Chapter Fourteen
The “Dark Ages” and Other Mythical Eras

LET US NOW RETURN TO earlier times and the fall of Rome. For centuries it has been the common wisdom that after the fall of Rome came the Dark Ages —many centuries during which ascendant Christianity imposed an era of ignorance and superstition all across Europe. In her long-admired study of medieval philosophers, Anne Fremantle (1909–2002) wrote of “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.”¹

The Italian humanist Petrarch (1304 –1374) may have been the first to call “the period stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire until his own age as a time of ‘darkness,’ ”² an anti-Christian judgment that has echoed down the centuries. Voltaire (1694 –1778) described this long era as one when “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.”³ According to Rousseau (1712–1778), “Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The people of this part of the world... lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.”⁴ Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) also proclaimed that the fall of Rome was the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”⁵ More recently, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) lent his authority to the matter, writing in the illustrated edition of his famous college textbook: “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. The Dark Ages, as they are called... it is not inappropriate to call these centuries dark, especially if they are set against what came before and what came after.”⁶

As Russell suggested, the prevailing ignorance during the Dark Ages seems magnified by contrast with the Renaissance. Being the French word for “rebirth,” Renaissance identifies the era beginning at the end of the fourteenth century when Europeans rediscovered long-forgotten classical learning, thereby causing new light to break through the prevailing intellectual darkness. According to the standard historical account, the Renaissance occurred because a decline in church control over major northern Italian cities such as Florence⁷ allowed a revival of classical Greco-Roman culture. Furthermore, this new appreciation for knowledge, especially for scientific knowledge not hobbled by theology, led directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Also known as the “Age of Reason,” the Enlightenment is said to have begun in the sixteenth century when (aided by the Reformation) secular thinkers freed themselves from clerical control and revolutionized both science and philosophy, thereby ushering in the modern world. To quote Bertrand Russell once more: “Enlightenment was essentially a revaluation of independent intellectual activity, aimed quite literally at spreading light where hitherto darkness had prevailed.”⁸

To sum up: Western history consists of four major eras: 1) classical antiquity, then 2) the Dark Ages when the church dominated, followed by 3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment which led the way to 4) modern times.

For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,⁹ despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”¹⁰ It is appropriate to use the term renaissance to identify a particular period in the arts when there was renewed interest in classical styles, and to distinguish this period from the Gothic or the Baroque. But it is inappropriate to apply this term to identify the rebirth of progress following the Dark Ages because there never were any Dark Ages !

The Myth of the “Dark Ages”

IRONICALLY, THE MOST BENEFICIAL factor in the rise of Western civilization was the fall of Rome! Like all of the ancient empires, Rome suffered from chronic power struggles among the ruling elite, but aside from that and chronic border wars and some impressive public works projects, very little happened—change, whether technological or cultural, was so slow as to go nearly unnoticed. This prompted the distinguished Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus (40–103 CE ) to note that “Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.”¹¹ Instead, as the centuries passed most people continued to live as they always had, “just a notch above barest subsistence... little better off than their oxen.”¹² Of course, as much as half of the population of the empire consisted of slaves who, in effect, were oxen. But even most free Romans lived at a bare subsistence level, not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living, but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of “surplus” production. If all production above the bare minimum needed for survival is seized by the elite, there is no motivation for anyone to produce more. Consequently, despite the fabulous wealth of the elite, Rome was very poor. As E. L. Jones noted, “emperors amassed vast wealth but received incomes that were nevertheless small relative to the immensity of the territories and populations governed.”¹³

When the collapse of the Roman Empire “released the tax-paying millions... from a paralysing oppression,”¹⁴ 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. No longer were the productive classes bled to sustain the astonishing excesses of the Roman elite, or to erect massive monuments to imperial egos, or to support vast armies to hold Rome’s many colonies in thrall. Instead, human effort and ingenuity turned to better ways to farm, to sail, to transport goods, to conduct business, to build churches, to make war, to educate, and even to play music. But because so many centuries later a number of examples of classical Greek and Roman public grandeur still stand as remarkable ruins, many intellectuals have been prompted to mourn the loss of these “great civilizations.” Many who are fully aware of what this grandeur cost in human suffering have been quite willing even to write-off slavery as merely “the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.”¹⁵ To put it plainly, for too long too many historians have been as gullible as tourists, gaping at the monuments, palaces, and conspicuous consumption of Rome, and then drawing invidious comparisons between such “cosmopolitan” places and “provincial” communities such as medieval merchant towns.

In any event, there was no “fall” into “Dark Ages.” Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent “statelets.”¹⁶ In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”¹⁷ In fact, it was during the “Dark Ages” that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.¹⁸ How could historians have so misrepresented things?

In part, the notion that Europe fell into the “Dark Ages” was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.” Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time. In addition, during this era only limited attention was paid to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and that too was taken as proof of widespread ignorance.

Another factor contributing to the myth of the “Dark Ages” is that in this era there no longer were large cities having hundreds of thousands of residents, as had ancient Rome and Alexandria.¹⁹ It seemed obvious that high culture could not have been sustained in the small communities of Medieval Europe—in the year 1000 there were only twenty thousand inhabitants in Paris, not many more in London, and Rome had shrunk to fewer than thirty thousand.²⁰ But perhaps the most important factor in the myth of the “Dark Ages” is the inability of intellectuals to value or even to notice the nuts and bolts of real life. Hence, revolutions in agriculture, weaponry and warfare, nonhuman power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce went unappreciated. So too did remarkable moral progress. For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the “Renaissance” it was long gone. But what is truly difficult to explain is how the creators of the “Dark Ages” myth could have overlooked what would seem to have been their chief interest: high culture. Nevertheless, they missed or dismissed the enormous progress that took place in music, art, literature, education, and science.

I have written at length elsewhere²¹ on what truly took place during the mythical era of the “Dark Ages.” Here a summary will suffice.

Progress in Technology

THE ROMANS MADE LITTLE use of water or wind power, preferring manual labor performed by slaves. In contrast, an inventory conducted in the ninth century found that one-third of the estates along the Seine River in the area around Paris had water mills, the majority of them on church-owned properties.²² Several centuries later there was one mill every seventy feet along this stretch of the river!²³ Meanwhile across the channel, the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 as a forerunner of the modern census, reported that there were at least 5,624 water-powered mills already operating in England, or one for every fifty families, and this is known to be an undercount.²⁴ Among many other things, mills such as these mechanized the manufacture of woolen cloth and soon enabled England to dominate the European market.²⁵ Many dams also were constructed during the “Dark Ages”; one at Toulouse, built around 1120, was more than thirteen hundred feet across and was constructed by driving thousands of giant oak logs into the riverbed to form a front and rear palisade, which then was filled with dirt and stone.²⁶ In similar fashion, “Dark Age” Europeans excelled at bridge building. Recently, underwater archeologists discovered the timbers that once had supported a bridge more than five hundred feet long across the Shannon River in Ireland. Tree ring evidence revealed that all of these timbers had been felled in 803.²⁷

During this era, Europeans also harnessed the wind. They not only used windmills to power the same equipment as did water mills; they also used them to reclaim huge portions of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands by pumping out the sea. Tens of thousands of windmills devoted to this task worked day and night throughout most of the “Dark Ages.” Indeed, by late in the twelfth century, western Europe had become so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.²⁸ (Europeans in this era sustained well-organized courts and a host of lawyers, although the latter may not have amounted to progress.)

Meanwhile, agriculture was revolutionized.²⁹ First came the shift to a three-field system wherein one third of the productive land was left unplanted each year while continuing to be cultivated (to remove weeds) and fertilized. The result of this renewal of the land was far greater production. In addition, the invention of the heavy plow permitted far better cultivation of the wetter, denser soils north of Italy, and the introduction of the horse-collar permitted the replacement of slow oxen teams with teams of horses, thus at least doubling the speed of cultivation. Selective plant breeding also began in the monasteries resulting in more productive and hardy crops. Altogether these “Dark Ages” achievements fed a larger population much better.

Also of immense importance was the invention of chimneys, which allowed buildings and homes to be heated without needing holes in the roof to let out smoke while letting in rain, snow, and cold air. Another revolutionary innovation was eyeglasses, which were invented in about 1280 and almost immediately went into mass production thus allowing huge numbers of people to lead productive lives who otherwise could not have done so.³⁰ In 1492, when Columbus set out on his first voyage west, eyeglasses still were known only in Europe.

Prior to the “Dark Ages,” there was no heavy cavalry. Mounted troops did not charge headlong at a gallop, putting the full weight of horse and rider behind a long lance. The reason was the lack of stirrups and a proper saddle. Without stirrups to brace against, a rider attempting to drive home a lance will be thrown off his horse. The ability of a rider to withstand sudden shocks is also greatly increased by a saddle with a very high pommel and cantle—the latter being curved to partly enclose the rider’s hips. It was not Rome or any other warlike empire that produced heavy cavalry: their mounted troops rode on light, almost flat, pad saddles, or even bareback, and they had no stirrups. Consequently, these mounted warriors could only fire bows, throw spears, or swing swords. They could not bowl over their opponents. It was the “barbarous” Franks who, in 732, fielded the first armored knights astride massive horses, and who slaughtered invading Muslim forces on the battlefield of Tours when they charged them behind long lances, secure in their high-backed Norman saddles and braced in their revolutionary stirrups.³¹ Nearly four centuries later, when the knights of Europe confronted Muslim armies in the Holy Land, nothing had changed. The crusaders still were the only ones with stirrups and adequate saddles. They also were the only ones with crossbows.

Roman sea power was based on galleys powered by oars and having only an auxiliary sail. They fought by ramming one another and then by engaging in hand-to-hand combat with swords and spears. But well before the end of the “Dark Ages,” Europeans had invented true sailing ships and armed them with cannons.³² That gun powder was not invented in the West is immaterial. What matters is that within a decade of the arrival of gunpowder from China, church bell manufacturers all over Europe were casting effective cannons that were adopted by every army and navy, transforming the nature of war.³³ In contrast, the Chinese cast only a few, ineffective cannons, mostly being content to use gunpowder in fireworks.³⁴

These are only a few of the important technological innovations achieved during the “Dark Ages.” What is clear is that so much important technological progress occurred during this era that classical Greece and Rome had been left far behind. In fact, even though they did not yet possess gunpowder, the crusader knights who marched off to the Holy Land in 1097 would have made short work of the Roman legions.

Inventing Capitalism

HISTORIANS OF THE RISE of Western civilization agree that the development of capitalism was of immense importance—even Karl Marx (1818–1883) supports this view, writing that “[capitalism has] created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all the preceding generations together.”³⁵ Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber’s (1864–1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the “depths” of the “Dark Ages.” Beginning in about the ninth century, many of the large, prosperous, and growing monastic estates developed into well-organized and stable firms involved in complex commercial activities that generated a sophisticated banking system within a developing free market, thereby achieving capitalism in all its glory.³⁶ Many secular capitalist firms were soon founded, especially in major Italian city-states, and capitalism began to spread rapidly. By the thirteenth century, there were 173 major Italian banks having hundreds of branches all over western Europe—even in England and Ireland.³⁷

Because capitalism had originated within the great religious orders, Christian theologians were prompted to rethink traditional doctrines opposed to profits and interest.

St. Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) proposed that the “just price” to charge for something is not what it cost, but what “goods are worth according to the estimation of the market at the time of sale.”³⁸ That is, a price is just if that’s what uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Echoing his teacher, but using many more words, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) began his analysis of just prices by posing the question, “Whether a man may lawfully sell a thing for more than it is worth?”³⁹ He answered by first quoting St. Augustine (354–430) that it is natural and lawful for “you to wish to buy cheap, and sell dear.” Next, Aquinas excluded fraud from legitimate transactions. Finally, he recognized that worth is not really an objective value—“the just price of things is not absolutely definite”—but is a function of the buyer’s desire for the thing purchased and the seller’s willingness or reluctance to sell, so long as the buyer was not misled, or under duress. To be just, a price had to be the same for all potential buyers at a given moment, thus barring price discrimination.

As to interest on loans, Aquinas was unusually confusing. In some writings he condemned all interest as the sin of usury, while in other passages he accepted that lenders deserve compensation, although he was fuzzy as to how much and why.⁴⁰ However, prompted by the realities of a rapidly expanding commercial economy, many of Aquinas’s contemporaries, especially the Canonists, were not so cautious, but began “discovering” many exceptions wherein interest charges were not usurious.⁴¹ For example, if a productive property such as an estate is given as security for a loan, the lender may take all of the production during the period of the loan and not deduct it from the amount owed.⁴² Many other exclusions involved the “costs” to the lender of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities such as buying goods for resale or acquiring new fields. Since these alternative opportunities for profit are entirely licit, it is licit to compensate a lender for having to forgo them.⁴³ Thus, while the “sin of usury” remained on the books, so to speak, “usury” had become essentially an empty term.

Thus, by no later than the thirteenth century, the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism—profits, property rights, credit, lending, and the like. As Lester K. Little summed up: “In each case they came up with generally favorable, approving views, in sharp contrast to the attitudes that had prevailed for six or seven centuries right up to the previous generation.”⁴⁴ Capitalism was fully and finally freed from all fetters of faith.⁴⁵

It was a remarkable shift. These were, after all, theologians who had separated themselves from the world. Most of them had taken vows of poverty. Most of their predecessors had held merchants and commercial activities in contempt. Had asceticism truly prevailed in the religious orders, it seems most unlikely that Christian disdain for and opposition to commerce would have mellowed, let alone have been radically transformed. This theological revolution was the result of direct experience with worldly imperatives. For all their genuine acts of charity, monastic administrators were not about to give all their wealth to the poor or to sell their products at cost. It was the active participation of the great houses in free markets that caused monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce. Nothing of the sort took place among Islamic theologians, with the result that capitalism could not develop, which had obvious consequences for Muslim economic progress.

Moral Progress

ALL CLASSICAL SOCIETIES WERE slave societies—both Plato and Aristotle were slave-owners, as were most free residents of Greek city-states. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus’s voyage.⁴⁶ Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!

Elsewhere I have told the story of how slavery reappeared and then was prohibited in the Western Hemisphere.⁴⁷ But the very first time slavery was eliminated anywhere in the world was not during the “Renaissance” or the “Enlightenment,” but during the “Dark Ages.” And it was accomplished by clever church leaders who first extended the sacraments to all slaves, reserving only ordination into the priesthood. Initially, the implications of the Christianization of slaves went unnoticed, but soon the clergy began to argue that no true Christian (or Jew) should be enslaved.⁴⁸ Since slaves were Christians, priests began to urge owners to free their slaves as an “infinitely commendable act” that helped ensure their own salvation.⁴⁹ Many manumissions were recorded in surviving wills. Soon there was another factor: intermarriage. Despite being against the law in most of Europe, there is considerable evidence of mixed unions by the seventh century, usually involving free men and female slaves. The most celebrated of these unions took place in 649 when Clovis II, King of the Franks, married his British slave Bathilda. When Clovis died in 657, Bathilda ruled as regent until her eldest son came of age. Bathilda used her position to mount a campaign to halt the slave trade and to redeem those in slavery. Upon her death, the church acknowledged Bathilda as a saint.

At the end of the eighth century Charlemagne opposed slavery, while the pope and many other powerful and effective clerical voices echoed St. Bathilda. As the ninth century dawned, Bishop Agobard of Lyons thundered: “All men are brothers, all invoke one same Father, God: the slave and the master, the poor man and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned, the weak and the strong.... [N]one has been raised above the other... there is no... slave or free, but in all things and always there is only Christ.”⁵⁰ Soon, no one “doubted that slavery in itself was against divine law.”⁵¹ Indeed, during the eleventh century both St. Wulfstan and St. Anselm successfully campaigned to remove the last vestiges of slavery in Christendom.⁵²

Progress in High Culture

EVEN IF VOLTAIRE, GIBBON, and other proponents of the “Enlightenment” could be excused for being oblivious to engineering achievements and to innovations in agriculture or warfare, surely they must be judged severely for ignoring or dismissing the remarkable achievements in “high culture” accomplished by medieval Europeans: in music, art, literature, education, and science.

Music: The Romans and Greeks sang and played monophonic music: a single musical line sounded by all voices or instruments. It was medieval musicians who developed polyphony, the simultaneous sounding of two or more musical lines, hence harmonies. Just when this occurred is unknown, but “it was an established practice when it was described in Musica enchiriadis, ” published around 900.⁵³ And, in about the tenth century, an adequate system of musical notation was invented and popularized so that music could be accurately performed by musicians who had never heard it.

Art: Unfortunately, the remarkable artistic era that emerged in eleventh century Europe is known as “Romanesque,” despite the fact that it was quite different from anything done by the Romans. This name was imposed by nineteenth century professors who “knew” that Europe only recovered from the “Dark Ages” by going back to Roman culture. Hence this could only have been an era of poor imitations of things Roman. In fact, Romanesque architecture, sculpture, and painting were original and powerful in ways that “even the late Roman artists would never have understood.”⁵⁴ Then, in the twelfth century, the Romanesque period was followed by the even more powerful Gothic era. It seems astonishing, but Gothic architecture and painting were scorned by critics during the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ for not conforming to “the standards of classical Greece and Rome: ‘May he who invented it be cursed.’ ”⁵⁵ These same critics mistakenly thought the style originated with the “barbarous” Goths, hence the name, and, as anyone who has seen one of Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals knows, the artistic judgment of these critics was no better than their history, to say nothing of their disregard for the architectural inventions, including the flying buttress, that made it possible for the first time to build very tall buildings with thin walls and large windows, thus prompting major achievements in stained glass. It also was thirteenth-century artists in northern Europe who were the first to use oil paint and to put their work on stretched canvass rather than on wood or plaster. This “allowed the painter to take his time, to use brushes of amazing delicacy, to achieve effects... which seemed close to miracles.”⁵⁶ Anyone who thinks that great painting began with the Italian “Renaissance” should examine the work of the Van Eycks. So much, then, for notions that the millennium following the collapse of Rome was an artistic blank or worse.

Literature: Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in English, not Latin. Voltaire wrote exclusively in French, Cervantes in Spanish, and Machiavelli and Da Vinci in Italian. This was possible only because these languages had been given literary form by medieval giants such as Dante, Chaucer, the nameless authors of the chansons de geste, and the monks who, beginning in the ninth century, devoted themselves to writing lives of saints—“the first known pages of French literature... belong to this genre.”⁵⁷ Thus was vernacular prose formulated and popularized. So much for “Dark Age” illiteracy and ignorance.

Education: The university was something new under the sun—an institution devoted exclusively to “higher learning.” This Christian invention was quite unlike Chinese academies for training Mandarins or a Zen master’s school. The new universities were not primarily concerned with imparting the received wisdom. Rather, just as is the case today, faculty gained fame and invitations to join faculties elsewhere by innovation. Consequently, during the “Dark Ages” university professors—now known as the Scholastics—gave their primary attention to the pursuit of knowledge.⁵⁸ And they achieved many remarkable results, as will be outlined in chapter 16. The world’s first two universities were founded by Catholic scholars in Paris and Bologna in about 1160. Forty years later came Oxford and Cambridge and by the end of the thirteenth century another twenty universities had been founded all across Europe, enrolling thousands of students.

Science: For generations, historians claimed that a “Scientific Revolution” began in the sixteenth century when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system. But recently, specialists in the history of science have concluded that what occurred was an evolution, not a revolution.⁵⁹ Just as Copernicus simply took the next implicit step in the cosmology of his day, so too the flowering of science in that era was the culmination of the gradual progress that had been made over previous centuries. This evolution will be properly traced in chapter 16.

This, then, was the era that the intellectual proponents of the “Enlightenment” described as a tragic decline into ignorance and superstition. Little wonder that many contemporary historians become incensed by use of the term Dark Ages. As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, “to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was ‘dark’ must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.”⁶⁰

The Myth of the “Renaissance”

OBVIOUSLY, IF THE “DARK Ages” are a ridiculous myth, so too must be the “Renaissance” since it proposes that Europe was saved from ignorance when intellectuals in various Northern Italian city-states broke sufficiently free from church control to allow the “rebirth” of classical knowledge. Had there really been a return to classical knowledge, it would have created an era of cultural decline since Christian Europe had long since surpassed classical antiquity in nearly every way. Unfortunately, many creators of the “Renaissance” myth had no knowledge of the immense progress of the “Dark Ages” and seem to have based their entire assessment on the extent to which scholars were familiar with Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and other stalwarts of classical learning and literature. But even this legacy of classical culture was fully restored long before the “Renaissance.” The key development was the translation of these writers into Latin, since Greek was no longer the intellectual language of Christendom. And these translations were not made during the “Renaissance,” but centuries earlier, by pious monastic scholars. Indeed, “between 1125 and 1200, a veritable flood of translations into Latin, made Greek... [writing] available, with more to come in the thirteenth century.”⁶¹ This is fully supported by surviving monastery library catalogues from as far back as the twelfth century which reveal extensive holdings of classical authors.⁶²

As for the famous “Italian Renaissance,” it was not a rebirth of classical learning at all! It was a period of cultural emulation during which people of fashion copied the classical styles in manners, art, literature, and philosophy. Out of this passion for their own ancient days of glory, northern Italians recast history to stress “the achievements of modern Italy and their dislike and contempt for the barbarians of the north.”⁶³ Thus they imposed the “Dark Ages” between themselves and their past. But it wasn’t so. The Scholastics knew of, and often knew more than, the ancient Greek and Roman authors.

The Myth of Secular “Enlightenment”

THE SINGLE MOST REMARKABLE and ironic thing about the “Enlightenment” is that those who proclaimed it made little or no contribution to the accomplishments they hailed as a revolution in human knowledge, while those responsible for these advances stressed continuity with the past. That is, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, and the rest were literary men, while the primary revolution they hailed as the “Enlightenment” was scientific. Equally misleading is the fact that although the literary men who proclaimed the “Enlightenment” were irreligious, the central figures in the scientific achievements of the era were deeply religious.⁶⁴ So much then for the idea that suddenly in the sixteenth century, enlightened secular forces burst the chains of Christian thought and set the foundation for modern times. What the proponents of “Enlightenment” actually initiated was the tradition of angry secular attacks on religion in the name of science—attacks like those of their modern counterparts such as Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. Presented as the latest word in sophistication, rationalism, and reason, these assaults are remarkably naive and simplistic—both then and now.⁶⁵ In truth, the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former, as will be seen in chapter 16.

Claims concerning the revolutionary character of the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” have seemed plausible because remarkable progress was made in these eras. But rather than being a revolutionary break with the past, these achievements were simply an extension of the accelerating curve of progress that began soon after the fall of Rome. Thus, the historian’s task is not to explain why so much progress has been made since the fifteenth century—that focus is much too late. The fundamental question about the rise of the West is: What enabled Europeans to begin and maintain the extraordinary and enduring period of rapid progress that enabled them, by the end of the “Dark Ages,” to have far surpassed the rest of the world? Why was it that, although many civilizations have pursued alchemy, it led to chemistry only in Europe? Or, while many societies have made excellent observations of the heavens and have created sophisticated systems of astrology, why was this transformed into scientific astronomy only in Europe?

Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in geography. But, that same geography long sustained European cultures that were well behind those of Asia. Others have traced the rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that these answers are part of what needs to be explained: Why did Europeans excel at metallurgy, ship-building, or farming? I have devoted a book to my answer: that the truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe.⁶⁶

Conclusion

WHEN ONE EXAMINES THE conventional outline of Western history one encounters some truly fabulous inventions of great historical eras that never really happened: the “Dark Ages,” the “Renaissance,” the “Enlightenment,” and the “Age of Reason.” We turn next to an equally fictitious era: the “Age of Faith.”