Another tack seems to be to deemphasize material remains and cultural complexity, and suggest that the energies of the post-Roman Western world were funneled into Christianity. Ward-Perkins notes that encyclopedias of Late Antiquity are heavily tilted toward coverage of religious arguments, schisms and transformations, with relatively little space given to architecture, secular learning or politics. In other words, though Late Antiquity might be materially poorer than the Classical Imperial period, at least in the west, it was spiritually superior. Frankly, to me this is reminiscent of Communist era attempts to dismiss the consumer cornucopia of the capitalist world by suggesting that socialist man was spiritually richer if materially poorer. ~Razib

Ward-Perkins, like Liebeschuetz before him, is absolutely right to emphasise the archaeological and material evidence that shows undeniable economic contraction and the relative decline of Greco-Roman urbanism of the classical type.  Indeed, no one working in late antiquity really denies any of these claims of fact, and every decent history of late antiquity in the Mediterranean world takes account of these changed material realities.  Late antique historians certainly talk about architecture, for instance, at least as far as the Eastern Empire goes, since the modeling of church basilicas on secular halls and the magnificent achievement of Hagia Sophia are but two remarkable legacies of the late antique period.  If there is a great deal of attention paid to religious arguments and schisms in late antique studies (in my opinion, there is not nearly enough attention actually paid to religious controversy and heaps and heaps of attention paid to hagiography), that is because there were quite a few of them happening with rather significant consequences for the development of different parts of the Mediterranean world.  Each time you have someone sniff with Gibbonian disdain for religious contentions over an iota, you will wind up with five cultural historians who want to dedicate their lives to defending the importance of such contentions.  Each time someone comes along and says, “But, look, people really were poorer!  Things got worse!” the cultural historians will groan and say, “Yes, we understand.  Now let’s talk about something really interesting.”  These two approaches should not have to be at war with each other, since they are inherently complementary.  Obviously, comparisons of late antique scholarship to commie propaganda in any context will not encourage this sort of happy collaboration.   

Where the cultural and late antique historians part company with the late Romanists and archaeologists is in their evaluation of the worth of the period and its production, or rather the former believe that the period should receive the attention appropriate to a crucial period of transformation that contains answers for, among other things, how the medieval world came into being. 

Late antiquity had to be invented as a separate period and basically as a new concept because generations of classicists had told everyone that once the glory of Rome had passed everything went to hell and wasn’t really worth talking about.  Even traditional church history in the West used to stop at Chalcedon, as if the theologians were conceding that the fate of the empire and the fate of really interesting theology were inextricably linked. 

Church historians obviously have a hard time going along with a full-on decline and fall view, since it quite explicitly devalues the epoch of the Church’s great early efflourescence.  Tell them that the world of the 4th and 5th centuries are a “period of decline” and they will throw Chrysostom and Augustine back in your face, and they are right to do so.  Cultural historians are horrified at the idea that a whole range of centuries, in which cultural production of various kinds (including Neoplatonic philosophical works, the work of the 4th and 5th century rhetoricians and the secular court poetry of, say, Corripus and George of Pisidia) remained fairly high but had changed form, should be put on the back burner because those centuries represent a relative worsening of material conditions compared to an earlier period.  Imagine if early modernists took the same approach, ignoring the 17th century because life was so much more miserable and so much more full of religious controversy in many parts of Europe than in the 16th–how absurd would that be?

On the whole, late antique historians today try to avoid speaking in terms of either decline or superiority.  This is a result of cultural history dominating late antique studies, and there are certain things to be said against arguments about transformation that are so vague that one might conclude that no one is paying that much attention to content, but one has to understand the tremendous prejudices and biases built in to the traditional narrative sweep of European history that late antique historians battle against all the time.  They are compelled to speak in terms of transformation and change because so many people still think of the period as one of collapse and ruin.  The old apologetic interest in the Age of Faith is not what it once was and there is also a reluctance among the scholars, most of whom are not necessarily particularly religious, to engage in a lot of Christian triumphalism.  If anything, late antique studies of late have often been aimed at rehabilitating the religious deviants and heretics of the period to give a complete picture of the social fabric of that world.  That actually seems to me to be a very worthwhile thing to be doing (it is also, in a way, the kind of thing I am doing, though with less heretic-rehabilitation and more focus on the meaning deviant theologies had for their adherents), and it does not require us to dismiss or ignore material evidence and the realities of straitened conditions that this evidence shows.