Did Christianity Cause The Dark Ages In Europe?

[Xavier]

I personally believe that Christianity did destroy Greco Roman civilization, and set civilization into the Dark Ages.

Prior to Christianity the Roman Empire had been relatively tolerent to people of different faiths and people were free to follow different religions.

When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, Christian emperors persecuted all other faiths and tried to force everyone to be Christian under pain of death.

Literature written by pagans was burnt and destroyed which resulted in many works of literature, mathematics, philosophy, engineering being lost, and destroyed centuries of accumulated learning.

[5thHorseman]

i think everyone wanting to invade everyone else had quite a bit to do with it as well, but no doubt the catholic church was a large thumb on the head of humanity.

[downbeatplumb]

Once christianity took hold the way to power in rome was no longer military prowess but religious power.
This meant the brightest and best entered the church rather than the military weakeneing the roman miliary machine.
Once rome could not defend all its assets it started to weaken and eventually led to the catholic church taking the last of its power.

[Watchman]

I think this may shed some light ..... not sure I agree totally with Humphreys but both he and Xavier may be pretty close to the truth.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/dark-age.htm

[Anomalocaris]

Roman Empired had covered a much wider area than the western European region which experienced the Dark Ages.

The economic weakness, relative cultural thinness, and military vulnerability of the western part of Roman empire that was ultimately made manifest by the fall of western empire had been structural to geography, history and democgraphy of the mediterranean world for a thousand years before Constantine. And the relative decline of the military prowess of the Romans compared to those of the northern invaders has also progressed most of the way to completion by the time Constantine made Christianity legal in the empire.

Despite happened to Rome in 476 AD there was no dark age in the Eastern Empire, christian infestation not withstanding. Greco-Roman civilization continued from constantinople right through what the west now called Dark Ages.

So I don't hink christianity destroyed the Greco-Roman civilization, and I don't think it was instrumental in the fall of the western empire.
Christianity is more like an opportunistic infection that may have hastened the death of an already terminally ill Western Empire, but which the stronger eastern empire proved able to live with. It may even have strengthended the eastern empire to some degree.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, consecutive crop failures and sustained periods of bad weather combined with the fall of the superpower of the day...in addition to a death cult rising to prominence in a world with little to no medical knowledge.....might have caused the dark ages.

[Justtristo]

I personally believe that Christianity did destroy Greco Roman civilization, and set civilization into the Dark Ages.

Prior to Christianity the Roman Empire had been relatively tolerent to people of different faiths and people were free to follow different religions.

When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, Christian emperors persecuted all other faiths and tried to force everyone to be Christian under pain of death.

Literature written by pagans was burnt and destroyed which resulted in many works of literature, mathematics, philosophy, engineering being lost, and destroyed centuries of accumulated learning.

If you have not read The Christian Delusion, get it and read a chapter by Richard Carrier entitled "Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science.

or go to his blog http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/ and find articles concerning ancient science (which he is an expert on).

[Happy UnBeliever]

I personally believe that Christianity did destroy Greco Roman civilization, and set civilization into the Dark Ages.

Prior to Christianity the Roman Empire had been relatively tolerent to people of different faiths and people were free to follow different religions.

When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, Christian emperors persecuted all other faiths and tried to force everyone to be Christian under pain of death.

Literature written by pagans was burnt and destroyed which resulted in many works of literature, mathematics, philosophy, engineering being lost, and destroyed centuries of accumulated learning.

Be my guess. It pretty much destroys anything it comes in contact with.

[Minimalist]

Yeah, the whole xtianity caused the dark ages routine leaves out the fact that the Byzantine empire lasted for another 1,000 years and was full of dim-witted xtians for the whole time.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

The term "The Dark Ages' has not been used by historians in a pejorative sense for at least 20 years of which I'm aware.


By the end of the Roman empire in Europe, the Christian church had already become hopelessly corrupt.Any negative impact had little to do with religion,and much to do with power and wealth. The history of the church has always been louche at best (like now) and downright sordid and disgusting at worst.(eg under the Borgias)

When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was widely used by historians. In 1860, as John Barber notes, Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy "formulated the classic contrast between the medieval period as the 'dark ages' and the achievements of the Renaissance as a period of revived antiquity that included literature, elegance and erudition".[29] However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, and with it a calling into question of the terminology of darkness,[9] or at least of its pejorative use. Historian Denys Hay exemplified this when he spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark".[30]

When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times.[9] The term is used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages,[1] the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450-1863), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future.[31] Some Byzantinists have used the term "Byzantine Dark Ages" to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800 AD,[32] because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from this period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire and formerly Byzantine territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly understood and must be reconstructed from other types of contemporaneous sources, such as religious texts.[33] It is also known that very few Greek manuscripts were copied in this period, indicating that the seventh and eighth centuries, which were a period of crisis for the Byzantines because of the Muslim conquests, were also less intellectually active than other periods.[34] The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history. Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.[3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%...ography%29