**Western civilization is built on a lie. **

Since the enlightenment, historians and philosophers draw a line from classical culture to modern western thought, bringing ancient prestige our current culture. Histories gloss over the inconveniently barbaric and fractured times between antiquity and renaissance. Yet after the ashes of the western Roman Empire had cooled, the dark ages were when modern western culture was born.

Faith, not philosophy, was the candle in the dark that led the frail steps of civilization; the grip of this ideology was absolute. With political power crumbling into ever smaller fiefdoms and the concomitant collapse of trade, a religion that had already spread through the causeways of the now defunct Roman empire proved to be more than a match for any competing forces of civilization. Intellectual thought was subsumed into the theological realm, political power was subservient to papal authority, and every year revolved around religious holidays. Take for example Pope Gregory, who transformed the backwater Diocese of Rome into the church that stands to this day:

While his hand managed the scattered empire, his thoughts dwelt on the corruption of human nature the temptations of ubiquitous devils , and the approaching end of the world. He preached with power that religion of terror which was to darken men’s minds for centuries. He accepted all the miracles of popular legend, all the magical efficacy of relics images and formulas. He lived in a world haunted with angels, demons, wizards, and ghosts. All sense of a rational order in the universe had departed from him. It was a world in which science was impossible, and only a fearful faith remained. The next 7 centuries would accept this theology.

In short Christianity absorbed, controlled, and directed the progress (or lack thereof) civilization. Nowhere else in Western history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many for so long. Rome lasted 480 years, the Mongol and British Empires 200 years, but the Roman Catholic empire was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne in 814 to the death of Boniface VIII in 1303, 489 years later.

Now, 700 years later, it only takes one look at the steepled church outside my window, my family’s catholic traditions, or America’s strange relationship with truth as defined by science to reveal how western civilization was truly forged in the dark ages. Age of Faith makes little attempt to connect the history of civilization with modern times, but through providing a holistic overview the period, it describes the bloody, intolerant, and mostly unwritten birth of western civilization.

Most of Age of Faith focuses on Christian Europe. While this focus is important for understanding ourselves, Christian Europe was a backwater at the time: the Islamic world (dar al-salaam) and Tang China were the contemporary seat of civilization. Durant ignores China, but Age of Faith’s overview provides context the near one-way flow of culture from east to west. The influence of Islam on Christendom was varied and immense: from Islam christian Europe received foods drinks drugs medicaments, armor, heraldry art motives and tastes, industrial and commercial articles and techniques, maritime codes and ways, and often the words for these things. It’s easy for a modern scholar to get swept up by availability bias, we may estimate the wealth of muslim literature in his time by noting that not 1 in 1000 volumes that he named is known to exist today. What we know of muslim thought in those centuries is a fragment of what survives, what survives is a fragment of what was produced. What appears in these pages is a morsel of a fraction of a fragment. Furthermore, Islamic empires and the rump state of Byzantium served as the buffer between Europe the apocalypses of the Mongols and Timur.

Europe in the age of faith was a more diverse place, but the Christianity of the time was more xenophobic. In the best case were entrepots like Sicily, where all sects “[hated] one another religiously, but [lived] together with no more than a Sicilian average of passion, poetry and crime." But more representative was Byzantium, where *“There was something shallow about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering superstition, fanaticism, and illiterate ignorance, and half the culture was devoted to perpetuating that ignorance.” * A series of pogroms, genocide, and atrocities led to the homogenization of Europe into the Christian faith it holds today.

Durant makes sacrifices in covering a such a broad scope in time and geography. But a wide lens is needed to catch the tectonic interactions between cultures and peoples of the time. Of course Gibbon is better at describing Byzantine decline, Ansary is better telling the story of the Islamic golden age, and Jabari is better at deconstructing the currents of Islamic thought. But in a breath, I’ve described 2000 pages of reading, not all of which is even available in English. By the time gunpowder and Equinus’ reason brought the middle age to a close, Europe had started to rebuild something that could be called civilization. But to understand the id of what it means to be a part of the west, put down the classics and start here with the barbaric, bloody, and benighted beginning. After all The Age of Faith may return if the age of reason achieves catastrophe.

49th book of 2021

Other interesting quotes

  • The Age of Faith may return if the age of reason achieves catastrophe.
  • Christian spain achieved in reconquista only because muslim spain surpassed it in fragmentation and anarchy.
  • Guilds as the precursors of special interests.
  • The inquisition postponed by three centuries the dismemberment of western Christianity.
  • Technology tends to advance, but civilizations spend most of their time in decline.
  • Jewish aristocracy in Spain: By its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.
  • School of oriental studies opened in 1250 by dominican monks to teach Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic studies were also prominent in Seville
  • The development of the bow began the military debacle of feudalism […] The final blow to feudal military power would come in the 14th century in the form of gunpowder and cannon, which killed the armored knight and shattered his castle.
  • He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith, but in his triumph he had brought the age of faith to its end.