We’ve all heard it. If you are a devout Christian and you’ve met some people outside the Faith, or if you listen to Hollywood Communists on TV talk about Christianity, invariably you hear that ‘Christians are stupid’, or ‘Christians burn books’. They have a smug superiority about them, as though our stupidity were a proven fact.
We need to be honest. Our culture is toxic and intolerant toward Christians. We have to take some of the blame, if only for letting this situation fester. We have put our heads down and just ignored them, because we heard it in a lecture or read it in a book. If you argue with them, you will almost certainly have the Dark Ages thrown at you. Since you don’t know anything about the Dark Ages, they win the argument. Like the flat earth myth of which it is a part, the Dark Ages is a fabrication of liberal scholars and scientists. In this post, we will go over what is true, as well as what is not true.
First, what is the Dark Ages myth? Take a look at the graph below of Knowledge vs. Time, as liberals see it.
I think nearly every Christian has had this graph described to them by a liberal. I was taught it as a university student long ago (universities are biased against Christians). Basically, under the Greeks there was a golden age. Under the Romans, knowledge stagnated but was preserved. Under the Christians knowledge suffered a crash from religious superstition, and it only recovered when Humanists took control and saved the world from the excesses of Christianity. The liberal then gleefully tells you that you are stupid and ignorant and your religion is a religion for half-wits.
Allegedly what triggered the modern age was the recovery of Classical knowledge by Europe. Islamic scholars had fortunately preserved the classics, and when translated into Latin they triggered a boom in scholarship that opened men’s minds up to the possibilities of the world. In the words of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374), a dark age was lifting (~1340). Petrarch was an Italian scholar and poet. Certainly there was a change in artistic styles during the Renaissance (14-17th centuries) but does that create a social and scientific revolution? It seems doubtful.
Among historians, the Dark Ages as a term has gone out of favor. There was a considerable amount of progress made in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages is also called the Middle Ages Medieval period because it is between classical civilization (Greek and Romans) and the modern period.
Let’s look, not at art or science, but at technology vs. time. This is a very different graph.
Notice that in the classical period, technology was flat and almost unchanging. Greeks frowned on technology; when asked to write a handbook of engineering, Archimedes refused, saying that the work of an engineer and, indeed, everything that would in any way make life easier, was ignoble and vulgar. In general Romans agreed, although they made exceptions for military technology. They were always interested in killing people.
With that attitude, it is no wonder that little new was added to the store of technology that Greeks and Romans inherited. Greeks and Romans had slaves to do their work; why bother with machines? It is very misleading to only talk about science when discussing classical civilization, because the average reader today thinks of science and technology as inseparable. Think STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. That was not true in Ancient and Medieval times; until the 19th century technological advances were made without the aid of science at all. Industry after industry advanced by trial and error; technology advanced step by step as men corrected their mistakes. Science had nothing to do with it.
To this misleading impression can be added another one: that classical science is similar to modern science. In fact the greatest scientist of his day, Aristotle, would not be considered a scientist today. Aristotle was an aristocratic philosopher who dabbled in science. His book on biology is noted mainly for his observation and cataloging of animals. Today he would be called a naturalist. Other Greeks worked on Astronomy. Anything that could be applied , e.g. Mechanics, was frowned upon. Greek aristocrats did not soil their hands with such things. They were considered ‘slavish’.
This had real life consequences. In a wheat-growing economy, one of the most important and inescapable needs was to grind the wheat kernel into flour. Without that, bread, the staff of life, could not be baked. What kind of mills did they have? From Exodus 11:6 we read:
the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill KJV
We would normally think that in grinding, we would be sitting next to the mill, not standing behind it. In ancient times, the miller was a slave, and he was standing behind a saddle quern. The saddle quern consisted of two stones: a lower, saddle shaped stone slightly tilted, and an upper stone. The miller (a slave) stood behind the mill and pushed the upper stone back and forth over the lower stone. Grain to be ground was placed on the lower stone. It was heavy work, but it was done by slaves so no one cared.
Saddle querns were used in Egypt during the Pyramid Age (2700 BC), and in ancient Israel, so they were already over 2000 years old by the time of classical civilization. Greeks and Romans continued to use them, particularly for home use. Romans did have rotary mills; soldiers used them because they were small and portable. They also had rotary mills powered by donkeys. Professional millers used saddle querns because they preferred slave labor to donkeys. Mills operated by slaves also did a better job.
When you think of flour you probably think of what you buy in 5 lb bags. Roman flour bore almost no resemblance to the flour you buy in the supermarket. It was not cleaned properly before grinding, so it had dirt and grit in it. It had all of the impurities of the wheat, some of which were poisonous. The bread was very hard on the teeth because of the dirt and grit. It was not what we think of when something is advertised as ‘Roman meal’.
The Romans and the Greeks before them just put up with it. They did not develop much in the way of improvements in washing or sieving the flour; the coarse sieves were made of horsehair. It was not ground very well; very little power was consumed in grinding so it was a poor job. This kind of stagnant technology was typical. Use of water mills did not occur until the late Roman period (300-500 A.D.) when the Empire was on the verge of collapse.
On the other hand, Christian technology rolled right along, powered mostly by the Christian ideal that everyone can be saved and that the poor will be first in Heaven. Under Christianity the poor and weak had dignity and worth. Christians substituted slave power with non-human power: animal, water, wind and even tidal power. In terms of milling, a survey done of England in 1088 showed there were 5674 water mills in operation. Mills were everywhere ( 1 for every 50 families). Most of them milled grain into flour, although some powered factories of various kinds. Household milling was done with much better rotary mills and it had to be done in secret since the lord of the manor usually owned the local mill and made most of his money milling for his tenants (i.e. serfs). He jealously guarded his monopoly for this reason, whereas the tenants secretly purchased rotary mills to save money. In all cases the ideal was to lighten the work of the worker, something unheard-of in ancient Rome, or indeed in any ancient civilization. The saddle quern was retired to the museum where it belonged.
The truth is that technology doesn’t just ‘happen’. It did not happen under the Greeks and Romans. In general, technology does not happen in aristocratic societies because technology is disruptive, and aristocrats hate disruption. Western technological society started in Europe during the Dark Ages. Christianity, particularly under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, fostered technology as a way to alleviate the plight of the poor, and in so doing triggered the technological age we live in today. Alleviating the plight of the poor is a very disruptive idea, which is why it needed the Church to push it. The modern, scientific society appeared first in Western Europe because that is where the Roman Catholic Church held sway. In the East, the Orthodox Church also sought to alleviate the plight of the poor, but that area was ruled by the aristocratic remnant of the Roman Empire, so it did not want the disruptions that Western Europe suffered through. Eventually it lagged behind the more dynamic area of Western Europe.
Our modern, technology-driven society first appeared in the Dark Ages, not the Renaissance. The Greeks and Romans had nothing to do with it; our scientific age has always been driven by technology. It is no longer the province of bored aristocrats. That technological drive is the result of an attitude toward the poor, an attitude from Lord Jesus’ teachings. The resulting technology grew out of the Church’s efforts to relieve poverty and the indignity of slavery. What happened in Europe was a one time historical event, and it had only one cause – Christianity.
This has only been an overview of the Dark Ages. There are more posts to come covering many topics, including:
Evaluation of classical civilization
Aristotle
Dark Age technological achievements
Life in the Dark Ages
Women in classical civilization
Women and Christianity
Women in the Dark Ages
We will see the contrast between the so-called Dark Ages and classical civilization. We will explode myth after myth designed to hide the truth. You can judge whether the accusations made against Christianity are fair or not.
