The Age of Faith

Summary

The Age of Faith is the fourth volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, subtitled A History of Medieval Civilization (Christian, Islamic, and Judaic) from Constantine to Dante, A.D. 325-1300. Its range was unusual for an English-language popular history of 1950: instead of treating the Middle Ages as Latin Christendom alone, Durant sets Byzantium, the world of Islam and the Jewish communities of the diaspora beside the Catholic West and moves among them as rival, borrowing and sometimes warring civilizations. The book opens where Caesar and Christ ended, with the Christian empire of Constantine's successors. Durant recounts Julian's attempt to restore the old gods, the Germanic and Hunnic invasions that dissolved the Western provinces, the doctrinal quarrels of the councils, the labors of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and the reign of Justinian, whose law code, Hagia Sophia and reconquests he treats as the summit of the early Byzantine age. A second section narrates Muhammad's life, the Koran, the Arab conquests and the caliphates of Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova, and then gives sustained attention to Islamic science, medicine and philosophy, from al-Razi and Ibn Sina to Ibn Rushd. A third follows Jewish life from the Talmudic academies of Babylonia to the flowering of Jewish letters in Spain, culminating in Maimonides. Durant then returns to the Latin West for the centuries he frames as the Dark Ages: the barbarian kingdoms, Charlemagne, the Northmen, feudalism, the monasteries and the reforming papacy. The final and longest movement, the climax of Christianity from about 1095 to 1300, covers the Crusades, the revival of towns and trade, Innocent III and the papal monarchy, heresy and the Inquisition, the friars, manners and morals, Gothic building, music, the universities, Abelard and the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, medieval science, the troubadours and romances, and at last Dante, in whom Durant sees the whole age gathered into one poem. Durant studied for the Catholic priesthood as a young man before leaving the Church, and the book shows both histories. He writes with evident admiration for medieval art, charity, saints and intellectual daring, while remaining openly critical of persecution, crusading violence and clerical worldliness, and he explains miracles and doctrine in naturalistic rather than theological terms. The volume is a narrative synthesis of secondary scholarship available in the 1940s, carried along by anecdote, character portraits and aphorism. It argues less a single thesis than a picture: medieval civilization as a creative order in which faith shaped law, learning and art. For students it works best as an orienting map for primary texts already in this library, from Augustine and the Koran to Avicenna, Aquinas and Dante, with its sources, judgments and 1950 vantage weighed against those texts and against later research.

Plot or Argument

• The Christian empire and the barbarian West (325-565)

  Julian the Apostate's pagan revival fails; the Western provinces fall to Goths, Vandals, Huns and Franks; councils define doctrine against Arius and others; Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine shape Latin Christianity; Justinian codifies Roman law, builds Hagia Sophia and attempts to reconquer the West.

• Muhammad and the making of the caliphates

  Durant narrates Muhammad's career in Mecca and Medina, summarizes the Koran and its law, and follows the Arab conquests from Persia to Spain, the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, and the brilliance of Baghdad and Cordova.

• Islamic learning and its passage westward

  Chapters on Islamic mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy and poetry present al-Razi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, and show how Arabic scholarship preserved and extended Greek learning before it was translated into Latin.

• Judaic civilization from the Talmud to Maimonides

  Durant follows Jewish communities after the dispersion: the Babylonian academies and the Talmud, life under Islam and in Christian Europe, the poets and philosophers of Spain, recurrent persecution, and Maimonides as legal codifier, philosopher and physician.

• Byzantium, Charlemagne and the feudal order

  The narrative moves through Byzantine continuity, the Frankish kingdom and Charlemagne's empire, the Viking and Magyar raids, the growth of feudal obligation, Benedictine monasticism, and the papal reform that set Gregory VII against the emperor.

• Crusade, commerce and the papal monarchy

  From Urban II's call in 1095 Durant traces the Crusades, the revival of towns, guilds and trade, Innocent III's claims over kings, the war on the Albigensians and the founding of the Inquisition, and the new mendicant orders of Francis and Dominic.

• Cathedral, university and Summa

  Gothic architecture, stained glass and church music lead into the rise of the universities, Abelard's dialectic, the recovery of Aristotle, the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, and medieval science from Roger Bacon to the medical schools.

• Chivalry, vernacular song and Dante

  Durant closes with manners and morals, chivalry and courtly love, the troubadours and romances, and finally Dante's Divine Comedy, presented as the poetic summation of the medieval mind.

Characters

• Will Durant, author and narrator-historian

  American popular historian and former seminarian whose sympathetic but naturalistic voice frames every chapter.

• Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor (361-363)

  Nephew of Constantine who tried to restore pagan worship; Durant treats him with some sympathy as a failed reformer.

• Augustine of Hippo, bishop and theologian

  Author of the Confessions and City of God, presented as the decisive mind of Latin Christianity.

• Justinian, Byzantine emperor (527-565)

  Codifier of Roman law and builder of Hagia Sophia whose reign closes the first part of the book.

• Muhammad, Prophet of Islam

  Subject of a full biographical chapter that Durant writes as a historian outside the faith.

• Ibn Sina (Avicenna), physician and philosopher

  Persian author of the Canon of Medicine, a central figure in the chapters on Islamic science.

• Ibn Rushd (Averroes), philosopher and jurist of Cordova

  Commentator on Aristotle whose influence on Latin scholastics Durant traces.

• Maimonides, rabbi, philosopher and physician

  Author of the Guide for the Perplexed and court physician in Egypt; the culminating figure of the Judaic section.

• Charlemagne, Frankish king and emperor (crowned 800)

  Ruler whose empire and patronage of learning anchor the account of the early medieval West.

• Innocent III, pope (1198-1216)

  Embodiment of papal monarchy, the Fourth Lateran Council and the campaign against the Albigensians.

• Francis of Assisi, founder of the Friars Minor

  Saint whom Durant portrays with marked tenderness as the age at its most Christlike.

• Peter Abelard, logician and teacher

  Paris master whose dialectic and tragedy with Heloise illustrate the new intellectual life of the twelfth century.

• Thomas Aquinas, Dominican theologian

  Author of the Summa Theologica, treated as the summit of scholastic reason's alliance with faith.

• Roger Bacon, Franciscan natural philosopher

  Advocate of experiment and mathematics who represents medieval science in Durant's account.

• Dante Alighieri, Florentine poet

  Author of the Divine Comedy, the figure with whom the volume ends.

Lessons

• Three civilizations on one stage

  Durant refuses to tell the medieval story from Rome and Paris alone. By placing Byzantium, Islam and Judaism beside Latin Christendom he shows trade, translation and conflict running in every direction, and he asks readers to see what the West received from neighbors it often fought.

  • Which ideas or techniques in the book pass from Islamic or Jewish scholars to Latin Christians, and by what routes?
  • Does arranging the book by civilization rather than strictly by date help or hinder understanding of events such as the Crusades?
  • Where does Durant seem most and least fair to each of the three traditions?

• An admiring outsider at the cathedral door

  Durant left the seminary and writes as a naturalist, yet he praises medieval saints, art and charity with real warmth. Students should learn to separate his narration of events from his evaluations, and to notice when a historian explains belief without sharing it.

  • How does Durant explain the appeal of Francis of Assisi, and is his explanation complete?
  • When Durant describes the Inquisition, which of his judgments are historical findings and which are moral verdicts?
  • Can a historian who does not share a faith describe it accurately? What does Durant do well or badly here?

• Reason inside the house of faith

  The scholastic chapters present Abelard, Averroes, Maimonides and Aquinas as thinkers who trusted that reason and revelation could not finally contradict each other. Durant admires the ambition while doubting the conclusion, which gives students a clear case for weighing an author's summary against the primary texts.

  • How do Maimonides, Ibn Rushd and Aquinas each relate philosophy to revealed scripture, as Durant presents them?
  • Read the first question of Aquinas's Summa beside Durant's chapter. Does Durant represent Aquinas's method accurately?
  • Why did the recovery of Aristotle unsettle twelfth- and thirteenth-century schools?

• Works of mercy as civilization

  Monastic infirmaries, hospitals in Baghdad and Cairo, leper houses and the care offered by the friars appear in Durant as evidence that faith built institutions as well as cathedrals. The lesson invites students to weigh these achievements beside the age's violence without letting either cancel the other.

  • Which institutions of care does Durant describe in Christian, Islamic and Jewish settings, and how do they compare?
  • How should a reader hold together the same century that produced the Franciscans and the Albigensian Crusade?

• Checking a synthesis against its witnesses

  A single author compressing nine centuries must rely on others' research and make thousands of choices about emphasis. Students practice treating The Age of Faith as a map: noting a claim, finding the primary source behind it, and asking what later scholarship has added or corrected since 1950.

  • Pick one vivid anecdote from the book. What primary source would confirm it, and is it in this library?
  • What does a 1950 vantage make Durant likely to see or miss about the Middle Ages?

Context

The Age of Faith appeared in 1950, five years after the Second World War, as the fourth installment of a plan Durant had announced in the 1930s: a narrative history of civilization written for general readers rather than specialists. It came after a generation of scholarship, represented by figures such as Charles Homer Haskins, Henri Pirenne and Etienne Gilson, that had begun to treat the medieval centuries as creative rather than merely dark, and Durant's volume carries that rehabilitation to a wide American audience while retaining an Enlightenment suspicion of clerical power. Its inclusion of Islamic and Jewish civilization at length distinguishes it from many Western-civilization surveys of its day.

Composition

Written through the 1940s after Caesar and Christ (1944) and published by Simon & Schuster in 1950 as Volume IV of The Story of Civilization. Will Durant is the sole named author of this volume; Ariel Durant was first credited as co-author on Volume VII (1961). The book has remained in print, and Simon & Schuster issued it as an ebook in 2011.

Reception

The volume found a large general readership, as the series did throughout its run. Academic medievalists generally regarded it as a readable synthesis dependent on secondary sources, with errors of detail and dated judgments, rather than a contribution to research. Readers have long valued its breadth, its prose and its willingness to give Islam and Judaism full chapters, and it remains a common first overview for adult self-learners.

Comparisons

• Caesar and Christ

  The preceding volume ends with Constantine's conversion and the Council of Nicaea; The Age of Faith picks up the Christian empire at that point, so the two read as one argument about how Christianity inherited Rome.

• City of God

  Durant summarizes Augustine's answer to pagans who blamed Christianity for the sack of Rome in 410; reading Books I and XIX directly shows how much of Augustine's theology of history his compressed portrait leaves out.

• Summa Theologica

  Durant's chapter on Aquinas describes the article-objection-reply method and its confidence in reason; a single article of the Summa lets students test whether that description is fair.

• The Canon of Medicine, Book I

  Durant presents Ibn Sina as the encyclopedist of Islamic medicine; Book I of the Canon supplies the humoral theory and definitions behind that reputation.

• The Divine Comedy

  The volume ends with Dante as the poet who gathered scholastic theology, Florentine politics and courtly love into one vision; the Comedy itself is the primary text Durant's closing chapter introduces.

• The Koran

  Durant summarizes the Koran's teaching as an outsider for Western readers; comparing his summary with selected suras shows what a historian's paraphrase gains in clarity and loses in voice.

• The Secret History

  Durant relies on Procopius for the court of Justinian and Theodora; the Secret History shows how hostile and gossipy that source can be, and why a historian must weigh it.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus

  Copleston, a Jesuit historian of philosophy, covers the same thinkers from Augustine to Scotus with technical precision and from within the Catholic tradition, a useful check on Durant's more literary treatment.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Durant introduces Muhammad and the Koran. Notice where he reports Muslim tradition, where he gives his own naturalistic explanation, and where he expresses admiration or criticism.
• The chapters on Islamic science and on the translators of Toledo and Sicily, which show Greek and Arabic learning reaching Latin schools. Track which names reappear later in the scholastic chapters.
• The pairing of Innocent III and Francis of Assisi in the Book V chapters on the Church. Ask how Durant judges papal power and mendicant poverty, and on what grounds.
• Durant's handling of the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. Separate the events he narrates from the verdicts he passes on them.
• The final chapter on Dante. Watch for how Durant uses the poem to draw together theology, politics and love, the threads of the whole volume.

Key terms and names

Caliphate

The succession of rulers claiming leadership of the Muslim community after Muhammad, notably the Umayyads at Damascus and the Abbasids at Baghdad, with a rival Umayyad line in Spain.

Talmud

The body of rabbinic commentary and law built around the Mishnah; Durant describes its Babylonian form as the center of Jewish life in the diaspora.

Feudalism

The network of personal oaths, land grants and military service that organized power in the post-Carolingian West, which Durant treats as a response to invasion and weak central government.

Investiture controversy

The eleventh- and twelfth-century struggle between popes and emperors over who could appoint bishops, dramatized in Gregory VII's conflict with Henry IV.

Mendicant orders

The Franciscans and Dominicans, friars who lived by begging and preaching in towns rather than in enclosed monasteries.

Scholasticism

The method of the medieval schools that posed questions, set out objections, and resolved them by reason and authority, reaching its height in Aquinas.

Gothic

The architectural style of pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses and large stained-glass windows that Durant treats as the visible expression of the age.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What span of years and which three civilizations does the volume cover, and in what order does Durant arrange them?
2. Comprehension According to Durant, how did Greek philosophy and medicine reach the Latin universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries?
3. Comprehension What role does Durant assign to Innocent III in the history of papal power?
4. Interpretation Durant clearly admires Francis of Assisi and the Gothic cathedral while criticizing the Inquisition. Is there a consistent principle behind his praise and blame, and is it one you accept?
5. Interpretation How does Durant explain the rapid spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, and what kinds of explanation does he leave out?
6. Interpretation Why might Durant have chosen to end with Dante rather than with Aquinas or a political event such as the death of Frederick II?
7. Big Question Can an age be judged by its highest achievements, by its worst cruelties, or only by both together, and what would faithfulness require of a historian who must choose what to emphasize?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 25:34-40 (Scripture)

  Christ identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger and the sick. Durant's chapters on monastic infirmaries, hospitals and the friars show medieval Christians trying to build institutions on this passage, and invite students to compare the ideal with the record.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (Scripture)

  Paul's call to test everything and hold fast what is good fits the scholastic habit of setting out objections before answering them, which Durant presents as one of the age's real achievements.

• Augustine, City of God XIX (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's account of the two cities and of the limited peace of earthly rulers helps students judge the papal monarchy and the Crusades that Durant narrates, since Augustine himself warned against confusing any earthly order with the city of God.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 1, a. 8 (Great Conversation)

  Aquinas asks whether sacred doctrine proceeds by argument and answers that faith uses reason without being reduced to it. Reading this article beside Durant's chapter shows how the scholastics themselves understood the alliance he describes.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Medieval civilization was not a pause between Rome and the Renaissance but a creative order of its own; in Byzantium, Islam, Jewish communities and Latin Christendom, religious belief organized law, learning, charity and art; these civilizations borrowed from and fought one another, and the West owed much of its recovered learning to Arabic and Jewish scholars; the age also produced persecution and holy war; therefore its achievements and its cruelties must be told together, and its summit is best seen in the cathedral, the Summa and the Divine Comedy.

Rhetorical device: paired portraiture. Durant repeatedly sets contrasting figures side by side, such as Innocent III and Francis of Assisi, or the crusader and the Muslim scholar, so that the reader judges each partly by the other without the author stating a verdict outright.

Debate: Resolved: Durant judges the medieval Church more fairly in its saints and scholars than in its exercise of power.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one figure from each of Durant's three civilizations (for example Ibn Sina, Maimonides and Aquinas) and argue what they shared and where they finally disagreed about the relation of reason to revelation, using Durant's chapters and at least one primary text.

Comparison with The Divine Comedy: Read Durant's closing chapter on Dante and then Paradiso XXXIII. Argue whether Durant's account of the poem as a summary of medieval thought does justice to its final vision, or whether the poem resists being read chiefly as a historical document.

Medical Lens

Useful as a narrative bridge in the history of medicine between Galen and the Renaissance. Durant gives Islamic medicine generous space, presenting al-Razi's clinical writing and Ibn Sina's Canon as the summit of medieval medical learning and describing hospitals and pharmacy in the great Muslim cities. The Judaic section presents Maimonides as a practicing court physician as well as a philosopher, and the late-medieval chapters cover the schools of Salerno and Montpellier, surgery, and monastic and civic care of the sick, including leprosaria. These are Durant's syntheses from secondary scholarship of the 1940s; specific claims (dates, attributions, numbers of hospitals or patients) should be checked against primary sources such as the Canon and against modern histories of medieval medicine before citation.

• Book I (The Byzantine Age), account of Justinian's reign

  The pandemic of the 540s that struck Constantinople under Justinian, as known chiefly from Procopius, placed in the context of the empire's strained resources.

  Plague Epidemic Death Dying
• Book II (Islamic Civilization), chapters on science and medicine

  Survey of Islamic medicine: al-Razi's clinical observations, including his treatise distinguishing smallpox from measles; Ibn Sina's Canon; hospitals and pharmacy in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo.

  Physicians Doctors Humoral Medicine Pharmacology Poisons Fever Infection
• Book III (Judaic Civilization), on Maimonides

  Maimonides's career as physician at the court in Cairo and his medical writings, presented alongside his legal and philosophical work.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine
• Book IV (The Dark Ages), on monasticism

  Monasteries as keepers of Latin medical texts and providers of infirmary care for monks, pilgrims and the poor.

  Nursing Caregiving Ancient Medicine
• Book V (The Climax of Christianity), on medieval science and medicine

  The medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier, translation of Arabic medicine into Latin, surgeons and barbers, hospitals and leper houses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  Physicians Doctors Surgery Leprosy Public Health Sanitation

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in Toledo around 1150 among a Muslim physician, a Jewish translator and a Christian cleric working together to put a medical or philosophical text from Arabic into Latin, drawing on what Durant reports about the translation movement.

• Essay

  Durant ends the volume with Dante. Argue whether a poet is the right figure to sum up an age, and propose a rival candidate (Aquinas, Francis or Innocent III) using the book's own portraits.

• Classroom

  Build a three-column timeline of Christian, Islamic and Jewish events from 325 to 1300 using the five books of the volume, then mark three moments where the columns touch.

• Fiction

  Tell the story of a pilgrim falling ill on the road to Compostela and being received at a monastic infirmary, using details of medieval care described in the volume.

Further Reading

• Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson

  Gifford Lectures (1950) arguing for religion as the driving force of medieval culture; written in the same year as Durant from within the Catholic tradition.

• The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Charles Homer Haskins

  Classic 1927 study of the medieval intellectual revival.

• The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson

• A History of the Crusades, Steven Runciman

• Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, Nancy G. Siraisi

• The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri