Sarah Hempel asks what I thought of A World Lit Only By Fire. I consider it one of the finest books I’ve ever read, particularly the final chapter, which I’ve re-read several times. Manchester was a great writer, and his depiction of the dark ages is the farthest thing from romanticizing.
Responding to one author’s “pietistic...admiration for the medieval churches, the pageantry of the age, its romance, it’s ‘spiritual passion,’ and above all, its interpretation of ‘Christ’s Gospel,’” Manchester writes “[n]o matter how hard I shake my kaleidoscope, I cannot see what he saw.” He goes on to demolish the “bogus aura of romance” that surrounds the dark ages—a period of time in which
nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of waterwheels in the 800s and windmills in the late 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared, no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember.... During the 1,436 years since the death of Saint Peter the Apostle, 211 popes had succeeded him, all chosen by God and all infallible. The Church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.... Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew—gullible, pitiful innocents....
Id. at 26-27.
It is this age that our modern Christian conservatives look to for inspiration when they denounce the “alienation” caused by nasty modern technology and individualism. Anyone who has read the Russell Kirks, the Richard Weavers, the Robert Nisbets, or listened to lectures by the David Whalens and Robert Edens of the world knows that I am right. Thank god for writers like Manchester, who are willing to call point out how bogus that romance really is.
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