Hello all,
Yesterday I finished Volume VI, The Reformation, of Will and now to be Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization.
A good part of this reading in this volume, and the others, is a slog for me. To read of the development of ceramics and goldsmithing, of artists whose work is entirely unfamiliar to me, of architectural change, finds me lost most of the time, scratching my head, unwilling because of my adventure to skip ahead, but reading as fast as I can.
Yesterday I finished Volume VI, The Reformation, of Will and now to be Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization.
A good part of this reading in this volume, and the others, is a slog for me. To read of the development of ceramics and goldsmithing, of artists whose work is entirely unfamiliar to me, of architectural change, finds me lost most of the time, scratching my head, unwilling because of my adventure to skip ahead, but reading as fast as I can.
Yet so much good lies in these volumes that the slogs are worth the effort. Durant gives wonderful biographical sketches of people like Luther, Ignatius Loyola and other Jesuits, popes and kings, soldiers and poets. He also writes at times with great wit and humor, saying, for example, of the Counter Reformation (the reforms in the Catholic Church) “All in all, it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products of the Protestant Reformation.” He writes evenhandedly of religion; Protestants, Catholics, Muslim, and Jew all receive balanced histories (though some individuals, certain popes and Calvin, among others, take some hits), and Durant lacks the often snarky disregard for faith evinced by some in our own time.
Durant has many strengths as an historian. He had studied a great amount of philosophy, and is able to untangle, for the most part, the knotted cords of various schools of thought that might otherwise have stumped many readers, including, of course, me. His sense of humanity and a broad compassion allow him to investigate and present certain historical figures and causes in ways that arouse similar sympathies in his readers. An example: he recognizes the moral failures and extravagant habits of many of the Renaissance popes, but he also credits them with the generosity they showed to the arts and to the poor, and shows us why and how politics played so great a part in their pontificates.
I also find, and keep marking in the book itself, sentences with which I either disagree or that make me smile. Here he writes, in the chapter “The Life of the People,” of Latin Christendom that “The same sturdy men who could believe so fiercely could fiercely blaspheme, and the girls who on Sunday bowed demurely before statues of the Virgin rouged their cheeks hopefully during the week, and many of them got themselves seduced, if only as a proposal of marriage.”
Here are some more:
“We can discover all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and all of ours in theirs, according to their means.”
“When a pretty girl held a lute in her lap, strummed its strings, and added her voice to its tones, Cupid could save an arrow.”
Of a musician, Di Lasso, looking for an increase in salary, “He received the increase, and died triumphant and insane. (1594)”
“A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.” (I thought when I read these words of the political faiths at war in our own age.)
Of Francis Villon, French poet and wild man: “He was a thief, but a melodious thief, and the world has need of melody.”
Of the sixteenth century in general, these sad words: “The Europe that our youth knew was taking form.” Born in 1885, Durant writes these words as a man who witnessed the destruction of Europe in two world wars.
On to Volume VII, The Age Of Reason Begins, which, Deo gratias, is two hundred pages shorter.
Durant has many strengths as an historian. He had studied a great amount of philosophy, and is able to untangle, for the most part, the knotted cords of various schools of thought that might otherwise have stumped many readers, including, of course, me. His sense of humanity and a broad compassion allow him to investigate and present certain historical figures and causes in ways that arouse similar sympathies in his readers. An example: he recognizes the moral failures and extravagant habits of many of the Renaissance popes, but he also credits them with the generosity they showed to the arts and to the poor, and shows us why and how politics played so great a part in their pontificates.
I also find, and keep marking in the book itself, sentences with which I either disagree or that make me smile. Here he writes, in the chapter “The Life of the People,” of Latin Christendom that “The same sturdy men who could believe so fiercely could fiercely blaspheme, and the girls who on Sunday bowed demurely before statues of the Virgin rouged their cheeks hopefully during the week, and many of them got themselves seduced, if only as a proposal of marriage.”
Here are some more:
“We can discover all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and all of ours in theirs, according to their means.”
“When a pretty girl held a lute in her lap, strummed its strings, and added her voice to its tones, Cupid could save an arrow.”
Of a musician, Di Lasso, looking for an increase in salary, “He received the increase, and died triumphant and insane. (1594)”
“A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.” (I thought when I read these words of the political faiths at war in our own age.)
Of Francis Villon, French poet and wild man: “He was a thief, but a melodious thief, and the world has need of melody.”
Of the sixteenth century in general, these sad words: “The Europe that our youth knew was taking form.” Born in 1885, Durant writes these words as a man who witnessed the destruction of Europe in two world wars.
On to Volume VII, The Age Of Reason Begins, which, Deo gratias, is two hundred pages shorter.