The Dark Ages (Or at Least a Large Gap)

The Great Books are arranged mostly chronological.  The set I have (the first edition) starts with Homer who lived sometime around 850 BC and continues along the timeline up until Freud at the beginning of the 20th century.  There are a few occasions where authors are paired together by subject, rather than time.  For instance, Ptolemy who lived in the second century is in the same book as Copernicus and Kepler, even though they both lived some 1300 years later.  It works though, since all three studied astronomy.
If you lay out a timeline of all the authors though, you find a giant gap.  Our current subject, St Augustine, died in 430 AD.  The next author, Thomas Aquinas, wasn't born until 1225.  For nearly 800 years, there were no authors deemed worthy enough to be included in the Great Books of the Western World series.  When I was younger, this period was known as the Dark Ages, though that term has fallen out of fashion.  In comparison to such busy times as 450 - 370 BC, it is pretty obviously a down time.
Along with the Great Books, I've been dipping in and out of a book called 'A History of Knowledge' by Charles Van Doren.  (A very interesting book, btw, and from the same Ivy league tradition as Mortimer Adler.)  I found his description of Augustine's impact to be very interesting, (all excerpts from Chap 4):

He [Augustine] died believing that he had been right. Christianity, in order to survive, had to renounce earthly glory and be willing to live on in small isolated, lonely places where the glory of the Heavenly City would shine forth and be more easily seen. Christians, St. Augustine believed, were seeking another kind of triumph from the Roman triumph. The Defeat of Rome, of New Carthage, or even of Hippo, did not really seem important no matter how much misery they might produce. The goal of Christians was in another life, and their city was not of this world.

Van Doren talks about how people then began to think:

St Benedict, for example, went to Rome around 500 AD to study at one of the few remaining Roman schools. He was shocked by the wealth and luxury...and retired to live for the rest of his days in the somber monastery that he founded at Monte Cassino at the beginning of the sixth century. In doing so he laid down a pattern and a rule of life that was imitated everywhere in the West.
For centuries the Benedictines were devoted to poverty, prayer and good works, following the rule of the founder and spiritual father.
...
From our modern point of view those centuries that we still call dark were the nadir of Western civilization. Our ancestors did not feel that way about their time.
They did become frightened and nervous as the year 1000 AD approached, as we are nervous about the coming of the second millenium [written in 1992]. They were like children, afraid of the unkown. They feared the world might come to and end at the close of the year 999. When nothing terrible happened, they drew a collective sigh of relief and set about rebuilding their new version of the Roman empire. We live in it today.

A few caveats are in order here, the first and most prominent being that while I find this interesting, I don't want to put this down as my belief.  We'll cover more of this ground when we get to Gibbon in October and I'm sure other places as well.  Maybe I'll have a firm opinion in ten years when the list is done. 
The second caveat, is that there were some great minds in those 800 years.  In the next chapter, Van Doren lists a good half dozen men who were notable, and I think they'll deserve a post of their own. 
The third caveat is that I find it wildly unlikely that there wouldn't be significant rebellion from the ideal of poverty, especially from the merchant class.  Or, if not rebellion, at least they wouldn't hew so closely to the ideal as to completely close up shop.  Something else must have been going, probably many, many things.
Still, 800 years.  Just think of that.  Eight full centuries without a writer that could crack the lineup of the Great Books.  That seems preposterous.  Or calamitous.  But would Augustine have thought it a great display of piety?