This Saturday at work, my coworkers and I were passing the time by marveling at marvelous men of history: the kind of people that seem to come along only a few times in a millenia and change the course of history forever. In our discussion I brought up the remarkable St. Thomas: the kind of mind that comes along once a millenia and changes the world forever with its brilliance and forcefullness. As I am reading Chesterton's hagiography about him at the moment, I was struck by the ignorance that so many people today have about him, the middle ages, and the Church.

While on an academic level, the middle ages is appreciably better understood, in high school we are fed straight lies that disagree with the majority of the history of critical work on the medieval period. While many still speak of the Dark Age, even in academia, there are good reasons to believe there was no such age. But, thanks to Gibbon, the Enlightenment, Moderns and the Rennaissance, millions can't consider the possibility that there wasn't. But people during the Middle Ages never believed there was a dark age. Learning never died. The written word was preserved by the Church. Civilization was preserved by the Church. Europe was more unified than it has ever been at any other time by a giant overarching authority structure that spoke with words of light rather than demanded obedience by the sword. Maurice Keen, a historian of the period, defines the Middle Ages as the time when Europe was Christendom: Charlemagne to the Council of Basel.

What historians sometimes mean when they refer to the Dark Age, I have come to understand, is that it was a time when many classical texts were lost. There are two observations I would make on this: First, this is partially true, but not completely so. While many Greek works, notably most of Aristotle and most of Plato were lost, many Latin works were not. And, while there was interest in these works, there was greater interest in the educated class for the Christian Fathers and the Bible. This is not surprising. Nor is this a sign of ignorance. This is my second observation: it is actually a totally understandable and reasonable view of the world that they lived in. Do not works breathed by the Holy Spirit merit a greater degree of inspection than works created by man alone? In a society that held to the Dogma of the Church, this behavior did not token ignorance or stupidity, but virtue and intelligence.

As a scholar who envies the life of the students in the universities of the twelth century, I find the arrogant position of the modern or post-modern student as being of superior intelligence and knowledge (usually because of a more accurate model of the natural processes of the world) annoying. Natural philosophy, or what we call "science" is not the Queen we take her for. The Queen of the sciences is, and always has been, Theology. And Saint Thomas, a friar who gave up the joys of the world out of a love for God, was one of her most brilliant handmaidens. It would be well for more of us from this darkening age to read him.