Dark Ages

“ Foam of the old phantasms still lingers in our mediæval liturgies, and even falls afresh where the daylight is shut out that altar-candles may burn, or for other dark seances are prepared the conditions necessary for whatsoever loves not the light.
What we call the Dark Ages were indeed spiritually a perpetual seance with lights lowered. Nay, human superstition was able to turn the very moon and stars into mere bluish night-tapers, giving just light enough to make the darkness visible in fantastic shapes fluttering around the Prince of Darkness,—or Non-existence in Chief! ”

“ Life goes on in those Dark Ages, but it doesn’t feel the call to articulate itself, to leave a record of its experiences. And that strikes me, as I sit here and think of it, as about the deepest tragedy that can overtake anything on this earth. Nothing, after all, is sadder than silence, the silence of dead civilizations and dead cities and dead souls. ”

“ In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages crystallized also--by a process which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses--that rich mass of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress, which differentiates one place from another, when the communications of a high material civilization break down. In all this the Dark Ages are a comfort to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the process of increasing complexity reaches its term; that the strain of development is at last relieved; that humanity sooner or later returns upon itself ”

“ The ancient civilization, which may be traced from Rome through Greece, Babylon and Egypt back to the dim dawn of history, is gone almost as if it had never been. For there came a period when great hordes of barbarians defeated the armies, burnt the cities, pillaged and destroyed, leaving only desolation and ruin behind them. Then followed hundreds of years of what we call the "Dark Ages,"—ages of ignorance and violence, when mankind was slowly struggling upwards again and was forming a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. ”

“ We in the West, looking back on our own immediate history, refer to this pre-civilized status as the Dark Ages. Actually, such Dark Ages are the transition stages between two periods of experiments with the building of civilizations. ”

“ Again one may compare the Dark Ages to the leafsoil of a forest. They are formed by the disintegration of an antique florescence. They are the bed from which new florescence shall spring.
It is a curious phenomenon to consider: this hibernation, or sleep: this rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and reflux of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse than to a growth. It makes us remember that rhythm which is observed in all forms of energy. ”

“ THE DARK AGES.—The Dark Ages is a name often applied by historians to the Middle Ages, a term comprising about 1,000 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the invention of printing in the fifteenth. ”

“ All this tended to make the Middle Ages gloomy, funereal, repulsive, austere. There was a time when I felt a sort of poetic interest in these dark times, and called them ages of faith; but the older I grow, and the more I read and reflect, the more dreary do those ages seem to me. Think of a state of society when everything suggested wrath and vengeance, even in the character of God, and when this world was supposed to be under the dominion of devils! ”

“ Of the ‘Dark Ages,’ emphatically so called, the period to which I allude was perhaps the darkest; it was ‘of Night’s black arch the key-stone.’ At a time when men were given over to the direst evils that can afflict humanity,—ignorance, idleness, wickedness, misery; at a time when the every-day incidents of life were a violation of all the moral instincts of mankind ”

“ While, as we have seen, with the fall of the Western Empire of Rome, the drift of literature was toward the East, there remained in the West a dim light that was kept burning thru the six hundred years so fittingly called the Dark Ages. ”

“ We take up the story in the early years of the tenth century, when the Dark Ages had not yet run their course. We end it in the closing years of the thirteenth century, when the choicest flowers of mediæval civilisation were already in full bloom. ”

“ This error cast its dismal shadow on the common life of the Middle Ages. You cannot penetrate the spirit of those centuries without a painful recognition of almost universal darkness and despair. How gloomy was a Gothic church before the eleventh century, with its dark and heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive pillars, its low roof, its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that church to hide themselves and sing mournful songs,--the Dies Irae of monastic fear! ”

“ It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. ”

“ Far-sighted were the initiates of antiquity. They realized that nations come and go, that empires rise and fall, and that the golden ages of art, science, and idealism are succeeded by the dark ages of superstition. ”

“ And just as light, though terrible, is reassuring, so those projections that bind continents together, and make the lonely station a part of the busy world, are chasing away the last terrors of the dark ages, wiping out their dark dreams. ”

“ The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers, broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history knows as the Dark Ages.
When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first impulse ”

“ Further, from the fifth century after Christ until the fifteenth, that period defined as the Middle Ages, such terrible struggles and fierce upheavals, such ruthless encounters and horrifying acts, were the rule among the peoples of Europe, that the Europeans rightly describe those ten centuries as the Dark Ages. ”

“ In this little volume, then, we have to outline the history of human efforts to prevent and treat the ills of mankind for nearly one thousand years. Until recently, it has been the custom to believe that there was so little of genuine interest in anything like the scientific care of ailing human beings during these centuries, that even a volume of this kind might seem large for the tale of it. Now we know how much these men of the Middle Ages, for so long called the “Dark Ages,” were interested in every phase of human progress. ”

“ Sometimes in history there have been so many changes within a short time that the effect has been cumulative and an epoch has been created, as at the break-up of the Roman Empire, when civilization was merged in the ‘Dark Ages’. ”

“ George and the Dragon, and consequently it is hardly fair to say that the dark ages were more superstitious than our own. Nor does every belief, even in supernatural objects, deserve the name of superstition. ”

“ Living in the very depth of the dark ages, it is no wonder that, like other illustrious illuminators of that darkness, he fell under the suspicion of magical practices, and several ridiculous stories are related to this purpose. ”

“ During these and subsequent centuries, well termed the ‘Dark Ages,’ learning was at a low ebb, because of the disturbed condition of the civilized world, and the overthrow of kings and dynasties by the irruptions of these strange and less than semi-barbarous nations, who swept away or destroyed in their progress nearly everything valuable to future ages, leaving only the more salient and remarkable historical facts to be imperfectly described by a few monks or refugees. ”

“ The inadequate supply, if not deficiency, of information respecting the great mass of the people in what are generally known as the Dark Ages, but more properly speaking as the Mediæval period, has induced many writers to describe those who lived and flourished in them as rude and unenlightened barbarians. ”

“ When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to set apart and stigmatize as the ‘Dark Ages’; when we consider how the seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon the soil which Imperial Rome had prepared ”

“ Ideas of this kind may help us to understand what must remain after all a paradox, that we have been taught to apply the term 'Dark Ages' to the period of what were in some respects the greatest achievements of the human mind, for example, the Cathedral of Florence and the writings of Dante. ”

“ We have come from the height of the classic period suddenly into the heart of the Middle Ages; and in the dark centuries that lie between, Christ and His Disciples have come and gone, and the religion of the Western World has changed; the old gods have perished and the saints have filled their places. And Rome has died, and Romance has been born.
The center of civilization has shifted to the north and west ”

“ There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages. ”

“ Soon a thick darkness spread over all the world, and when the last gleam of light faded from the sky, all the evil things that had lain hidden for fear of the gods, or that wished to live away from the light,—all these came boldly forth from caves and dark forests and holes underground, for they knew that their time had come at last. ”

“ Still the old mysterious glimmer from mountain and cave allures, and the golden gleams divide and descend on us from the haunts of the Gods.
The dark age is our darkness and not the darkness of life. It is not well for us who in the beginning came forth with the wonder-light about us, that it should have turned in us to darkness, the song of life be dumb. We close our eyes from the many-coloured mirage of day, and are alone soundless and sightless in the unillumined cell of the brain. ”

“ And so, on and on through endless transformations he passed, and he saw how the first world of dark elements crept in upon the world of beauty, clothing it around with grossness and veiling its fires; and the dark spirits entered by subtle ways into the spheres of the spirits of light, and became as a mist over memory and a chain upon speed; the earth groaned with the anguish. ”

“ Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain,
Through labor and endurance. This deep world
Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heaven's all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his glory unobscured,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne; from whence deep thunders roar
Mustering their rage, and Heaven resembles Hell!
As he our darkness, cannot we his light
Imitate when we please? ”

“ At such times all existence begins to look like an unending nightmare. We see the bright unnumbered throng of stars as so many specks of dust on the dark mantle of old Chaos, most ancient of devils. And even they appear remote and unfriendly. ”

“ In darkness we have lived; in darkness we shall emerge. Then shall we feast in the arena of Vashta as we did of old. We shall see this new world; we shall breed and people the world; we shall take up our lives again. ”

“ The luminous inferior orbs enclosed⁠420
From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks. A globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent,
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky ”

“ But into the midst of this menacing chaos light has already begun to penetrate with an organizing power; and over the dark profound hovers a spirit which can and will divide the darkness from the light, and prepare a new creation. ”

“ The Silver Age, then, belongs to a long-since vanished past.44 The stalwarts of the Bronze Age, we are told, destroyed by their deeds, went down into the gloomy home of the dreadful Hades, nameless. Black Death seized them, for all their violence, and they left the light of the sun. ”

“ For the Old World is fast crumbling and crushing down upon us like an ancient ruin struck by lightning-flash and thunderbolt; the old vices, lusts, and littlenesses are being torn away from us as a storm-wind tears away the parasite ivies from mouldering walls—and we shall presently see a break in the clouds and light through the darkness. ”

“ THE PATRIARCH'S TALE
“In the beginning,” he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, “our people were as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a great breaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of the earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of, only dark. It circled about the earth--”
“By Jove!” cried Stern, and started to his feet. “That dark patch in the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the Hudson!” ”

“ Ah! we will soon know the best or worst; for, far away to the west, dark, portentous as a thundercloud--spread out like the wings of mighty armies--moving like a Fate over the bright sky, comes on the vast array of the Demons. ”

“ Bloody ages, brilliantly splendid epochs, are merely dissimilar chambers through which he advances, silently, calmly, becoming more and more distinct, through the twilight veil, until he reaches that period on the threshold of which he now stands, contemplated by many with rapture, by many, too, with fear. ”

“ Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before—Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. ”

“ Darkness envelops their history during the middle ages, from which it gradually emerges in the early part of the sixteenth century, when Belon and Rondiletius in France, Salviani in Italy, and Conrad Gesner in Switzerland, devoted themselves to the study of Natural History with great success. ”