How lucky we are to be free of Obscurantism!

by Fritz Wagner

The term "Enlightenment" is an ideological term with no utility in studying the structures of reality. But it has great utility in shutting off debate and preventing inquiry into questions about "progress" or the roles and limitations of the natural sciences. It purports to describe that era when western civilization freed itself from the "dark ages."

Dr. Richard Bishirjian, President of Yorktown University, has pointed out that the inversion of "enlightenment," the term "dark ages" first appears in Petrarch. Indeed. And Voegelin made the same reference in THE ECUMENIC AGE, O&H Vol IV, CW Vol 17, at p. 335-336 where he writes

"The potentialities of the new type of expectations became apparent in the fourteenth century, when Petrarca (1304-1374) symbolized the age that began with Christ as the tenebrae, as the dark age, that now would be followed by a renewal of the lux of pagan antiquity. The monk as the figure promising a new age was succeeded by the humanist intellectual."

I started to think about "the dark ages" and looked up its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (unabridged):

"dark ages, a term sometimes applied to the period of the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time;"

The Random House 2nd Unabridged gives three definitions:

"1. the period in European history from about AD 476 [when the Goths pushed out the last western Roman emperor from Rome] to about 1000,

2. the whole of the middle ages from about AD 476 to the Renaissance,

3. a period or stage marked by repressiveness, a lack of enlightenment or advanced knowledge, etc (1720-1730)."