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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.