The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Thus one of the oldest ceremonies of primitive religion—the eating of the god—is widely practiced and revered in European and American civilization today.

In every great religion ritual is as necessary as creed.

Every day and night, at intervals of some three hours, and from a million chapels and hearths, these conspiring prayers besieged the sky.

All the poetic and popular polytheism of antiquity rose from the never dead past, and filled Christian worship with a heartening communion of spirits, a brotherly nearness of earth to heaven, redeeming the faith of its darker elements.

many folk “worship images of saints; … they have not abandoned idols, but only changed their names.”71 In this matter, at least, the will and need of the people created the form of the cult.

the left arm of John the Baptist….

“I should rightly be condemned for a madman if I should dispute with madmen.”

In general the Church did not so much encourage superstitions as inherit them from the imagination of the people or the traditions of the Mediterranean world.

The Church found that rural converts still revered certain springs, wells, trees, and stones; she thought it wiser to bless these to Christian use than to break too sharply the customs of sentiment.

The finest triumph of this tolerant spirit of adaptation was the sublimation of the pagan mother-goddess cults in the worship of Mary. Here too the people took the initiative. In 431 Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, in a famous sermon at Ephesus, applied to Mary many of the terms fondly ascribed by the pagans of Ephesus to their “great goddess” Artemis-Diana; and the Council of Ephesus in that year, over the protests of Nestorius, sanctioned for Mary the title “Mother of God.”

It was the people who created the fairest flower of the medieval spirit, and made Mary the most beloved figure in history.

“Lord, if Thou free me not from this temptation, I will complain of Thee to Thy mother.”

A new religion had been created, and perhaps Catholicism survived by absorbing it. A Gospel of Mary took form, uncanonical, incredible, and indescribably charming.

One can forgive much to a religion and an age that created Mary and her cathedrals.

The Church based her technique of moralization through faith not on arguments to reason but on appeals to the senses through drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, and poetry; and it must be confessed that such appeals to universal sensibilities are more successful—for evil as well as for good—than challenges to the changeful and individualistic intellect.

From Novgorod to Cadiz, from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, steeples and spires raised themselves precariously into the sky because men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die.

Such occasional indifference marked the beginning of a decline in the authority of canon law over the laity of Europe. As the Church had taken so wide an area of human life under her rule when, in the first Christian millennium, secular powers had broken down, so in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as secular government grew stronger, one phase after another of human affairs was recaptured by civil from canon law.

The states that had grown up under the protection, and by the permission, of the social order that she had created declared themselves of age, and began that long process of secularization which culminates today.

Pope Alexander III complained that “when God deprived bishops of sons the Devil gave them nephews.”

As in every system, the rich had superior opportunities to prepare themselves for the long hierarchical climb; but career was open to all, and talent, not ancestry, chiefly determined success.

Gradually, subtly, the rule of Rome was restored over Europe by the astonishing power of the word.

exhausted. “I have no leisure,” he mourned, “to meditate on supramundane things. Scarce can I breathe. So much must I live for others that almost I am a stranger to myself.”

Charges of corruption have been made against every government in history; they are nearly always partly true, and partly exaggerated from startling instances; but at times they rise to a revolutionary resentment.

It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization.

The doctrines and practices of the Cathari were in part a return to primitive Christian beliefs and ways, partly a vague memory of the Arian heresy that had prevailed in southern France under the Visigoths, partly a product of Manichean and other Oriental ideas.

There was no hell or purgatory in this theology; every soul would be saved, if only after many purifying transmigrations.

Christ had no place to lay His head, but the pope lived in a palace; Christ was propertyless and penniless, but Christian prelates were rich; surely, said the Cathari, these lordly archbishops and bishops, these worldly priests, these fat monks, were the Pharisees of old returned to life!

Catharism seemed to Innocent a mess of nonsense, made poisonous by the simplicity of the people.

Whether because it shared these views without formulating them, or because simple souls naturally fear the different or the strange, or because men enjoy releasing, in the anonymity of the crowd, instincts normally suppressed by individual responsibility, the people themselves, except in southern France and northern Italy, were the most enthusiastic persecutors;

So many Dominicans were employed in this work that they were nicknamed Domini canes—the (hunting) “dogs of the Lord.”

this would prove a heady stimulus to monarchs who found that inquisition and acquisition were near allied.

Many sects, some heretical, some mystical, survived in Bohemia and Germany, and prepared the way for Huss and Luther.

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

The methods of the inquisitors, including torture, were adopted into the law codes of many governments; and perhaps our contemporary secret torture of suspects finds its model in the Inquisition even more than in Roman law.

Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.

Morals fall as riches rise, and nature will out according to men’s means.

In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows.

The Church herself was the severest critic of her sinning members; a noble succession of ecclesiastical reformers labored to bring monks and abbots back to the ideals of Christ.

“My lord, if we possessed property we should need arms to defend it.”

Tantum homo habet de scientia, quantum operatur —“A man has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.”

“We ought to return this mantle to its owner. For we received it only as a loan until we should come upon one poorer than ourselves…. It would be counted to us as a theft if we should not give it to him who is more needy.”

In the morning, when the sun rises, every man ought to praise God, who created it for our use…. When it becomes night, every man ought to give praise on account of Brother Fire, by which our eyes are then enlightened; for we be all, as it were, blind; and the Lord by these two, our brothers, doth enlighten our eyes.

Two other leaders dominated that dynamic age: Innocent III and Frederick II. Innocent raised the Church to its greatest height, from which in a century it fell.

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

They entered the universities and produced the two giants of Scholastic philosophy, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; it was they who saved the Church from Aristotle by transforming him into a Christian.

A large perspective of monastic history does not bear out the exaggerations of moralists nor the caricatures of satirists.

Many cases of monastic misconduct can be cited; they draw attention precisely because they are exceptional; and which of us is so saintly that he may demand an untarnished record from any class of men?

virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians.

In Germany the nunneries tended to be havens of intense mysticism; in France and England they were often the refuge of noble ladies “converted” from the world, or deserted, disappointed, or bereaved.

If history had been as careful to note instances of obedience to conventual rules as to record infractions, we should probably be able to counter each sinful lapse with a thousand examples of fidelity.