Epinoia

I just now saw this on a political discussion board:

When the Emperor Constantine turned the Roman Empire over to the Christian Church in the 4th century A.D., the Dark Ages began. It's a curious fact that missionaries from Rome, where the marvels of Roman engineering (viaducts, aquaducts, roads, bridges) still survived, were sent to preach Christianity only. Not one of those missionaries thought to teach the barbarians in Europe how to repair the Roman infrastructure, now decaying, still less how to begin building again. Neither did they teach the barbarians how to write: that was a skill reserved for the priesthood only; other Christians would remain illiterate for centuries. The philosophy of Greece, well-known in Rome--science, arts, including that of the Egyptians, Indians and so on--was never passed on by the missionaries and soon was forgotten even in Rome and Greece, where the monuments remained.

What saved the world, and led to the European Renaissance, was that the Arabs treasured knowledge and wherever they went they translated the works of the ancients into Arabic to preserve for posterity. Arab scholars also built on the work of the Ancients in medicine, astronomy and many other areas of learning. Baghdad was an early center of such research and learning until it was destroyed by Genghiz Khan, at which point it was said that the river ran black with the ink of all the books the Mongols had tossed into it. In the Middle-Ages in Europe, people would travel down to El-Andalus to be treated by Arab physicians. One of the first things the Arabs did on arrival in Spain was establish a paper-mill. Within a short time Cordoba had 40 libraries. Scholars would be sent from Christian monasteries in the north of Italy to study at the Arab schools in the Arab kingdom of Sicily. (Ironically, these scholars were going only with the purpose of studying Muslim religious thought in order to refute it.) Eventually the knowledge reserved in the libraries of the Arabs, despite the great book-burnings of the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades, filtered through to the rest of Europe and became the European Renaissance.

My questions:
1) Is the account above basically what did happen?
2) Did any other religious group (Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) have anything to do with propagating either the lack of knowledge or preservation/enhancement of same?

Thanks.

Gurdur

That simply is not true.
The Dark Ages are basically the description of the time from the fall of the Western Roman Empire and complete breakdown of political/national organization in Western Europe; it's simply false to equate that with the Christianization allegedly done by Constantine (there seems to be a little controversy over whether he actually did as much)
uh, it's a curious fact that Christian missionaries usually missionized.
But on the other hand it was also Christian monks and missionaries who brought literacy back into Western Europe (the area having gone very illiterate in the breakdown) and also built farming abbeys and the like, which were hugely important in the economic reconstruction.
Probably because they didn't have the resources and the means.
It takes a lot to repair an aquaduct, and for an aquaduct to be kept in good condition, the people surrounding it must not only be able to do so, but to want to do so, which very often wasn't the case with the "barbarian" invaders.

Whoever wrote this piece has a lot of explaining to do; the writer can explain just why the Eastern Roman Empire (Constantinople/Byzantium) managed to survive, while CHristian, and manged to keep its infrastructure (water etc.) going relatively well.
AFAIK, that isn't too true; Christian missionaries from Ireland and elsewhere did in fact teach literacy often. That they may have only taught literacy in combination with Christianity might be a regrettable lapse into pure self-interest, but the charges of the writer are quite unfairly biased.
The writer can explain why it was the monasteries that often helped ancient manuscripts survive, and made copies of them. Whatever other criticisms are made, the fact that the Christian monasteries were the libraries and copying-houses of the times is not in doubt.
That bit is partly true.True,but Gutenberg was also a Christian, and the large number of monastery libraries is simply not mentioned by whoever wrote this really biased stuff.
____________

1) No,.
2) The Jews were often very involved with the preservation of knowledge; Buddhists, Hindus, and if you like Taoists, Shintoists and Confucianists also did a hell of a lot to preserve knowledge.