Obscurantism

We explain what darkness is, why it is related to the Middle Ages and what are its main characteristics.

What is darkness?

Darkness is the tendency to hinder knowledge and keep the popular sectors without instruction, that humanism and enlightenment attributed to the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. In general, The term to characterize the Middle Age as a dogmatic era is used dominated by the Church and subject to religious superstition.

The term darkness was born in the 16th century and He was used from the 18th century by enlightened philosophers that they opposed religious darkness and proposed, however, that knowledge could only be illuminated by the light of reason. The enlightened and the liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also gave importance to the dissemination of education (against the restriction of knowledge) or strictly religious education, promoted by the most conservative sectors of the Church.

Although some practices and institutions of the Middle Ages represented many aspects of what was called darkness (for example, the Inquisition, the censorship of ideas or the ecclesiastical restriction of knowledge), some historians maintain that Consider this time as a “dark age” is equivalent to simplifying a much more complex situation in which, together with the oppressive domain of the Church, philosophical ideas, technical innovations, artistic styles and phenomena such as commerce and urbanism were developed.

The origin of the term “darkness”

The term “darkness” It arose from the title of satire Letters of dark men (In Latin, Epistolae darkrum virorum) of the 16th century. This satire was about the dispute between the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin and some Dominican friars, parodied as dark men who supported the burning of non -Christian books and hindered human knowledge.

In the 18th century, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment used the term “dark” to qualify the conservative and superstitious aspects of religious thought and ecclesiastical structures. For this reason, This term was linked to a particular historical period, the Middle Ages which was understood as a dark era that was between classical antiquity and rebirth. This conception had an antecedent in authors such as Petrarca (1304-1374), who believed they were leaving behind the darkness of the Middle Ages.

Currently, The religious darkness is still used In reference to issues related to the Church, theology, the restriction of knowledge and the orthodox tradition of various religions, and another idea of ​​obscurantism was incorporated that defines the use of a deliberately complex language for the exposition of philosophical ideas.

Medieval religious darkness

The characterization of The Middle Ages as an era of religious darkness and of the ecclesiastical institutions of the Modern Age as a continuity of that dark era, it was sustained in a series of specific characteristics of medieval society:

• The domain of the Catholic dogma and the word of the Bible About the use of reason, critical thinking and science.
• The restriction of knowledge to a small group of people mostly clergy, and the maintenance of the humble sectors in ignorance. In times of relative expansion of education to other social sectors, at the end of the Modern Age the monopoly and control of the instruction by the Church was denounced.
• The censorship of publications considered contrary to dogma which threatened any glimpse of freedom of expression.
• Theocentrism, which put God at the center of all things And it reduced the individual to a subordinate or marginal place, unlike anthropocentrism proposed by humanism and enlightenment, which emphasized the human being and their decision -making capacity.
• The interference of the Catholic Church and its religious precepts in all orders of people’s lives.
• Diffusion, among the humble sectors, of conservative ideas that legitimized the religious authority of the Church and the political power of the monarchy.
• The legitimation of the division of society in estates (some privileged and others harmed), considered as dictated by God, and the stimulus to the submission of the peasants and other humble sectors.
• The institution of the Inquisition that condemned everything that considered heresy through the use of complaint, torture and public executions.

Criticism of the idea of ​​medieval darkness

Humanist, enlightened and liberal intellectuals emphasized The negative and “dark” aspects of the Middle Ages (Considered an era of oppression, misery, dogmatism, ignorance and backwardness), with the aim of contrasting that stage to the values ​​they defended: lighting through reason, science, progress and freedom. Some of these principles were reflected in episodes such as the French Revolution, or also in other “bourgeois revolutions”, which had a strong anticlerical bias.

However, some Historians currently question the characterization of the Middle Ages as an era of dark darkness . Although many of the aspects called “dark” were actually part of the European society of that time, practices, institutions and ideas less attached to the representation of darkness or decline could also be found:

• Medieval art He generally expressed Christian issues and was strictly guarded by the Church. However, it produced works of important aesthetic value and shape three styles that had their peculiarities: the pre -Romanesque, the Romanesque and the Gothic.
• Medieval literature It was limited by the censorship of the Church. The texts about the lives of saints, theological reflections and Christian poetry were common. However, songs of Gesta, stories of cavalry and folk romances were also composed.
• Technical and Technological Innovations They were not rare in the Middle Ages. Some emerged by contacts with Arab or Byzantine populations, and others for their own experiments. In general, they had to do for practical purposes, such as improvements in navigation and war, or the increase in agricultural production.
• While the scientific method was developed during the years of Renaissance humanism, some medieval theologians, such as Guillermo de Ockham (c. 1285-1349), put The basis of observation and experimentation . For its part, alchemy, which developed thanks to figures such as Roger Bacon (1214-1294), was a history of chemistry.
• The universities They were born during the Middle Ages and dealt mainly with the study of theology. However, they also taught right, rhetoric, medicine, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, among other subjects. In addition, the philosophical ideas of Aristotle were given importance, although accommodated to Christian doctrine. One of the outstanding intellectuals of this era was Tomás de Aquino (c. 1225-1274). Even so, religious dogma put limits to knowledge (for this reason, until the Modern Age entered, it was censored and pursued those who raised ideas considered heretical, such as the one that stated that the Earth was not the center of the universe).
• Cities and commerce They lived an important impulse during the Middle Ages, which at the same time affects the emergence of a new social class, the protagonist of processes of social and political transformation in the following centuries: the bourgeoisie.

• Continue with: Medieval culture

References

• García de Cortázar, Ja & Sesma Muñoz, Ja (2008). Medieval History Manual. Alliance.
• Hunt, L., Martin, Tr, Rosenwein, BH & Smith, BG (2016). The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures. 5th edition. BEDFORD/ST. Martin’s.
• Madigan, K. (2015). Medieval Christianity: a New History. Yale University Press.
• Spencer, S. et al. (2022). Christianity. Britannica Encyclopedia. https://www.britannica.com