1054 AD marked a watershed moment for the respective histories of both the Eastern Byzantine Empire and what was soon to become Western Christendom. For the previous 300 years, the Byzantine Empire had lost much of its territory to the rising Islamic Empire, yet still was able to sustain much of its riches and splendor. And, ever since the fall of Rome in 476 AD, Western Europe was slowly being rebuilt through the ceaseless efforts of thousands of anonymous monks and priests from the Church of Rome. Although Rome was still in communion with the great patriarchates of the East, for all practical purposes it was on its own in the West, with popes acting as often corrupt administrative heads, and western monastics slowly rebuilding Europe from the ground up, resurrecting the dead pagan world into the image of Christ.
Yet in 1054 AD, the growing rift between East and West was simply too great to overcome. The cultural, political, administrative, and religious differences between the Latin/Catholic West and the Greek/Byzantine East all contributed to the growing divorce that become official with the Great Schism of that year. This monumental event marked not only the beginning of the end of the great Byzantine Empire, but also the rise of Western Catholic “Christendom.” For the next 400 years, the Byzantine Empire in the East would continue to be weakened by the encroaching forces of the armies of Islam until the tragic fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. By contrast, ironically due to that very threat of Islam, the Pope called for Catholic Christendom in the West to unite to fight a number of crusades against the Muslim forces in the East, and that would lead to a resurgence on all levels in Western Europe: culturally, politically, and scholastically.
During the High Catholic Age, while Christianity slowly became a minority in the East (initially, a minority Muslim rule over the majority of Christian population, but eventually a distinct minority), in the West, with the start of the Crusades, the Roman Catholic Church came into its golden age. After 500 years of slowly rebuilding a new society from the ruins of an old, dead paganism (despite the deep corruption that had taken over the papal throne in Rome), the Catholic Church finally came under authority of a number of reform-minded popes who sought to root out the corruption that had so diseased the Church.
And although no society is perfect, you would be committing intellectual suicide if you bought into the false narrative spun by modern historians who try to say that the “Middle Ages” were a time of backwardness, superstitions, and ignorance. Honest historians know the opposite is true. Despite the shortcomings within the High Catholic Age, it was this age, having emerged from the foundational work of the Byzantine Age, that produced some of the most significant cultural, scholastic, intellectual, and technological advances in world history. Just like the emergence of the technologically marvelous Gothic cathedrals, it was a time of dawning and light in Europe—certainly not one of “dark ages.”
The False Narrative of Enlightenment Propaganda
Ever since the Enlightenment, a false narrative has been told concerning the “Middle Ages.” (In this blog series, I have done away with the term and have instead divided that time period into two: The Byzantine Age and The High Catholic Age). As a matter of fact, the so-called Enlightenment’s narrative concerning the “Middle Ages” sprang from an utter hatred of all things Catholic. The narrative goes something like this:
(A) there was a golden age of culture and learning during the Greco-Roman period, but
(B) with the rise of Christianity, fanatical, close-minded, bigoted, hateful Christians destroyed the glory of Greece and Rome, and ushered in 1,000 years of cultural and philosophical darkness known as the “middle ages,” or “dark ages.” (For example, Daniel Boorstin states in his book, The Discoverers, that during the “Middle Ages” a “Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia… afflicted the continent…” (37).
And then, (C) with the rise of liberated and enlightened (i.e. atheistic and secular) men like Voltaire and Rousseau, society was able to break the chains of ignorance, terror, and superstition that the Catholic Church had imposed on Europe for the past 1,000 years, and usher in the Enlightenment, when the glory of ancient Greece and Rome began to be recovered.
Does that sound familiar? Is that what you generally have believed about the so-called “Middle Ages”? Chances are your answer is “yes,” for such has been the historical narrative of Western history that we have imbibed for the past 500 years. Consider the following quotes from several writers from the past 150 years:
“The Christian party [in the early Middle Ages] asserted that all knowledge is to be found in the Scriptures and in the traditions of the Church…The Church thus set herself forth as the depository and arbiter of knowledge; she was ever ready to resort to the civil power to compel obedience to her decisions. She thus took course which determined her whole future career: she became a stumbling-block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years.” –John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)
“With the decline of Roman and the advent of the Dark Ages, geography as a science went into hibernation, from which the early Church did little to rouse it… Strict Biblical interpretations plus unbending patristic bigotry resulted in the theory of a flat earth with Jerusalem in its center, and the Garden of Eden somewhere up country, from which flowed the four Rivers of Paradise.” –Boise Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance (1955)
[The Middle Ages were] “a dark, dismal patch, a sort of dull and dirty chunk of some ten centuries, wedged between the shining days of the golden Greeks…and the brilliant galaxy of light given out jointly by those twin luminaries, the Renaissance and the Reformation.” –AnneFremantle (1902-2002)
“As the central authority of Rome decayed, the lands of the Western Empire began to sink into an era of barbarism during which Europe suffered a general cultural decline.” –Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
If I may be so bold, such statements reveal a shocking ignorance of history in general, and the life-changing impact that Christianity has had on the world. As we have already seen in earlier posts, the Greco-Roman world was anything but ideal and golden. To be sure, the philosophical elite of Greece laid the foundation of all later philosophy, and imperial might of Rome established a unified empire that provided the structure for the dissemination of culture and philosophy. But we cannot, as Rodney Stark has stated, allow ourselves to be merely wide-eyed tourists, enamored with the magnificent buildings of the Greco-Roman world, and being completely ignorant of the day to day, life on the ground that 99% of the Greco-Roman world endured under the crushing weight of slavery, violence, excessive taxation, and economic stagnation.
Simply put, the majority of the Greco-Roman world lived in cultural, economic, and religious darkness. It wasn’t until the collapse of Western Roman Empire that there was any glimmer of hope true enlightenment and progress for Western Europe. As Rodney Stark says in Triumph of Christianity, “When the collapse of the Roman Empire ‘released the tax-paying millions…from a paralyzing oppression,’ many new technologies began to appear and were rapidly and widely adopted with the result that ordinary people were able to live far better, and, after centuries of decline under Rome, the population began to grow again” (239-40). With the collapsing of the pagan darkness, Christianity offered a new light that began to dawn, first during the Byzantine Age, and then even more magnificently during the High Catholic Age.
Historical Backdrop: 1“Power vs. Piety”
In his attempt to make sense of the Roman Catholic Church during this time, Stark suggests that we make a distinction between the Church of Power, and the Church of Piety. The Church of Power signified the corrupt leaders within the Church that often were nothing more than immoral, secular rulers in papal vestments. The Church of Piety, on the other hand, signified Church leaders who sought to root out such corruption in the Church, and lead the Church in ways of Christ-like holiness. Throughout the Byzantine and High Catholic Ages, the Church found itself under the leadership of one of these two groups.
Throughout the Byzantine Age, the Church of Power often dominated Western Europe. Despite the corruption and decadence of the Church of Power, though, the Church of Piety had been diligently building a spiritual infrastructure throughout Western Europe. And in the mid-11th Century, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (1017-1056 AD) was able to initiate a reformation within the Catholic Church that ended up putting the reins of power back into the hands of the Church of Piety. Within the latter half of the 11th century a seismic shift occurred in both the history of the Church and the history of Europe. A string of reform-minded popes in Rome, the Great Schism with the Eastern Church, and the rise of the Crusades, converged within that 50-year time-span to send both the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church down two very different roads.
The Church of Piety Reforms the Roman Catholic Church
In 1049 AD, Pope Leo IX began what can only be described as a Catholic Reformation that launched the Church of Rome, as well as Western Europe, into cultural golden age. To be sure, there really is no such thing as a pure “golden age”—every age has its share of cultural, philosophical, and religious dross—but the thing to note here is that shortly after the rise of reforming popes like Leo IX, a new age of cultural enlightenment dawned in Western Europe. And that enlightenment began when Leo IX began to clean house and sweep the Church of Power out to the curb. He did so by excommunicating all bishops and abbots who paid money (i.e. bribed) to secure their positions. He then cracked down on the rampant sex scandals that plagued many church offices—bishops, priests, (and even a past pope or two…or three!) were known to have kept numerous concubines and bedded countless prostitutes. In response, Pope Leo IX methodically filled every church office that came available with monks.
This reformation was continued with Pope Nicholas II (1059-1061 AD), who not only exhorted every day Christians to refuse the sacraments offered by any priest who had paid for (i.e. bribed) his position, or who kept concubines, but also revolutionized the way in which future popes were selected. It was Nicholas II who established the College of Cardinals to be the ecclesiastical body who selected future popes. No longer would popes be selected by powerful and corrupt families to serve as their religious puppet. Ten years later, Pope Gregory VII became the first monk in centuries to be selected pope.
And so, within the span of a little over ten years, popes Leo IX and Nicholas II cleansed the Catholic Church from many of the evils that had plagued it for centuries. By rooting out the largely corrupt secular puppets from Church positions and by filling those positions with pious monks, these two popes, at least for the time being, reformed and purified the Catholic Church, and launched the High Catholic Age.
Ironically, it was during this very time that perhaps the greatest tragedy happened in Church history—the Great Schism of 1054 AD split the Church in what is known today as the Western Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Given the cultural differences between the East and West, perhaps it was inevitable, but the ramifications of the Great Schism were, well, great indeed. At the time, though, no one realized just how significant the event was—both the East and West remained in contact with one another for quite some time. In fact, it was the Byzantine Emperor Alexius’ request to Pope Urban II that launched the First Crusade in 1096 AD.
That will be the subject of the next few posts.
The best that can be said of the idea that the Medieval Roman Catholic Church was anti-science is that it’s a silly myth. For over a thousand years the medieval Catholic Church was the primary sponsor of scientific investigation; they didn’t use the term “science,” instead using the term “natural philosophy,” but they were interested in science. Back in 2011 Oxford professor of the history of science James Hannam (who hosts the website Bede’s Library) wrote a book called: *The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.* Prof. Hannam illuminates the myriad ways in which the European Middle Ages contributed to “natural philosophy.” It was the Medieval Church in the west which gave us the first universities during the 12th c. “Scholastic Renaissance.”
Medieval universities taught the seven liberal arts, the basic course of the *trivium*— rhetoric, logic and grammar, and at the higher level the *quadrivium* of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. “Trivium” and “quadrivium” mean, respectively, a three-way and a four-way crossroads, implying that these paths of knowledge are fundamentally interconnected and, by extension, that all other paths of learning can be found to intersect with them as well. Hannam says that “The Church made math and science a compulsory part of the syllabus at medieval universities for anyone who wanted to study theology. That meant loads of students got grounding in these subjects, and professors could hold down jobs teaching it.” Thus by 1200, he says, almost half of the highest offices in the church were held by degreed masters.
And the Medieval Scholastics were also empiricists, in other words, they did not just sit in their scriptoria and think about the world, but were keen observers of it. For example, the medieval Scholastics were the first to build their knowledge of human anatomy on dissection. The first such dissections were performed by Mondino dei Luzzi at the University of Bologna in 1315. English Franciscan and bishop Robert Grosseteste based his work on Aristotle’s vision of the dual path of scientific reasoning, concluding from particular observations into a universal law, and then back again.
Much more could be said but I’ll stop here.
Pax.
Lee.