Quote for Today
“The Dark Ages are a myth. The long centuries between the fall of Rome and the full emergence of a Christian Europe were incomparably the greatest period of moral improvement in human history. In the Classical world, such practices as infanticide, abortion, pederasty, sodomy, slavery, suicide, and crucifixion were everyday facts of life. Public entertainment in Rome included going to the Colosseum to watch gladiators kill each other or wild animals tear helpless people apart.
“As Christianity gained ascendancy, all these things were abolished by law. By the end of the so-called Dark Ages they had been banned throughout Christendom and ceased to exist, except insofar as they could be performed illicitly. Until recently we took their non-existence so much for granted that we forgot our huge debt to the Dark Ages — the very name of which signifies our modern ingratitude.
“The Dark Ages understood virtue and built a civilization; the progressive age doesn’t understand virtue and is tearing down the civilization it inherited.” – Joe Sobran
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My comment: the propaganda of the English was so effective in shaping my early education that it was not until I was fifty years old, that I first heard that slavery had been abolished in Europe during the Medieval Period.
The English heresiarchs, in order to justify their separation from the Catholic Church, denigrated every accomplishment of the period where she held greatest sway.
By sad irony, those selfsame denigrations would be used unchanged by the still more heretical reformers of the benighted period called Enlightenment, when Jacobins and atheists introduced the French Terror and planted the seeds of the Russian revolution.
This revolt against God, Christ, Church, Civilization, Law, Art, Learning, and Reason, currently called Woke-think, had a beginning in the denigration of the Middle Ages, and the contempt heaped on all the advancements of that era, the only period of true moral advancement in human history.
The English thought they could throw away the Church and keep the rest. As if a man can throw away his head, and live happily with just his neck-stump, torso, and limbs.
A quote from GK Chesterton, The Thing , recently supplied in this space by a reader with the high yet somewhat Frank Herbertian name of Alia, is here most apt:
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“The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is not really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modem moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
