The Dark Ages, The Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment

 

 

Have you noticed how the world likes to change the use and meaning of words, especially when they want to remove God from their worldview? This has become a rampant problem, but it seems like it is not a new problem.

 

Some time ago, my mind wandered and I got to thinking about the terms "the Dark Ages" and the later occurring "Enlightenment". I got to wondering what the basis of these terms actually was. On the surface, one might think that the Dark Ages were a time of oppression, lack of human flourishing and maybe even spiritual repression if you have a bent towards theological thinking. The Enlightenment would seem to then be the contrast to that, suggesting that oppression had ceased, human civilization grew and advanced and that spiritual repression had ceased. But is this really the case?

 

As it turns out, the term "Dark Ages" was coined, somewhat indirectly and unintentionally, by an Italian poet by the name of Francis Petrarch who lived in the 14th century. Since the so-called Dark Ages spanned from about the 5th century to anywhere between the 10th and 15th centuries, Petrarch lived either sometime after the Dark Ages ended or towards their close. Petrarch was considered a scholar of his time, so his opinion seemed to matter to those among whom he was familiar.

 

Petrarch was known to have a fondness for the Greek and Roman past and bemoaned the losses of civilization with the collapse of those societies. Petrarch is also credited with planting the seeds of humanist thought through his own musings and writings. Humanism elevates the roles and contributions of mankind while at the same time rejecting the idea of a Creator God.

 

The quote that is attributed to Petrarch from which the term "Dark Ages" is purported to be derived, is as follows; "My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance." Petrarch elevated the civilizations of Greece and Rome, with their intellectual societies, advancement of the arts and leisure and the development of governmental systems, and he lamented the age in which he found himself, hence the referral to the hoped for dispersal of darkness and the future illumination of humanity again, hearkening back to his beloved earlier civilizations. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), wrote of the "Dark Ages", stating that they were a time when "barbarism, superstition and ignorance covered the face of the world".

So what was it about the fifth to fifteenth centuries that was so hard to endure? Granted, this was a time of kings and vassals; a time when food production was tedious and labour intensive, and it was a time before the value of the human life and the rights that come with that were recognized. If you were not of the ruling class, your existence was almost worthless except for what material goods you could contribute to the wealth and opulence of the ruling class.

 

Interestingly, this was also the time of the rise of the church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church. Constantine made Christianity an accepted state religion in 312 AD, which is the fourth century. This decision lead to the rapid growth and rise in power of the Roman Catholic Church, which maintained it's significant influence until the Reformation, which was initiated by Martin Luther in 1517, or the sixteenth century. After this point, the Roman Catholic Church and the power that it had exercised began to wane and its influence over the people, sometimes through brute force, was severely limited.

If you have read my articles for a while, you will already know that I have a strong dislike for the Roman Catholic Church. Besides the theological malfeasance that it practices, there is a strong history of corruption stemming right from the seat of the Pope all the way down to the priests. It may have begun as a Christian movement, but when Constantine got involved, it devolved into a political mechanism and the Roman Catholic Church has never found it's way back to it's roots.

But are you seeing the overlap? What the world refers to as the "Dark Ages" largely coincides with the growth and maintenance of the influence of the church. The collapse of the domination of the Catholic Church coincides with the change of an era, according to human history. The names of the ages that follow the Dark Ages of Catholic supremacy include "The Renaissance" (1400-1600; 15th to 17th centuries), "The Scientific Revolution" (1500-1700; 16th to 18th centuries) and "The Enlightenment" (circa 1675-1775; 17th to 18th centuries). What inspiring names! What better way to draw a distinction between the era of church rule and the following eras in which men have thrown off the heavy chains of (small c) christianity.

So without even examining what actually happened during those time periods, we can see that the longest age, the supposed "dark" age, lasted anywhere from 500 to 1000 years and was punctuated by the immense influence of the church on society, while each of the other "ages" lasted only 100 to 300 years each and were punctuated by the human intellect and ingenuity. So it seems that the names of these ages, which are still used today, were not necessarily an apt description of the times, but rather a description of the influence of the church as conjured up by those who rejected the role of the church in society.

We are lead to believe that human flourishing, ingenuity and invention began only after the church began its long decline and humanity pulled itself from beneath the corpse of the behemoth that had held humanity back for centuries; but this is far from the truth. In fact, while the Greek and Roman civilizations considered themselves enlightened because of their political, spiritual and moral theorizing, it was the dawn of the Christian era that brought the sciences to life.

For all of its many faults, it was the church that built and supported the first universities in order to advance human knowledge and share that knowledge with others, and it was these very universities that spawned interest in understanding the natural world around us, holding firmly to the understanding that the world was created by an all-knowing and wondrously wise God. The purposes of the sciences were, first and foremost, to learn more about God through the study of His creation.

 

The first university is regarded as being the University of Bologna (Italy) which was founded around 1088. This was followed by the University of Paris (France) in 1150, Oxford University (England) in 1167, the University of Palencia (Spain) in 1208 and Cambridge University (England) in 1209. Notice how all of these are located in what were, at the time, strong Christian faith countries? That is no coincidence. And all of these places of higher learning were established firmly within the time frame of the supposed "Dark Ages". In fact, by 1500, the supposed end of the Dark Ages, there were about another 60 Universities that were added, and over half of those were founded upon the basis of the Catholic Church.

Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, wrote a book about how the Dark Ages have been reputationally maligned by humanity. This book is called "Bearing False Witness" if you are interested in further reading on this topic. I am including a link to a digital copy of the book through the U.S. archive website at the bottom of this article.

 

Anyone who remembers their high school science is probably familiar with the name Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), whose scientific discoveries are attributed as being the start of the Scientific Revolution. Rodney Stark briefly examines the life times of six famous scientists who were predecessors to Nicolaus Copernicus, and whose research built the foundations upon which Copernicus' discoveries were built, beginning with Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253). Stark's logical conclusion is that, contrary to common belief, the discoveries of the scientists of the "Scientific Revolution" were not conjured up out of thin air by men who were suddenly freed from the constraints of religious thinking, but rather, they were simply the scientifically logical next step to research and conclusions that were completed by those who came before them; men who had studied and conducted research at Christian universities.

In another section of that book, Stark examines the famous scientists that came out of what is referred to as the "Scientific Revolution", beginning in 1543, which is the year of Copernicus' death, and including all those who were born before 1680, which is around the beginning of the "Age of Enlightenment", and he came up with a total of 52 scientists. Of those 52 scientists, he found that 13 were ordained clergy and that 9 of those were Roman Catholic; 31 were devoutly religious while another 20 were "conventionally" religious; and out of those 52 scientists, only one was a religious skeptic.

 

Some of the advances that were made during the time of the Dark Ages included agricultural advances such as crop rotation to reduce the incidents of crop disease and to allow the land to replenish nutrients, as well as the development of the heavy plow and the collars which made it possible for horses to pull the plow. The development of non-animal power was also revolutionized through the use of windmills and water wheels. There were military advancements such as the development of the cannon and heavily armoured cavalry, and architecture and musical composition also saw advances leading to the Gothic style of buildings and the refinement of musical notation.

These discoveries may seem to be quite rudimentary to those of us who are living in an age of blossoming artificial intelligence, but these were cutting edge developments for that time, and they changed the course of history. As is the case with all scientific discovery, it is all built on the discovery of those who came before. While the scientific discoveries of the next ages capture our attention with the development of an understanding of the solar system and the laws of physics, these discoveries would not have been possible if not for the observations of those who came before them. This is not to say that these things would not have been discovered if not for the scientists of the Dark Ages, but their discoveries would have been delayed, because those who did discover them would have been contemplating ways in which to grow more food and power machines without animal power.

Scientific discovery is like climbing a stepped mountain. Every advancement made could only have come about by all of the advancements made before it. And because of this, the scientific advances of the Scientific Revolution and the further advances of the Enlightenment owe their own existence to the era of the church, the advancement of the understanding of the natural sciences and the very belief in God that later scholars claimed was a barrier to greater understanding. It was the biases against the church that lead to the misnomer of "the Dark Ages", not the lack of human ingenuity or the push back of the church against the growth of the human intellect.

None of this is to say that the church did not inflict itself upon the citizenry in ways that were cruel, or to say that the church did not try to dissuade certain scientific knowledge from getting out. The Church as a whole and the Roman Catholic Church in particular are not faultless throughout history, but history should recognize the contributions of the Church to society and science, and stop calling the era of Church supremacy "The Dark Ages". This was clearly intended to deride the church and to try to build a world mindset that Christian beliefs are a hindrance to intelligence and scientific advancement, when it was actually the Christian church that instituted the official study of the sciences in the first place.

Bearing False Witness; Rodney Stark: 

https://ia601909.us.archive.org/8/items/bearing-false-witness-rodney-stark/Bearing%20false%20witness%20-%20Rodney%20Stark_text.pdf