I recently finished reading a fascinating book: “The Victory of Reason – How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success” by Rodney Stark.
I consider it to be along the lines of “6 Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization” by Philip J. Sampson for its ability to take on popular modern myths and elucidate the fact of the matter.
From pp. 35-36
CHRISTIAN COMMITMENT TO REASON AND PROGRESS WASN’T ALL talk; soon after the fall of Rome, it encouraged an era of extraordinary invention and innovation.
To appreciate this remarkable achievement it is necessary to confront an incredible lie that long disfigured our knowledge of history. For the past two or three centuries, every educated person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century Europe was submerged in the “Dark Ages”- centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery- from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment.Bur it didn’t happen that way. Instead, during the so called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world!
The idea that Europe fell into the Dark Ages is a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals who were determined to assert the cultural superiority of their own time and who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries as- in the words of Voltaire-a time when “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.”
Views such as these were repeated so often and so unanimously that, until very recently, even dictionaries and encyclopedias accepted the Dark Ages as an historical fact. Some writers even seemed to suggest that people living in, say, the ninth century described their own time as one of backwardness and superstition.
Fortunately, in the past few years these views have been so completely discredited that even some dictionaries and encyclopedias have begun to refer to the notion of Dark Ages as mythical.Unfortunately, the myth has so deeply penetrated our culture that even most scholars continue to take it for granted that-in the words of Edward Gibbon- after Rome fell came the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”
In part this is because no one has provided an adequate summary of what really took place.
Furthermore, from p. 51
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 commerce, surely they must be judged severely for ignoring or dismissing the remarkable achievements in high culture accomplished by medieval Europeans.
He elucidates advances in music, art, literature, education and science. Through the book he makes specific mention of various advances and inventions in all of these fields and more.
He concludes this section by stating, in pp. 54-55
All of this Dark Age theorizing was well known to Copernicus, who was not an isolated church canon in a remote part of Poland, as he is so often depicted, but one of the best-educated men of his generation, having trained at the Universities of Cracow, Bologna (possibly the best university in Europe), Padua, and Ferrara. So much progress took place during the so-called Dark Ages that by no later than the thirteenth Century, Europe had forged far ahead of Rome and Greece, and ahead of the rest of the world as well.” Why? Primarily because Christianity taught that progress was “normal” and that “new inventions would always be forthcoming.”
This was the revolutionary idea. Nor was faith in progress limited to technology or to high culture. Medieval Europeans were equally attuned to developing better ways to get things done.
Copernicus, and for that matter Galileo, are poster children in two other myths of modernity which are dispelled in the following—with the flat earth myth thrown in:
“The Copernican Myths”
“Galileo – A Story of a Hero of Science
From p. 68
The path to modern times did not suddenly open during the Renaissance any more than it sprang from the forehead of Zeus. Western civilization arose progressively over many centuries subsequent to the fall of Rome: the so-called Dark Ages were a period of profound enlightenment in both the material and the intellectual spheres, which when combined with Christian doctrines of moral equality, created a whole new world based on political, economic, and personal freedom.
In the future I will be posting more from Rodney Stark’s “The Victory of Reason” as he does a great job of building his case.