The Age of Ignorance

in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent
- A World Lit Only by Fire, by William Manchester

Learning was still regarded as paganism:

The church encouraged ignorance: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the most influential Christian of his time, bore a deep distrust of the intellect and declared that the pursuit of knowledge, unless sanctified by a holy mission, was a pagan act and therefore vile."
-- A World Lit Only by Fire - The Medieval Mind and The Renaissance, by William Manchester

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
-- Saint Augustine of Hippo, 5th century

The facts of history prove that:
(1) The pagan power to which Christianity succeeded in Europe had already given the world a fine general system of education.

(2) Christianity contemplated the complete ruin of this school-system without a murmur, indeed applauded its disappearance, and made no effort to replace it.

(3) So little was done in the way of education during the thousand years of absolute Christian domination that more than ninety percent of the people in every Christian nation were illiterate and densely ignorant.

(4) The modern school-systems which have opened the eyes of the masses and enabled them to rise are due entirely to secular sentiment, and their development was in most cases opposed and retarded by the Churches.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

The ancient Roman and Hellenic world had been highly literate. Under the ignorance brought on by Christianity with its hatred of all that was pre-Christian, most of Europe and the Christianised countries of North-Africa, which had earlier been part of the Greco-Roman world, were sunk into illiteracy.

The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher, in the porch of a house perhaps, teaching the children how to write on wax-faced tablets. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The Church, however, got an early and fair start on its wonderful career as the organizer and creator of civilization. In 529 [by priest-prompted edict of Justinian] "the schools of philosophy were closed. From that date Christianity had no rival." (CE. ii, 43.) We have read the Imperial Law of Justinian with the fatal title: "Pagans Forbidden to give Instruction"; consequently "the State schools of the Empire had fallen into decay." (CE. xiii, 555.) Thenceforth the Church, inspired by its Holy Ghost, was the sole Mentor and Instructor of Christendom.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless, where CE refers to the Catholic Encyclopaedia

What the Church did
In the course of the fifth century this Roman system of schools was entirely destroyed. By the year 400, as I said, Christianity had become, by imperial decree, the sole religion of the empire, which means of the entire civilized world apart from India and China. By the year 500, there was not a single trace left of the pagan structure of schools. No writer on education can prove the existence of a single school in Europe at that date. To say, therefore, that Christianity gave the world schools, when its triumph was followed by the annihilation of the finest system of education the world ever had until the second half of the nineteenth century, is a constructive untruth of a monumental character; for there is not the least controversy anywhere about these two facts -- that the pagan Romans of the fourth century had a fine system of general and higher education, and that the whole of it perished in the fifth century.

Although I was for several years a professor, and ultimately head of a college, in the Church of Rome, I then knew nothing whatever about these facts. We merely copied from earlier apologists, and repeated the traditional claim that "Christianity gave the world education." These traditional claims we never dreamed of checking by modern authorities. The preacher who repeats them today is usually honest. They are given to him as part of his clerical education. They occur still, as brazenly as ever, in his apologetic literature. There is not one preacher in a thousand who goes further and inquires if the facts, as given in modern history, support the claims he makes.

Learning in the Middle Ages
How profound was the night that now enveloped Europe, and how fully the Church was responsible for it, may be gathered from a letter written by Pope Gregory "the Great" to a French bishop. Gregory ruled the Church from 590 to 604 A.D. The triumph of Christianity was now complete. Paganism was very dead; and civilization had almost expired with it. Rome had not been destroyed by the Goths, but it was suffered, decade by decade, to fall into ruin by the forty thousand miserable and grossly ignorant Christians who now moved, like lizards, amongst the moldering buildings that had once housed a million happy, open-eyed folk. Europe at large was correspondingly desolate.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

Under Christian hatred for knowledge, many ancient works of literature, science and philosopy were destroyed for being "the work of the devil". Much of this was active destruction as books were burnt, but other books were lost through passive destruction: purposefully neglected and left to hopefully crumble to dust, making sure no copies were made. Other works had already perished in Christianity's earlier, large-scale destruction of antiquity's libraries.
In the Levant and the Middle East, which had been part of the Hellenic world, a few were preserved by the pre-Christian Assyrians, the Arabians who followed their pre-Christian religions, and Jews. The remnants of this pre-Christian literature were translated into Arabic as well as some other Middle Eastern languages. When Islam arose, these Greek works (along with Indian, and the few remaining Persian works that survived the parallel fall of Persia to Islam) were also heavily used as references and building blocks for new literature in Arabia. In this way, ancient Hellenic knowledge was reintroduced into Europe, along with the introduction of pre-Christian knowledge from Persia's ruins and beyond.

Greek literature was preserved in the Greek Empire, and was conveyed to Europe by the Jews and Moors. As to Latin literature, genuinely religious monasteries regarded it, like Tertullian, as "inspired by the devil," and would not look at it; and the great bulk of the monasteries were too gross and ignorant to do any copying. (Fortunately, in every age there was an abbot or a bishop here and there who loved a cup of wine and a maid as well as Horace did, and they preserved the treasure for us.) Copies even of the Latin classics were exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, Heeren shows, although a parchment-book lasted practically forever.

Where the monks did spend any part of their time in "the writing room," they were, naturally, copying the Fathers of the Church and later Christian literature. In a corner of the great British National Library at London there is a full collection (the Migne collection) of the works of the Fathers, Latin and Greek: five or six hundred large quarto volumes of closely printed ... what shall I call it? No one seems to approach this gallery of literary fossils except myself. It is all waste paper from the modern point of view. And that is almost all we owe to the famous monks. Heeren insists that they destroyed more classical works than the barbarians did.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Sometimes monks did preserve ancient Greek and Roman works - accidentally:

In one singular and unintentional way, however, is it true that "the preservation of fragments of Greek and Roman classics is due to the monasteries, which were the custodians of manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophy," science, and literature. Such manuscripts existed in great numbers in the age of Greek and Roman culture; they were written on enduring parchment. When the Light of the Cross dimmed Pagan culture, and its learning became abhorrent to the pious Christian, the monks needed papyrus for their literary efforts, so they gathered in the manuscripts wherever found; -- and thus they "preserved" them: "Due to cost of vellum, old books were scraped and used again" -- (that is the meaning of "Palimpsest") -- for the scribbling of the precious monkish chronicles and theological folderol soon to be noticed. "In the West much use was made of old manuscripts from the seventh to the ninth century, when, in consequence of the disturbed state of the country, there was some scarcity of material, and the old volumes of neglected authors were used for more popular works. ... The practice continued down to the sixteenth century.

Many Latin and most Greek manuscripts are on reused vellum. A manuscript in the Vatican contained part of the 91st Book of Livy's 'Roman History.' The famous Sinai Bible discovered by Tischendorff was written over by lives of female saints. Parts of the Iliad and the 'Elements' of Euclid were covered by monkish treatises. The 'De Republica' of Cicero, was discovered under the Commentary of Augustine on Psalms, and several of his Orations under the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon." Other such monkish palimpsests were discovered to contain the Institutes of Gaius; eight orations of the Roman senator Symmachus, the Comedies of Plautus, parts of Euripides, epistles of Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius, and others, the 'Fasti Consolaris' of 486, the Codex Theodosianus, are among the precious remains of Greek and Roman erudition which were "Preserved" in this monkish fashion in the erudite monasteries. (NIE. xvii, 762-3.) As for "monks constantly occupied in copying the classic texts," for the preservation and diffusion of Pagan culture, it is a joke! They couldn't read Greek nor good Latin, and nobody else could read at all, -- also, Holy Church and Churchmen loathed Pagan culture and literature.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Christianity even managed to ruin Latin, the very language used by the Roman Church for Christian literature. And eventually, under Christianity even Roman nobility would become illiterate:

Our only indications of the moral condition [in the first half of the 7th century] are Papal documents (written in such barbarous Latin that one can scarcely read them)
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

It is on record that at this time [10th century] some of these members of the highest Roman nobility could not write their own names; how many could we do not know. It is useless to ask us to consider these vices as relics of paganism, when we know that from being a generally literate city, and in its higher class a very refined and cultivated city, Rome under the Popes had sunk to an illiteracy that has no parallel elsewhere in the history of civilization.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

A bishop of Laon (in France) of the eleventh century says:

"There is more than one bishop who cannot name the letters of the alphabet on his fingers."

Ordinary priests had not the slightest understanding of the Latin they mumbled. Even the secretaries of the Papacy at Rome sent out their documents in the most atrocious Latin, full of common grammatical errors. Kings and nobles could not sign their names. Their signatures had to be cut for them in wood and stamped on documents. The illiteracy of Europe had increased to more than ninety-nine percent.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

The French writer Montalembert is responsible for the myth. His discovery that "every monastery was a school" is still quoted everywhere, though every serious historian of education will tell you that not one monastery in one hundred educated even its own monks. ...The overwhelming majority of the monasteries of the Middle Ages were colonies of fat and gross sensualists, mainly hypocritical peasants, who could not write their own names. Impossible? In his "History of Pedagogy" Compayre shows that at the close of the thirteenth century, which is supposed to be the most intellectual and scholarly period of the Middle Ages, not one single monk in the largest and greatest monastery of France, St. Gall, could read or write!
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

In history we divide time into three parts, Ancient Times, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times; and we consider the Middle Ages (as we ought to say) a period of dark and turbulent semi-barbarism lying between two phases of civilization, ancient paganism and modern paganism.
...
let us be quite clear what we mean by the Middle Ages. Roughly we mean from about 500 A.D. when paganism and the Roman Empire were extinct, to about 1500 or 1600 A.D. The first half of this period, say from about 500 to 1100, we call the Dark Ages.

The Church is deeply and terribly responsible for the Dark Ages, for the suspension of the evolution of civilization for a thousand years. Today there would be -- as will be the condition in a few centuries -- no war, little or no poverty, no ignorance, no crime, and infinitely more happiness, if the Christian church had been a civilizing force.

By the end of the fourth century Christianity was established. The world was now Christian, and I would advise any serious inquirer to find for himself what happened. If he cannot read the original Latin authorities, he has two learned works, which cover the period: the Protestant historian Dean Milman's "History of Latin Christianity," and the "History of European Morals" of Mr. Lecky: a Rationalist, but a man who says all that can justly be said, and much more, in favor of Christianity.

These two historians agree entirely that Europe passed into a state of moral chaos. The Dean is at first disturbed when he approaches the period, and he piously reflects that "the evil was too profoundly stated in the habits of the Roman world to submit to the control of religion." But Milman was too candid a scholar to maintain that insincere position. The evil was new, not inherited from the pagans, and it grew worse and worse as the world moved farther away from paganism.

For the fifth century our one authority is the priest Salvianus. In a Latin work "On the Providence of God" he very frankly describes the morals of the Christian world in which he lives, and he explicitly says that there has been a very considerable deterioration of morals since pagan days.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

The Middle Ages, the period roughly from the end of the Ancient era in the fifth century to the Renaissance in the fourteenth century, was a millennium of almost unrestricted rule of Christianity in Europe. The major part of this era has been termed the Dark Ages. As historian Joseph McCabe observed in the 1920's:

"No one except an expert today reads any book written between 420 and 1100 A.D.; and if that doesn't mean a Dark Age we wonder what the word means."
-- The Lies And Fallacies Of The Encyclopedia Britannica, J. McCabe

In contrast, even ancient non Christian literature is widely read today, for example the writings and poetry of Greek and Roman authors such as Homer, Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca, and students of mathematics and natural sciences today study ... principles of mathematics and geometry first laid down by ancient Greek philosophers such as Archimedes, Euclid, Thales and many more.

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It is a well known historical fact that the last schools of Greek philosophy were suppressed and finally closed by the Christian emperor Justinian (483-563). The reason, of course, was that the Greek schools taught pagan, and secular ideas. [1]

...The ascent of Christianity into temporal power was accompanied in parallel by the decline in secular education.
...by the year 1100, 99 percent of Christian Europe was illiterate. [4] It was secular developments, such as the Renaissance in the fourteenth to sixteenth century, and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, that rejuvenated the education system in Europe. The Renaissance, in part, was an attempt to revive the great pagan works which Christianity had successfully suppressed until then. [5]

But where possible the churches still continued to suppress education. By any count they were pretty successful; for up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, fully 90 percent of Christian Europe was illiterate. [6] As recently as 1846, we find the English statesman, Richard Cobden (1804-1865) complaining, in a letter to a friend, that he faced extreme resistance from clergymen of all denominations in his quest for mass education. [7]
Indeed the attitude of the Catholic Church was no different from the English Protestant ones. The historian Thomas MacCaulay (1800-1859), in his book History of England (1845) has this to say about the Catholic Church's attitude towards education and intellectualism:

...during the last three centuries to stunt the growth of the human mind was her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance had been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, had been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportions to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude and in intellectual torpor. [8]

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End of non-Christian Roman Civilization, start of the Dark Ages of Christianity

Before the dazzling Light diffused by the Church blinds us to the view, let us take a farewell look at the Pagan civilization of the Roman world, as recorded under the Antonine Emperors and their successors, such conditions prevailing quite up to the era of [Christian Roman Emperor] Justinian and the Church; -- it will be a millennium and a half before we see a spark of such like:

"The internal peace and prosperity were no less remarkable than the absence of war. Trade and commence flourished; new routes were opened, and new roads built throughout the Empire, so that all parts of it were in close touch with the capital. The remarkable municipal life of the period, when new and flourishing cities covered the Roman world, is revealed by the numerous inscriptions that record the generosity of wealthy patrons or the activity of free burghers. ... Guilds and organizations of all conceivable kinds, mainly for philanthropic purposes, came into existence everywhere. By means of these associations the poorer classes were in a sense insured against poverty. ... The activity of the Emperor was not confined to merely official acts; private movements for the succor of the poor and of orphans received his unstinted support. The scope of the alimentary institutions of former reigns was broadened, and the establishment of charitable foundations such as that of the 'Puellae Faustinianae' is a sure indication of a general softening of manners and a truer sense of humanity. The period was also one of considerable literary and scientific activity. ... The most lasting influence of the life and reign of Antoninus was that which he exercised in the sphere of law. Five great Stoic jurisconsults [named] were the constant advisers of the Emperor, and under his protection they infused a spirit of leniency and mildness into Roman legislation which effectually safeguarded the weak and unprotected, slaves, wards, and orphans, against aggressions of the powerful. ... An impulse was given in this direction which produced the later golden period of Roman jurisprudence under Septimus Severus, Caracalla, and Alexander Severus."
-- (CE. i, 587.) [Catholic Encyclopaedia]

For vivid contrast, we may here recall the "vivid remark" of Bishop St. Bruno, in the year 1049, that "justice had perished" (CE. vi, 793) and the confession, relating to the beginning of the Reformation five hundred years later: "Churchmen in high places were constantly unmindful of justice." (CE. xii, 767.) The "golden period of Roman jurisprudence" had been replaced by Christian "superstitions in the administration of justice during many centuries of the Middle Ages, and known as ordeals or 'judgments of God.' ... These 'judgments of God' gave rise to new superstitions. Whether guilty or not, persons subjected to the trials would often put more confidence in charms, magic formulas, and ointments than in the Providence of God." (CE. xiv, 341,) Up to as late as 1538 "the legal lore had hitherto been presented in a very barbarous form." (CE. i, 273.) As for benevolence,: charity, the care of the poor, the protection of the weak against the strong, the cursory Pagan record just quoted must suffice; their continuance in the Christian Dark Ages is sufficiently belied by the shocking social conditions to be cursorily noticed in the general cultural sketch to follow. As for widows and orphans, one of the proudest brags of the clerics, the Church by sword and rack and stake, has made an infinity more of widows and orphans that she ever scantily cared for in her monkish lazzarettos and pestilential lying-in shambles.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless, where CE refers to the Catholic Encyclopaedia

About these "judgements of God" ordeals for determining truth and justice:

Not without astonishment can we look back at what, in those times, were popularly regarded as criteria of truth. Doctrines were considered as established by the number of martyrs who had professed them, by miracles, by the confession of demons, of lunatics, or of persons possessed of evil spirits: thus, St. Ambrose, in his disputes with the Arians, produced men possessed by devils, who, on the approach of the relics of certain martyrs, acknowledged, with loud cries, that the Nicean doctrine of the three persons of the Godhead was true. But the Arians charged him with suborning these infernal witnesses with a weighty bribe. Already, ordeal tribunals were making their appearance. During the following six centuries they were held as a final resort for establishing guilt or innocence, under the forms of trial by cold water, by duel, by the fire, by the cross.

What an utter ignorance of the nature of evidence and its laws have we here! An accused man sinks or swims when thrown into a pond of water; he is burnt or escapes unharmed when he holds a piece of red-hot iron in his hand; a champion whom he has hired is vanquished or vanquishes in single fight; he can keep his arms outstretched like a cross, or fails to do so longer than his accuser, and his innocence or guilt of some imputed crime is established! Are these criteria of truth?
-- History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, by J.W. Draper

This is what had replaced ancient non-Christian Rome.

See:

Christianity and Education

History repeats itself: a Christian denomination of today against education