The Age of Faith by Will Durant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The “Country of the Mind,” from Julian to Dante The fourth volume in Will and Ariel Durant’s epic Story of Civilization, The Age of Faith (1950), begins with Julian the Apostate (332-63) and ends with Dante (1265-1321). The tome (a 60+ hour audiobook) is divided into five books, The Byzantine Zenith, Islamic Civilization, Judaic Civilization, The Dark Ages, and The Climax of Christianity. There are seven chapters on Islamic history and three on Jewish, while twenty-eight chapters concern Christian history. Nonetheless, the Durants often stress the vast and deep influence from Islamic and Jewish cultures on Christian cultures in everything from language, religion, poetry, and music to agriculture, architecture, science, and medicine, demonstrating that “The continuity of science and philosophy from Egypt, India, and Babylonia through Greece and Byzantium to Eastern and Spanish Islam, and thence to northern Europe and America, is one of the brightest threads in the skein of history.” They are humanist citizens of the globally connected “Country of the Mind,” optimistically believing that “Civilization … is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed.” The Durants are much more interested in religion, art, architecture, music, writing, calligraphy, history, philosophy, medicine, textiles, ceramics, metal and wood working, and culture generally, than in the war strategies, generals, armies, and battles. In a sentence or two they glide by turning points of history battles like Tours (where the Franks destroyed the Umayyad army in 732 and stopped the spread of Islam in Europe) or Manzikert (where the Seljuks destroyed the Byzantine army and opened up Anatolia to the Turks in 1071) only to spend pages detailing the construction and decoration of beautiful and sublime mosques and cathedrals or quoting sensual love poetry or inspiring letters or sublime hymns or secular songs or explaining efficient irrigation systems or the crafting of illuminated books or the making of stained glass windows or the encyclopedic and exuberant nature of Gothic cathedral sculpture, etc. This is no military history of the Age of Faith! Perhaps that’s because, as they say, “The ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds.” That is, the Durants serve culture rather than celebrate (or even deplore) war. As they go, the Durants put their belief that “He who would know the history of words would know the history of the world” into practice by revealing many interesting etymologies, like “sterling” deriving from “Easterling” (Hanseatic League members being perceived to be trustworthy) and curfew from French “cover fire” (due to William the Conqueror’s law to reduce fires in English cities). The Durants are not free from condescension to women, referring at one point to "a command sorely uncongenial to the gentle sex" to speak only when absolutely necessary in nunneries. And their homophobia (or that of their 1950 era) shows up here and there, as when they say that Jews had “wholesome” sexual morals because they were “less given to pederasty,” or that one of the things brought back to the west from contact with Islamic civilization was “sexual perversion.” Their demotic bias manifests sometimes as well, as when they refer to Paradise Lost as “dull.” The Durants have a refreshingly humble opinion of their own profession, more than once denigrating “the historian” in asides, as when, describing a free hospital in an Islamic city, they say, “The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional storytellers, and, perhaps, books of history.” Indeed, at times the book is fatiguing because of its many excerpted letters, poems, tales, songs, and the like, often given both in their original languages and in their English translations. But mostly the Durants’ book is an illuminating pleasure to read, because of their open-minded, curious, critical, humane, objective, sensitive, modest, and ambitious vision of human nature, civilization, and history. And because of their writing style: rolling sentences with comma-separated clauses and witty, pithy, ironic comments. They love their material and enjoy telling it, coloring everything with their twinkling eyed, sardonic, too tolerant to be cynical take on things. Like Edward Gibbon, they are informative and entertaining and write in an elegant and strong style (though Gibbon cannot be matched by twentieth-century writers.) From the first sentence of the book (“In the year 335 the Emperor Constantine, feeling the nearness of death, called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided among them, with the folly of fondness, the government of the immense Empire that he had won”), there are many memorable lines. Here are ten: 1. Left sole Emperor, he returned to Constantinople, and governed the reunified realm with dour integrity and devoted incompetence, too suspicious to be happy, too cruel to be loved, too vain to be great. 2. Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed. 3. Statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterities. 4. Sadi was a philosopher, but he forfeited the name by writing intelligibly. 5. Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died. 6. It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization. 7. Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. 8. Virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians. 9. There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth. 10. Modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism. With his rich bass voice and clear enunciation, Stefan Rudniki gives a fine reading of most of the text, but he tends to deliver poetry, songs, and impassioned letters in a too uniform declamatory mode. View all my reviews
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