The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  The defeat of Florence at Montaperto by Siena and Manfred entailed a second flight of the Guelf leaders; and for six years Florence was ruled by Manfred’s delegates. The collapse of the imperial cause in 1268 brought the Guelfs back to power, nominally subject to Charles of Anjou. To control the podesta, who was an appointee of Charles, they established a body of twelve anziani (“ancients” or elders) to “advise” that official, and a Council of One Hundred “without whose sanction no important measure, nor any expenditure, is to be undertaken.”58 Taking advantage of Charles’s preoccupation with the Sicilian Vespers, the bourgeoisie in 1282 put through a constitutional change by which a “Priory of the Arts,” composed of six priori (foremen) chosen from the greater guilds, became in effect the ruling body in the city government. Through all these mutations the office of podesta survived, but shorn of power; the merchants and the bankers were supreme.

  The vanquished party of the old nobility reorganized itself under the handsome and haughty Corso Donati, and, for unknown reasons, received the name of Neri, the Blacks. The new nobility of bankers and merchants, led by the Cerchi family, took the name of Bianchi, the Whites. Hopeless of aid from the shattered Empire, the old nobility turned to the Pope for succor from the triumphant bourgeoisie. Through the Spini, his Florentine agents in Rome, Donati planned with Boniface VIII to capture control of Florence. The Tuscan factions had infected the Papal States, and Boniface despaired of restoring order there unless he should secure a decisive voice in the municipal governments of Tuscany.59 A Florentine attorney learned of these negotiations, and accused three Spini agents in Rome of treason to Florence. The priori condemned the three men (April, 1300), whereupon the Pope threatened to excommunicate the accusers. A group of armed nobles of the Donati faction assaulted certain officers of the guilds. The Priory, of which Dante was now a member, exiled several nobles, in defiance of the Pope (June, 1300). Boniface appealed to Charles of Valois to enter Italy, subdue Florence, and recapture Sicily from Aragon.

  Charles reached Florence in November, 1301, and announced that he had come only to establish order and peace. But soon thereafter Corso Donati entered the city with an armed band, sacked the houses of the priors who had banished him, threw open the prisons, and released not only his friends but all who cared to escape. Riot ran loose; nobles and criminals joined in robbing, kidnaping, killing; warehouses were plundered; heiresses were forced to marry impromptu suitors, and the fathers were compelled to sign rich settlements. Finally Corso turned out the priors and the podesta; the Blacks chose a new Priory, which submitted all its proposed measures to the Black leaders; for seven years Corso was the dashing dictator of Florence. The deposed priors were tried, condemned, and banished, including Dante (1302); 359 Whites were sentenced to death, but most of them were allowed to escape into exile. Charles of Valois accepted these events gracefully, and 24,000 florins ($4,800,000) for his trouble, and departed south. In 1304 the unchecked Blacks set fire to the homes of their enemies; 1400 houses were destroyed, leaving the center of Florence in ashes. The Blacks then divided into new factions, and in one of a hundred acts of violence Corso Donati was stabbed to death (1308).

  We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys an adequate picture of any age. During these conflicts of popes and emperors, Guelfs and Ghibellines, Blacks and Whites, Italy was sustained by a hard-working peasantry; perhaps then, as now, Italian fields were cultivated with art as well as industry, and were divided and arranged to please the eye as well as feed the flesh. Hills and crags and mountains were carved and terraced to hold grapevines, fruit and nut orchards, and olive trees; and gardens were laboriously walled to check erosion and hold the precious rain. In the cities a hundred industries absorbed the great majority of men, and left little time for the strife of speeches, votes, knives, and swords. Merchants and bankers were not all merciless ghouls; they too, if only by their acquisitive fever, made the cities hum and grow. Nobles like Corso Donati, Guido Cavalcanti, Can Grande della Scala could be men of culture even if, now and then, they used their swords to make a point. Women moved with vibrant freedom in this high-spirited society; love was for them no wordy sham of troubadours, nor the grim fusion of sweating peasants, nor yet the service of a knight to a parsimonious goddess; it was a gallant and ardent amorousness leading with reckless despatch to a full-bodied abandonment and unpremeditated motherhood. Here and there, in this ferment, teachers maneuvered with desperate patience to insert instruction into reluctant youth; prostitutes eased the tumescence of imaginative men; poets distilled their foiled desire into compensatory verse; artists hungered while seeking perfection; priests played politics and consoled the bereaved and the poor; and philosophers struggled through a labyrinth of myths toward the bright mirage of truth. There was a stimulus in this society, an excitement and competition, that sharpened men’s wits and tongues, brought forth their reserve and unsuspected powers, and lured them, even if by their own destruction, to clear the way and set the stage for the Renaissance. Through many pains, and the shedding of blood, would come the great Rebirth.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The Roman Catholic Church

  1095–1294

  I. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE

  IN many aspects religion is the most interesting of man’s ways, for it is his ultimate commentary on life and his only defense against death. Nothing is more moving, in medieval history, than the omnipresence, almost at times the omnipotence, of religion. It is difficult for those who today live in comfort and plenty to go down in spirit into the chaos and penury that molded medieval faiths. But we must think of the superstitions, apocalypses, idolatry, and credulity of medieval Christians, Moslems, and Jews with the same sympathy with which we should think of their hardships, their poverty, and their griefs. The flight of thousands of men and women from “the world, the flesh, and the Devil” into monasteries and nunneries suggests not so much their cowardice as the extreme disorder, insecurity, and violence of medieval life. It seemed obvious that the savage impulses of men could be controlled only by a supernaturally sanctioned moral code. Then, above all, the world needed a creed that would balance tribulation with hope, soften bereavement with solace, redeem the prose of toil with the poetry of belief, cancel life’s brevity with continuance, and give an inspiring and ennobling significance to a cosmic drama that might else be a meaningless and intolerable procession of souls, species, and stars stumbling one by one into an inescapable extinction.

  Christianity sought to meet these needs with a tremendous and epic conception of creation and human sin, of the Virgin Mother and the suffering God, of the immortal soul destined to face a Last Judgment, to be damned to everlasting hell, or to be saved for eternal bliss by a Church administering through her sacraments the divine grace earned by the Redeemer’s death. It was within this encompassing vision that most Christian lives moved and found their meaning. The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence that right would win in the end, and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimated in the universal triumph of the good.

  The Last Judgment was the pivot of the Christian, as of the Jewish and the Moslem, faith. The belief in the Second Advent of Christ, and the end of the world, as preludes to the Judgment, had survived the disappointments of the apostles, the passing of the year 1000, and the fears and hopes of forty generations; it had become less vivid and general, but it had not died; “wise men,” said Roger Bacon in 1271, considered the end of the world to be near.1 Every great epidemic or disaster, every earthquake or comet or other extraordinary event was looked upon as heralding the end of the world. But even if the world continued, the souls and bodies of the dead would be resurrected at once* to face their Judge.

  Men hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell. There was much tenderness in medieval Christianity, probably more than in any other religion in history, but the Catholic, like the early
Protestant, theology and preaching, felt called upon to stress the terror of hell.† Christ was to this age no “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” but the stern avenger of every mortal sin. Nearly all churches showed some representation of Christ the Judge; many had pictures of the Last Judgment, and these portrayed the tortures of the damned more prominently than the bliss of the saved. St. Methodius, we are told, converted King Boris of Bulgaria by painting a picture of hell on the wall of the royal palace.4 Many mystics claimed to have had visions of hell, and described its geography and terror.5 The monk Tundale, in the twelfth century, reported exquisite details. In the center of hell, he said, the Devil was bound to a burning gridiron by red-hot chains; his screams of agony never ended; his hands were free, and reached out and seized the damned; his teeth crushed them like grapes; his fiery breath drew them down his burning throat. Assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the bodies of the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth. Sulphur was mixed with the fire in order that a vile stench might be added to the discomforts of the damned; but the fire gave no light, so that a horrible darkness shrouded the incalculable diversity of pains.6 The Church herself gave no official location or description of hell; but she frowned upon men who, like Origen, doubted the reality of its material fires.7 The purpose of the doctrine would have been frustrated by its mitigation. St. Thomas Aquinas held that “the fire which will torment the bodies of the damned is corporeal,” and located hell in “the lowest part of the earth.”8

  To common medieval imagination, and to such men as Gregory the Great, the Devil was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil; he could usually be sent packing by a dash of holy water or the sign of the cross; but he left an awful odor of burning sulphur behind him. He was a great admirer of women, used their smiles and charms as bait to lure his victims, and occasionally won their favors—if the ladies themselves might be believed. So a woman of Toulouse admitted that she had frequently slept with Satan, and had, at the age of fifty-three, given birth, through his services, to a monster with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail.9 The Devil had an immense cohort of assistant demons, who hovered around every soul and persistently maneuvered to lead it into sin. They, too, liked to lie as “incubi” with careless or lonely or holy women.10 The monk Richalm described them as “filling the whole world; the whole air is but a thick mass of devils, always and everywhere in wait for us … it is marvelous that any one of us should be alive; were it not for God’s grace, no one of us could escape.”11 Practically everybody, including the philosophers, believed in this multitude of demons; but a saving sense of humor tempered this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror. Such demons, it was believed, intruded audibly but invisibly into conversations, cut holes in people’s garments, and threw dirt at passersby. One tired demon sat on a head of lettuce, and was inadvertently eaten by a nun.12

  More alarming was the doctrine that “many are called but few are chosen” (Matt, xxii, 14). Orthodox theologians—Mohammedan as well as Christian —held that the vast majority of the human race would go to hell.13 Most Christian theologians took literally the statement ascribed to Christ: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark xvi, 16). St. Augustine reluctantly concluded that infants dying before being baptized went to hell.14 St. Anselm thought that the damnation of unbaptized infants (vicariously guilty through the sin of Adam and Eve) was no more unreasonable than the slave status of children born to slaves—which he considered reasonable.15 The Church softened the doctrine by teaching that unbaptized infants went not to hell but to limbo—Infernus puerorum—where their only suffering was the pain of the loss of paradise.16 Most Christians believed that all Moslems—and most Moslems (Mohammed excepted) believed that all Christians—would go to hell; and it was generally accepted that all “heathen” were damned.17 The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared that no man could be saved outside the Universal Church.18 Pope Gregory IX condemned as heresy Raymond Lully’s hope that “God hath such love for His people that almost all men will be saved, since, if more were damned than saved, Christ’s mercy would be without great love.”19 No other prominent churchman allowed himself to believe—or say—that the saved would outnumber the damned.20 Berthold of Regensburg, one of the most famous and popular preachers of the thirteenth century, reckoned the proportion of the damned to the saved as a hundred thousand to one.21 St. Thomas Aquinas thought that “in this also doth God’s mercy chiefly appear, that He raiseth a few to that salvation wherefrom very many fail.”22 Volcanoes were supposed by many to be the mouths of hell; their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned;23 and Gregory the Great argued that the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.24 The congested bowels of the earth held in their hot embrace the great majority of all the human beings that had ever been born. From that hell there would be no respite nor escape through all eternity. Said Berthold: Count the sands of the seashore, or the hairs that have grown on man or beast since Adam; reckon a year of torment for each grain or hair, and that span of time would hardly represent the beginning of the agony of the condemned.25 The last moment of a man’s life was decisive for all eternity; and the fear that that final moment might find one sinful and unshrived lay heavy on men’s souls.

  These terrors were in some careful measure mitigated by the doctrine of purgatory. Prayers for the dead were a custom as old as the Church; penances undergone, and Masses said, to aid the dead, can be traced as far back as 250.26 Augustine had discussed the possibility of a place of purging punishment for sins forgiven but not fully atoned for before death. Gregory I had approved the idea, and had suggested that the pains of souls in purgatory might be shortened and softened by the prayers of their living friends.27 The theory did not fully capture popular belief till Peter Damian, about 1070, gave it the afflatus of his fevered eloquence. In the twelfth century it was advanced by the spread of a legend that St. Patrick, to convince some doubters, had allowed a pit to be dug in Ireland, into which several monks descended; some returned, said the tale, and described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness. The Irish knight Owen claimed to have gone down through that pit into hell in 1153; and his account of his nether experiences had a prodigious success.28 Tourists came from afar to visit this pit; financial abuses developed; and Pope Alexander VI, in 1497, ordered it closed as an imposture.29

  What proportion of the people in medieval Christendom accepted the doctrines of Christianity? We hear of many heretics, but most of these admitted the basic tenets of the Christian creed. At Orléans in 1017 two men, “among the worthiest in lineage and learning,” denied creation, the Trinity, heaven, and hell as “mere ravings.”30 John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, tells of hearing many persons talk “otherwise than faith may hold”;31 in that century, says Villani, there were at Florence epicureans who scoffed at God and the saints, and lived “according to the flesh.”32 Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?-1220) tells of an unnamed priest who, reproved by another for careless celebration of the Mass, asked whether his critic really believed in transubstantiation, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and resurrection-adding that all this had been invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint, and was now carried on by hypocrites.33 The same Gerald of Wales quotes the scholar Simon of Tournai (c. 1201) as crying out, one day, “Almighty God! how long will this superstitious sect of Christians, and this upstart invention endure?”34 Of this Simon the story is told that in a lecture he proved by ingenious arguments the doctrine of the Trinity, and then, elated by the applause of his audience, boasted that he could disprove the doctrine with yet stronger arguments; whereupon, we are told, he was immediat
ely stricken with paralysis and idiocy.35 About 1200 Peter, Prior of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, London, wrote: “There are some who believe that there is no God, and that the world is ruled by chance…. There are many who believe neither in good or evil angels, nor in life after death, nor in any other spiritual and invisible thing.”36 Vincent of Beauvais (1200?-64) mourned that many “derided visions and stories” (of the saints) “as vulgar fables or lying inventions,” and added, “We need not wonder if such tales get no credence from men who believe not in hell.”37

  The doctrine of hell stuck in many throats. Some simple souls asked “why God had created the Devil if He foresaw Satan’s sin and fall?”38 Skeptics argued that God could not be so cruel as to punish finite sin with infinite pain; to which the theologians answered that a mortal sin was an offense against God, and therefore involved infinite guilt. A weaver of Toulouse, in 1247, remained unconvinced. “If,” he said, “I could lay hold on that god who, out of a thousand men whom he has made, saves one and damns all the rest, I would tear and rend him tooth and nail as a traitor, and would spit in his face.”39 Other skeptics argued more genially that hell-fire must in time calcine the soul and body to insensitivity, so that “he who is used to hell is as comfortable there as anywhere else.”40 The old joke about hell having more interesting company than heaven appears in the French idyl of Aucassin et Nicolette (c. 1230).41 Priests complained that most people put off thought of hell to their deathbed, confident that however sinful their lives, “three words” (ego te absolvo) “will save me.”42