There is a trend to try and deny the Dark Ages ever existed; even to portray them as really lovely, light and wonderful ages of goodness and achievement. I’m exaggerating. But only a little. I’ve debunked this a lot. I have a whole category assigned to the subject. And I wrote a whole chapter on it, with scholarship and evidence cited, in Christianity Is Not Great. My book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire also has a pertinent section on the myth (Chapter 5.10). But here I’m going to take on a recent iteration of the idea.

The McDaniel Case

I wrote a while ago about Spencer Alexander McDaniel’s often good website yet flawed article on the historical evidence for Jesus. And I there mentioned that like everyone (including me) he doesn’t always get things right. He can be a mixed bag even in the same article.

I mentioned in particular McDaniel’s piece debunking the Dark Ages, which has a lot of good material rightly debunking a lot of misconceptions about the Dark Ages. For instance, that wasn’t the era of mass witch hunts (the Inquisition, for example, was actually a much later phenomenon of a far more prosperous time) or of the kind of “armored knights” people usually imagine, and so on. And pretty much all educated persons knew the earth was a sphere, even in the Middle Ages.

But what we mean by the Dark Ages, an era of Western civilization between the 5th and 10th centuries, was also an age of decline and stagnation that did set us back a thousand years. McDaniel gets wrong many facts about the history of technology and science that mislead him into concluding otherwise. In this case his mistakes are mostly of inference rather than fact; but there are enough factual mistakes to warrant some correction as well.

For example, McDaniel argues that publicly seen depictions of the universe as a sphere indicate popular knowledge the earth was a sphere, but that’s incorrect: those spheres illustrate the entire cosmos, not the earth. The belief that a flat earth inhabited a spherical universe remained widespread—among the illiterate, who indeed also still thought such things as that lunar eclipses were caused by witch magic and not orbital shadows (see my references in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 170 and 213 n. 13). But this was as true at the height of the Roman Empire as in the Dark Ages.

McDaniel is otherwise right that even in the Dark Ages flat-earthers among the educated were rare weirdos just as today. Even if then far more influential weirdos—the infamous flat-earther Lactantius tutored Constantine’s children and may even have been responsible for Constantine’s selection of Christianity as an imperial state religion (inexorably changing the future of humanity). But his flat-earthism never caught on, even as his textbook on education advocating it remained revered among Christian educators throughout the Medieval West (see my discussion in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 495-96; in context: pp. 489-96).

More serious a flaw though is McDaniel’s non sequitur that correcting all those mistaken views of the Dark Ages allows us to reject the conclusion that “we would be millennia ahead of where we are now technologically” (more accurately it would be one millennium ahead, but I’ll excuse his hyperbole) and that those ages “have not held us back collectively as a species.” None of his subsequent argument actually supports that conclusion. Actual evidence very clearly supports the contrary.

It’s all the worse when McDaniel violates his own warning not to confuse “later eras” with the Dark Ages…and then claims a bunch of inventions for the Dark Ages that were actually centuries later—or had already been invented centuries before! Like “the printing press.” Sorry. That’s the Renaissance. Also, the Chinese invented it centuries before. Likewise, “paper money.” Nope. Not in Europe until the 17th century. Wayyyy after the Middle Ages. Unless he means the Chinese—who, yep, invented paper money a thousand years earlier. And “eyeglasses,” though at least uniquely European this time, were invented in the “High” Middle Ages or early Renaissance, not the Dark Ages. Meanwhile, the “lateen sail” and “heavy plow” and “water mill” and “glass mirrors” were all in wide use in ancient Rome long before the Dark Ages (see Scientist, pp. 191, 204, 219, 229; likewise “waterwheel,” in the Index of Inventions, p. 627, referencing several pages documenting extensive and diverse industrial uses and applications of wheel-drive water-power).

Meanwhile, inventions like “the horse collar” and “sternpost-mounted rudder” are not as significant as claimed (ancient side-rudders and harness systems were basically just as good: Scientist, pp. 203-04). But also, that rudder? Invented in China a thousand years earlier; diffused from there to Arab ship design; and thence to Europe—after the Dark Ages. That’s multiple factual fails right there. And the horse collar? Again, China. Centuries before. But it at least reached Europe by the end of the Dark Ages, so it’s not wildly off. Just not that big a deal. (And both were cultural diffusion, not invention.)

The magnetic compass was also invented in China a thousand years before; and the dry compass around the same time as in Europe: 12th century. After the Dark Ages. Likewise windmills: not in Europe until the High Middle Ages or early Renaissance; and already invented by the Arabs and Chinese centuries before—and technically already by the Romans, where working wind-powered water pumps were already in use, documented by Hero of Alexandria; and indeed the European mill design is essentially a rip from that inventor’s pages, combined with already-ancient Western watermill designs.

The notion even that “there were just about as many major technological advancements made in western Europe during the Middle Ages as there were in classical Greece and Rome” is so wildly false it’s jaw dropping to see anyone still repeating it. But alas so many do. Indeed that myth is still so commonly repeated now that I devoted fifty pages to refuting it in Scientist, listing literally hundreds of ancient inventions (the index of them alone spans three whole pages, and isn’t even complete: pp. 625-27), vastly outpacing the Middle Ages even as a whole, but absolutely dwarfing the Dark Ages in particular—in fact demonstrating how shockingly little was invented in the Dark Ages (Scientist, pp. 190-240). Thus demonstrating precisely the problem with that era.

It’s telling that McDaniel buries a candid admission in his article that it’s “generally agreed among historians…that only the Early Middle Ages in western Europe (c. 475 – c. 800 AD)…can really be called a ‘Dark Age’.” Rather, that is literally only what anyone informed calls the Dark Ages. That’s what we all mean by the Dark Ages. “The Dark Ages didn’t exist except when they did” is not a very catchy headline I guess. Nevertheless, McDaniel correctly dispels a lot of mistaken beliefs among the less educated public as to which icons of the Middle Ages actually did and didn’t belong to the period actually called the Dark Ages. And as such, his article is quite useful. But the rest must be taken with a corrective.

Getting It Right

I’ve written before on why the Dark Ages are in fact aptly so-called, despite all the additional myths still believed about them. Even the original coiners of the term did not mean by it “total darkness” or anything the like. They meant a substantial and catastrophic decline in civilization over a five hundred year period (from which we did not fully recover for yet another five hundred years), during which vast amounts of knowledge and information were lost, and had to be rediscovered or reinvented in the early Renaissance; allowing us to finally pick up where the West had left off in the 4th century, by the middle of the Renaissance in the 15th century. Which is approximately one thousand years after that decline began—which beginning was not in the Dark Ages, but Late Antiquity. As nearly all scientific and technological progress ceased after the 3rd century A.D. and everything spiraled out for a century or two more until it all fell apart. The resulting collapse of civilization in the West spanned centuries after that, and is what we call the Dark Ages.

That collapse was much slower in the East, owing to its absurd wealth; so the Dark Ages does not refer there, as McDaniel rightly points out. People often forget the Eastern Roman Empire hung on a bit longer and did a bit better. But it still stagnated and continually declined as a civilization. It made no significant advances in science or technology for a thousand years, and then was finally overrun and extinguished by Muslim nations, never to exist again—Muslims who had centuries before adopted the same abandonment of science that doomed Christian lands in both the East and the West for a thousand years. But unlike the West, the Islamic world experienced no Renaissance with which to rescue itself. It remained in stunted ignorance. And thereby surrendered all future world dominance to Western Imperialism.

My chapter on “The Dark Ages” in Christianity Is Not Great lays out the facts and scholarship demonstrating how catastrophic that period was for the West and why it took so long to recover from. And why, consequently, it held us back. We lacked the wealth even barely to survive much less continue the advances that ancient civilization had been steadily building on; we lost vast amounts of human and intellectual and technological resources (see below). And Christianity as an ideology was wholly ill-equipped to fix or prevent this, as it was hostile to the very values necessary to the task: curiosity, empiricism, and commitment to progress. Which is why civilization stalled even in the Eastern, Byzantine Empire.

I first demonstrated this point in my chapter “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science” in The Christian Delusion. It was only the recovery of pagan ways of thinking, and some of their lost works, that brought us back to a real recovery—as in, a restoration of Western civilization to where it had left off: a scientifically and technologically inquisitive and progressive society with a potent base of accumulated knowledge and capabilities to build on. Had the abandonment of all that in the 4th and 5th centuries not occurred—had Roman civilization been allowed to continue thriving on the same intellectual and material basis as it ended the 2nd century with—we would be 1000 years more advanced today. But Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages combined into a total stall-out, experiencing almost nothing but decline, no significant advance.

Which is not to say Christianity caused that stall-out. It didn’t. It just guaranteed by its take-over of the Western mind that nothing that needed doing to reverse that downfall would be done for at least a thousand years. As I demonstrate in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (e.g. pp. 471-542), and with respect to education, in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (e.g. pp. 137-66), Christian values were the opposite of scientific values, and kept humanity from returning to the latter for far too long. As to the catastrophies of the third century that actually started this downfall, which were not caused by Christianity but rather contributed to Christianity’s rise to dominance, see my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith (pp. 435-40).

For my previous takes on all this, addressing the technological and the scientific topics, and the bogus claims of modern Christian scholars, see my past articles, Ancient Industrial Machinery and Modern Christian Mythology and The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Ancient Greece. These are necessary to see how the likes of McDaniel aren’t doing their homework, and are falling victim to the ignorance of Medievalists, who didn’t think to check their claims with Classicists down the hall.

The Decline Was Horrific

There is a great roundup of examples of this new trend at the Slate Star Codex, written up by Scott Alexander. A typical example is warehoused at the website Is Christianity True, that commits all the same follies as McDaniel, and more (note Slate Star has an expired link; I’ve linked to the latest version). Alexander then follows that list of examples with an excellent debunking not just of the modern myth of “there being no Dark Ages,” but of the rhetorical tactics and tricks of argument used to push the myth. I highly recommend reading it (not least for its excellent dry humor). He lists data that supplements mine. I’ve been using similar evidence in talks for years now.

Here’s a quick summary. From an actual expert, in his own peer reviewed study of the period:

[T]he post-Roman centuries saw a dramatic decline in economic sophistication and prosperity, with an impact on the whole of society, from agricultural production to high culture, and from peasants to kings. It is very likely that the population fell dramatically, and certain that the widespread diffusion of well-made goods ceased. Sophisticated cultural tools, like the use of writing, disappeared altogether in some regions, and became very restricted in all others. … It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries…[which] was no mere transformation, [but] a decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’. … [T]here is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline [like this]. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 87, 183

Even the so-called Carolingian Renaissance was a mere blip in this record, a brief, isolated, relatively unimpressive attempt at a recovery—that failed. Society wouldn’t really start pulling out of this hole until around 1000 A.D. The very pit of the decline was reached in the 7th century, but it took over two more centuries to get back to the rim of that hole, and over four more to get back to where Western civilization had once attained. And even that march up the wall of the pit was relatively inglorious. Compared to the High Roman Empire, the Carolingian era was barbaric, below even the level of societal wealth, sophistication and achievement of Classical Greece, which the Romans at their height had long since surpassed, and which no civilization on earth would obtain again until the Renaissance.

Instead:

Archaeologists see very substantial simplifications in post-Roman material culture in the fifth to seventh centuries…which in some cases…is drastic; only a handful of Roman provinces [i.e. the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire] did not experience it. … [Even] the resources for political players lessened considerably, and the structures in which they acted simplified, often radically. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (Viking 2009), p. 9

As I wrote in Christianity Is Not Great, there surveying the scholarship and evidence:

The declines in trade and population were enormous, many cities falling into ruin, countless roads and bridges and aqueducts vanished or abandoned, access to literacy and education (and peace and justice) plummeted, and even where available, the Bible more typically replaced secular learning in math, history, philosophy, literature, law and science as objects of study and tools for organizing society, resulting in many a backward walk in the areas of human rights, morals, security, and welfare.

And as Peter Sarris documents in Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (Oxford University Press 2011; pp. 75-76), in many regions this decline was so severe as to mark “a period of stark and rapid economic decline” that was “unprecedented in human history,” witnessing “massive economic and cultural dislocation and, in terms of material culture and economic complexity, a return to prehistoric levels.”

Every archaeological indicator documents this (just for some examples see my article on technology). Population dropped by at least a third, urbanization by half, trade and industry by over an order of magnitude. Manuscript production plummeted; the practice of writing of new books almost disappeared. Over 99% of all ancient books and discoveries were lost. Standards of inquiry and reportage fell to the level of quaint embarrassment. Even the East saw substantial losses and declines in all these same markers, if not to the same scale suffered in the West.

The Dark Ages sucked. Severely. And denying that is scandalous.

Conclusion

Yes, the Dark Ages happened. They occupied the period from the 5th to the 10th century. And they took five hundred more years to fully recover from, bringing Western civilization back by the 15th century to all the peak markers of accomplishment that it had achieved by the 2nd century. That’s a thousand years we were set back.

And yes, those ages were sufficiently dark in every measure to warrant the appellation. They dropped the Western world (and even, if less catastrophically, the Near Eastern world) to its lowest levels of decline by every measure not seen since before the rise of the Ancient Greeks who built up Western civilization on a foundation of democracy, technology, and science. The Dark Ages were an era we as human beings should look upon in shame, disappointment, and concern never to repeat what caused them or sustained them. They deserve the name. And only someone who would deny that can have any reason to avoid it.

Enter Rodney Stark, a typical example. He’s a Christian sociologist who often says completely false things about the history of science and Christianity’s relationship to it (he is one of the targets I debunk in my chapter on this in The Christian Delusion). He has this to say in his hopelessly unreliable book The Victory of Reason, subtitled “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success” (pro tip: it didn’t):

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. But 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!

Literally every sentence of that paragraph is false. Except for “it didn’t happen that way,” but that accidentally obtains truth only by everything Stark saying around it being false!

No relevantly educated person for the last three hundred years has regarded the Dark Ages as extending “to about the fifteenth century.” Indeed, the Renaissance began in Italy in the 1200s and spread to the rest of Europe by the 1400s, the fifteenth century. Which follows on the High (or Late) Middle Ages. The Dark Ages only mark the first half of the Middle Ages, the Low (or Early) Middle Ages. So right out of the gate, Stark is fabricating a straw man, and on that basis declaring the Dark Ages don’t exist, merely because some (?) less informed people confuse which period they denote.

The Dark Ages were “centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery.” As I just showed you their misery is extensively documented in the archaeological and historical record. As is their ignorance and superstition. Even scholars of the period, far scarcer than in former times, were significantly backward in their comprehension and access to knowledge compared to their peers at the height of the Roman Empire.

The Renaissance took centuries to develop once society began its climb out of the Dark Ages around 1000 A.D. And it took centuries more for the Renaissance to evolve into The Enlightenment, which began in the 17th century. Altogether, from the end of the Dark Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment, we find over 600 years. That is not “suddenly, almost miraculously.” It’s painfully, sloggishly, maddeningly slowly.

In absolutely no sense whatever did European technology and science overtake and surpass the rest of the world “during the so-called Dark Ages.” Or even in the High Middle Ages. It only did so during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Which we could have obtained one thousand years earlier, if the Dark Ages had not happened—if Christianity had brought a scientific spirit to Western civilization during an age of crisis instead of abandoning it. Which resulted in the Dark Ages causing a massive centuries-long decline in “European technology and science,” that we then had to take centuries yet more to crawl back out of—not a surpassing of prior glory; but a loss of nearly all of it.

It’s time to reject this new attempt to rewrite and whitewash history. Stand up to it. Not with false ideas about the Dark Ages, however, but correct ones. McDaniel’s article is worthwhile for learning what myths in the other direction to avoid. But his enthusiasm takes him too far. This present article, and the articles and resources it links to, aim to fill that gap. Between the two, you can crusade for what really happened in the Dark Ages.

Pun intended.