The Goths in the time of Constantine were heavily Romanised. The northern border of the Roman Empire on the Danube was quiet and peaceful. The Goths traded with the Romans and supplied mercenaries for the Roman Army. The Roman Empire by this time was Christian though the Goths were not. They still worshiped Pagan gods; however that was changing. Between the Goths capturing Christian Romans in prior warfare from the third century and integrating them into Gothic culture as slaves and peasants, and the increasing Romanisation of the Goths, Christianity began to be adopted.

Emperor Constantine from SA Moberly's photostream.

Constantine moved the center of the Roman Empire to Constantinople and established regular contact with the Goths. With this came Greek speaking, as opposed to Latin speaking, missionaries. Additionally Goths learnt Greek and studied Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Apparently there was one such student named Ulfia who translated the Greek bible to the Goth language; part of which still survives today. An innovation to achieve that was to create an alphabet for the Gothic language. Quite remarkable.

There was also philosophical disagreement over Christianity. Alessandro Barbero writes:

[C]hristians of that time were not yet in agreement about the definition of the Trinity, about Christ's nature, or about the relationship between the Father and the Son, and the faith was split into ferociously quarreling factions.

One of which was the Catholics, or universalists. It does point to the Goths being far from the barbarian horde of common historical mythology. They were heavily Romanised and culturally were integrating into the wider Roman Empire and culture even if they did not kneel before Constantine as subjects.

Christianity was absorbed into the state mechanism by the Roman Emperors starting with Constantine. One of the main issues with early Christian doctrine was how convoluted it was with numerous competing doctrines in the Middle East, North Africa, as well as East and Western Roman Empire.

One of the political problems for the Emperors was maintaining public order and all the different Christian groups and their in-fighting over creed could negatively affect that order and the Emperor's ability to govern. Consequently the Emperors would step in, announce a Council, and then stack the council such that a state backed 'orthodoxy' in Christian was found. Later Emperor's would even pass law that would brand Christian doctrines outside of the orthodoxy as heretical.

Constantine also bound Christianity into the arm of state through making the Churches tax exempt. As a result Bishoprics became wealthy places to run and Bishops took on political aspects; maintaining their power and wealth in the empire through becoming a vessel of state policy. Bishops sought to maintain the status quo through orthodoxy in order to maintain their tax exempt and wealthy positions.

Alongside this was the philosophical difficulty in explaining the relationship between God and Christ through reason. The Greek method of though was slowly replaced by the domination of faith over empiricism and the world became less scientific and more mystical as a result. The political use of faith as certainty and truth was also used to subdue reason. The Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, in replying to a Western Senator wrote:

What you are ignorant of, we know from the word of God. And what you try to infer, we have established as the very wisdom from God.

So we have a religious order, trained in politics and wealth by the Roman Empire in order to maintain public order, and with a doctrine that places certainty and truth in the wisdom of God and backed by the state as the common 'orthodoxy'. With the collapse of the Roman Empire into West and East, the political power of the Church in Rome was able to replace a weakened Roman state in Rome. This process arguably started with Pope Leo who began to establish the Holy See as the dominant political power.

More than the toppling of reason to faith, it is rather a story of Christianity as a political movement and the ease with which it could establish and maintain its political power through the doctrine of certainty in faith.

* As a note, I would probably give Peter Freeman's book a miss. I wouldn't read it again. It was interesting but confusing and the thesis wasn't so obvious in the second two thirds of the book.

Charles Van Doren writes in A History of Knowledge that the period from 450 to 550 AD were the darkest in the history of western civilization. The Byzantine Empire was unable to re-establish the Pax Romana that western Europe had known and the literacy, commerce and law became scarce.

Instead people were illiterate, their world shrunken to a small area around where they were born. Roads were too dangerous to travel as the law was one of arbitrary violence and force. Commerce shrunk to subsistence living and barter become the main mechanism of trade as the coins of the old Roman Empire were used up. The arts, philosophy and other leisure activities that the stability of the Roman political system had enabled was gone too. The population waned as a result of this instability. Van Doren writes:

It is hard to imagine them [these years]. Historically, they are almost a blank, we only know that at the end of this period of rapine and death the region now called Europe was utterly changed.

Van Doren's argument as to why there was a fall into the Dark Ages when Europe has survived political collapse and invasions (barbarian and nation-state) since without the catastrophic collapse of society, commerce and civilization; is that it was the effect of Christianity and its cultural dominance that led to the Dark Ages.

Van Doren writes that Rome was more like we are today; deeply devoted to the material world, and with out lust for adventure, travel, power, wealth and leisure - including exercise and health. With the collapse of the Empire and its replacement by the arbitrary nature of Dark Ages feudalism, Van Doren argues the people embraced Augustine's City of God rather than Rome's City of Man. Van Doren writes:

The new kind of Christians, after the fall, had little interest in their bodies as such. They cared about the health of their souls. They had no interest in consumption. They could lose their reputation rather than gain it for possessing wealth in a society where poverty was next to godliness.

Roman wealth was replaced by Christian poverty. Van Doren notes that rationality is perfectly logical to the people living under it at the time. To a Dark Ages christian they did not see the Dark Ages as a fall, or as dark; they saw it perfectly rational and normal to devote their lives to their soul's ascent to heaven through living for God.