Ummm, Roger Bacon, early contributor to “scientific method” 12-1300’s.
Science didn’t really exist as such until the continent started putting itself back together.
Good example, and Friar Bacon did some encyclopedic work with the approcal of Pope Clement IV, but when that pope died shortly afterwards, Bacon did have a hard time getting approval for his work. He was eventually imprisoned, but that was probably due in part to being a follower (or at least accused follower, some could argue) of Joachim of Fiore, another of the founders of the Free Spirit Heresy, who taught an apocalytic viewpoint which had become quite popular during this century and yet was viewed as very dangerous by the existing order.
The Dark Ages were not caused by Christianity, but Christianity kept it alive. It was in the interest of the religious leaders to keep the laity ignorant of science so that it would believe their dogma. It was the Arabs who kept copies of the written records that have survived to this day. If it weren’t for the Arabs, we would not have any copies of the great Greek philosphers, playwrights, and writers.
I guess it was the invention of the Gutenberg press that finally saw the end of the Dark Ages. Copies of all those great writings could finally be disseminated, and even ordinary folks, who learned to read, got to know something besides what the priests were saying.
The ancients weren’t all that scientific: there wasn’t much sense of hypothesis testing, for example. Moreover, they certainly were not technological. While the basics of steam were understood, it was only harnessed to produce toys. The invention of the waterwheel and windmill predated Christ, but only came into common use by the Middle Ages. (William’s survey of England in 1086 uncovered 5624 watermills in about 3000 villages.)
The explanation for the above is thought to lie with the slave-labor foundation of ancient society: there wasn’t much incentive for the slaves to tinker with new technology and for the elite, experiments with the means of production would carry the social stigma of manual labor. “A society based on slavery may produce great works of art and literature, but it cannot produce sustained economic growth”, according to Rondo Cameron (1993). [Key word: sustained]
Eyeglasses and mechanical clocks were later invented by medieval tinkerers. One could thus argue that Christianity was pro-technology (if it wasn’t overly supportive of scientific investigation), notwithstanding the pro-slavery asides of St. Paul.
Not that I want to argue with someone who just helped me understand RNA, Barbitur8, but what pre-1500 scientific knowledge conflicted with Christian dogma? The Ptolemaic system was imported whole from Rome, and there was no ancient theory of evolution so far as I know. What was threatening to the medieval church about the Greeks on a scientific level?
Aynrandlover, it’s not true that the people of the middle ages desired to be “unroman”. They saw themselves as the heirs to Rome. Charlegmagne saw himself as a modern day Caesar, and naming his empire what he did “The Holy Roman Empire” was a sign of that. In their mind, it WAS Rome, just the Rome that would have happened if it had been Christian from the start.
What caused the fall of Rome? Gibbons blames the Christians, but the real answer it seems to me, is this. Rome was big, very big, At it’s height, it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates river, from the border of Scotland to the Sahara Desert. Nowadays, that isn’t such a big distance. A plane ride from Casablanca to London isn’t that big a deal, and it’s even easier to pick up the telephone. However, back then, it wasn’t so easy. The periphery was out of touch with Rome for large periods of time. Add to that that most land in the provences were held by small groups of noblemen, who fielded their own peasant armies, and built their own strongholds, and had no use for the Empire as a whole, even if the Empire was otherwise stable or the Emperors were capable, which very rarely happened. The Empire was often split by civil war, assasination, and plotting. Because most emperors spent most of their resources on defeating either real or imagined plots, they didn’t have any to spend on the frontier, increasing the independence of the provincial nobles. Add to that movements of tribes in Central Asia, especially the westward movement of the Huns, and nomadic horsemen appear on the landscape, driven west in fear of the Huns themselves, and needing new places to live. This leads to further war and disruption. Finally, in the 470’s, the western part of the Empire collapses. The western Emperor, Romulus Augustus, is killed in battle, and the eastern Emperor is unable to send much support because he is forced to deal with unrest at home. In the next several hundred years, the eastern Emperors intend to retake the west, but war with Persia looms, and then a new religion comes out of the Arabian desert, conquering the Persians, and threatening to take over Constantanople itself. The West is left to it’s own devices, as they are forced to withdraw from Sicily and Apuela, and retreat into Hellas. In a nutshell, that’s how the empire fell in the west.
But first, jmullaney, whatever opinion I may have of your views or your particular style of argumentation, it warms my heart that someone else out there knows who Joachim of Fiore is.
This is patently untrue. I do not wish to diminish the accomplishment of the Arabs, especially the philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, but it is ridiculous to say that they were the sole inheritors of Greek knowledge. Increased travel between east and west and the return of Greek linguistic knowledge in the west gave scholars access to real Greek texts, untransmitted by Arab scholars.
So you are saying effectively that any society without general literacy is in the “Dark Ages”? Congratulations, you’ve dismissed Greece, Rome, and Ancient China.
flowbark, of course, is quite right in his/her assessment of the impact of slave labor on technological development. It simply wasn’t necessary. Furthermore, given the extremely low crop yields and relative precariousness of ordinary existence, it simply did not benefit anyone to stray from tried and true methods of production.
Virtually nothing. Mostly because Greek scientific texts were not available to medieval scholars. In a nutshell, the following texts were available before the 13th century:
Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiae
Fragments of Boethius’ translation of Plato’s Timaeus
Fragments of Porphyry’s commentary on Aristotle’s de Anima
Fragments of Aristotelian logic: categoric material mostly, and nothing even as sophisticated as the syllogism.
There was plenty that was threatening on a metaphysical level, however, which St. Thomas Aquinas made abundantly clear. It took over one hundred years of growing pains before Aristotelian logic, in all of its glory, was assimilated into the orthodox Christian church. What the church objected to in the Summa Theologica could be the subject for another discussion.
This refers only to a specific group of people at a specific time. By and large, medieval people did not consider themselves to be the heirs of the Roman Empire. The aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire, restricted to Germany and sometimes Northern Italy surely did. Rome was more important to medieval man as the center of the Catholic Church, not as the great city of antiquity. Walter Map, a 12-13th century English writer, sums it up nicely in a vicious acrostic.
SPQR is a common Roman abbreviation, which means SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS. The Senate and People of Rome. So here’s what Map has to say:
Stultus
Personus
Quaerit
Romam
Stupid people go to Rome.
Captain Amazing, your explanation of the fall of Rome in the west is mostly on target, though it is short a few issues. But I it would stray a little too much from the OP to discuss it here.
The Greeks, for example, knew that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the earth was not flat, notwithstanding Ptolemy. Copernicus showed that it revolved around the sun and proved it was round. Other than scientific knowledge, you have all the works of the Greeks and their philosophical writings. There was no ancient theory of evolution, and the ancients were ignorant of a lot of scientific knowledge, but that doesn’t mean they were ignorant. Any of the Greek works would be inconsistent with a one-God religion.
Another post accused me of equating illiteracy with the Dark Ages. I don’t believe I said that, or even reasonably implied it, but if I did all I can say is 
Huh? You had me there for a bit.
barbitu8, you did reasonable imply it.
Maeglin,
You’re right. My post was overly simplistic, and most people probably didn’t think about the Roman Empire at all. My description of the fall of Rome was also horribly oversimplified. Debating that question would be a whole other thread. It’s also important to define what is meant by the “Dark Ages”. Most people start in 476, but when do we end? The Carloginian Empire? The invention of the printing press? The Reformation? Part of the problem with the way the middle ages has been taught and understood goes like this.
First there was Rome. Then, one day Rome fell, and everybody forgot all about it, and became savages. Nothing of note happened for about a thousand years, except that the Church did Bad Things. Then, everybody learned about Rome again and became Protestant.
This has traditionally been the way the time period has been looked at, and it’s wrong.
Also, IIRC, Augustine’s City of God was also avaliable, as well as his summary of Cicero’s Republic. I believe Origen’s Contra Celsus also existed.
Barbitu8, it’s not true that "any of the Greek works would be inconsistant with a one-God religion, as the adaptation of Aristotle by Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas shows. The philosophies were adapted…Aquinas’ “first mover” is different than Aristotle’s, but there wasn’t a rejection of Aristotle.
In the middle ages, the common scientific attitude about the universe was that the Earth was round, and the planets and stars revolved around it, both of which were derived from Greek speculations on the universe. Neither of these two beliefs were ever religious dogma, however. When Copernicus (who was a church canon and probably a priest) produced the heliocentric theory, he actually dedicated the work to the Pope, who was an avid astronomer and scientist, and sent a copy of his work to Rome, where it was debated, with members of the papal court supporting both the heliocentric and geocentric models. What got Galileo in trouble was not supporting heliocentrism, but saying 1. Heliocentrism is a fact, and only a fool would deny it (thereby offending the pope at the time, who supported the geocentric theory, and 2. Because heliocentrism is a fact, that means that the bible must be false. That was what the Catholic Church objected to.
jmullaney wrote:
Then Maeglin wrote:
I think that’s too much of a stretch in putting words in jm’s mouth, Maeg. In ancient Greece and Rome, the educated elites were enlisted in keeping their civilization humming along. In the Medieval Europe, literacy was largely under the control of the Church, whose main agenda was “salvation” rather that maintaining and improving society’s infrastucture. Once literacy became widespread did people become less dependant on elites in making improvements in their lives.
You’ve confused me with barbitu8, sqweels.
And, just because it has been bothering me, exactly when did people, in general, stop speaking Latin?
Also, sqweels – it wasn’t the Church’s job to maintain and provide infrasctruct back then any more than it is now. That is what they had Kings and Emperors for, just like we have governments today.
I’m not entirely clear on the relationship between the Church and the University system in Europe. Most people didn’t have a real need to learn to read during the Dark and early Middle Ages (English wasn’t even written down till, when?), but if you wanted to learn most anything else, you only had to get off your @$$ and do so. The economy just wasn’t advanced enough to make mass education feasible. That’s got nothing to do with the Church.
Admittedly, the Greeks knew the world was round, Eratosthenes (maybe? correct me if I’m wrong) proved that thousands of years ago. But did they know that the Earth went around the sun? I recently saw an astronomy textbook that showed an “Ancient Greek model” that had the Earth at the center of the solar system. They specifically distingished this from the Ptolemaic model, which had a separate diagram.
Copernicus, IIRC, lived in 16th century Poland and was not an ancient Greek.
Barbitu8 wrote:
Au contraire. The medieval church believed the earth was round. As I said in an earlier post, the flat-earth thing is a modern myth. The church accepted the Ptolemaic system, which posited a spherical earth. (For cite, see the Gould book I mentioned above.)
As to heliocentrism, there was one Greek, Aristarchus, who proposed that idea. But he met with hostility in his time (Archimedes said he should be tried for impiety–sound familiar?). The popular Greek view was that of Aristotle, whose concentric-sphere model was adapted by Ptolemy with some modifications.
The church may have suppressed Greek polytheism and philosophy, sure. But it’s tough to say they suppressed Greek science when there map of the univers was Greek.
jmulleny wrote:
Actually, my encyc says it was first written down in the 600s, after the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain. They adopted the Celtic-Roman system to write Old English.
Sorry, that was Cleanthes who said Aristarchus should be tried. Had a little brain seizure…
Yes, Copernicus was not an ancient Greek, but the ancient Greeks did know that the earth revolved around the sun, inspite of Ptolemy. Ptolemy lived in the 2d Century AD and his theory was in vogue until Copernicus. Nonetheless, prior to Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician, whose name I cannot now recall, showed that the earth revolved around the sun. In fact, he calculated the distances between different points on the earth based upon his theory, which remained hidden until Copernicus.
barbitu8, do you have a citation for that? By your description, it sounds as though you are describing the actions of Eratosthenes who showed the Earth was round (and described it as approximately 25,000 miles in circumference) by measuring the angles of shadows at wells at noon in two Egyptian cities that were several hundred miles apart.
That is different than describing the sun as the center of the solar system.
Hellooo, guys? Did anyone look at my post? His name was Aristarchus?
:o Sorry Domina and Tomndebb. I combined Aristarche and Erastosthenes into one person. The premise, however, as Domina pointed out, that the Greeks knew about the heliocentric theory, remains true.