201-0501: Early Church History– Essay Assignment, Lesson Eight, by Dean Mischewski (Student ID: A-351)
The Creativity of the “Dark Ages”
By Dean Mischewski
1)Introduction
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an English historian who wrote a number of books about cultural history, the relationship between religion and culture, and the shaping of Western civilization.
In the introduction to his book The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity, Dawson describes the period usually known as the “Dark Ages” as “the most creative age of all”. Such a description goes against the traditional perspective of the Dark Ages as a time of ignorance and barbarism, but Dawson, a renowned historian, would not have made such a statement without a sound rationale. This essay is a brief attempt to explore that rationale.
2)The Dawn of a New Age
The Dark Ages was the period roughly between 476 and 800 AD, between the collapse of the old Roman Empire and the flowering that followed the crowning of Charlemagne. Perhaps a key part of Dawson’s assertion comes from the insight that the Dark Ages were the seedbed or foundation of a new Europe; the dawn of a new culture consolidated around the structure of the Catholic Church. If Western civilization itself was the product of the Dark Ages, then Dawson is fully justified in asserting that period’s surpassing creativity, for what creative achievement could be more substantial than the building of a new civilization? “If it was dark, its darkness was that of the womb.”[1]
AuthorH. W. Crocker III, following Dawson, describes this period as:
“the Catholic "Age of Faith," when monks, priests, farmers, merchants, kings, bishops, and knights created the dynamic civilization – theadmixture of Classical, Catholic, and Germanic culture – thatis the West.”[2]
Europe blossomed in the high and late Middle Ages (1000 to 1500 A.D.) because of the foundation laid in the centuries beforehand.
3)The Importance of the Church in the Preservation and Development of Culture
The Dark Ages were characterised by frequent warfare and to a large extent the disappearance of urban life. It was an unstable time and the only enduring institution was the Catholic Church. The Church, in various manifestations, preserved the heritage of the classical past, and was also the focal point for much of the cultural development that took place.
The two facets of monastic life, broadly characterised as Benedictine and Celtic monasticism, both provided crucial support to the nascent civilization around them. John Henry Newman’s memorable observation about the impact of the Benedictines is instructive:
“St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it… but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city.”[3]
Similarly, the role of the Celtic monks can be summarised like this:
“Not only did these monks salvage Latin literature from impending oblivion, they scattered across Europe scores of monasteries that restored learning and books to their rightful place. They also reinvigorated the literary spirit and offered to pagan peasants a compelling example of the power of the Christian message.”[4]
In a violent and uncertain time, it was perhaps stability more than anything else that offered the possibility of cultural advancement, and the role of the monasteries in providing this is nicely shown in an illustration Dawson provides:
“Indeed, nothing could be simpler and more fundamental than St. Molua’s statement of the economic basis of the monastic life. ‘My dearest Brethren,’ he said, ‘till the earth well and work hard, so that you may have a sufficiency of food and drink and clothing. For, where there is sufficiency among the servants of God, then there will be stability, and when there is stability in service, then there will be the religious life. And the end of religious life is life eternal!’”[5]
The stability of the monasteries translated to the stability of the Church, and therefore of the entire culture; an enduring example of Christians following Christ’s exhortations to be “salt” and “light”.
Similarly, religion as a whole provided an inducement for cultural creativity:
“[Religion] introduces into human life an element of spiritual freedom which may have a creative and transforming influence on man’s social culture and historical destiny and well as on his inner personal achievement. If we study a culture as a whole, we find that there is an intimate relation between its religious faith and its social achievement… The centuries which followed the fall of the Empire in the West, in spite of the impoverishment of their material culture, were from the liturgical point of view a great creative age… All these ages possessed of poetry, music and art found expression in the liturgy – an expression which no later age has been able to surpass.”[6]
4)Conclusion
In summary, Dawson’s assertion about the creativity of the Dark Ages is amply borne out since it was this period which, as he puts it:
“created not this or that manifestation of culture, but the very culture itself – the root and ground of all the subsequent culture achievements [of Europe].”[7]
The Dark Ages saw the conversion of the West, the great expansion of Christian art and liturgy and, of course, the foundation of Western civilization. That age was indeed creative.
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[1]Lynn White, quoted in The Tenth Century: How Dark the Dark Ages?, ed. Robert S. Lopez (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1959), p. 2.
[2]H. W. Crocker III, Monasteries and Madrassas: Five Myths About Christianity, Islam, and the Middle Ages, in Crisis magazine, July/August 2006. Available at accessed 2 February 2008.
[3] John Henry Newman, Historical Studies II, cited in Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (Image Books: 1957), pp. 53-54.
[4] Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry (Encounter Books: 2002), p. 17.
[5]Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, p. 53.
[6]Ibid, pp. 14, 38.
[7] Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (Meridian Books, 1956), p. 15.