Lessons from the Dark Ages?

Nineteenth Friday after Pentecost

Historians nowadays call it the Early Middle Ages (500-1100 AD) as opposed to the Late Middle Ages (1100-1500). These terms are purely chronological, not value laden. The other terms are the Dark Ages and the High Middle Ages, definitely value laden. 

 

What made the Dark Ages dark? It's best summed up in one word: illiteracy

 

A few other matters of definition. The terms apply only to Europe (also called the West and Western Civilization).  High civilizations were flourishing during this time in other parts of the world. The Syrian and Arab civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa were flourishing. The 1500 year old civilization of Ethiopia had become Christian and was preserving Christian and Jewish texts that were lost to Europe. Civilizations in India, China, and Southeast Asia were continuing their long development.

The Dark Ages came with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Central Asian ethnic groups, i.e. barbarian tribes, had taken over different parts of the Roman Empire, including Rome itself. Muslim Arabs took over the Latin civilization of North Africa in the seventh century along with most of Spain. 

The tribes, Goths, Huns, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, etc. were warriors, not readers, destroyers not creators. Wealth was not created; it was stolen. The barbarians advanced from tents to huts. The civilized declined from houses to huts. The greatest technological advance of the period was the stirrup. 

What was left of civilization was what survived in the monasteries. Monasteries were last on the list of barbarian attack targets, partly because they had little or no wealth, more because they had no women to rape. The monasteries, with only a handful of exceptions, had declined to illiteracy.

Thomas Cahill's prize winning book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and earlier Kenneth Clark's PBS television series, Civilisation, popularized an understanding of many historians. Barbarians push civilization to the margins. In the case of early medieval Europe those margins tended to be geographical, the extremes of the continent--Ireland and Scotland. 

By the end of the sixth century literacy was virtually vanished in Europe. In a somewhat romanticized story, both Clark and Cahill visit the desolate island promontory called Skellig Michael, on the southwest coast of Ireland. It's a place where the weather is always bad, cold,windy, and rainy. Eight miles of treacherous seas separate it from the Irish mainland. 615 steps climb to the isolated monastery atop. Barbarians never made it there. There was nothing there for them. The monks there wrote. They copied. They preserved the Bible and a bit of Latin literature. As the winds of tribal migration slowed to a calm, the monks and their literature could timidly venture forth with what they had preserved and copied,what little that was left, the ability to read and write. 

Kenneth Clark entitled the  first episode in Civilisation "By the Skin of Their Teeth." That's what European civilization survived by.

As disease and disunity covers our nation, I sometimes wonder whether we are entering a new Dark Age. Pray faithfully like the monks. And read and write,

Faithfully,

Christian