The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed.

From that time to this, with brief intermissions, the Eastern Church has remained the servant of the state.

“Give me chastity,” he prayed, “but not yet!”58

Neoplatonism entered deeply into his philosophy, and, through him, dominated Christian theology till Abélard.

from this foot of earth he moved the world.

Augustine lived in the Country of the Mind, and labored chiefly with his pen.

The divine foreknowledge does not destroy this freedom; God merely foresees the choices that man will freely make.66

The theory of innate human depravity, said Pelagius, was a cowardly shifting to God of the blame for man’s sins. Man feels, and therefore is, responsible; “if I ought, I can.”

“Dispute not by excited argument,” he wrote to a friend, “those things which you do not yet comprehend, or those which in the Scriptures appear … to be incongruous and contradictory; meekly defer the day of your understanding.”71 Faith must precede understanding. “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand”—crede ut intelligas.

But even faith is not enough for understanding; there must be a clean heart to let in the rays of the divinity that surrounds

The Confessions is poetry in prose; the City of God (413–26) is philosophy in history.

Augustine’s second answer was a philosophy of history—an attempt to explain the events of recorded time on one universal principle.

“The poet could say of Athens, Thou lovely city of Cecrops; and shalt not thou say of the world, Thou lovely city of God?”92—

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.

The basic cause of cultural retrogression was not Christianity but barbarism; not religion but war. The human inundations ruined or impoverished

Let us agree that it is incredible. We must be content with accepting Arthur as in essentials a vague but historical figure of the sixth century, probably not a saint, probably not a king.

But probably it was Patrick’s character, rather than his wonders, that converted the Irish—the undoubting confidence of his belief, and the passionate persistence of his work. He was not a patient man; he could dispense maledictions and benedictions with equal readiness;

They considered themselves not barbarians but self-liberated freemen; Frank meant free, enfranchised.

But history, by telescoping one dramatic event into the next, leaves a false impression of the Franks as merely warriors.

For nearly every crime had its price: the accused or convicted man might usually absolve himself by paying a wergild or “man-payment”—one third to the government, two thirds to the victim or his family.

leave a trail of blood through many generations. Wergild and judicial combat were the best expedients that primitive Germans could devise to wean men from vengeance to law.

From the day of Clovis’ marriage the history of France has been bisexual, mingling love and war.

Chilperic is described to us as “the Nero and Herod of our time,” ruthless, murderous, lecherous, gluttonous, greedy for gold.

“We cannot command religion, for no one can be forced to believe against his will.”

The career of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (475?–524) paralleled that of Cassiodorus, except in longevity.

None of these writings repays reading today, but it would be hard to exaggerate their influence on medieval thought.

The most dangerous heresy is that of a sovereign who separates himself from part of his subjects because they believe not according to his belief.71

“it is the most unhappy kind of misfortune to have been happy.”

The last work of pagan philosophy was written by a Christian who, in the hour of death, remembered Athens rather than Golgotha.

the lives of great men all remind us how brief is immortality.

Procopius, who devoted a volume to Justinian’s faults, called him “insincere, crafty, hypocritical, dissembling his anger, double-dealing, clever, a perfect artist in acting out an opinion which he pretended to hold, and even able to produce tears … to the need of the moment”;

“He was a fickle friend,” continues Procopius, “a truceless enemy, an ardent devotee of assassination and robbery.”

the court was not awed by its own solemnity.

Belisarius, leader of the army, took the assignment, assembled a number of Goths from his troops, led them to the Hippodrome, slaughtered 30,000 of the populace, arrested Hypatius, and had him killed in jail.

For the next thirty years Justinian was secure, but only one person seems to have loved him.

This “Secret History” is a brief of candid malice, completely one-sided, devoted to blackening the posthumous reputations of Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius.

“Convent of Repentance” for reformed prostitutes. Some of the girls repented of their repentance, and threw themselves from the windows, literally bored to death.

Justinian can be forgiven his passion for unity; it is the eternal temptation of philosophers as well as of statesmen, and generalizations have sometimes cost more than war.

Justinian was favored with competent generals, and harassed by limited means.

No general since Caesar ever won so many victories with such limited resources of men and funds; few ever surpassed him in strategy or tactics, in popularity with his men and mercy to his foes;

it merits note that the greatest generals—Alexander, Caesar, Belisarius, Saladin, Napoleon—found clemency a mighty engine of war.

Those years completed the ruin of Italy. Rome had been five times captured, thrice besieged, starved, looted; its population, once a million, was now reduced to 40,000,18

History rightly forgets Justinian’s wars, and remembers him for his laws.

We can admire the Code of Justinian more readily as a whole than in its parts. It differs most from earlier codes by its rigid orthodoxy, its deeper obscurantism, its vengeful severity.

The Emperor could not escape his environment and his time; and in his ambition to unify everything he codified the superstition and barbarity, as well as the justice and charity, of his age.

In the end death won all arguments.

The Emperor outlived the general by eight months. In his final years his interest in theology had borne strange fruit: the defender of the faith had become a heretic.

He was a great ruler, whose very faults sprang from the logic and sincerity of his creed: his persecutions from his certainty, his wars from his Roman spirit, his confiscations from his wars. We mourn the narrow violence of his methods, and applaud the grandeur of his aims. He and Belisarius, not Boniface and Aëtius, were the last of the Romans.

BYZANTINE economy was a modernistic mixture of private enterprise, state regulation, and nationalized industries.

From the fifth century to the fifteenth Constantinople remained the greatest market and shipping center in the world.