The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

For no man can know what France accomplished in that century—besides her universities, her poets, her philosophers, and her Crusades—unless he stands in person before one after another of the Gothic audacities that can here be only names:

It is good to remember, in ages of destruction, that men, when they will, can build as once they built in France.

It is a proverb in Spain that “Toledo has the richest of our cathedrals, Oviedo the holiest, Salamanca the strongest, Leon the most beautiful.”

Gothic architecture was the supreme achievement of the medieval soul.

The men who dared to suspend those vaults on a few stilts of stone studied and expressed their science with greater thoroughness and effect than any medieval philosopher in any summa, and the lines and harmonies of Notre Dame make a greater poem than The Divine Comedy.

Why did Gothic architecture decline? Partly because every style, like an emotion, exhausts itself by complete expression, and invites reaction or change.

The struggle between the classic and the Gothic styles still rages in our churches and schools, our marts and capitals, while a new and indigenous architecture, bolder even than Gothic, rides the sky.

we thank a million forgotten men for redeeming the blood of history with the sacrament of art.

Ut queant laxis resonare floris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum. This “solmization,” or naming of the musical tones by the syllables ut (or do), re, mi, fa, sol, la,

The Church looked askance upon polyphony; she distrusted the religious effect of music becoming a lure and end in itself;

“a poem without music,” said the troubadour Folquet, “is a mill without water.”

The abdication of literature had left the field to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the common man, which had always been different from those of the poets and orators.

lingua romana; not till the tenth century was it sufficiently distinct to receive the name lingua gallica. The lingua romana in turn divided into what France called two languages: the langue d’oc of France south of the Loire, and the langue d’oil

Even so, about 1300, he hesitated between Latin and the Tuscan dialect as the language of The Divine Comedy. By the narrow margin of this choice he escaped oblivion.

He who should know the history of words would know all history.

Many parchments were scraped to erase an old manuscript and receive a second composition (“palimpsest”).

Explicit hoc totum;

Pro Christo da mihi potum.

Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella—“For the [work of the] pen let the writer receive a beautiful girl.”

An ordinary volume cost between $160 and $200 in the currency of the United States of America in 1949.15

The cost of books delayed the rise of a booksellers’ trade till the twelfth century;

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. North of the Alps, before 1100, literacy was almost confined to “clerics”—clergymen, accountants, scribes, governmental officials, and professional men.

The student of today can hardly appreciate the literary wealth that city and college libraries lay freely at his feet.

No other man in history has ever done so much to enrich one culture with another.

We can only compare Gerard’s industry with that of Hunain ibn Ishaq and al-Mamun’s “House of Wisdom,” which in the ninth century had poured Greek science and philosophy into an Arabic mold.

The frequent references of Roger Bacon to Averroës, Avicenna, and “Alfarabius” give one measure of the new influence and stimulation; “philosophy,” said Bacon, “has come down to us from the Arabs”;

Discipline was severe; flogging was considered as necessary in education as hell in religion;

Aut disce aut discede; manet sors tertia caedi—“Learn or depart; a third alternative is to be flogged.”37

The curriculum began with the “trivium”—grammar, rhetoric, logic—and passed on to the “quadrivium”—arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy...

“Grammar” was not the dull study that loses the soul of a language in studying its bones; it was the art of writing (grapho, gramma);

Rhetoric continued to mean the art of speaking, but again included considerable study of literature. Logic seems a rather advanced subject for the trivium, but perhaps it was good that students should learn to reason as early as they loved to argue.

With Irnerius began the golden age of medieval jurisprudence.

St. Bernard complained that the courts of Europe rang with the laws of Justinian and no longer heard the laws of God.42

If these arrangements seem to the modern student unusually sensible, it should be remembered that the law students at Bologna were men between seventeen and forty years of age, old enough to provide their own discipline; that they came to study, not to play; that the professor was not the employee of trustees, but a free-lance lecturer whom the students in effect engaged to instruct them.

No educational institution since Aristotle has rivaled the influence of the University of Paris.

the notion that all science must be based upon mathematics, since all force, in its passage through space, follows geometrical forms and rules.

He was the first of a thousand brilliant minds whose achievements created the magnificent prestige of Oxford in the educational and intellectual world.

This has all the earmarks of righteous exaggeration; we may only conclude that at Paris cleric and saint were not synonyms.V

If the murderer left town he was seldom pursued; and an Oxford man considered it sufficient punishment for an Oxford murderer to be compelled to go to Cambridge.72

Every step in the scholastic year was a “jocund advent” to be graced with wine.

The students swore in haste and sinned at leisure.

Of seventeen failures at the examination of forty-three candidates in Vienna in 1449, all were for moral, none for intellectual, deficiency.

We may forgive these faults more readily if we consider that any way of life develops a similar dogmatism about the assumptions on which it rests. So today we leave men free to question the religious, but not the political, faith of their fathers; and political heresy is punished by social ostracism as theological heresy was punished by excommunication in the Age of Faith; now that the policeman labors to take the place of God, it becomes more dangerous to question the state than to doubt the Church. No system smiles upon the challenging of its axioms.

While so many other achievements of the Middle Ages crumble before the juggernaut of time, the universities, bequeathed to us by the Age of Faith in all the elements of their organization, adjust themselves to inescapable change, moult their old skins to live new lives, and wait for us to wed them to government.

winds of the voice (flatus vocis);

God, he is reported to have said, is a word applied to the three Persons of the Trinity, just as man is applied to many men; but all that really exists is the three Persons—in effect, three gods.

If we may believe Abélard, who was too good a warrior to be a good historian,

He was drunk with the “dear delight” of philosophy; this famous lover loved dialectic more than he loved Héloïse.

Truth cannot be contrary to truth, Abélard pleads; the truths of Scripture must agree with the findings of reason, else the God who gave us both would be deluding us with one or the other.21

Abélard did not question the authority of the Bible; but he argued that its language was meant for unlettered people, and must be interpreted by reason; that the sacred text had sometimes been corrupted by interpolation or careless copying; and that where scriptural or patristic passages contradicted one another, reason must attempt their reconciliation.