I have trouble understanding how Christianity gets the blame for the Dark Ages when it was the only civilizing influence in Europe at the time, since the Roman Empire had collapsed.
Yeah you might want to look into when Christianity became a unified religio-political doctrine and when the collapse of the Roman Empire occurred. I'm not saying empirically that one had anything directly to do with the other, but I would think that the consolidation of power by Constantine (not the true Christian as he is painted to be) and his successors, despite (and perhaps due to) the schismatic relationship of early Christian groups, led to certain bishops' and then the Church's (as a unified entity) grab for power after the secular empire collapsed and any previous methods of thinking (Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Arianism, Universalism, Platonism, any form of Paganism, etc) were crushed and rejected as heresy, upon pain of death in order to retain power.
So how exactly was Christianity during the period of 400-1400 particularly civilizing, especially in regards to the masses?
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