The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, him to whom you were united, after your tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of divine love, and with whom… you have served the Lord, him the Lord now takes in your stead, or as another you, and warms in His bosom; and for the day of His coming, when shall sound the voice of the archangel and the trumpet descending from heaven, He keeps him to restore him to you by His grace.48

  She joined her dead lover in 1164, having lived to equal his age, and almost his fame. She was buried beside him in the gardens of the Paraclete. That oratory was destroyed in the Revolution, and the graves were disturbed and perhaps confused. What were reasonably believed to be the remains of Abélard and Héloïse were transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 1817. There, even till our time, men and women might be seen, on a summer Sunday, bringing flowers to adorn the tomb.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  The Adventure of Reason

  1120–1308

  I. THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES

  HOW shall we explain the remarkable outburst of philosophy that began with Anselm, Roscelin, and Abélard, and culminated in Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas? As usual, many causes conspired. The Greek East had never surrendered its classical heritage; the ancient philosophers were studied in every century in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria; men like Michael Psellus, Nicephorus Blemydes (1197?–1272), George Pachymeres (1242?–1310), and the Syrian Bar-Hebraeus (1226?–82) knew the works of Plato and Aristotle at first hand; and Greek teachers and manuscripts gradually entered the West. Even there some fragments of the Hellenic legacy had survived the barbarian storm; most of Aristotle’s Organon of logic remained; and of Plato the Meno and the Timaeus, whose vision of Er had colored Christian imaginations of hell. The successive waves of translations from the Arabic and the Greek in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the West the revelation and challenge of Greek and Moslem philosophies so different from the Christian that they threatened to sweep away the whole theology of Christendom unless Christianity could construct a counterphilosophy. But these influences would hardly have produced a Christian philosophy if the West had continued poor. What brought these factors to effect was the growth of wealth through the agricultural conquest of the Continent, the expansion of commerce and industry, the services and accumulations of finance. This economic revival collaborated with the liberation of the communes, the rise of the universities, the rebirth of Latin literature and Roman law, the codification of canon law, the glory of Gothic, the flowering of romance, the “gay science” of the troubadours, the awakening of science, and the resurrection of philosophy, to constitute the “Renaissance of the twelfth century.”

  From wealth came leisure, study, schools; scholê at first meant leisure. A scholasticus was a director or professor of a school; the “Scholastic philosophy” was the philosophy taught in the medieval secondary schools or in the universities that for the most part grew out of them. The “Scholastic method” was the form of philosophical argument and exposition used in such schools. In the twelfth century, barring Abélard’s classes in or near Paris, Chartres was the most active and famous of these schools. There philosophy was combined with literature, and the graduates managed to write of abstruse problems with the clarity and grace that became an honorable tradition in France. Plato, who also had made philosophy intelligible, was a favorite there, and the quarrel between realists and nominalists was mediated by identifying the “real” universals with the Platonic Ideas, or creative archetypes, in the mind of God. Under Bernard of Chartres (c. 1117) and his brother Theodoric (c. 1140) the school of Chartres reached the height of its influence. Three of its graduates dominated the philosophical scene in Western Europe in the half century after Abélard: William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porrée, and John of Salisbury.

  The widening of the Scholastic ken is startlingly revealed in William of Conches (1080?-1154). Here was a man who knew the works of Hippocrates, Lucretius, Hunain ibn Ishaq, Constantine the African, even Democritus.1 He was fascinated by the atomic theory; all the works of nature, he concluded, originate in combinations of atoms; and this is true even of the highest vital processes of the human body.2 The soul is a union of the vital principle of the individual with the cosmic soul or vital principle of the world.3 Following Abélard into a dangerous mystery, William writes: “There is in the Godhead power, wisdom, and will, which the saints call three persons.”4 He takes with a large grain of allegory the story that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. He answers vigorously a certain Cornificius and other “Cornificians” who condemned science and philosophy on the ground that simple faith sufficed.

  Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason…. But we say that in all things a reason must be sought; if reason fails, we must confide the matter… to the Holy Ghost and faith….5 [They say] “We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.” You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so….6 Rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.7

  This was too strong for the stomach of William of St. Thierry; the zealous monk who had set St. Bernard to hound Abélard hastened to denounce this new rationalist to the watchful abbot of Clairvaux. William of Conches retracted his heresies, agreed that Eve had been made from Adam’s rib,8 abandoned philosophy as an enterprise in which the profit was not commensurate with the risk, became tutor to Henry Plantagenet of England, and retired from history.

  Gilbert de la Porrée (1070–1154) managed the dangerous business more successfully. He studied and taught at Chartres and Paris, became Bishop of Poitiers, and wrote a Liber sex principiorium, or Book of Six Principles, which remained for many centuries a standard text in logic. But 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.9 In 1148, though he was now seventy-two, he was charged with heresy by St. Bernard; he stood trial at Auxerre, baffled his opponents with subtle distinctions, and went home uncondemned. A year later he was tried again, consented to burn certain passages torn from his books, but again returned a free man to his diocese. When it was suggested that he should discuss his views with Bernard he refused, saying that the saint was too inexpert a theologian to understand him.10 Gilbert, said John of Salisbury, “was so ripe in liberal culture as to be surpassed by no one.”11

  John might have spoken so for himself, since of all the Scholastic philosophers he possessed the widest culture, the most urbane spirit, the most elegant pen. Born at Salisbury about 1117, he studied under Abélard at Mont Ste.-Geneviève, under William of Conches at Chartres, under Gilbert de la Porrée at Paris. In 1149 he returned to England, and served as secretary to two archbishops of Canterbury, Theobald and Thomas à Becket. He undertook for them various diplomatic missions, visited Italy six times, and stayed at the papal court eight years. He shared Becket’s exile in France, and saw him killed in his cathedral. He became bishop of Chartres in 1176, and died in 1180. It was a full and varied career, in which John learned to check logic with life, and to take metaphysics with the modesty of an atom judging the cosmos. Revisiting the schools in his later years, he was amused to find them still debating nominalism vs. realism.

  One never gets away from this question. The world has grown old discussing it, and it has taken more time than the Caesars consumed in conquering and governing the world…. From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia: “He thinks of nothing else, talks of nothing else; and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb.”12

  John himself settled the question simply: the universal is a ment
al concept conveniently uniting the common qualities of individual beings; John, rather than Abélard, proposed “conceptualism.”

  In the best Latin since Alcuin’s letters, he composed a history of Greek and Roman philosophy—an astonishing evidence of the widening medieval horizon; a Metalogicon which lightened logic with autobiography; and a Polycraticus (1159) whimsically subtitled De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum—“On the Follies of Courtiers and the Vestiges of Philosophers.” This is the first important essay in political philosophy in the literature of Christendom. It exposes the errors and vices of contemporary governments, delineates an ideal state, and describes the ideal man. “Today,” he consoles us, “everything is bought openly, unless this is prevented by the modesty of the seller. The unclean fire of avarice threatens even the sacred altars…. Not even the legates of the Apostolic See keep their hands pure from gifts, but at times rage through the provinces in bacchanalian frenzy.”13 If we may believe his account (already quoted), he told Pope Hadrian IV that the Church shared liberally in the corruption of the times; to which the Pope in effect replied that men will be men however gowned. And John adds, wisely: “In every office of God’s household [the Church], while some fall behind, others are added to do their work. Among deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and legates I have seen some who labored with such earnestness in the harvest of the Lord that from the merits of their faith and virtue it could be seen that the vineyard of the Father had been rightly placed under their care.”14 Civil government, he thinks, is far more corrupt than the clergy; and it is good that the Church, for the protection of the people, should exercise a moral jurisdiction over all the kings and states of the earth.15 The most famous passages in the Polycraticus concern tyrannicide:

  If princes have departed little by little from the true way, even so it is not well to overthrow them utterly at once, but rather to rebuke injustice with patient reproof until finally it becomes obvious that they are obstinate in their evil-doing…. But if the power of the ruler opposes the divine commandments, and wishes to make me share in its war against God, then with unrestrained voice I answer that God must be preferred before any man on earth…. To kill a tyrant is not merely lawful, but right and just.16

  This was an unusually excitable outburst for John, and in a later passage of the same volume he added, “provided that the slayer is not bound by fealty to the tyrant.”17 It was a saving clause, for every ruler exacted an oath of fealty from his subjects. In the fifteenth century Jean Petit defended the assassination of Louis of Orléans by quoting the Polycraticus; but the Council of Constance condemned Petit on the ground that even the king may not condemn an accused person without summons and trial.

  We “moderns” cannot always agree with the moderni to whom John belonged in the twelfth century; he talks now and then what seems to us to be nonsense; but even his nonsense is couched in a style of such tolerance and grace as we shall hardly find again before Erasmus. John too was a humanist, loving life more than eternity, loving beauty and kindness more than the dogmas of any faith, and quoting the ancient classics with more relish than the sacred page. He made a long list of dubitabilia—“things about which a wise man may doubt”—and included the nature and origin of the soul, the creation of the world, the relation of God’s foresight to man’s free will. But he was too clever to commit himself to heresy. He moved among the controversies of his time with diplomatic immunity and charm. He thought of philosophy not as a form of war but as a balm of peace: philosophia moderatrix omnium—philosophy was to be a moderating influence in all things; and “he who has by philosophy reached caritas, a charitable kindliness, has attained to philosophy’s true end.”18

  II. ARISTOTLE IN PARIS

  Toward 1150 one of Abélard’s pupils, Peter Lombard, published a book which was at once a compilation of Abélard’s thought purified of heresy, and a beginning of the formal Scholastic philosophy. Peter, like Anselm, Arnold of Brescia, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas, was an Italian who came to France for advanced work in theology and philosophy. He liked Abélard, and called the Sic et non his breviary; but also he wanted to be a bishop. His Sententiarum libri IV, or Four Books of Opinions, applied and chastened the method of the Sic et non: he drew up under each question of theology an array of Biblical and Patristic quotations for and against; but this Peter labored conscientiously to resolve all contradictions into orthodox conclusions. He was made bishop of Paris, and his book became for four centuries so favorite a text in theological courses that Roger Bacon reproved it for having displaced the Bible itself. More than 4000 theologians, including Albert and Thomas, are said to have written commentaries on the Sentences.

  As the Lombard’s book upheld the authority of the Scriptures and the Church against the claims of the individual reason, it stayed for half a century the advance of rationalism. But in that half century a strange event transformed theology. As the translation of Aristotle’s scientific and metaphysical works into Arabic had in the ninth century compelled Moslem thinkers to seek a reconciliation between Islamic doctrine and Greek philosophy; and as the impingement of Aristotle upon the Hebrew mind in Spain was in this twelfth century driving Ibn Daud and Maimonides to seek a harmony between Judaism and Hellenic thought; so the arrival of Aristotle’s works in Latin dress in the Europe of 1150–1250 impelled Catholic theologians to attempt a synthesis of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology. And as Aristotle seemed immune to scriptural authority, the theologians were forced to use the language and weapons of reason. How the Greek philosopher would have smiled to see so many world-shaking faiths pay homage to his thought!

  But we must not exaggerate the influence of Greek thinkers in stimulating the efflorescence of philosophy in this period. The spread of education, the vitality of discussion and intellectual life in the schools and universities of the twelfth century, the stimulus of such men as Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Abélard, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury, the enlargement of horizons by the Crusades, the increasing acquaintance with Islamic life and thought in East and West—all these could have produced an Aquinas even if Aristotle had remained unknown; indeed the industry of Aquinas was due not to love of Aristotle but to fear of Averroës. Already in the twelfth century the Arabic and Jewish philosophers were influencing Christian thought in Spain. Al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Ibn Gabirol, Averroës, and Maimonides entered Latin Europe by the same doors that admitted Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy.

  Such an invasion by alien thought was a mental shock of the first order to the immature West. We need not wonder that it was met at first with an attempt at repression or delay; we must marvel rather at the astonishing feat of adaptation by which the old-new knowledge was absorbed into the new faith. The initial impact of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, and of Averroës’ commentaries, which reached Paris in the first decade of the thirteenth century, shook the orthodoxy of many students; and some scholars, like Amalric of Bène and David of Dinant, were moved to attack such basic doctrines of Christianity as creation, miracles, and personal immortality. The Church suspected that the seeping of Arabic-Greek thought into south France had loosened orthodoxy among the educated classes, and had weakened their will to control the Albigensian heresy. In 1210 a Church council at Paris condemned Amalric and David, and forbade the reading of Aristotle’s “metaphysics and natural philosophy,” or of “comments”—commentaries—thereon. As the prohibition was repeated by a papal legate in 1215 we may assume that the decree of 1210 had stimulated the reading of these otherwise forbidding works. The Fourth Council of the Lateran allowed the teaching of Aristotle’s works on logic and ethics, but proscribed the rest. In 1231 Gregory IX gave absolution to masters and scholars who had disobeyed these edicts, but he renewed the edicts “provisionally, until the books of the Philosopher had been examined and expurgated.” The three Parisian masters appointed to attend to this fumigation of Aristotle seem to have abandoned the task. The prohibitions were
not long enforced, for in 1255 the Physics, Metaphysics, and other works of Aristotle were required reading at the University of Paris.19 In 1263 Urban IV restored the prohibitions; but apparently Thomas Aquinas assured him that Aristotle could be sterilized, and Urban did not press his vetoes. In 1366 the legates of Urban V at Paris required a thorough study of the works of Aristotle by all candidates for the arts degree.20

  The dilemma presented to Latin Christendom in the first quarter of the thirteenth century constituted a major crisis in the history of the faith. The rage for the new philosophy was an intellectual fever that could hardly be controlled. The Church abandoned the effort; instead, she deployed her forces to surround and absorb the invaders. Her loyal monks studied this amazing Greek who had upset three religions. The Franciscans, though they preferred Augustine to Aristotle, welcomed Alexander of Hales, who made the first attempt to harmonize “the Philosopher” with Christianity. The Dominicans gave every encouragement to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in the same enterprise; and when these three men had finished their work it seemed that Aristotle had been made safe for Christianity.

  III. THE FREETHINKERS

  To understand Scholasticism as no vain accumulation of dull abstractions, we must see the thirteenth century not as the unchallenged field of the great Scholastics, but as a battleground on which, for seventy years, skeptics, materialists, pantheists, and atheists contested with the theologians of the Church for possession of the European mind.

  We have noted the presence of unbelief in a small minority of the European population. Contact with Islam through the Crusades and the translations extended this minority in the thirteenth century. The discovery that another great religion existed, and had produced fine men like Saladin and al-Kamil, philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës, was in itself a disturbing revelation; comparative religion does religion no good. Alfonso the Wise (1252–84) reported a common disbelief in immortality among the Christians of Spain;21 perhaps Averroism had trickled down to the people. In southern France there were in the thirteenth century rationalists who argued that God, after creating the world, had left its operation to natural law; miracles, they held, were impossible; no prayer could change the behavior of the elements; and the origin of new species was due not to special creation but to natural development.22 At Paris some freethinkers—even some priests—denied transubstantiation;23 and at Oxford a teacher complained that “there is no idolatry like that of the sacrament of the altar.”24 Alain of Lille (1114–1203) remarks that “many false Christians of our time say there is no resurrection, since the soul perishes with the body”; they quoted Epicurus and Lucretius, adopted atomism, and concluded that the best thing to do is to enjoy life here on earth.25