Anachronous Rex
New Member
I wasn't sure if I should put this here or in Religion and Irreligion, if I guessed wrong then I invite any mod to correct me.
This is partially a response to a post by Pennies for Thoughts, but mostly just intended for general discussion:
Now I had remarked that Pennies' treatment of the so-called "dark ages" made my historian brain cry. Perhaps I should have done this before, but I will now elaborate on this point. For those of you not interested in my long angry rant on the subject skip to either bolded section below.
First of all, let me state that while I am only a sort of pseudo-medievalist, I am quite familiar with many professional medievalists, nearly all of whom hate the term with a passion and typically don't use it. Simply put, this time period is hopelessly misunderstood. Further, almost everything associated with the "dark ages" is anachronistic; being almost exclusively high-medieval. It is often depicted as being the hight of Christian power when in truth the exact opposite was true. Without the Roman Empire to prop up the Church it was left with little actual power, and exceedingly vulnerable to the advance of Islam. Europe was nowhere near as Christian as is often depicted. It is also depicted as a time of superstition, inquisition, and which hunts, and while the former is almost certainly true (to the extent it is true of any primitive society), the latter two are actually far more pronounced in the High to Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (I highly recommend R. I. Moore's Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250), and which-hunting specifically was actually yet more pronounced in the run up to the Enlightenment then any time previous.
Moreover, I could not for the life of me account for Pennies' dates: 325-1425? Admittedly the term itself is somewhat arbitrary, but the man who coined it, Francesco Petrarca (you may have heard of him), set the start-date at the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not 325; almost no historian I know of would ever push the term beyond the High Middle Ages, and most Medievalists think it should stop at or before the 12th Century.
Hence why the term makes me cry, however I then revived the following, confusing, reply:
"Icks-nay, Bible-thumper Rex. Roman Catholic suppression of free thought, the Dark Ages, began with the Council of Nicaea in 325 and lasted until about the time Europeans began figuring out that the Sun didn't go around the Earth."
Now to call me a "bible-thumper" is nothing more then criminally ignorant, and can be safely disregarded. Likewise the dates seem to be, again, arbitrary, and I will pay them no heed. However, the rest of it actually plays to a point that I think ought to be discussed.
Can we blame the decline of European civilization, and corresponding brain-drain, from the fall of the Roman Empire to somewhere around the 12th Century on Christianity?
The more I think about it the only answer I can come to is 'no.' You might argue (and perhaps I would agree) that Christianity may have contributed to Rome's fall, but it did not cause it. Christianity did not cause the Plague of Justinian, it did not cause widespread starvation (well, aside from the ascetic movement
), it did not depopulate the western Med, and it did not cause the Empire's intellectual infrastructure to collapse.
If it did anything to damage knowledge in these years, it is in that it selectively preserved. Plato was more-or-less maintained, Aristotle was not; to this we can assign some blame, but not too much. Vellum was not cheep, and transcribing not easy; many works owe their continued existence exclusively to fact that the Catholic Church saw fit to preserve them. There was no other faction in Europe with the means or disposition to do so, to this end we actually own the Monastic movement our thanks.
Now if you want to claim that Christianity was an impediment to Europe's intellectual recovery, you have my full support. Superstition is always like this. And if you were to argue that Christianity in the 12th and 13th Centuries was especially violent and intolerant, you have my support there too. Everyone gets their turn at bat it seems. But let us not overplay our hand. We want to be taken seriously after all, the evidence against religion is damning enough as it is, we don't need to exaggerate it. You see theists pulling this sort of thing all the time, watch how well it works for them. Exaggeration does not help any position, to do so only exposes it to needless risk and easy debunking.
Thoughts? Rebuttals? Offers to attend an orgy of hedonistic debauchery?
This is partially a response to a post by Pennies for Thoughts, but mostly just intended for general discussion:
Now I had remarked that Pennies' treatment of the so-called "dark ages" made my historian brain cry. Perhaps I should have done this before, but I will now elaborate on this point. For those of you not interested in my long angry rant on the subject skip to either bolded section below.
First of all, let me state that while I am only a sort of pseudo-medievalist, I am quite familiar with many professional medievalists, nearly all of whom hate the term with a passion and typically don't use it. Simply put, this time period is hopelessly misunderstood. Further, almost everything associated with the "dark ages" is anachronistic; being almost exclusively high-medieval. It is often depicted as being the hight of Christian power when in truth the exact opposite was true. Without the Roman Empire to prop up the Church it was left with little actual power, and exceedingly vulnerable to the advance of Islam. Europe was nowhere near as Christian as is often depicted. It is also depicted as a time of superstition, inquisition, and which hunts, and while the former is almost certainly true (to the extent it is true of any primitive society), the latter two are actually far more pronounced in the High to Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (I highly recommend R. I. Moore's Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250), and which-hunting specifically was actually yet more pronounced in the run up to the Enlightenment then any time previous.
Moreover, I could not for the life of me account for Pennies' dates: 325-1425? Admittedly the term itself is somewhat arbitrary, but the man who coined it, Francesco Petrarca (you may have heard of him), set the start-date at the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not 325; almost no historian I know of would ever push the term beyond the High Middle Ages, and most Medievalists think it should stop at or before the 12th Century.
Hence why the term makes me cry, however I then revived the following, confusing, reply:
"Icks-nay, Bible-thumper Rex. Roman Catholic suppression of free thought, the Dark Ages, began with the Council of Nicaea in 325 and lasted until about the time Europeans began figuring out that the Sun didn't go around the Earth."
Now to call me a "bible-thumper" is nothing more then criminally ignorant, and can be safely disregarded. Likewise the dates seem to be, again, arbitrary, and I will pay them no heed. However, the rest of it actually plays to a point that I think ought to be discussed.
Can we blame the decline of European civilization, and corresponding brain-drain, from the fall of the Roman Empire to somewhere around the 12th Century on Christianity?
The more I think about it the only answer I can come to is 'no.' You might argue (and perhaps I would agree) that Christianity may have contributed to Rome's fall, but it did not cause it. Christianity did not cause the Plague of Justinian, it did not cause widespread starvation (well, aside from the ascetic movement
), it did not depopulate the western Med, and it did not cause the Empire's intellectual infrastructure to collapse.If it did anything to damage knowledge in these years, it is in that it selectively preserved. Plato was more-or-less maintained, Aristotle was not; to this we can assign some blame, but not too much. Vellum was not cheep, and transcribing not easy; many works owe their continued existence exclusively to fact that the Catholic Church saw fit to preserve them. There was no other faction in Europe with the means or disposition to do so, to this end we actually own the Monastic movement our thanks.
Now if you want to claim that Christianity was an impediment to Europe's intellectual recovery, you have my full support. Superstition is always like this. And if you were to argue that Christianity in the 12th and 13th Centuries was especially violent and intolerant, you have my support there too. Everyone gets their turn at bat it seems. But let us not overplay our hand. We want to be taken seriously after all, the evidence against religion is damning enough as it is, we don't need to exaggerate it. You see theists pulling this sort of thing all the time, watch how well it works for them. Exaggeration does not help any position, to do so only exposes it to needless risk and easy debunking.
Thoughts? Rebuttals? Offers to attend an orgy of hedonistic debauchery?
