On The Dark Ages Being Dark
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.” -Abraham Lincoln
The Dark Ages(476 -1000AD), which I like to say was 500 years of moving backwards, was a terrible time in our history, that saved us from the rule of pure science and rational thinking. As horrific as those times were, and I think we can agree none of us presently would like to live in those times, some interesting things can be said about them.
The Dark Ages thought us to believe in something other than what we see. The rise of Faith, and faith can directly be linked to the advance of religion during this bleak. Traced to this time also is our advances in science. The questions religion made us ask, and drove men to answer came from these times. Let us not forget the Scientific revolution started in the 1500′s, near the end of the Middle Ages. Nicolaus Copernicus started the scientific revolution, and Galileo Galilei further advanced it, while suffering the consequences for going against the establishment.
Yet the dark ages are not dark because of the backward culture, it is so called because we know so little about it. The historical records are tarnished, distorted or destroyed,and art and culture was both suppressed or rewritten at the whims of man and king alike. Yet even so, many of our cannons of law and chivalry and honor, of the beginnings of romance and fairs and festival celebrations came from this era. In fact, it’s generally accepted the Middle Ages were more responsible for the decline of science than the dark ages, and until the Golden age, there was a lot more torment. As one point of fact, during the Middle ages, is where nearly all the Inquisitions occurred.
What to take away from this? That at any dark point in history, something good shall come, and let us not be swayed by the tag that is given something. The Dark Ages are not so dark, it was just the end of an era, the start of Fall of the Roman Empire. The real Dark Ages came when no one was in charge.
OceansOfThought @ April 14, 2008
I’d like to point out that the term “dark ages” applies largely to european history, and other cultures were doing fantastic things at the time. There is a facinating PBS show called “cracking the Mayan code” that focuses on translating the complicated (and largely artistic) glyphs inscribed in ruin stones in MesoAmerica. They had their own history going on, which we never hear about because they weren’t white so our traditional historians didn’t care, it’s not necessarily that the information isn’t available, it’s that what we have is not understood.