The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Just as the sternness of Yahveh had necessitated Christ, so the justice of Christ needed Mary’s mercy to temper it. In effect the Mother—the oldest figure in religious worship—became, as Mohammed had prophetically misconceived her, the third person of a new Trinity.

A new religion had been created, and perhaps Catholicism survived by absorbing it. A Gospel of Mary took form, uncanonical, incredible, and indescribably charming.

The worship of Mary transformed Catholicism from a religion of terror—perhaps necessary in the Dark Ages—into a religion of mercy and love. Half the beauty of Catholic worship, much of the splendor of Catholic art and song, are the creation of this gallant faith in the devotion and gentleness, even the physical loveliness and grace, of woman.

Guillaume Durand wrote the medieval classic on the Roman liturgy in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, or Rational Exposition of the Divine Offices (1286); we may judge its wide acceptance from the fact that it was the first book printed after the Bible.

Every church was a sanctuary with right of asylum in which hunted men might find some breathless refuge till the passions of their pursuers could yield to the processes of law; to drag men from such a sanctuary was a sacrilege entailing excommunication.

From Novgorod to Cadiz, from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, steeples and spires raised themselves precariously into the sky because men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die.

In the feudal system each owner or tenant was expected to leave something to the Church at death; those who did not were suspected of heresy, and might be refused burial in consecrated ground.

Charges of corruption have been made against every government in history; they are nearly always partly true, and partly exaggerated from startling instances; but at times they rise to a revolutionary resentment.

Moving perhaps with returning Crusaders, new waves of Oriental mysticism flowed into the West. From Persia, through Asia Minor and the Balkans, came echoes of Manichean dualism and Mazdakian communism; from Islam a hostility to images, an obscure fatalism, and distaste for priests; and from the failure of the Crusades a secret doubt as to the divine origin and support of the Christian Church.

the Humiliati in Italy, the Béguines and Beghards in the Low Countries, were orthodox in everything except their embarrassing insistence that priests should live in poverty. The Franciscan movement arose as such a sect, and narrowly escaped being classed as heretical.

The most powerful of the heretical sects was variously named Cathari, from the Greek for “pure”; Bulgari, from their Balkan provenance (whence the abusive term bugger);

Christ had no place to lay His head, but the pope lived in a palace; Christ was propertyless and penniless, but Christian prelates were rich; surely, said the Cathari, these lordly archbishops and bishops, these worldly priests, these fat monks, were the Pharisees of old returned to life!

all the leading troubadours except two were considered to be on the side of the Albigensians; these troubadours made fun of pilgrims, confession, holy water, the cross; they called the churches “dens of thieves,” and Catholic priests seemed to them “traitors, liars, and hypocrites.”

Feeling herself an inseparable part of the moral and political government of Europe, the Church looked upon heresy precisely as the state looked upon treason: it was an attack upon the foundations of social order.

The state, with some reluctance, joined in persecuting heretics because it feared that government would be impossible without the aid of a Church inculcating a unified religious belief.

So many Dominicans were employed in this work that they were nicknamed Domini canes—the (hunting) “dogs of the Lord.”

They thought of themselves not as judges impartially weighing evidence, but as warriors pursuing the enemies of Christ.

We prohibit all laymen to discuss matters of the Catholic faith; if anyone does so he shall be excommunicated.

Roman law had permitted the eliciting of confessions by torture. It was not used in the episcopal courts, nor in the first twenty years of the papal inquisition; but Innocent IV (1252) authorized it where the judges were convinced of the accused man’s guilt, and later pontiffs condoned its use.

The worst tragedies of the Inquisition were concealed in the dungeons rather than brought to light at the stake.

In judging the Inquisition we must see it against the background of a time accustomed to brutality. Perhaps it can be better understood by our age, which has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon.

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.

Many Minorites protested against the relaxation of Francis’ rule. As “Spirituals” or “Zealots” they lived in hermitages or small convents in the Apennines, while the great majority of Franciscans preferred spacious monasteries. The Spirituals argued that Christ and His apostles had possessed no property; St. Bonaventura agreed; Pope Nicholas III approved the proposition in 1279; Pope John XXII pronounced it false in 1323; and thereafter those Spirituals who persisted in preaching it were suppressed as heretics. A century after the death of Francis his most loyal followers were burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

the beginning of “modern times”: it was the victory of nationalism against supernationalism, of the state against the Church, of the power of the sword over the magic of the word.

When Urban II united Christendom against the Turks the dream of Gregory was almost realized; but when Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and Boniface VIII gave the holy name of crusade to their wars against the Albigensians, Frederick II, and the Colonnas, the great ideal broke to pieces in papal hands stained with Christian blood.

Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.

To priests and theologians woman was still in these centuries what she had seemed to Chrysostom—“a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.”

Most of the English guilds contained as many women as men, largely because craftsmen were permitted to employ their wives and daughters, and enlist them in the guilds. Several guilds, devoted to feminine manufactures, were composed wholly of women; there were fifteen such guilds at Paris at the end of the thirteenth century.

Cleanliness, in the Middle Ages, was not next to godliness. Early Christianity had denounced the Roman baths as wells of perversion and promiscuity, and its general disapproval of the body had put no premium on hygiene.

Many cities in Germany, France, and England had public baths in the thirteenth century; one student reckons that Parisians bathed more frequently in 1292 than in the twentieth century.

Taverns were numerous, ale was cheap. Beer was the regular drink of the poor, even at breakfast. Monasteries and hospitals north of the Alps were normally allowed a gallon of ale or beer per person per day.

Many monasteries, castles, and rich homes had their own breweries, for in the northern countries beer was reckoned as second only to bread as a necessary of life.

Perhaps hypocrisy, so indispensable to civilization, increased in the Middle Ages as compared with the frank secularism of antiquity, or the unabashed corporate brutality of our time.

it taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime.

There was a somber and static quality in Byzantine art, a fragile and feminine elegance in Arabic ornament, that could never represent the dynamic and masculine vitality of a rebarbarized and reinvigorated West.

Within the church the central aisle, if its flanking colonnades supported arches curving to meet across the ceiling vault, looked like the inner hull of an inverted ship, whence its name of nave.

we perceive the unseen but omnipresent medieval artisan, proud of his skill, joyful in his strength, laughing at theologies and philosophies, and drinking with relish, and to the last drop, the bubbling, brimming, lethal cup of life.

History is a duel between art and time.

Gothic architecture was the supreme achievement of the medieval soul. The men who dared to suspend those vaults on a few stilts of stone studied and expressed their science with greater thoroughness and effect than any medieval philosopher in any summa, and the lines and harmonies of Notre Dame make a greater poem than The Divine Comedy.

case endings had to be replaced by prepositions, conjugational endings by auxiliary verbs. The old demonstrative pronouns ille and illa became definite articles—il, el, lo, le, la-, and the Latin unus (one) was shortened to form the indefinite article un.

It was a medieval custom to differentiate dialects by their way of saying yes: South France said it with oc from the Latin hoc, this; the North used oil, a fusion of the Latin hoc ille, this-that.

Italian hardly existed as a language at the beginning of the thirteenth century; there were merely some fourteen dialects continued and variously corrupted from the ancient Latin of the market place, each barely intelligible to the rest, and cherishing its differences with passionate atomism; sometimes different quarters of the same city, as at Bologna, had distinct dialects.

tragic, however, was the influence of Latin sentence structure—keeping the verb to the end-in changing the once simple syntax of the German people into the stiff, inverted, and breath-taking periods of the later German style.

The cost of books, and the dearth of funds for schools, produced a degree of illiteracy which would have seemed shameful to ancient Greece or Rome.

It was merely an incident that, through the inability of the translators to find Latin equivalents, many Arabic words were now introduced into the languages of Europe. It was more important that algebra, the zero, and the decimal system entered the Christian West

“philosophy,” said Bacon, “has come down to us from the Arabs”;

Thomas Aquinas was led to write his Summas to halt the threatened liquidation of Christian theology by Arabic interpretations of Aristotle.

Moral education was stressed in the Middle Ages at the expense of intellectual enlightenment, as intellectual education is today stressed at the expense of moral discipline.

For some time (500–800) the Church gave all her attention to moral training, and did not reckon the transmission of secular knowledge as one of her functions. But under the prodding of Charlemagne cathedrals, monasteries, parish churches, and convents opened schools for the general education of boys and girls.