[Awar]

Originally Posted by Rodney Stark

Spurred by the pioneering work of Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944), scholars have realized for several decades that Christianity played no role in the defeat of Rome and that the “Dark Ages” weren’t so dark. The decline of Rome had many reasons, but the actual “fall” was nothing more than the culmination of several centuries of a shift in military capacity from the Romans to various Germanic groups. When the last battles came, Germans made up most of the Roman Army as well, and in that sense had already supplanted the ethnic Romans.

So? What does one have to do with the other?

As a result of the military defeat of Rome, the political and cultural center of Europe shifted northward.

Nope, not really. For a long time before 476. the more important center was Constantinople, and it remained so important during the fall of Rome, and for centuries to follow.

It is this shift that was interpreted as a cultural and intellectual decline by those who, many centuries later, equated civilization with the writings of a tiny group of Greco-Roman intellectuals. To this earlier generation of scholars, enlightenment was to be found only in books and abstract ideas, certainly not in machines or in farming practices. As French historian Jean Gimpel has put it, the “scorn of men of letters for engineers throughout history has kept them, all too often, oblivious to the technology created by those engineers.”

Non-sequitur.

Whatever their differences from the leaders of classical Greece and Rome, Europe’s leading scholars of, say, the eighth century were no “barbarians.” Certainly not morally: Both Plato and Aristotle owned slaves, while “Dark Age” Europeans rejected slavery. Nor in terms of technology: The Medieval period, says Gimpel, was “one of the great inventive eras of mankind,” as machinery was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”

Why? Because slavery wasn't as common in Europe as it was during the Roman era?

How does owning slaves make someone barbaric?

These slaves often had more rights than medieval peasants.

In any case, Gimpel can say anything he pleases, it's just not true.

Within just the last generation there has come a flood of books establishing that long before the end of the Middle Ages, before any “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment,” or “Scientific Revolution,” Europe’s technology advanced far beyond anything achieved by the ancients: effective waterwheels, mills, camshafts, mechanical clocks, the compass, and so on.

... so on? The list ends there.

Not all of these were original inventions. Consider gunpowder. The Chinese were the first to use an explosive powder, but it is a misnomer to call it gunpowder since the Chinese did not develop guns, limiting its use to fireworks. When knowledge of this Chinese explosive arrived in Europe, probably during the first decade of the fourteenth century, the application to gunnery was immediate--cannon probably were first used in battle during a seige of Metz in 1324. What is certain is that by 1325 cannon existed across all of Western Europe.

Mongols had primitive cannons before the 14th century,
and Chinese did develop a primitive gun, but weren't interested in using it.

The rapid adoption of the compass is another compelling example. The claim that the magnetic compass reached Europe from China through Islam is false. Apparently, it was invented independently in both China and Europe around the eleventh century.

The Chinese were satisfied with a very crude compass involving a magnetized needle floating in a liquid which enabled them to determine the North-South axis, which was primarily of magical concern. In contrast, soon after discovering the floating needle compass, medieval Europeans added the compass card and then the sight which allowed mariners not only to know which way was North, but to set accurate courses in any direction. It spread among sailors from Italy to Norway in only a few years.

...and what does the church have to do with this?

Far from Christianity plunging Europe into an era of ignorance and backwardness, so much technical progress took place during this era that by no later than the thirteenth century, European technology surpassed anything to be found elsewhere in the world. This did not occur because of the “rediscovery” of classical knowledge. There is no more misleading account of Western civilization than the one that starts with classical culture and proceeds directly to the “Renaissance,” dismissing the millennium in between as an unfortunate and irrelevant interlude. Western civilization is not the direct descendant of Greco-Roman culture. It is the product of centuries of interaction between the cultures of the Germanic “barbarians” who superceded the Romans (who had far more sophisticated cultures than had been acknow-ledged) and Christianity. The subsequent addition of Greco-Roman learning was more decorative than fundamental.

A massively stupid statement.

I wonder if this writer is a nordicist, because he clearly favours Germanic tribes over the already advanced pre-christian civilizations of the Mediterranean.

The progress achieved during the “Dark Ages” was not merely technological. Medieval Europe excelled in philosophy and science.

True, but, THEOLOGICAL philosophy and science.

The term “Scientific Revolution” is in many ways as misleading as “Dark Ages.” Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church.

Ah, those damned atheist conspiracies

The notion of a “Scientific Revolution” has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Columbus and the flat earth.

LOL! First the writer builds a strawman, then attacks it, to "prove"
his own lies.

This article's only value so far is in the sheer number of fallacies the author uses to appeal to the reader.

First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science.

Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been carefully nurtured by religiously devout scholastics.

How religious were they really?

Granted, the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. But, just as roses do not spring up overnight, and must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so too the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of intellectual progress.

... and the rosebud has it's roots, stirpes (), the ground....
it's in the classical era, the bronze age, the neolithic....

From Ockham through Copernicus, the development of the heliocentric model of the solar system was the product of the universities--that most Christian invention. From the start, the medieval Christian university was a place created and run by scholars devoted entirely to knowledge.

It's obvious they were devoted to knowledge, but,
how clear is it, if these scholars were really believers?

It's one thing to be a believer, and a whole different thing to be
a man who just says what he must, and acts in a way in which he must,
so he can just go on with the work that he loves.

While the Soviet era lasted, everyone had to love Stalin,
scientists were members of the communist party, they officially all loved Stalin, but what they thought in the privacy of their own minds was left to them only. It only became apparent AFTER the fall of the USSR what the real sentiment was.

The autonomy of individual faculty members was carefully guarded. Since all instruction was in Latin, scholars were able to move about without regard for linguistic boundaries, and be-cause their degrees were mutually recognized, they were qualified to join any faculty.

So? Latin was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, long before Christ.
The advantages of having such a unifying language are clear.

The church inherited Latin from the Roman empire and its institutions.

It was in these universities that European Christians began to establish science. And it was in these same universities, not later in the salons of philosophes or Renaissance men, that the classics were restored to intellectual importance. The translations from Greek into Latin were accomplished by exceedingly pious Christian scholars.

Again... is this man claiming to be a telepath or what?

The Italian “Renaissance” was not a “rediscovery” of classical learning.

Oh? So, what does the word 'renaissance' mean?

Rather, it was a period of cultural emulation during which people of fashion copied the classical style in manners, art, literature, and philosophy. Out of passion for their own ancient days of glory, explains French historian Régine Pernaud, Italians began to claim that Western history consisted of “two periods of light: antiquity and the Renaissance...and between the two...crude centuries and obscure times.” Thus, from fashionable enthusiasm and ethnic pride was born the notion of a dark age followed by a dawning of a new enlightenment. But, it wasn’t so. Scholastic scholars knew and understood the works of Plato, Aristotle, and all the rest.

Scholastic scholars?!

Nor were these devout scholars intimidated by classical learning.

Telepathy again. This man should be a fortune-teller.

Scholastics such as Jean Buridan and Nicole d’Oresme rejected many erroneous claims made by classical writers. Albertus Magnus (1205-1280) supplemented and corrected Aristotle, putting his empirical claims to observational testing and frequently finding them to be in error. Along the way he instituted a tradition of research that led directly to the breakthroughs in biology and physiology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It's clear that these scholars built upon the earlier works, corrected some mistakes etc.

The fact that Aristotle and others made mistakes doesn't make them
bumbling idiots, and it doesn't mean their work wasn't science.

In 200 years, future scientists will find the 21st century knowledge to be
ridiculously lacking, but that doesn't make Einstein an alchemist, it makes him just another step on a long road.

It was the Christian scholastics, not the Greeks, Romans, Muslims, or Chinese, who built up the field of physiology based on human dissections. Once again, hardly anyone knows the truth about dissection and the medieval Church. Human dissection was not permitted in the classical world (“the dignity of the human body” forbade it), which is why Greco-Roman works on anatomy are so faulty. Aristotle’s studies were limited entirely to animal dissections, as were those of Celsius and Galen. Human dissection also was prohibited in Islam.

So? Every society/religion has its traditional limitations and dogmas.

Science tends to be above these societal limitations.

With the Christian universities came a new outlook on dissection. The starting assumption was that what is unique to humans is a soul, not a physiology. Dissections of the human body, therefore, have no theological implications. Dissection soon became a customary part of anatomy classes. “Made without serious objection from the Church,” the introduction of human dissection into the Latin West “was a momentous occurrence,” summarizes historian Edward Grant.

This only proves that Christianity was more open to dissection of corpses than some other religions.