[PaulKersey]

>Great original thoughts which do not accord with fact are called fantasies

Tell that to H. Schlieman before he discovered Troy, and a bookfull of others who went beyond "accepted facts". Only pedantic dullards are trapped in the fantasy that accepted "facts" are the only "facts", or are, in fact, facts at all.

[The_Reader_David]

The problem with the idea is not going beyond "accepted facts" but proceeding on the basis of false "facts". The Dark Ages were a local phenomenon. It is particularly ironic that the post mentions Justinian: during the so called Dark Ages, Justinian gave the definitive codification of Roman Law, classical learning still alive, and science was no more stagnant than during the pagan Imperial period. Indeed it was during this period that the liquid fire which burned on contact with water, so called "Greek fire" was discovered.

The arts were not stagnant: Imperial secular art still exhibitted full knowledge of perspective, used in the conventional way, while Orthodox iconography, far from forgetting the laws of perspective, deliberately turned them upside down, so that the viewer became the vanishing point, and what was beyond the icon became visually as well as symbolically the view into a larger 'spiritual space'.