Why It’s Called the “Dark Ages”

Triumph of Christianity
Tommaso Laureti

Academics now refer to it as the “Middle Ages,” because the term “Dark Ages” is biased. It’s not considered politically correct to refer to this millennium-long period of Western Civilization as “Dark” because it suggests the culture of this period was culturally backward and characterized by ignorance. According to extreme notions of multiculturalism, where all cultural practices have value and worth, it is wrong to disparage 600AD-1000AD (the narrowest definition of the age) as a dark time in Western history, because theological cultures flourished during it.

I recently discovered a copy of the New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, compiling the world of common scientific facts as they were known in 1995 (and much has changed since then, I assure you). Each chapter summarizes a different subject, such as biology, chemistry, physics, and medical science, with key figures, discoveries, and facts pertinent to it. There is also a timeline within each chapter, and there is a glaring gap within the three-millennia timelines.

I took four discoveries or achievements that occurred in Western Civilization from each timeline¹ (more in some subjects), starting from the Dark ages and sampling outward. Here’s what I found:

If I were to plot all the years of discoveries into a spreadsheet and plot them on a graph, we would see the plot line bottom-out between 100 and 1300 AD, a black hole of cultural stagnation for Western Civilization.

For Christianity and Islam this thousand years without scientific progress was a triumph of light. It was the scholar Petrarch who turned this idea on its head, arguing that Christianity was the darkness destroying the wealth of knowledge and achievements of the previous millennia, contributing nothing to civilization in return.

What did Christianity and Islam accomplish during their 1,000-year reign? They took turns destroying the Library of Alexandria, burned the mathematician Hypatia alive, and waged perpetual war with one another. Who knows how many more achievements would be listed before the Dark Ages, if they had not worked so tirelessly to eradicate all evidence of the accomplishments that preceded them?

To me, this great big gap, spanning a thousand years, is a cultural wasteland because science is culture. It outrages me the wealth of cultural knowledge burned to the ground in religious fervor. We’ll never know how advanced the Classical world was in understanding our universe, because those advances were lost to ideological extremism.

¹There were many accomplishments in Eastern civilization during this time period, and I did leave one Dark Age accomplishment off the timeline because–and this may be my personal bias–I don’t consider the Bubonic Plague an accomplishment.

Note: Without a hint of irony, one of my sources argues on the Internet that we are currently living in the Dark Ages.