Dr. Stephen Hicks thinks the Early Middle Ages were a “Dark Age” thanks to the Church, and considers any revision of that idea to be the work of conservative ideologues. Working from dubious sources, a succession of erroneous presuppositions and some total fantasy, he supports this via a sustained string of bungled arguments about history that leaves his audience considerably dumber for having heard them. Why do atheist philosophers keep doing this?

I was not aware of Dr Stephen Hicks until this week, but it seems he is a Canadian philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, a small private college in Illinois. He is also the Executive Director of the University’s Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship and if entrepreneurship and philosophy seem an odd combination, it should be noted that he is a follower of the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. As such, he is an ideological opponent of both the Postmodernists on the left and religious conservatives on the right and it seems he detects his enemies in unlikely places.

This is why in a podcast and video in November 2018 he alleged that conservatives are behind a nefarious attempt at downplaying “the Dark Ages” and have wicked motives for trying to discourage the use of that term. The full 32 minute piece was part of “Open College with Dr. Stephen R.C. Hicks” and can be found in its video form here:

Hicks opens by declaring that it is “a faux pas in some intellectual circles, mostly conservative ones, to say there was a ‘Dark Ages’ in European history”. It would certainly be news to historians of the Middle Ages that this is the case in “mostly conservative [circles]”. Historians of the Middle Ages have largely abandoned the term “Dark Ages” because of its pejorative historiographical baggage and the way it has traditionally been applied to the whole Medieval period. Even the earlier part of the period, for which many of the elements that make up the popular conception of the “Dark Ages” are at least somewhat applicable, is most usually referred to as the “Early Middle Ages” as a more neutral term without the ideologically-driven value judgements of the term “the Dark Ages”. None of this has anything to do with “conservatism” or any ideological stances at all, just good modern historiography correcting the distorting Whiggish positivism of nineteenth century conceptions of the past. I have gone into the origins of the term “the Dark Ages” and why modern historians now largely reject it in detail before – see “‘The Dark Ages’ – Popery, Periodisation and Pejoratives”.

Hicks presents the conception of the Middle Ages as a “Dark Age” as “the mainstream view” and illustrates it thus:

On this point historian Brian Ward-Perkins, a Fellow at Oxford University, puts it this way in his ‘The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation’ on the ‘scared of the world mentality’ (quote):

“ … and as for trying to sail down the West African coast everyone knew that as soon as you passed the Canary Islands you would be in the sea of darkness in a medieval imagination this was a region of uttermost dread where the heavens fling down liquid sheets of flame and the waters boil or serpent rocks and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand of Satan reaches up from the fathomless depths to seize him where he will turn back in face and body as a mark of God’s vengeance for the insolence of his prying into this forbidden mystery. And even if he should be able to survive all these ghastly perils and sail on through, he would then arrive in the Sea of Obscurity and be lost forever in the vapors and slime at the edge of the world.”

Two things are striking about this lurid passage. First, despite it being presented on the authority of an esteemed historian and Fellow of Oxford, it is total nonsense. No medieval geographer or encyclopedist describes the oceans south of the straits of Gibraltar in this way, and there are no claims of “sheets of flame” or the danger of Satan reaching up from the depths. Early medieval mariners did not venture down West Africa for entirely practical reasons. Maritime technology was still too rudimentary for this kind of oceanic voyage and medieval sailors tended to avoid it for the same reason Greek and Roman sailors did – because they did not want to be wrecked on a coast far from home. There were Greek reports of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno who is supposed to have ventured into these waters in the sixth or fifth century BC and lived to tell the tale, but that story was semi-legendary and no other such ancient voyages of that kind are known. The prevailing winds and strong westerly ocean currents in that region of the Atlantic also made the attempt extremely difficult and hazardous, which is why most Muslim trade with western and central Africa was conducted over land routes. Finally, Muslim domination of both Spain and North Africa formed a political barrier to European exploration in this direction.

Two of these factors began to change in the later Middle Ages, with advances in maritime technology such as the mariner’s compass and the development of larger stern-rudder ships making longer ocean voyages more viable. The decline in Muslim power in both Spain and North Africa from the thirteenth century onward also made the route more feasible. A papal embargo on Christian trade with Egypt in 1291 gave an incentive to find a sea route for the spice trade with the Indies and in that year the Genoese brothers Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi sailed west through the straits of Gibraltar with the aim of circumnavigating Africa and reaching the Indies (see J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, Oxford, 1988, pp. 155-58). Unfortunately medieval maritime technology was not yet up to the task and the Vivaldis were last seen passing Cape Chanuar on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and it was another century before medieval sailors began to successfully explore the west coast of Africa. What is clear is that the barriers to earlier exploration were entirely practical, not weird and superstitious fears about giant Satanic hands.

Which leads to the second odd thing about the Ward-Perkins “quote” above – it is nowhere to be found in Ward-Perkins’ book. Given that I have read The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005) several times, I found it odd that I had never noticed this passage in it, as it would have jarred and so been something I would notice. So I checked, and it simply is not there. Further searching located the source of the quote. It does not come from a distinguished Oxford historian, but rather from American journalist Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998). Hochschild, in turn, appears to be quoting from novelist Peter Forbath’s sole non-fiction book The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration and Exploitation of the World’s Most Dramatic River (1977). So the reason this strange account of supposed “medieval” fears bears little resemblance to actual medieval attitudes is that it was invented wholesale by a popular writer with no knowledge of medieval history.

Hicks has managed to correctly attribute the quote to Hochschild in a 2012 blog post, so his misattribution of it to Ward-Perkins appears to be due to clumsy error rather than deception. But this kind of sloppiness certainly casts some doubt on his reliability on history. The 2012 blog post also exhibits more of his strange biases against the Middle Ages, as well as his profound ignorance of medieval exploration of the wider world – see my article “Medieval Maps and Monsters” for more on that topic.

Moving on from this less than spectacular start, Hicks contrasts this “mainstream” view of the Middle Ages as a “Dark Age” with the counter-arguments made by “admirers of the Middle Ages”, citing conservative Catholic scholar Anthony Esolen’s 2013 essay “Were the Middle Ages Dark?”. Hicks says these “admirers” note medieval philosophers like Aquinas, Maimonides, William of Ockham and Duns Scotus. They point to the rise of universities in the Middle Ages, such as Bologna, Oxford, Padua, Cambridge and the Jagiellonian University in Poland. They refer to medieval advances in technology such as the invention of the blast furnace, the printing press, the flying buttress and the mechanical clock. And they highlight the giants of medieval literary culture, like Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Again, while it is not hard to find conservatives who make this case, it is weird that Hicks frames this as a “conservative” argument, given that pretty much any scholar in the fields of Medieval Studies would make exactly the same points, regardless of their political or ideological leanings. This is not an ideological argument, even though it is clear it is often presented by conservatives for ideological reasons. It is simply an argument based on facts – depicting the whole Middle Ages as a “dark age” is nonsensical for these and hundreds of other examples that show clearly that they were nothing of the sort. Conservatives like Esolen and others who are Hicks’ ideological adversaries may make this argument in defence of certain political ideas, but any and all scholars of the Middle Ages also make it simply because it is true and because they get tired of the popular misapprehensions about a period they know well. A number of such scholars grew so weary of constantly battling against common cliches about the period that they came together to create a collection of essays with further reading aimed at undergraduates to debunk some of the most common such myths – see Stephen J. Harris and Byron L. Grigsby (eds.), Misconceptions About the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2008). This project was motivated by a regard for the facts and a desire to educate, not politics.

Having presented this argument, Hicks then responds to it by noting – correctly – that the Middle Ages span about 1000 years and pointing to the fact that all the examples given fall into its second half, from around 1000 AD onward:

My understanding is that good historians break the medieval into two parts from 400 CE to a thousand and then from about 1000 CE to 1500 year time periods. The [400 to 1000] time period really was awful and that’s what the Dark Ages are about.

This is largely correct, though historians try to avoid emotive language like describing a whole 500 years of history as simply “awful”. Those who cite the examples noted above do so to counter the idea that the whole Medieval Period, early and late, was “dark” and are well aware that the first 500 years of the period is different to the later half of the period in significant ways.

But Hicks feels their arguments are somehow avoiding the fact that the earlier period was (to use his term) “awful” and so focuses on this as his genuine “Dark Age”. Here we should pause and note that this distinction between the Early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages makes a great degree of sense. There is no doubt that many things changed in western Europe with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the collapse of that polity and its attendant economic power saw political fragmentation, a massive decline in long distance trade, the end to most large scale capital works and, with that, an attendant loss of much technical knowledge and skills. The localisation of political power, depopulation of urban centres and collapse or fragmentation of many former institutions meant the European world in, say, 750 AD looked very different to that 500 years earlier. This fragmentation saw Europe become much more open to external invasion and raiding and small scale warfare was more common between the new political units in the region. And all this accelerated and exacerbated a decline in educational structures and learning generally that had began back in the third century.

These are the reasons any comparison of the state of economic development, political structures, technical knowledge or learning and scholarship in this Early Medieval Period with the centuries before or after it is going to be an invidious one – this was a period in which the shock waves of the collapse of an Empire were felt for a long time. But Hicks wants to present this as his true “Dark Age” so he can blame Christianity for what he calls “six centuries of relative nothingness”, from 500 to around 1100 AD. To illustrate this, he provides a helpful timeline:

He seems to think this proves his point nicely; after all, who can miss the large blank space between 500 and 1100 – there is the “six centuries of relative nothingness” right there. Except this graphic will ring warning bells for anyone with a detailed grasp of the relevant history. First of all we see “Hypatia” at c. 400 and then “Universities closed” at c. 500. Hicks is under the impression that the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria marked some kind of significant turning point, despite this being a hoary myth. He is under the impression that Justinian “closed the pagan universities” in 529 AD and that this included the Academy of Plato. In fact, as I have argued in detail in response to similar claims by A.C. Grayling – another philosopher who is bad at history – Justinian did nothing of the sort. He passed some edicts restricting the funding for the small number of pagan schools still operating at that time and generally made it difficult for them to operate, but the great academies in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and other schools in Athens, Beirut and Gaza continued operation and continued teaching the classical curriculum uninterrupted – see “The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning”. Like Grayling, Hicks seems to have got his understanding of history via poor secondary sources and clearly has no detailed grasp of the scholarship or primary material. And no, Damascius’ small Athenian school was not the ancient Academy of Plato – that is another myth.

More importantly, the blank space on his timeline seems due to either profound ignorance or, more likely, careful selection. Why, for example, is Hypatia highlighted, yet John Philoponus omitted? Philoponus would sit in the blank space of Hicks’ “six centuries of relative nothingness” and, unlike Hypatia, he actually did original proto-scientific work of some significance. Yet he is missing. For some reason Hicks includes Brunelleschi’s great dome in Florence, completed in 1436, in his commentary’s list of later achievements. Yet Isidore of Miletus‘ remarkable domed Hagia Sophia is not mentioned, despite this also falling into Hicks’ blank zone (537 AD).

Other omissions also show that Hicks creates his blank zone largely by focusing purely on western Europe. This means Oxford, Cambridge and Bologna get mentioned, but for some reason Leo the Mathematician‘s founding of the Imperial University in Constantinople in the ninth century does not. Similarly, mechanical clocks are listed, but much earlier elaborate medieval Byzantine automata are not. Even if we do restrict ourselves to western Europe when talking about “the Early Middle Ages”, there are still strange omissions. Most literature scholars would hold up Beowulf as one of the sophisticated gems of Medieval literature, yet it is not listed while Chaucer and Dante are. Similarly, Giotto and Van Eyck are, apparently, worthy artists and so get listed, but the geniuses who created the Book of Kells or the Lindesfarne Gospels are ignored. Here it seems that the only medieval arts and literature considered “good” enough are ones close enough to “proper” Greco-Roman traditions – Germanic and Celtic forms need not apply. This is a very quaint view of things.

So it appears Hicks’ blank space is partially due to him cherry picking the evidence. But it is also because he restricts his examples to western Europe and so his “six centuries of relative nothingness” reflect the long period of decline and slow recovery after the break up of the Western Roman Empire. The fact that we do not see similar “nothingness” in the half of the Empire that did not collapse – the equally-Christian Byzantine Empire – shows that this western “nothingness” was due to that collapse, not to the stultifying grip of Christianity. The very-Christian Byzantines were still building domes, creating mechanical marvels and studying Archimedes and Aristotle while their unfortunate western neighbours were having to fight off Avars and Vikings.

Hicks does make some nods toward the fragmentation and decline in key areas in western Europe being the result of the collapse of Rome and its attendant conditions (pandemics, climate change) and effects (economic decline, loss of technical knowledge). But he continually slips in claims it was also due to the dominance of Christianity. So he says “as a result of the fall of Rome and the rise of the Christian era widespread illiteracy had resulted” (my emphasis). He does not explain how “the rise of the Christian era” somehow resulted in widespread illiteracy, nor does he make the case that it was Christianity that caused illiteracy rather than the much more obvious cause: the near total collapse of the institutions and infrastructure that had sustained relatively widespread literacy previously. Given that the one institution that provided training in literacy that did not collapse was the Christian Church, his implication that Christianity somehow “resulted” in widespread illiteracy makes no sense at all.

One of his “data points” on early medieval illiteracy is that Charlemagne was illiterate and asks in amazement “imagine being the head guy in Europe and being illiterate”. Except the idea that he was illiterate comes from a single reference by Einhard:

He also attempted to write and, for this reason, used to place both wax tablets and notebooks under the pillows on his bed, so that, if he had any free time, he might accustom his hand to forming letters. But his effort came too late in life and achieved little success

(Life of Charlemagne, XXV)

“Literacy” in the pre-modern world had several layers and writing was just one of them and usually the last mastered. We know that the native Frankish speaker Charlemagne was also fluent in Latin and could understand some Greek, though could not speak it well. The evidence that he could read is ambiguous, but very possible. So what Einhard is saying is that his writing was not very good, though what level of writing would be considered “success” by a scholar like Einhard is not clear. What is clear is that Charlemagne’s Merovingian predecessors could write and so could his immediate Carolingian successors, so if his literacy was not high, he was an exception among Frankish rulers, not the rule (for a detailed discussion of the complex evidence around Charlemagne’s literacy see Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, Palgrave, 2004; Chapter 3 “Carolus Magnus Scriptor”, pp. 69-92).

His second “data point” on the extent of decline in the early medieval period is from “historian William Manchester”:

Manchester … points out in the year 1500 the best roads in Europe …. were roads that had been built by the Romans over a thousand years ago. So that’s really a thousand years of neglect such that the best roads – obviously not in great condition – but nonetheless the best roads in a thousand years.

Hicks seems to think that the fact medieval rulers did not build another extensive network of roads alongside the existing Roman one means they were incapable of doing so. What it actually means is they did not do so because … they already had the Roman network. The Romans built their roads well and made them to last. Examination of medieval maps shows the main routes generally follow the old Roman network – about 40% of the travel routes on the fourteenth century English Gough Map follow the roads the Romans built. Hicks’ claim that the Roman roads would be “obviously not in great condition” is also nonsense. We have extensive evidence of ongoing maintenance of Roman roads throughout the Middle Ages. This was largely local in nature and road maintenance was considered an act of charity by a local magnate or wealthy benefactor. But the main routes were usually well-maintained because armies needed to be moved and rulers were regularly on the road due to the itinerant nature of medieval kingship. In January 1300 the entire court of Edward I travelled an average of nineteen miles a day, despite there being only nine hours of winter daylight and about two of those were spent stopping to eat. Unencumbered by wagons and retainers, a young Edward III rode to York in September 1336 and averaged fifty-five miles a day. These are very comparable to estimates of Roman travel speeds and clearly could not be maintained if the roads were pitted dirt tracks.

It is also curious that Hicks’ source here is the notorious A World Lit Only by Fire (1992) by William Manchester. Manchester was a popular writer and not a “historian”, except perhaps in the very loosest sense of the word. He decided to write a book on the way the Age of Discovery changed the previously dark and primitive world of the Middle Ages, but was disturbed to find most modern historians did not consider it to have been dark and primitive at all. He remedied this by the nifty trick of only consulting older works, which conformed more closely to his biased preconceptions about the period. In the book’s preface Manchester notes cheerily:

[This] is, after all, a slight work, with no scholarly pretensions. All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century.

(“Author’s Note”)

He also did not “master” any recent scholarship on the Middle Ages, and his book has become a source of great amusement for actual medieval historians – at least one I know of calls it “The Book of Howlers” and loves giving dramatic readings of some of its sillier passages in his classes. In his scathing review of the book in the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, Jeremy duQuesnay Adams displays gentlemanly restraint when he says Manchester’s work includes “some of the most gratuitous errors of fact and eccentricities of judgement this reviewer has read (or heard) in quite some time” (Speculum, 70 (1), 1995, pp. 173–74). That this terrible book is the kind of work Hicks turns to for information about the medieval world speaks volumes.

Of course, none of this means there was no steep decline and disintegration in the Early Medieval Period, just that Hicks is not to be trusted on the nature of that decline, let alone its causes. He acknowledges that this decline began to reverse and that we see advancements of the sort he approves of in the later Medieval Period. But this poses a problem for his thesis that it was Christianity that had been, at least in part, the problem in the first place. After all, the Church was a dominant cultural and social force in the second half of the period as well. In fact, to be accurate, the later Medieval Church was far more powerful, well-networked and sophisticated in its infrastructure, administration and integration with political structures than its smaller, more disjointed and far weaker Early Medieval predecessor. So people who, like Hicks, want to argue that the post-Roman decline was substantially the fault of Christianity have an uphill battle to explain why it happened when the Church was at its weakest and reversed when it was its strongest. Surely it should be the other way around.

Hicks attempts to do this by way of a fairy tale:

Why did activity pick up after the Year 1000 or so? What caused the change? And I think … interesting … there’s a number of things that are going on. One of them, I think, comes out of religion itself. If you put yourself in the mindset of a strongly religious person who believes in Judgement Day who and it believes that it is imminent from a close reading of Scripture, and you add a little bit of numerology to that  – imagine the way you are thinking about the year 1000 as it approaches. So there you are in the year 900, 960, 970, 980 – it’s closer and closer … the year 1000 is going to come and it makes perfectly good sense to you that that’s when the apocalypse is going to happen -Judgement Day is going to occur.

But of course, what happens is the Year 1000 arrives and there is no apocalypse – there is no Judgement Day. So, what do you do? Well, who knows when the apocalypse then is actually going to happen? Maybe it’s time actually to pay attention to some more earthly, worldly concerns. So the failure of Judgement Day to arrive – you know, particularly now that we’re getting to be about a thousand years after the death of Jesus  – maybe we should put Judgement Day on hold and get on with business. So, people did start getting on with business.

This is neat little story and, like most of Hicks’ conception of the Middle Ages, it is based on some outdated assumptions and cliches. Unfortunately for him, it does not conform to what we know about history.

It assumes as fact that there really was some widespread expectation that the apocalypse would come in the year 1000 and that expectation of it built up in the preceding century and then dissipated when it failed to eventuate. The evidence for this, however, is extremely thin. There certainly were some rising apocalyptic expectations in the tenth century, but there had been similar periodic rises in such expectations in previous centuries, as there were in the centuries that followed. Writing in 954 the Frankish abbot Adso of Montier-en-Der wrote a tract entitled On the Birth and Time of the Antichrist which gave an account of the last days and the coming reign of Christ’s eschatological opponent. While this document indicates a strain of apocalyptic thought that was current at the time, Adso does not predict when this or Judgement Day would occur and notes that the Roman Empire had been “the restraining force” that held back the Antichrist and so concludes that “so long as the kings of the Franks last, … the dignity of Roman rule will not totally perish” and the rise of the Antichrist will be restrained.

The idea of a widespread belief that 1000 AD (or 1033 AD AD) was the date of the coming end is based almost entirely on passages in the Historiarum of Ralph Glaber. Glaber was a monk with a gift for annoying people and managed to get kicked out of no less than five monasteries before ending up at Cluny. His chronicle is gossipy and fun to read, though it needs to be handled with care. Glaber reports various comets and portents that led up to the end of the tenth century and reports that there was an expectation of something apocalyptic “at the millennial anniversary of the Passion of the Lord” (i.e 1033 AD) and when this passed “the clouds cleared in obedience to divine mercy and goodness and the smiling sky began to shine and flow gentle breezes”. He goes on the report on the beginning of the popular “Peace of God” movement, which saw large assemblies of laypeople gathering to hear sermons and engage in worship, so he attributes this new devotion to “the effect of the previous calamity”.

Glaber is unlikely to be making up the idea that there had been some apocalyptic expectations at this time, but there is very little evidence it was particularly widespread, let alone universally acknowledged. Writing in the generation before Glaber, Abbo of Fleury reports hearing a preacher in Paris declare “as soon as the number of a thousand years was completed, the Antichrist would come, and the last judgement would soon follow”. Abbo ridiculed the preacher and quoted various scriptures that disputed the idea the apocalypse was imminent. This view had powerful support in the influential work of Augustine, who had argued in The City of God that the Book of Revelation was purely a spiritual allegory and not to be interpreted literally. Some still did, most others did not. But there is no evidence of some general or even widespread belief that 1000 AD would see the end of the world.

The claim, therefore, that the aftermath of the passing of this date meant medieval Europeans began to “get on with business” and “actually … pay attention to some more earthly, worldly concerns” has no foundation. It is further undercut by the fact that it was in the centuries that followed 1000 AD that we actually see a rise in apocalyptic expectation, not a decline in it. The early medieval period had seen a few upsurges in this idea, but was actually fairly free of apocalyptic movements. This changed somewhat in the tenth century, but apocalyptic ideas began to gain real popular support in the eleventh century; evidenced in the the People’s Crusade, which saw a mass movement stirred up by the preaching of the First Crusade and which had theological motivations that mainstream clergy found disturbingly unorthodox and distinctly apocalyptic – see Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011) on this aspect of the early crusading movement. The rise in popular apocalyptic ideas came to be increasingly reflected in scholarly writings as the Medieval period went on, and the prophecies of the twelfth century mystic Joachim of Fiore fired a new fervour for the apocalyptic in the next several centuries, despite being officially condemned by the Church.

So far from 1000 AD seeing earlier widespread apocalyptic ideas dissipating and western Europe “getting on with worldly concerns” instead, what millennial ideas there were then were actually just the beginning of a great rise in apocalyptic interest in the later Middle Ages. Hicks gets things precisely backwards. On actual medieval apocalyptic traditions see Brett Edward Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard 2009) and Norman Cohn’s classic The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford, 1957, 1970).

Hicks then presents his second argument as to why the later Middle Ages saw more development, in spite of Christianity. This one is a weird fantasy caricature of the story of the Twelfth Century Renaissance. According to Hicks, western medieval Europeans suddenly stumbled across “all sorts of Greek and Roman texts that had been lost to Western Europe” thanks to the fall of Toledo in 1085 and a general greater awareness of the wider world via the Crusades. Hicks confidently informs us that 1085 saw the Muslims “forced out of Spain” and claims at this date “and Spain becomes fully Christian again”, despite this not actually happening for another 407 years with the fall of Grenada in 1492. So we can add the Reconquista to the long list of medieval historical topics Hicks clearly knows nothing about.

According to Hicks these lost Greek and Roman texts had a profound impact:

[C]urious minds start to read some of these texts and discover these magnificent civilisations that had existed long before and, shockingly, were not Christian. How was it possible that they could have achieved so much great stuff but they didn’t know the one true faith?

So Hicks seems to be under the impression that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries medieval western Christians had not previously realised that ancient Greek and Roman culture had existed or, at least, had not understood the nature and extent of their intellectual heritage, and thus only came to realise this after reading these lost texts thanks to the Muslims.

How someone who lectures on philosophy at a university could believe such a bizarre caricature of history is hard for me to grasp. Hicks is so utterly ignorant of this subject that he is, it seems, unaware that texts from the Greeks and Romans had been at the heart of the medieval educational curriculum for centuries. He does not seem to know that the logical works of Aristotle and Porphyry made up the study of dialectic that was one of the three foundational disciplines of the Trivium, which medieval students had to master before moving on to more advanced study. He seems unaware that the other two foundational disciplines – grammar and rhetoric – required study of Priscian, Donatus and Martianus Capella and saw students reading Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus Pompeius, Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Terence.

He seems to think that the fact that many works in Greek had been lost due to the decline in literacy in that language before and, increasingly, after the fall of the Western Empire, means medieval scholars were unaware of the loss and even unaware of ancient learning generally. So he thinks they “discovered” all this with the fall of Toledo and that it was “shocking” to learn of non-Christian civilisations of great sophistication.

In fact, Christian scholars had accepted the learning of the pagan Greeks and Romans as a gift from God long before the Empire fell and had happily absorbed that learning. So much so that the loss of parts of it in the collapse of the Empire pained them greatly and they complained of the Latinorum penuria – “the poverty of the Latins”. They did not somehow stumble across the Arabic translations of these lost works by accident – they actively sought them out. Gerard of Cremona did not accidentally “discover” Ptolemy’s Almagest – he knew of it already and crossed a continent twice to go find it in Arabic translation. It would take me thousands of words to detail how hilariously wrong Hicks is here, so I would direct the reader to my detailed correction of similar bizarre errors by A.C. Grayling.

Working from this weird caricature of history, Hicks goes on to tell us how medieval Europe reacted to this alleged “discovery” that there had been advanced pre-Christian learning. In his telling, this “discovery” brought the benighted medievals face to face with ancient “southern European ideas” and thus they had to take account of them. So the great medieval intellects that “those who deny the dark ages or who are big fans of the Middle Ages” like to claim – Aquinas and Roger Bacon, for example – are actually products of this newly “discovered” learning. He assures us that “their reintroduction of empirical modes of thinking do mark a healthy turning back to the natural world” because they were both “pro reason and pro science” thanks to this new Greek and Roman knowledge.

And, again, this is all total and complete garbage. As already noted above, Hicks’ conception of Greek and Roman reason and “science” (natural philosophy, actually) as something medieval scholars suddenly “discovered” is total fantasy. The scholars and translators of the Twelfth Century Renaissance were delighted by these texts because they fitted perfectly with the already centuries-old intellectual tradition of the Christian integration of Greco-Roman thought: they just added these newly rediscovered texts to what they had already. So Aquinas and Bacon were not innovators who were suddenly integrating this material. They were working in a long-established tradition of doing so. The new texts made a huge impact because there were so many of them and they expanded the working corpus of ancient works considerably. But any “empirical modes of thinking” found in them were already well-established thanks to the logical texts that had been translated into Latin back in the sixth century and had been at the core of medieval learning ever since.

Then Hicks’ pseudo historical fantasy then gets even more exciting. In his lurid story, Aquinas and Bacon and their new “empirical modes of thinking” are a threat to the Church and he assures us that these brave heroes were in grave danger:

[T]hey were threatened with excommunication precisely on the grounds … the authoritative grounds … that such attempts to integrate Christianity with pagan classical thought …  threatens traditional essentially Augustinian theology – the one that has been dominant and institutionalised now for about eight hundred years in Europe. And that dominant Augustinian Christian theology is very anti-empirical. It emphasises revelation, mysticism, authority and faith reason to the extent that is allowed is severely subordinated. Minimisation of empiricism or exclusion of empiricism is built into the tradition.

This is still more total nonsense. Neither Bacon nor Aquinas were ever “threatened with excommunication”. There was a later claim, made eighty years after his death, that Bacon had been imprisoned for “suspected novelties”, but most modern historians doubt this ever happened or think, if it did, that it had something to do with the factional disputes within the Franciscan Order of the time. That either of them were somehow under any threat for doing what medieval scholars had been doing for centuries – applying logic and reason to the examination of the world – is utterly absurd. Contrary to Hicks fantasies, medieval theology had a high regard for reason and the study of logic underpinned all other disciplines. The most detailed account of the real state of reason in medieval scholarship is the great (and, unfortunately, now the late) Edward Grant’s magisterial God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2001). Once again, Hicks does not have the faintest clue what he is talking about.

But he bumbles on:

Now 1277 is an important year here. Aristotelian philosophy is explicitly condemned by the Bishop of Paris – this is Etienne Tempier – and by Roger [sic] Kilwardby at Oxford. So the official reactions to Aquinas, the emerging humanists, the early scientific thinkers like [indistinct], they were consistently negative. And it makes good sense on philosophical, theological grounds. The message that the mainstream church was teaching in the 1200s was not ‘Oh, go out and think for yourself, do your own research, trust your independent judgement, challenge us, ask the hard questions and so forth – let’s debate’, rather it was still very much the opposite.

It will probably be unsurprising at this stage to learn this is not remotely close to anything that actually happened. Aristotle’s logic had been integral to medieval education and scholarship generally for centuries. The “Condemnation of 1277” Hicks refers to was not some blanket ban on “Aristotelian philosophy” but a skirmish in an ongoing academic turf war between the Arts Faculty and the Theology Faculty at Paris University. It did not condemn Aristotle, rather it isolated certain specific claims in Aristotle’s works which seemed to place limits on God’s omnipotence and declared them off limits for discussion. This dispute remained restricted to Paris – no other university bothered with it and an earlier attempt at a much broader such ban at Paris had prompted the University of Toulouse to advertise itself to Parisian students as the place to “hear the books of Aristotle which were forbidden at Paris”. That ban had been largely ignored and the 1277 one also had little effect, with philosophers in the Arts Faculty simply noting that God was the exception to the rules in question and then discussing Aristotle’s ideas on those points anyway. Archbishop Robert (not “Roger”) Kilwardby instituted a shorter list of similar articles at Oxford which also had little to no effect on the study of Aristotle. This summary of these disputes gives a fair account of the actual issues and the sequence of events.

So, yet again, Hicks’ bizarre version of the story bears almost no relationship to the facts. 1277 did not see any ban on Aristotle generally, not even at Paris, let alone anywhere else. The issue was not “emerging humanists [and] early scientific thinkers”, but some fine points of theology. And the limited restrictions at two universities did not even apply to anything remotely close to “humanism” or “science” and only tried to limit theological debate. Hicks just does not understand the issues at all, let alone their context or their effects.

But in his ridiculous cartoon version of history, Aquinas and Bacon represent forerunners of secular thinkers and their acceptance and the acceptance of their scholarship is merely “the Church’s intellectuals consistently [engaging] in rearguard accommodation with empiricism and emerging science only when they lost the battles”. Anyone with even an undergraduate grasp of the history of medieval thought and the rise of science would laugh out loud at this total nonsense.

Hicks finishes by saying “that’s history” before turning to his ideological enemies on the conservative right. The problem is, that is not history. His garbled ramble is a hotchpotch of half-understood gobbets, mischaracterised nonsense and total and complete fantasy. If he is teaching this garbage in his podcasts, I can only imagine what gibberish he is serving up to his students. It appears Rockford University actually has a History Department and even teaches a course in “Ancient and Medieval Studies”. I wonder if any of the historians there are aware of what complete nonsense is being peddled about their area of expertise by their colleague down the hall. Perhaps they could have a quiet word with Dr. Hicks. Then again, I suspect he would not listen.