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

by Will Durant

His loquacity is redeemed by quaintness and clarity; there are no shopworn phrases here, no pompous absurdity. We are so weary of language used to conceal thought or its absence that we can overlook the egoism in these self-revelations. We are surprised to see how well this amiable causeur knows our hearts; we are relieved to find our faults shared by so wise a man, and by him so readily absolved. It is comforting to see that he too hesitates and does not know; we are delighted to be told that our ignorance, if realized, becomes philosophy.

And what a relief it is, after St. Bartholomew, to come upon a man who is not sure enough to kill!

Though these pagan subjects echo his stay in Italy, his Venuses lack all classic line; they cannot live in the north on sun and air and wine, as in the south; they must eat and drink to cushion themselves from rain and mists and cold; Teutonic flesh, like British whiskey—English or Scotch—is a climatic defense.

Rubens was a Catholic only in the Renaissance sense, and a Christian only by location. His paganism survived within his piety.

He was not as deep as Rembrandt, but wider; he shied away from the dark depths that Rembrandt revealed; he preferred the sun, the open air, the dance of light, the color and zest of life; he repaid his own good fortune by smiling upon the world. His art is the voice of health, as ours today sometimes suggests sickness in the individual or national soul.

Among the general public of the United Provinces literacy was probably higher than anywhere else in the world. The Dutch press was the first free press. The Leiden weekly News and the Amsterdam Gazette were read throughout Western Europe because they were known to speak freely, while elsewhere the press was at this time governmentally controlled. When a king of France asked to have a Dutch publisher suppressed he was astonished to learn that this was impossible.

Nudes were out of style; in that damp climate, with those stout forms, nudity was no delight.

The maxims which she left in manuscripts have nothing hackneyed about them. E.g.:

Fools are to be more feared than knaves. To undeceive men is to offend them.

More courage is required for marriage than for war.

Philosophy neither changes men nor corrects men.

The Mohammedan religion inspired men to hopeful bravery in war, but to an enervating fatalism in peace; it lulled them with dervish dances and mystic dreams; and though it had in its youth allowed great science, it had now frightened philosophy into a scholasticism of barren pedantry.

the Christians in Islam enjoyed a religious toleration such as no Christian ruler would have dreamed of according to Mohammedans in Christian states. At Smyrna, for example, the Moslems had fifteen mosques, the Christians seven churches, the Jews seven synagogues.

Turkish society was almost exclusively male, and since there was no permitted association of men with women outside the home, the Moslems found companionship in homosexual relationships, platonic or physical. Lesbianism flourished in the zenana.

we could not be expected to understand it, or admire its art, when the great debate was between Moslem and Christian, not yet between Darwin and Christ. The competition of the cultures is not over, but for the most part it has ceased to shed blood, and they are now free to mingle in the osmosis of mutual influence. The East takes on our industries and armaments and becomes Western, the West wearies of wealth and war and seeks inner peace. Perhaps we shall help the East to mitigate poverty and superstition, and the East will help us to humility in philosophy and refinement in art. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

Germany was a confusion within a complexity: not a nation but a name, a medley of principalities agreeing in language and economy, but jealously diverging in customs, government, currencies, and creeds.I

Eating and drinking were major industries. Half the day of a well-to-do German was consumed in passing edibles from one end of his anatomy to the other.

The first Christmas tree in recorded history was part of a celebration in Germany in 1605; it was the Germans who surrounded the Feast of the Nativity with picturesque relics of their pagan past.

Next to invective, the most popular literary form was the drama.

The Catholics had the advantages of tradition and unity; the Protestants enjoyed more liberty of belief, and they divided into Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Unitarians; even among the Lutherans there was a war of creeds between the followers and the opponents of the liberal Melanchthon. In 1577 the Lutherans formulated their faith in the Book of Concord, and thereafter Calvinists were expelled from Lutheran states.

The struggle between Lutherans and Calvinists was as bitter as between Protestants and Catholics, and it damaged Protestant co-operation during the war, for each alternation of roles between persecutors and persecuted left a heritage of hate.

Through the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the reformation of the clergy, the zeal of bishops, and the diplomacy of popes and nuncios, half the ground won by German Protestantism in the first half of the sixteenth century was regained for the Church in the second half.

the masses were tired of uncertainty, controversy, and predestination; their rulers saw in a unified and traditional Catholicism a stronger support of government and social order than in a Protestantism chaotically divided and precariously new.

the population of Germany rapidly declined during the war. The decline has been exaggerated and was temporary, but it was catastrophic. Moderate estimates reckon a fall, in Germany and Austria, from 21,000,000 to 13,500,000.77 Count von Lützow calculated a reduction of population in Bohemia from 3,000,000 to 800,000.78 Of 35,000 villages existing in Bohemia in 1618, some 29,000 were deserted during the conflict.

though the Reformation had been saved, it suffered, along with Catholicism, from a skepticism encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemics, the brutality of the war, and the cruelties of belief. During the holocaust thousands of “witches” were put to death. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practiced wholesale fratricide. They discovered the political and economic motives that hid under religious formulas, and they suspected their rulers of having no real faith but the lust for power—

RELIGIONS are born and may die, but superstition is immortal. Only the fortunate can take life without mythology. Most of us suffer in body and soul, and Nature’s subtlest anodyne is a dose of the supernatural. Even Kepler and Newton mingled their science with mythology: Kepler believed in witchcraft, and Newton wrote less on science than on the Apocalypse.

In Lorraine 800 were burned for witchcraft in sixteen years; in Strasbourg 134 in four days (October 1582).16 In Catholic Lucerne 62 were put to death between 1562 and 1572; in Protestant Bern, 300 in the last decade of the sixteenth century, 240 in the first decade of the seventeenth.

In divers translations, but always interpreted as the word of God, the Bible continued its career as the most popular of all books and the most influential in doctrine and language, even in conduct, for the worst brutalities of the time—wars and persecutions—quoted Scripture in self-justification. As the humanist Renaissance receded before the theological Reformation, the idolatry of the pagan classics was replaced by worship of the Bible.

Reason, as well as tradition and authority, was now to be checked by the study and record of lowly facts; and whatever “logic” might say, science would aspire to accept only what could be quantitatively measured, mathematically expressed, and experimentally proved.

Mechanical inventions multiplied as industry grew, for they were due less frequently to the researches of scientists than to the skill of artisans anxious to save time. So we first hear of the screw lathe in 1578, the knitting frame in 1589, the revolving stage in 1597, the threshing machine and the fountain pen in 1636.

Truss bridges were built on the simple geometrical principle that a triangle cannot be deformed without changing the length of a side.

The modern mind was slowly climbing back to what the Greeks had known two thousand years before.

The fertility of women barely kept up with the resourcefulness of death. Childbirth was made doubly painful by its frequent futility; two fifths of all children died before completing their second year.59 Families were large, populations were small.

The revision that Sosigenes had made for Caesar about 46 B.C. had overestimated the year by eleven minutes and fourteen seconds; consequently, by 1577 the Julian calendar lagged behind the progress of the seasons by some twelve days, and ecclesiastical feasts had fallen out of the season for which they had been intended.

Is Christianity dying? Is the religion that gave morals, courage, and art to Western civilization suffering slow decay through the spread of knowledge, the widening of astronomic, geographical, and historical horizons, the realization of evil in history and the soul, the decline of faith in an afterlife and of trust in the benevolent guidance of the world? If this is so, it is the basic event of modern times, for the soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

it was no longer a question of Catholicism versus Protestantism, it was a question of Christianity itself, of doubts and denials rising about the dearest fundamentals of the ancient creed. The thinkers of Europe—the vanguard of the European mind—were no longer discussing the authority of the pope; they were debating the existence of God.

the study of the Bible led to doubts of its meaning and infallibility, and the appeal to reason ended the Age of Faith.

Bolder were the “Epicureans” of Germany, who laughed at the Last Judgment, which took so long in coming, and at hell, which was probably not so terrible after all, since all the jolliest company gathered there.

The central feature of medieval politics was the unifying supremacy of the papacy over the kings; the outstanding aspect of modern political history is the conflict of national states freed from papal power; hence the first question that agitated political philosophy in the century after the Reformation was the demand of Catholic thinkers that papal supremacy be restored, and the demand of Protestant thinkers that papal authority be wholly destroyed.