The “Middle Ages” That Never Were
Most history books lump the time between the rise of Constantine and the Renaissance as the “Middle Ages,” or the “Medieval Period,” or the “Dark Ages.” As most people have now just come to assume, ancient Greece and Rome was a golden age of philosophy and reason, but then when Christianity came on the scene, the fanatical Church persecuted peace-loving pagans, rejected their philosophy and science, and ushered in 1,000 years of intellectual darkness, during with time superstition and ignorance reigned supreme as the Church took power and ran Europe into the ground. Finally, with the “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment,” all that classical learning was rediscovered and tyranny of the Church slowly came to lose its grip on Europe. The superstition of irrational faith soon gave way to the “light” of science and reason…hence, the “Enlightenment.”
Enjoy a bit of humor from Monty Python along these lines:
Well, to cut to the chase, that historical narrative that has dominated Western thinking for the past 200 years is completely false. Such labels like “Dark Ages,” “Renaissance,” and “Enlightenment” are historically simplistic and naïve at best, and positively slanderous at worst. The very labels were actually made up by anti-Catholic propagandists during the so-called “Enlightenment” in an attempt to disparage the previous 1,000 years of history as being shrouded in darkness, superstition, ignorance, and fear, all due to the fact that the Church was in charge of society. Therefore, with the “dawn” of science and rational thought, the so-called “Enlightenment” thinkers portrayed themselves as being the true “lights of the world,” as opposed to the darkness of Christianity.
Such Enlightenment propagandists, not surprisingly, looked back at ancient paganism as if it were a golden age of culture and learning. As Rodney Stark, in his book The Triumph of Christianity, points out, Edward Gibbon (1737-1784) claimed “the triumph of Christianity was produced by ‘intolerant zeal.’ Pagans were unable to survive this militant Christian onslaught because they were, in Gibbon’s oft-quoted phrase, imbued with ‘the mild spirit of antiquity’” (183). Likewise, Jonathan Kirsch, in his book God Against the Gods, lamented how close Julian the Apostate had come to restoring that golden age of paganism. He wrote, “…it is tantalizing to consider how close he [Julian] came to bringing the spirit of respect and tolerance back into Roman government and thus back into the roots of Western civilization, and even more tantalizing to consider how different our benighted world might have been if he had succeeded’” (Triumph, 183).
I’ll say it again: anyone who knows the actual history about life in the ancient world will know such comments for what they are: ignorant Enlightenment propaganda. As a matter of historical fact, it must be pointed out that it wasn’t until 391 AD, during the reign of Theodosius, that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire—after Julian the Apostate’s attempt to destroy Christianity. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire. What prompted Theodosius to do so is that Julian’s attempt to force paganism onto an increasingly Christian populace brought back fears of Diocletian’s violent persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. So much for such “tolerant paganism.”
For that matter, as we will see in the next few posts, the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire hardly meant that Christians actively persecuted pagans—no persecution happened under Constantine, or his Christian successors. The fact was, Paganism was already dying all on its own. The reason why Julian was so unsuccessful in his attempts to revive paganism was that there simply weren’t a lot of pagans left. Paganism had already proven itself to be morally bankrupt. That didn’t mean there were brilliant pagan thinkers and politicians—there were: they had positions in the government of Constantine and his successors.
Needless to say, such a narrative of history that Enlightenment thinkers like Gibbon put forth is a complete fiction. Real life is far more complex than such caricatures. Unfortunately, though, such simplistic thinking has continued up to the present day. In fact, it is more proper to say that the “dawn” of the so-called “Enlightenment” has ushered in a kind of darkness and ignorance of actual history. The reality is there never was a “Dark Ages,” and therefore never any kind of “Enlightenment” that brought Western civilization out of such supposed darkness.
At the same, though, (and this is equally important to note), it would be equally dishonest and wrong to claim that what has been labeled as the Dark Ages was really a golden age of enlightenment, and that the so-called Enlightenment was one of complete darkness. In reality, all ages have their light and darkness; all ages have their advances and regressions; all ages have their instances of moral progress and moral failings. Any clear thinking about history, philosophy, theology, and civilization in general is dependent on recognizing this fact.
In any case, instead of going along with the standard historical labels for Western civilization (i.e. Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment), I have decided to present the various times with what I think are more historically accurate descriptions. In the present case, one simply cannot lump over 1,000 years of Western civilization under the banner of the “Middle Ages,” for they weren’t in the “middle” of anything, and the relevant people and events were not all in the West.
Anyone who knows anything about the Roman Empire knows that, given how vast it was, there were essentially two parts to it: the Eastern part of the empire and the Western part of the empire. Over the 1,000 years in question, a vast number of things happened that eventually resulted in a historical, theological, philosophical, and cultural split between the eastern half of the empire and the western half of the empire. At the same time, though, there was considerable overlap and interplay between the two cultures, and it is simply impossible to understand the development of Western civilization without considering the impact of that interplay.
This next number of posts will focus on what I have called the Byzantine Age—the time period between the rise of Constantine (313 AD and the Edict of Milan) and the Great Schism of 1054 AD. During this time period there was a slow but steady divorce between the East and the West, but it was still primarily shaped by a significantly Byzantine worldview.
After these posts, I will turn my attention to what I’ve called the High Catholic Age—the time period between the Great Schism (1054 AD) and the Martin Luther’s nailing of his 95 theses in 1517 AD, which marked the beginning of the so-called “Reformation” (again, a term that is slightly misleading). It was during the time period of 1054-1517 AD that the impact of the distinctly Roman Catholic Church can be analyzed.
