“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon accuses Christianity of replacing classical civilization with religious barbarism. But classical civilization was itself infused with barbarous practices like pederasty and slavery. Moreover, the Christians didn’t destroy Roman civilization. The Huns, Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths did. These barbarians, who came from the pagan regions of northern Europe, smashed a Rome that had long been weak and decadent. Fortunately, they eventually converted to Christianity. Over time it was Christianity that civilized these rude people. Christianity didn’t overrun and lay waste to a learned civilization. Christianity found a continent that had already been laid waste. The “Dark Ages” were the consequence of Roman decadence and barbarian pillage.
Slowly and surely, Christianity took this backward continent and gave it learning and order, stability and dignity. The monks copied and studied the manuscripts that preserved the learning of late antiquity. Christopher Dawson shows in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture how the monasteries became the locus of productivity and learning throughout Europe. Where there was once wasteland they produced hamlets, then towns, and eventually commonwealths and cities. Through the years the savage barbarian warrior became a chivalric Christian knight, and new ideals of civility and manners and romance were formed that shape our society to this day. If Christianity had not been born out of Judaism, Rodney Stark writes, we might still be living in the Dark Ages.
