Scriptorium Daily
When religion, especially Christianity, was dominant didn’t we live in a Dark Age?
Americans are not very good at history. We are a young country where Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary was marked as an historical event. Safe to say, many of my students’ main ideas about the Middle Ages are like those in Monty Python’s classic movie, Search for the Holy Grail.
What is the secular myth of the Medieval?
As Christianity spread, culture and civilization declined from the secular glories of Greece and Rome to a dark age dominated by priestcraft and superstition. This is the story that secularists tell themselves, but it is false.
Christians did not gain control in Rome until the libertine and spendthrift leadership class had bankrupted the Western Empire morally and financially. In the East, where financially and culturally, the Empire was strongest and where the Christian emperors were most often found, the Empire gained one thousand years of civilization and glory by adopting Christianity. In the West, non-Christian barbarians and semi-Christian heretics destroyed the Empire, which was a shell of its former glory in any case.
Popes, bishops, and missionaries began the hard work of restoring civilization in the West. Monasteries saved what they could and founded the colleges and universities that provided the intellectual space for the birth of the modern world.
This was hard work with many defeats and false starts. Human sin destroyed many promising starts, but the Middle Ages were a time of recovery and development that by the end of the thousand years had surpassed the Romans. Dante, Aquinas, and the universities of Italy, France, and England were ready for even greater things.
Despite constant pressure from Islam, the Eastern Christian Roman Empire (commonly called the Byzantine) maintained a strong educational system and rich cultural heritage. From the great cathedral of the Church of the Holy Wisdom to the marvelous art of the iconographers, it enriched human civilization. Byzantium preserved Hellenistic learning, including the best of paganism, from the ravages of the barbarians. Even at the very end of the Byzantine Empire, when it was tiny and under siege by Moslems, it was educating the Western world and doing interesting intellectual work.
When Constantinople, the great city of Byzantium, fell, the scholars of Byzantium fled with their texts to Christian Italy. There the combination of Eastern and Western Christian learning helped produce the “Renaissance.”
These centuries were not Utopia, especially from a Christian perspective. They were the early stages in the development of Christian civilization. The people living in them did the hard work that developed the basic ideas that allowed for modern science, from physics to physicians to exist, but this was hard labor. They made mistakes along the way. Some of those mistakes had some justification, like the Crusades, and others produced some good, like the Inquisition which helped shape international law, but they were still errors.
The sadistic inquisitor and the greedy and brutal crusader were real. They were great hypocrites, doing evil in the name of the religion of love. Pointing out these moral lepers is perhaps the most effective attack secularists make, but it also demonstrates the success of Christianity in producing civilization.
Hypocrisy is a disease of morality and of success. The only movement that does not attract hypocrites is a failure. Hypocrites are drawn to the great things, because they use them for their own ends. Christians themselves, from the time of the New Testament to the writings of Chaucer, exposed such hypocrites when they could. Perversely the very success of moral men tempts the immoral to try to gain the benefits of virtue without the work. (more)
