February 2009 - Vol. 27

How barbarism was overcome in the dark ages
Before Rome’s fall, its citizens had lost the characteristics that had made them distinctly Roman: discipline, respect, and obedience. Incest and adultery had invaded families, breaking the natural bonds of love and commitment and setting yokes of bitterness, disdain, and hatred in their place. Moral education had been supplanted by indolence, corruption, and decadence.

Thus damaged from within, Rome was unable to resist direct barbarian assaults from without. The once great empire fell in the fifth century, and Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe whose cavalry proved superior to the foot soldiers who had sustained and advanced the Roman empire for centuries. During the next few centuries, chaos ruled Europe. Warring bands of illiterate Germanic tribes opposed and deposed one another. Cities and cultural centers disappeared as inhabitants were scattered across the land in crude huts and rough towns. Literacy, law, and order – the pillars of civilization – crumbled, and the aristocratic culture of the ancient Western world nearly disappeared. Early medieval Europe seemed destined for complete barbarism.

One force prevented this. The church.

Instead of conforming to the barbarian culture of the Dark Ages, the medieval church modelled a counter-culture to a world engulfed by destruction and confusion. Thousands of monastic orders spread across Europe, characterized by discipline, creativity, and a coherence and moral order lacking in the world around them. Monks preserved not only the Scriptures but classical literature as well; they were busy not only at their prayers but in clearing land, building towns, and harvesting crops. When little else shone forth, these religious provided attractive models of communities of caring and character; and in the process they preserved both faith and civilization itself.

It is important to note that the church challenged not only the values of the barbarians but those of the Roman Empire as well. Living by a value system dictated by the kingdom of God, they rejected both Roman and barbarian lapses of character, uprooting such attitudes as the aversion to physical labor predominant among the Roman masses and the barbarian love of violence. As points of light in a dark age, they called attention to the values of an endless age. And in so doing, they saved their civilization.

Though the world now appears far more sophisticated than when the Visigoths overran Rome, it’s only because today’s barbarians wear pinstripes instead of animal skins and wield briefcases rather than spears. Like the monastic communities of the Middle Ages, the church today can serve as outposts of truth, decency, and civilization in the darkening culture around us. For even though the church itself is shot through with an individualism that cripples its witness, even though the church today – like the medieval monastic communities – is made up of sinners like you and me, it is the one institution in society that still has the capability to challenge culture by bearing witness to God’s transcendent standards of absolute justice and righteousness.

Why? Because the church has an independent locus of authority beyond itself, beyond the state, beyond the tides of passing fashion. The church cleaves to the absolute standards of Scripture and is infused with the work of the Holy Spirit to guide it.     > Go to Next Page

[Excerpt from Against the Night © 1999 by Charles Colson. Published by Regal Books, www.regalbooks.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.]
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