Amazon-ing around, I came across an intriguing book published last fall, The Fall of Rome; And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins.

Was the fall of Rome a great catastrophe that cast the West into darkness for centuries to come? Or, as scholars argue today, was there no crisis at all, but simply a peaceful blending of barbarians into Roman culture, an essentially positive transformation?

In The Fall of Rome, eminent historian Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that the "peaceful" theory of Rome’s "transformation" is badly in error. Indeed, he sees the fall of Rome as a time of horror and dislocation that destroyed a great civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times.

Attacking contemporary theories with relish and making use of modern archaeological evidence, he looks at both the wider explanations for the disintegration of the Roman world and also the consequences for the lives of everyday Romans, who were caught
in a world of economic collapse, marauding barbarians, and the rise of a new religious orthodoxy.

What caught my eye was the contrast, made in the reader reviews,  between this book and Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason:

I came to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ work indirectly, through reading Rodney Stark’s "The Victory of Reason." Stark argues the reason for the superiority of Western culture is the Christian religion, especially the Catholic Christian religion with its emphasis on the (alleged) rationality of God and on the goodness of creation.

Stark’s Christian triumphalism requires him to attack the classic account of the "Decline and Fall" of Western Roman Civilization by Edward Gibbion. Gibbon argued (in 1776) that the "useless" activities of the monasteries and churches in the 5th Century required so much labor and wealth that little was left over to fend off the barbarians. The fall of Rome, Gibbon concluded, "was a triumph of barbarism and religion." (Amazon sells a nice little summary of Gibbon’s views entitled "Christians and the Fall of Rome.")

Stark dissents from Gibbon’s view, arguing that there had been no "fall" of civilization in the 5th Century. There had simply been a cultural segue from one type of social organization (Roman) to another (feudal society featuring monasteries and local castles).

I had never heard anyone seriously deny there had been a "fall" of Roman civilization in the 5th Century, and I did not know enough at that time to contest his ideas. Then while in a waiting room, I came across an article by Ward-Perkins in the magazine "History Today" (as I recall its title). Ward-Perkins briefly laid out the issue between the defenders of the "discontinuity thesis" (like Gibbon) and the defenders of the "continuity thesis" (which included historians like the Oxford historian Peter Brown and of course Rodney Stark).

Well, this is all very interesting, and a little more searching led me to the blog (heretofore unknown by me) on the Oxford University Press site, which in two entries features a debate/discussion between Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, author of another book on the Fall of Rome, also published by Oxford last fall, on the issue, here. A decent summary of the scholarly debate (with some contemporary applications by the writer) , which also involves the time period labeled "Late Antiquity,’ developed in the work of Peter Brown, is here. A review of Ward-Perkins’ and Heather’s books by Victor David Hansen from the New Critereon is here. (Requires registration and purchase – but purchase is via PayPal, so it’s easy) – a concluding excerpt:

So there we have it: two gifted historians, through quite different methodologies, come to surprisingly similar conclusions that the Western empire fell to foreign aggression from barbarian tribes in the late fifth century. To Ward-Perkins this was all a horror and a lesson for Western civilization today to remain vigilant. But to Heather, the fall was a result of unbridled Western “aggression” and thus something that was ultimately “pleasing.”