The Dark Ages Myth

[Quid est Veritas?]

Furthermore, just as a group of eighteenth-century philosophers invented the notion of the Dark Ages to discredit Christianity, they labeled their own era the Enlightenment on grounds that religious darkness had finally been dispelled by secular humanism.

This isn't true. As stated before, Petrarch coined the term Dark Ages for his own times and it is therefore a Mediaeval term itself, although one of opprobrium.
The Enlightenment was so named after the fact as well by French historians, perhaps under the influence of the former term though.

I never said that Europe abolished slavery by law, but the Church did abolish slavery by its own actions.

No it did not. It encouraged freeing Christian slaves, but it did not require it nor had a problem with the institution. Hence Crusaders held slaves in Outremer and slaves were taken from the pagan Balts before their conversion.
Slavery disappeared because serfdom was cheaper and easier to maintain.

Part of the reason for the health, population, and life expectancy problem in Europe was the decimation of society in general by the Plagues. Quite honestly, to this day, there is no cure for anyone contracting the plague, though they may live a longer life than those in those times.

Um ... no. Plague was caused by Yersinia Pestis bacterium. It can be cured with a course of fluroquinolones or aminoglycoside antibiotics. Streptomycin may need to be added in resistant cases. This is for both Pneumonic and Bubonic variants.

The Romans had many plagues themselves, such as the two devastating Antonine plagues and the plague during Claudius Gothicus's reign.
The reasons for the health and life expectancy differences are that the Romans had better hygiene (Public Baths), clean water (Aquaducts and public fountains), Sanitation (Sewer systems and public latrines), better diet (public doles and starvation relief) and better medicine (Galenic and Hippocratic medical traditions).
These are largely absent in the Middle Ages which had lost much medical knowledge and threw chamberpots out the window into furries cut next to the street. Clean water was usually the nearest well or river where such sewage could easily end up. Subsequently rats and disease were more rampant anyway. The medical tradition picked up in the late period though, but again we are shading into the Renaissance. They did not have proper famine relief systems in place in case of poor harvests as well, as this depends more on the local lord while Rome controlled it more centrally.

The myth of the Renaissance is that it proposes that Europe was saved from ignorance when intellectuals in various northern-Italian city-states broke free from Church control to allow a rebirth of classical knowledge. If that were true, it would have created an era of cultural decline since Christian Europe had surpassed classical antiquity in many ways. Unfortunately, the creators of the Renaissance myth had no knowledge of the immense progress of the Dark Ages and based their assessments on the extent to which scholars were familiar with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, and other big names in classical learning and literature. But even that was restored long before the Renaissance. This is fully supported by surviving monastery library catalogues from as far back as the 12th century. The Italian Renaissance was a period of cultural emulation during which people copied the classical styles in all sorts of disciplines.

I have never heard this myth as the Renaissance was Church-led. Pius II, the pope, was one of its leading lights. It began with people like Petrarch or Dante which were closely associated with the Church. Its art was made for Churches and often depicted Biblical scenes. Desiderius Erasmus or Thomas More were again of the Church.
The Renaissance did break with Mediaeval Scholasticism though, which is its chief characteristic, which was done through the rediscovery of the Original texts newly translated from Greek by the Byzantines fleeing the final collapse of their empire.
The western copies of the ancient philosophers were often corrupt by being translations of translations or more commentary by later Arab or late Roman scholars.
While the Renaissance is a continuation of Mediaeval intellectual life, it is different from it because of a better reacquantance with the ancient texts, better translations, rediscovery of the Greek language in western universities and an intellectual ferment to question the academic orthodoxy. Renaissance itself was also a native term used during it, so they were well aware what texts their predecessors knew or were familiar with and what not.
Please supply a credible historian who ascribes to this 'myth' you say they hold as I have never met one. (No, one liners calling the Middle Ages 'dark' isn't the same as usually such historians would qualify such statements by describing positive developments as well. Such passages are usually just literary flourishes)

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

There was plenty of innovation, in fact, were it not for scientific breakthroughs in the Dark Ages, we wouldn't have had Copernicus' theory of heliocentrism, just to name one.

No. The Greeks had competing geocentric and heliocentric systems. Aristarchus of Samos proposed a fairly adequate although imperfect, Heliocentric system with a leading light such as Archimedes being one of his supporters.
Ptolemy's geocentric model was an alternative and generally more popular ancient Greek theory and this largely held sway in the middle ages, but was by no means universally held.

The late Roman astronomer Martianus Capella agreed with Heliocentrism and wrote in support of it. He is mentioned and thanked by name by Copernicus, so Copernicus' Heliocentrism is as much if not more a product of the Renaissance. Copernicus was well aware of both sides in the Ancient Greek argument between Geo and Heliocentrism and opted for the latter based on his own observations.

The culture today believes Renaissance/Enlightenment = all good, Dark Ages/Scholasticism = all bad. And this is mainly because of self-aggrandizement by the authors of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the onslaught of secular humanism.

No serious historian considers such black and white assertions valid.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I didn't say slavery was abolished by law. I said that by the actions of Catholic leaders, it was extinguished-and not once but twice (when it was abolished in the Western Hemisphere). Serfdom was a working/living arrangement between a landowner and people who needed to support themselves. While it was a life-long commitment, even generational, it is not the same as slavery. Slaves owned nothing, not even their lives. They could be sold and bought. Serfs were indentured, but that meant that the lord of the manor owed them something-namely, living place and sustenance.

Serfs were free in every way except their labour and being tied to their land and occupation.

They had to do service to their lord and live on his estates and were expected to provide a set amount of goods for his use.
The lord in turn allowed them by his grace to build themselves a home and work a bit more to provide for themselves as actually any labour they do belongs to their Lord by rights.
They were expected to use his mill regardless how much the lord charged them and they could not move away to another lord or estate. Basically the lord had monopolistic control over them and could force them to work as hard as he wished and take as much of their harvests as he wanted and charge as much as he wanted for ancillary services that only he was allowed to provide.

In return the lord provided protection from brigands and invading armies. He had no responsibility to feed or house them and often in times of famine, the lords took their normal amount of the harvest and left little to their serfs.

An abusive lord could make his serfs' lives hellish. Obviously it was in the Lord's favour to keep his serfs in a reasonable state that they could work for him, but this was generally not a very good life. Many lords were absentees to their estates and capitalistic urges often led to quite poor treatment of their serfs, who had no legal recourse. This is part of the reasons that there were so many uprisings of common folk that lords had to periodically suppress.

Serfs often ran away and a lot of Mediaeval legislation was regarding returning runaway serfs. Serfdom was not a good thing, though marginally better than slavery, which is why so much effort was expended to abolish it in later times (Russia only abolished serfdom in the 19th century for instance). Your depiction of it is far too rosy.

Luckily there were also free folk, the yeomen, peasants and tenant farmers. The changes in labour conditions following the black death and the development of trading routes and fairs favoured them and gradually serfs were manumitted in the later Middle-Ages, especcially in England, but serfdom lingered in certain areas for centuries thereafter.

Again though, Slavery was not extinguished in Europe. Venice and Genoa engaged in slave trading throughout the middle ages. Often returning Crusaders brought their slaves with them. Acre for instance had a thriving slave market and Irish slaves were still being sold in 1169 during the Norman Invasion of Ireland. It became rare, but it never disappeared entirely and although Canon law opposed Christian slaves, it had no problem with non-Christian ones.
When Spain and Portugal started colonial empires, they bought and traded slaves and enslaved natives they found there, without it being illegal or even considered abnormal. The Church played a significant part in ending abuse of slaves in the New World, but as in Europe, slavery largely ended on economic grounds. Many Churchmen opposed slavery it is true, often heroically so, but slavery only ended when it became more economical to not have slaves then to keep them. (Often this was due to Abolitionists making acquiring slaves expensive by disrupting slave trading routes or helping runaways though. For instance, New World slavery started to die when Britain ended the Transatlantic Slave trade)

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

By that logic, slavery still hasn't been abolished today, but merely replaced with the capitalist wage system. Abolish one economic system, such as slavery, necessarily implies developing another one to replace it with.
.

I agree a new system has to replace it. Serfdom replaced slavery. But slavery was not outlawed and slaves continued to exist and be traded by the European powers throughout the Middle Ages, although seldom if ever used in their home countries.
So if we still could legally go to another country and buy someone and bring them home, where we had complete control over them, then Slavery would still exist. This could be done in the Middle Ages.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

No, it wasn't. There was activity in all major disciplines, education, theology, science and technology, the arts. By the last half of the period, Greek wasn't even known in the west, thereby requiring that books be translated to Latin.

Exactly, Greek wasn't known. The very Lingua Franca of the ancient world. The original language in which most of our philosophy and science had been written.
This very fact should show you that an intellectual decline had set in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which the European Intellegentsia had to make due with their few translations and later commentaries without the ability to read the original texts themselves.

 

[Colter]

Why is it common knowledge that the Dark Ages was all that dark?

It has long been received wisdom that following the collapse of Rome, Europe slumbered through a millenium of ignorance that came to be known as the Dark Ages. Historian JB Bury noted that when Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, this "inaugurated a millenium in which reason was enchained, thought was enslaved, and knowledge made no progress "
William Manchester described it as an "era of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and almost impenetrable mindlessness...The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension."

We know these things to be so far from the truth as to be classified as myth. Is it just anti-Catholic rhetoric, or is something else behind it?

Because it was the height of ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Today, when we listen to the concepts of God and purported religious history among believers, it's still dark!

 

[Albion]

The Dark Ages refers to the early Middle Ages only.

Good point. I don't know that it was true of any of those discussing the issue on this thread, but it's common to hear people talk as though Dark Ages and Middle Ages are interchangeable terms.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Good point. I don't know that it was true of any of those discussing the issue on this thread, but it's common to hear people talk as though Dark Ages and Middle Ages are interchangeable terms.

It was pointed out in my first post and by other posters as well that the terms aren't interchangeable, but people are ignoring it.

 

[Albion]

It was pointed out in my first post and by other posters as well, but people are ignoring it.

I guess that's right, although I thought that a number of the posts dealt that point only a glancing blow and didn't nail it down in unmistakable terms.

 

[Job8]

But a legitimate authority does not bring darkness.

What if the authority is illegitimate? The elders, scribes, and Pharisees regarded themselves as the legitimate authority in Israel and condemned Christ to death. But we know that they were not legitimate since Jesus condemned them to Hell. Why? Because they had brought darkness to Israel instead of light.

 

[Root of Jesse]

I minored in history and have read several textbooks and am also a certified history teacher, I've never once read a textbook that said what you're claiming they say.

What about other books? The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin, Senior Historian at Smithsonian? " Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from AD 300 to at least 1300. This occurred because the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge." Or A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance—Portrait of an Age by William Manchester? He described the era as "an era of incessant warfare, lawlessness, strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness...the Dark Ages were stark in every dimension." They seem to concur with Petrarch, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Russell, who also fomented the idea of what the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were.

 

[EastCoastRemnant]

The period from 538ad to 1798ad was foretold in the scriptures and identified the church/state power of this time as the beast power of Revelation. That power was diminished greatly when Berthier deposed the reigning Pope and brought it's temporal power to a close.... but no worries RoJ, the Bible says the beast that was wounded will live again. We are seeing it's ascendancy today, gaining an ever increasing influence on world state powers. Imagine the persecution she could do today with modern techniques!

 

[Root of Jesse]

This isn't true. As stated before, Petrarch coined the term Dark Ages for his own times and it is therefore a Mediaeval term itself, although one of opprobrium.
The Enlightenment was so named after the fact as well by French historians, perhaps under the influence of the former term though.

The terms were coined by Petrarch, and then continued to the present day. See how many people in this thread believe in them? Why?

No it did not. It encouraged freeing Christian slaves, but it did not require it nor had a problem with the institution. Hence Crusaders held slaves in Outremer and slaves were taken from the pagan Balts before their conversion.
Slavery disappeared because serfdom was cheaper and easier to maintain.

Wrong answer. You need to realize how long the period was. Outremer was during the middle of it. The Church was always against slavery. Always. That members of the Church didn't heed the Church is nothing new, really.

Um ... no. Plague was caused by Yersinia Pestis bacterium. It can be cured with a course of fluroquinolones or aminoglycoside antibiotics. Streptomycin may need to be added in resistant cases. This is for both Pneumonic and Bubonic variants.

Fact is, we cannot get rid of it. We can cure it, now, once it's contracted, but considering where it comes from, eradicating it is impossible. Also, the plagues of the Middle Ages took nigh on 30% of the population. The Roman Galenic or Antonine, which was probably measles, 10%. By the way, the idea that the Roman Empire had more population than Middle Ages Europe is wrong. The population of the Roman Empire from 150 to 400 fell 30% to about 50 mil. There was not much population growth in the Early Middle Ages, by 1000 there were 56 million, which grew to 78 million by 1400.

The Romans had many plagues themselves, such as the two devastating Antonine plagues and the plague during Claudius Gothicus's reign.
The reasons for the health and life expectancy differences are that the Romans had better hygiene (Public Baths), clean water (Aquaducts and public fountains), Sanitation (Sewer systems and public latrines), better diet (public doles and starvation relief) and better medicine (Galenic and Hippocratic medical traditions).
These are largely absent in the Middle Ages which had lost much medical knowledge and threw chamberpots out the window into furries cut next to the street. Clean water was usually the nearest well or river where such sewage could easily end up. Subsequently rats and disease were more rampant anyway. The medical tradition picked up in the late period though, but again we are shading into the Renaissance. They did not have proper famine relief systems in place in case of poor harvests as well, as this depends more on the local lord while Rome controlled it more centrally.

All of this appears to have continued well into the Renaissance and the age of "Enlightenment".

I have never heard this myth as the Renaissance was Church-led. Pius II, the pope, was one of its leading lights. It began with people like Petrarch or Dante which were closely associated with the Church. Its art was made for Churches and often depicted Biblical scenes. Desiderius Erasmus or Thomas More were again of the Church.

The point is that the Church led the time labeled the "Dark Ages", as well.

The Renaissance did break with Mediaeval Scholasticism though, which is its chief characteristic, which was done through the rediscovery of the Original texts newly translated from Greek by the Byzantines fleeing the final collapse of their empire.
The western copies of the ancient philosophers were often corrupt by being translations of translations or more commentary by later Arab or late Roman scholars.

What I wonder is "What was wrong with scholasticism, as a method of teaching and learning?"

While the Renaissance is a continuation of Mediaeval intellectual life, it is different from it because of a better reacquantance with the ancient texts, better translations, rediscovery of the Greek language in western universities and an intellectual ferment to question the academic orthodoxy. Renaissance itself was also a native term used during it, so they were well aware what texts their predecessors knew or were familiar with and what not.

As they say today, new does not necessarily mean improved. The terms Dark Ages and Renaissance were created by the likes of Gibbon and Voltaire, who were intellectuals, not those who had their hands on any of it.

Please supply a credible historian who ascribes to this 'myth' you say they hold as I have never met one. (No, one liners calling the Middle Ages 'dark' isn't the same as usually such historians would qualify such statements by describing positive developments as well. Such passages are usually just literary flourishes)

Done, see above. That you have never met one does not mean that they aren't there. See those in this thread who think the Dark Ages were really dark.

 

[Root of Jesse]

No. The Greeks had competing geocentric and heliocentric systems. Aristarchus of Samos proposed a fairly adequate although imperfect, Heliocentric system with a leading light such as Archimedes being one of his supporters.
Ptolemy's geocentric model was an alternative and generally more popular ancient Greek theory and this largely held sway in the middle ages, but was by no means universally held.

The late Roman astronomer Martianus Capella agreed with Heliocentrism and wrote in support of it. He is mentioned and thanked by name by Copernicus, so Copernicus' Heliocentrism is as much if not more a product of the Renaissance. Copernicus was well aware of both sides in the Ancient Greek argument between Geo and Heliocentrism and opted for the latter based on his own observations.

The Greek systems were proven wrong in the Middle Ages, as was Ptolemy's. The fact is that there was no real astronomy until the Middle Ages. Astronomy grew out of astrology.
Capella wrote the Satiricon, but it was an allegory. While important in its way, it did not propose heliocentrism. The Satiricon describes a modified geocentric astronomical model, in which the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe and circled by the moon, the sun, three planets and the stars, while Mercury and Venus circle the Sun. Copernicus did, indeed mention it, and gave credit to it, but it wasn't heliocentrism.

No serious historian considers such black and white assertions valid.[/QUOTE]
Except the ones I've mentioned.

 

[Root of Jesse]

Serfs were free in every way except their labour and being tied to their land and occupation.

They had to do service to their lord and live on his estates and were expected to provide a set amount of goods for his use.
The lord in turn allowed them by his grace to build themselves a home and work a bit more to provide for themselves as actually any labour they do belongs to their Lord by rights.
They were expected to use his mill regardless how much the lord charged them and they could not move away to another lord or estate. Basically the lord had monopolistic control over them and could force them to work as hard as he wished and take as much of their harvests as he wanted and charge as much as he wanted for ancillary services that only he was allowed to provide.

In return the lord provided protection from brigands and invading armies. He had no responsibility to feed or house them and often in times of famine, the lords took their normal amount of the harvest and left little to their serfs.

An abusive lord could make his serfs' lives hellish. Obviously it was in the Lord's favour to keep his serfs in a reasonable state that they could work for him, but this was generally not a very good life. Many lords were absentees to their estates and capitalistic urges often led to quite poor treatment of their serfs, who had no legal recourse. This is part of the reasons that there were so many uprisings of common folk that lords had to periodically suppress.

Serfs often ran away and a lot of Mediaeval legislation was regarding returning runaway serfs. Serfdom was not a good thing, though marginally better than slavery, which is why so much effort was expended to abolish it in later times (Russia only abolished serfdom in the 19th century for instance). Your depiction of it is far too rosy.

Luckily there were also free folk, the yeomen, peasants and tenant farmers. The changes in labour conditions following the black death and the development of trading routes and fairs favoured them and gradually serfs were manumitted in the later Middle-Ages, especcially in England, but serfdom lingered in certain areas for centuries thereafter.

Again though, Slavery was not extinguished in Europe. Venice and Genoa engaged in slave trading throughout the middle ages. Often returning Crusaders brought their slaves with them. Acre for instance had a thriving slave market and Irish slaves were still being sold in 1169 during the Norman Invasion of Ireland. It became rare, but it never disappeared entirely and although Canon law opposed Christian slaves, it had no problem with non-Christian ones.
When Spain and Portugal started colonial empires, they bought and traded slaves and enslaved natives they found there, without it being illegal or even considered abnormal. The Church played a significant part in ending abuse of slaves in the New World, but as in Europe, slavery largely ended on economic grounds. Many Churchmen opposed slavery it is true, often heroically so, but slavery only ended when it became more economical to not have slaves then to keep them. (Often this was due to Abolitionists making acquiring slaves expensive by disrupting slave trading routes or helping runaways though. For instance, New World slavery started to die when Britain ended the Transatlantic Slave trade)

So, serfs were free in every way except for their labor. That's like saying I'm free in every way except when I am at work.
Regarding slavery in Europe, the Church, which held moral authority, declared that those who held slaves were excommunicate. It is true that people ignored this, but so what? The Renaissance and Enlightenment crowd thinks they did away with slavery, when it was long previously morally frowned upon.

 

[Root of Jesse]

I agree a new system has to replace it. Serfdom replaced slavery. But slavery was not outlawed and slaves continued to exist and be traded by the European powers throughout the Middle Ages, although seldom if ever used in their home countries.
So if we still could legally go to another country and buy someone and bring them home, where we had complete control over them, then Slavery would still exist. This could be done in the Middle Ages.

Again, I never said slavery was outlawed. Serfdom did not replace slavery. They're two different things. The use of slaves in the Western Hemisphere was also something frowned upon by the Catholic Church hierarchy. That they were powerless to do something about it is irrelevant.

 

[Root of Jesse]

Exactly, Greek wasn't known. The very Lingua Franca of the ancient world. The original language in which most of our philosophy and science had been written.
This very fact should show you that an intellectual decline had set in after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which the European Intellegentsia had to make due with their few translations and later commentaries without the ability to read the original texts themselves.

Why is it a decline? Why isn't use of Latin progress? Having Latin as the common language allowed free thinking across the continent, with professors traveling freely between universities and able to teach their students?

 

[Root of Jesse]

Because it was the height of ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Today, when we listen to the concepts of God and purported religious history among believers, it's still dark!

QEV. see what I mean?

 

[Root of Jesse]

The period from 538ad to 1798ad was foretold in the scriptures and identified the church/state power of this time as the beast power of Revelation. That power was diminished greatly when Berthier deposed the reigning Pope and brought it's temporal power to a close.... but no worries RoJ, the Bible says the beast that was wounded will live again. We are seeing it's ascendancy today, gaining an ever increasing influence on world state powers. Imagine the persecution she could do today with modern techniques!

Again, @QEV, see what I'm saying? Common knowledge was my point. What academia believes hasn't carried down.

 

[EastCoastRemnant]

Actually, up until recently, a lot of academia (secular and theological) outside of Catholicism believed the beast/antichrist/man of sin of Revelation was the Papacy. Now-a-days I guess it's not politically correct to point out such things...

As far as the dark ages moniker, I wonder what the millions of martyrs under RC rule thought about it?