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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (30513)	6/30/1999 4:07:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

"Why were the Dark Ages so Dark?" There's another of your books. But at least read your Gibbon. The Byzantine civilization never collapsed completely, although it went through some terrible times -- iconoclasm and the like. Rome was conquered so many time by so many barbaric tribes -- Goths, Vandals, the Byzantines (Belisarius and Narses) and Italy and France were ravaged so many times that nothing much survived for a century or more. France had to repel the Huns and the Moors and the Norse. The West was also ravaged by struggles between Aryan and Christian beliefs, and repeatedly destroyed advanced civilizations (like the Irish and Jewish scholars and Moorish scholars. Islamic civilization (before the Ottomans, at least) had its ups and downs but welcomed Jewish and even Orthodox Christian scholarship. I believe the key was the resistance of the church to theological and scientific dispute. The silencing and suppression of Bacon and the other Franciscans, the attacks on nominalism, the war on heresy led by Saint Dominic and his running dogs (including St. Thomas Aquinas), the attempt to monopolize philosophy. The most brilliant Christian youths were inevitably drawn into the church, where they were fobbed off with wealth, silenced, and suppressed. The near impossibility of intellectuals founding a family must have had a cumulative affect on dumbing down society. Charlemagne, as able as he was, could never learn to write. The near exclusion of women from education perhaps led to a progressive dumbing down of all children.