Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

by Will Durant

I report it as a matter of fact repeatedly observed, that I have often felt, in the presence of growing things, an emotion that reminds me of the childhood piety with which I approached the Communion railing, or mumbled

my way through the Stations of the Cross. I cannot look at any green shoot sprouting from the soil without feeling that in that mystic presence I am closer to the essence of reality than when my grandson ...

This tree—I see it pushing its roots ever more deeply and widely into the soil, yet lifting itself up to the sky as if in prayer for light and warmth, spreading its branches and unfolding a hundred thousand leaves to breathe the air and catch the sun; I feel in myself the same lust for light and growth; this tree and I are kindred souls sharing the same hunger and the same life. I see fond parent...

This, then, is the God I worship: the persistent and creative Life that struggles up from the energy of the atom to make the earth green with

growth, to stir the youth with ambition and the girl with tender longing, to mold the form of woman, to agitate geniuses, to guide the art of Phidias, and to justify itself in Spinoza and Christ.

Is my God personal? No—and why should it

The God I worship could not be such a separate and partial self; it is the sum and source of that universal vitality of which our little egos are abstracted fragments and experimental proliferations. I am prepared to have you put me down as an atheist, since I have reluctantly abandoned belief in a personal and loving God. But I am loath to leave the word God out of my life and creed.

I have rejected materialism, I have accepted mind as the reality most directly known to me, and I have pictured the world as a scene not of blind mechanism but of striving and creative life. Let me then keep the term God for the inventive vitality and abounding fertility of Nature, the eon-long struggle of “matter” to rise from atomic energy to intelligence, consciousness, and informed and deliberate will, to statesmen, poets, saints, artists, musicians, scientists, and philosophers. Let me have something to worship!

I consider myself a Christian in the literal and difficult sense of sincerely admiring the personality and ethics of Christ, and making a persistent effort to behave like a Christian.

I am not quite a saint. I have on several occasions attended and furtively enjoyed theatrical displays featuring the female form. Even in my nineties, I have felt a strong erotic urge, which my recent illness seemed to have knocked out of me; but already I fee...

respecting the pleasures of the senses as well as those of the mind, even while wishing that I could be as ...

pledged to follow as far as possible the ethics of Christ, including chastity before marriage, fidelity within it, extensive charity, and peaceful opposition to

any but the most clearly defensive war.

They took me into the arcane of their simple nunnery,

For by 1906 I had replaced my Christian creed with a dream of socialism as the hope of the world; so Utopia comes up as heaven goes down. By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy; I left the seminary, causing much grief to my parents, and years of mental chaos and loneliness to myself.

defeat. To me the “death of God” and the slow decay of Christianity in the educated classes of Christendom constitute the profoundest tragedy in modern Western history, of far deeper moment than

the great wars or the competition between capitalism

I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths.

of Ecclesiastes’ somber warning—“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” for knowledge can destroy a happy innocence and many a comforting or inspiring delusion. I can interpret Adam’s “sin,” like so

Heaven and hell remain for me not places in another world, but states of mind often associated

and vice in this life. I

can think of Christ as the personification of godliness because—barring his rejection of his mother (Matt. 13:54–58) and some bitter words about hell (Matt. 13:37–42; Mark 9:48; Luke 16:25)—he preached a code of conduct which, if generally practiced, would make even poverty an earthly paradise. I can praise Christianity for winning wider acceptance of moral ideas by transforming these into pictures, narratives, dramas, and art, and thereby helping to tame the unsocial impulses of mankind. In this sense I could think of Church leaders as religio...

coming control of American life by the Catholic

Many of our larger cities are already under Catholic control; that control will in the near future extend to many legislatures; by 2100 it may include Congress and the presidency. A like triumph of the

capacity, an inequality of status and possessions seems unavoidable short of a dictatorship complete enough to abolish

Standards of living may rise in interludes of peace, but the least affluent nations and classes (however better off than their similars in previous centuries) will still feel and protest against their exclusion from the possessions and privileges of the rich.

many are the functions that supernatural religion fulfills that the skeptic must learn to make his peace with it, only hoping that the love which radiated from Christ will overcome the fearful intolerance of empowered creeds.

Two world wars have seriously wounded Christianity; a third may end it as a force in history. Has the Age of Nietzsche begun?

Where shall we find again a belief to give us stimulus, a conscience to give us decency,

a new devotion to give nobility to our little span? To prescribe for a religion is as presumptuous

Religions are not made by the intellect, else they would never touch the soul or reach the masses, or achieve longevity. A successful religion without incredible

ask that a religion shall soften the heart of man, that it shall inspire courage, conscience, and charity, that it shall make the strong a little more generous to the weak, that it shall mitigate the rigor of competition and the brutality of war. Since the only real progress is moral development, a religion faithful to these aims would (other things being equal) be the best faith and antidote for

we examine our memories we shall find that what stirred us in our native faith was not a body of doctrine but the ethics and story of Christ,

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could improve upon this outline of a faith for the modern soul.

Through all the adventures of the mind among philosophies and creeds the figure of Christ remains the most appealing in history.

all the world will hear gladly the story of a man who died that there might be good will among men and peace among states. What else is the world longing

We do not propose the abandonment of theology; we contemplate a congregation in which each member will be free to form or hold his own theology or philosophy, tolerantly extending a like freedom to his associates.

intellectual classes returning to the temple, glad to mingle once more with the simplest worshippers, happy to feel a community of soul beneath a diversity of thought, to have again something that they believe and revere, to honor with all their hearts an ideal that, even if every generation opposes it, will never

if we define Christianity as the practice of the principles of Christ? Certainly;

acceptance of those principles. Perhaps Christ meant the full code only for his preaching disciples, not for the laity. For the rest of us we

The problem with the Notion of Christianity is that Christ is God, if Christ’s example were excepted by all without needing to acknowledge prices God than a notion that he espouses would go further than it does today

We believe that many saints would appear in such a moral faith, men like

honor the freedom of mind in science and print and speech, and would recognize that the good and the beautiful may shine out in sages, rebels, and poets as well as in prophets and saints. Indeed the new Church

accumulation of a second Bible, recording the most inspiring thoughts and actions of every race of men. Who will be the Plutarch of the moral heroes of history?

I think that this is what the Unitarians practice in their believes

There are in America and Europe thousands of clergymen who are ready and eager for the Christianity of Christ. It is we, the

Does he really believe that the clergy is going to give up their power and their income. That sounds a bit like the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the time of Christ

We must give courage to our leaders to lead us, to re-create for us a Christianity that would be intelligible to Christ. Let us lift up

Historically, religion has been the worship of supernatural powers. Webster defines morality as “the quality of that which conforms to right ideals or principles of human conduct.” But who is to

Personally I should define morality as the consistency of private conduct with public interest as understood by the group. It implies a recognition by the individual that his life, liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust himself to the needs of the community.

Nice introduction

am not at all confident that man’s unsocial impulses can be controlled by a moral code shorn of religious belief.

That is, he does not believe that when kind can maintain a moral code without the fear of death and hell

gave the attack upon Christianity 182 of 799 pages in The Age of Voltaire, for that attack was the most important—the most widely, deeply, lastingly influential—event of the eighteenth century; but I stated the case for the Church with

I’m sorry but I don’t get the reference of the 18th century since they tack on the Roman church was in 1550 at

The Church had overlaid the incomparable ethics of Jesus with a complex structure of incredible dogma echoing St. Paul and mostly unknown to Christ, and with an omnipresent incubus of organization and theocratical police lying heavy upon the human mind, ready to stifle any independent thought by using the powers of the state