · asked by dell 1 in Arts & Humanities History

6 answers

The problem here is that there is a popular idea about "the Dark Ages" and of the role of Christianity before and after it that simply does not fit the facts. In fact, most historians would prefer not even to use the TERM "Dark Ages" anymore, because of the way it misleads.

The point is this -- the Church did NOT take people backwards --it preserved much and added to it. And intellectual and scientific advances of the modern era were NOT a result of somehow 'escaping' Christianity and the Church, but were themselves the fruit of Christian faith.

I used to accept much of this popular view until, like Chesterton and others below, I started to actually READ the history!

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So, here is a collection of observations about these matters, which I hope will help (follow their links for more details):

"Medievalists have been at (largely unsuccessful) pains to convince their students that the "Dark Ages" is a misnomer, that the centuries between 500 and 1500 saw not only the birth of Europe but the beginnings of parliamentary democracy, romantic affection, universities, and even the discovery of the individual as a complex, internally contradictory agent in uneasy relation to society."
Paul H. Freedman
Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/chart.htm


"There were no "Dark Ages". It was a pejorative term invented through ignorance"

"Dark Ages. the early medieval period of western European history. Specifically, the term refers to the time (476-800) when there was no Roman (or Holy Roman) emperor in the West; or, more generally, to the period between about 500 and 1000, which was marked by frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life. It is now rarely used by historians because of the value judgment it implies. Though sometimes taken to derive its meaning from the fact that little was then known about the period, the term's more usual and pejorative sense is of a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity."
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,29246+1,00.html


As Chesterton points out, the so called "dark ages" were caused by the vacuum left by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and it was Christianity which preserved learning and brought the world out of it:

"I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the dark ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the dark ages, was the one path across the dark ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilisations. If anyone says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. . . . the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. she took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."
(Chesterton G.K., "Orthodoxy", 1961, reprint, p.146)
http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/200005/0133.html


"In fact, although scientists at times have been persecuted, the scholastic tradition and modern science were a direct result of the Roman Catholic Church. In the "dark" ages, the church (and especially its belief system about progress and learning the details of God's works) created the first Universities, the concept of academic freedom (even to the extent that scholars could travel through hostile lands safely) and science itself. This is well documented (it started around 1100 AD) but very few people know it - including academics.

"It is popular history that science was either Greek in origin, or from the Enlightenment (or perhaps from the Arabs). That, however, ignores the facts, just as "the dark ages" is a misnomer. The rise of science (not just observations) in Europe but nowhere else is not an accident - the causative factors were the Catholic belief system, the church's ability to set up institutions, and the monastic system which gave many scholars the time and place to do their work, not to mention providing other folks to write and duplicate work before the age of the printing press." -John Moore
http://gmroper.mu.nu/archives/169558.php


"I must disagree with your statement that Christianity set Europe back for centuries. First of all, Rome fell due to several things, among them a weakening political system, a far flung economy they could no longer control, and extensive and increasing pressure from "barbarians." Their knowledge and texts were preserved by Arabs and by Christian convents and monasteries. The title "Dark Ages" is generally agreed upon as being a misnomer and is no longer used in academic discussion. Rather with Europe in comparative political chaos, learning and knowledge took rather different directions. In Europe academic progress now continued out of the limelight and in secluded places. These institutions for learning (convents/monasteries) eventually served as the model for what would become colleges and universities. They also produced minds like Hroswitha, Hildegard von Bingham, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. "
http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=786&start=50&

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And here's a clip from a larger overview from the article "False Conflict" by Rodney Stark:

"As a result of the military defeat of Rome, the political and cultural center of Europe shifted northward. It is this shift that was interpreted as a cultural and intellectual decline by those who, many centuries later, equated civilization with the writings of a tiny group of Greco-Roman intellectuals. To this earlier generation of scholars, enlightenment was to be found only in books and abstract ideas, certainly not in machines or in farming practices. As French historian Jean Gimpel has put it, the “scorn of men of letters for engineers throughout history has kept them, all too often, oblivious to the technology created by those engineers.”

"Whatever their differences from the leaders of classical Greece and Rome, Europe’s leading scholars of, say, the eighth century were no “barbarians.” Certainly not morally: Both Plato and Aristotle owned slaves, while “Dark Age” Europeans rejected slavery. Nor in terms of technology: The Medieval period, says Gimpel, was “one of the great inventive eras of mankind,” as machinery was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”

Within just the last generation there has come a flood of books establishing that long before the end of the Middle Ages, before any “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment,” or “Scientific Revolution,” Europe’s technology advanced far beyond anything achieved by the ancients: effective waterwheels, mills, camshafts, mechanical clocks, the compass, and so on. . . .

"Far from Christianity plunging Europe into an era of ignorance and backwardness, so much technical progress took place during this era that by no later than the thirteenth century, European technology surpassed anything to be found elsewhere in the world. This did not occur because of the “rediscovery” of classical knowledge. There is no more misleading account of Western civilization than the one that starts with classical culture and proceeds directly to the “Renaissance,” dismissing the millennium in between as an unfortunate and irrelevant interlude. Western civilization is not the direct descendant of Greco-Roman culture. It is the product of centuries of interaction between the cultures of the Germanic “barbarians” who superceded the Romans (who had far more sophisticated cultures than had been acknow-ledged) and Christianity. The subsequent addition of Greco-Roman learning was more decorative than fundamental.

"The progress achieved during the “Dark Ages” was not merely technological. Medieval Europe excelled in philosophy and science. The term “Scientific Revolution” is in many ways as misleading as “Dark Ages.” Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a “Scientific Revolution” has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible."
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17713/article_detail.asp

2006-10-20 15:50:37 · answer #1 · answered by bruhaha 7 · 0 1

The "dark" ages was actually a stand still in lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general. It hardly had anything to do with Christianity at all. So, if it survived the first "dark" age it can certainly survive another one. =)

2016-05-22 04:39:17 · answer #2 · answered by ? 4 · 0 0

"Survive"! Christianity thrived during the Dark Ages. They converted new peoples up north and east, like the Vikings. They even conquered the Holy Land (1099) and held it for nearly a century.

2006-10-20 07:52:27 · answer #3 · answered by dyauspiter 3 · 1 0

Christianity CAUSED the Dark Ages.

2006-10-19 21:59:22 · answer #4 · answered by lindavankerkhof 3 · 1 5

There was no organised attack on it. The Church appeared to be a permanent and valuable international organisation, it was not generally seen to be playing politics (although it probably was), and its rituals and beliefs helped to keep the masses fairly contented and not agitating to change their status in life, so why should anybody want to rock the boat?

2006-10-20 04:53:43 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 1 1

Christianity "survived" by exterminating Jews and other "heretics" who made Christians "uncomfortable."
.

2006-10-22 17:34:48 · answer #6 · answered by Hatikvah 7 · 1 3

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