Found this from another poster. I have to say, it has changed my thinking completely on the history of the middle ages.
Worth a serious read.
<<The basic cause of cultural retrogression was not Christianity, but barbarism; not religion but war. The human inundations ruined or impoverished cities, monasteries, libraries, schools, and made impossible the life of the scholar and the scientist. Perhaps the destruction would have been worse had not the Church maintained some measure of order in a crumbling civilization. "Amid the agitations of the world," said Ambrose, "the Church remains unmoved; the waves cannot shake her. While around her everything everything is in a horrible chaos, she offers to all the shipwrecked a tranquil port where they will find safety." And often it was so.
The Roman Empire had raised science, prosperity, and power to their ancient peaks. The decay of the Empire in the West, the growth of poverty and the spread of violence, necessitated some new ideal and hope to give men consolation in their suffering and courage in their toil: an age of power gave way to an age of faith. Not till wealth and pride should return in the Renaissance would reason reject faith, and abandon heaven for utopia. But if, thereafter, reason should fail, and science should find no answers, but should multiply knowledge and power without improving conscience or purpose; if all utopias should brutally collapse in the changeless abuse of the weak by the strong; then men would understand why once their ancestors, in the barbarism of those early Christian centuries, turned from science, knowledge, power and pride, and took refuge for a thousand years in humble faith, hope and charity.
Chapter 3, "The Progress of Christianity", in The Age of Faith, a History of Medieval Civilization - Christian, Islamic and Judaic - from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325 - 1300, by Will Durant. |
