To summarize, Western history consists of four major eras:
(1) classical antiquity,
(2) then the Dark Ages when the Church dominated, followed by
(3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment that led the way to
(4) modern times.
For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,11 despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”12 It is appropriate to use the term “Renaissance” to identify a particular period in the arts when there was renewed interest in classical styles and to distinguish this period from the Gothic or the Baroque. But it is inappropriate to apply this term to identify the rebirth of intellectual progress following the Dark Ages because there never were any Dark Ages.
Even the respectable encyclopedias now define the Dark Ages as a myth. The Columbia Encyclopedia rejects the term, noting that “medieval civilization is no longer thought to have been so dim.” Britannica disdains the term Dark Ages as “pejorative.” And Wikipedia defines the Dark Ages as “a supposed period of intellectual darkness after the fall of Rome.” As for the recovery of classical learning, to the extent it ever was lost, Church scholars accomplished the recovery long before the Renaissance.
And if one wishes to identify an Age of Reason, it must be redated to have begun very early in the Christian era, for the Western faith in reason originated in Christian theology. To assume that the sacking of the city of Rome in 410 by Alaric and his Gothic forces caused “the whole world to perish,” as Saint Jerome (347–420) lamented, is to assume that the only civilized people of that time lived in the city itself. But of course, true Romans lived all over the empire, and they didn’t suddenly become ignorant when the city fell. Indeed, at the time, Rome was not even still the capital of the empire; the emperor had moved to Ravenna. The fall of the city was, no doubt, of immense symbolic importance, but symbols should not be mistaken for reality.
Of even greater importance, the Goths who conquered Rome were not barbarians, regardless of what the Romans called them. Alaric had served as a commander in the Roman army, and the majority of his troops were Roman army veterans. By the same token, the “barbarian north” had long since been fully “Romanized” and sustained sophisticated manufacturing centers with active trade routes even to the Far East. For example, as early at 250 CE, the island city of Helgö near Stockholm, Sweden, was a flourishing industrial center turning out “large quantities of iron tools and weapons, bronze jewelry, gold ornaments, and other products … [including] locks and keys … [and] glass beads.”
Coins found at the site of Helgö show it was involved in a vast trade network, and so does the finding of a “bronze Buddha figure made in India.”13 Nor was Helgö an anomaly: there were numerous industrial centers like it all over northern Europe, home of the supposed barbarians. Incredibly, not only was there no “fall” into “Dark Ages,” this was “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known” as the French historian Jean Gimpel put it.
14 In fact, it was during the "Dark Ages" that Europe took the great technological leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.15 How could historians have so misrepresented things? In part, the notion that Europe fell into the “Dark Ages” was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time. In addition, during this era, only limited attention was paid to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and that too was taken as proof of widespread ignorance.
Another component contributing to the myth of the Dark Ages was that in this era there were no longer large cities having hundreds of thousands of residents, as had ancient Rome and Alexandria.16 It seemed obvious that high culture could not have been sustained in the small communities of medieval Europe—in the year 1000 there were only 20,000 inhabitants in Paris, not many more in London, and Rome had shrunk to fewer than 30,000.17 But perhaps the most important factor in the myth of the Dark Ages was the inability of intellectuals to value or even to notice the nuts and bolts of real life. Hence, revolutions in agriculture, weaponry and warfare, nonhuman power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce went unappreciated.
So too did remarkable moral progress. For example, at the fall of Rome there was slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the Renaissance it was long gone. But what is truly difficult to explain is how the creators of the Dark Ages myth could have overlooked what would seem to have been their chief interest: high culture. Nevertheless, they missed or dismissed the enormous progress that took place in music, art, literature, education, and science. I have written at length in How the West Won (2014) on what truly took place during the mythical era of the Dark Ages. Here a summary will suffice.
Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (pp. 75-77). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.
(1) classical antiquity,
(2) then the Dark Ages when the Church dominated, followed by
(3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment that led the way to
(4) modern times.
For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,11 despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”12 It is appropriate to use the term “Renaissance” to identify a particular period in the arts when there was renewed interest in classical styles and to distinguish this period from the Gothic or the Baroque. But it is inappropriate to apply this term to identify the rebirth of intellectual progress following the Dark Ages because there never were any Dark Ages.
Even the respectable encyclopedias now define the Dark Ages as a myth. The Columbia Encyclopedia rejects the term, noting that “medieval civilization is no longer thought to have been so dim.” Britannica disdains the term Dark Ages as “pejorative.” And Wikipedia defines the Dark Ages as “a supposed period of intellectual darkness after the fall of Rome.” As for the recovery of classical learning, to the extent it ever was lost, Church scholars accomplished the recovery long before the Renaissance.
And if one wishes to identify an Age of Reason, it must be redated to have begun very early in the Christian era, for the Western faith in reason originated in Christian theology. To assume that the sacking of the city of Rome in 410 by Alaric and his Gothic forces caused “the whole world to perish,” as Saint Jerome (347–420) lamented, is to assume that the only civilized people of that time lived in the city itself. But of course, true Romans lived all over the empire, and they didn’t suddenly become ignorant when the city fell. Indeed, at the time, Rome was not even still the capital of the empire; the emperor had moved to Ravenna. The fall of the city was, no doubt, of immense symbolic importance, but symbols should not be mistaken for reality.
Of even greater importance, the Goths who conquered Rome were not barbarians, regardless of what the Romans called them. Alaric had served as a commander in the Roman army, and the majority of his troops were Roman army veterans. By the same token, the “barbarian north” had long since been fully “Romanized” and sustained sophisticated manufacturing centers with active trade routes even to the Far East. For example, as early at 250 CE, the island city of Helgö near Stockholm, Sweden, was a flourishing industrial center turning out “large quantities of iron tools and weapons, bronze jewelry, gold ornaments, and other products … [including] locks and keys … [and] glass beads.”
Coins found at the site of Helgö show it was involved in a vast trade network, and so does the finding of a “bronze Buddha figure made in India.”13 Nor was Helgö an anomaly: there were numerous industrial centers like it all over northern Europe, home of the supposed barbarians. Incredibly, not only was there no “fall” into “Dark Ages,” this was “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known” as the French historian Jean Gimpel put it.
14 In fact, it was during the "Dark Ages" that Europe took the great technological leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.15 How could historians have so misrepresented things? In part, the notion that Europe fell into the “Dark Ages” was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time. In addition, during this era, only limited attention was paid to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and that too was taken as proof of widespread ignorance.
Another component contributing to the myth of the Dark Ages was that in this era there were no longer large cities having hundreds of thousands of residents, as had ancient Rome and Alexandria.16 It seemed obvious that high culture could not have been sustained in the small communities of medieval Europe—in the year 1000 there were only 20,000 inhabitants in Paris, not many more in London, and Rome had shrunk to fewer than 30,000.17 But perhaps the most important factor in the myth of the Dark Ages was the inability of intellectuals to value or even to notice the nuts and bolts of real life. Hence, revolutions in agriculture, weaponry and warfare, nonhuman power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce went unappreciated.
So too did remarkable moral progress. For example, at the fall of Rome there was slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the Renaissance it was long gone. But what is truly difficult to explain is how the creators of the Dark Ages myth could have overlooked what would seem to have been their chief interest: high culture. Nevertheless, they missed or dismissed the enormous progress that took place in music, art, literature, education, and science. I have written at length in How the West Won (2014) on what truly took place during the mythical era of the Dark Ages. Here a summary will suffice.
Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (pp. 75-77). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.
