The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  * Coulton, the leading English medievalist, reckoned English currency in 1200 as worth forty times its value in 1930.35 Ignoring fluctuations during the Middle Ages, this volume calculates medieval monetary values at approximately fifty times the values of corresponding units of currency or precious metal in 1948.

  * “Ghibelline” was a variant of Waiblingen, a village owned by the Hohenstaufens. This family took its name—“High Staufen”—from a mountain castle and village in Swabia.

  * Robin Hood, famous in legend but obscure in history, may have been one of the Anglo-Saxons who continued for over a century a guerrilla resistance against the Norman conquerors. The English poor celebrated his memory as an unbeaten rebel who lived in Sherwood Forest, acknowledged no Norman law, robbed the lords, helped the serfs, and worshiped the saints.

  * Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II, had worn a sprig (planta) of the broom plant (Fr. genêt) in his hat.

  * Nicknamed Lackland because, unlike his elder brothers, he had not received from his father any appanage on the Continent.

  * The five groups here named became later the House of Lords.

  * The counts had previously used the place as a hunting rendezvous; hence its name,’s Graven Haag, the Count’s Lodge, now den Haag.

  * There appears to be no historical warrant for the existence of William Tell.58

  * This title, applied to him by his chaplain, found no medieval currency, but was applied to him by modern French historians.

  * Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VI, 119. The edict is generally accepted as genuine;80 but it may have been forged by the lawyers of Philip IV as a weapon against Boniface VIII; cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. Louis IX.

  * From the seaport town called Portus Cale by the Romans, and Oporto (“the port”) today.

  * So called from its display center, a “Wicked Lane” formerly devoted to courtesans.

  * The early Christian theory that all judgment of the dead would be postponed till the “doomsday” of the end of the world had been replaced by the doctrine that every person would be judged immediately after his death.2

  † Cf. General William Booth (1829–1912) on the methods of his Salvation Army preachers: “Nothing moves the people like the terrific. They must have hell-fire flashed before their faces, or they will not move.”3

  * From these words cynics formed the phrase “hocus-pocus.”

  † For the music of the Mass, see below. Chapter XXXIII.

  * On May 20, 1918, the revised Corpus iuris canonici became the official law of the Church.

  * The general celibacy of monks, priests, and nuns after 1215 presents a problem in genetics. It may be that Europe suffered some biological loss by the abstention of so many able persons from parentage, but we do not know to what extent superior ability is inherited. Less theoretical were the effects of the numerical disbalance caused between the sexes in the lay population by the withdrawal of monks and priests from marriage. As commercial and other travel, war and Crusades, feuds and other hazards raised the death rate of men above that of women, a substantial percentage of the female sex was left to spinsterhood or promiscuity. The Church welcomed into nunneries such qualified women as cared to enter, but monks and priests combined far outnumbered nuns. The unmarried daughters of the nobility were often dowered to a convent; but in other classes surplus women resigned themselves to the spinning wheel, or lived as tolerated aunts with their relatives, or devoted themselves, in shame and terror, to satisfying the demands of respectable men.

  * James Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Agesy N. Y., 1928, p. 601. Cf. Voltaire: “The Roman Church has always had the advantage of giving that to merit which in other governments is given only to birth” (Essay on the Manners and Morals of Europe, in Works, N. Y., 1927, XIII b, 30). This, said Hitler, “is the origin of the incredibly vigorous power that inhabits this age-old institution. This gigantic host of clerical dignitaries, by uninterruptedly supplementing itself from the lowest layers of the nations, preserves not only its instinctive bond with the people’s world of sentiment, but it also assures itself of a sum of energy and active force which in such a form will forever be present only in the broad masses of the people” (Mein Kampf, N. Y., 1939, p. 643).

  * From a report by the inquisitor Sacchoni.12 We know the doctrines and practices of the Cathari only from their enemies; their own literature was lost or destroyed.

  * Said a great scholar not usually tender to the faults of the Church: “The vulgar charge frequently made that medieval monks were gluttonous, wasteful, extravagant, and profligate is belied by the hundreds of cartularies, or inventories, which have been preserved, and which show care, intelligence, and honesty in management. The enormous economic betterment of medieval Europe which the monks achieved proves them as a whole to have been intelligent landlords and agriculturalists.”—Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, 630. “The most perfect and efficacious works of Christianity,” said the skeptical Renan, “were those executed by the monastic orders.”—Marc Aurèle, Paris, n.d., 627.

  * Not to be confused with the Augustinian or Austin Friars founded by anchorites in Tuscany in 1256.

  * The literature on Francis is partly history, partly legend. As the legends are among the masterpieces of medieval literature, some of them are included in the following pages, with a warning in each instance. Most of the Fioretti (“Little Flowers of St. Francis”) and the Speculum perjectionis (“Mirror of Perfection”) are legend; and quotations from these writings are to be so construed.

  * It has been suggested that these swellings could have been due to malignant malaria, which, in the absence of modern treatment, has been known to produce purple hemorrhages of blood in the skin.61

  * A boys’ bishop, however, is still annually elected at Addlestone, Surrey, England.144

  * Cf. the twelfth-century Crucifixion in the Liebfrauenkirche of Halberstadt, or the thirteenth-century statue of James the Less in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  * In the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  * Learning that it had been stolen, he returned it to the Italian government, and contented himself with a medal for honesty.7

  * The main picture is now in the Opera or Museum of the Siena Cathedral.

  * The Campo Santo is being restored.

  * The word minster, an abbreviation of monastery, should properly be used only for an abbey church; but custom has congealed the phrase “York Minster,” though that cathedral was never monastic.

  † A ninth-century bishop of Winchester. Legend said that rain had delayed for forty days the transference of his body in 971 to the shrine prepared for it; hence the popular adage that rain on St. Swithin’s day (July 15) presages forty days of rain.

  * Only five sequences have been admitted by the Church into her liturgy: Victimae paschali laudes, by Wipo; Veni Sancte Spiritus, ascribed to Innocent III; Lauda Sion, by Thomas Aquinas; Stabat Mater, by Iacopone da Todi; and Dies irae, by Thomas of Celano.

  * The first three lines will indicate how slowly French and German evolved: “Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, dist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat.”

  “In Gedes minna ind in these Christianes folches ind unser bedhero gealtnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, so fram so mir Got gewizci indi madh furgibit.”

  English translation: “For the love of God, and for the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forth, as God may give me wisdom and strength.”1

  * Many government records continued to be written on rolls; such “pipe rolls” were used in England from 1131 to 1833. The keeper of these archives was “Master of the Rolls.”

  * In the sixteenth century the Sorbonne became the theological faculty of the University; in 1792 it was closed by the Revolution; it was restored by Napoleon, and is now the seat of public courses in science and letters at the University of Paris.

  * These are the co
nservative estimates of Rashdall.63 The jurist Odofredus, writing about 1250, reckoned the students in Bologna in 1200 at 10,000. Rabanus Gauma, a Nestorian monk, put the number of students at Paris in 1287 at 30,000. Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, calculated, about 1360, that there had once been 30,000 students at Oxford; about 1380 Wyclif doubled this estimate; in 1450 Bishop Gascoigne, who had been Chancellor of Oxford, returned to 30,000.64 These estimates are evidently guesswork and exaggeration; but we cannot prove them false.

  * But cf. Rashdall: “There is only too much evidence that de Vitry’s picture of the scholastic life of his age, if exaggerated, is not fundamentally untruthful.”68

  * Albert’s major works in philosophy and theology: I. Logic: Philosophia rationalis; De praedicabilibus; De praedicamentis; De sex principiis; Perihermenias (i.e., De interpretatione); Analytica priora; Analytica posteriora; Topica; Libri elenchorum. II. Metaphysics: De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas; Metaphysica; De fato. III. Psychology: De anima, De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia; De intellectu et intelligibili; De potentiis animae. IV. Ethica. V. Politica. VI. Theology: Summa de creaturis; Summa theologiae; Commentarium in Sententias Petri Lombardi; Commentarium de divinis nominibus. The first five treatises here listed fill twenty-one volumes of Albert’s works, which are still incompletely published.

  * “If,” says the learned Gilson, “Maimonides had not been moved by Averroës to a special notion of immortality, we might say that Maimonides and Thomas agreed on all important points.”65 It is a slight exaggeration, unless we rank the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement as unimportant elements of the Christian faith.

  * The final stanzas are also sung in the Benediction of the Sacrament; and the entire hymn is used as the processional on Holy Thursday.

  * The Summa to and including Part III, Question 90, is by Thomas; the remainder may be by Reginald of Piperno, his companion and editor.

  * (1), (2), and (5) are from Aristotle through Albert; (3) from Maimonides; (4) from Anselm.

  * Thomas, not foreseeing that the Church would decide in favor of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—i.e., her freedom from the taint of original sin—thought that Mary too had been “conceived in sin”; he added, with tardy gallantry, that she was “sanctified before her birth from the womb.”110

  * Of this only Book I, and Chapters 1–4 of Book II, are by Thomas; the remainder is by Ptolemy of Lucca.

  * The oft-quoted passage about the blessed in heaven enhancing their bliss by observing the sufferings of the damned occurs in the Summa’s Supplement (xcvii, 7), and is to be discredited not to Thomas but to Reginald of Piperno.138

  * Giraldus Cambrensis tells of a youth who, at his father’s painful expense, studied philosophy for five years at Paris, and, returning home, proved to his father, by remorseless logic, that the six eggs on the table were twelve; whereupon the father ate the six eggs that he could see, and left the others for his son.148

  * In the laws of Visigothic Spain the physician was not entitled to a fee if his patient died.69

  * “Equal to you, O Rome! there is nothing, even when you are almost a ruin; how great you were when whole, broken you teach us. Long time has destroyed your pride, and the citadels of Caesar sink in the marshes with the temples of the gods. That work, that mighty work lies low which the dire barbarian trembled to see standing and mourns to see fallen…. But no lapse of years, no fire, no sword can all destroy this glory.”

  † (Rome speaks:) “Sweeter to me this defeat than those victories; greater am I poor than when rich, greater prone than standing; more than the eagles has the standard of the cross given me, more Peter than Caesar, more a weaponless crowd than commanders girt with arms. Standing I mastered nations; ruined I strike the depths of the earth; standing I ruled bodies, broken and prostrate I rule souls. Then I commanded a miserable populace, now the princes of darkness; then cities were my realm, now the sky.”

  ‡ Another source is a manuscript in the Harleian Library, written before 1264, and published by Thomas Wright in 1841 as Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.

  * “May God be propitious to this toper!”

  * Tannhäuser, one of the later minnesingers, has been confused by legend with the knight Tannhäuser, who fled from Vcnusberg to Rome, and found a niche in opera.

  * Grail is uncertainly traced to a hypothetical cratalis derived from the Latin crater, cup.

  * Chaucer’s translation—The Romaunt of the Rose—oí the first half of William’s poem is as fine as the original.

  * We should except Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translations of the Vita nuova and of Dante’s predecessors.

  * The adjective Divina was added by admirers in the seventeenth century.

  * The following recapitulation is mostly confined to medieval Christianity, and will not repeat the summary of Islamic civilization given at the conclusion of Book II.