Legends and Myths

The Myth of the Dark Ages

The standard secular humanist perspective on European history was wrapped up and handed to us by Enlightenment philosophes.  The basic thesis was that rational thought and accomplishment ended with the waning of the Roman Empire.  It was succeeded by the Dark Ages--a period of ignorance, disease, poverty and brutality--until Charlemagne (circa 800AD), who represented a flickering, dying ember of former glories.  But human history did not recommence its triumphant upward movement until the Enlightenment, which it began to hymn brazenly, and with just a smidgen of self-serving chutzpah, declaring "We are the Champions of the World". 

Nowadays only the untutored cling to such a deceitful trick, and then only for the purposes of propaganda--which is elegantly appropriate, since this was largely why Gibbon wrote his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The way the story "rolled" was to magnify Rome and its Empire and contrast its glories with the succeeding degradations, then slip in an association of the "decline and fall" with the spread of Christianity (a superstition undermining classical thought), leading to the "inevitable" conclusion that the Christian religion was bad for the general well-being of mankind. 

Here is Gibbon's paean of praise to Roman accomplishment:

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.  The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour.  The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces.  Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.  The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence, etc. etc.

Then came the barbarian hordes in the fifth century, destroying and trampling all before them, tearing down Rome's civilised accomplishments, bequeathing a dark night of degradation, poverty, squalor, and disease upon Western Europe.

These days pesky archaeologists have nosed around sufficiently to demonstrate comprehensively that it never happened.  With the passing of Roman control, the end of a slave-based "civilisation" came to an end. Having shrugged off the dark aspects of the Roman Imperium, Western civilisation continued to develop and progress.

Peter S. Wells, professor of Archaeology at the University of Minnesota, writes in the preface to his book, Barbarians to Angels,

We now have the benefit of archaeological material from the first millennium, which is rich enough to give us a powerful alternative picture.  As I show in this book, the time once known as the Dark Ages--the fifth through eighth centuries--was anything but dark.  It was a time of brilliant cultural activity. . . . Subsequent developments in Europe, including the Renaissance and modern civilization, owe as much to the "barbarians" as to Rome.  Rather than a disjuncture in cultural life, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries--the "Dark Ages" to some--were times during which Europeans created the basis for medieval and modern Western civilization.  [Peter S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), p. xiv.]

Some of the advances included:

1. The moldboard plow, which greatly increased agriculture productivity and food production.


2. The development of medieval architecture, along with its engineering underpinnings, eventually leading to the huge cathedrals with their magnificent lying buttresses, as just one application. 


3. Written law codes, incorporating Roman law, but also the traditions and equity of local ethnic traditions.  "Frankish, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon law codes were written down in the course of the sixth century." (Ibid., p.11)

Moreover, there is no solid archaeological evidence for "Saxon invasions" or other mass migration of peoples into Western Europe and Britain, destroying much of what was before them. The presence of new forms of pottery, jewellery, and objects of various kinds in "Dark Ages" Britain seems to be due not to invaders conquering native inhabitants and imposing their cultural patterns upon them, but to the gradual influence of trade goods and the imitation of styles and tastes found in Western Europe, by merchants and travellers picking up goods and ideas and bringing them into Britain, where they found a ready market.

Why is it important to get these kinds of things right?  It seems there is a perpetual tendency to idealise some aspects of the past.  There is also a persistent tendency to denigrate other aspects of the past, in the attempt to make the present seem more triumphantly glorious, in the ilk of "We are the champions . . . "  In the case of the myth of the Dark Ages it was both.  The Roman past was idealised as a golden age of human civilisation.  The Modern Period (from the Enlightenment onwards) has been glorified as a continuation of humanity's upward rationalist trajectory.  Christianity has been denigrated as producing a "middle age"--which was a Dark Age of Western history: ignorant, prejudiced, superstitious, and degrading. 

It's the stuff of legends and myths.