The Church in the Dark Ages Volume 2

<p class=ql-align-justify><strong>The Church in the Dark Ages </strong>is the second installment in Henri Daniel-Rops' monumental <em>History of the Church of Christ</em>. This volume includes the last five chapters of that work surveying the threats to the Christian East from the rise of Islam and onslaughts of <em>jihad</em> to the Iconoclastic Controversy burgeoning heresy and imminent schism; the greatness of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance; the subsequent era of disorder in the West counteracted by the first great medieval pope St. Nicholas I; the Byzantine Revival emergence of Caesaro-Papism and conclusive Great Schism; and lastly the tragic dawn of the new millennium whose light finds the Church inspired by a spirit of renewal manifest in the monastic reforms of the Abbaye de Cluny.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>A magnificent presentation of six centuries' worth of Church history <em>The Church in the Dark Ages </em>proves the aptness of the term <em>les temps barbares</em>. From 400 a.d. to 1050 a.d. the world endured-in Rops' eloquent phrasing-a night in which humanity seemed to be groping blindly amid the bloody confusion of today and the anguish of the morrow. Only the Church guided by a transcendent ambition pursued her course unwaveringly and in working to her own supernatural ends she became the most effective means of ensuring the salvation of civilization.</p>