How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe - by Thomas Cahill, 1995.
Posted on 06/25/2002 9:28:55 AM PDT by ArcLight
“From the fifth to the tenth century Europe lay sunk in a night of barbarism which grew darker and darker. It was a barbarism far more awful and horrible than that of the primitive savage, for it was the decomposing body of what had been a great civilization.”
“The Christian-Germanic virtues did not result in progress, but in steady and growing barbarization. It is not true that a New World began at once to sprout on the ruins of the old. On the contrary, for close on five hundred years Europe sank lower and lower; things went steadily and continuously from bad to worse. In the ninth century the conditions were immeasurably more desolately dark and more utterly hopeless than they had been in the sixth or seventh. If we picture that Dark Continent of the ninth century isolated from the rest of the world and left to its own resources, there is no ground for surmising that it could ever, by virtue of any element of life existing within it, become civilized at all. Whatever, possibilities might exist in that dark welter of degradation, whatever factor might under propitious conditions be turned to advantage, it contained no endogenous seeds of life and progress that had power to germinate by virtue of their intrinsic force. The fate of Europe might conceivably have been to become fossilized into a kind of barbaric Abyssinia.
“The light from which civilization was once more rekindled did not arise from any embers of Greek-Roman culture smoldering amid the ruins of Europe, or from the living death on the Bosporus. It did not come from the Northern, but from the Southern invaders of the Empire, from the Saracens.”
That was then, this is now. If you replace the word Europe with Arabia, it would read the same way except that the Western World progressed and Arabia never really has, thanks to their unwavering devotion to cultism in the form of Islam.
Byzantine civilization provided a rich source of art, science, and technology to Western Europe but clearly Western Europe had developed it own art science and technology during this period as many examples of Medevil architecture will show.
Ahmed's veiwpoint does not withstand scrutiny.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Traders and Crusaders brought it back to Europe but it was not Moslem accomplishments that they imported. There is not a Moslem-arab component in European Civilization. It is still Judaeo-Christian-Greek and was preserved by Jews and Christians in the Moslem empires and by Christian monks in Europe itself.
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe - by Thomas Cahill, 1995.
"It will be seen from all this that the development of the Byzantine Empire was by no means uniform in point either of time or of place. Why is it then that the word Byzantine conveys a definite and self consistent idea? Was there not something which through all those centuries remained characteristic of Byzantines in contrast with the neighbouring peoples? To this it must be replied that such was certainly the ease, and that the difference lay, first of all, in the more advanced civilization of Byzantium. Many small but significant details are recorded — as early as the sixth century Constantinople had a system of street-lighting; sports, equestrian games or polo-playing, and above all races in the circus attained a high national and political importance; Byzantine princesses married to Venetians introduced the use of table forks in the West. More striking are the facts that as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, the Byzantines, in their wars with the Arabs, used gunpowder — the so-called Greek fire — and that a German emperor like Otto III preferred to be a Roman of Byzantium rather than a German. This Byzantine civilization, it is true suffered from a serious and incurable disease, a worm gnawing at its core — the utter absence of originality. But here again, we should beware of unwarranted generalization. A change in this respect is to be noted from age to age, in the first centuries, before the complete severing of the political and ecclesiastical ties uniting them with the Eastern nations the Greek mind still retained its gift of receptivity, and ancient Greek art traditions, in combination with Persian, Syrian, and other Oriental motives, produced the original plan of the true Byzantine church — a type which left its impression on architecture, sculpture painting, and the minor arts. And yet so complete was the isolation of the empire, separated from other nations by the character of its government, the strictness of its court etiquette, the refinement of its material civilization, and, not least, by the peculiar development of the national Church, that a kind of numbness crept over both the language and the intellectual life of the people. The nations of the West were indeed barbarians in comparison with the cultured Byzantines, but the West had something for the lack of which no learning, no technical skill could compensate — the creative force of an imagination in harmony with the laws of nature."
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