The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

thrift is a virtue which, like most others, must be practiced with discrimination.

Underneath this social crust of gold was a middle class fretted with taxation, a plodding bureaucracy, a medley of meddlesome monks, a flotsam and jetsam of proletaires exploited by the price system and soothed by the dole.

Chrysostom condemned dancing as exciting passion, but Constantinople danced.

people must be consoled for monogamy and prose.

in this, as in other fields, the best and the worst received too much, the rest too little.

Mules fared better than men; the most scientific work of the period was the Digestorum artis mulomedicinae libri IV of Flavius Vegetius (383–450); this book almost founded veterinary science, and remained an authority till the Renaissance.

But upon these foundations quackery raised a weird ziggurat of magic, divination, and planetary abracadabra.

Their work lay in rehearsing again and again the theories of the ancient masters; they were oppressed and stifled by the magnitude of their heritage; their only deviations were into a mysticism that borrowed from the less orthodox moods of Christianity.

These works are chiefly four: On the Celestial Hierarchy, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, On the Divine Names, and On Mystical Theology.

and talks so frequently of himself as if he found it hard to distinguish between himself and the cosmos.

It is discouraging to note how many things were known to the youth of our civilization, which are unknown to us today.

Knowing at first hand the merits of the general and the parsimony of the ruler, he made Belisarius a brilliant hero, and left Justinian in the shade.

The Secret History was not given to the world until after Justinian—and perhaps Procopius—had died. It is a fascinating book, like any denunciation of our neighbors; but there is something unpleasant in literary attacks upon persons who can no longer speak in their own defense.

each of us seeks comfort for his ignorance.

old and venerable beliefs may not be discredited.

The pre-eminent achievements of Byzantine civilization were governmental administration and decorative art: a state that survived eleven centuries, a St. Sophia that stands today.

Christianity at first suspected art as a support of paganism, idolatry, and immorality;

But when Christianity had triumphed, and great basilicas were needed to house its swelling congregations, the local and national traditions of art reasserted themselves, and architecture lifted itself out of the ruins.

There on the Dalmatian coast Diocletian, at the opening of the fourth century, had given his artists free play to experiment in raising a palace for his retirement; and they accomplished a revolution in European architecture. Arches were there sprung directly from column capitals, with no intervening entablature; so at one stroke were prepared the Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic styles.

The East preferred color to line, the vault and dome to the timbered roof, rich ornament to stern simplicity, gorgeous silks to shapeless togas.

The old classic orders—Doric, Ionian, Corinthian—became almost meaningless in an architectural world of arches, vaults, pendentives, and domes.

Never before had an art been so rich in color, so subtle in symbolism, so exuberant in decoration, so well adapted to quiet the intellect and stir the soul.

Baths of Zeuxippus in polychrome marble;

the Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, or Creative Logos, of God Himself.

($134,000,000)

and on December 26, 537, the Emperor and the Patriarch Menas led a solemn inaugural procession to the resplendent cathedral.

Procopius described the dome as “a work admirable and terrifying … seeming not to rest on the masonry below it, but to be suspended by a chain of gold from the height of the sky.”

Justinian in anticipating the boast of the Mogul shahs—that they built like giants and finished like jewelers.

St. Sophia was Justinian’s supreme achievement, more lasting than his conquests or his laws.

“If you should see one of them by itself you would suppose that the Emperor had built this work only, and had spent the whole time of his reign on this one alone.”

Architecture was the masterpiece of the Byzantine artist, but about it or within it were a dozen other arts in which he achieved some memorable excellence.

The Byzantine artist excelled and reveled in the minute;

Loving brilliance and permanence, the Byzantine painter made mosaic his favorite medium.

From this painstaking art Gothic would derive part of its inspiration for stained glass.

for ornament was the soul of Byzantium.

One must be an Oriental to understand an Oriental art. To a Western mind the essence of Byzantinism means that the East had become supreme in the heart and head of Greece:

The ancient Greek spirit would have found this alien and unbearable, but Greece herself was now part of the Orient. An Asiatic lassitude fell upon the Greek world precisely when it was to be challenged in its very life by the renewed vitality of Persia and the incredible energy of Islam.

Iran meant more, in our third century, than Iran or Persia today.

In Persia, as in all civilized societies, clothes made half the man, and slightly more of the woman.

The conventions of European and American diplomacy may be traced to the courts of the Persian kings.

“They are temperate in eating, modest in the privy and in marital relations.”

Persian women were exceptionally beautiful, and perhaps men had to be guarded from them.

banquets and receptions;14 lyre, guitar, flute, pipe, horn, drum, and other instruments abounded; tradition avers that Khosru Parvez’ favorite singer, Barbad, composed 360 songs, and sang them to his royal patron, one each night for a year.15 In education, too, religion played a major part; primary schools were situated on temple grounds, and were taught by priests. Higher education

Under this enlightened monarch the college of Jund-i-Shapur, which had been founded in the fourth or fifth century, became “the greatest intellectual center of the time.”

Neoplatonists there planted the seeds of Sufi mysticism;

The dog was so useful in guarding flocks and homes that the Persians made him a sacred animal; and the Persian cat acquired distinction universally.

Armenians, Syrians, and Jews connected Persia, Byzantium, and Rome in slow exchange.

We may judge the wealth of the upper classes by the story of the baron who, having invited a thousand guests to dinner, and finding that he had only 500 dinner services, was able to borrow 500 more from his neighbors.29

“King of Kings, King of the Aryans and the non-Aryans, Sovereign of the Universe, Descendant of the Gods”;32 Shapur II added “Brother of the Sun and Moon, Companion of the Stars.”

“Without army, no king; without revenues, no army; without taxes, no revenue; without agriculture, no taxes; without just government, no agriculture.”