Some historians divide the epochs into the “age of this” and the “age of that.” And so we are sometimes told that the medieval period, at least in Europe, was the Age of Faith. The general idea is that in that era the touchstone of truth was conformity to religious doctrines. Now, this is certainly an oversimplification, at least to the extent that it suggests that the medievals — especially the great Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers of that period — did not hold natural reason and the power of human intellect in high esteem. They certainly did. Still, it is not flatly false.
Faith mattered to the people of the Middle Ages. The great thinkers of the era — Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides, just to name a few particularly influential ones — were people of faith. They believed (as I myself believe) that there is harmony, rather than conflict or even tension, between faith and reason, and that faith can and should be reasoned and reasonable. What’s more, they regarded the apparent incompatibility of a proposition with the doctrines of their faith as indicating a problem with the proposition, just as they regarded a proposition’s apparent incompatibility with a principle of logic or other norm of rationality as indicating a problem with the proposition.
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