Having read the following excerpt from Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy 1998: Medieval Philosophy Assignment, TCD, Ireland

Having read the following excerpt from Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy 1998, outline in your own words Magee’s account of the key developments in Medieval thought. Your response should be approximately 1000 words in length. It should not contain any quotations from Magee’s work. The collapse of the Roman Empire saw the overrunning and occupation of its various territories by other forces, many of them pagan hordes who were often at war with one another.

The classical civilization that by now consisted of the accumulated treasures of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman culture was brought down in ruins and was succeeded by the period that we call the Dark Ages. Since Europeans have for so long tended to equate civilization itself with European culture it is worth noting that while Europe was going through this dark age – approximately the period between AD 600 and 1000 – there were more highly developed civilizations flourishing in other parts of the world. It was the golden age of Islam, which prospered throughout the eastern part of what had been Alexander’s empire, and from there all the way across North Africa to Spain. Chinese civilization reached the high point of the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), which is considered by connoisseurs to be the greatest period ever of Chinese poetry.

A distinctive Japanese culture was emerging and developing rapidly towards what was to be its classical period. Another half millennium was to pass before Europe began to get itself launched on the process of effectively imposing its power and its culture on the rest of the globe. If anyone in the Dark Ages had suggested that this barbaric, benighted continent would ever one day be able to do that it would probably have seemed absurd.

During that period it was the Islamic world that preserved much of the culture of classical antiquity. The outstanding example of this in philosophy involves the works of Aristotle. Most of these were lost in Europe but preserved in the Arab world and were not to be reintroduced into Europe until the 13th century.  The only works of Aristotle to survive in Europe during the Dark Ages were his logical writings, and this was because they were translated into Latin by Boethius (c. 480-c. 524 AD).

This extraordinary man rose to high office under an Ostrogoth ruler of Italy called Theodoric whose principal minister he became for many years, but his enemies conspired against him, and he was imprisoned and executed. While awaiting his death in prison he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy which has continued to be read from that day to this. Although he was a Christian the consolations to which his title refers are not specifically Christian but rather Stoic and Neo-Platonist. His book remained one of the two or three books with the most universal appeal throughout the Middle Ages. Ireland as a Beacon After Boethius, Europe’s reversion to barbarism lasted over a period of several hundred years, throughout which time the individuals and institutions trying to cling to the remnants of civilization were very much on the defensive. Foremost among these institutions was the Christian church, which in the earlier part of the period had to fight every inch of the way for its own survival.

So it was not a time in which much could be expected in the way of disinterested and original intellectual work, and scarcely any was done. The Germanic tribes that destroyed Roman rule in northern Europe invaded and occupied Britain, but stopped at the Irish Sea; so Ireland was left urbanized. Many of the literate and learned from Britain and the Continent fled there, with the result that an amazing period occurred in Irish history – roughly the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries – when that island was an outpost of civilization on the edge of an otherwise uncivilized Europe.