The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

“The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning…. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”24

God, he insisted, gives His love to all peoples, Jews and heathen included.

Those who recommend faith without understanding are in many cases seeking to cover up their inability to teach the faith intelligibly:

We may provisionally conclude that they are among the most brilliant forgeries in history, unreliable in fact, but an imperishable part of the romantic literature of France.

Not content to see things through a glass darkly, he must behold all things face to face….

There is a heavy ballast of nonsense in his system, as in all philosophies that do not agree with our own;

He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith; but in his triumph he had brought the Age of Faith to an end.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

We must not think of Scholasticism as an abstraction purged of a thousand individual peculiarities, but as a lazy name for the hundreds of conflicting philosophical and theological theories taught in the medieval schools from Anselm in the eleventh century to Occam in the fourteenth.

The historian is miserably subject to the brevity of time and human patience, and must dishonor with a line men who were immortal for a day, but now...

We cannot know God, but we can love Him, and that is better than knowing.

Scholasticism was a Greek tragedy, whose nemesis lurked in its essence.

Aristotle’s philosophy was a Greek gift to Latin Christendom, a Trojan horse concealing a thousand hostile elements.

it was Avicenna and Averroës, as well as Aristotle, who infected Christianity with the germs of rationalism.

“Logic, ethics, and metaphysics,” said Condorcet, “owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients themselves”;

“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.

Science and philosophy, in the medieval West, had to grow up in such an atmosphere of myth, legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination, and sorcery as comes only in ages of chaos and fear.

The population of devils never declined.

But our time, despite some effort, has not yet equaled the Age of Faith—in Islam, Judaism, or Christendom—in belief that the future is decipherably written in the stars.

Many sincere students—Constantine the African, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Vincent of Beauvais—were accused of magic, and of relations with devils, because the people could not believe that their knowledge had been obtained by natural means.

He was clever enough to keep on good terms with both Frederick II and the popes; but the inexorable Dante consigned him to hell.

Transmission is to civilization what reproduction is to life.

Not till the sixteenth century did the Hindu numerals finally replace the Roman; in England and America the duodecimal system of reckoning survives in many fields; 10 has not finally won its thousand-year-long war against 12.

Mathematics in the Middle Ages had three purposes: the service of mechanics, the keeping of business accounts, and the charting of the skies.

All astronomers, however, agreed that the earth is a sphere.35

Marco gave the first description of a trip across all Asia; the first European glimpse of Japan; the first good account of Pekin, Java, Sumatra, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, the Zanzibar coast, Madagascar, and Abyssinia.

This Alexander was his own Aristotle.

The grape-producing countries distilled wine, and called the result aqua vitae, eau de vie water of life; the North, with less grapes and bitterer cold, found it cheaper to distill grain. The Celtic term uisqebeatha, which was shortened into whisky, also meant “water of life.”55

Poverty always mingles myth with medicine, for myth is free and science is dear.

Ancient methods of diagnosis by auscultation and urinalysis retained (and retain) their popularity, so that in some places the urinal became the emblem or signboard of the medical profession.

Every city of any importance paid physicians to treat the poor without charge.

“No one can be a good physician if he is ignorant of surgery; and no one can properly perform operations if he does not know medicine.”

No special provision seems to have been made for the care of the insane before the fifteenth century.

The fertility of women labors to atone for the stupidity of men and the bravery of generals.

he is told that the kings make war, judges take bribes, prelates drink too much, all promises are broken, all friends are envious.

“I learned from my Arabian masters under the leading of reason; you, however, captivated by… authority, follow your halter. For what else should authority be called than a halter?” Those who are now counted as authorities gained their reputation by following reason, not authority. “Therefore,” he tells his nephew, “if you want to hear anything more from me, give and take reason…. Nothing is surer than reason… nothing is falser than the senses.”

Experimentum solum certificat, which seems to say that “only experiment gives certainty.”

As if anticipating the “idols” denounced by his namesake three centuries later, Roger begins by listing four causes of human error: the “example of frail and unworthy authority, long-established custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of one’s ignorance under the show of wisdom.”

Roger Bacon made the implicit explicit, and planted the flag of science firmly on the conquered ground.

Except in optics and calendar reform, Roger, like Francis, Bacon made only negligible contributions to science itself; they were philosophers of science rather than scientists.

With all its faults and sins, his Opus maius deserves its name as a work greater than any other in all the literature of its amazing century.

EVERY age is an age of romance, for men cannot live by bread alone, and imagination is the staff of life.

From such bones Shakespeare made a man.

Nothing human was alien to medieval poetry.

Our knowledge of the pagan or skeptical aspects of medieval life is naturally fragmentary; the past has not transmitted itself to us impartially, except in our blood.

It was a learned man’s nonsense, quite as rational as history.

and his head

it is hard to romanticize desire fulfilled, and where there are no impediments there is no poetry.

The canzo was a song of love; the plante was a dirge for a friend or lover lost to death; the tenson was a rhymed debate on a question of love, morality, or chivalry; the sirvente was a song of war, feud, or political attack; the stxtine was a complicated rhyme sequence of six stanzas, each of six lines, invented by Arnaud Daniel and much admired by Dante; the pastourelle was a dialogue between a troubadour and a shepherdess; the aubade or alba, a song of the dawn, usually warned lovers that the day would soon reveal them; the serena or serenade was an evening song; the balada was a narrative in verse.

“to the envious my ill luck; to the liars my sorrows; to false lovers my follies; to the ladies my heart’s pain.”39