The So-Called "Dark Ages"

Harland has been reading The Lives of the Saints. Each morning he reads about the life of a saint whose feast day is assigned to that particular day on the liturgical calendar. Many of these saints lived before 1000 A.D., in the so-called Middle Ages, medieval times.

These earlier A.D. centuries have also been dubbed “The Dark Ages.” It would appear, however, that enough information was available from these early times so as to make the careful deliberations necessary to canonize these early saints. This got him to wondering: was there a lot more history available from the Middle Ages than we are led to believe—and if so, what's the reason to keep the facts about the history of this time-frame from the People? In other words, is there a more ominous reason that these centuries have come to be called the “Dark” Ages? If so, can we shine some light thereon?

 

Harland turned to Curtius for some help:

 

Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (ELLMA), trans. fr. German by Willard R. Trask (1953) (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, Bollingen Series XXXVI (1983, 1990)) 

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The extracts below are from The Medieval Bases of Western Thought, in the Appendix of that same ELLMA, pp. 587-598 (1990), which originally was a lecture delivered on July 3, 1949 at the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, at Aspen, Colorado, and was added by the author to the English translation of his book. 

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His first finds are as follows:

 

“If I were to sum up in two words what I believe is the essential message of medieval thought, I would say: It is the spirit in which it restated tradition: and this spirit is Faith and Joy.” (Emphasis added) 598

 

“The bases of Western thought are classical antiquity and Christianity. The function of the Middle Ages was to receive that deposit, to transmit it, and adapt it. Its most precious legacy, to my mind, is the spirit which it created while performing this task. Edward Kennard Rand has left us a beautiful book entitled The Founders of the Middle Ages. These founders were St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and a few others. They belong to the fourth and fifth century of our era. They represent the last stage of Greco-Roman antiquity. And this last stage coincides with the first stage of Christianity. The lesson of the Middle Ages is reverent reception and faithful transmission of a precious deposit…The nineteenth century produced a type of writer who championed revolutionary ideas and revolutionary poetry. That is a feature which betrays an age of disintegration, to use the formula of Toynbee. It may amount to what he called ‘a refusal of mimesis.’ But the equilibrium of culture will be preserved only if those disrupting forces are balanced by new ways of stating and adapting the legacy which has been entrusted to us by the past.” (Emphasis added) 597

 

“Goethe has not been succeeded by another universal genius. He had a very clear consciousness of belonging to [the cultural tradition that preceded the great economic change known as the Industrial Revolution]. He pointed to Homer, to Plato, to Aristotle, and to the Bible as its foundations…He is the last link of that golden chain. Yet he is not too remote from us. We can still grasp that link.” 589

 

“[Poetry] is below reason just as theology is above reason.” (Emphasis added) 593

 

“If philosophy is able to explain history, it ought also to explain poetry. For poetry is one of the most powerful manifestations of mankind. It is present in all ages and civilizations. It has a far wider appeal than science. One of the great features of Aristotle is that he found room for poetry in his philosophical survey. We are bound to acknowledge that, even if we feel that his account of poetry is limited by the fact that he knew nothing but Greek poetry. But has any other leading philosophy handled that problem? I am not aware of it. The rebirth of Aristotelianism which led to scholasticism neglected the Poetics.” (Emphasis added) 593

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Harland could further empathize with Curtius, especially when he wrote:

I felt like the schoolboy who wrote in his copybook: ‘The Middle Ages is what comes between antiquity and posterity.’ There is too much loose thinking, I believe, about the traditional period-divisions. They will have to be revised. 589

These are tantalizing clues that the so-called "Dark Ages" very well may be covering up a lot of light, wisdom and truth. These years may have been a golden age of mankind during which powerful and sacred human beings walked the Earth transforming it into a nascent City of God. And maybe it was the “better known” second millennium, from the Renaissance on, that saw that same City of God systematically dismantled. It’s an interesting hypothesis.

 

As he has previously threatened, Harland will delve deeply into ELLMA, this magisterial work of Curtius. As he proceeds he will report further findings.