The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Justinian not only decreed death for homosexual acts, but often added torture, mutilation, and the public parading of the guilty persons before their execution. In this extreme legislation against sexual irregularities we feel the influence of a Christianity shocked into a ferocious puritanism by the sins of pagan civilization.

While Catholicism controlled the Alexandrian episcopacy, heresy spread throughout the countryside; the peasants ignored the decrees of the patriarch and the orders of the Emperor, and Egypt was half lost to the Empire a century before the Arabs came.

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

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

The Arab felt no duty or loyalty to any group larger than his tribe, but the intensity of his devotion varied inversely as its extent; for his tribe he would do with a clear conscience what civilized people do only for their country, religion, or “race”—i.e., lie, steal, kill, and die.

For the authority of the Prophet was creating a civic rule for Medina; and more and more he was compelled to address his time and inspirations to the practical problems of social organization, daily morals, even to intertribal diplomacy and war. As in Judaism, no distinction was made between secular and religious affairs; all alike came under religious jurisdiction; he was both Caesar and Christ.

belief in predestination made fatalism a prominent feature in Moslem thought. It was used by Mohammed and other leaders to encourage bravery in battle, since no danger could hasten, nor any caution defer, the predestined hour of each man’s death. It gave the Moslem a dignified resignation against the hardships and necessities of life; but it conspired with other factors to produce, in later centuries, a pessimistic inertia in Arab life and thought.

The ethic of the Koran, like that of the New Testament, rests on the fear of punishment, and the hope of reward, beyond the grave. “The life of the world is only play, and idle talk, and pageantry” (lvii, 20); only one thing is certain in it, and that is death.

The Koran, like the Fundamentalist forms of Christianity, seems more concerned with right belief than with good conduct; a hundred times it threatens with hell those who reject Mohammed’s appeal

In the Koran, as in the Talmud, law and morals are one; the secular is included in the religious, and every commandment is of God.

The teachings of the Koran about angels, the resurrection, and heaven follow the Talmud rather than the Old Testament.

As the Byzantines for three centuries had fought to contain the Arab expansion, so now the Moslems fought to check the westward movement of the Turks; so, later, the Turks would struggle to stay the Mongol flood. Periodically the pressure of a growing population upon the means of subsistence generates the mass migrations that overshadow the other events of history.

Next to bread and woman, in the hierarchy of desire, comes eternal salvation; when the stomach is satisfied, and lust is spent, man spares a little time for God.

All religions are superstitions to other faiths.

The Jews of the Near East had welcomed the Arabs as liberators. They suffered now divers disabilities and occasional persecutions; but they stood on equal terms with Christians, were free once more to live and worship in Jerusalem, and prospered under Islam in Asia, Egypt, and Spain as never under Christian rule.

The Christians of the East in general regarded Islamic rule as a lesser evil than that of the Byzantine government and church.

Increasingly after the year 715, when out of doors, they veiled the face below the eyes; in this way every woman could be romantic, for at any age the eyes of Arab women are perilously beautiful. Women matured at twelve and were old at forty; in the interval they inspired most of Arabic poetry, and maintained the race.

The Moslem male, separated from women before marriage by purdah, and surfeited with them after marriage by the harem, fell into irregular relations; and women, secluded from all men but relatives, slipped into similar perversions.

The Moslems were honest about lying; they allowed a lie to save a life, to patch up a quarrel, to please a wife, to deceive in war the enemies of the faith.

Circumcision, though not mentioned in the Koran, was taken for granted as a precaution of hygiene; boys underwent the operation at five or six.

The law by which the great realm was ruled claimed to deduce itself from the Koran. In Islam, as in Judaism, law and religion were one; every crime was a sin, every sin a crime; and jurisprudence was a branch of theology.

Civilization is rural in base but urban in form; men must gather in cities to provide for one another audiences and stimuli.

In general Moslem society was one of excellent manners; from Cyrus to Li Hung Chang the East has surpassed the West in courtesy. It was an ennobling aspect of this Baghdad life that all the permitted arts and sciences found there a discriminating patronage, that schools and colleges were numerous, and the air resounded with poetry.

When Baghdad was destroyed by the Mongols it had thirty-six public libraries.

“princes like Sahib ibn Abbas in the tenth century might own as many books as could then be found in all the libraries of Europe combined.”

Avicenna was the greatest writer on medicine, al-Razi the greatest physician, al-Biruni the greatest geographer, al-Haitham the greatest optician, Jabir probably the greatest chemist, of the Middle Ages; these five names, so little known in present-day Christendom, are one measure of our provincialism in viewing medieval history.

In philosophy, as in science, Islam borrowed from Christian Syria the legacy of pagan Greece, and returned it through Moslem Spain to Christian Europe.

Here, through however imperfect translations of apocryphal texts, a new world appeared: one in which men had reasoned fearlessly about everything, unchecked by sacred scriptures, and had conceived a cosmos not of divine whimsy and incalculable miracle, but of majestic and omnipresent law.

Soon the whole edifice of Mohammedan dogma began to tremble and crack, as Greek orthodoxy had melted under the Sophists’ eloquence, as Christian orthodoxy would wince and wilt under the blows of the Encyclopedists and the whips of Voltaire’s wit.

He took over Aristotle’s proofs of God’s existence very much as Aquinas would do three centuries later: a chain of contingent events requires for its intelligibility an ultimate necessary being; a chain of causes requires a First Cause; a series of motions requires a Prime Mover unmoved; multiplicity requires unity. The ultimate goal of philosophy, never quite attainable, is knowledge of the First Cause; the best approach to such knowledge is purity of soul. Like Aristotle, al-Farabi carefully managed to make himself unintelligible on immortality. He died at Damascus in 950.

Avicenna’s Shifa and Qanun mark the apex of medieval thought, and constitute one of the major syntheses in the history of the mind. Much of it followed the lead of Aristotle and al-Farabi, as much of Aristotle followed Plato; only lunatics can be completely original.

Avicenna occasionally talks what seems to our fallible judgment to be nonsense; but that is also true of Plato and Aristotle; there is nothing so foolish but it may be found in the pages of the philosophers.

What we know of Moslem thought in those centuries is a fragment of what survives, what survives is a fragment of what was produced; what appears in these pages is a morsel of a fraction of a fragment. When scholarship has surveyed more thoroughly this half-forgotten legacy, we shall probably rank the tenth century in Eastern Islam as one of the golden ages in the history of the mind.

In reality, the mystic held, these individual things exist only by the divine power in them; their sole reality is this underlying divinity.

Saints, unknown to early Islam, became numerous in Sufism.

Day by day the religion that some philosophers supposed to be the product of priests is formed and re-formed by the needs, sentiment, and imagination of the people; and the monotheism of the prophets becomes the polytheism of the populace.

We—who have less leisure than men had before so many labor-saving devices were invented—cannot spare the time to read all these couplets and bury all these kings; but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost?

Moslem Spain disintegrated into twenty-three taifas or city-states, too busy with intrigue and strife to stop the gradual absorption of Mohammedan by Christian Spain.

Another group, under the name of “Universal Religion,” deprecated all dogmas, and pled for a purely ethical religion. Some were agnostics: the doctrines of religion, they said, “may or may not be true; we neither affirm nor deny them, we simply cannot tell; but our consciences will not allow us to accept doctrines whose truth cannot be demonstrated.”

The theists accepted God and immortality, but denied creation and the resurrection of the body, and called heaven and hell spiritual conditions only; the deists acknowledged a deity but rejected immortality, and viewed the world as a self-operating machine; the materialists completely rejected the idea of God.

By a “transcendental dialectic” as subtle as Kant’s, the Moslem mystic argued that reason leads to universal doubt, intellectual bankruptcy, moral deterioration, and social collapse. Seven centuries before Hume, al-Ghazali reduced reason to the principle of causality, and causality to mere sequence: all that we perceive is that B regularly follows A, not that A causes B. Philosophy, logic, science, cannot prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul; only direct intuition can assure us of these beliefs, without which no moral order, and therefore no civilization, can survive.

The world was never created, said al-Arabi, for it is the external aspect of that which in inward view is God. History is the development of God to self-consciousness, which He achieves at last in man.

Mohammedanism, like Christianity, was a developing and adjustable religion, which would have startled a reborn Mohammed or Christ.

he preached his pantheism in the market place. The populace ignored him, or did not understand him. Hayy concluded that Mohammed was right: that the people can be disciplined to social order only by a religion of myth, miracle, ceremony, and supernatural punishments and rewards.

For though the philosopher cannot accept in their literal sense the dogmas of “the Koran, the Bible, and other revealed books,”100 he perceives their necessity in developing a wholesome piety and morality among the people, who are so harassed with economic importunities that they find no time for more than incidental, superficial, and dangerous thinking on first and last things.

Averroës does not explicitly teach, he merely implies, the doctrine imputed to him by Christian critics—that a proposition may be true in philosophy (among the educated) and false (harmful) in religion (and morals).

Once again history illustrated the truism that civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest.

the Mongols came and went within forty years; they came not to conquer and stay, but to kill, pillage, and carry their spoils to Mongolia. When their bloody tide ebbed it left behind it a fatally disrupted economy, canals broken or choked, schools and libraries in ashes, governments too divided, poor, and weak to govern, and a population cut in half and shattered in soul.

this, and no change of climate, turned Western Asia from world leadership to destitution, from a hundred teeming and cultured cities in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Caucasus, and Transoxiana into the poverty, disease, and stagnation of modern times.

The rise and decline of Islamic civilization is one of the major phenomena of history. For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy.