The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

Scito te ipsum (Know Thyself)

his Commentary on Boethius suggested that the nature of God was so far beyond human understanding that all statements about it must be taken as mere analogies, and so stressed the unity of God as to make the Trinity seem but a figure of speech.

“We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not”82—not movable, multiple, mutable, temporal. Why should infinitesimal minds expect to know more about the Infinite? It is hard for us to conceive an immaterial spirit, said Thomas (anticipating Bergson), because the intellect is dependent upon the senses, and all our external experience is of material things; consequently “incorporeal things, of which there are no images, are known to us by comparison with sensible bodies, of which there are images.”

Try as we will, and despite our tendency to think of all things in material terms, we can find nothing material in consciousness; it is a reality all the world unlike anything physical or spatial. This rational soul must be classed as spiritual, as something infused into us by that God Who is the psychical force behind all physical phenomena. Only an immaterial power could form a universal idea, or leap backward and forward in time, or conceive with equal ease the great and the small.

The mind can be conscious of itself; but it is impossible to conceive a material entity as conscious of itself. Therefore it is reasonable to believe that this spiritual force in us survives the death of the body. But the soul so separated is not a personality; it cannot feel or will or think; it is a helpless ghost that cannot function without its flesh.

If at this point one asks why a God who foresees all should have created a man and a woman destined to such curiosity, and a race destined to such heritable guilt, Thomas answers that it is metaphysically impossible for any creature to be perfect, and that man’s freedom to sin is the price he must pay for his freedom of choice. Without that freedom of will man would be an automaton not beyond but below good and evil, having no greater dignity than a machine.

As to evil, Thomas labors to prove that metaphysically it does not exist. Malum est non ens, evil is no positive entity; every reality, as such, is good;114 evil is merely the absence or privation of some quality or power that a being ought naturally to have.

God gives us the freedom to do wrong, but He also gives us, by a divine infusion, a sense of right and wrong. This innate conscience is absolute, and must be obeyed at all costs. If the Church commands something against a man’s conscience he must disobey. If his conscience tells him that faith in Christ is an evil thing, he must abhor that faith.

Thomas does not admit that property is unnatural. He considers the arguments of the communists of his time, and answers like Aristotle that when everybody owns everything nobody takes care of anything.

The supreme facts of history are that man committed an infinite crime by disobeying God, thereby meriting infinite punishment; and that God the Son, by becoming man and suffering ignominy and death, created a redeeming store of grace by which man can be saved despite original sin.

Thomas struggles to reconcile divine predestination with human freedom, and to explain why a man whose fate is already sealed should strive to virtue, how prayer can move an unchangeable God, or what the function of the Church can be in a society whose individuals have already been sorted out into the saved and the damned. He answers that God has merely foreseen how each man would freely choose.

He did not succeed in reconciling Aristotle and Christianity, but in the effort he won an epochal victory for reason. He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith; but in his triumph he had brought the Age of Faith to an end.

Duns argued —precisely contrary to Francis Bacon—that all inductive or a posteriori proof—from effect to cause—is uncertain; that the only real proof is deductive and a priori—to show that certain effects must follow from the essential nature of the cause.

the moment we begin to reason about God we run into baffling contradictions (the Kantian “antinomies of pure reason”). If God is omnipotent He is the cause of all defects, including all evil; and secondary causes, including the human will, are illusory.

the tragic and basic fact in Scotus is his abandonment of the attempt to prove the basic Christian doctrines by reason. His followers carried the matter further, and removed one after another of the articles of faith from the sphere of reason, and so multiplied his distinctions and subtleties that in England a “Dunsman” came to mean a hairsplitting fool, a dull sophist, a dunce.

Those who had learned to love philosophy refused to be subordinated to theologians who rejected philosophy; the two studies quarreled and parted; and the rejection of reason by faith issued in the rejection of faith by reason. So ended, for the Age of Faith, the brave adventure.

the admission, by Duns Scotus and others, that the faith could not be established by reason shattered Scholasticism, and so weakened the faith that in the fourteenth century revolt broke out all along the doctrinal and ecclesiastical line.

the unwitting revenge of Islam; invaded in Palestine, and driven from nearly all of Spain, the Moslems transmitted their science and philosophy to Western Europe, and it proved to be a disintegrating force; it was Avicenna and Averroës, as well as Aristotle, who infected Christianity with the germs of rationalism.

“Modern” thought begins with the rationalism of Abélard, reaches its first peak in the clarity and enterprise of Thomas Aquinas, sustains a passing defeat in Duns Scotus, rises again with Occam, captures the papacy in Leo X, captures Christianity in Erasmus, laughs in Rabelais, smiles in Montaigne, runs riot in Voltaire, triumphs sardonically in Hume, and mourns its victory in Anatole France.

Greek science migrated through Syria into Islam in the ninth century, and stirred Moslem thought to one of the most remarkable cultural awakenings in history, while Christian Europe struggled to lift itself out of barbarism and superstition.

The attribution of magic powers to certain numbers came down from Pythagoras through the Christian Fathers: three, the number of the Trinity, was the holiest number, and stood for the soul; four represented the body; seven, their sum, symbolized the complete man; hence a predilection for seven—ages of man, planets, sacraments, cardinal virtues, deadly sins.

The enlightened Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons in the ninth century, complained that “things of such absurdity are believed by Christians as no one ever aforetime could induce the heathen to believe.”

The Romans used several forms of the abacus; in one form the counters slid in grooves; they were made of stone, metal, or colored glass, and were called calculi, little stones.

Perhaps Leonardo learned Greek as well as Arabic; in any case we find him well acquainted with the mathematics of Archimedes, Euclid, Hero, and Diophantus. In 1202 he published his Liber abaci; it was the first thorough European exposition of the Hindu numerals, the zero, and the decimal system by a Christian author, and it marked the rebirth of mathematics in Latin Christendom. The same work introduced Arabic algebra to Western Europe, and made a minor revolution in that science by occasionally using letters, instead of numbers, to generalize and abbreviate equations.

The Celtic term uisqebeatha, which was shortened into whisky, also meant “water of life.”

We have no mortality statistics for the Middle Ages, but it is probable that not more than half of those born reached maturity. The fertility of women labors to atone for the stupidity of men and the bravery of generals.

I have learned more important truths from men of humble station than from all the famous doctors. Let no man, therefore, boast of his wisdom.

these works of the thirteenth century mingled theology with science, and superstition with observation; they breathed the air of their time; and we should be chagrined if we could foresee how our own omniscience will be viewed seven centuries hence.

Like the great summae and The Divine Comedy, the science of this age suffered from too great certainty, from a failure to examine its assumptions, and from an indiscriminate mingling of knowledge with faith.

The name roman meant at first any work written in that early French which, as a Roman legacy, was called roman. The romances were not called romans because they were romantic; rather certain sentiments came to be called romantic because they were found so abundantly in the French romans.

Half the terrors of the medieval soul are gathered into this gory chronicle. As one reads its awful pages the gruesome horror mounts, until at last the cumulative effect is oppressive and overwhelming. Not all the sins and crimes of man from nebula to nebula could match the sadistic fury of this divine revenge. Dante’s conception of hell is the crowning indecency of medieval theology.

Centuries of barbarism, insecurity, and war had to intervene before man could defile his God with attributes of undying vengeance and inexhaustible cruelty.

If a man so bitter could win a conducted tour through paradise we shall all be saved.

What Dante achieves at last is sublimity. We cannot find in his epic the Mississippi of life and action that is the Iliad, nor the gentle drowsy stream of Virgil’s verse, nor the universal understanding and forgiveness of Shakespeare; but here is grandeur, and a tortured, half-barbaric force that foreshadows Michelangelo.

In Europe the Age of Faith reached its last full flower in Dante; it suffered a vital wound from Occam’s “razor” in the fourteenth century; but it lingered, ailing, till the advent of Bruno and Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon and Hobbes; it may return if the Age of Reason achieves catastrophe.

The Middle Ages are a condition as well as a period: in Western Europe we should close them with Columbus; in Russia they continued till Peter the Great (d. 1725); in India till our time.

The boundary between “medieval” and “modern” is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life.

the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy.

The Inquisition left its evil mark on European society: it made torture a recognized part of legal procedure, and it drove men back from the adventure of reason into a fearful and stagnant conformity.

We shall never do justice to the Middle Ages until we see the Italian Renaissance not as their repudiation but as their fulfillment.