TheDark Ages

by Gentle Touch...

estern histories have put forth many theories about the fall of Rome and attributed the onset of the Dark Ages to a wide variety of causes, except the one cause that may have had more to do with it than any other: Christianity. By denying women's spiritual significance and forbidding Goddess Worship, the church alienated both sexes from their pagan sense of unity with the divine through each other.

Christians said one of the diabolic symptoms of the oncoming End Of The World was "the spread of knowledge," which they endeavored to check with wholesale book-burnings, destruction of libraries and schools, and opposition to education for laymen. By the end of the 5th century, Christian rulers forcibly abolished the study of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and geography. Lactantius said no Christian should study astronomy. Pope Gregory I the Great (born 540? Pope from 590-604 C.E.) denounced all secular education as folly and wickedness, and forbade Christian laymen to read even the Bible. He burned the library of the Palatine Apollo, "lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven."

In the church's view, every opinion except its own was heretical and devlish, likely to raise doubts in the minds of believers. Therefore, Pagan Intellectuals and teachers were persecuted and schools were closed . Christian emperors commanded the burning of all books of the philosophers, as Theodosius (Theodosius the Great; 346?-395, Roman emperor 379-395) said, "for we would not suffer any of those things so much as to come to men's ears, which would tend to provoke God to wrath and offend the minds of the pious." After years of vandalism and destruction, St. John Chrysostom proudly boasted, "Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth."

It was almost true. Christian persecutions left "but few fragments of a vast liturgy and religious literature of paganism which would have cast many a ray of light on the origins of our own faith; and demolished holy places and beautiful temples such as the world shall never rear again" After temples were destroyed, monks and hermits were settled in the ruins to defile the site with their excrement, and to prevent reconstruction.

Rulers melted down bronze, gold, and silver artworks for money. Peasants broke up marble gods and goddesses and fed their pieces to limekilns for mortar. It is recorded that 4th-century Rome had 424 temples, 304 shrines, 80 statues of deities in precious metal, 64 staues of ivory, 3,700 staues in bronze, and thousands in marble. By the next century, nearly all of them were gone. The historian Eunapius, a hierophant of the Eleusian Mysterias, watched the destruction and wrote that the empire was being overwhelmed by a "fabulous and formless darkness mastering the lovliness of the world."

Roman society was losing its cohesiveness and discipline, with the usual symptoms of social decline: runaway inflation, shortages, crime, apathy, and a discouraged middle class taxed to the breaking point to support a top-heavy, stagnant bureaucracy. Most Christians came not from that middle class, but from the lower elements of society, taking advantage of lawless times to grab what they could. Celsus (2nd century C.E.,Greek Platonist philosopher; in his 'The True Word', or 'The True Account', made first attack on Christianity) said the Christians invited into their ranks "whosoever is a sinner or unintelligent, or a fool, in a word, whosoever is god-forsaken, him the kingdom of God will receive. Now whom do you mean by the sinner but the wicked: thief, housebreaker, poisoner, temple robber, grave robber? ... Jesus, they say, was sent to save sinners, was he not sent to help those who have kept themselves free from sin? They pretend that God will save the unjust man if he repents and humbles himself. The just man who has held steadily from the cradle in the ways of virtue he will not look upon."

Bertrand Russell (philosopher and scholar, 1872-1970) described the philosophical outlook of St. Jerome(or Eusebius Hieronymus 340?-420) thus: "He thinks the preservation of virginity more important than victory over the Huns and Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn to any possible measure of practical statesmanship; never once does he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an army composed of barbarians. The same is true of Ambrose (C.E. 340?-397, bishop of Milan, Italy, born in Gaul) and Augustine (AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY died 604?. The founder of the Christian church in England and the first archbishop of Canterbury) ... It is no wonder that the Empire fell into ruin."

Conventional histories presented a picture of early Christians as peaceable souls, unjustly persecuted. This picture could only have arisen because historical writing was monopolized by the church for many centuries, and there was no compunction about changing the falsified records. Pagan Rome didn't persecute religious minorities. "lt never disputed the existence or reality of other deities, and the addition of a new member to the Pantheon was a matter of indifference ... [All] deities of all peoples were regarded as but manifestations of the one one supreme deity." Dionysus, Venus, and Priapus were honored co-residents of the temple of Isis in Pompeii. Italian and Greek deities together in the temple of Mithra at Ostia. All deities were willing to co-exist except the Christian one. The Christian church alone "has always held the toleration of others to be the persecution of itself." As early as 382 C.E. the church officially declared that any opposition to its own creed in favor of others must be punished by the death penalty.

Contrary to the conventional mythology, Christians were not prosecuted under Roman law for being Christians but for committing evil crimes. They caused riots, "often tumultuously interrupted the public worship, and continually railed against the national religion." They seem to have been guilty of vandalism and arson. The Great Fire in 64 C.E. was set by Christians who were "anxiously waiting for the world to end by fire and who did at times start fires in order to prompt God." Crying that the world would end at any moment, Christian fanatics sometimes developed the notion that starting the fires of the final holocaust would redound to their credit in heaven. At least one saint was canonized for no particular reason other than having been an arsonist: St. Theodore, whose sole claim to fame was burning down the temple of the Mother of the Gods.

The decline of Roman civilization and the onset of the Dark Age was the period Gilbert Murray characterized as the western world's failure of nerve. It marked the transition of the west from a position of cultural leadership to one of regressed barbarism, and transformed Europe into what is now known as an "undeveloped area." Intellect, taste, and imagination disappeared from art and literature. Rather than broadening the western mind, its church crippled that mind by allowing childish superstitions to flourish in an atmosphere of ignorance and unreason. Suppression of the teaching priestess or alma mater led to an eclipse of education in general.

Many scholars fled from Christian persecutions eastward to Iran, where the Sassanid king helped them found a school of medicine and science. This was the world's intellectual capital for two centuries. Already in 529, when Justinian closed the Athenian schools, Hellenistic learning had been dispersed to Sassanian Persia, Gupta India, and Celtic Ireland.

Church historians have claimed nothing of real value was lost in the destruction of pagan culture. Modem scholars disagree. The havoc that afflicted art, science, literature, philosophy, engineering, architecture, and all other fields of achievement has been likened to the havoc of the Gigantomachia as if the crude giants overthrew the intelligent gods. The widespread literacy of the classical period disappeared. Aqueducts, harbors, buildings, even the splendid Roman roads fell into ruin. It has been pointed out that centuries of devastating war could hardly have shattered Roman civilization as effectively as did its new obsession with an ascetic monotheism.

Books and artworks were destroyed because they expressed un-Christian ideas and images. The study of medicine was forbidden, on the ground that all diseases were caused by demons and could be cured only by exorcism. This theory was still extant in the time of Pope Alexander III, who forbade monks to study any techniques of healing other than verbal charms. Under the Christian emporers, educated citizens were persecuted by the illiterate who claimed their books were witchcraft texts. Often, "magical" writings were planted by Christian magistrates for the sake of the financial rewards they received when they caught and executed heretics - a system the Inquisition also used to advantage in later centuries. Priestesses were especially persecuted, because they were female, wealthy, and laid\par claim to spiritual authority.

Fathers of the church seemed cynically aware that public ignorance worked in their favor. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote to St. Jerome thus: "A little jargon is all that is necessary to impose upon the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated."

Lactantius declared that pagan temples should be torn down because, in them, "The demons are attempting to destroy the kingdom of God, and by means of false miracles and lying oracles are assuming the appearance of real gods." It was dangerous to leave the temples intact, even when they were converted into Christian churches. The temple of the Mother of Heaven at Carthage was made over into a church, but in 440 C.E., the bishop discovered that the Carthaginians were actually making their devotions to the old Goddess, and ordered the entire temple area leveled to the ground.

Ignorance was helpful to the spread of the faith; so ignorance was fostered. Richard Payne Knight, in his book, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, says, "Men are superstitious in proportion as they are ignorant, and ... those who know least of the principles of religion are the most earnest and fervent." In keeping western Europe as ignorant as possible, however, the church lost much of its history. Even contemporary events went inaccurately reported, or altogether unnoted. Events of the past were absurdly garbled. All the public knew of history was provided by bards, who tried to maintain the druidic tradition of rote-learning, with indifferent success. They taught, for example, that Alexander the Great made an expedition to the Garden of Eden, where he was instructed by the poet-magician Virgil, by "Monsignor St. Paul," and by "Tholomeus" (Ptolemy), king of Egypt. They taught that Julius Caesar was a king of Hungary and Austria, and a prince of Constantinople; his mother was the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, a daughter of Judas Maccabeus; he married Morgana,the Fairy Queen, and became the father of Oberon and St. George.

The field of natural science was in even worse disorder. Learned books taught that mice do not reproduce like other mammals but are generated spontaneously and asexually from "the putrefaction of the earth"; that wasps produce themselves out of a dead horse and bees out of a dead calf; that a crab deprived of its legs and buried will turn into a scorpion; that some mammals, such as hares, can change from one sex to the other; that a duck dried into powder and placed in water will generate frogs; that a duck baked and buried will generate toads; that asparagus is produced from buried shavings of a ram's horn; that scorpions can be created from garden basil rubbed between two stones; that rain and lightning can be raised by burning a chameleon's liver on a rooftop; that no fleas can breed where a man scatters dust dug up from his right footprint in the place where he heard the first springtime call of a cuckoo. Because the very idea of experimentation to test hypotheses had been replaced by credulous reliance on theological authority, even notions that would have been simple to test remained untested.

As for more complex hypotheses, they were beyond the ken of theologians. Pagan thinkers long ago understood the shape of the earth, and even calculated its approximate circumference with only a small error. But Lactantius and other learned churchmen called this field of endeavor "bad and senseless," and proved by quoting the Bible that the earth was flat.

The most thoroughly Christianized nations hardly began to recover from the church's eclipse of learning until the present century. In Spain for example, the tradition of book-burning became an integral part of the auto-da-fé in 1502. It was against the law for any layman to read any book not approved by the bishops. To own vernacular copies of either Testament of the Bible was punishable by burning at the stake. Reading declined to almost nothing. What few grammar schools existed were only "superficial preparation for the priesthood." Still, many priests were illiterate. General education was attempted only after the revolutions of 1834 and 1855, when the monasteries were suppressed. Yet in 1896, more than two-thirds of the population were still unable to read or write.

Spanish suspicion of books carried over into the New World, and deprived anthropologists and archeologists of literary treasures that might have shed much light on pre-Columbian civilizations. Spanish friars "converted" the Maya of Yucatan in 1562, by their usual forceful methods, such as torture and burning. They fed the fires with hundreds of Maya sacred books which, had they survived, would have greatly assisted modern scholars to unravel the mysteries of Mayan script. The friars said the natives were "greatly afflicted" by the loss of their scriptures; but as far as the friars could see, these books "contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, so we burned them all."