Comment by gbog
10 years ago
> the "Dark Ages" weren't "dark."
I don't know. With the cognitive relativism of our times, we want to make sure each civilisation, and each of its ages, are "equal". They certainly can be equally interesting for studies, but if we take a simple way to measure its effect on the human race by checking out how many books that are still read today have been written during these periods, you'll see that ancient Greece and Rome (and ancient China, and French enligthment) have been periods of great fertility, while for the normally educated man it is hard to find more than 2 or 3 books from the Middle Age that are still read and having influence nowadays.
So, at least following a few similar criteria, the Dark Ages were "dark". And it is not very surprising: when all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates, you get very few results.
Really how many works from Greece and Rome are still widely read today? The Aeneid, Odyssey are as obscure as Beowulf or Canterbury Tales in terms of who actually reads them certainly if your standard is the "normally educated man". Plus writing off Augustine, Aquinas et al as having "obscure religious debates" is rather churlish. The morality developed during that period, combined with governmental changes formed the basis for the political / legal system which now governs most of the world. I'd much rather their debates happened rather than live under Greek, Roman or Chinese systems.
If by obscure, you mean that tens if not hundreds of thousands of high school and college students read all or part of them every year, and that their themes and motifs permeate our culture and still underly our understanding of governance, mathematics, and even Science, then yeah...they're obscure.
The writings of Plato and Aristotle, in particular, are still widely read among the "well-educated" and continue to exert enormous influence on the world. It is perhaps true that they are not now important of the "normally educated", but this is something that has happened only in last twenty or thirty years, as trend of college educations becomes more and more "vocational".
I don't know what a previous poster meant by mentioning Augustine and Aqunas and then saying "the morality developed during that period" (Augustine 4th century BC, Aquinas 13th century). The truth is that Augustine was especially heavily influenced by Plato and Aquinas' entire philosophy was mostly an attempt to synthesize Aristotle with Christianity. There is a tendency by some Christians to think morality somehow can't exist without God, but the truth is otherwise. The Greeks certainly had well-developed modern morality, along with brilliant moral theory. And the reality is that most of the important advancements in morality have come from "liberal", often secular, thinkers, while Christianity (and other religions) get pulled upward from old barbarisms only while kicking and screaming.
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The basis of political and legal system in Latin Europe is Roman jurisdiction, as far as I know.
I don't think your claim that "all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates" is very realistic. For one thing, the concept of university is clearly a medieval invention.
Lots and lots of innovation was done during Middle Ages, as was interesting philosophy. Ancient Rome and Greece get the attention because they are the oldest stuff that is somewhat preserved, not because they would not have been surpassed in the following centuries.
Not sure I agree. In many domains of science, politic and arts, not only middle ages didn't surpass the ancient times, they were even a regression. Some domains that come to mind: sculpture, architecture, mathematics, theater, law, philosophy, poetry...
I don't know enough about sculpture, but regarding architecture, there were many innovations during Middle Ages.
First of all, medieval builders constructed churches and palaces that were bigger and higher than ancient ones. That's what Gothic architecture is all about (even though the name "Gothic" is a later pejorative). This was possible because of new innovations in structure of arches etc.
They were also able to construct these buildings with real windows, which was not actually the case in ancient times. (For instance, look at Pantheon: ancient, and quite big and impressive, but no windows, just the oculus at top).
For construction tools, medieval times came up with e.g. the wheelbarrow (although this was independently developed in China much earlier) and various types of cranes.
If we look at politics, law and economics, well, medieval politics was sophisticated in many ways and I cannot see why we should call it regression. As I wrote in another comment, during Middle Ages the development achieved, for instance, abolition of slavery and things like Magna Carta. As well as the start of merchant banking and foreign exchange contracts.
And many of our well-known poetic legends are medieval: Roland's Song, Carmina Burana, The Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf, and if you go to religious arts, people like St. Francis.
Edit: regarding sculpture, I'd imagine that the Greek had easy access to sculptable stone materials that medieval Central Europeans had less so. There's even less stone sculpture in northern Europe where the bedrock is granite and it takes absolutely modern tools to sculpt them.
Not true for pretty much all of that. A great deal of the advances made by the Romans were simply unworkable in Northern Europe. Roman concrete, for example, depended on volcanic pozzolanic ash which was not available further north. Roman agriculture was based on simple scratch ploughs that took advantage of the sandy soils around the Mediterranean. To work the hard, dense soils of the north required the invention of the heavy carruca, leading to a dramatic increase in food production and a population explosion through the middle ages.
You can keep on going down the list. Medieval poetry and literature developed extensively into forms we take for granted within our modern culture. The ideas of chivalry, nobility, and courtly love are so deeply ingrained within our society that we take them for granted.
As for architecture? Come on! Take a look at Aachen Cathedral[0] (built in 800 AD) and tell me that's a "regression" compared to the Romans.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Aachen_C...
It's a bit of a myth that mediaeval philosophers spent all of their time discussing obscure points of religious doctrine.
Well they did spend quite some time discussing the trinity and the virginity of Mary. Also there was this problem with stillborn babies: but baptised, they wouldn't go to the paradise, but how could they go to hell if they didn't have time to commit their first sin? Big debates... So they invented the limbo, just for this special corner case. (As a developer I see this as very smelly, the abstraction was leaking too much)
Yes, they often discussed theological issues, but that was far from the only thing they did. It's easy to be smug in retrospect. Most of what philosophers and scientists talk about now will no doubt seem rather silly in, say, 800 years' time. The theological discussion is also very rich, by the way. In particular, the attempts to clarify the ontology of the trinity were really quite interesting, and gave rise to some independently interesting philosophical discussion.
There is a bit of a selection bias at play. The selection of ancient Greece and Rome are in a large part due to those dark-age intelligentsia; they and their successors picked those books to be the basis of knowledge.
Most of these classics, especially the Greek ones, were forgotten in Western Europe of the middle ages. They were preserved in the Byzantine and Muslim cultures and were reintroduced to the West starting from the 12th Century, a process which culminated in the Renaissance.
when all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates, you get very few results.
What's great about this sentence is how it brings the whole narrative full circle, back to fascism and Germany.
The Papacy in the middle ages was basically a fascist institution - ridiculing and condemning anyone that didn't agree with it.
But it wasn't till the 16th century that a German named Martin Luther dealt that fascist regime a serious blow by nailing some thoughts to a Cathedral door.
Luther wasn't the first to have those thoughts, though. He was simply the first credible mind to have those thoughts outside the sphere of influence of the Pope. The German politics Luther lived under enabled him to contradict the Papacy without fear of punishment.
> the Dark Ages were "dark".
In Europe perhaps, but there's a whole world out there.
Certainly, for example Tang dynasty was a golden age in China.