THE "CHRISTIAN DARK AGE" MYTH

At the SOLO Passion forum I had the following exchange with James Valliant, a prosecutor and the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics.  Valliant is an atheist and an Objectivist who is working on a new book about the New Testament.

It's been my experience that Objectivists generally subscribe to an atheist narrative of history that consigns the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance to a dark age fomented by the rise of Christianity.  It's a myth that first got traction with Edward Gibbon's seminal work The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and was further developed by the anti-Christian polemics of Robert Green Ingersoll and the debunked A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White.  (If you are curious why so many atheists are in accord about the history of Christianity and Western civilization, these are their textbooks.)

In light of the book Valliant is working on, I was interested in discussing a little history with him.  I wondered if he believed the "Christian Dark Age" myth fostered by Gibbon, Ingersoll, and White.  Here is what we had to say ...

I wrote:

James,

You said:  "What's happening with Christianity has the same kind of motivations behind it, but a very different effect. Over time, as more benevolent ethical and political ideas have become current, they have been integrated into Christian thought."

That puts the cart before the horse. Judeo-Christian thought is responsible for the amelioration of Western society over the past two and half millennia, starting with the ancient Israelites' war against idolatry that eventually dethroned man and his works as god and created the political space for the supremacy of law in government.

Regards, Bill

Valliant responded:

No, Bill, I'm afraid "Judeo-Christian thought" helped to destroy the classical world and create a true Dark Age. The recent attempt at revisionism by certain Christian historians, such as Rodney Stark (The Victory of Reason), ignores so much data that it is surprising how seriously it is being taken. But, no, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all well-named phenomena.

The ideas of Darwin and Copernicus had to fight up hill against religion. Just ask Galileo, Bruno, etc. And, before that, science moved, shall we say, at much slower pace -- burning heretics at the stake did not encourage creative thought and neither faith nor hope advance science one bit.

So much was lost with the fall of the classical world! Those ideas of evolution and a sun-centered solar system were published and known to the ancient Greeks -- in the centuries before Christ. Archimedes had a form of calculus. The Romans built multistoried buildings made out of concrete --and with glass windows. Roman cities were more sanitary and had more clean water than any cities of the world before the industrial revolution. But this did not last. Rome's population fell by about 90% during the very century the Roman popes were consolidating their own authority there and over Western Christianity.

Even the great gothic cathedrals and castles were not built until the savage Christians of western Europe were exposed to Muslim and Byzantine engineering through their travels during the crusades. Observational science emerged only at this time, too, but really didn't get off and running until the rediscovery of the Ionian and Hellenistic philosophy and science of pre-Christian pagans -- which, thank goodness, the Muslims had preserved. (Possessing a copy of Aristotle before the 13th century would have got you and the book burned, btw...)

The ideas of the New Testament are mystical and, frankly, primitive. It is the work of those who looked elsewhere, e.g., the Platonist, Augustine, the Aristotelian, Aquinas, that gave Christianity any real substance -- even as a philosophy. And this "classing-up" took a long, long time indeed.

Christianity did topple man from a certain "throne." It's taken a while to put man back on his rightful throne, and we are not quite there yet... but give us more time.

I replied (at length):

James,

I grant that history involves some interpretation, but facts still matter.

The “classical” Roman Empire collapsed in the third century A.D. after a century of militarism and inflation fostered by its lack of economic productivity.  There was little creation of wealth beyond agriculture.  For all the glory of Rome that Gibbon waxed about, it was a brutal society based upon slavery and theft.  The aristocracy seized existing wealth through conquest.  When conquest failed, they seized it from ordinary Romans, including their farms.  And so the Roman Empire fed upon itself as the booty dried up.

This decay climaxed with the anarchy of the mid-third century.  Diocletian’s attempts to resuscitate the empire as a constitutional monarchy was too little, too late.  None of this can be blamed upon the Christians or their religion.  Indeed, Diocletian’s rabid persecution of Christians, who unlike atheist myth were not otherworldly lay-abouts but the core of the empire’s productive class, doomed whatever hope his reforms had.  Over the next generation, the perennial ills of the Roman Empire returned with a vengeance.

Only Constantine’s re-founding of the Roman Empire in Byzantium as a Christian society revitalized it in the fourth century.  Upon that foundation, the Roman Empire endured for more than a millennium as the Byzantine Empire until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.  During that time the new empire was more prosperous, commercial, urban, literate, and cosmopolitan than the old empire ever had been.  All the while it was the nearest thing in history to a Christian theocracy of any significant scale.  (Perhaps that is why atheists always seem to overlook the small fact of how the Roman Empire endured to the modern era as a Christian society.)

Of course, the western provinces fell to the Germanic tribes by the middle of the fifth century as the Roman Empire consolidated its frontiers around the wealthier eastern provinces.  Again, how Christians or their religion were responsible for this is not evident.  The rot and corruption of the third century could not be overcome, and so the Roman Empire had to carry on upon a smaller but sturdier foundation in the east.  But then the so-called Dark Ages that followed were hardly so dark.  From the fall of the empire in the west until the Carolingian Renaissance three centuries later, Roman law and culture followed the cross as civilization, albeit agrarian not urban, spread across northern Europe.  The windmill and the plow improved agricultural productivity and little by little wealth began to be accumulated again during the Dark Ages, in no small part because a confiscatory imperial bureaucracy no longer existed there.

As for the loss of knowledge during the Dark Ages, it had never been that widespread in the old Roman Empire.  You can credit the Muslims if want for preserving the ancient texts of Greece and Rome, but there were no Muslims until the seventh century and it was quite some time after that before they had a tradition of scholarship.  So who do you think preserved those texts during the intervening centuries?  The Christian church, of course.  They were never lost and were always a part of Christian scholarship.  Moreover, the university, which from its very beginnings encouraged open inquiry, was a Christian invention of the eleventh century rooted in the parish schools founded by Charlemagne three centuries earlier.

The university is just the best example of the intellectual and economic ferment of the Medieval era.  Western civilization expanded to Greenland and Scandanavia and Russia.  Parliaments were established in England and France.  Elsewhere republican government flourished in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  International trade thrived, and modern banking took root.  The professions of the law and medicine were established.  The inquisition (the beginnings of our current judicial system) supplanted the accusation and ordeal in justice.  And under the umbrella of the Universal Church, friars and monks traveled freely across Europe to spread academic and technical knowledge from one part of the continent to another.

Medieval Europe was not paradise, of course.  It was a hard place, but there was progress.  It was a world that was wealthier and more cultured than ancient Rome had been.  However, the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century spelled the downfall of this world, along with the growing corruption of the Church which had embroiled itself in the pursuit of temporal power.  A great deal of what had been accomplished during the Medieval era was lost over the course of a couple generations.  Contrary to atheist myth, the fifteenth-century Renaissance was mired in superstitution and mysticism as its now-forgotten literature attests.  (Other than Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, what endures today?)  A belief in witches became widespread.  Astrology and alchemy were enshrined as sciences.  And monsters ruled where traders, sailors, and travelers had ventured in Medieval times.  To the extent that the men of the Renaissance re-discovered the texts of the ancient era, they only re-discovered that which had been neglected in the wake of the Black Death.

And what did they do with the words of the ancient Greeks and Romans?  Like Rome, republics gave way to princes and absolute monarchs reduced parliaments to ciphers.  Dictators would be the bane of Christian civilization until the Enlightenment.  Nevertheless, the Renaissance closed with an explosion of painting and sculpture, the discovery of the New World, that Catholic priest Copernicus sparking the scientific revolution, the incipient rise of the middle class, and the Protestant Reformation, the tyranny and carnage from which forced the Western world to make a political virtue of tolerance.  Thus, the progress of the Medieval era resumed after the one-step-backward-and-two-steps-forward of the Renaissance.

So, James, the facts don’t support dismissing the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance as a dark age, especially one brought about by Christianity.  It’s a myth first fashioned by Edward Gibbon and given further currency by Robert Ingersoll and Andrew Dickson White.  What I find remarkable is how atheists have consistently recycled the fictions of Ingersoll and White to this very day, oblivious not only to what has always been known about the Roman Empire, the Medieval era, and the Renaissance, but the century of scholarship since that has grounded the “Christian dark age” myth into dust.

Regards, Bill

Comments

[Micah]

Thanks for that... good stuff. Consonant with what I've read as far as current historical consensus, too. How is Valliant going to be successful publishing book that flies in the face of historical scholarship? Answer: people will read it regardless because it agrees with their existing biases.

[Bill]

Hi, Micah.

Thanks for the kind words. You are right that books that are nonsense get read because they reinforce the nonsense people want to believe. As for Mr. Valliant, I think it is only fair to wait and see what he publishes before drawing any conclusions about his project.

Regards, Bill

[Jim Valliant]

Bill,

The dialogue did not end there. Your readers may wish to go to www.solopassion.com and read our full exchange.

[Bill]

Thanks for providing that link, Jim.

Regards, Bill