The Not-So Dark Ages
Correcting some revisionist history about the medieval era
For centuries, it has been taught that there was a long “dark age” in European history from about 450 CE to sometime between 1250 to 1350 CE. The idea has been repeated so often that it is accepted as truth. This period is denoted by the relative lack of new scholastic material in the sciences, literature, and philosophy. Those who support the myth of a dark age blame as culprits the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity.
It is a popular myth that philosophy, if not critical thinking in general, ended sometime in the late third or early fourth centuries, but the evidence belies the myth. The reality is that the method of Christian philosophers was a normal continuation of a philosophical method that emerged in Greek philosophy long before the Christian era. Plato’s philosophy was a dualism that saw the higher realm of the Forms as the truer reality. Plotinus followed with the teaching about the One. The fourth and fifth centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity saw Christian thought mature as a continuation of long patterns of thought. Christianity did not end philosophy but intertwined with it, largely continuing the concerns and issues present in Greek philosophy.
The myth of a dark age stems from people who looked back in time and did not see previous people performing the quest for understanding in the way that they did it. The epithet of the “Dark Ages” arose during the so-called Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s, when people hostile to religion arrogantly dismissed the medieval period as irrelevant. Labeling it the “Dark Ages” was a rhetorical device saying, “We’re doing something that is much more important and of much more quality than what people did generations before us.” The myth of a Dark Age caused by religion not allowing people to think for themselves and the notion that nothing was really happening of any intellectual depth has stuck with us for the last 300+ years, but it’s not really true.
The Transition From Antiquity to Medieval
We do see a relative lack of published material in philosophy between 450 and 1250, but Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars were, in fact, the only ones who kept philosophy and protoscience alive. What dark age there was was caused by a loss of social cohesion which was caused by waves of barbarian invasions that caused severe economic and demographic disruption.
The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE — a stunning catastrophe that affected people then far more than 9/11 affects the early 2000s. Rome was literally the center of the known world and had been for more than 500 years. That it would fall to an impoverished, barbarian people was world shattering. Then in 455 CE, the Vandals sacked Rome even more viciously, an act that gave us the words “vandals” and “vandalism.” The military government of the western Roman Empire, rife with corruption and civil strife, finally fell to barbarians in either 476 or 493 CE, depending on whether you consider Odoacer to be the last Roman or the first barbarian ruler of Italy. Then things got worse. Wave after wave of tribes from the north or east devastated former Roman territory: The Ostrogoths, the Alemanni, the Huns, the Franks, the Bulgars, the Avars, the Suebi, the Magyars, the Lombards, the Goths, the Pechenegs, the Cumans, the Arabs, the Normans, and finally the Vikings all invaded significant swaths of territory over a 500-year period. Some pillaged and disappeared. Others stayed and settled, like the Suebi, Ostrogoths, Bulgars, Magyars, and Lombards. Each generation faced a new barbarian invasion and had to recover and rebuild. Continual outbreaks of plague, often brought by invaders, also contributed to the strife and anarchy.
These violent disruptions affected the Western half of the former Roman Empire more than the Eastern half that was based in Constantinople. As the disruptions continued, western lands were increasingly isolated from the still vibrant political, economic, and cultural centers in what are now Greece, Turkey, and southern Balkans. The political and economic structures of the old Western Empire were swept away or withered away. The loss of social structure meant a loss of education. Schools disappeared. Classical Latin learning did not disappear entirely, but it became limited to prominent families who were well connected and could afford the very few remaining private tutors. These included heads of state, Christian bishops, and the households of dependents and advisers to bishops and secular rulers. Even this education was a limited affair compared to times past and consisted primarily of basic grammar and rhetoric. Philosophy was decreasingly part of that education, even for the elites. This was not because it was banned or frowned on but because it simply was lost to the chaos of the times. The only remaining bastions of learning were isolated Christian monasteries from Ireland in the far West to Persia in the East where the monks kept libraries of ancient scrolls of Greek, Roman, and Christian scholars. The monks’ withdrawal from the world was more than a spiritual statement; it was an eminently practical response to the chaos around them.
Compared to what we have today, people in the medieval period had very few of Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings. Those in the West did not have much at all of Greek philosophy because the great works of the philosophers were lost to them. By the 400s, the only work of Plato available in Latin was Timaeus, giving people then an incomplete view of Plato. However, its vision of a perfect heavenly realm and our imperfect world fit well with other ideas that were common, such as those of the Stoics and various religious groups at that time such as the Gnostics.
Aristotle’s books fared only slightly better and thanks only to the efforts of Boethius (477–524), who translated into Latin and wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works. Thus, the West’s supply of Aristotle’s genius included only his logic that informed philosophical dialogue, with none of his insights and theories on metaphysics, physics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Without knowledge of Aristotle, the student of the natural world, they had a very incomplete view of Aristotle.
The loss of ancient texts meant that scholars did not know about Aristotle’s ideas about objects and change. That meant they didn’t have a counterexample to the more mystical ideas of Plato and his most notable interpreter — Plotinus. The one book of Plato that survived, Timaeus, is perhaps the oddest of Plato’s books and expresses the most “out there” of his thoughts. Timaeus does not feature Socrates as the central character but rather a storyteller, Timaeus, who relates a mythic story that explains why things are the way they are. That story was that the visible world was created by a mystical being, the Demiurge, who crafted the visible realm by copying the Forms. This is why the visible world resembles the Forms but is filled with lesser copies. Armed with Plato’s Timaeus and Plotinus’ thought (inspired by Plato, mostly Timaeus), along with some Gnostic ideas about Logos, what scholarship survived the collapse of the Roman civilization developed into philosophy as a study of the mystical Intellect using Aristotle’s rigid rules of intellectual reasoning. The whole of Plato and Aristotle, and the rest of Greek philosophy, would not be restored to Western Europe until the 1200s.
The constant chaos in Western Europe started to calm down by around 1100. Philosophical scholarship gradually returned in the Christian monasteries and seminaries. What emerged was the medieval philosophical movement of Scholasticism: a blend of Catholic theology and ancient philosophy that reopened the unanswered questions left by the Greeks and Romans. Inquiring minds in Scholasticism debated these questions armed with the texts and tools that they had, such as Aristotle’s logic.
