The Brilliant Ages
The Dark Ages have a bad reputation.
But, in many ways, the feudal system, with one universal Church and many local kings and barons maintaining the folk law, tied to subjects and vassals by personal oaths of loyalty, with neither the slave markets of the ancient world, the theocratic sultanates, ancestor worship, or caste systems of the Near and Far East, nor with the plutocracies, state-syndicates, and socialisms of modern Europe, achieved something unheard-of in the ancient world and forgotten in the modern:
It achieved maturity. It achieved something never achieved before or since: a form of civilization fitted to the human condition, high and low, male and female, spiritual and temporal. It achieved the modern world without the more notorious evils and drawbacks of the modern world.
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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.