The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

by Will Durant

RELIGION is the last subject that the intellect begins to understand.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end.

Science gives man ever greater powers but ever less significance; it improves his tools and neglects his purposes; it is silent on ultimate origins, values, and aims; it gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by death or omnivorous time.

If religion had not existed, the great legislators—Hammurabi, Moses, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius—would have invented it. They did not have to, for it arises spontaneously and repeatedly from the needs and hopes of men.

it was in ecclesiastical libraries, at St. Gall, Fulda, Monte Cassino, and elsewhere, that the humanists of the Renaissance found precious relics of brilliant civilizations that had never heard the name of Christ. For a thousand years, from Ambrose to Wolsey, it was the Church that trained Western Europe’s teachers, scholars, judges, diplomats, and ministers of state;

Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy.

the constitution of man rewrote all constitutions.

In any society the majority of abilities is contained in a minority of men; therefore, sooner or later, the majority of goods, privileges, and powers will be possessed by a minority of men. Wealth became concentrated in the Church in the Middle Ages because she served vital functions and was herself served by the ablest men. The Reformation, in one aspect, was a redistribution of this naturally concentrated wealth by the secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property or revenues.

If one may venture a slight anachronism, a natural death was a disgrace that no man could survive.

noting a predilection, among monks and friars, for good food and bad women.

But it is a rare reformer who can be silent.

‘Poor Preaching Priests’

He appears to have translated the New Testament himself, leaving the Old Testament to Nicholas Hereford and John Purvey. The whole was finished some ten years after Wyclif’s death.

All the major elements of the Reformation were in Wyclif:

art lay in the form.

All long poems, however beautiful, become dull; passion is of poetry’s essence, and a passion that runs to 8,386 lines becomes prose almost as rapidly as desire consummated.

Perhaps he felt, like any man of the world, that a prudent philosopher will not wear his metaphysics on his sleeve.

the first and greatest of the many poets who there again bear the beat of measured feet.VI

Paris, though always inferior to its fame, and much indebted to the lies of its own people, is undoubtedly a great city. To be sure, I never saw a dirtier place, except Avignon. At the same time it contains the most learned men, and is like a great basket in which are collected the rarest fruits of every country. There was a time when, from the ferocity of their manners, the French were reckoned barbarians. At present the case is wholly changed. A gay disposition, love of society, ease and playfulness in conversation, now characterize them. They seek every opportunity of distinguishing themselves, and make war against all cares with joking, laughing, singing, eating, and drinking.6

The women stand out with more credit than the kings in history, and fight bravely a desperate battle to civilize the men.

so nature and human ignorance, those resolute Malthusians, cooperated with war and famine to counteract the reproductive ecstasies of mankind.

the germs had not signed the treaty.

Pessimism wrote half the poetry of the period.

“We lived in the senility of the world,”

his virtues, as Goethe would have said, were his own attainment, while his delusions were infections from the age.

He looked not an iota, but would be every inch, a king.

to his resolve that France should under his hammer be forged out of feudal fragmentation into monarchic unity and monolithic strength, and that this centralized monarchy should lift France out of the ashes of war to new life and power.

like Caesar counting nothing done if anything remained to do.

even the magpies were taught to mock him

He and his generation paid for the future prosperity and splendor of France.

Perhaps inferior persons will not give themselves the trouble to read these memoirs, but princes... may do it, and find some information to reward their pains.... For though neither enemies nor princes are always alike, yet, their affairs being often the same, it is not altogether unprofitable to be informed of what is past.... . One of the greatest means to make a man wise is to have studied histories .... and to have learned to frame and proportion our counsels and undertakings according to the model and example of our predecessors. For our life is but of short duration, and insufficient to give us experience of so many things.22

He rivaled Caesar briefly in the planning of campaigns, the provisioning of his armies, the affection of his troops, and in exposing himself in all battles and weathers.

Under the blows of necessity Henry developed the virtues and vices that seemed to him demanded by his place.

Girls were brought up in protective demureness and modesty, for men were beasts of prey, and virginity was an economic asset in the marital mart.

The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”

more books than morals.

English humanism never developed, as in some scholars of the Italian Renaissance, even a concealed hostility to Christianity; it treasured the Christian heritage above all intellectual refinements, and its most famous disciple found no embarrassment in being dean of St. Paul’s.

the good life as the best theology.

He was a loyal opposition in the Church, loving her despite her faults.

God Himself is swallowed up with all the blessed in an absence of modes... an eternal loss of self.... . The seventh degree is attained when, beyond all knowledge or all knowing, we discover in ourselves a bottomless not-knowing; when, beyond all names given to God or to creatures, we come to expire, and pass over in eternal namelessness, where we lose ourselves .. . and contemplate all these blessed spirits which are essentially sunken away, merged and lost in their superessence, in an unknown darkness without mode.

“hammer of heretics,”

Perhaps the fashion in such items was different then than now; even our desires may be indoctrination.

Massys had some steel in his fiber, some acid in his oils.

wished long life to the lord’s horses, lest he should take to riding his serfs.

Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings.

When he died (1437) Europe mourned that one who for a time had been the voice of European progress had failed in everything but dignity.

Louis of Bavaria, Wyclif in England, Huss in Bohemia, rehearsed the play for Luther,

This all-bathing ocean of deity Eckhart conceived as not a person or a spirit, but only “absolute bare unity .. . the abyss, without a mode and without form, of the silent and waste divinity... where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than within itself.”

What put an end to the Middle Ages? Many causes, operating through three centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the spreading acquaintance of renascent Europe with Islam; the disillusioning capture of Constantinople; the resurrection of classic pagan culture; the expansion of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator’s fleet, and Columbus, and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the business class, which financed the centralization of monarchical government; the development of national states challenging the supernational authority of the popes; the successful revolt of Luther against the papacy; printing.