The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

After a century of discussion no certain answer remains; inquiry is fatal to certainty.

The good Christians and fair knights of the Middle Ages felt no compulsion to acknowledge their literary debts. But the matter of the romances was felt to be common property; any man might forgivably borrow if he could improve.

For into paradise go none but such people as aged priests, old cripples, and the maimed, who all day and night cough before the altars…. With them have I nought to do. But to hell will I go. For to hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney or the great wars, and the stout archer, and the loyal man. With them will I go.

at any age and in any guise love is as interesting as the blood is warm.VII

We know not what imp of the perverse led him to put his learning, his anticlericalism, his contempt of woman and romance, into a continuation of the most romantic poem in all literature.

The Roman de Renart was the greatest of the fabliaux. A fabliau was a fable of animals satirizing man, usually in octosyllabic verse running from thirty to a thousand lines.

For a century now satire would hold the stage, and would gnaw at the heart of faith until all the props and ribs of the medieval structure would crack and break, and leave the soul of man proud and tottering on the brink of reason.

they created a language that Dante could call “illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial”

Partly a great man is great because those less than he have paved his way, have molded the mood of the time to his genius, have fashioned an instrument for his hands, and have given him a task already half done.

Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi [Behold a deity stronger than I, who, coming, will rule me]….

A lad nearing puberty is ripe for such a trembling; most of us have known it, and can look back upon “calf love” as one of the most spiritual experiences of our youth, a mysterious awakening of body and soul to life and sex and beauty and our individual incompleteness, and yet with no conscious hunger of body for body, but only a shy longing to be near the beloved, to serve her, and hear her speak, and watch her modest grace.

What! Can I not look upon the face of the sun and the stars everywhere? Can I not under any sky contemplate the most precious truths?

The secret of his character was a flaming intensity. “Not by the grace of riches but by the grace of God I am what I am, and the zeal of His house hath eaten me up.”

There, as all the world knows, Byron came and wept. Today the tomb lies almost unnoticed around the corner from Ravenna’s busiest square; and its old and crippled custodian, for a few lire, will recite sonorous beauties from the poem that all men praise and few men read.

Never was a poem more painstakingly planned.

Nothing could be more artificial; yet all art is artifice, though at its best concealed;

“Nothing that hath the harmony of musical connection can be transferred from its own tongue to another without shattering all its sweetness and harmony.”

The poem, he says, belongs to the genus philosophy, and its concern is morality. Like a theologian interpreting the Bible, he assigns three meanings to his words: the literal, the allegorical, and the mystical.

the Inferno is man passing through sin, suffering, and despair; the Purgatorio is his cleansing through faith; the Paradiso is his redemption through divine revelation and unselfish love.

the astronomy, cosmology, geology, and chronology of an age too busy living to be learned.

History has exaggerated either the heterodoxy of Siger or the orthodoxy of Dante.

Like any artist he fused existing material, transformed it from chaos to order, and set it on fire with his passionate imagination and his burning sincerity.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diritta via era smarrita.

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate!

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

Dante’s conception of hell is the crowning indecency of medieval theology.

It is pleasant to learn that even in heaven Beatrice has beautiful feet.

la sua volúntate è nostra pace —“His will is our peace.”57 This is the basic line of The Divine Comedy.

Dante lived so intensely in his time that his poem almost breaks under the weight of contemporary allusions unintelligible today without a litter of notes obstructing the movement of the tale.

He loved to teach, and tried to pour into one poem nearly all that he had ever learned, with the result that the living verse lies abed with dead absurdities.

all Europe rang with the story of the proud exile who had gone to hell, and had returned, and had never smiled again.

In the history of man—so multiple is he and diverse—one mood may survive in some souls and places long after its successor or opposite has risen in other minds or states.

The Middle Ages are a condition as well as a period:

The boundary between “medieval” and “modern” is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life.

The men of the Middle Ages were the victims of barbarism, then the conquerors of barbarism, then the creators of a new civilization.

That legacy included evil as well as good. We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism—these still survive amongst us; and the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy.

In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.