The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization (Christian, Islamic, and Judaic) from Constantine to Dante, A.D. 325 1300

The Story of Civilization #4

by Will Durant, Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

The fourth volume in Will Durant s Pulitzer Prize winning series, "The Age of Faith" surveys the medieval achievements and modern significance of Christian, Islamic, and Judaic life and culture. Like the other volumes in the Story of Civilization series, this is a self-contained work, which at the same time fits into a comprehensive history of mankind. It includes the dramatic stories of St. Augustine, Hypatia, Justinian, Mohammed, Harun al-Rashid, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Maimonides, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and many others, all in the perspective of integrated history. The greatest love stories in literature of Heloise and Abelard, of Dante and Beatrice are here retold with enthralling scholarship.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Philosophy, World History, Audiobook, Ancient History

62 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Reviews

[Janet Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Christians and the Pagans. Sound like a football match to you? Well it might. At the end of Will Durant's Caesar and Christ the home team were definitely on a winner. Then the ref blew the half-time whistle and when we came back in with The Age of Faith the lads had changed sides and everybody was running the other way.

Question is how long can Julian the Apostate keep his team scoring before the Christians make a comeback?

Next question. What happens when the referee happens to be the emperor and the emperor dies? Well, it’s not really a question, is it? Durant doesn’t leave things like that to guesswork.

[Luffy Sempai · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began reading this book in January the 10th 0f 2021 and finished reading it on the 13th of April of the same year. This means that I blitzed my way through this book. For you see, this book was enormous, both in its physicality and its scope.

There is only one book above 1000 pages of my knowledge that has FUN stamped all over it in each page, and that book, is not LoTR. LoTR doesn't count because it is not a genuinely single work.

Back to The Age of Faith. The words in it are meant to be absorbed over a longer time than it took me. I hurried my way through it, but if it worked for The Way of Kings, it ought to be good enough for any chunky book. By the way The Way of Kings is that book that is perfect in each of its page. Until a reread dethrones it that is. Been having awful rereads recently.

I was most interested in England, France, Ireland, Italy and the Middle East mainly. I kind of got my answer to the age old question as to why the Italians are so refined in their culture but also are so Mesozoic in some of their ways. By the way, I've followed a few recipes from top chefs based in Italy and I came away with the feeling that I was being punked. Italian cooking is marginally inferior to English cooking. Just my opinion.

What I take from the Age of Faith is that history is different from popular culture. I was always bummed by the adage of calling our worldview theory... postmodernism. In fact we're proud of this word. This book made me realise how myopic so many current theologians, tech gurus, sociologists, historians and journalists are. News Flash people! we are never going to be postmodernists. That will happen when and only when people are enlightened enough when they expect a G7 summit gathering dress up their leaders in what I wear around the house. Boxer shorts and wife beater.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several months ago, I had a little debate with a friend of mine, who is studying history, about the Middle Ages. I was arguing, I’m sorry to say, a simplistic and stereotyped version of that period. I noted that the science of the day was almost wholly derived from Aristotle and other classical philosophers; that Galen, a Roman physician, was still considered the major authority of medicine; that philosophy was so intermingled with theology as to be wholly compromised. My friend pointed out to me that, first, to judge a different time period by the standards of one’s own is always questionable; and second, these large generalizations don’t do justice to the daily reality of the time, and that there was doubtless much variation from place to place, and from time to time.

The debate influenced me enough to prompt me to look more closely into the period’s history. First, I made my way through the works of Augustine and Aquinas, who had long been on my to-read shelf. Meanwhile, I took a trip to the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a beautiful branch of the museum overlooking the Hudson River—constructed out of pieces of several European abbeys, transported to New York—which houses the Met’s impressive collection of medieval art. And, finally, I began on Will Durant’s Age of Faith, the massive fourth installment of his even more massive Story of Civilization, which covers the period from the death of Constantine (337) to the death of Dante Alighieri (1321).

An enormous amount of information is packed into these pages—so much that I can’t hope to do justice to it all in this review. To a large extent, this book is of a piece with the two preceding volumes, The Life of Greece and Caesar and Christ; it differs mainly in being larger and more varied in subject matter. Durant aims to tell the story of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the resulting political chaos of Western Europe; the gradual decline and fall of the Eastern Empire and the development of Byzantine culture; the emergence of the modern political landscape from the invasions and conquests of the Middle Ages; as well as the history of the three major religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The sections on Islam and Judaism I found especially impressive. What were the Dark Ages for Western Europe was the Renaissance for the Muslim World; and Durant’s lengthy chapters on Muslim and Jewish thinkers are both admirable and inspiring. Now I am determined to at least read Moses Maimonides, Averroës, and Avicenna, to do justice to the intellectual life of this time period.

Durant is a fine writer and an competent chronicler, but what sets him apart is his versatility. He can write ably about mythology, poetry, sculpture, architecture, commerce, philosophy, literature, religion, culture, medicine, music, art, war, language, and government. Certainly, he is by no means an expert in any of these subjects, and doesn’t pretend to be; and it is fair to say that his treatment of each tends to be superficial and cursory. But the final combination is, as the saying goes, more than the sum of its parts. What emerges is a compelling portrait of an entire era, from its trade routes to its wandering minstrels, from its superstitions to its greatest thinkers. And every ounce of his versatility is needed in these pages, for, as I soon learned, the Middle Ages were a complex and eventful time, a far cry from the sorry stereotype I had held before.

Just last week, I found myself standing inside the Toledo Cathedral. I sat in the pews and looked up at the vaulted ceiling, which seemed supernaturally suspended above me. Every surface of the building was significant; every picture told a story, every shrine commemorated a holy event. Generations of artists had collaborated on this structure, making the final product a mix of styles across centuries; and yet every element coalesced into a nearly perfect whole. Colored light poured in through the stained glass windows high up above; voices echoed and re-echoed, seeming to descend from the ceiling in a chorus of unintelligible whispers; an intoxicating smell, I believe of frankincense, wafted over the space; and as I sat there, I found myself agreeing with Santayana, that, stripped of its pretentions to reality, the Catholic faith might be the most compelling piece of art ever made.

Shortly after leaving the cathedral, I found myself in a museum of torture devices used in the Middle Ages. Though I’m sure the information was exaggerated to titillate the tourist, it was impossible to look upon these devices without feeling a sense of shame for all of humanity, that we could ever subject one another to these bizarre and horrid punishments—especially for something as intangible as a religious belief. (Though, to be sure, heresies were often tied to politically revolutionary movements.) The juxtaposition of these two things, the cathedral and the torture devices, summarized for me why you can’t form a verdict of an age; sublimity and barbarism so often, if not always, exist side-by-side.

Durant does his best to do justice to this strange concatenation of cruelty and superstition, faith and reason, worldliness and otherworldliness; and I’m happy to say that he mostly succeeds. He does, however, have his faults. For one, although he is versatile in subject matter, he is not a flexible writer. His style becomes somewhat monotonous as it roles on; and by this, the fourth volume, the reader is familiar with all of Durant’s favorite turns of phrase and rhetorical devices—though admittedly when one writes as much as Durant, it is forgivable to run out of tricks. Durant is also unfortunately fond of superlatives; these pages are filled with the words “most” and “best”—to the extent that it all becomes rather meaningless. Added to this is his penchant for broad, unsustainable stereotypes. For example, he persistently characterizes the French as clear writers and logical thinkers—which any reader of Foucault and Bourdieu knows to be claptrap.

But what really separates Durant from true greatness is his lack of depth, rigor, and originality. His analyses of history are superficial; his writing style is adapted from Gibbon, though considerably watered down; his explanations of scientific theories and philosophical ideas are often sketchy; and no idea in this volume can be said to originate with Durant. He is not a historian, nor is he a philosopher; rather, Durant is a popularizer. Durant frankly writes for a middlebrow audience, perhaps the same audience who subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and brought Mortimer Adler and his Great Books of the Western World to fame. In the U.S. in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, apparently, there was a widespread hunger among the middle class for classical learning; and in that light, Durant’s Story of Civilization can be seen as remedial education for bourgeois Americans with highbrow aspirations. After all, a blue-blooded member of the intelligentsia would hardly have need for these volumes.

But fortunately for Durant, if he is a popularizer, he is an exceedingly good one—perhaps one of the best. And being myself a member of the uncultured American middle class, this remedial education in European history and culture is much appreciated. Thus I have nothing but gratitude for his diligence, and a deep respect for his capacious and genial mind.

[فؤاد · Rating 4 out of 5]

بخش قرون وسطاش جالب بود. جزئیات دادگاه های تفتیش عقاید و شکنجه ها و مخالفت های بعضی از فرقه های مذهبی (فکر کنم فرانسیسکن ها) با این دادگاه ها و اصلاً علت تشکیل این دادگاه ها به خاطر نهضت های بی دینی و طغیان های مردم شهرهای مختلف، و این که اعترافی که متهم، تحت شکنجه می کرد ولی بعداً از اعترافش بر می گشت، معتبر نبود و باید دوباره شکنجه می شد و دوباره اعتراف می کرد و آن قدر این چرخه ادامه می یافت که اعتراف تحت شکنجه اش با اعتراف بعد از شکنجه هماهنگ باشد!!! و خلاصه حاوی ماجراهای خنده آوری بود. فکر کنم به این نوع طنز می گویند "طنز سیاه" یا "طنز مرگ" یا همچون چیزی.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book exhausted me. I'll return soon to write a review. I'm trying to read one/month until November. Got this one in under the wire for April.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant's The Age of Faith, clocking in at a hefty thousand pages and every one of them weighed down with papal bulls, Byzantine plots, and untranslatable scholastic syllogisms, reads less like a history book and more like the travel diary of a philosopher with a memory longer than a medieval winter.

As Durant tiptoes from Augustine's guilt-ridden North Africa to Aquinas's logic-choked Summa, the reader is handed an intellectual tourniquet: either keep up, or bleed interest. "In the thirteenth century," Durant wryly observes, "even the angels debated whether they were real," and such divine hair-splitting sets the tone.

This is a world where a monk could spend forty years copying a single manuscript, and Abelard could lose both his virtue and his organs in a single chapter. The drama is operatic: we witness Alcuin tutoring Charlemagne between raids, the Umayyads installing public lighting in Córdoba while Christendom stumbles in the dark, and Bernard of Clairvaux damning Abelard with a poetic flair rarely seen outside ecclesiastical hit jobs.

Plot—though Durant would loathe the word in this context—is generated not by action but by accumulation: of facts, crusades, councils, curses. Jews are expelled from England in 1290 with a cold formality worthy of a tax code, while Maimonides, in Muslim Cairo, sneaks Jewish rationalism past two kinds of censors. Durant describes him as "a mind in exile from his own people and his own time." Popes hurl anathemas like ticker tape.

The plot thickens in Constantinople, which is sacked in 1204 not by Turks, but by fellow Christians—an ecclesiastical own goal of magnificent proportions. Meanwhile, the drama of women flows underground: Heloise, cloistered yet intellectually incandescent, pens letters that bleed philosophy and longing, while Hildegard of Bingen composes symphonies and castigates bishops with the fury of a Germanic Cassandra.

Occasionally, Durant succumbs to pious admiration ("Aquinas was a mountain"), but more often he lets dry irony do the talking. He notes, with a wink, that during the Crusades "more Christians died at the hands of their allies than their enemies." Sic transit gloria mundi.

Between his sweeping generalizations, he preserves space for lives and details that linger like bright embroidery on a dark cloak. Consider the lovable polymath Gerbert d'Aurillac, who, after studying Arabic science in Spain, became Pope Sylvester II—"one of the few popes who understood the astrolabe" and whose mechanical creations led to rumors of sorcery. Or the spirited Bernard of Clairvaux, who could "move armies with a sermon and rebuke popes with a whisper," yet still found time to bicker about the proper length of monks' sleeves.

Imagine the Visigoths, those shaggy-haired enthusiasts for pillage and theology, sacking Rome in 410—not just for gold, but to squabble over Arianism while looting chalices.

The Ostrogoths galloped in with a flair for urban renovation, turning Roman baths into stables and amphitheaters into goat pens. Attila the Hun, that beady-eyed "Scourge of God," received a Roman princess's hand in marriage (or at least her ring) as a diplomatic gift, only to celebrate his wedding night by eating and drinking himself to death—truly a romantic of gastrointestinal conviction .

One bishop reportedly bribed a barbarian chieftain not with gold, but with an urgent plea to spare the library—a gambit which worked until the chief asked, “What’s a library?” Then torched it. Such was the chaos of civilization colliding with horsemen who thought Latin was a type of wine.

Durant delights in contradictions: the iconoclastic emperor Leo III is called "a soldier with the zeal of a prophet," while Roger Bacon, cloistered in academic obscurity, rails against ignorance as the "mother of all heresy." We're told of Rabban Bar Sauma, the Nestorian monk who toured Europe like a medieval Marco Polo in reverse, dining with kings and kissing pontifical rings.

I didn't count, but deep in the footnotes lie hundreds of ecclesiastical underdogs and theological misfits who would have made even Monty Python proud. Take Abelard’s lesser-known protégé, Berengar of Tours, who tried to prove Christ wasn’t literally in the Eucharist—an argument that earned him such fervent threats he once disguised himself as a monk just to attend his own heresy trial unnoticed.

Then there’s the curious monk Gottschalk of Orbais, whose obsession with double predestination led to beatings, prison, and—possibly worse—literary obscurity. And let’s not forget poor Saint Guinefort, a greyhound canonized by French peasants who mistook the dog’s posthumous loyalty for divine grace, leading to centuries of illicit puppy pilgrimages. The Middle Ages were a flea market of divine oddities.

And there's Alcuin, Charlemagne's brainy tutor, who juggled theology with trivia and once remarked with characteristic wit, "Do not wonder that I have learned so much; wonder rather that I have forgotten so little."

Among the many highlights of medieval piety and punishment, smorgasbord of macabre medievalism is goringly detailed: monks who, in a fit of righteousness, starved themselves into ecstatic visions; heretics who were cheerfully slow-roasted over open fires like theological kebabs; and one unfortunate criminal who had his hands chopped off and then nailed to the gallows for a posthumous moral lesson . There are lurid tales of eyes gouged out, tongues ripped from sockets, and the infamous trial-by-ordeal where one might prove innocence by pulling a stone from boiling water without screaming. The book also treats us to Charlemagne’s not-so-charitable day when he allegedly had 4,500 Saxons beheaded in a single pious afternoon. Let’s just say medieval justice came marinated in blood and served with a hymnal.

Even the sordid episodes gleam with narrative verve: the archbishop of Milan gets flogged in a cathedral for his political sins, while Peter Abelard's tragedy becomes a medieval soap opera—brilliance, scandal, castration, and all. Durant mourns the lost music of Hildegard von Bingen's compositions, marvels at the Moorish libraries of Córdoba (one boasting 400,000 volumes), and notes, with dry humor, that King Alfonso X "spent more time with astronomy than administration, but at least the stars obeyed him." In the East, the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena pens history with such swagger that Gibbon called her "the Tacitus of the palace," and in the West, towns sprout guilds "as mushrooms after rain," filling the streets with bakers, cobblers, and heretics alike.

Medieval attitudes toward sex, are also laid bare: virginity was prized so highly that theologians debated whether Mary remained a virgin even during Christ’s birth (they concluded she did, painlessly and miraculously). Meanwhile, celibate monks reportedly had such lurid dreams that entire treatises were written on nocturnal emissions and whether they counted as sin.

One monk was said to have immolated himself rather than endure the torments of lust, and yet prostitution was so widespread in Avignon that the Church regulated it—ensuring courtesans were clean, taxed, and not too loud.

Flagellants whipped themselves in public to quell carnal urges, while noblewomen snuck away to secret orgies that some inquisitors insisted were "witchcraft" but sounded suspiciously like very enthusiastic sex parties. And in one particularly spicy anecdote, a pope was rumored to have died mid-coitus, a sin so grave it required several cardinals to brainstorm just how to bury him without implicating the Church in his, ahem, climax.

Even death gets its anecdote: during the Black Death, some flagellants beat themselves with such fervor that Durant dryly comments, "It was the only time in history when penance outpaced sin." Through these vignettes, the medieval world doesn't just live—it jests, weeps, chants, and bleeds.

What does one carry away? A sense that faith, in its medieval forms, was both opiate and engine: stupefying when hierarchical, electrifying when mystical. Durant's style—learned, ornate, lovingly baroque—is not a vehicle for ease but for immersion. One doesn't read him; one is submerged in him like a heretic in a ducking stool.

If history is, as Durant suggests, philosophy teaching by example, then The Age of Faith is its most ironic classroom—complete with burnings, excommunications, and celestial debates about the exact location of Paradise.

The Crusaders, God’s blood-splattered pilgrims, were an odd bunch: one devout knight refused to eat until he had personally bitten into the Holy Sepulchre; another carried a jar of Saint Nicholas’s beard oil for good luck. When they reached Eretz Israel, their reverence manifested in charmingly grotesque ways—some wept upon seeing Jerusalem, while others promptly massacred everyone in it, reportedly up to their knees in blood, which either says something about their fervor or medieval exaggeration. One monk-turned-general marched barefoot across scorching Syrian plains while quoting Virgil, confusing both the enemy and his own men. And in one bizarre episode, a Crusader claimed he was cured of gout by licking the tomb of a martyred camel (possibly a mistranslation… or a divine joke).

The Muslim conquests stormed through empires with Koran in one hand and scimitar in the other, often literally. Durant recounts how the capture of Damascus turned its rose-scented courtyards into blood sluices; prisoners were beheaded in assembly-line fashion, their heads carted off to caliphs as grisly trophies of divine favor. In North Africa, Berber resistors were reportedly crucified along the roads, their bodies left to rot in the desert sun while muezzins called the faithful to prayer nearby.

One caliph famously celebrated a victory by feasting before a mound of 500 enemy skulls—an oddly symmetrical centerpiece for someone so invested in Islamic law. The conquest of Persia featured execution pits so deep that Durant pauses to note that the blood of Zoroastrian nobles “flowed like a sacrament,” and in Spain, Arab cavalry reportedly trampled Visigoth corpses into the soil until one general joked they had fertilized al-Andalus.

Even martyrdom had its baroque twist: slain Muslims were washed, perfumed, and paraded like holy meat in what one observer described as “a joyless wedding.” This was colonial empire-building with a butcher’s ledger and a prophet’s banner.

One wonders what medieval Islamic life smelled like after reading about Avicenna’s 100-strong harem and his habit of composing medical treatises in between seductions and fainting spells brought on by his own intellect; meanwhile, al-Ma’mun, the caliph with a fetish for Greek philosophy, nearly caused a civil war by forcing the doctrine of the Qur'an's createdness—essentially arguing God had a deadline.

At the other end of decorum, Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, a man who banned mulukhiyah (a perfectly innocent green soup) for being too sensual, also disappeared mysteriously while riding a donkey into the hills. And the fact that Muslim Spain produced physicians who removed cataracts with a needle while Europe was still bleeding patients for demonic possession is not just weirdly impressive—it’s practically slapstick when you remember the “barbers” across the Pyrenees. Islam in the medieval world, Durant reminds us, was less the exotic monolith of clichés and more a chaotic, intellectual circus tent with minarets.

The Jews, meanwhile, drift between pogrom and privilege, tolerated when taxed, vilified when convenient, and enduring with a tenacity that Durant treats with respectful melancholy.

After the Bar Kokhba revolt left Judea scorched and templeless, Roman vengeance exiled the Jews from their homeland in a dispersal that Durant describes as both geographical and theological: from the land into the law.

The Talmud emerges in this exile as both fortress and flame—debated in Babylon, codified through centuries of verbal acrobatics, and guarded as fiercely as any citadel. Durant calls it “the constitution of a people without a state,” a book so revered it could replace territory.

But if the Talmud sustained Jewish life, antisemitism calcified against it. In Europe, Jews were taxed, segregated, and slandered with such monotonous ingenuity that Durant’s dry understatement becomes its own form of lament. Blood libels spread like fungal rot—one boy’s death in Norwich became a pretext for hundreds—and the synagogue, once a place of prayer, was often torched before the amen. Popes issued condemnations, princes demanded conversions, mobs preferred bonfires.

Yet in Babylon and Spain, in Cairo and Troyes, Jewish scholars refined their dialectic into defiance. It was a chapter of mutilated maps and rabbinic resolve, a theology lived in footnotes and flight.

The Jews of the medieval world, Durant shows, were not so much a wandering people as a people chased into genius. In Gaul, King Chilperic offered conversion—or eye removal—with the casual menace of a man doling out options from a menu. In Persia, respected rabbis openly advertised in new towns for temporary wives to “model marital virtue” during their travels—rabbinical bachelorhood had its perks.

Meanwhile, a French king was so enriched by the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property that he rewarded his coachman with a synagogue. Benjamin of Tudela, Jewish Marco Polo avant la lettre, wrote of communities in Ceylon, Alexandria, and beyond, including one where four kidnapped rabbis, sold as slaves by Muslim pirates, went on to found major Jewish academies in the cities where they were ransomed.

In a particularly Gothic twist, crusaders trampled 3,000 Jews under their horses at Bordeaux when baptism was refused—Durant’s wry comment: Pope Gregory IX “condemned the slaughter, but did not raise the dead”. Amid all this, Rabbi Rashi quietly sold wine in Troyes while writing Talmudic commentaries so lucid they’ve never gone out of print.

These were centuries where Jewish philosophers wrote in Arabic, martyrs memorized prayers for death on demand, and one enterprising rabbi taught the Mishna in Champagne between vintages. It was not survival—it was a sustained intellectual jailbreak.

In medieval theater, actors playing demons were so convincingly terrifying that women would faint or go into labor mid-mystery play, which, frankly, sounds more intense than modern horror films . Meanwhile, Byzantine artists painted angels with disturbingly birdlike features, possibly to frighten sinners straight—or because no one dared correct the monk with the brush.

In music, some Church councils banned certain harmonies for being “too lascivious,” proving that even Gregorian chants could be scandalous if sung in the wrong mode.

Gothic cathedrals rose like stone hallucinations while peasants thought gargoyles were demon repellents, though some sculptors allegedly modeled them after their least favorite abbots.

And in literature, a monk once annotated a holy manuscript with doodles of battling rabbits and fart jokes, suggesting that even in cloisters, bathroom humor was eternal.

The final impression is that of a thousand years of human paradox: saints with swords, philosophers with blind spots, and sinners with hymns on their lips. Five stars—for every wound in the side of reason, and every candle flickering in the cathedrals of doubt.

[Helga چـو ایـران نباشد تن من مـباد · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Nothing is lost in history; sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development and adds its color to the flame of life.”

The Age of Faith, the fourth volume of The Story of Civilization, covers the Middle Ages in Europe and the Near East giving a fair and comprehensive account of the economic, political, legal, military, moral, social, religious, educational, scientific, philosophic and artistic aspects of four distinct civilizations- Byzantine, Islamic, Judaic and West European.

“But if, thereafter, reason should fail and science should find no answers, but should multiply knowledge and power without improving conscience or purpose; if all utopias should brutally collapse in the changeless abuse of the weak by the strong; then men would understand why once their ancestors in the barbarism of those early Christian centuries, turned from science, knowledge, power and pride and took refuge for a thousand years in humble faith, hope and charity.”

[محمد شکری · Rating 4 out of 5]

چگونه میتوان درمورد کتابی با حجم 1050 صفحه (دست کم 2100 صفحه استاندارد) که در طول 5 سال خوانده شده، به سادگی نقد و بررسی نوشت؟ آن هم کتابی که از هر نظر برای خواننده جذاب بوده اما بخشهای بسیاری از آن (به همان دو دلیل حجم و زمان) از خاطر او رفته است

به هر حال، من میکوشم به این پرسش اصلی که «عصر ایمان چگونه کتابی است؟» پاسخ دهم. این پاسخ دست کم سه وجه کلی خواهد داشت

ساختار و فرم کتاب
عصر ایمان کتابی است با دو رویکرد تو-در-تو: تاریخ کلان و تاریخ زندگینامه ای
منظور از تاریخ کلان توجه به عناوین کلی مانند «رشد مسیحیت»، «شکل گیری اروپا»، «تمدن اسلامی» و... است که ساختار اصلی این کتاب (و باقی مجلدات تاریخ تمدن) را شکل میدهد. از این نظر کتاب از پنج بخش کلی تشکیل شده که عبارتند از: ر
یک) اوج اعتلای بیزانس؛ در هفت فصل (140 صفحه) که از بربریت اروپا تا تمدن بیزانس و ایران را روایت میکند/ 325 تا 363 هجری قمری
دو) تمدن اسلامی؛ در هفت فصل (190 صفحه) که از شخصیت پیامبر اسلام تا اوج اعتلای مسلمانان در عهدین اموی و عباسی و سپس تا حمله مغول که عامل اصلی انحطاط مسامین است را در بر دارد/ 53 تا 656 هجری قمری
سه) تمدن یهودی؛ در سه فصل (70 صفحه) که از تدوین تلمود تا ماجرای یهودیان در اروپا و مواجهه یهودیت و اسلام را به قلم میکشد/ 135 تا 1300 میلادی
چهار) عصر ظلمت؛ در پنج فصل (150 صفحه) که از زندگی اولیه اروپایی تا پیروزی مسیحیت در عصر فئودالیسم را روایت میکند/ 566 تا 1095 میلادی
پنج) اوج مسیحیت، در 16 فصل (500 صفحه) که بار اصلی کتاب را بر دوش دارد و از جنگ های صلیبی آغاز شده و به تاریخ کلیسا، هنرهای قرون وسطایی و پایان این اعصار به عنوان سکوی پرش رنسانس میپردازد. این فصل مسئول نشان دادن درهم تنیدگی مسیحیت و تمدن اروپایی در قرون وسطاست

همانطور که معلوم است، ساختار اصلی کتاب، تاریخ کلان یا مسئله محور است. ولی در هر بخشی دورانتها به رویکرد زندگینامه نویسی روی آورده اند که بی شک میتوان گفت شیرینی و تعلیقیه اصلی کتاب برای غیرمورخانی مثل من است
برای من زندگی نامه اهمیت بسیاری دارد، ترکیبی از روایت تاریخی و داستانی که هم افق گشاست و هم محدودکننده خیال؛ محدودکننده به معنای بازدارنده خیال از سقوط به آنچه امثال نوسبام و مرداک نام آن را توهم گذاشته اند
در توصیه نهایی به این نکته بر خواهم گشت

محتوای کتاب
انتهای کتاب حدودا 450 منبع ذکرشده که در متن به آنها ارجاع داده شده است! با این همه باز از نظر من تاریخ تمدن به شکل پژوهش تاریخی نوشته نشده و این شاید حتی حسن کتاب باشد. کتاب با ظرایف اقوال و اختلاف گزارشها پر نشده، جا به جا مولف و نظریات شخصی او حضور دارند و پرشهای جزئی به کلی و برعکس در آن بسیار است. این رویکرد خاص دورانت(ها) اثر را به نوعی روایت تاریخی خواندنی تبدیل کرده
از نظر بیطرفی که ادعایی رنگ باخته و ناموجه است، باید گفت پیشفرضها و طرفداریهای دورانت بسیار عالمانه و پخته بود. حضور، قضاوت و احکام تاریخی او بسیار سنجیده است. او دریافته که «تاریخ جهان» جایگاهی فراتر از جایگاه معرفتی ما دارد و جهان همواره با جریانی درهم به پیش رفته است. به همین دلیل است که دورانت در مواجهه با اسلام، یهودیت و حتی بربریت همانطور حکم میدهد که درباره مسیحیت و غرب
من البته منکر طرح جامع اروپامحور دورانت نیستم. از یک مورخ امریکایی قرن نوزدهم-بیستمی هم انتظار ندارم با نگاهی چندفرهنگی یا ساختارشکنانه به تاریخ نظر کند. ولی جدا از طرح کلی که ذهن مورخ را مشغول خود میکند، گزینش و نگارش جزئی او هم اهمیت دارد که از نظر من در این آزمون انصاف خود را نشان داده است
یک نکته درباره ترجمه: ترجمه اثر در کل خوب بود اما چند مترجمی در آن کاملا مشهود بود

جامعیت کتاب
من داور مناسبی برای این وجه نیستم؛ به عبارت دقیقتر داور نامناسب«تر»ی برای این بخشم. اما جدای جامعیت اثر که در بخشهایی (تاریخ اقتصادی) بسیار ناقص، در بخشهایی (تاریخ هنر) معقول و در بخشهایی (تاریخ فرهنگی) بسیار مطول است، مانعیت اثر هم جای بحث دارد. کتاب بسیار بیش از آنی که منِ نوعی انتظار داشتم در بزنگاه هایی توقف کرده و شرح مبسوطی از روزمره یا فرهنگ و روابط خاص دوره یا گروهی داشت که خواندن اثر را بسیار دشوار میکرد. یکی از دلایلی که بجای 5 به این کتاب 4 ستاره دادم همین زیاده نویسی بود


یک توصیه درباره کتاب
حجب کتاب قاعدتا بیش از آنی است که بتوان آن را به کسی توصیه کرد. ولی اگر کمی به تاریخ ادیان و زندگینامه علاقه دارید، این بخشها را که از جمله درخشانترین زندگینامه های این کتاب بودند بخوانید: «آبلار و هلوئیز»، «سنت آگوستین»، «صلاح الدین ایوبی»، «قدیس برنار»، «پوستیانوس»، «هارون الرشید» و «قدیس هیرونوموس»
همچنین اگر به تاریخ اسلام علاقمندید، فصول 10 تا 12 کتاب را بخوانید تا نگاه (احتمالی) شما به بنی امیه و بنی عباس اصلاح شده و به اهمیت باورنکردنی آنها در تمدن اسلامی پی ببرید

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

To understand the Middle Ages we must forget our modern rationalism, our proud confidence in reason and science, our restless search after wealth and power and an earthly paradise; we must enter sympathetically into the mood of men disillusioned of these pursuits, standing at the end of a thousand years of rationalism, finding all dreams of utopia shattered by war and poverty and barbarism, seeking consolation in the hope of happiness beyond the grave.

On sites for book readers you can occasionally find posts that ask if Will Durant’s eleven volume Story of Civilization is still worth reading, and the responses are generally mixed. For me, though, the answer is an emphatic yes. Durant was not an academic historian who wrote primarily for other historians; he was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide to the key developments of history across a broad range of topics: politics, economics, religion, science, philosophy, literature, art, and more. New scholarship has added some details and incorporated some changes in emphasis, but Durant remains an excellent source for big-picture history, with his astonishing ability to tie together peoples, places, times, and events. If you seek to understand the past, Durant is a good place to start.

Volume Four, The Age of Faith, covers the Middle Ages from the death of Constantine in 337 to Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1320. It ranges from the fall of the western Roman empire to the rise and decline of Byzantium; the invasions of the barbarians; the spread of Islam; the birth of feudalism; the age of chivalry and the shift in emphasis from infantry to mounted warfare; the Crusades; the Spanish Reconquista; the expansion of the power and influence of the Roman Catholic church across Europe and the growing resistance to it from newly emerging nation states. Along the way the book adds chapters on philosophy, law, architecture, science, economics, and the growing power of towns and guilds at the expense of feudal lords.

The book is particularly good on the rise and spread of Islam. Our present age is one of religious confrontation, but it is well to be reminded that early Islam was a dynamic and invigorating force for civilization. It was more tolerant, placed greater emphasis on justice and mercy, and more accepting of new ideas than the Christianity of that age, thus preserving precious works of history, science, and philosophy that otherwise would have been lost forever. By the time Islam arrived in the Levant, the political and religious institutions of the Byzantine empire had become corrupt, oppressive forces. The Moslem armies were abetted and welcomed by many people in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, who were granted far more autonomy in worship than they previously had.

The rise in power and prestige of the Papacy was accompanied by a rise in corruption, and those who objected too vocally disappeared into dungeons and onto gibbets. Francis of Assisi’s doctrine of poverty and simplicity almost led to its being condemned, as many other similar movements were. Religious orthodoxy was seen as essential to maintaining order, and in one of its darkest moments, the Papacy unleashed the Inquisition, permitting and even encouraging torture and murder. Since the Inquisitors received a portion of the wealth of the condemned, many innocent people were sent to their deaths.

Before starting The Story of Civilization, Durant was known for his very popular book The Story of Philosophy. Not surprisingly, his chapters on philosophy in The Age of Faith are excellent, whether he is discussing Jewish mysticism, Christian Scholasticism, or the Islamic incorporation of Aristotle into their own systems. Durant fills out his discussions with details about the factors that led to the creation of these schools of philosophy, their leading adherents, and their effects on social and religious practices.

Another area that Durant seems to have a special interest in is architecture. In this he sometimes lets his enthusiasm lead him astray. In addition to discussing the origins, technical details, and principles of design of the emerging Gothic style, he takes time to discuss at length what seemed like every cathedral in Europe: its dimensions, its statuary and stained glass, and its effect on visitors. It made me want to learn more about Gothic architecture, but the chapter ran on longer than it needed to be.

The Renaissance would not have been possible without advances made in the Middle Ages. Stronger kings were able to maintain stability and enforce justice, modern financial and banking institutions arose, as did the first universities, and advances in metallurgy that eventually led to the Industrial Revolution. It was a fascinating age, and Durant’s book does justice to its vigorous complexity, the slow and difficult process of bringing order after the collapse of Western civilization, and laying the groundwork for great age to follow.

I highlighted 290 quotes from this book, and it was difficult for me to trim them down to a few exemplary ones that show Durant’s knowledge, understanding, and even humor, and still stay within Goodreads’ length limitations, but following are some that I particularly enjoyed.

-We shall never do justice to the Middle Ages until we see the Italian Renaissance not as their repudiation but as their fulfillment.

-The emperor himself could legislate by simple decree, and his will was the supreme law. In the view of the emperors, democracy had failed; it had been destroyed by the Empire that it had helped to win; it could rule a city, perhaps, but not a hundred varied states; it had carried liberty into license, and license into chaos, until its class and civil war had threatened the economic and political life of the entire Mediterranean world.

-History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die.

-In Europe the Age of Faith reached its last full flower in Dante; it suffered a vital wound from Occam’s “razor” in the fourteenth century; but it lingered, ailing, till the advent of Bruno and Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon and Hobbes; it may return if the Age of Reason achieves catastrophe.

-Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died.

-It is discouraging to note how many things were known to the youth of our civilization, which are unknown to us today.

-The cost of books, and the dearth of funds for schools, produced a degree of illiteracy which would have seemed shameful to ancient Greece or Rome.

-Once again history illustrated the truism that civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest.

-Gaul now surpassed Italy in Roman pride, in order and wealth, in Latin poetry and prose; but in every generation it had to defend itself against Teutons whose women were more fertile than their fields.

-The higher birth rate outside the Empire, and the higher standard of living within it, made immigration or invasion a manifest destiny for the Roman Empire then as for North America today.

-patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime.

-The rise and decline of Islamic civilization is one of the major phenomena of history. For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy.

-belief in predestination made fatalism a prominent feature in Moslem thought. It was used by Mohammed and other leaders to encourage bravery in battle, since no danger could hasten, nor any caution defer, the predestined hour of each man’s death. It gave the Moslem a dignified resignation against the hardships and necessities of life; but it conspired with other factors to produce, in later centuries, a pessimistic inertia in Arab life and thought.

-The Koran, like the Fundamentalist forms of Christianity, seems more concerned with right belief than with good conduct; a hundred times it threatens with hell those who reject Mohammed’s appeal

-The Jews of the Near East had welcomed the Arabs as liberators. They suffered now divers disabilities and occasional persecutions; but they stood on equal terms with Christians, were free once more to live and worship in Jerusalem, and prospered under Islam in Asia, Egypt, and Spain as never under Christian rule.

-Property was concentrated in the hands of a few; the great gulf between rich and poor, between Christian and Jew, divided the nation into three states; and when the Arabs came, the poor and the Jews connived at the overthrow of a monarchy and a Church that had ignored their poverty or oppressed their faith.

-Moslem civilization had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, education, and war.

-The Christians of the East in general regarded Islamic rule as a lesser evil than that of the Byzantine government and church.

-The Moslems seem to have been better gentlemen than their Christian peers; they kept their word more frequently, showed more mercy to the defeated, and were seldom guilty of such brutality as marked the Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

-Mohammedanism, like Christianity, was a developing and adjustable religion, which would have startled a reborn Mohammed or Christ.

-Christianity sought unity through uniform belief, Judaism through uniform ritual.

-Talmudic law, like the Mohammedan, was man-made law, and favored the male so strongly as to suggest, in the rabbis, a very terror of woman’s power.

-“Modern” thought begins with the rationalism of Abélard, reaches its first peak in the clarity and enterprise of Thomas Aquinas, sustains a passing defeat in Duns Scotus, rises again with Occam, captures the papacy in Leo X, captures Christianity in Erasmus, laughs in Rabelais, smiles in Montaigne, runs riot in Voltaire, triumphs sardonically in Hume, and mourns its victory in Anatole France.

-God is beyond our understanding; we can only say what He is not, not what He is; “almost everything that is said of God is unworthy, for the very reason that it is capable of being said.”

-In an age of faith, where hardship makes life unbearable without hope, philosophy inclines to religion, uses reason to defend faith, and becomes a disguised theology.

-More puzzling, still-filling all Augustine’s life with wonder and debate—was the problem of harmonizing the free will of man with the foreknowledge of God. If God is omniscient He sees the future in all details; since God is immutable, this picture that He has of all coming events lays upon them the necessity of occurring as He has foreseen them; they are irrevocably predestined. Then how can man be free? Must he not do what God has foreseen? And if God has foreseen all things, He has known from all eternity the final fate of every soul that He creates; why, then, should He create those that are predestined to be damned?

-Having displaced the axis of man’s concern from this world to the next, Christianity offered supernatural explanations for historical events, and thereby passively discouraged the investigation of natural causes; many of the advances made by Greek science through seven centuries were sacrificed to the cosmology and biology of Genesis.

-Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach toleration; she looked with the same hostile eye upon individualism in belief as the state upon secession or revolt.

-Feeling herself an inseparable part of the moral and political government of Europe, the Church looked upon heresy precisely as the state looked upon treason: it was an attack upon the foundations of social order.

-To millions of souls the Church brought a faith and hope that inspired and canceled death. That faith became their most precious possession, for which they would die or kill; and on that rock of hope the Church was built.

-the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy.

- A century after the death of Francis [of Assisi] his most loyal followers were burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

-Papal bull of Nicholas III (1280): We prohibit all laymen to discuss matters of the Catholic faith; if anyone does so he shall be excommunicated.

-Rome was the center, but hardly the model, of Latin Christianity. No city in Christendom had less respect for religion, except as a vested interest.

-Moral education was stressed in the Middle Ages at the expense of intellectual enlightenment, as intellectual education is today stressed at the expense of moral discipline.

-The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence that right would win in the end, and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimated in the universal triumph of the good.

-All religions are superstitions to other faiths.

-Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

-Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things.

-It is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy.

-In judging the Inquisition we must see it against the background of a time accustomed to brutality. Perhaps it can be better understood by our age, which has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon.

-these works of the thirteenth century mingled theology with science, and superstition with observation; they breathed the air of their time; and we should be chagrined if we could foresee how our own omniscience will be viewed seven centuries hence.

-If [Dante,] a man so bitter could win a conducted tour through paradise we shall all be saved.

-Half the terrors of the medieval soul are gathered into this gory chronicle [The Divine Comedy]. As one reads its awful pages the gruesome horror mounts, until at last the cumulative effect is oppressive and overwhelming. Not all the sins and crimes of man from nebula to nebula could match the sadistic fury of this divine revenge. Dante’s conception of hell is the crowning indecency of medieval theology.

-Centuries of barbarism, insecurity, and war had to intervene before man could defile his God with attributes of undying vengeance and inexhaustible cruelty.

-Taverns were numerous, ale was cheap. Beer was the regular drink of the poor, even at breakfast. Monasteries and hospitals north of the Alps were normally allowed a gallon of ale or beer per person per day.

- The women kept the place as clean as circumstances would permit, but the busy peasants found cleanliness a nuisance, and stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking I ought to know more about medieval history, and now by God I know more about medieval history. Quite a lot more, really. The fact that I retain so much of such a long book says a lot about Durant's skills as a writer. I especially enjoyed his commentary and aides, though: Sweeping generalizations that, however quotable, no editor would permit today; bits of color to liven up the narrative; no attempt at an overarching thesis. Since he finished the book in 1946 I am sure that some of the scholarship is out of date, but he was quite progressive for his time, and in any case this is about broad outlines and good stories not careful interpretations. Quite enjoyable.

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Western civilization is built on a lie.

Since the enlightenment, historians and philosophers draw a line from classical culture to modern western thought, bringing ancient prestige our current culture. Histories gloss over the inconveniently barbaric and fractured times between antiquity and renaissance. Yet after the ashes of the western Roman Empire had cooled, the dark ages were when modern western culture was born.

Faith, not philosophy, was the candle in the dark that led the frail steps of civilization; the grip of this ideology was absolute. With political power crumbling into ever smaller fiefdoms and the concomitant collapse of trade, a religion that had already spread through the causeways of the now defunct Roman empire proved to be more than a match for any competing forces of civilization. Intellectual thought was subsumed into the theological realm, political power was subservient to papal authority, and every year revolved around religious holidays. Take for example Pope Gregory, who transformed the backwater Diocese of Rome into the church that stands to this day:

While his hand managed the scattered empire, his thoughts dwelt on the corruption of human nature the temptations of ubiquitous devils , and the approaching end of the world. He preached with power that religion of terror which was to darken men’s minds for centuries. He accepted all the miracles of popular legend, all the magical efficacy of relics images and formulas. He lived in a world haunted with angels, demons, wizards, and ghosts. All sense of a rational order in the universe had departed from him. It was a world in which science was impossible, and only a fearful faith remained. The next 7 centuries would accept this theology.

In short Christianity absorbed, controlled, and directed the progress (or lack thereof) civilization. Nowhere else in Western history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many for so long. Rome lasted 480 years, the Mongol and British Empires 200 years, but the Roman Catholic empire was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne in 814 to the death of Boniface VIII in 1303, 489 years later.

Now, 700 years later, it only takes one look at the steepled church outside my window, my family's catholic traditions, or America’s strange relationship with truth as defined by science to reveal how western civilization was truly forged in the dark ages. Age of Faith makes little attempt to connect the history of civilization with modern times, but through providing a holistic overview the period, it describes the bloody, intolerant, and mostly unwritten birth of western civilization.

Most of Age of Faith focuses on Christian Europe. While this focus is important for understanding ourselves, Christian Europe was a backwater at the time: the Islamic world (dar al-salaam) and Tang China were the contemporary seat of civilization. Durant ignores China, but Age of Faith’s overview provides context the near one-way flow of culture from east to west. The influence of Islam on Christendom was varied and immense: from Islam christian Europe received foods drinks drugs medicaments, armor, heraldry art motives and tastes, industrial and commercial articles and techniques, maritime codes and ways, and often the words for these things. It’s easy for a modern scholar to get swept up by availability bias, we may estimate the wealth of muslim literature in his time by noting that not 1 in 1000 volumes that he named is known to exist today. What we know of muslim thought in those centuries is a fragment of what survives, what survives is a fragment of what was produced. What appears in these pages is a morsel of a fraction of a fragment. Furthermore, Islamic empires and the rump state of Byzantium served as the buffer between Europe the apocalypses of the Mongols and Timur.

Europe in the age of faith was a more diverse place, but the Christianity of the time was more xenophobic. In the best case were entrepots like Sicily, where all sects “[hated] one another religiously, but [lived] together with no more than a Sicilian average of passion, poetry and crime." But more representative was Byzantium, where "There was something shallow about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering superstition, fanaticism, and illiterate ignorance, and half the culture was devoted to perpetuating that ignorance." A series of pogroms, genocide, and atrocities led to the homogenization of Europe into the Christian faith it holds today.

Durant makes sacrifices in covering a such a broad scope in time and geography. But a wide lens is needed to catch the tectonic interactions between cultures and peoples of the time. Of course Gibbon is better at describing Byzantine decline, Ansary is better telling the story of the Islamic golden age, and Jabari is better at deconstructing the currents of Islamic thought. But in a breath, I've described 2000 pages of reading, not all of which is even available in English. By the time gunpowder and Equinus' reason brought the middle age to a close, Europe had started to rebuild something that could be called civilization. But to understand the id of what it means to be a part of the west, put down the classics and start here with the barbaric, bloody, and benighted beginning. After all The Age of Faith may return if the age of reason achieves catastrophe.

49th book of 2021

Other interesting quotes

* The Age of Faith may return if the age of reason achieves catastrophe.
* Christian spain achieved in reconquista only because muslim spain surpassed it in fragmentation and anarchy.
* Guilds as the precursors of special interests.
* The inquisition postponed by three centuries the dismemberment of western Christianity.
* Technology tends to advance, but civilizations spend most of their time in decline.
* Jewish aristocracy in Spain: By its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.
* School of oriental studies opened in 1250 by dominican monks to teach Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic studies were also prominent in Seville
* The development of the bow began the military debacle of feudalism [...] The final blow to feudal military power would come in the 14th century in the form of gunpowder and cannon, which killed the armored knight and shattered his castle.
* He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith, but in his triumph he had brought the age of faith to its end.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Durant volume takes the reader from the tail of the Roman Empire to the 13th century, primarily in Christendom Europe.

In this Age when faith and orthodoxy ruled, St. Augustine was its most powerful voice Durant says. Augustine allowed earthly cities, but life there was secondary to the divine city "of the one true God." Augustine gave "a definitive stamp to catholic theology," Durant continues, "giving it a Neoplatonic tinge." Augustine formulated "the claim of the Church to supremacy over the mind and the state." That supremacy, however, had to be achieved through conflict with pagans and tribes; with Arab, Islamic, and Byzantine peoples; and with religious thinkers who strayed from orthodoxy. At the apex of the Church's standing in Latin Christianity, Pope Innocent III (1161-1216) envisioned a moral world-state.

In this era of faith, life was stuck in time. Feudal society (freemen, serfs, slaves) was characterized by a dual loyalty, with serfs and slaves trading "subjection for protection" from their masters and looking to the church for comfort and salvation. Slaves were slaves because it was their nature, and women were intended to be inferior by God. "Like Plato," Durant comments, "the Jew thanked God that he had not been born a woman; and the woman replied humbly, 'I thank God that I was made according to His will.'" Magic and superstition were everywhere; science and knowledge were subservient to religious orthodoxy and medicine was "a branch of theology." Life was strict and unforgiving. It was a "God-intoxicated age" where "Most Christians believed that all Moslems - and most Moslems...- believed that all Christians would go to hell...." Under the Inquisition, torture was used to get confessions, and "wars and persecutions" revealed "a ferocity unknown in any beast," Durant writes. St. Francis' devotion to life and non-life was such that he hesitated to blow out a candle for fear that "the fire might object to being put out." A hundred years later, "his most loyal followers were burned at the stake by the Inquisition." The consecrated wafer came to contain "the whole body, blood, and soul of Jesus Christ" and, Durant comments, "one of the oldest ceremonies of primitive religion - the eating of the god - is widely practiced and revered in European and American civilization today." Nevertheless, the church was "doing its best" to promote civilizing values, Durant states. It built the great cathedrals in Europe, created majestic music to fill its chambers, and served as hubs of charity and comfort for the weak and the poor.

Even so, these civilizing values were confined by a faith-based worldview that kept man and women in their proper place. Women were seen as "the favored instrument of Satan" who led men to hell. At the end of this age, Thomas Aquinas, who sought to reconcile Aristotle's scientific thinking with the word of God, was the prisoner of his own religious world. "'The woman,'" Aquinas wrote, "'is subject to the man on account of the weakness of her nature, both mind and body.'" This is, he believed the law of nature and that law in his Aristotle-based theology was the law of God. Facing the lessons of Aristotle that were coming into Europe at the time, Aristotle could not ignore the biological nature of man. Body and soul are one, he believed, and knowledge begins with the senses as opposed to faith-based knowledge. Sense-based knowledge combines with reason to reveal God's existence and God's sole role as the creator of everything. Everything has a cause and such chains of logic can be taken all the way back to the beginning, the First Cause, that acts upon but is not acted upon. This was God.

Aquinas' philosophy-theology was comprehensive in scale and scope. He took what he faced, the all-dominant Church on the one hand and the increasingly pervasive evidence that the world, in fact, operated by more than faith and magic, and weaved together a story that made a good deal of sense. But the tie between reason and theology was tenuous and began to fray in the centuries to come. This was to become the Renaissance, which is the subject of Durant's next volume.

Durant's knowledge and writing is impressive. In this volume, as in his prior ones, Durant offers observations here and there about the lessons of history, believing that the best predictor of the future is who we have been in the past. Patterns repeat themselves. Civilization is a thin veneer. The brutality of the Inquisition was surpassed only by the two wars of the last century he says (the volume was written in the late 1940s). The battle for the human soul, which found a temporary resolution in Aquinas, continues. Faith-based knowledge competes with empirically based-reason and reason competes with itself. Remove God and re-substitute Platonic Forms, and Aquinas is still relevant today in some objective, non-empirical reality. Is the soul transcendent spirit, mind, or is it lodged in our body?

Durant's histories continue to give. This very long volume was written many decades ago but, as in Volumes II and III, Durant acknowledges his role as a historian for the future as well as the past. He writes, "Thank you, again, friend reader." Class act.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my favorite book I've listened to all year. Most books I listen to are because I want to find our place in the universe and how we got where we are. This book does that better than any book I've listened to this year.

The author ties the pieces of the history covered together as a coherent whole. The period of time covered is from about 330 AD (Constantin's son) to about 1315 (Dante), and makes the listener understand how the events led to the making of Modern Europe and explains how we get where we are thus adding to my understanding about our place in the universe.

Most books that mention the Islamic Civilizations from 650 AD to 1300 just give comic book like characterizations. This book does not. He tells the story by first telling the story of the early Christian Church in ways which the reader can understand. I had earlier read an audible book called "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years". I couldn't follow it, too many 'isms' unless you're an expert. Durant is expert at stepping the reader through. One thing I always like to focus on is the development of the Trinity and how it is ultimately resolved. This book shed light on that for me, for example.

I learned even more about Christianity and what they believe in and why by listening to the sections on Islam and Judaism. The author explains by comparing and contrasting between the religions (including paganism), and explaining clearly while looking within a religion.

The author has a couple of narratives that he uses to tie the book together. Perfect order leads to no liberty, tolerance of others beliefs can not exist under absolute certainty, and the part can not understand the whole.

The second half of the book covers from Charlemagne to the Italian Renaissance, which compares and contrast the progress in Western Civilization with the Islamic Civilization. The author does step away from his formula that he used in his first two Volumes. He uses a chronological approach and looks at subsets of natural entities within Europe and is less thematic than he was in his first two volumes. This allows him to be redundant and tell the same story in different places allowing the listener to relearn what he probably didn't catch the first time.

He'll spend a long time on Peter Abelard (1140 AD) which leads to a long section on Thomas Aquinas. Both allow the crack of reason into the magistracy of Faith. Once reason is permitted the relationship between man and the church will change. The Islamic civilization (at this time period) allowed theology to trump philosophy. In the end, Christian Western Europe allowed philosophy to coexist and will ultimately lead to the "Age of Reason".

As I was listening to the second half, I realized that the main character who had not been properly introduced was Dante, but he kept being mentioned. During the story, I ended up buying "Dante's Inferno", because the author would always include Dante way before he was to pop up in the story as a main character, and talks about Dante's Comedy in the final hour of the book and why it is a summary of the whole "Age of Faith". (I also bought a cheap Historical Atlas in order to follow the places better).

People, in general, avoid this period of history because it can be complex and is often thought of has not relevant to today. They are wrong, and I would strongly recommend this book.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

One gets the sense that Will and (Ariel Durant) have to work slightly harder to find interest in this volume - it's not the glory of ancient empires, nor the flowering of the Renaissance and Enlightenment in volumes to come. But their work pays off, and this book, running from the last pagan Roman Emperor until Dante, is a hefty cornucopia of philosophy, art, music, wars, and all the other follies of civilisation. It covers Rome's decline and fall and replacement by barbaric European tribes, the cleft of the Empire, the birth of Christianity and its ascent to become the official faith; the origins of Islam and the greatness of the Arab Golden Age, receiving classical learning and preserving and increasing it; Jewish civilisation; the social and economic conditions of the Middle Ages - feudalism, courtly love, troubadours, witch-burning, feasts and fasts; heretics, the Inquisition and the Crusades; the age of Scholastic phiosophy and Duns Scotus' eventual admission of defeat in reconciling faith with reason, and that perhaps, opening the door to the Renaissance. That last run-on sentence is very Durantian, although I haven't the same style. But what I'm trying to say is, there's far too much here to sum up in this brief review, but every page bursts with humility and humanism. Dense but compulsive reading.

[Petrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a part of my bucket list I'm slowly making my way through all these volumes--I would read them faster but they are so heavy I really have a hard time holding up the book while reading in bed--so I have to read sitting up, which I don't have much time for. I love these books and really enjoy his witty style. I wonder how many experts and linguists must have helped him put all this information together. This volume covers Christian, Jewish and Muslim development from the 300s AD. to the 1300s--a lot happened, a lot of important people thought and wrote. I can't really summarize it all--it wouldn't matter, but it's worth the investment to read it if anyone has time and interest.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The death of two men bookends the Middle Ages, one transformed the Roman Empire by injecting Christianity into the government and the other was the man who ended the reign of Latin in the literature of Italy to produce the greatest of medieval Christian books. The Age of Faith is the fourth volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization series focusing on the end of the Western Roman Empire, the rise of Christian Europe, the zenith and slow decline of Byzantium, the birth and stagnation of Islamic civilization, and the continued resilience of Jewish faith and culture.

Unlike the previous volumes of the series, Durant does not need a prologue to introduce anything as the volume beings where the ends the death of Constantine. Over the course of a millennium from the death of the first Christian emperor to the death of Dante the champion of vernacular Italian and champion of the dream of a unified Italy. For Durant this millennium isn’t all about Christianity, but the rise and continuation of the Abrahamic religions so the rise of Islam and the blooming of Islamic civilization as well as the continuation of Judaism are significant portions of the volume and whose contributions would be interwoven into the medieval fabric in the 12th and 13th centuries. However, three-quarters of the volume shows how Christianity fought against, preserved, and built upon the classical heritage of Greece and Roman to form medieval Christendom in culture, science, art, and political theories. Yet, as with previous volumes Durant’s word usage can be problematic though as well as distaste for religion when comparing/contrasting it to philosophy even though he praises the sincerity of those that live their faith while showing the twists and turns of theological development that intertwined what those in power thought was orthodoxy in opposition to those who thought differently. Durant demonstrates that modern Europe is essentially still medieval either as it’s extension of classic antiquity that would birth the Renaissance or it’s civilized barbarity that would bring about a Reformation.

The Age of Faith was a millennium of decline, rebirth, preservation, innovation, of change and stability that was needed in Will Durant’s view before the coming of an “age of reason” that would bring about modernity.

[Reynold Witmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

My fondness for Durant only grew with this book. I'm constantly impressed with his ability as a historian to see what is best in a culture, and his gift for communicating that insight through enjoyable writing. These volumes have a rhythm to them the makes them easier to read in larger chunks. The Age Of Faith covers a large slice of time and cultures; I think it is the most ambitious of Durant's books so far. But I consider myself (rather vainly) the perfect reader for his books, and a thousand page overview of a thousand aspects of the Middle ages was for me a delightful introduction to a fearful subject. I am sure that many an indignant scholar has found errors in fact and judgement in this tome. I read as a layman, and enjoyed it with all freely.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading this over the past five years and finally came to the end last evening. What a journey!

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Story of Civilisation is the greatest written work. It is also the longest, luckily for us. I think the full 11 volume series is some 12 000 pages in total. The audiobook version of the age of faith is 61 glorious hours long.

I find myself skimming a lot of nonfiction books lately, skipping whole chapters here and there. Pattern recognition kicks in, you see where it’s going, you get bored, and you skip. It never occurs to me to to that when I read Will and Ariel Durant. I can never guess where they will go. The density of knowledge and wisdom here is unparalleled. Being this learned, while managing to weave it all together in beautiful prose, and never being repetitive, in a work of this length? They truly have become the like the titans they write about.

It is quite literally the Story of (Abrahamic) Civilisation, with a focus on philosophy, theology and the arts. Wars aren’t mentioned much at all. I suppose they see that all activity is downstream from ideas, and that wars aren’t physical events first and foremost, but spiritual friction made manifest in corporeality. The gods battle it out in the higher spheres, and the consequences echo down to us. In school we are taught the opposite, we are told to remember names and dates without any understanding of the tectonic forces underlying and connecting them all. In a sense then, this work is very Hegelian, in that it is a story of the soul and its unfolding. It is a story of the inside, of consciousness and its multitudes of beliefs throughout time.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thorough and excellent introduction to medieval art, literature, culture, religion, history. I feel like I have to to back to it again to refresh a lot of things, there's so much in it! People often think of the Medieval ages as the dark ages but some of the greatest accomplishments of the human mind actually came from there e.g. Gothic cathedral, Dante, origins of polyphonic music, the spiritual experiences of St. Francis, Meister Eckhart, etc. Maybe to say that you need Christianity to prepare the conditions for Renaissance and Enlightenment is not far from the truth. Someone like Zizek even claimed that Christianity is essential to his atheism.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOW,

that's the only way I can describe this book. It covers the 1000 years between the conversion of the Roman Empire to the start of the Renaissance. It is the fourth out of eleven in Will Durant's series on the history of civilization. Here are my general thoughts. My first thought leaving this book was its sheer size. It is 1089 huge small print pages of writings. I once read that this book takes 40 hours to finish and that honestly seems conservative. This book took me 2 days shy of a month to finish, for a comparison, my average is four days. Will Durant says that the original manuscript was yet another 500 pages, which I find astonishing. This means that you really get tired of Will Durant and his writing style by the time you're finished. Being a Will Durant fan could be compared to joining a demonic cult, it will give you endless cryptic knowledge and unlock your mind in countless ways, but will slowly rot you on the inside in the long run (one does that through human sacrifice and the other through really dense writing, but what's the real difference?). I can barely justify the time and effort this book took me.

On the other hand, this book is truly incredible. It covers an area from India to Iceland in pretty good depth. Where else will you learn about early Medieval conceptions of beauty or Medieval Jewish Egyptian Philosophy? I always felt Will Durant put too much emphasis on literature and philosophy and too little on economic and military affairs, but that's what he set out to do. Will Durant does his normal good work of chronicling the rise and fall of civilizations, best shown in this book on the section on Islam. The section of Medieval Judaism was a nice break and that's often skipped in most histories and offers a different picture from the massive Christian and Islamic empires of millions of people.

The book is revolutionary in a couple ways, most people think of the Middle Ages as an endless Dark Age of poverty, idiocy and violence. YOU ARE SO WRONG. Will Durant points out that the Middle Ages had great science, were a golden age of philosophy, economy and literature. He gave Islam serious study (1949) when that wasn't really a thing yet. As a history buff I found a few things later historians have disproved, but you can't hate on Will Durant after the simply impossible amount of research he puts into these books. In general, I wouldn't call this Will Durant's best book. That prize would go to Caesar and Christ so far in the series, simply because of the Age of Faith's sheer size and weak focus due to the massive region and era it covers. This means that the Age of Faith isn't a single narrative, but separate Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish and Catholic stories, which weakens the reader's investment.

Pros
-Unbeatable Detail and Research
-Groundbreaking
-Amazing Scope

Cons
-Far too long
-FAR TOO DENSE
-Too large to tell a single coherent narrative

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the risk of becoming tiresome, I must say Durant again surpasses himself in the fourth volume of his magnum opus, The Age of Faith. It is a history from late antiquity (circa Constantine) to the early fourteenth century. I expect he covers the One Hundred Years War and the Black Plague in volume V. In such a panoramic view it is hard to focus in particularly points to comment. I'll say that his coverage of the birth and spread of Islam is superb (including Islamic Spain and Sicily), as well as the story of Judaism from the successive occupations of Jerusalem from Titus onward to the diaspora. I most enjoyed his description of the birth of Gothic architecture and his great summaries of the thoughts of great Islamic, Judaic and Christian thinkers. He also summarizes the full Arthurian cycle and the works of Dante and others. This enlivens history, which is mostly tragedies, wars, pestilence and famine. His view of the Middle Ages as a robust period where Northern barbarians were tamed by the inheritance of Greek and Roman cultures through Christianity is spot on. I can't wait to move on to volume V.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

High school history classes, beyond brief surveys of antique civilizations, took off in the early modern era, focusing on revolutions such as those in the Americas, France and Russia. The college history courses I attended refined this focus to early modern Europe and Russian revolutionary movements in particular. My knowledge of late antiquity and the European middle ages was scanty until seminary, when church history courses awakened an interest in what, for me, had truly been 'dark ages'.

This, the fourth volume of Durant's monumental history of (mostly western) civilization, takes up and illuminates that neglected period very nicely and in a manner that neophytes, like myself, can appreciate.

[Barry Belmont · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a review, consider just this single sentence within a single paragraph buried deep within this massive tome: "Above all, the world needed a creed that would balance tribulation with hope, soften bereavement with solace, redeem the prose of toil with the poetry of belief, cancel life’s brevity with continuance, and give an inspiring and ennobling significance to a cosmic drama that might else be a meaningless and intolerable procession of souls, species, and stars stumbling one by one into an inescapable extinction."

Durant knows how to make one feel the fraternity of humankind like no other. This book, like all others in his Story of Civilization, stands as a testament to both the achievements of a single man and the achievements of all mankind.

[Largo Vanderkelen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this series with an intense passion!

[Purple Wimple · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here're a few of the pithy quotes from this volume (the full list exceed the max characters allowed in these reviews!)
• In a developed civilization nothing can equal the free man’s varying wage, salary, or profit as an economic stimulus. IV-29
• Eloquence is seldom accurate. IV-31
• Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from the trunk. IV-31
• If art is the organization of materials, the Roman Catholic Church is among the most imposing masterpieces in history. IV-44
• It is pleasant to know that women have always been as charming as they are today. IV-53
• Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed. IV-64
• All confessions are camouflage. IV-71
• The soul of the simple man can be moved only through the senses and the imagination, by ceremony and miracle, by myth and fear and hope; he will reject or transform any religion that does not give him these. IV-76
• Men [living under a despot] must find some substitute for elections. IV-93
• Eminence makes enemies. IV-100
• The lives of great men all remind us how brief is immortality. IV-103
• Unity ... is the eternal temptation of philosophers as well as of statesmen, and generalizations have sometimes cost more than war. IV-107
• The greatest generals—Alexander, Caesar, Belisarius, Saladin, Napoleon—found clemency a mighty engine of war. IV-108
• Thrift is a virtue with, like most others, must be practiced with discrimination. IV-120
• People must be consoled for monogamy and prose. IV-120
• It is discouraging to note how many things were known to the youth of our civilization, which are unknown to us today. IV-125
• An historian who strains his pen to prove a thesis may be trusted to distort the truth. IV-125
• In Persia, as in all civilized societies, clothes made half the man, and slightly more of the women. IV-137
• Religious belief ... seems indispensable to parental authority. IV-138
• Modern improvements in transport and communication have permitted greater wars. IV-146
• We cannot judge past beauty by present ruins. IV-149
• Nothing is lost in history; sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life. IV-150
• The populace is always more royalist than the king. IV-151
• For his tribe [the Arab] would do with a clear conscience what civilized people do only for their country, religion, or “race”—i.e., lie, steal, kill, and die. IV-157
• To rob ... trespassers [is] an unusually straightforward form of taxation. IV-158
• Understanding ... the management of men ... seldom comes to highly educated persons. IV-162
• Every successful preacher ... g[ives] voice and form to the need and longing of his time. IV-163
• A religion is, among other things, a mode of moral government. IV-176
• The [early Islamic] legal disabilities of women barely matched the power of their eloquence, their tenderness, and their charms. IV-181
• The greatest problems of the moralist are first to make co-operation attractive, and then to determine the size of the whole or group with which he will counsel pre-eminent co-operation. A perfect ethic would ask the paramount co-operation of every part with the greatest whole—with the universe itself, or its essential life and order, or God; on that plane religion and morality would be one. But morality is the child of custom and the grandchild of compulsion; it develops co-operation only within aggregates equipped with force. Therefore all actual morality has been group morality. IV-182
• The Koran, which excoriates the Jews, is the sincerest flattery they have ever received. IV-184
• The persistence of [the Byzantine emperor model of kingship, taken from the Persian Kings of Kings] to our time suggests its serviceability in the government and exploitation of an unlettered population. 193.
• The virtues of a saint may be the ruin of a ruler. IV-195
• Periodically the pressure of a growing population upon the means of subsistence generates the mass migrations that overshadow the other events of history. IV-203
• Civilization is a union of soil and soul—the resources of the earth transformed by the desire and discipline of men. Behind the façade, and under the burden, of courts and palaces, temples and schools, letters and luxuries and arts, stands the basic man: the hunter bringing game from the woods; the woodman felling the forest; the herdsman pasturing the breeding his flock; the peasant clearing, plowing, sowing, cultivating, reaping, tending the orchards, the vine, the hive, and the brood; the woman absorbed in the hundred crafts and cares of a functioning home; the minor digging in the earth; the building shaping homes and vehicles and ships; the artisan fashioning products and tools; the pedlar, shopkeeper, and merchant uniting and dividing maker and user; the inventor fertilizing industry with this savings; the executing harnessing muscle, materials, and minds for the creation of services and goods. These are the patient yet restless leviathan on whose swaying back civilization precariously rides. 206
• Next to bread and woman, in the hierarchy of desire, comes eternal salvation; when the stomach is satisfied, and lust is spent, man spares a little time for God. IV-211
• All religions are superstitions to other faiths. IV-217
• All religions, however noble in origin, soon carry an accretion of superstitions rising naturally out of the minds harassed and stupefied by the fatigue of the body and terror of the soul in the struggle for continuance. IV-217
• Men being by nature unequal in intelligence and scruple, democracy must at best be relative; and in communities with poor communication and limited schooling some form of oligarchy is inevitable. 225
• War an democracy are enemies. IV-225
• Civilization is rural in base but urban in form; men must gather in cities to provide for one another audiences and stimuli. IV-228
• [Few] historians [have] the courage to set [their] own religion in that modest perspective which every nation or faith must bear in time’s immensity. IV-238
• The continuity of science and philosophy from Egypt, Indian, and Babylonia through Greece and Byzantium to Eastern and Spanish Islam, and thence to northern Europe and America, is one of the brightest threads in the skein of history. IV-241
• Avicenna was the greatest writer on medicine, al-Razi the greatest physician, al-Biruni the greatest geographer, al-Haitahm the greatest optician, Jabir probably the greatest chemist, of the Middle Ages; these five names, so little known in present-day Christendom, are one measure of our provincialism in viewing medieval history. IV-249
• In a society where government, law, and morality are bound up with a religious creed, any attack upon that creed is viewed as menacing the foundations of social order itself. IV-251
• A scientist completes himself only through philosophy. IV-255
• Only lunatics can be completely original. IV-257
• There is nothing so foolish but it may be found in the pages of the philosophers. IV-257
• At their peak philosophy and religion meet in the sense and contemplation of universal unity. The soul untouched by logic, too weak of wing for the metaphysical flight from the many to the one, from incident to law, might reach that vision through a mystic absorption of the separate self in the soul of the world. And where science and philosophy failed, where the brief finite reason of man faltered and turned blind in the presence of infinity, faith might mount to the feet of God by ascetic discipline, unselfish devotion, the unconditional surrender of the part to the whole. IV-258
• Day by day the religion that some philosophers supposed to be the product of priests is formed and re-formed by the needs, sentiment, and imagination of the people; and the monotheism of the prophets becomes the polytheism of the populace. IV-261
• Which of us—who have less leisure than men had before so many labor-saving devices were invented—has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? IV-270
• The people [are] always healthier in their conduct than in their creeds. IV-278
• Every conquest creates a new frontier, which, being exposed to danger, suggest further conquest. 283
• Nothing fails like success. IV-285
• Statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterities. IV-295
• The ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds. IV-296
• The good, the true, and the beautiful fluctuate with the fortunes of war. IV-303
• Civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest. IV-338
• Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope. Therefore his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed. IV-343
• Only at the peaks of history has a society produced, in an equal period, so many illustrious men—in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, and medicine—as Islam in the four centuries between Harun al-Rashid and Averroës. 343
• The continuity of history reasserts itself: despite earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations, and catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, carries them on imitatively, then creatively, until fresh youth and spirit can enter the race. As men are members of one another, and generations are moments in a family line, so civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history; they are stages in the life of man. IV-343
• Civilization is polygenetic—it is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed. Therefore the scholar, though be belongs to his country through affectionate kinship, feels himself also a citizen of that Country of the Mind which knows no hatreds and no frontiers; he hardly deserves his name if he carries into his study political prejudices, or racial discriminations, or religions animosities; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the torch and enriched his heritage. IV-343—44.
• Dietary wisdom begins with the teeth. IV-357
• No people has surpassed the Jews in the order of beauty of family life. IV-360
• By and large no other people has ever given as generously as the Jews. IV-361
• Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of the arts. IV-384
• The life of the mind is a composition of two forces: the necessity to believe in order to live, and the necessity to reason in order to advance. In ages of poverty and chaos the will to believe is paramount, for courage is the one thing needful; in ages of wealth the intellectual powers come to the fore as offering preferment and progress; consequently a civilization passing from poverty to wealth tends to develop a struggle between reason and faith, a “warfare of science with theology.” In this conflict philosophy, dedicated to seeing life whole, usually seeks a reconciliation of opposites, a mediating peace, with the result that it is scorned by science and suspected by theology. In an age of faith, where hardship makes life unbearable without hope, philosophy inclines to religion, uses reason to defend faith, and becomes a disguised theology. IV-405
• The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly. IV-416
• It is the unfortunate who must believe that God has chosen them for His own. IV-418
• It is almost a Newtonian law of history that large agricultural holdings, in proportion to their mass and nearness, attract smaller holdings, and, by purchase or otherwise, periodically gather the land into great estates; in time the concentration becomes explosive, the soil is redivided by taxation or revolution, and concentration is resumed. IV-434
• It is easier for the ignorant than for the learned to be original. IV-437
• Beliefs make history, especially when their or wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died. 458
• Every great man value[s] time. IV-470
• Every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens up new problems. IV-471
• Literary prose comes later than poetry in all literatures, as intellect matures long after fancy blooms; men talk prose for centuries “without knowing it,” before they have leisure or vanity to mold it into art. IV-491
• Men wear out rapidly in war or government. IV-492
• Life’s brevity forbids the enumeration of gods or kings. IV-502
• Time sanctions error as well as theft. IV-508
• Journalism and history, luring the reader with the exceptional, miss the normal flow of human life. 509
• History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil. IV-510
• It is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy. IV-551
• Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things. IV-560
• It would of course be absurd to expect soldiers to be saints; good killing requires its own unique virtues. IV-575
• Romantic love—i.e., love that idealizes its object—has probably occurred in every age, in degree loosely corresponding with the delay and obstacles between desire and fulfillment. IV-576
• Modern politeness is a dilution of medieval chivalry. IV-578
• Whatever its excesses and absurdities in literature, however far chivalry in fact fell short of its ideals, it remains one of the major achievements of the human spirit, an art of life more splendid than any art. IV-578
• The price of sovereignty is the capacity for self-defense. IV-592
• Men must learn to kill with a good conscience if they are to fight successful wars. IV-593
• War does one good—it teaches people geography. IV-612
• Every cultural flowering finds root and nourishment in an expansion of commerce and industry. 614
• The Middle Ages disciplined men for ten centuries in order that modern men might for four centuries be free. IV-621
• Medieval man could eat his breakfasts without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world. IV- 622
• Gold and civilization wax and wane together. IV-625
• We may judge the fall of money from some typical prices: at Ravenna in 1268 a dozen eggs cost “a penny”’ at London in 1328 a pig cost four shillings, an ox fifteen; in thirteenth century France three francs bough a sheep, six a pig. History is inflationary. IV-626
• Every generation borrows, and denounces those who lend. IV-628
• [A Medieval craftsman] did not read much, and was spared much stupefying trash. IV-636
• As, in a limitless universe, any point may be taken as center, so, in the pageant of civilizations and states, each nation, like each soul, interprets the drama of history or life in terms of its own role and character. IV-659
• It is remarkable to how many different environments, from Scotland to Sicily, the Normans adapted themselves; with what violent energy they aroused sleeping regions and peoples; and how completely, in a few centuries, they were absorbed by their subjects, and disappeared from history. IV-703
• Faith declines as wealth increases. IV-710
• We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys and adequate picture of any age. IV-731
• In many aspects religion is the most interest of man’s ways, for it is his ultimate commentary on life and his only defense against death. IV-732
• It is difficult for those who today live in comfort and plenty to go down in spirit into the chaos and penury that molded medieval faiths. IV-732
• Village atheists leave few memorials behind them. IV-736
• The medieval mind, for the most part, surrendered itself to faith, trusted in God and the Church, as modern man trusts in science and the state. IV-738
• In every grate religion ritual is as necessary as creed. It instructs, nourishes, and often begets, belief; it brings the believer into comforting contact with his god; it charms the senses and the soul with drama, poetry, and art; it binds the individuals into a fellowship and a community by persuading them to share in the same rites, the same songs, the same prayers, at last the same thoughts. IV-742
• One can forgive much to a religion and an age that created Mary and her cathedrals. IV-748
• Appeals to universal sensibilities are more successful—for evil as well as for good—than challenges to the changeful an individualist intellect. IV-752
• Men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die. IV-754
• Charges of corruption have been made against every government in history; they are nearly always partly true, and partly exaggerated from startling instances. IV-768
• It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization. IV-768
• Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. IV-784
• Morals fall as riches rise, and nature will out according to men’s needs. In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows. IV-786
• Europe insisted on traversing the exciting parabola of wealth, science, philosophy, and doubt. IV-802
• Which of us is so saintly that he may demand an untarnished record from any class of men? IV-804
• Virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians. IV-804
• When we look back upon the nineteen centuries of Christianity, with all their heroes, kings, and saints, we shall find it difficult to list many men who came so close to Christian perfection as the nuns. Their lives of quiet devotion and cheerful ministration have made many generations blessed. When all the sins of history are weighed in the balance, the virtues of these women will tip the scale against them, and redeem our race. IV-807
• Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life. IV- 819
• Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race. Law frightened instinct with the specter of punishment. Conscience tamed youth with the detritus of an endless stream of prohibitions. IV-819

[Kaveh Jazani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only real 5 Stars books

[David Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am continuing my slog through the mammoth work of Will Durrant’s History of Civilization. Vol. 4 is outstanding. Compacting 7 centuries of history of Europe and Asia into one tome is quite the feat. Durrant, although criticized by some for the brevity he gives to some history is masterful. It takes a great writer to be able to write concisely while producing a work that is engrossing to the reader. This volume contains summaries of important events – military, religious, cultural and social - as well as biographies of legendary people of the era we call the Dark Ages. This volume covers the period from the waning days of the Roman Empire to the 13th century, primarily in Christendom Europe.

In this Age when faith and orthodoxy ruled, St. Augustine was its most powerful voice. Augustine allowed earthly cities, but life there was secondary to the divine city "of the one true God." Augustine gave "a definitive stamp to catholic theology," Durant continues, "giving it a Neoplatonic tinge." Augustine formulated "the claim of the Church to supremacy over the mind and the state." That supremacy, however, had to be achieved through conflict with pagans and tribes; with Arab, Islamic, and Byzantine peoples; and with religious thinkers who strayed from orthodoxy.

In this era of faith feudal society (freemen, serfs, slaves) was characterized by a dual loyalty, with serfs and slaves trading "subjection for protection" from their masters and looking to the church for comfort and salvation. Slaves were slaves because it was their nature, and women were intended to be inferior by God. Magic and superstition were everywhere; science and knowledge were subservient to religious orthodoxy and medicine was "a branch of theology." Life was strict and unforgiving. It was an age where Christians believed that Muslims would go to hell and Muslims believed Christians would go to hell. Under the Inquisition, torture was used to get confessions, and wars and persecutions revealed an almost unparalleled cruelty. Nevertheless, the church was "doing its best" to promote civilizing values. It built the great cathedrals in Europe, created majestic music to fill its chambers, and served as hubs of charity and comfort for the weak and the poor.

Even so, these civilizing values were confined by a faith-based worldview that kept man and women in their proper place. Women were seen as "the favored instrument of Satan" who led men to hell. At the end of this age, Thomas Aquinas, who sought to reconcile Aristotle's scientific thinking with the word of God, was the prisoner of his own religious world. The woman, Aquinas wrote, “is subject to the man on account of the weakness of her nature, both mind and body.” This is, he believed the law of nature and that law in his Aristotle-based theology was the law of God.

Aquinas' philosophy-theology was comprehensive in scale and scope. He took what he faced, the all-dominant Church on the one hand and the increasingly pervasive evidence that the world, in fact, operated by more than faith and magic, and weaved together a more logical world view, less influenced by superstition. But the tie between reason and theology was tenuous and began to fray in the centuries to come.

Though we are conditioned to think of the European Middle Ages as exclusively Christian, all three of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) contributed to the socio-cultural life of medieval Western Europe. Western Europe were at least nominal Christians. But their beliefs and practices were as varied then as they are today.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of those of us "of a certain age" have had sets of the Durant's famous history of civilization on our bookshelves for well...decades. They are as faithful a companion as our music or our quills (remember I did say "Of a certain age") Still, I wonder how many of us have really slowly worked our way through any of the volumes, instead of using them as an Everyman's Historical Almanac? Well, I'm proud to say I have just accomplished that feat...for one volume anyway. As usual, I'm overwhelmed by the expanse of the Durants' work, but I am also really captured by their very vibrant storytelling art. For books almost as white haired as I am getting to be, these volumes are full of life and energy. Not just a fine encyclopedia, but a wonderful living document!

[Pat Rolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Durant tradition continues providing a sweeping
incredibly detailed rendition of Western Civilization from the fall of Rome to the Middle Ages. The format is consistent with his previous three volumes in his ‘Age of Civilization, series documenting all aspects of life from manners at the dinner table to architecture, art, and religion. This is the longest thus far of the volumes, but no less interesting in content and stylistic flare. His elegant pen with super human research combines to produce astonishing work. It can be exhausting if not approached with patience and as always it is best in smaller doses treating the experience as a leisurely journey around the world.