More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Durant
Read between
June 18 - July 22, 2019
Humanism was a pagan reversion to classical culture; Protestantism was a pious return to gloomy Augustine, to early Christianity, even to Old Testament Judaism;
If we want truth, every man ought to be free to say what he thinks without fear. If the advocates of one side are to be rewarded with miters, and the advocates on the other with rope or stake, truth will not be heard....
“I endure the Church till the day I shall see a better one.” 107
The Reformation of the sixteenth century was Luther’s work; but if any fresh Reformation is .... coming, it can only be based on the principles of Erasmus.”
As internal liberty varies (other things equal) with external security,
whether a mouse that nibbled at a fallen consecrated Host was eating bread or God.
The Protestant music of the Reformation rose to rival the Catholic painting of the Renaissance.
His political opinions in his later years suggest that silence is trebly golden after sixty.
If I rest I rust.”
It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen.
Calvin is more human than his theology:
Calvin’s genius lay not in conceiving new ideas but in developing the thought of his predecessors to ruinously logical conclusions, expressing these with an eloquence equaled only by Augustine, and formulating their practical implications in a system of ecclesiastical legislation.
Is it because these believers gained more strength from believing themselves the few elect than they lost by admitting that their conduct contributed nothing to their fate?
So, by a simple act of faith in one’s self, one could, if only in imagination, possess and transmit paradise. For such immortal boons a confession of helplessness was a bargain price.
Faith is good, but love is better, and God Himself is love.
certainty in religion and philosophy is unattainable, and that therefore theologians and philosophers should not kill.
De haereticis an sint persequendi (Should Heretics Be Persecuted?)
such disputes do not make men better; all that we need is to carry the spirit of Christ into our daily lives,
Moreover (he thought), persecution of beliefs is futile; martyrdom for an idea spreads the idea far more rapidly than the martyr could have done had he been allowed to live.
he anticipated Descartes by making the “art of doubting” the first step in the pursuit of truth.
In the eighteenth century the influence of Voltaire moderated the Calvinist tradition, and ended the sway of a puritan ethic among the people.
Men who chose their own pastors soon claimed to choose their governors, and the self-ruled congregation became the self-governed municipality. The myth of divine election justified itself in the making of America.
Decade by decade the churches that had taken their lead from Calvin discarded the harsher elements of his creed.
We are grateful to be so reassured, and we will agree that even error lives because it serves some vital need. But we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.
punished where he had sinned.I
He took the salamander as his symbol, betokening persistent resurrection from every conflagration, but life scorched him none the less.
was content to be “the smallest angle” of that “perfect triangle.”
Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart was the nest of our freedom.”
“Avaricious or lecherous as a priest or a monk.”
The comedy of the rulers hardly relieved the tragedy of the people.
He—and in slightly less degree Charles—agreed with Machiavelli that statesmen, whose task is to preserve their countries, may violate the moral code which they require from their citizens, whose task is only to preserve their lives.
Men said that he had become Spanish in Spain.
grace notes in her song of love.
“I see very well,” he said, “that fortune resembles a woman; she prefers a young king to an old emperor.”
“Let everyone have his own doctor .... this man is the doctor for me.”
“I content myself with my own,” he told Giustiniani; “I wish to command only my own subjects; but on the other hand I do not choose that anyone shall have it in his power to command me”;
so unnatural is peace.
In truth neither could trust the other, for it is a lesson of history that men lie most when they govern states.
The Cardinal believed that ceremony is the cement of power; force can gain power, but only public habituation can cheaply and peaceably sustain it; and people judge a man’s altitude by the ceremony that hedges him in.
“If God spare me life, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scripture than you do.”
When the historic Authorized Version appeared (1611), 90 per cent of the greatest and most influential classic in English literature was unaltered Tyndale.44
She excelled in culture and refinement, but husbands have seldom found erudition charming in a wife.
“skilled in nonsense”),
The Irish people, heroic and anarchic, virile and violent, poetically gifted and politically immature, resisted, every day, their subjection to an alien blood and speech.
Order was more important than liberty.
Born to royalty, he was surrounded from birth with obeisance and flattery; only a few men dared withstand him, and they were buried without their heads.
And how shall we, who fret at the pinpricks of private tribulation, understand a man who bore in his mind and person the storm and stress of the English Reformation, weaned his people by perilous steps from a deeply rooted loyalty, and yet must have felt in his divided soul an erosive wonder—had he freed a nation or shattered Christendom?
The Reformation had to be; we must repeatedly remind ourselves of this while we record the deviltry of the century that gave it birth.
Perhaps Elizabeth and Shakespeare could not have been had not England been set free by her worst and strongest king.
THE warm and genial south generates civilization; the cold and hardy north repeatedly conquers the lax and lazy south, and absorbs and transforms civilization.
