Stephen Hicks Mangles History

Stephen Hicks Mangles History

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:

Timline

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.

51 thoughts on “Stephen Hicks Mangles History

  1. Oh dear, another Grayling merrily spouting nonsense and ignorance in the noble cause of lecturing on the progress of knowledge. Someone ban philosophers from talking about history — or force them to talk to their historian colleagues!

    My best guess as to why these philosophers persist with this mangled history is — as with many other public intellectuals — a basic failure to grasp that history is a body of knowledge in progress; instead they see it as a stick of immutable facts with which to beat their ideological hobby horse.

    Another well-written and informative article. Apart from the debunking, the mentions and references regarding actual history, from proto-scientific thought and Glaber’s personality to Edward I’s lunch breaks, make it an interesting, insightful read on its own.

    (The Visconti brothers have become the Vivaldis when they disappear, approx third para.)

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    1. Thanks.
      And the Visconti/Vivaldi mistake has been fixed. That was a Freudian slip: I was listening to Vivaldi while writing his article.

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  2. I find it interesting how these new atheists would be willing to twist the truth to make us theists look bad

    As a Christian, I don’t believe that all atheists are hateful theist bashers and it saddens me that you have those people representing you

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    1. I am a staunch atheist and wholeheartedly reject the claim that folks like Dawkins, Harris, Grayling and now Hicks represent me. The only one who has my permission to represent me is I myself, thank you very much.
      Or does pope Alexander VI represent you, just because you two are (were) both christians?

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    2. @Mr. V

      Thank you!

      Like FrankB said, I don’t feel represented by people like Grayling (whom I never heard of) or Hicks, whose work I’ve read and find.. not very rigorous.

      Unfortunately, it is true that many prominent atheist voices (some of which I do find more agreeable on other matters) repeat these debunked historical myths like undeniable facts, or even use them as trump cards to “win” arguments against religious people.

      If I may speculate about their motivations, I don’t think they’re deliberately lying as such, but merely uncritically repeating out of date clichés that have lost favor in academia long ago but remain alive and well in “pop history”, a similar thing happens with many outdated Freudian concepts in pop psychology, for example.

      The “Christian Dark Ages” cliché belongs in the same category as such notions as “Columbus discovered the Earth was round”, “Vikings had horned helmets” and “debauchery and decadence led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire”. I wouldn’t be surprised if high schools still taught all those things as facts (except maybe the horned helmets thing, that seems to be on the way out).

      That being said, people who pride themselves in their skepticism should really question these assumptions, especially when being challenged on them, instead of trying to defend them at any cost, simply because they sound too “truthy” to be false.

      Unfortunately many of these atheists don’t take history as seriously as they would biology or astronomy.

      For what it’s worth, I used to believe many of these conflict thesis clichés as well. They’re not limited to New Atheist types, but are pretty widespread in pop history, sadly.

      1. For what it’s worth, I used to believe many of these conflict thesis clichés as well. They’re not limited to New Atheist types, but are pretty widespread in pop history, sadly.

        They are. But that is less of a problem – most people’s grasp of history comes from dim memories of school and, principally, popular culture. As a result, most people’s understanding of history is terrible. The problem is, as you say, these people who preach to others about fact checking, doing research, respecting the consensus of experts and humbly accepting correction when you are shown to be wrong, throwing all that out the window when it comes to history. Which is why this blog exists and, I suspect, will have to continue for some time.

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  3. Thank you for this post! I’ve had a similar argument with intelligent people who have only heard the “Dark Ages were terrible” version of history, and it’s a very difficult one to have precisely because they are intelligent (and so tend to think that they can identify obvious rubbish when they hear it).

    Trying to explain that (1) yes, there was a Dark Ages but (2) it wasn’t as long or as dark as made out and (3) there’s an awful lot of polemic there, firstly from anti-Catholic polemic by Protestants which was then handily taken over as general anti-Christian/anti-religious polemic by those taking the side of Science or secularism.

    Broadly speaking, yes a Dark Ages from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (which lasted in however crumbling a state for a good long time) and throughout Europe, but not evenly and if you take it from around the 3rd-5th centuries(roughly speaking) to 8th-10th centuries (again roughly speaking) and with a lot of wiggle room on both ends of those dates, something you could call a Dark Ages happened.

    But there were a lot of reasons, not just the good old Gibbonian “those pesky Christians making the Romans all soft and mushy with notions of mercy and human equality” excuses. And as you point out, for places like Ireland, the 8th century plus was our Golden Age!

    But even with that, the intelligent uninformed are still likely to respond “So you’re trying to argue there wasn’t any Dark Ages? But you’re wrong!” and then they presume it’s all down to religious/conservative biases on your part. Hard work! So thank you once again for this effort to at least get the facts straight.

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    1. “yes, there was a Dark Ages”
      The problem is, as pointed out by Tim oN, is that it’s loaded terminology. As soon as you and the intelligent people you refer to try to describe it it becomes very easy to demonstrate that the Renaissance, the 16th Century and Antiquity were as dark as the Middle Ages. Just look at all the illiteracy, the ignorance and the superstition. So I’m unsurprised that even you don’t even try to describe what you exactly mean with it.
      Now it is possible to provide an objective definition: interim-period without written sources. An example is Britain from 400 until 550 CE. But that’s clearly not what you’re thinking of.

  4. Hi Tim, thanks for another well-written article.

    One minor nitpick – In your line where it reads:

    “There were Greek reports of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno who is supposed to have ventured into these waters in the sixth or fifth century and lived to tell the tale,…”

    Should there be a BC/BCE inserted there? It may be clear from context what you mean, but perhaps worth doing just for clarity.

  5. Once again, I am amazed that a professional philosopher is wrong about things I learned *in undergraduate courses on historical philosophy*. Never mind the history department — he could just talk anyone in my Medieval Phil class last fall, who would inform him of: the influence of Plato, Neoplatonism and Aristotle on Augustine and the other Early Medievals; Alcuin of York, the Trivium, Quadrivium, and the Carolingian Renaissance; and how the recovery of *some important lost bits* (i.e. not the whole corpus) of Aristotle was greeted with enthusiasm by what became the Scholastic movement.

    Hicks apparently would have flunked that course. But then, he’s a Randroid, which is a big stroke against him in my book.

    1. I’ve yet to come across a Rand fan who wasn’t a poor thinker. Hicks is also cited and supported by Jordan Peterson, which is another warning sign about this guy. Here’s a critique of his work on Postmodernism that shows how much of a sloppy scholar and biased ideologue he is:

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      1. I’m an agnostic with generally left-of-center political views. For a long time, I was accustomed to thinking of atheists as being generally left-wing. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that there are a lot of New Atheists out there who support even the most nonsensical and odious right-wing extremist ideologies. Stephen Hicks and Ayn Rand are, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg.

        For instance, there’s a guy who comments on my blog who is a fanatical New Atheist, a Mythicist, and a huge fan of Richard Carrier, but also an outright Neo-Nazi. He is an avowed admirer of the white supremacist Richard Spencer. He openly supports the creation of a “white ethnostate.” He says that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. He says that women “lack a will to outside the box thinking.” He claims that anyone who is opposed to racism is a member of a “bioleninist cult” and that people who advocate aid for the poor are just “prais[ing] … the underclass.”

        Dealing with that guy’s trolling has made me realize that New Atheism is a movement that, in many ways, has more ties with the far right than the far left.

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        1. I think it’s more correct to say that the only things atheist activists have in common are (i) no belief in any God or gods and (ii) a tendency to be outspoken and more than a little contrarian. I have come across plenty of anti-theists who are extremely progressive and advocates for LGBT rights and social justice issues. And more than a few who are exactly the opposite. I don’t think there is a dominant political flavour to “atheism” or even to “anti-theistic activism”. The contrarian streak in many anti-theists means that whatever their political tendency, they are often pretty strident about it.

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          1. Oh, I completely agree with you that atheists can have views from all across the political spectrum. I should perhaps clarify what I mean; what I’m saying is not that New Atheists are inevitably right-wingers or even necessarily that they have a tendency to be right-wingers, but rather that there is considerable common ground between New Atheism and certain right-wing ideologies.

            Notably, in its most extreme forms, New Atheism devolves into a kind of instinctive, irrational hatred against religious people, especially Christians and Muslims. It becomes a movement rooted in ideas of superiority and intolerance.

          2. For the record, I am a provisional Occam’s Razor atheist. Admittedly, Richard Dawkins and his friends are harsher than they have to be to get their point across. However, he didn’t get radical about his atheism until the 9-11 tragedy. Similarly, the Radical Religious Republican Right in America gives me the willies in a way that the gay Episcopalians of Santa Fe do not.

        2. “odious right-wing”
          Martin Bormann was openly atheist. In my opinion (and I’m pretty radical left myself) there is nothing in atheism that prevents someone to become a (neo-)nazi.

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          1. At the same time, I would add for the sake of completion, that there is nothing in atheism (even of the New Atheist variety) that encourages someone to become a (neo-)nazi.

          2. I came across an interesting article where the atheist author says that atheists should condemn atheists that say hateful things – https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7jx8/too-many-atheists-are-veering-dangerously-toward-the-alt-right?fbclid=IwAR19nobcGFaFsMcTEPqaafWBTmaCmpnMNCzOwOLq4pE0zZoArI9jnhd4l0I

            “As more and more nonreligious young white men seek out community, resources, and a sense of identity and purpose online, any overlap between online atheism and the alt-right should move atheists to speak out. Spencer’s views are not shared by the majority of atheists in America, but if we want to keep it that way, atheists cannot stay silent.”

  6. The depth of his dissimulation are shocking. You might not want to answer this but do you think it is ignorance or lying?

      1. It also reflects a great deal of confirmation bias. What one will even consider accurate is much influenced by what one believes already. It’s the debate effect applied to history…everyone’s favorite wins. In history, people note what they presume should be there. I consider myself blessed by early exposure to teachers with excellent qualifications in history. I do remember the incidents in the 13th century Paris university being mentioned. I have used it as a perfect example of how illusory control of thinking was in the church, despite claims to the contrary. Thank you Mr. Thorne.

  7. Thanks for email. My historical knowledge of the period was nil. Picking up on some Acquinas lately. Quite fascinating to talk to materialists after reading of some parts of ST and SContra Gentiles, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Dr Fesers work as a Thomist.

  8. I was laughing out loud all the way through this.

    My favorite part the part where he declares that the rise of Christianity somehow directly resulted in widespread illiteracy.

    Yes, a religion that is largely rooted in age-old unwritten traditions and has no official sacred texts is replaced by a new religion based on an official canon of written texts that are regarded as the Word of God… and somehow this causes people to become illiterate.

    My other favorite part is where he claims that Saint Thomas Aquinas—the most revered theologian and apologist of the Roman Catholic Church and patron saint of theology—was a secular empiricist who bravely went against the teachings of the church and was “threatened with excommunication.” That’s really rich.

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    1. It was silly from the beginning but towards the end the stuff he’s saying is just bonkers. And if you listen to the podcast, he delivers all this fantasy nonsense with this tone of smug self-assurance that is just hilarious.

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  9. “the whole Middle Ages as a “dark age”
    This I really don’t get. Hello, ever heard of scholasticism? Think of it what you want (and like my compatriot Desiderius Erasmus half a millennium ago I don’t think too much of it), “dark” in the sense of “intellectually inactive” it was not. Of course that leaves the first half of the Middle Ages, but really, haven’t those professors heard of Barbarian invasions, with the Vikings being the last ones? Or must I conclude that they are stupid enough to not realize that endless raids and invasions do not exactly support an intellectually and culturally active climate?
    (I wrote this before reading “having to fight off Avars and Vikings”).
    This is why I stress that historical research is scientific. What Hicks and co do is as stupid as explaining that GPS doesn’t work because of Newtonian mechanics.

    “though historians try to avoid emotive language like describing a whole 500 years of history as simply “awful”
    Understandable. Still I’d like to point out (sometimes it’s an advantage to be an amateur) that for the vast majority of the people Antiquity was at least equally awful. And those who lived in the wrong places during the Habsburgian wars (beginning with the Italian wars from 1496 on and ending with the Thirty Years war in 1648 – a whopping 150 years) had not much reason to rejoice either. Now we’re at it – what about Eastern Europe from 1914 on?

    “that Charlemagne was illiterate”
    Even then – let’s suppose he was. So what? The first priority of kings and emperors like Charlemagne was to be militarily successful. That has exactly zilch to do with christianity.

    “all sorts of Greek and Roman texts that had been lost to Western Europe”
    Now you (or rather Hicks) has totally lost me. How this is supposed to confirm that christianity was responsible for cultural and intellectual decline is beyond me. It fails even as an ad hoc argument.

    “Christians had not previously realised that ancient Greek and Roman culture had existed”
    Even if they hadn’t – why didn’t they burn the Toledo library after the conquest, like they are supposed to have done during Late-Antiquity? Like I wrote, I’m lost.

    “are actually products of this newly “discovered” learning”
    It’s getting boring – even if this were correct, how is this supposed to support the statement that christianity is detrimental to a rich intellectual and cultural climate?

    “Aquinas and Bacon represent forerunners of secular thinkers”
    Well, at least this Hicks got right, albeit exactly in the opposite way as he claims.

    “Then again, I suspect he would not listen.”
    You can’t expect that from a Randian, can you?

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    1. Re the ‘ illiteracy of Charlemagne’ , I think we have to be careful how we define ‘literacy’ in the context of the era before printed books became available.
      Reading was a skill which was necessarily harder to acquire and indeed to practice when it was confined to manuscripts, despatches and charters ( although I believe that Charlemagne could read). Writing was even more difficult when the main tool was either chalk on a slate or a reed/quill pen on very expensive skin. The manual dexterity required to write under these conditions would be hard to achieve and maintain, so it was left mainly to specialists : scribes. Specialisation is often regarded as a marker of a complex culture.

      By the way, there is considerable concern amongst teaching surgeons that many current medical students lack the manual dexterity needed for surgery, typing and tapping having replaced writing for many. Is this a symptom of a Dark Age?

  10. I really appreciate your blog. Hard to understand why you, an amateur as I understand it, are so much more knowledgeable than many professional scholars and people with doctorates. As a wikipedia editor who tries to keep some of these misconceptions out of the site which, unfortunately I often think, has become the first place worldwide that people turn to for information, I am sorry I can’t reference your blog there, blogs are not acceptable sources on wikipedia.

    1. Thanks Stephen. The problem of professional scholars saying stupid things usually occurs when they venture out of their area of expertise. Unfortunately silly pronouncements on history by scholars who are not historians are very common because everyone thinks they have an okay grasp of history via some vague memories of high school, popular culture and some snippets they have picked up along the way. Those of us who have actually studied history know that this kind of “history” is largely nonsense and riddled with myths, misconceptions and outdated cliches, but people like Hicks, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris and others seem to think it’s just fine. Last week I was alerted to a discussion between Laurence Krauss and Noam Chomsky where both praised Catherine Nixey’s terrible book The Darkening Age and Chomsky declared it a “great book” and both proceeded to summarise its claims as though they were unvarnished fact, despite neither having any background in Late Roman History and both being (apparently) totally unaware that actual specialists in that period consider Nixey’s book to be total junk.

      The Wiki rule that blogs are not suitable sources but books are is frustrating, but understandable I suppose. After all, it is slightly more likely that a book went through some kind of third party scrutiny before being deemed suitable to print, while any clown can write a blog. That said, it is annoying to see people citing my articles and have the citation removed, when any crappy travelogue or polemical nonsense in print form can be left standing as “support” for false historical claims.

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      1. Wikipedia doesn’t necessarily regard books as reliable sources, either, and on a subject like ancient or medieval history, academic books and journal articles are very much preferred. The problem is that Wikipedia has more articles than its dedicated editors can really oversee, and casual editors will often add citations using substandard sources. Blogs are more likely to get removed when somebody uses one as a source because it’s obvious what they are, whereas books tend to require a little more checking.

  11. I was wondering what he would do with Charlemagne after seeing the timeline you provide with the absence of anything around 800. He would have been better off not mentioning him at all. Leaving aside the complexity of defining literacy at the time, if you want to believe it was a benighted age, how do you deal with the fact that illiterate or not, Charlemagne clearly believed in the importance of education, to the extent that one of the myths that French historians continually have to debunk is that “Charlemagne invented schools”? And then, if you’re going to blame the rise of Christianity, how do you deal with the fact that Charlemagne’s undoubted education reforms were led by Alcuin of York, who was, unsurprisingly, a cleric (who apparently convinced Charlemagne to abolish the death penalty for pagans, at that)? Add to that that Alcuin played a big role in spreading the Carolingian minuscule script, making things easier to read, which most people would consider a leap forward rather than either regression or stagnation…

    Note: I am in no way an expert on any of this. I just did two minutes of googling based on what I remembered of Charlemagne’s reputation as a school-builder. As most of the information comes from Wikipedia, a lot of it may be inaccurate. And it’s STILL clearly much more research than Hicks did.

    1. Yeah, I was going to say something about the Carolingian Minuscule issue you raised, since it is front and center in at least one undergraduate textbook section debunking the myth of the “so-called ” Dark Ages.
      (I am thinking it might have been raised in this context in Cole and Symes’s “Western Civilizations”, published by WW Norton which I last read 7-8 years ago ).

      Punctuation and lowercase letters are a crucial step toward literacy for the masses in Europe. When all scribes had used were capital letters with no punctuation, then reading was closer to decipherment , as all individual literacy depended not just upon understanding written words, but upon using obtuse contextual clues to infer sentence structure. Once someone came up with the brilliant visual shortcut of using little dots and squiggles to make grammatical intentions clearer, reading became much faster and the interpretive ambiguity was reduced. That is an early Medieval great leap forward if there ever was one.

      1. I wrote a term essay on William of Ockham, and in the course of my readings I learned that quotation marks were only just being invented about then. Hence, Ockham’s semantics had to include material supposition, to cover the case where one is talking about the word, rather than about the thing that the word signifies. It struck me as a bit awkward to have this whole semantic category that would need to be inferred from context.

    2. Alcuin as the foremost scholar of his age was also interested in, and wrote about, mathematics and complex calculation.

      Of course, he put much of this at the service of the church, and of the understanding and clarification of ritual calendar. That was the over riding concern of learning during his time. That calculation was used in this way does not diminish its importance, any more than the use of complex code for computer hpgames lessens that achievement.

  12. I have just come to accept people can be very intelligent in some areas, but not others. I am sure Dr Hicks is a fine philosopher but he is clearly not a historian. He should be smart enough to know this but his bias gets in his way.

    I am simply coming to accept no matter how much people claim otherwise we all have biases and preconceptions. We would be lost without them in a dangerous world but sometimes those cognitive states can turn around and damage us a lot.

    I like to think I am a smart guy; I have dual degrees in history and science and I am a teacher. I retired from the US Army in 2017 and in my time in did several deployments. From 2005 to 2006 I was in Iraq, mainly around Baghdad. We did a lot of fighting in that area. I remember coming back really disliking Muslims and basically believing the worst about them. I was truly convinced the only true Muslim was a terrorist. It took me many years to see though this bias and finally accepting Muslims are like any other people, good and bad. There is no such thing as a true Islam in the same way there is no such thing as a true Christianity. There is almost endless understandings of it. For example some Muslims in Turkey believe in reincarnation. In 2011 I deployed to Kosovo and got to know the Muslims who lived there. That finally cured what remained in me of disliking Muslims. I just saw them as people trying to grasp the world the same way the rest of humanity does. I knew how bad they had been hurt by the Serbs. I came to realize how deeply prejudiced I had been toward Muslims and just let the prejudice go.

    Professor Hicks has his prejudice and blinders and often times those things make fools of anyone. They made a fool out of me when it came to Muslims. They are making a fool out of him when it comes to Christian history.

    Philosophers in the end can be just as irrational as the rest of us.

    1. I am sure Dr Hicks is a fine philosopher but he is clearly not a historian.

      I wouldn’t be so sure.

      He wrote a book about postmodernism and it was atrocious. He demonstrated a high degree of ignorance about philosphy in that book.

      To be fair, at least he is being true to his muse, Ayn Rand, who also overestimated her own skills as a philosopher despite being quite philosophically illiterate.

      [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtvTGaPzF4&w=560&h=315%5D

  13. I am totally supportive of WardPerkins in his argument that there was a near total collapse of the material culture in the territory previously comprising the Western Roman Empire . The archeological evidence is irrefutable.

    The current fashion for ‘change and continuation’ is largely based on evidence from the Byzantine lands, which maintained an unbroken material and intellectual tradition , although of course it evolved and changed over the nine centuries between the Fall of the West and the Ottoman conquest. A few gold brooches do not a civilisation make.

    It is also undeniable that what ‘culture’ ( by which I mean a knowledge and appreciation of previous intellectual and artistic achievements, and the facility and interest to practice, contribute and develop in those areas) was mainly fostered by the Christian Church in the West.
    The British Isles were reviving literacy and scholarship within the shelter and substance of the Church until the pagan invasions of the ninth century nearly stamped it out. Bede of Jarrow wrote not only history in the sense that modern historian could recognise, but also about astronomical calculations and the measuring and prediction of tides.

    The Caroligian Renaissance, which was indebted to the AngloSaxon as well as the Roman tradition, was largely thwarted by the Norse invasions ,who destroyed libraries , books and seats of learning in monasteries and palaces . There is considerable evidence that they were motivated not just by greed, but by anti Christian sentiment.

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    1. Ward-Perkins’ book is an excellent antidote to some post-War overemphasis on continuity over collapse, but since its publication most historians of the period consider the best answer question of “collapse or continuity” to be “it depends where and when”. Many of Ward-Perkins’ examples come from parts of the Empire where the economy and major infrastructure existed largely to support the Roman Army and its many dependents. When that was withdrawn or dissolved in those regions, the collapse came fairly suddenly and dramatically. This is seen in Britain, northern Gaul, the Rhineland and western Spain. Other more populous and heavily urbanised parts of the Empire did not see a dramatic collapse at the same time as the outlying provinces. So in Italy, Africa, Illyria and eastern Spain we see a long slow decline, but not a catastrophic fall. Vandal kings were building arenas and dedicating bathhouses with extensive libraries in Africa right into the sixth century, for example. The collapse in those places was much slower, giving plenty of opportunity for continuities. As James J. O’Donnell argues in The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2008) it was the Eastern Empire’s reconquest campaigns and the political vacuums it left behind that really accelerated the collapse in Africa, Spain and Italy. That and the pandemic of Justinian’s time.

    2. Ward-Perkins’ book is an excellent antidote to some post-War overemphasis on continuity over collapse, but since its publication most historians of the period consider the best answer to the question of “collapse or continuity?” to be “it depends where and when”. Many of Ward-Perkins’ examples come from parts of the Empire where the economy and major infrastructure existed largely to support the Roman Army and its many dependants. When that was withdrawn or dissolved in those regions, the collapse came fairly suddenly and dramatically. This is seen in Britain, northern Gaul, the Rhineland and western Spain.

      Other more populous and heavily urbanised parts of the Empire did not see a dramatic collapse at the same time as the outlying provinces. So in Italy, Africa, Illyria and eastern Spain we see a long slow decline, but not a catastrophic fall. Vandal kings were building arenas and dedicating bathhouses with extensive libraries in Africa right into the sixth century, for example. The collapse in those places was much slower, giving plenty of opportunity for continuities. As James J. O’Donnell argues in The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2008) it was the Eastern Empire’s reconquest campaigns and the political vacuums it left behind that really accelerated the collapse in Africa, Spain and Italy. That and the pandemic of Justinian’s time.

      “There is considerable evidence that they were motivated not just by greed, but by anti Christian sentiment.”

      There is? Such as?

      1. ” the collapse came fairly suddenly and dramatically. This is seen in …. the Rhineland ….”
        Risking some confusion because Rhineland is a modern name I still want to point out that historian of Antiquity Jona Lendering has a somewhat different view.

        https://www.livius.org/articles/place/noviomagus/nijmegen-photos/nijmegen-valkhof/

        Nijmegen (Noviomagus) as a Dutch city doesn’t belong to modern Rhineland, which is German. But that doesn’t seem relevant here. So I quote:

        “In Nijmegen, this meant that the last Roman garrison commander became the first lord of an increasingly independent Frankish princedom, minting coins of his own, with the legend Niomago. It cannot have made much difference.”

        It looks like the same happened to Utrecht (Traiectum) and Maastricht (Mosa Traiectum). We could say that replacing one (Roman) elite by another (Frankish) elite was “fairly sudden and dramatical”, but otherwise life just went on.

        Like Roger Daltrey famously sung: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

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    3. I, too believe that Bede would be a counterexample to Hicks’ narrative, living in a time and place that might be considered one of the “darkest” for the purposes of this discussion (7th-8th centuries, Northern England). His absence in the timeline/ chart demonstrate, I think, either his selectivity in his examples, or his complete lack of knowledge of the period and particularly the source material.

  14. The Eastern Roman Empire did undergo a dark-age, though. From about 600-800 CE, this empire lost territory first to the Sasanians and then to the proto-Muslim Arabs. Very little of value was composed or even recorded during this time. That is why Robert Hoyland had to scramble for sources in “Seeing Islam as Others Saw It”.

    The Sasanians, famously, fared worse – they were wiped out. Iran also underwent “two centuries of silence” under Arab domination as their modern nationalists bemoan.

    Over in the west, the Franks fared poorly under the later Merovingians. Spain declined over the 600s, having lost trade to an increasingly dangerous Mediterraneans, then fell to a semi-Muslim Arab and Berber army, and to chaos.

    Henri Pirenne is right: there was, indeed, a Dark Age throughout western Eurasia from 600-800 CE. And it was induced by a religion.

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    1. Pirenne’s thesis has been largely rejected, and the rest of your comment above is almost as simplistic as Hicks’ nonsense.

    2. @Zimriel: Serious people first define “dark age” before starting to argue. Propagandists like you don’t even try, because they are afraid of testability.
      So you’re not even wrong.

  15. Someone should recommend Dr. Peter Adamson’s excellent podcast series ‘A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps’ to Profs. Hicks and Grayling. They’d learn a lot. I’ve been listening to that series for years and I’m constantly amazed by the brilliance of many Ancient and Medieval philosophers. More importantly, Adamson’s series fills in a lot of the gaps in Hicks’ flawed ‘timeline’.

  16. The Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissances is another example of significant advance right in the period where Hicks wishes there were none.

  17. On the issue of Charlemagne’s “illiteracy” and whether he was probably just unable to write; correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t writing on those wax tablets quite difficult and took some time for most people to master?

  18. If there is something I can always count on; it’s libertarians or self-declared “classical liberal”s arrogantly making uninformed idiots of themselves.

    As for Charlemagne; is it fair to assume that writing with wax tablets took a fair amount of practice and dexterity to master?

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