The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

His work on the Old Testament elicited forty refutations, indicating its irrefutability.

He died in 1742, aged eighty-six, after wisely drinking a glass of wine against his doctor’s orders. Life, like wine, should not be taken in excess.

As accounts of other continents accumulated, the educated classes of Europe could not but marvel at the variety of religious beliefs on the earth, the similarity of religious myths, the confidence of each cult in the truth of its creed, and the moral level of Mohammedan or Buddhist societies that in some respects shamed the gory wars and murderous intolerance of peoples dowered with the Christian faith.

The modern mind, said Alfred North Whitehead, has “been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for it by the genius of the seventeenth century” in science, literature, and philosophy.

So at last, after twenty years of preparation, appeared the most important book of seventeenth-century science, rivaled, in the magnitude of its effects upon the mind of literate Europe, only by the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) of Copernicus and The Origin of Species (1859) of Darwin. These three books are the basic events in the history of modern Europe.

Newton’s mind was a mixture of Galileo’s mechanics and Kepler’s laws with Böhme’s theology. We shall not soon see his like again.

The outbreak of the Fronde in France—aiming, like the revolt in England, to limit royal power—confirmed his conviction that only an absolute monarchy could maintain stability and internal peace.

“The knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called science, is not absolute, but conditional. No man can know by discourse [reasoning] that this or that is, has been, or will be, which is to know absolutely; but only that if this be, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be; which is to know conditionally.”6 As that passage foresaw Hume’s argument that we know only sequences, not causes, so Hobbes anticipated Locke’s sensationist psychology. All knowledge begins with sensation.

All impulses (as La Rochefoucauld would argue fourteen years later) are forms of self-love, and derive from the instinct of self-preservation. Pity is the imagination of future calamity to ourselves, aroused by perceiving another’s calamity; charity is the satisfied feeling of power in helping others. Gratitude sometimes includes a certain hostility.

benefits oblige, and obligation is thralldom.”

The basic aversion is fear, the basic appetite is for power.

We desire riches and knowledge as means to power, and honors as evidence of power; and we desire power because we fear insecurity. Laughter is an expression of superiority and power.

the sovereign, to be really sovereign, must have absolute power, for without it he cannot ensure individual security and public peace. To resist him is to violate the social contract which every person in the community has implicitly agreed to by accepting the protection of its head.

Revolution is always a crime until it succeeds. It is always unlawful and unjust, for both law and justice are determined by the Sovereign; but if a revolution establishes a stable and effective government, the subject is bound to obey the new power.

Absolutism is necessary, for when power is shared, as between king and parliament, there will soon be conflict, then civil war, then chaos, then insecurity of life and property;

Government by an assembly might serve, but only on condition that its power be absolute, not subject to the shifting desires of an uninformed populace. “A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators.”

If the Church were independent of the state there would be two sovereigns, therefore no sovereign; and subjects would be torn between two masters.

He suggests that Christianity should require of its adherents only a faith in “Jesus the Christ,” and that for the rest it should allow public opinion to vary within the safe bounds of public order. To a creed so chastened he offers not only the support of the government, but the full force of the state to propagate it. He agrees with the pope that only one religion should be tolerated in a state.

After a nineteenth century of relative democracy growing in an England guarded by the Channel and in an America protected by the seas, a modified absolutism returned in totalitarian states exercising governmental control over life, property, industry, religion, education, publication, and thought.

The absolutist polity is a child of war, and democracy is a luxury of peace.

family. To let the state define morality (though this too has passed into the totalitarian regimes) is to destroy one of the forces improving the state.

One clear debt we owe him: he formulated his philosophy in logical order and lucid prose. Reading him and Bacon and Locke, or Fontenelle and Bayle and Voltaire, we perceive again what the Germans had made us forget, that obscurity need not be the distinguishing mark of a philosopher, and that every art should accept the moral obligation to be intelligible or silent.

The extension of geographical, historical, and scientific knowledge widened the skeptical current. Every day some traveler or chronicler told of great nations whose religion and morals were shockingly different from the Christian, but usually as virtuous, and seldom as homicidal.

The brave attempt of many Christian theologians to demonstrate the creed by reason weakened the creed; no one, said Anthony Collins, doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it.

Lord Herbert’s disciple, Charles Blount, carried on with Anima Mundi (1679). All organized religion, ran the argument, was the creation of impostors seeking political power or material gain; heaven and hell were among their clever inventions to control and milk the populace.

They argued that if there is a spiritual as well as a material world, there must be spirits as well as bodies in the universe; and judging from the parlous state of things some of these spirits must be devilish. If pious people communicate with God or saints or angels, why should not wicked people communicate with Satan and his demons?

The Devil’s last stratagem, said Glanvill, is to spread the belief that he does not exist.

Whereas some Huguenot and some Jesuit philosophers had sanctioned revolution to protect the one true religion, Locke sanctions it only to protect property. Secularization was changing the locus and definition of sanctity.

Today critics smile at Locke’s derivation of government from the consent of free men in a state of nature, just as he smiled at Filmer’s derivation of it from the patriarchs, Adam, and God. “Natural rights” are suspect and theoretical; in a lawless society the only natural right is superior might, as now among states; and in civilization a right is a liberty desired by the individual and not injurious to the group.

When the American colonists rebelled against the resurgent monarchy of George III, they adopted the ideas, the formulas, almost the words, of Locke to express their Declaration of Independence. The rights that Locke had vindicated became the Bill of Rights in the first ten amendments to the American Constitution.

his essays on toleration influenced the founding fathers in separating Church from state and decreeing religious liberty. Rarely in the history of political philosophy has one man had such lasting influence.

there are “no innate practical principles”—no inborn conceptions of right and wrong; history shows so great, sometimes so contradictory, a variety of moral judgments that they cannot be a part of man’s natural inheritance; they are a social inheritance, differing from place to place and from time to time.

Whatever his private doubts, he felt, like an English gentleman, that good manners and morals required public support of the Christian church. If philosophy should take from the people their faith in a divine justice standing behind the apparent injustices and sufferings of life, what could it offer to sustain the hopes and courage of men?

“I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”

He quoted passage after passage from the New Testament requiring of a Christian only the belief in God and in Christ as his divine messenger or Messiah. Here, said Locke, is a plain and intelligible religion, fit for any man, and independent of all learning and theology. As to the existence of God, he felt that “the works of nature in every part of them sufficiently evidence a Deity”;

he insisted that all forms of Christianity except Catholicism should enjoy full liberty in England. He had written an essay on toleration as early as 1666. When he moved to Holland (1683) he found much more freedom of worship than in England; and while he was there he must have noted Bayle’s powerful defense of toleration (1686).

Locke noted that most of the religions demanded toleration when they were weak, but refused it when they were strong. Persecution, he felt, comes from lust for power, and from jealousy masquerading as religious zeal.

We admire the subtlety of his web-weaving, and concede that no one since Plato had written nonsense so charmingly.

Did atheism lead to corrupt morals? If that were so, said Bayle, one would have to conclude, from the crime, corruption, and immorality prevalent in Europe, that most Christians are secret atheists. Jews, Mohammedans, Christians, and infidels differ in creeds, but not in deeds.

What influence had the precepts of Christ upon the European conception of courage and honor?—which praised most the man who promptly and violently avenged insults and injuries, who excelled in war, inventing an infinity of machines to make sieges more murderous and frightful;

As to all men inheriting the guilt of Adam and Eve: “A creature which does not exist cannot be an accomplice of an ill action.”

The best we can hope for is a government that, though manned by corrupt and imperfect men, will provide enough law and order to enable us to cultivate our gardens in security, and pursue our studies or hobbies in peace.

he “sowed dragon’s teeth.”48 Where he walked in feigned discourse with his imaginary Marquise, the army of the Enlightenment would rise with the dashing light horse of Voltaire, the heavy infantry of d’Holbach, the sappers of the Encyclopédie, and the artillery of Diderot.

THIS strange and lovable character, who made the boldest attempt in modern history to find a philosophy that could take the place of a lost religious faith,

whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.30 This was probably the most forthright declaration of independence yet made for reason by a modern philosopher. So far as it was accepted, it involved a revolution of profounder significance and results than all the wars and politics of the time.

In what sense, then, is the Bible the Word of God? Only in this: that it contains a moral code that can form men to virtue. It contains also many things that have led—or been adapted—to human deviltry.

the emphasis of religious teaching should always be upon conduct rather than creed. It is a sufficient creed to believe in “a God, that is, a supreme being who loves justice and charity,” and whose proper worship “consists in the practice of justice and love towards one’s neighbor.” No other doctrine is necessary.

powers and laws constitute the order of nature as natura naturans; they constitute, in theological terms, the will of God. The modes of matter in their totality are the body of God; the modes of mind in their totality, are the mind of God; substance or reality, in all its modes and attributes, is God; “whatever is, is in God.”

God is not a person, for that means a particular and finite mind; but God is the total of all the mind (all the animation, sensitivity, and thought)—as well as of all the matter—in existence.

There is will in God, but only in the sense of the laws operating everywhere. His will is law. God is not a bearded patriarch sitting on a cloud and ruling the universe; He is “the indwelling, not the transient, cause of all things.”