The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  In general the Church was lenient with the lusty humor of the Age of Faith; she knew that men must have a moral holiday now and then, a moratorium on the unnatural moral restraints normally necessary to a civilized society. Some ultra-Puritans like St. John Chrysostom might cry out: “Christ is crucified, and yet you laugh!”—but there continued to be “cakes and ale,” and wine ran hot in the mouth. St. Bernard was suspicious of mirth and beauty; but most churchmen in the thirteenth century were hearty livers who enjoyed their meat and drink with a good conscience, and took no offense at a well-turned joke or ankle. The Age of Faith was not so solemn after all; rather it was an age of abounding vitality and full-blooded merriment, and tender sentiment, and a simple joy in the blessings of the earth. On the back of a medieval vocabulary book some wistful student wrote a wish for all of us:

  And I wish that all times were April and May, and every month renew all fruits again, and every day fleur-de-lis and gillyflower and violets and roses wherever one goes, and woods in leaf and meadows green, and every lover should have his lass, and they to love each other with a sure heart and true, and to everyone his pleasure and a gay heart.145

  IX. MORALITY AND RELIGION

  Does the general picture of medieval Europe support the belief that religion makes for morality?

  Our general impression suggests a wider gap between moral theory and practice in the Middle Ages than in other epochs of civilization. Medieval Christendom was apparently as rich as our own irreligious age in sensuality, violence, drunkenness, cruelty, coarseness, profanity, greed, robbery, dishonesty, and fraud. It seems to have outdone our time in the enslavement of individuals, but not to have rivaled it in the economic enslavement of colonial areas or defeated states. It surpassed us in the subjection of women; it hardly equaled us in immodesty, fornication, and adultery, or in the immensity and murderousness of war. Compared with the Roman Empire from Nerva to Aurelius, medieval Christendom was a moral setback; but much of the Empire had in Nerva’s day enjoyed many centuries of civilization, while the Middle Ages, through most of their duration, represented a struggle between Christian morality and a virile barbarism that largely ignored the ethics of the religion whose theology it indifferently received. The barbarians would have called some of their vices virtues, as necessary to their time: their violence as the other side of courage, their sensuality as animal health, their coarse and direct speech, and their shameless talk about natural things, as no worse than the introverted prudery of our youth.

  It would be an easy matter to condemn medieval Christendom from the mouths of its own moralists. St. Francis bemoaned the thirteenth century as “these times of superabundant malice and iniquity”;146 Innocent III, St. Bonaventura, Vincent of Beauvais, Dante considered the morals of that “wonderful century” to be dishearteningly gross; and Bishop Grosseteste, one of the most judicious prelates of the age, told the pope that “the Catholic population, as a body, was incorporate with the Devil.”147 Roger Bacon (1214?-94) judged his time with characteristic hyperbole:

  Never was so much ignorance…. Far more sins reign in these days than in any past age… boundless corruption… lechery… gluttony…. Yet we have baptism and the revelation of Christ… which men cannot really believe in or revere, or they would not allow themselves to be so corrupted…. Therefore many wise men believe that Antichrist is at hand, and the end of the world.148

  Such passages, of course, are the exaggerations necessary to reformers, and could be matched in any age.

  Apparently the fear of hell had less effect in raising the moral level than the fear of public opinion or the law has now—or had then; but the public opinion, and in a measure the law, had been formed by Christianity. Probably the moral chaos, born of half a millennium of invasion, war, and devastation, would have been far worse without the moderating effect of the Christian ethic. Our selection of instances in this chapter may have been unwittingly biased; at best they are fragmentary; statistics are lacking or unreliable; and history always leaves out the average man. There must have been, in medieval Christendom, thousands of good and simple people like Fra Salimbene’s mother, whom he describes as “a humble lady and devout, fasting much, and gladly dispensing alms to the poor”;149 but how often do such women make the pages of history?

  Christianity brought some moral retrogressions and some moral advances. The intellectual virtues naturally declined in the Age of Faith; intellectual conscience (fairness with the facts) and the search for truth were replaced by zeal and admiration for sanctity, and a sometimes unscrupulous piety; “pious frauds” of textual doctoring and documentary forgery seemed negligible venial sins. The civic virtues suffered from concentration on the afterlife, but more from the disintegration of the state; nevertheless there must have been some patriotism, however local, in the men and women who built so many cathedrals and some lordly town halls. 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.

  Against these and other debits many credits stand. Christianity struggled with heroic tenacity against an inundation of barbarism. It labored to diminish war and feud, trial by combat or ordeal; it extended the intervals of truce and peace, and sublimated something of feudal violence and pugnacity into devotion and chivalry. It suppressed the gladiatorial shows, denounced the enslavement of prisoners, forbade the enslavement of Christians, ransomed numberless captives, and encouraged—more than it practiced—the emancipation of serfs. It taught men a new respect for human life and work. It stopped infanticide, lessened abortion, and softened the penalties exacted by Roman and barbarian law. It steadfastly rejected the double standard in sexual morality. It immensely expanded the scope and operations of charity. It gave men peace of mind against the baffling riddles of the universe, though at the cost of discouraging science and philosophy. Finally, it taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime. Over all the competing cities and petty states of Europe it established and maintained one moral law. Under its guidance, and at some necessary sacrifice of liberty, Europe achieved for a century that international morality for which it prays and struggles today—a law that shall raise states out of their jungle code, and free the energies of men for the battles and victories of peace.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  The Resurrection of the Arts

  1095–1300

  I. THE ESTHETIC AWAKENING

  WHY is it that Western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reached a climax of art comparable with Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome?

  The Norse and Saracen raids had been beaten off, the Magyars had been tamed. The Crusades aroused a fever of creative energy, and brought back to Europe a thousand ideas and art forms from the Byzantine and Moslem East. The reopening of the Mediterranean, and the opening of the Atlantic to Christian commerce, the security and organization of trade along the rivers of France and Germany and on the northern seas, and the expansion of industry and finance, generated a wealth unknown since Constantine, new classes capable of affording art, and prosperous communes each resolved to build a finer cathedral than the last. The coffers of abbots, bishops, and popes were swelling with the tithes of the people, the gifts of the merchants, the grants of nobles and kings. The Iconoclasts had been defeated; art was no longer branded as idolatry; the Church, which once had feared it, found in it now a propitious medium for inculcating her faith and ideals among the letterless, and for stirring souls to a devotion that lifted spires like supplicating litanies to the sky. And the new religion of Mary, rising spontaneously from the hearts of the people, poured its love and trust of the Divine Mother into magnificent temples where thousands of her children might gather at once to do her homage and beg her aid. All these influences, and many more, came together to flood half a continent with profuse streams of unprecedented art.

  The ancient techniques had here and there survived barbarian devastation
and municipal decay. In the Eastern Empire the old skills were never lost; and it was above all from the Greek East and Byzantine Italy that artists and art themes now entered the life of the resurrected West. Charlemagne drew into his service Greek artists fleeing from Byzantine Iconoclasts; hence the art of Aachen married Byzantine delicacy and mysticism to German solidity and earthiness. The monk artists of Cluny, inaugurating in the tenth century a new era in Western architecture and adornment, began by copying Byzantine models. The school of monastic art developed at Monte Cassino by Abbot Desiderius (1072) was taught by Greek teachers on Byzantine lines. When Honorius III (1218) wished to decorate San Paolo fuori le mura he sent to Venice for mosaicists; and those who came were steeped in the Byzantine tradition. Colonies of Byzantine artists could be found in a score of Western cities; and it was their style of painting that molded Duccio, ‘Cimabue, and the early Giotto himself. Byzantine or Oriental motives—palmettes, acanthus leaves, animals within medallions—came to the West on textiles and ivories and in illuminated manuscripts, and lived hundreds of years in Romanesque ornament. Syrian, Anatolian, Persian forms of architecture—the vault, the dome, the tower-flanked façade, the composite column, the windows grouped by two or three under a binding arch—appeared again in the architecture of the West. History makes no leaps, and nothing is lost.

  Just as the development of life requires variation as well as heredity, and the development of a society needs experimental innovation as well as stabilizing custom, so the development of art in Western Europe involved not only the continuity of a tradition in skills and forms, and the stimulation of Byzantine and Moslem examples, but also the repeated turning of the artist from the school to nature, from ideas to things, from the past to the present, from the imitation of models to the expression of self. 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. Nations that were rising out of the Dark Ages toward the noon of the thirteenth century preferred the noble grace of Giotto’s women to the stiff Theodoras of Byzantine mosaics; and, laughing at the Semitic horror of images, they transformed mere decoration into the smiling angel of the Reims Cathedral, and the Golden Virgin of Amiens. The joy of life conquered the fear of death in Gothic art.

  It was the monks who, as they preserved classic literature, maintained and disseminated Roman, Greek, and Oriental art techniques. Seeking self-containment, the monasteries trained their inmates to the decorative as well as the practical crafts. The abbey church required altar and chancel furniture, chalice and pyx, reliquaries and shrines, missal, candelabra, perhaps mosaics, murals, and icons to inform and inspire piety; these the monks for the most part fashioned with their own hands; indeed, the monastery itself was in many cases designed and built by them, as Monte Cassino rises by Benedictine labor today. Most monasteries included spacious workshops; at Chartres, for example, Bernard de Tiron founded a religious house and gathered into it, we are told, “craftsmen both in wood and iron, carvers and goldsmiths, painters and stonemasons … and others skilled in all manner of cunning work.”1 The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages were almost all the work of monks; the finest textiles were produced by monks and nuns; the architects of the early Romanesque cathedrals were monks;2 in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries the abbey of Cluny furnished most of the architects for Western Europe, and many of the painters and sculptors;3 and in the thirteenth century the abbey of St. Denis was a thriving center of varied arts. Even the Cistercian monasteries, which in the days of the watchful Bernard had closed their doors to decoration, soon surrendered to the lure of form and the excitement of color, and began to build abbeys as ornate as Cluny or St. Denis. As the English cathedrals were usually monastic minsters, the regular or monastic clergy continued to the end of the thirteenth century to dominate ecclesiastical architecture in England.

  FIG. 16—Cimabue: Madonna with Angels and St. Francis Cathedral of Assisi

  FIG. 17—Portrait of a Saint Book of Kells

  FIG. 18—Glass Painting, 12th Century Chartres Cathedral

  FIG. 19—Rose Window Strasbourg Cathedral

  FIG. 20—Notre Dame Paris

  FIG. 21—Gargoyle Notre Dame, Paris

  FIG. 22—Gargoyle Notre Dame, Paris

  FIG. 23—Cathedral, West View Chartres

  FIG. 24—“Modesty” North transept, Chartres Cathedral

  FIG. 25—“he Visitation” North transept, Chartres Cathedral

  But a monastery, however excellent as a school and refuge for the spirit, is condemned by its seclusion to be a repository of traditions rather than a theater of living experiment; it is better fitted to preserve than to create. Not until the widened demands of a richer laity nourished secular artists did medieval life find the exuberant expression, in unhackneyed forms, that brought Gothic art to fullness. First in Italy, most in France, least in England, the emancipated and specializing laymen of the twelfth century, grouped in guilds, took the arts from monastic teachers and hands, and built the great cathedrals.

  II. THE ADORNMENT OF LIFE

  Nevertheless it was a monk who wrote the most complete and revealing summary of medieval arts and crafts. Theophilus—“lover of God” in the monastery of Helmershausen near Paderborn—wrote, about 1190, a Schedula diversarum artium:

  Theophilus, a humble priest… addresses his words to all who wish, by the practical work of their hands, and by the pleasing meditation of what is new, to put aside … all sloth of mind and wandering of spirit.… [Here shall such men find] all that Greece possesses in the way of diverse colors and mixtures; all that Tuscany knows of the working of enamels … all that Arabia has to show of works ductile, fusible, or chased; all the many vases and sculptured gems and ivory that Italy adorns with gold; all that France prizes in costly variety of windows; all that is extolled in gold, silver, copper, or iron, or in subtle working of wood or stone.4

  Here in a paragraph we see another side of the Age of Faith—men and women, and not least monks and nuns, seeking to satisfy the impulse to expression, taking pleasure in proportion, harmony, and form, and eager to make the useful beautiful. The medieval scene, however suffused with religion, is above all a picture of men and women working. And the first and basic purpose of their art is the adornment of their work, their bodies, and their homes. Thousands of woodworkers used knife, drill, gouge, chisel, and polishing materials to carve tables, chairs, benches, chests, caskets, cabinets, stairposts, wainscots, beds, cupboards, buffets, icons, altarpieces, choir stalls… with an incredible variety of forms and themes in high or low relief, and often with a mischievous humor that recognized no barrier between the sacred and the profane. On the misericords one might find figures of misers, gluttons, gossipers, grotesque beasts and birds with human heads. In Venice the wood carvers sometimes made frames more beautiful and costly than the pictures they enclosed. The Germans began in the twelfth century that remarkable wood sculpture which would become a major art in the sixteenth.*

  The workers in metal rivaled the workers in wood. Iron was wrought into elegant gratings for windows, courtyards, and gates; for mighty hinges that spread across massive doors in a variety of floral designs (as on Notre Dame at Paris); for cathedral choir grilles as “strong as iron” and as delicate as lace. Iron or bronze or copper was fused or hammered into handsome vases, goblets, caldrons, ewers, candelabra, censers, caskets, and lamps; and bronze plates covered many cathedral doors. Armorers liked to add a touch of decoration to swords and scabbards, helmets, breastplates, and shields. The gorgeous bronze chandelier presented to the cathedral of Aachen by Frederick Barbarossa attested the ability of the German metalworkers; and the great bronze candlestick from Gloucester (c. 1100), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bears like testimony to English skill. The medieval fondness for making art of the simplest articles shows in the adornment of bolts, locks, and keys. Even weathervanes were carefully decorated
with ornament that only a telescope could see.