A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

The power of the medieval mind had been irrevocably broken. Its dogmatism, its infallibility, its absolute lack of ambiguity, were lost. It had already been deeply troubled. The Renaissance, nationalism, humanism, rising literacy, and the new horizons of trade—all these had challenged blind, ritualistic allegiance to the assumptions of a thousand years. But Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe. Since the earth was revolving daily, heaven and hell could not be located where they had been thought to be, and in rational minds there was a growing skepticism that either of them existed. Satan without hell was implausible. God without heaven was inconceivable, at least the medieval God was, but here reason ended. Christendom found the prospect of a godless world intolerable. Because faith in a higher power was needed, it would be necessary to find, or even to fabricate, another Creator, a new King of Kings and Lord of Lords—“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer” (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”), Voltaire would write in 1770.