The Age of Reason Begins: The Story of Civilization, Volume VII

by Will Durant

It proposes to cover the history of economic life, statesmanship, religion, morals, manners, music, art, literature, science, and philosophy in all the countries of Europe, and in the Islam of Turkey and Persia, from the accession of Elizabeth I (1558) and the births of Bacon (1561) and Shakespeare (1564) to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the deaths of Galileo (1642) and Descartes (1650). In this period the basic developments were the rise of murderous nationalisms and the decline of murderous theologies.

She suggested to the local magnates who manipulated elections to Parliament that it would facilitate matters if they chose candidates with no boyish notions about free speech; she wanted pounds without palaver. Her early Parliaments yielded gracefully; her middle Parliaments yielded angrily; her later Parliaments neared revolt.

No one thought of letting the people rule; politics was—as always—a contest of minorities to determine which should rule the majority.

She knew how to ally herself with time, which dissolves more problems than men solve;

She discovered that in politics, as in love, he who does not hesitate is lost.

Inheriting a nation politically in chaos and militarily in decay, her only practicable policy was to keep England’s enemies from uniting against it, to encourage the Huguenot revolt against the French monarchy, the Netherlands revolt against Spain, the Protestant revolt against a Scottish Queen too closely bound to France. It was an unscrupulous policy, but Elizabeth believed with Machiavelli that scruples are not becoming in rulers responsible for states.

Every Continental government condemned and admired her. “If she were not a heretic,” said Pope Sixtus V, “she would be worth a whole world.”

When she acceded there was hardly a nation so poor as to do England reverence; when she died England controlled the seas and challenged the intellectual hegemony of Italy or France.

When an ambassador complimented her on her languages she remarked that “it was no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it were far harder to teach her to hold her tongue.”

She re-established the Reformation, but she represented the Renaissance—the lust to live this earthly life to the full, to enjoy and embellish it every day. She was no exemplar of virtue, but she was a paragon of vitality.

within the court, and through the nation, the bitter battle of the Reformation raged, and created a problem that many thought would baffle and destroy the Queen. She was a Protestant; the country was two-thirds, perhaps three-quarters, Catholic.

Protestantism in the sixteenth century had the feverish energy of a new idea fighting for the future; Catholicism had the strength of traditional beliefs and ways deeply rooted in the past.

Elizabeth, to whom the Protestant creed was as little true as the Catholic … had a latitudinarian contempt for theological dogmatism.”

All parties and governments in the sixteenth century agreed that theological dissent was a form of political revolt.

At the close of that day the Armada had lost four thousand men; four thousand more were wounded, and the surviving vessels were with difficulty kept afloat. Seeing that his crews could bear no more, Medina-Sidonia gave orders to withdraw. On the thirtieth the wind carried the broken fleet into the North Sea. The English followed them as far north as the Firth of Forth; then, lacking food and ammunition, they returned to port. They had lost sixty men and not one ship.

Of the 130 vessels that had left Spain, 54 returned; of 27,000 men, 10,000, most of them wounded or sick.

The defeat of the Armada affected almost everything in modern European civilization. It marked a decisive change in naval tactics; grappling and boarding gave way to cannonading from shipside and deck. The weakening of Spain helped the Dutch to win their independence, advanced Henry IV to the throne of France, and opened North America to English colonies. Protestantism was preserved and strengthened, Catholicism waned in England, and James VI of Scotland ceased to flirt with the popes.

wars determine theology and philosophy, and the ability to kill and destroy is a prerequisite for permission to live and build.

Leicester and Walsingham paid their debt to nature, Drake and Hawkins would soon be swallowed by the sea they had thought to rule.

he phrased the doctrine of sea power perfectly: “Whoever commands the sea commands the trade; whoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

Elizabeth struggled nobly against debasement of the English coinage. She accepted the advice of her canny councilor, Sir Thomas Gresham, who warned her (1560), in words that became “Gresham’s law,” that bad money drives out good—that coins with an honest content of precious metal will be hoarded or sent abroad, while coins without proper content will be used for all other purposes, especially for taxes, the state being “paid in its own coin.”

Home industries had to be protected in time of peace, lest the nation be dependent on foreign products in time of war. Hence governments discouraged imports by tariffs and encouraged exports with subsidies.

London Bridge, built in 1209, was the pride of the town and the only road between its north and south sides. The south specialized in taverns, theaters, brothels, and jails. The north was the chief center of business; here the merchant was master, the titled lord entered on sufferance; royalty and nobility lived mostly in palaces outside London.

The curriculum was classical plus flogging, and the Anglican religion was compulsory in all schools. At Westminster School classes began at seven and ended at six, with humane interludes for breakfast at eight and a cat nap and short recess in the afternoon. Parents were resolved that the school should fill to the full one of its main functions—to relieve them of their children.

Most marriages were arranged by the parents after a mutual courtship of properties; then the dizzy goddess of the hour became a disillusioned housekeeper, dedicated to children and chores, and the race survived.

The nature of man, despite so many centuries of religion and government, still resented civilization, and it voiced its protest through a profusion of sins and crimes.

Criminal law relied on deterrents rather than surveillance or detection; laws being weak, punishments were severe. Death was the statutory penalty for any of two hundred offenses, including blackmail, cutting down young trees, and stealing more than a shilling; in an average Elizabethan year eight hundred persons were hanged in Merrie England for crime.

Clothing made women a temporarily impenetrable mystery. Half their day must have been taken up with taking on and taking off; “a ship is sooner rigged than a woman.”

Meat, fish, and bread were the staple foods, and nearly everybody who could afford it suffered from gout.

the Elizabethan Englishman was a scion of the Renaissance. In Germany the Reformation overwhelmed the Renaissance; in France the Renaissance rejected the Reformation; in England the two movements merged.

In 1595 Florio began to publish his translation of Montaigne; after that nothing was certain, and doubt was the air men breathed; as Marlowe is Machiavelli, so Shakespeare is Montaigne.

no one expected a man to write sonnets to his own wife, whose generosity stilled the muse.

France followed the classic rules and produced Racine; England rejected them, gave its tragic drama romantic freedom and naturalistic scope, and produced Shakespeare. The ideal of the French Renaissance was order, reason, proportion, propriety; the ideal of Renaissance England was liberty, will, humor, life.

Lear bids fornication thrive and adultery increase, “for I lack soldiers”;15 all virtue, in his darkened view, is a front for lechery, all government is bribery, all history is humanity preying upon itself. He goes mad perceiving the profundity and the apparent victory of evil, and he sheds all faith in a sustaining Providence.

Generally, Shakespeare’s humor is good-natured, not the savage misanthropy of Swift; he felt that the world was better for a clown or two; he suffered fools patiently, and emulated God in seeing little difference between them and world-explaining philosophers.

To offset the divisive power of the barons, the kings had supported the Catholic clergy, and had dowered these with wealth leading to venality, lethargy, and concubines.

James disgraced himself by having two Unitarians burned for doubting the divinity of Christ despite the proofs which he offered them (1612), but he distinguished himself by never thereafter allowing an execution for religious dissent; these were the last men to die for heresy in England.

Though his reason still questioned theology, he had learned to distrust reason too as but another faith, and he decided that the old creed should be accepted without further argument, if only to bring peace of mind and security of bread.

Aristotle had recognized, and occasionally preached, induction, but the predominant mode of his logic was deduction, and its ideal was the syllogism.

Bacon felt that the old Organon had kept science stagnant by its stress on theoretical thought rather than practical observation. His Novum Organum proposed a new organ and system of thought—the inductive study of nature itself through experience and experiment. Though this book too was left incomplete, it is, with all its imperfections, the most brilliant production in English philosophy, the first clear call for an Age of Reason.

like his great predecessor William of Ockham, he availed himself of the distinction between theological and philosophical truth: faith might hold to beliefs for which science and philosophy could find no evidence, but philosophy should depend only on reason, and science should seek purely secular explanations in terms of physical cause and effect.

A little dissimulation is necessary to success, if not to civilization. Love is a madness, and marriage is a noose. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises … The best works, and of the greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.”

Bacon distrusted Parliament as composed of uneducated and intolerant landowners and merchants or their agents;

What Bacon wanted to overthrow was the mistaken attempt to deduce medieval creeds from ancient metaphysics. In any event, he helped to free Renaissance Europe from too cramping a deference to antiquity.

“Tantum possumus quantum scimus”—Our power is proportioned to our knowledge.

The class war became also a conflict of regions and moral codes. The north was overwhelmingly agricultural and largely Catholic, however clandestinely; London and the south were increasingly industrial and Protestant.

The multiplication of sects, and their spirited debates, led a small minority to doubt all forms of Christianity. Bishop Fotherby mourned (1622) that “the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are thought only fit for the ignorant and the idiotic.”

A call to duty sounded throughout the Puritan ethic, and with it a stern inculcation of courage, self-reliance, prudence, thrift, and work. It was an ethic congenial to the middle class; it made for industrious workers and gave a religious sanction to mercantile enterprise and private property. Poverty, not wealth, was a sin; it revealed lack of personal character and divine grace.

Charles’s basic mistake was his failure to recognize that the wealth now represented by the House of Commons was much greater than that wielded by or loyal to the King, and that the power of Parliament must be increased accordingly.

Catholicism in Italy deliberately ignored the minds of the elite and offered to the masses of the people a beneficent but unwelcome moral code wrapped up in poetry, drama, symbolism, catharsis, and hope.