The propagated myth by modern academics and atheist 'humanists', is that post the German takeover in the 5th century of the decrepit, totalitarian, bureaucratic and despotic nonsense named the late Roman empire; all became 'dark' and all of the 'great' classical learning was lost. No science, or math was performed until the Catholic Galileo came strutting orb of light in hand, to rekindle the verities of science. The Galileo myth is as obnoxious as the age of darkness myth from 500-1500 AD. The Catholic church always exalted and funded reason together with faith, and some of the greatest scientists in history were Christians funded by the church searching for the truth of God's miraculous creation and the physical and natural laws – so perfectly developed and in such harmonious balance and ratio – that saying otherwise denotes ignorance and bigotry and leads to Churchophobia.
The truth of course is the opposite. The Roman empire for all its advances in engineering, literature, aspects of governance and perhaps law [the Justinian codex was a 6th c. product, at the beginning of the so-called Dark Age, and created by the Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire, not the Western Roman]; was a force for retrogression long before it fell. Once released from the tyranny, the inflation, the over taxation, the endless wars and strife from Rome, Europe finally began to develop institutions, trade, technology, agricultural progress and faith; which eventually led it 1000 years later, to world mastery.
Today tourists gawk and gape at the wonders of Middle Age architecture and practical engineering. How would a dark age produce 10.000 functioning water mills in England circa 850 AD, when under Roman rule there was not one? What is dark, is the propaganda declaiming against a period, in which mostly Latin was used, or early forms of the vernacular, neither of which is accessible today, or understood by 'historians'. Literally thousands of tonnes of documents still exist that have yet to be exhumed and analyzed. From a society which believes in general, that plant food, a trace chemical which is a rounding error element, and which falls out of the hydrological cycle, causes climate; disparaging an older civilization, which for 400 years fought for its life to survive against almost insurmountable odds, is rather dark.
We can state that the medieval period for all purposes laid down the foundations of modern science. When the Moslem Jihad cut off papyrus from Egypt, the medieval mind of genius discovered the incredibly rich process of producing vellum from cow and sheep skin. Books, copied laboriously by monks, from the ancient world and the medieval, were preserved. Biblical narratives such as the Lindisfarne gospels or the Book of Kells are amongst the masterpieces in world artistic history. Likewise we see that alchemy which leads directly to chemistry and also metallurgy reached a high point of development in the early Medieval period. Eyeglasses were invented in the 13th century, and before that independently in both Catalonia and Sweden the first blast furnaces had appeared by the 11th. The first mechanical clocks were invented in England during this time along with higher mathematics, mean speed theorems and geometry. The Medievals also understood the principles of engineering statics magnificently demonstrated in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe which still stand 800 years after they were constructed. Not one single European in the Medieval world believed the world was flat. Flat earth societies would only appear in the age of Darwin and the middle of the 19th century.
The Roman Catholic Church to this day believes that Divine Revelation can be known and understood by faith and reason. The things of nature were believed to be revelations of the Divine nature itself. Nature can be known by reason alone but the Church taught that with faith, this process of knowing was made more perfect as “faith seeks understanding.” Thus, there never has been a conflict between faith and reason. Indeed without faith, there is oftentimes precious little reason, as witnessed by 'scientific' cults such as evolution, Nazism, Communism, or Gaia worship, or Bronze age artifacts such as Islam. All are in the main, anti-human death cults, dedicated not to salvation or reason, but destruction and violence.