Doctor Submarine wrote:I know we're way past this at this point, but I wanted to clarify. Preserving so many super-important works of literature is hardly something to be brushed aside as unimportant. I'm not saying that there wasn't something of a decline, but the term "Dark Ages" is incredibly misleading. The first person ever to use the term "Dark Ages" used it to describe the period of time between the end of Charlemagne's rule and the beginning of the Gregorian Reforms. Aka, a period of time where the Church had little political power or ties to powerful leaders. The time period was "Dark" because the Church had little control. It was later co-opted by any number of people to describe multiple periods of time in the Middle Ages. You call something "Dark" so that you can create a negative association with something else. In this case, it's been used so much that it's basically meaningless. Not to mention the fact that plenty of places outside Europe were having a grand old time.
The context of this discussion was whether Christianity was responsible for a diminution of progress. Someone brushed this aside, claiming they were all pagans in the Dark Ages / Middle Ages. This wasn't true - for most of this 1000 year period, the big players in Europe (French, Italians, Germans, Spanish, Saxons were thoroughly Christianized.
And the term is not meaningless. It refers to a specific geographical area (Europe) and it refers to a very specific epoch: mid-5th century AD (Fall of Rome) to mid-15th century AD (Renaissance). The term is at least as, if not more, precise as "Classical Antiquity" or "Reformation" or "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment".
As for what was happening outside Europe... Sure, China had come up with printing, gunpowder, and the compass, and were sending ships to Africa in the early 15th century. But we were discussing Christianity's braking effect on progress. And there was a massive slow-down, stalling, and even reverse of any measure of progress you care to come up with: scientific understanding, living standards, human rights, etc.
Yes, it's now more PC to call it "Middle Ages" because "Dark Ages" has a judgemental tone about it. Academia likes to be very politically correct. But I'm calling a spade a spade. The "lights went out" in Europe for about 1000 years - there was virtually no advance across a whole range of intellectual fields.
If you dispute this, feel free to cite some examples where Europe progressed during this 1000 year interval.
not long to go now...