The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on
strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying
in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the
bravest martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by
mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against
existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but
scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce,
when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth
or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to
reason by divine right and by grace of a club.