So why am I so interested in the Dark Ages? Particularly, the history of the North (the Germanic peoples, especially)? Well, it is partly, I suppose, because of the stories that come from that time and place: King Arthur; St. Patrick; Hengest and Horsa; Beowulf; the Song of Roland; King Alfred; Vikings. It is also attractive because we know so little (or think we know so little) about the period – so there’s a mystery to be probed there – but also because despite our ignorance, who we are as the inheritors of the civilization of Europe comes out of this period. Europe became the Europe we know between the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West and the Crusades. School history will frequently skip over nearly a thousand years of important stuff in a day or two. One day, we’re talking about the heyday of the Roman Empire -- Augustus, Trajan, with maybe a mention of Constantine; the next, we’re on to Islam. By the time we’re done with Islam, we’re talking the three-field manorial system, flying buttresses, and Magna Carta. When my daughter took World History in high school, I warned her about this. Naturally, she was looking forward to learning about all the Dark Ages stuff that Daddy was always going on about. Despite my warning, she was shocked and outraged when the class passed over all that time without even blinking. For someone interested in the roots of our culture, the period from about 410 (Sack of Rome, Augustine’s City of God ) to 1215 (Magna Carta, the Fourth Lateran Council) is crucial. The dates are movable in either direction, since the great Fog of Ignorance covers much else that occurred before and after, but the heart of the story is here. A great upheaval took place, the world we know was born. We think of “Rome” as a timeless way of being, as one of the ancestors of our culture. Then we think of “the Middle Ages” as a time of kings and parliaments and wars culminating in the Renaissance and the Reformation, which gave us “Modernity.” But without this period, misleadingly called “Dark,” we are disconnected from Antiquity and deny the roots of Modernity. The result is, we misunderstand both the ancient past and the world we inhabit today. For someone interested in the Church, understanding this period is even more important. Major theological decisions were made, the serious evangelization of Europe was undertaken at last, western monasticism flowered. The shape and sound of the liturgy and the standard text of the Bible and the organization of religion up to the Reformation are all fixed in this period. Without some kind of understanding of this period, theologians and Church historians are forever trying to reconstruct a "New Testament" church of their own invention or setting up some early modern (Reformation or Counter-Reformation or Great Awakening) rootless past to idealize. To understand how we got from the New Testament to modern times, you must pass through the church of the Dark Ages. And behold, it was an Age of Light.