The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

The bonders opposed the new religion fiercely, and demanded that Olaf should make sacrifice to Thor as in the ancient ritual; he agreed, but proposed to offer Thor the most acceptable sacrifice—the leading bonders themselves; whereupon they became Christians.

It was a crowded Valhalla: twelve gods and twelve goddesses;

The Valkyries—“Choosers of the Slain”—were empowered to decree the death date of each soul.

In this Twilight of the Gods all the universe fell to ruin: not merely sun and planets and stars, but, at the last, Valhalla itself, and all its warriors and deities; only Hope survived—that in the movement of slow time a new earth would form, a new heaven, a better justice, and a higher god than Odin or Thor.

But time sanctions error as well as theft, and compromises by calling the poems the Poetic or Elder Edda.

The literature of Scandinavia in this period doubtless exaggerates the violence of Viking society, as journalism and history, luring the reader with the exceptional, miss the normal flow of human life.

They began like pirates and ended like statesmen;

History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.

Feudalism was the economic subjection and military allegiance of a man to a superior in return for economic organization and military protection.

It cannot be rigidly defined, for it had a hundred variations in time and place.

Slavery diminished as serfdom increased.

An institution that had lasted throughout known history appeared inevitable and eternal, even to honest moralists.

The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change.

Servitude continued, and the word servus served for both slave and serf; but in time it became the word serf, as villein became villain, and Slav became slave. It was the serf, not the slave, who made the bread of the medieval world.

Like most economic and political systems in history, feudalism was what it had to be to meet the necessities of place and time and the nature of man.

A cat controlled the mice, and a dog watched over all.

He was ignorant of everything but farming, and not too skilled in that. His manners were rough and hearty, perhaps gross; in this turmoil of European history he had to survive by being a good animal, and he managed it.

He was greedy because poor, cruel because fearful, violent because repressed, churlish because treated as a churl. He was the mainstay of the Church, but he had more superstition than religion.

Despite his superstitions he was a realist; he knew the merciless whims of the sky, and the certainty of death; one season of drouth could bring him and his brood to starvation.

Flood and plague and earthquake entered the play, and made every comedy a tragedy at last.

At the beginning of the Middle Ages the greater part of Europe’s soil was untilled and unpeopled forest and waste; at their end the Continent had been won for civilization. Perhaps, in proper perspective, this was the greatest campaign, the noblest victory, the most vital achievement, of the Age of Faith.

Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things.

Feudalism feudalized the Church.

Theoretically the knight was required to be a hero, a gentleman, and a saint.

Chivalry, despite its religious aura, represented a victory of Germanic, pagan, and Arab conceptions over Christianity; a Europe attacked on every side needed the martial virtues again.

few knights lived up to it, as a few Christians rose to the arduous heights of Christian selflessness.

EVERY cultural flowering finds root and nourishment in an expansion of commerce and industry.

For society, as well as for an individual, primum est edere, deinde philosophari—eating must come before philosophy, wealth before art.

Like Venice and Pisa, Genoa traded freely with Islam: Venice with Egypt, Pisa with Tunisia, Genoa with Moorish Africa and Spain. Many of them sold arms to the Saracens during the Crusades.

gold ran thicker than faith or blood, and the “blasphemous trade” went on.

The Hanseatic League was for a century an agency of civilization. It cleared the Baltic and North Seas of pirates, dredged and straightened waterways, charted currents and tides, marked off channels, built lighthouses, ports, and canals, established and codified maritime law, and in general substituted order for chaos in northern European trade.

When the workers of England revolted in 1381, they pursued all the Hanseatics even into church sanctuaries, and murdered all those who could not say “bread and cheese” with a pure English accent.

Rhenish League,

Normally they sold, as well as bought, wholesale—en gros, said the French. The English translated en gros into grosser, and used this first form of the word grocer to mean one who sold spices in bulk.

The Middle Ages disciplined men for ten centuries in order that modern men might for four centuries be free.

In England the crown claimed all silver and gold deposits; baser metals could be mined by the landowner on payment of a “royalty” to the king.23

Gold and civilization wax and wane together.

History is inflationary.V

The abbey of St. André in France did so flourishing a banking business that it hired Jewish moneylenders to manage its financial operations.

every generation borrows, and denounces those who lend.

When their tide ebbed they left some of their terms—banco, credito, debito, cassa (money box, cash), conto, disconto, conto corrente, netto, bilanza, banca rotta (bank broken, bankruptcy)—in almost all European languages.

This “credit system”—made possible by mutual trust—was not the least important or honorable aspect of the economic revolution.

Aristotle’s condemnation of interest as an unnatural breeding of money by money,

That which is taken by you, beyond what suffices you, is taken by violence.

We cannot be sure that men are happier today than they would have been had the view of the Church prevailed.

St. Thomas Aquinas, about 1250, courageously formulated a new ecclesiastical doctrine of interest: the investor in a business enterprise might legitimately share in the gain if he actually shared in the risk or the loss;

The professional moneylenders exacted high rates of interest not so much because they were conscienceless devils as because they ran great risks of loss and head.

When borrowers defaulted, the lenders could only make up the loss by raising rates on other loans; the good loan had to pay for the bad one, as the price of commodities bought must include the cost of commodities spoiled before sale.

In the spirit of the times the craft guild took a religious form and a patron saint, and aspired to monopoly.

After two or three years the journeyman, if he had enough capital to open his own shop, was examined for technical ability by a board of his guild; if he passed he was made a master. Sometimes—but only in the later Middle Ages—the candidate was required to submit to the governors of the guild a “masterpiece”—a satisfactory sample of his craft.