3-10-14
As a period in history, the so-called Dark Ages probably could use a Marketing Specialist or a Branding Team. The term has been applied to the period between the Third-century fall of Rome and the Carolingian Renaissance (Charlemagne’s rule of the briefly reconstituted Holy Roman Empire) or, usually, the Late Gothic and Florentine Renaissance, around the 13th century. Certainly, sanitation and plumbing declined and virtually disappeared during the Dark Ages; literacy was uncommon; life – in Europe – was simpler, less ambitious, less creative after Rome. The lack of records and paucity of artifacts means that a certain darkness descended over the centuries about which we are curious.
I have often said, and I know that “futurists” hold, that if a social catastrophe were to hit the United States – perhaps on the order of cessation of electricity; stoppage of water supply; production, transport, and delivery of goods – a New Dark Age would descend. Would you know how to raise meat and produce for your family’s table? Could you resume a livelihood without computers and electricity? How, long-term, to make clothes from scratch, or build houses? Most of us would bemoan the New Dark Age.
All this is not implausible. But it would not really be a Dark Age. It would be hard, brutal even, a radical change in so many lifestyles.
But it would not be “dark.” Presumably we would all remember (those who possess it now) elements of culture. We would savor traditions, and pass them along more fervently than now. We would form associations, standing together. We would probably turn again to religion, not out of emotional desperation, but for spiritual succor, and because we would realize the perilous nature, and the fragility, of self-sufficiency.
So it was in the Dark Ages. The term, by the way, has been variously applied, re-invented, connoted as negative and positive through the subsequent years, so as to make it virtually meaningless except as temporal book-ends. But we shall visit a moment with a man who, perhaps better than anyone else, saw things to admire – greatly admire – in the so-called Dark Ages. His reasoning can light our path today in the Post-Post-Modern Digital Age where people are so sure they have everything figured out.
Henry Adams was the great-grandson of America’s second president, and grandson of our sixth president. He was a diplomat, author, journalist, professor, social critic, friend of the intellectual and political elite of two continents, and by nature somewhere between a cynic and a misanthrope. In 1880 he wrote, anonymously, the scathing indictment of Gilded-Age society, “Democracy.” Even his friends never knew he was the author.
Two books, however, led Adams to a unique perspective on the Dark Ages. His autobiography, “The Education of Henry Adams,” was published in a small edition for friends only. It was published for the general public the year after his death, 1918, and soon won the Pulitzer Prize… and is considered one of the great books of the 20th century. Among many other wonderful observations, Adams reported visiting the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, and being transfixed by the Dynamo – a gargantuan machine that moved, roared, displayed myriad moving parts, all to no specific purpose! But it was built to suggest that such machines were the wave of the future, able to do all, manufacture all, satisfy all.
Henry Adams saw even more in it: the dawn of the machine age, when such mechanisms would not only supplant labor, but be a unifying Force in the modern world… a new Church, even a Savior, that would draw all men to it. The Machine. Including of course, by extension, in our day, the Computer.
He was primed for such a point of view, based on obsessive private scholarship about yes, the Dark Ages. What the Dynamo was in 1900, he saw French cathedrals, especially, as representative of a certain ethos in the past – regrettably, the dead past. He studied every little corner, and every grand architectural metaphor, in cathedrals; the major book that resulted was “Mt St-Michel et Chartres,” and it too was meant for few eyes, in fact written as a treatise for the edification of his niece. Almost a decade later he was persuaded to publish it for architectural students; but it was embraced by the general public.
To our point: Adams recognized in the Dark Ages not a suppression of knowledge but a singular devotion of all of European societies to an ideal, a unifying force, commonly held beliefs, a loyalty to something bigger and nobler than themselves. In Europe, generally, Jesus; in France particularly, around 900-1100, the Virgin.
People worked their jobs, and then worked harder and longer to build these colossal cathedrals. Every family member lived around, and for, the church. They knew scripture, debated little, and found fulfillment in serving the church. Thousands of design elements, colors, symbols in the exteriors and interiors, stained-glass windows and vestments, MEANT something, theologically… and therefore meant important things to the daily lives of locals and worshipers. For those who could not read, signs and symbols told the gospel story.
There was cultural unity in the “Dark” Ages. And they were better societies for it. At least, we have not seen this in the West for centuries; and today we are fractured, disputatious, rudderless, “diverse,” and unhappy.
In a civic sense, there was a season in America when an astonishing maturity of purpose, a common understanding of political ideals devoted to liberty, bound a happy society together. It ran through the times of the Founders, the Framers, and the “Era of Good Feeling” when de Tocqueville visited in the 1840s. We surely do not have this harmony today, neither in civic nor religious senses.
I cannot end this tour on a happy note. Can the UNITY represented by majestic, consequential cathedrals of the Middle Ages – by the US Constitution, in the civic sphere – return in America? Would people, all across society, again agree on common principles, goals, and sacrifices worthy to bear?
Today, denominations argue over points of social policy more than points of theology. One result is seen in a recent news story about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In the five years since the denomination formally embraced homosexuality, including in the clergy, it has lost half a million members and 1000 congregations. Maybe there IS unity among believers, but it is different from that of the enlightened Christians of the Dark Ages.
+ + +
For anyone who thinks that peasants of the “Dark” Ages were insect-infested dirt-eaters, a quick tour of Chartres Cathedral will dispel that notion. The massive scope, the architectural challenges that were solved, ambitious feats of construction, the multitude of delicate artistic and design touches… these were people, a thousand years ago, who lived not in the Dark but in a special Light. In future essays we will visit Mt St-Michel, built on a monolithic rock off the Brittany coast.
Click: Chartres Cathedral
Recent Comments