The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

by Will Durant

Except in the aristocracies, women were goddesses before marriage and servants afterward.

Probably it was not Protestantism, but commercialism and unbelief, that diminished charity.

Luther, whose heart was as kind as his tongue was harsh, was among the first to perceive that the state must take over from the Church the care and rescue of the destitute.

“As it is disgraceful,” he wrote, “for the father of a family in his comfortable home to permit anyone in it to suffer the disgrace of being unclothed or in rags, it is similarly unfitting that the magistrates of a city should tolerate a condition in which citizens are hard pressed by hunger and distress.”

All in all the Reformation, though it ultimately improved the morals of Europe, temporarily damaged lay morality.

Men had not been much better before, and would not be much better in later centuries, if we may trust the preachers. We can discover all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and all of ours in theirs, according to their means.

People then, as now, were judged more by their manners than by their morals; the world forgave more readily the sins that were committed with the least vulgarity and the greatest grace.

When both teacher and pupil were gone it became customary to call Okeghem the Donatello, Deprès the Michelangelo, of musical art.

“the Devil,” said Luther, “has no right to all the good tunes.”

The democratization of religious music marked the lands of the Reformation, covering the darkness of the creed with the releasing joy of song.

Like any old and complex institution, which has so much to lose by an unsuccessful innovation, the Church was conservative, even more in ritual than in creed.

“I approve only of Christ and Tully.”

Much is lost in history, but so much of worth has been preserved that not a hundred lifetimes could absorb it.

Luther condemned the existing grammar schools as teaching the student “only enough bad Latin to become a priest and read Mass .... and yet remain all his life a poor ignoramus fit neither to cackle nor to lay eggs.”

“I am willing to lose my share of paradise,” vowed Clément Marot, “if those great beasts”—the professors—“did not ruin my youth.”

Holland boasted of several ladies who could be courted in Latin, and who could probably conjugate better than they could decline.

Diogenes the Cynic, who, “seeing one without learning seated on a stone, remarked .... ‘Behold where one stone sitteth on another.’

“Lord God, what incomparable sweetness of words and matter in the works of Plato and Cicero, wherein is joined gravity and delectation, excellent wisdom with divine eloquence, absolute virtue with pleasure incredible,” so “that those books be almost sufficient to make a perfect and excellent governor!”

To understand these texts better—Latin in language but Byzantine in bearings—

history as the “treasure house of humanity,” a museum in which a thousand examples of virtue and vice, statesmanship and decay, are preserved for the instruction of mankind;

he loved life more than books. He is pictured for us as a man of distinguished presence, tall and handsome, a well of learning, a light and fire of conversation.

Je vais chercher un grand peut-être—“I go to seek a great perhaps.” 29 Alas, it is a legend.

“May that intellectual sphere whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whom we call GOD, keep you in His Almighty protection”

The secret of his verve is imagination plus energy plus clarity; he sees a thousand things unobserved by most of us, notes innumerable quirks of dress and conduct and speech, unites them fantastically, and sets the mixtures chasing one another over the sportive page.

He was tolerant of everything but intolerance. Like nearly all the humanists, when driven to choose, he preferred Catholicism with its legends, intolerance, and art to Protestantism with its predestination, intolerance, and purity.

he preferred scatology to eschatology.

fortuites—“a certain gaiety of spirit preserved in contempt of the accidents of life”

“Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul” (II, viii).

He offered to the women he courted the old invitation to make play while beauty shines,

the vase of form cannot be shattered and then be refashioned in an alien mold.

Martial, the things that do attain The happy life be these, I find: The riches left, not got with pain; The fruitful ground, the quiet mind; The equal friend; no grudge, no strife; No change of rule nor governance; Without disease the healthful life; The household of continuance; The mean diet, no delicate fare; True wisdom joined with simpleness; The night dischargèd of all care, Where wine the wit may not oppress; The faithful wife, without debate; Such sleep as may beguile the night; Contented with thine own estate, Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

“Mad zeal possesses all men today, that we should believe .... that God is ours alone, that there is no heaven, faith, spirit, Christ, but in our sect.”

“My heart is alien to none. I have my brothers among the Turks, Papists, Jews, and all peoples.”

And now larger than ever lies the curse On this our time; and all that went before Keeps altering its face from bad to worse; And each of us has felt the touch of war- War after war, and exile, dangers, fear— And each of us is weary to the core Of seeing his own blood along a spear And being alive because it missed its aim. Some folks have lost their goods and all their gear, And everything is gone, even the name Of house and home and wife and memory. And what’s the use of it? A little fame? The nation’s thanks? A place in history? One day they’ll write a book, and then we’ll see.52

He was one of the most complete personalities of a time rich in complete men.

Always, in these hurried pages, conscience runs a race with time, and warns the hurrying pen that, like the hasty traveler, it is but scratching surfaces.

The ink runs dry; and while it lasts it must be enough if from its scratches and splashes some hazy picture unfolds of men and women resting a while from theology and war, loving the forms of beauty as well as the mirages of truth and power, and building, carving, painting words until thought finds an art to clothe it, wisdom and music merge, and literature arises to let a nation speak, to let an age pour its spirit into a mold so fondly fashioned that time itself will cherish’ and carry it down tnrough a thousand catastrophes as an heirloom of the race.

ART had to suffer from the Reformation, if only because Protestantism believed in the Ten Commandments.

“truth” banished beauty as an infidel.

Osez! he told his artists—“Dare!”

Would the Louvre have been possible if the aristocracy had been just?

From day to day, while learning dying.”

But Gothic was dying of old age, perhaps of senile excess and Flamboyant old lace;

In the end we have to agree with the judgment passed on the early Cranach by the aging Dürer—that Lucas could depict the features but not the soul.

How futile are words before a work of art!

Each art successfully resists translation into any other medium; it has its own inalienable quality, which must speak for itself or not at all. History can only record the masters and the masterpieces; it cannot convey them. To sit silently before Holbein’s picture of his wife and children is better than a biography.

youth and genius seldom love home.

more interested in anatomy than in religion.

The Church in Spain was almost the sole patron of the arts; therefore it called the tune, named the themes, and made art, like philosophy, the handmaiden of theology.

Art is order, yet everything was in chaos—not religion only, but morals, social order, art itself.