The Church and the rise of universities

Abstract

The history of Europe is intimately linked with the history of the Catholic Church throughout the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era. Realising this, the enemies of the Church, have always attempted to decry the Middle Ages in order to cast discredit and disrepute on this Institution. They have unimously called the Middle Ages-the ages in which the light of Christianity and civilization shone with the greatest lustre - the Dark Ages. True it is, that they were ages of violence and greed, of anarchy and strife. But we must remember that society was then in an age of transition, hence necessarily violent and aggressive, and that the nations of Europe were still struggling into shape. What is more, "the Age of the greatest light is a Dark Age, in the sense, that the greatest light casts the darkest shadow, and so in the deep, well defined shadows of the Middle Ages, ...... anti-Catholic historians have poked and searched, like beetles on a carcass". They have busied themselves for centuries in raking up all the most unpleasant phases of this period, and in searching for the dark sides of its history.