Books: Century of Faith & Fire

THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS (732 pp.) —Will and Ariel Durant—Simon & Schuster ($10).

In 1619, Johann Kepler published his remarkable studies on the orbital speed of planets. Two generations later, they were to lead Newton to the theory of gravitation, and in Kepler’s own time they so impressed James I of England that he tried to hire the great German astronomer as an adviser to his court. Back home in Linz that same year, Kepler’s mother was thrown into prison as a witch.

The paradox that has fascinated all historians—of reason beside unreason, of rationalism beside blind faith—was never more sharply apparent than in the century (1558-1648) from Elizabeth to Richelieu and from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king’s touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster—although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans on the ground that they had prolonged the cold weather long past the change of seasons. And yet the voice that defined the age and spoke one of its most famous lines belongs to a rationalist: “I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends,” wrote Francis Bacon to Lord William Cecil, “for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”

Historian Durant’s province is scarcely less vast, as readers of his massive, generally excellent Story of Civilization know. The seventh volume in that story is also one of the best. It introduces the period that Durant regards as his own. What was planned as Durant’s final volume is now to become part of a trilogy—with The Age of Louis XIV (1963) and The Age of Voltaire (1965) still ahead.

Pardon for All. Although the Age of Reason thus becomes the most scrupulously scrutinized period of Durant’s entire enterprise, this volume contains some curious errors of emphasis: the great migration of peasants and adventurers, jailbirds and divines from the England of James I to the New World is dismissed in a paragraph; the years during which Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov and the first of the Romanov dynasty were transforming Muscovite Russia into an imperial power get only six pages.

But in chronicling the great events that convulsed the century—the religious wars, the confrontation of Christianity and rationalist philosophy, the growing defiance of the authority of kings—Durant is painstaking, persuasive and tolerant. Even academic critics no longer dismiss him as a mere popularizer, and he shows once again that, better than any other historian living, he understands how to dis till the flavor of an age from its arts and manners. Like one of his favorite figures, Montaigne, he can “speak to paper as I do to the first person I meet.” Indeed, he is often at his most eloquent when speaking of Montaigne himself, whose lifelong preoccupation with his health (notably kidney stones) leads Durant to a typical, one-sentence appraisal: “He sought the philosopher’s stone and found it lodged in his bladder.”

As usual, Durant writes better of the century’s philosophers and men of science —Montaigne. Bacon. Kepler, Descartes—than he does of its poets and painters.

But if he has a major fault, it is the defect of a major virtue. The eye that he turns on the world is that of a gentle rationalist, and consequently he is forever poised between the “for and against”; he rarely raises his voice. The view is admirably balanced, but occasionally the reader must miss a sense of passion equal to the murderous events of the bloody century described. There is in Durant none of the messianic conviction of a Carlyle, say, or the obsessive pattern-making of a Toynbee. When he examines Elizabeth’s execution of Mary Stuart, he can find, at last, nobody to blame. “Pardon is the word for all.”

Murderous Nationalism. Will Durant’s pages are filled with odd shapes and figures, arresting and contradictory facts; for history, Durant believes, “is baroque. It smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our -rules.” And yet there was a pattern to the century, imposed by “the rise of murderous nationalism and the decline of murderous theologies.” Under its great Queen, England was emerging as the world’s leading mercantile power, and Historian Durant is nowhere better than in his description of the “Elizabethan Englishman,” that “scion of the Renaissance” whose reckless ambitions and lusty style were shaped by the court of the “amorous virgin.” Notes Durant wryly: “Rarely has a woman derived so much advantage from barrenness, or so much pleasure from virginity.”

The energy that transformed a nation of 5,000,000 into a world power derived, Durant thinks, from a unique fusion of the Reformation and the Renaissance: while in France the Renaissance “rejected the Reformation” and in Germany the reverse happened, “under Elizabeth the Reformation triumphed; in Elizabeth, the Renaissance.” Their mingling produced the complete Englishman, most ideally personified by Raleigh, who could excel in turn as soldier, poet, philosopher and explorer before going to his execution with a remark worthy of a martyr: “Let us dispatch. At this hour mine ague comes upon me; I would not have mine enemies to think I quaked from fear.”

The century was really a curtain raiser, and it is on that note that Durant ends his survey. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, he points out, by strengthening the Protestant North, checked the Counter Reformation and “ended the reign of theology over the European mind,” leaving faith “naked to rationalist winds.”

Henceforth, the “thinkers of Europe—the vanguard of the European mind—would no longer be discussing the authority of the pope [but] debating the existence of God.” The Age of Reason, as Durant might have added, was moving toward the point where superstition was derided and believed dead—but in which Reason itself all too often became a superstition.

Life Imprisonment. In his study in a handsome, Spanish-style home in Los Angeles, Historian Durant, 75, writes 1,000 small, neat words every day, using a 39¢ ballpoint pen that he throws away when it runs dry. He has been doing it since 1929, and neither depression nor war has slackened or speeded his pace. For him and his wife, Durant notes, “it’s been a life imprisonment, and we’ll be with it until we or civilization die.”

One of seven children of an immigrant French Canadian, Durant was born in Massachusetts, educated in parochial schools, but left the Roman Catholic Church in his null — thus achieving, he says, “a certain detachment toward the religious issue.” He has never belonged to a church since, calls himself an agnostic. Durant started out to be a reporter on the New York Journal, but found the life too strenuous, and settled down to teaching Latin, French, English and geometry (he has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University). He got the idea for his huge project in 1912 when he was in Damascus. Ill with dysentery, he recalled that famed Historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62) had also fallen ill in Damascus and had died there before he could launch his own cherished story of civilization. At 27, Durant decided to complete what Buckle had not lived to do. The Story of Philosophy, which since 1926 has sold a phenomenal 3.000,000 copies, gave Durant the money to retire from a career as a popular lecturer and teacher at 42 and to launch into Volume I. Our Oriental Heritage, of The Story of Civilization.

All Fouled Up. In order to get civilization on paper. Durant has been forced virtually to retire from it. He works “all the time except for meals and sleep.” keeps at it seven days a week. He rarely goes out except for a daily mile-long walk and an occasional evening’s concert. Says he: “I think cocktail parties are one of the things Americans should be particularly ashamed of—such a waste of time and liquor.” A small (5 ft. 5 in.’), silver-haired man with a bristly mustache. Durant settles at 8 in the morning into a rocking chair (for sluggish circulation) with a drawing board in his lap and a supply of peanuts at hand (for quick protein—he is a vegetarian). After a light supper at 6. he reads and takes notes, is in bed by 10. He reads a minimum of 500 books for each volume he turns out, averages about one completed volume every six years.

From the start, Durant has been assisted in research by his wife Ariel, now 63. a former student of his whom he married when she was only 15. Durant knows just how Gibbon felt when he yearned to have a few years left after The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1965. when he is 80. Durant expects to complete his last volume. -‘Then.” says he. “we’re going on a spree.” Even if “the Reaper stays his hand,” adds Durant, the history will not be pushed beyond Napoleon: “I would not be mentally fit to deal with the igth century.”

In his long contemplation of civilization, Durant has arrived at only one general conclusion: “The world situation is all fouled up. It always has been. It always will be. I see no reason for change.”