The Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wycliffe to Calvin, 1300 - 1564 (The Story of Civilization, Book 6) [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]

The Story of Civilization #6

by Will Durant

The Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wycliffe to Calvin, 1300 - 1564 (The Story of Civilization, Book 6) [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, World History, Philosophy, Reference, Christianity

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant’s Story of Civilization is more than just history, and his greatest strength is his ability to help the reader understand what it was like to live in another time, showing the social, religious, artistic, economic, and intellectual traditions that informed and directed people’s actions. This is Volume 6 of the series, and with this one, more than with any of the others, I had difficulty trying to understand and sympathize with these people. In the ancient world there was a shared understanding of justice, decency, and the search for truth, and an agreement that there were many different paths to the same goal: just think of all various religions and schools of philosophy that coexisted in the Roman empire.

The age of the Reformation, by contrast, was an age of certainty, of men proclaiming that they possessed absolute truth and were uniquely qualified to understand and speak for god. It didn’t matter that they also confessed themselves to be poor, ignorant sinners whose weaknesses caused them to frequently fall short of their goals. They were nevertheless so convinced of the rightness of their beliefs that they were willing to put to death anyone who disagreed with them. A modern mind agrees with Montaigne when he said, “It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them,” but tolerance was foreign to these men, and I was reminded that people who never have doubts are capable of any depravity.

As with the previous volumes of this series, I think it is most useful to let Durant speak for himself, so following are some quotes that I found most interesting or illuminating.

commentary:
- A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.
- One is reminded of the Emperor Julian’s comment: “There is no wild beast like an angry theologian.”
- Our present intolerance is rather for those who question our economic or political principles, and we explain our frightened dogmatism on the ground that any doubt thrown upon these cherished assumptions endangers our national solidarity and survival.
- Perhaps we judge the age too harshly, forgetting the barbarities of our enlightened century.
- an excessive concentration of wealth may tear a society to pieces by promoting revolution.
- Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory.
- From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
- no man can be tolerant except where he is indifferent.
- Creeds and ceremonies are to be judged not on their literal claims but by their moral effects; if they promote social order and private virtue they should be accepted without public questioning.
- Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings.
- To Erasmus it seemed obvious that a God who punished sins that His creatures as made by Him could not help committing, was an immoral monster unworthy of worship or praise.
- In any case, Erasmus concluded, let us admit our ignorance, our incapacity to reconcile moral freedom with divine prescience or omnipresent causality; let us postpone the solution to the Last Judgment; but meanwhile let us shun any hypothesis that makes man a puppet, and God a tyrant crueler than any in history.
- think of [Rabelais] not as a great poet, but as a sane and cheerful voice in a century of hate.
- when [Rabelais] was asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, he answered, Je vais chercher un grand peut-être—“I go to seek a great perhaps.”
- [Pope Paul III] had character without morals, and intellect without wisdom.
- This is the honor and weakness of Protestantism, that it appeals to the intellect, which is always changing; and the strength of Catholicism lies in its refusal to adjust itself to the theories of science, which, in the experience of history, seldom survive the century in which they were born.

history:
- What put an end to the Middle Ages? Many causes, operating through three centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the spreading acquaintance of renascent Europe with Islam; the disillusioning capture of Constantinople; the resurrection of classic pagan culture; the expansion of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator’s fleet, and Columbus, and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the business class, which financed the centralization of monarchical government; the development of national states challenging the supranational authority of the popes; the successful revolt of Luther against the papacy; printing.
- The government would not always be as powerful as under Henry the Terrible; it would be weak under a sickly son and an embittered daughter; then, under a vacillating but triumphant queen, the nation would rise in a burst of liberated energy, and lift itself to the leadership of the European mind. Perhaps Elizabeth and Shakespeare could not have been had not England been set free by her worst and strongest king.
- nowhere in contemporary Christendom—not even in Spain—were so many men and women burned for their opinions as during Reginald Pole’s primacy of the English Church.
- Manners were grave and perfect, much better than hygiene; every Spaniard was a gentleman, but few were knights of the bath.
- Beer and wine were the staple drinks at all meals, even breakfast; one of Thomas More’s claims to fame was that he drank water.

religion:
- Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accept faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end.
- The Church was at her best when, by the consolations of her creed, the magic of her ritual, the nobler morality of her adherents, the courage, zeal, and integrity of her bishops, and the superior justice of her episcopal courts, she took the place vacated by the Roman Imperial government as the chief source of order and peace in the Dark Ages (approximately 524–1079 A.D.) of the Christian world.
- Throughout the fourteenth century the Church suffered political humiliation and moral decay. She had begun with the profound sincerity and devotion of Peter and Paul; she had grown into a majestic system of familial, scholastic, social, international discipline, order, and morality; she was now degenerating into a vested interest absorbed in self-perpetuation and finance.
- Since the Church had survived for a century without reform, but could hardly survive a week without money, he concluded that money was more urgently needed than reform.
- It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen.
- Cardinals were chosen rarely for their piety, usually for their wealth or political connections or administrative capacity; they looked upon themselves, not as monks burdened with vows, but as the senators and diplomats of a rich and powerful state; in many instances they were not priests; and they did not let their red hats impede their enjoyment of life. The Church forgot the poverty of the Apostles in the needs and expenses of power.
- As education rose, faith fell; and as the clergy had most of the education, they showed in their conduct that they no longer took to heart the once terrifying eschatology of their official creed.
- Many theologians accepted [William of Ockham’s] view that the basic tenets of the Christian religion could not be proved by reason; and the distinction between philosophical truth and religious truth was as widely spread in the fourteenth century as is today the tacit truce between scientific inquiry and religious ministrations.
- Catholicism proposes to meet the religious demands of the people, who have barely heard of Copernicus and Darwin, and have never heard of Spinoza and Kant; such people are many and fertile.
- For if the Church was divine, her opponents must be agents of Satan, and against these devils perpetual war was a religious obligation to an insulted God.

reformation:
- despite its original intolerance, the Reformation rendered two services to the Enlightenment: it broke the authority of dogma, generated a hundred sects that would formerly have died at the stake, and allowed among them such virile debate that reason was finally recognized as the bar before which all sects had to plead their cause unless they were armed with irresistible physical force.
- The Protestants would not admit that a priest could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; and the Catholics felt that to surrender transubstantiation would be to give up the very heart of the Mass and the Roman ritual.
- Protestantism, in time, helped to regenerate the moral life of Europe, and the Church purified herself into an organization politically weaker but morally stronger than before. One lesson emerges above the smoke of the battle: a religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme.
- The Reformation had to be; we must repeatedly remind ourselves of this while we record the deviltry of the century that gave it birth. The break with the past was violent and painful, but only a brutal blow could shake its grip on the minds of men.
- Wherever Protestantism won, nationalism carried the flag.
- [Luther:] “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has. .... She is the Devil’s greatest whore... a whore eaten by scab and leprosy, who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed.”
- Protestantism could not favor science, for it is based itself on an infallible Bible. Luther rejected the Copnernican astronomy because the Bible told of Joshua commanding the sun—not the earth—to stand still.
- [Luther] lacked appreciation of the historic role that the Church had played in civilizing northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind’s hunger for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal justly with his Catholic or Protestant foes. He freed his followers from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible book; and it has been easier to change the popes than the book.
- Printing fell in with [Luther’s] purposes as a seemingly providential innovation, which he used with inexhaustible skill; he was the first to make it an engine of propaganda and war.
- Printing was the Reformation; Gutenberg made Luther possible.
- Luther should never have grown old. Already in 1522 he was outpapaling the popes. “I do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved.”
- Calvin was as thorough as any pope in rejecting individualism of belief; this greatest legislator of Protestantism completely repudiated that principle of private judgment with which the new religion had begun.
- [Calvin] professes to know why God so arbitrarily determines the eternal fate of billions of souls: it is “to promote our admiration of His glory” by the display of His power.
- “We are persuaded,” [John Knox] wrote, “that all which our adversaries do is diabolical.” For such God-damned opponents no Christian love was due, for they were sons of Satan, not of God; there was no good in them whatever, and it would be well to exterminate them completely from the earth.
- an obscure Anabaptist in those same years penned a criticism of Calvinism, under the title of Careless by Necessity; Scottish Protestants sent it to Knox to be confuted, and for a moment the voice of reason whispered amid the war of faiths. The author wondered how the Calvinists, after knowing Christ’s conception of a loving Father, could believe that God had created men whose eternal damnation he had foreseen and willed. God, said the Anabaptist, had given men a natural inclination to love their offspring; if man was made in the image of God how could God be more cruel than man? Calvinists, the author continued, did more harm than atheists, for “they are less injurious to God who believe that He is not, than they which say that He is unmerciful, cruel, and an oppressor.” Knox replied that there are mysteries beyond human reason.
- Knox took the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy as still in force, and interpreted it literally. Every heretic was to be put to death, and cities predominantly heretical were to be smitten with the sword and utterly destroyed, even to the cattle therein, and every house in them should be burned down.
- In the progressive weakening of faith and the papacy men were beginning to think of themselves as patriots first and Christians afterward. Catholicism, which is supranational, declined; nationalism, which is Protestant, rose.
- Humanism was a pagan reversion to classical culture; Protestantism was a pious return to gloomy Augustine, to early Christianity, even to Old Testament Judaism; no humanist could accept the doctrines of predestination and determinism without sacrificing the dignity and value of man or of human life: here was another basic cleavage between the Reformation and the Renaissance.
- Henry [VIII] was now the sole judge of what, in religion and politics, the English people were to believe. Since his theology was still Catholic in every respect except the papal power, he made it a principle to persecute impartially Protestant critics of Catholic dogma, and Catholic critics of his ecclesiastical supremacy.

society:
- Beer and ale were the national drinks; wine was not as plentiful or popular as in France or Italy, but a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns. The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”
- Holland boasted of several ladies who could be courted in Latin, and who could probably conjugate better than they could decline.
- as the Roman senator Cato said, “Simple thieves lie in prisons and in stocks; public thieves walk abroad in gold and silk.”
- Marriages were arranged by the parents, and came early; girls of twelve, boys of fourteen, were considered nubile. Wedding ceremonies were complex, with ancient symbolism and festivities; through all these the bride was required to keep a modest silence; her revenge was deferred.
- Day by day a secularizing, paganizing Renaissance asserted its classical predilections over the sacred traditions of medieval faith and form.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

So continues Durant’s tour through European history.

As Durant himself points out, calling this book The Reformation is not really accurate, for it is actually a history of all Europe (besides Italy) between 1300 and 1564, with a few other topics thrown in. This book effectively completes the picture painted in his earlier volume, The Renaissance, which covered the history of Italy during this same time. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of separating Italy from everywhere else, since you can hardly understand Luther without being acquainted with Renaissance Rome, nor can you understand the political situation in Italy without this wider context; but I suppose there are more inelegant solutions to dealing with so much material.

Even if much more than the Reformation is covered, the story of the Reformation lies at the heart of this book. Durant, himself a lapsed Catholic, promises to treat of the conflict impartially, and does a pretty good job; indeed, by the end nobody—not the Catholics, Protestants, or humanists—comes off very well. The humanists were tolerant at the cost of being entirely ineffective in reform; and the reformers and counter-reformers were effective at the cost of being inhumanly intolerant.

To be fair, it is easy to exaggerate the degree of religious persecution during this time. Statistics and stories of persecution are apt to be unreliable. Victims exaggerate their losses and victors magnify their gains. And when we look at our current election cycle in the United States, I don’t think we have much reason to be condescending about this sort of thing.

Granted all this, I cannot help finding the whole conflict between Protestants and Catholics terribly depressing. That men could kill one another over whether the host is transubstantiated or consubstantiated; or whether doing good deed makes you a good person, or being a good person makes you do good deeds—it boggles the mind. Of course, religious differences were inseparable from political conflicts. The real phenomenon of this period, arguably, was not the rise of Protestantism, but of nationalism. This was the age of the consolidation of power, during which the feudal system—wherein authority is decentralized among noble families—was replaced by absolute monarchies. These monarchies could no longer tolerate having to compromise with an international church. Even in Spain, the most Catholic of countries, the power of the Church was effectively transferred from Rome to the state.

Many impressive characters arose during this time. We have the Catholic humanists—most notably Erasmus and Thomas More. We have great and terrible statesmen, Charles V, Francis I, Henry VIII, Suleiman the Magnificent. In religion, we have Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, as well as St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Ignatius of Loyola. In art we meet Pieter Bruegel, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, and my favorite, Hieronymous Bosch; and in music, Palestrina (though Durant doesn’t give enough space to Tomás Luis de Victoria to satisfy me). In science, the two giants of the age are Vesalius and Copernicus. And in literature, we finally encounter François Rabelais, the monk who, Durant remarks, “preferred scatology to eschatology.”

As usual, Durant is best in cultural history, worst in political history. The first third of this book consists of little more then summaries of political developments. Durant simply lacked the journalistic instinct and dramatic talent to give life to intrigues, plots, rebellions, and wars. He seems to know this about himself, however, which is why he gets the political history out of the way as soon as possible in all his books. The final sections of his volumes, which he titles “Behind the Scenes,” is always a relief, for Durant is at his best when he is imitating Burckhardt rather than Gibbon.

Also as usual, Durant has some irritating habits. One that is beginning to really bother me is his preoccupation with what he calls “sexual morality." In all his evaluations of historical personages, he feels compelled to note every marital infidelity, sexual “perversion,” or illegitimate child. I am not saying that a historian should ignore these things; but to me it seems childish to chide historical individuals for their sexual escapades. For somebody who prided himself on being cosmopolitan and tolerant, Durant had quite a puritan streak. Either that, or all this talk of sexual morality is just a cover for prurience. (Or perhaps being puritan and prurient are two sides of the same coin?)

In any case, there are few writers who can avoid being irritating through so many pages. Whatever his defects, the fact remains that I have happily read five hefty volumes of history from his pen, and look forward to reading the remaining five in the series.

[Helga · Rating 5 out of 5]

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

The Reformation is the 6th volume in The Story of Civilization series.
Its subject being Protestant Reformation, it considers religion and its functions in general and the conditions and problems of the Roman Catholic Church in the centuries before Luther, covering from 1300 to 1564 Europe.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listening to Will Durant's histories, especially when they're read by Grover Gardner, is a fine pastime.

[Steve R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whereas the previous work on the Renaissance was drastically restricted to the art of Italy, and even more so, to the three cities of Florence, Rome and Venice, this work deals with developments in the religious, political, economic, social, moral and artistic spheres of not only Italy, but also Germany, France, England, Spain, Holland and Eastern Europe. While the principal emphasis is on the religious challenge posed by not only Luther, but also by Wyclif, Huss, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli and the French Huguenots to the Catholic Church, a virtually equal emphasis is given to the rise of the absolutist nation state, and principally to the three larger-than-life rulers of the sixteenth century: Charles V, Henry VIII and Francis I. If (and when) I ever finish reading The Story of Civilization, my new goal now that I've read this work is to read more extensively the story of the interactions of these three men. The challenge of Protestantism to Catholicism is dealt with quite evenhandedly by Durant. The corruption of the Popes, bishops, monks and nuns is amply described, as is the bombast of Luther and the near-fascistic intolerance of Calvin in Geneva. The final debate between a Catholic and a Protestant in the work's 'Epilogue' is masterfully written and presents a concise summary of the strengths of both views. Other developments of the time are included. Vasco da Game got to India. Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Magellan, or at least some of his crew, circumnavigated the globe. The slave trade began. There were peasant uprisings in both England and Germany. There was the glorious painting of The Adoration of the Lamb by van Eyck.
The Spanish Inquisition was merely the tip of an intolerant iceberg which saw the burning of 'heretics' in virtually every country of Europe. Antisemitism grew exponentially, as most nations opted to expel their Jews, who consequently began their second major diaspora. Erasmus, in his humanism, tried to walk a fine line between recognizing the need for reform of the Church and not wanting to displace its primacy in people's lives. Albrecht Durer became the major German artist of his or any time. Charles' armies sacked Rome in 1527 to a greater degree than any of the barbarians had not over a century earlier. While not receiving a salary, Cardinal Wolsey in England became rich enough by dispensing posts to employ five hundred retainers. Thomas More wrote of an ideal world in his Utopia before being beheaded by his king for whom he'd previously served as Chancellor. Gustavus Vasa of Sweden led as interesting a life of ups and downs as did the three monarchs previously mentioned. Arabic histories were written by Ahmedi of Sives and Ibn-Khaldun. Sulieman presents a fifth highly interesting leader of this time. Palestrina wrote ninety-three masses and 486 other works. Juan Vives argued for a fundamental reform of education. Rabelais wrote the highly entertaining Gargantua and Pantagruel. Francis I's chateau had 440 rooms, and stables for 1200 horses. Holbein's art showed Flemish realism to be a vibrant new departure in painting. Copernicus' work on astronomy was as revolutionary in this field as Darwin's was to be in biology, and both of them hesitated to publish their findings. Vesalius' On the Structure of the Human Body (1543) with its 663 pages and 277 woodcuts represented the beginning of modern medicine. Teresa of Avila became a saint through a remarkable life of physical suffering, penitence and prayer. Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuit order, which Durant refers to as 'the most successful educational order in history'. The Council of Trent (1545-63) officially inaugurated the Counter Reformation, by which Catholic Spain, Italy and France were firmly opposed to Protestant England, Holland and Germany. These are but a few of the highlights of historical data to be culled from this impressive work. Absolutely first rate.

[Barry Belmont · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book starts slow, becomes tumultuous, and as it ends leaves you wanting more. Durant is the voice of history for me. His prose rises and falls with the times. I lament that he is not here to write of our own.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not yet reviewed.

[Heidi Burkhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant writes history like no one else. His volumes are enormous, but his writing is very accessible to people who aren't serious history scholars! Highly recommended for those who have time, or are willing to take time for the books in this series.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a note to his readers, Durant writes that “The Reformation” (Part 6 of The Story of Civilization) “is not quite an honest title for this book.” “An accurate title would be,” he says, “A History of European Civilization Outside of Italy from 1300 to 1564, or Thereabouts, Including the History of Religion in Italy and an Incidental View of Islamic and Judaic Civilization in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia.” While the information on the reformation -- the N. European break from Catholicism (Henry VIII, Luther, Calvin); Erasmus; the Catholic counterrevolution and the rise of the Jesuits) -- is interesting, this volume is more about the overall history of Europe during this period, including the vast geographic discoveries by European explorers. As with other Durant volumes, the detail can be overwhelming but can also serve as an excellent reference if more information is desired.

Durant describes Suleiman’s defects as more evident “in his family relations than in his government.” This Sultan, concerned about competition for his throne, killed his son by a slave woman, and then killed that son’s son. Suleiman had his brother strangled and that brother’s five sons were put to death. Reading this, it’s hard not to wonder about the viability of “kin selection” theory.

Of the Spanish Inquisition, Durant writes that “at the place prepared for execution, the confessed were strangled, then burned; the recalcitrant were burned alive.” The priests and spectators returned to their altars and their homes, convinced that a propitiatory offering had been made to a God insulted by heresy. Human sacrifice had been restored.” Durant then observes that “Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory. We must try to understand such movements in terms of their time, but they seem to us now the most unforgivable of historic crimes. A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.”

“The Black Death,” Durant writes, “was a special tragedy for the Jews of Christendom...in Western Europe a populace maddened by the ravages of the pestilence accused the Jews of poisoning the wells in an attempt to wipe out all Christians….In one town in southern France the entire Jewish community was cast into the flames….All in all, some 510 Jewish communities were exterminated in Christian Europe as a result of these pogroms.” In his summary statement of this era’s history, Durant writes that “It would be hard to find, before our time, or in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death.”

Life for the common person was not good. As Durant describes it, “Throughout this period the villages of Europe had to keep watch night and day against wolves, wild boars….The hunting stage survived within the agricultural age: man had to kill or be killed…A thousand insects, the beasts of the forests, and the birds of the air competed with the peasant for the fruit of his seeds and drudgery; and mysterious diseases decimated his herds….hunger was always around the corner.” The common people worked the land, and its food “fed the barons in the castle, the kings in their courts, the priests in their pulpits, the merchants and craftsmen in the towns, the physicians, teachers, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, and, last and least, the slaves of the soil themselves. Civilization is a parasite on the man with the hoe.”

The reformation leaders themselves were not appealing people. Women for Luther were “divinely designed for childbearing, cooking, praying, and not much else.” Luther, Durant writes, stated that his doctrine cannot be “judged by anyone, even by angels.” Luther’s break with Catholicism was significant from a religious history perspective and it was a repudiation, Durant comments, of the Renaissance’s “emphasis on earthly affairs and joys.” The Reformation in turn severely challenged theological certainty. “The Copernican revolution’ Durant states, “was far profounder than the Reformation; it made the differences between Catholic and Protestant dogmas seem trivial; it pointed beyond the Reformation to the Enlightenment…to the pessimistic agnosticism of a nineteenth century that would add the Darwinian to the Copernican catastrophe.”

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Owing to a spotty education in the public schools and in college, the period from the early Roman empire until the Enlightenment was a pretty grey area for me until seminary. There, thanks to required church history classes and inspired subsequent reading, I 'got into' the European middle ages through the Reformation, which, arguably, heralded the true birth of the modern.

As ever, Durant's survey is an excellent introduction to the period.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since college I have wanted to learn history but was foiled by the history books assigned in school and by the teaching in the classroom. Boring! Dates, rulers and wars. Where were the people?

Sometime near the end of the 20th century I became aware of Will Durant. I read his Story of Philosophy and revived another path of inquiry. I had dropped a philosophy course in college, lest I fail, because I could not make head nor tail of the assignments. Then, at a going out of business sale at a used bookstore I found the entire eleven books of his Story of Civilization series and got the whole set for $40!

The Reformation is the sixth book in the series. I have been reading them in order since 2002. My process is to read 5 pages a day. Is the reading dry? Sometimes. Do I need maps? Absolutely: the ones on the end pages, a globe and the internet. The wonder of his method is that he intertwines the politics, the rulers, the wars, the science, the art, the philosophies and the social milieu from rich to poor.

I found The Reformation especially relevant to my life since I was raised in the Lutheran church. Luther, I learned, was quite a complex person, not particularly admirable, a dedicated antisemite and so patriarchal. But he did break the spell of the hold the Roman Catholic Church had over Western Europe. I had not realized how much the Renaissance overlapped the Reformation. Not to mention the whole Henry VIII influence.

It took me a year and some months to get through The Reformation. I am taking a short break. Next up is The Age of Reason. The next five books, if I do manage to get through them, will take me through the Age of Napoleon.

I am amazed how much reading these books has deepened my understanding of historical fiction, a genre I have mostly relied on to learn history. No matter how pedantic it sounds, I see that I need both fiction and nonfiction in order to learn about the western world. I still need a way to learn about the Far East.

[Suby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant books on the series 'The Story of Civilization' are always voluminous. The volume I just completed is the 6th in the series. The book is in three parts. While the first two parts are well researched accounts of how the reformers took over Europe between 1300 to 1575 AD, the third part contains history of Islamic Civilization, story of the Turkish empire which aspired to conquer Europe in its entirety and managed to conquer upto Spain. They also had plans to turn the entire known world into Islam. Then there is the Russian Civilization of the period. I never knew Tzar really meant Caesar!
Columbus discovering the American continent while searching for a route to India by sailing westward, He and his successors ruining the Inca and Mayan civilizations and also their bloody destruction of all American Indian tribes is described in detail. While Mr. Durant elaborates the collapse of Cairo after Vaco de Gama found the sea route to India and the European search for a land route to India, he fails to mention the value of the Indo-European trade to the European countries.
The book is very readable to those who have the time and inclination, which incidentally I have!

[Henrik Haapala · Rating 5 out of 5]

”In any society the majority of abilities is contained in a minority of men; therefore, sooner or later, the majority of goods, privileges, and powers will be possessed by a minority of men. Wealth became concentrated in the Church in the Middle Ages because she served vital functions and was herself served by the ablest men. The Reformation, in one aspect, was a redistribution of this naturally concentrated wealth by the secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property or revenues.” 17

"”One of the greatest means to make a man wise is to have studied histories ...and to have learned to frame and proportion our counsels and undertakings according to the model and example of our predecessors. For our life is bit of short duration, and insufficient to give us experience of so many things.” (p.100) Comines, memoirs"

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant's writing is clear and interesting. This is the first in the twelve book series that I have read, but I intend to work my way through more. I gained a greater insight into the political and economic underpinnings of the Reformation, a subject I thought I knew quite a bit about.

[John Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant is a fabulous historian and a great writer. His detailed accounts of civilization paint vivid pictures of all time periods.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Reformation was the outgrowth of and the downfall of the humanism of the Renaissance, together both movements ended the Middle Ages while dividing Europe civilization in the process. The Reformation is the sixth volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization as he explores how the rest of Europe outside of Italy transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era as Christendom divided and as Europeans expanded their footprint across the world.

This volume is unique in Durant’s series as it was originally supposed to be combined with The Renaissance but given the length and depth of the research would have resulted almost twice the size of the longest book in the series. This volume is a continuation of The Age of Faith outside of Italy as well as paralleling the events through the end of the Council of Trent. After setting the stage for Luther’s protest in the first third of the book, Durant then turned to the period from Luther’s thesis to the death of John Calvin in which northern Christianity split away from Rome and developed into different sects aiming for reform, the final third of the book was Durant looking at Islam and Jewish developments followed by cultural accomplishments and then the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This volume was a change from previous volumes as Durant concentrated most of the text on a 50-year period instead of the ebbs and flows of history and society over the course of centuries. The fact that most of this period centered around religion, Durant is able for the most part to keep his contempt for belief at bay though he does go a little off in the Epilogue in synthesizing the developments of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Yet throughout the book, Durant notes that the religious developments were a reaction the pagan influences of the Renaissance along with the budding of nationalism that would be supercharged once the church came under the purview of the state.

The Reformation is a unique book as Will Durant must literally dedicate the majority of his writing towards religion instead of culture, yet he is able to hide his contempt to look how the reforming of Christianity influenced and was influenced by centralizing of various nation-states as Europe entered the Early Modern Era.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sprawling look at the fracture of Christendom.

Durant’s sixth volume in "The Story of Civilization" picks up the European thread where "The Renaissance" left it—only now the thread is fraying, tangled, and occasionally on fire. "The Reformation" (1954) is less about a single movement than a continental identity crisis, as Christendom splinters under the weight of theology, politics, and the sudden realization that Gutenberg’s invention makes heresy scalable. Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Henry VIII, and a host of lesser-known doctrinal pugilists take center stage, each armed with scripture, pamphlets, and a healthy dose of righteous indignation.

As with previous volumes, Durant’s prose is most alive when he’s writing about art, architecture, and the philosophical undercurrents of the age. He dutifully covers the Diets, Edicts, and ecclesiastical cage matches, but you can tell his heart isn’t in the mudslinging. His admiration for Erasmus is palpable—Durant clearly prefers the humanist who tried to reform with a pen over the firebrands who reformed with bonfires. Calvin’s Geneva gets a long, wary look, and Luther’s thunderous certainty is both respected and gently side-eyed. One of Durant’s more piercing observations is that the Reformation didn’t so much dethrone authority as relocate it—from the papal throne to the printed page. In rejecting the infallibility of the pope, reformers embraced the infallibility of the Bible, and in doing so, made reasoned debate even more difficult. Popes, after all, come and go; scripture remains. The irony, of course, is that this shift—intended to liberate conscience—often led to even more rigid dogma.

If "The Renaissance" was a love letter to Italian art, "The Reformation" is a breakup text to medieval unity. It’s dense, occasionally dizzying, and absolutely worth the read. Durant’s ability to synthesize theology, politics, and culture into a coherent narrative remains unmatched—even if, as always, he’d rather be describing a cathedral than a cavalry charge. Observant, erudite, and often slyly amused, "The Reformation" is Durant doing what he does best: making the chaos of history feel like a story worth telling.

[David Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant's 6th vol. of the Story of Civilization, The Reformation, chronicles the history of European civilization from 1300 to 1564, including the schism within the Roman Catholic Church and the formation of early Protestantism; the theology of Martin Luther and his societal impact; the rise of Humanism and the life of Desiderius Erasmus; the royal monarchies of England, France, Spain, and Italy; the imperial conquests of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the Americas; the Bohemian revolution of Eastern Europe, the unification of Russia, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire; the teachings of John Calvin; and the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century.

The book is fascinating and details how much mischief kings and prelates can cause when church and state mix. The Church offered the gifts of religion to men and states coopted those gifts to their benefit. The Reformers molded the figure of Jesus into a divine embodiment of virtues, and formulated creeds, and created a personal God. Who had descended from heaven to suffer ignominy and death in atonement for the sins of humanity. Year by year the drama grew larger; saints and martyrs died for the creed, and bequeathed their example and their merits to the faithful.

Whatever the original motives of the reforms, they did and said some crazy stuff. Luther, despite original motivations seems to suffer from obsessive compulsive self-condemnation, he exacted on his followers. Then there was Calvin who advocated the arrest of women for having hair of an immoral height; a father arrested for not naming his son Abraham (he preferred Claude); a child beheaded for striking its parent. Every last aspect of life was so completely regimented, and people from the church were commissioned to go through each house ensure complete compliance on an annual basis.

In the end, though, the Reformation does not seem to have been very much motivated by religion. It was, instead, a reaction against Rome. The Germans, English, etc., wanted more money - rather, the states wanted more money - and the best way to achieve such a goal was to dissolve the monasteries and forbid the sending of tithes to the Pope. Among the religious figures there were the arts and sciences embodied in Holbein, Dürer, Erasmus, Rabelais, Copernicus, Vesalius, and others.

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic book written by Will and Ariel Durrant on the the reformation. A little dated since it was written in the 1950s but still very insightful on the conflict between Protestantism and Luther and the Catholic Church and how the Catholic Church responded along with all the political intrigues of that time. So worth the read of 940 pages.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Durant's The Reformation is an detailed thousand-page study of Europe leading up to the Reformation, the actual splintering of the Church in the 16th century, and the Catholic Church's own Counter-Reformation.

Durant's histories are always worth reading because they attempt to present the complete picture of what was happening, including not only events but the effects on the culture of the period. Hence, we have not only the deeds of Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Henry VIII, but the Ottoman Empire and the Jews, and the art, music, and literature. Particularly useful are Durant's notes, detailed bibliography, and exhaustive index.

I am no saying that Durant's book is the best possible book on the subject, but it may very well be the best place to start.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

A milestone. I started reading Vol 7 of Durant's "Story of Civilization" back in 2014, went through Vol 10, and much later restarted with the beginning, and now I've gone full circle, finishing up Vol 6. And what a story it's been. 10K pages of dense pack history writing, focused on western history, and written for the American mkt, but intending to give a full story, with context, of what's been going on in the world's civilizations since back around the dawn of history. I'm a big history buff, but previously Id focused on the period from the Enlightenment to the current day. I knew all the former periods must be important also, but I just never had time to really get into them. Thanks to the Covid 19 lock down, I finished Vol 4-6 over the past 11 weeks. And now my understanding of the 11th century forward through the Reformation gives me a much better appreciation of how the modern ages developed, the key influences in them, and how it all could have turned out so very differently. Understanding the philosophy of an age really is so vital being able to understand why the key players in any age made the decisions they made, and why some decisions were so much better than others. I fel as accomplished as if I just another college degree.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much killing over "who is right" in religion. I wonder how surprised the Reformation Religious Zealots both Catholic and Protestant (who killed 2 to 60 million people, according to one's source) would feel about a whole world where only 56% currently believe in heaven, 54% in life after death and only 49% believe in hell. OUCH!

While China is the least believing country in the world (only 33% religious; 67% atheists), the Reformers would have been quite pleased in the following countries with their current 100 % belief in God: Indonesia, Bangladesh and Philippines, according to the survey by Gallup International.

Besides this, Will Durant sure did write a good book. Sometimes I love the parts where he shows some emotion after stating a fact...more to come.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The part about Martin Luther and the core of the Christian reformation was definitely the most interesting part to me. One of the most important figures in history, and presents a really interesting study in the revolutions enabled by technology (Gutenberg press in this case) as well.

I guess it is too much to expect that 100% of the Story of Civilisation will interest a single reader, other than its authors. So outside of the core mentioned above I found myself mentally drifting and skipped ahead.

My historical understanding (which I conceptualise as fourth dimensional understanding, as opposed to the third dimensional, lower, vulgar, reality of ‘living in the moment’) has deeply improved through reading this series and other historical works. I’m about to finish a BA in history that I did online and part time over the last two years, and can now feel my motivation diminishing. Unsure whether I’ll finish the whole series. Studying history has been a great update to my mind though, and have made the world a lot more interesting. It’s part of my drift away from rationalism towards a more organic thinking, realising that all is growth, all is continuation and thus limited by that which has been.

[D.J. Speckhals · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a plod for me but a worthwhile one. I listened to this during my work commute, paused for the winter, then restarted. It's hard to describe my feelings about this. I simply can't believe how much time Durant invested into this volume, and it shows on every page.

It's a balanced view of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, with a focus on central Europe. Yet there were also interesting excursions to the Middle East, North Africa, the Slavic lands, and the Caucasus.

I learned a lot, highlighted liberally, and found new interests also. Never being one to appreciate medieval cultural history (art, music, writing) enough, I certainly gained a higher view of those subjects and how they affected the people around them.

Some pinnacles of this volume were the many anecdotes and quotes from the big name reformers (Luther, Calvin, Knox, etc.)—ones that put them in both good and bad lights. The representation of the Catholic Church and their role in the lives of both peasants and nobles was also very insightful.

My only real gripe was the layering of mid-20th-century economic and social terminology into the otherwise very historical narrative—like capitalist/communist labels, which felt a tad anachronistic to me.

After reading this (volume 6) first, now I want to go backward in the series and start at the beginning! If you're ready to invest yourself into European history, this is a book for you!

[Earle Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

When fanatic Christians massacred while Islam was tolerant

Eric Hoffer’s classic “The True Believer,” which I reviewed March 11, gave me some insight into the fanaticism driving the religious violence and terrorism that is tearing apart so much of the world.

“The Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300 – 1564,” volume six of Will Durrant’s massive and monumental 10-volume “The Story of Civilization,” reminds me that, until very recent times, the violence, atrocities, and bloodshed committed under the name of Christianity were every bit as violent and atrocious as that committed by the fanatic fringe of Islam today. And for centuries, the Islamic world was a more tolerant and advanced society than Christendom.

Christian intolerance and violence was far from limited to the infamous Spanish Inquisitions of the Catholic Church. Protestants, too, even in North America, burned witches and heretics. Martin Luther, in leading the Reformation, wound up preaching violence. “It were better that every bishop were murdered… than one soul should be destroyed… for the sake of their worthless trumpery,” he wrote of priests who inflamed a peasants’ revolt in Germany. “If they will not hear God’s word, but rage and rave with bannings and burning, killings and every evil, what do they deserve better than a strong uprising which will sweep them from the earth? And we should smile did it happen.”

An estimated 130,000 were killed in battles and massacres during the two-year revolt, with 50,000 left homeless; a minor episode of the many in which millions perished under the Christian banner.

Of the Catholics, Luther wrote that there was “no remedy” but to attack by the sword “these masters of perdition… this sink of the Roman Sodom… and wash our hands in their blood.” As for Jews, he urged whoever could to “throw brimstone and pitch” and “hurl hell fire at them… Let them be driven like mad dogs out of the land.”

We recoil at today’s Islamic atrocities but could anything be worse than the fate of Jean Lecleric, a French wool-carder who called the Pope Antichrist in 1526. “His right hand was cut off, his nose was torn away, his nipples plucked with pincers, his head was bound with a band of red-hot iron, and he was burned alive.”

Durant calls Calvin, who followed Luther and inspired the witch-burning Puritans, “The man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honoured history of nonsense.” As preacher, professor of theology, administrator of churches, and guardian of public morals, Calvin ruled Geneva with such severity that women who wore the wrong type of hat were jailed. In one year under his administration, 58 Catholics and heretics were executed, 14 witches were burned at the stake, and 76 others were banished from the city. When a citizen called Calvin a “gross hypocrite,” against whom the people would rise up, he was tortured every day for 30 days before he was nailed to a stake and his head cut off.

“It is hard for us, pigeon-holed in Christendom, to realize that from the eighth to the thirteenth century, Islam was culturally, politically, and militarily superior to Europe,” Durant writes. This, mind you, in a book that was published more than half a century ago.

Islam was not exactly without violence. In the 16th century, Suleiman captured half of Hungary, burning and pillaging and driving 100,000 Christian captives to slavery in Constantinople. Yet earlier, when the Moors conquered Spain, Christians and Jews were left free to practice their religion, as decreed by Islamic law. When Christians in turn regained control, they showed no such tolerance or mercy. One hundred thousand Moors who refused to convert to Christianity were exiled to suffer shipwrecks, starvation, robbery, rape, disease and massacres. Nothing in this period, however, matched the fury of the European crusaders who sought to convert Islamic infidels by slaughtering as many as two million.

The tolerance that the Moors granted Christians and Jews in Spain, prevailed in much of Islam during much of the five centuries referred to by Durant. For example, in present-day Iran, at Oran, then a city exceeded in size by only three European cities, the ruling dynasty protected the religious freedom of Jews and Christians for three centuries.

“A supreme and unchangeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind,” Durant summarizes.

The Christian world is right, of course, to condemn and seek to suppress the terror, atrocities and bloodshed of fanatics of whatever religion. But we need to be mindful of our own bloody history, less we become as intolerant as our forebears.

A word about the massive, 10-volume, 100,000-page Story of Civilization, which took Will Durant and his wife Ariel (she is listed as co-author of the final four volumes) 40 years to research and write. No one was ever expected to read every word of every volume, just as no one ever read the entire humungous Sunday editions that the New York Times used to produce. In reading the 10-volume history over a period of time, I read only which held my interest, and wound up reading about 70 percent. I have extensive marginal notations in each volume, to which I still refer.

The strength of the 1,000-page volume six on the Reformation is also its weakness. As a history of European civilization during a period of 254 years, it allows the Reformation to be seen in the context of the times, but it also makes it easy to loose any focus. Sections dealing with such topics as the music of this period, or British “Art in the lowlands,” have little to do directly with the Reformation and were easy for me to skip.

Most of this volume, as with the others, gripped and held my interest, making easy, if lengthy reading the first time. It was just as gripping on the second reading. These are books to read, enjoy, study, and treasure.

TAGS Christianity, Islam, Jews, Religion, Reformation, Massacres, Sectarianism, Religious Persecution, Crucifixion, Crusades, Protestants, Catholicism, Heretics, Witches, Torture, Atrocities, Burning at the stake, Intolerance, Martin Luther, John Calvin

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

The corruption of the Catholic Church is much exposed--venality, extravagance, nepotism, tithe, sale of indulgences, and other means of heavy exploitation of Christendom, and other evils, but, at the same time, Church's sponsorship and promotion of humanism and renaissance arts are well credited. On the other hand, the analysis on Protestantism is more impressive to me, as even though triggering a positive reform of the Church, it also brought many negative effects--superstition, reversal to Old Testament, iconoclasm and oppression of art and humanism, heightened religious despotism and intolerance, etc. Relevant to this is Durant's comment: "From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day. " As usual, the author lists many literature and art works with analyses based on his own original study, even though there was much less art creation in this era as compared to that of Renaissance.

I regret that it would take too much time for me to write a decent review (I took notes of near 19,000 words while reading), but it is a good consolation to remember that there are dozens of reviews on this book.

[فیصل مجید · Rating 3 out of 5]

ول ڈیورنٹ نے کہا کہ الفاظ میں بڑی طاقت ہے۔ اس بات کو ثابت کرنے کے لئے وہ لوتھر کی مثال دیتا ہے جسکی کتب کی وجہ سے ریفارمیشن کی تحریک کامیاب ہوئی) اور مزید وہ کہتا ہے کہ جب الفاظ ناکام ہوجائیں تو تلوار (طاقت) چلتی ہے یا پھر دولت۔
پاکستانی معاشرے میں الفاظ کا اثر بہت کمزور ہے بالخصوص جب وہ تحریر کی صورت میں ہوں۔ انتظار حسین بھی اس بات کو مانتے ہیں۔ گو کہ بڑے لوگوں نے لوح و قلم کی پرورش کی اور کرتے رہے۔ بنیادی طور ہمارے معاشرے میں تحریر سے زیادہ خطابت کا اثر ہے اور اسکی وجہ یہ ہے کہ مملکت خداداد کی شرح خواندگی بہت کم ہے۔ سنجیدہ ادب کے قارئین اور بھی کم۔ اور پڑھ کر سمجھنے والے آٹے میں نمک کے برابر۔ اور عمل کرنے والوں کا تو نہ ہی پوچھیں۔ تو نتیجہ یہ نکلتا ہے ہمارے معاشرے میں یا تو طاقت کا اثر ہے یا پھر دولت کا۔ صارفی کلچر میں دولت کو ہی مرکزی حثیت حاصل ہے۔

از Faisal Majeed

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rudnicki reads the book with his usual understated competence, but this time out the author maybe didn't have quite enough material---I often felt as if the narrative was a bit attenuated, filled out with too many examples and occasional repetitions. Still, it's a grand tale of men (and, occasionally, women) and ideas in conflict, easy to follow and lit with flashes of humor. Terrific for listening to on long walks, as are the other volumes in the series.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s amazing how much the author knows about virtually everything. It’s difficult to give an unbiased view of what occurred during this period of human history. The author does his best. His conclusions are succinctly stated in the Epilogue. If you want to save a lot of time, read the last 5 pages. Otherwise, read the book slowly and carefully, for it is a wealth of information.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably my favorite in the series so far.

Some excerpts:

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I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing is so irritating as impartiality. The reader should be warned that I was brought up as a fervent Catholic, and that I retain grateful memories of the devoted secular priests, and learned Jesuits, and kindly nuns who bore so patiently with my brash youth; but he should note, too, that I derived much of my education from lecturing for thirteen years in a Presbyterian church . . . Less than any man have I excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
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The power of the pope, said Agostino, is from God, Whose vicegerent he is on earth. Even when he is a great sinner he must be obeyed; he may be deposed by a general council of the Church for manifest heresy; but short of this his authority is second only to God's, and transcends that of all earthly potentates. He may dethrone kings and emperors at will even over the protests of their people or the electors. He may annul the decrees of secular rulers, and may set aside the constitutions of states. No decree of any prince is valid unless the pope gives it his consent. The pope stands higher than the angels, and may receive equal reverence with the Virgin and the saints. Pope John accepted all this as following logically from the generally conceded establishment of the Church by the Son of God, and acted on it with adamantine consistency.
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The complaint that finally sparked the Reformation was the sale of indulgences. Through the powers apparently delegated by Christ to Peter (Matt. 16:19), by Peter to bishops, and by bishops to priests, the clergy were authorized to absolve a confessing penitent from the guilt of his sins and from their punishment in hell, but not from doing penance for them on earth. Now only a few men, however thoroughly shriven, could rely on dying with all due penances performed; the balance would have to be paid for by years of suffering in purgatory, which a merciful God had established as a temporary hell. On the other hand, many saints, by their devotion and martyrdom, had earned merits probably in excess of the penances due to their sins; Christ by his death had added an infinity of merits; these merits, said the theory of the Church, could be conceived as a treasury on which the pope might draw to cancel part or all of the temporal penalties incurred and unperformed by absolved penitents. Usually the penances prescribed by the Church had taken the form of repeating prayers, giving alms, making a pilgrimage to some sacred shrine, joining a crusade against Turks or other infidels, or donating money or labor to social projects like draining a swamp, building a road, bridge, hospital, or church. The substitution of a money fine for punishment was a long-established custom in secular courts; hence no furore was caused by the early application of the idea to indulgences. A shriven penitent, by paying such a fine — i.e., making a money contribution to the expenses of the Church, would receive a partial or plenary indulgence, not to commit further sins, but to escape a day, a month, a year in purgatory, or all the time he might have had to suffer there to complete his penance for his sins. An indulgence did not cancel the guilt of sins; this, when the priest absolved a contrite penitent, was forgiven in the confessional. An indulgence, therefore, was the remission, by the Church, of part or all of the temporal (i.e., not eternal) penalties incurred by sins whose guilt had been forgiven in the sacrament of penance.
This ingenious and complicated theory was soon transformed by the simplicity of the people, and by the greed of the quaestiarii, or "pardoners," commissioned or presuming to distribute the indulgences. As these purveyors were allowed to retain a percentage of the receipts, some of them omitted to insist on repentance, confession, and prayer, and left the recipient free to interpret the indulgence as dispensing him from repentance, confession, and absolution, and as depending almost entirely upon the money contribution.
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[Wyclif argued] Christ and the Apostles had taught no doctrine of indulgences. ... If the pope had the power to snatch souls from purgatory, why did he not in Christian charity take them out at once?
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All the major elements of the Reformation were in Wyclif; the revolt against the worldliness of the clergy, and the call for a sterner morality; the return from the Church to the Bible, from Aquinas to Augustine, from free will to predestination, from salvation by works to election by divine grace; the rejection of indulgences, auricular confession, and transubstantiation; the deposition of the priest as an intermediary between God and man; the protest against the alienation of national wealth to Rome; the invitation to the state to end its subordination to the papacy; the attack (preparing for Henry VIII) on the temporal possessions of the clergy. If the Great Revolt had nor ended the government's protection of Wyclif’s efforts, the Reformation might have taken form and root in England 130 years before it broke out in Germany.
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For two weeks Dozsa and his aides were kept without food; then he was tied to a red-hot iron throne, a red-hot crown was placed upon his head, a red-hot scepter forced into his hand; and his starved companions were allowed to tear the roasted flesh from his body while he was still conscious. From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
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Those who were judged guilty of major heresy, but denied it to the end, were (till 1725) refused the last sacraments of the Church, and were, bv the intention of the Inquisition, abandoned to everlasting hell. The “reconciled” were now taken back to prison; the impenitent were “relaxed” to the secular arm, with a pious caution that no blood should be shed. These were led out from the city between throngs that had gathered for leagues around for this holiday spectacle. Arrived at the place prepared for execution, the confessed were strangled, then burned; the recalcitrant were burned alive. The fires were fed until nothing remained of the dead but ashes, which where scattered over fields and streams. The priests and spectators returned to their altars and their homes, convinced that a propitiatory offering had been made to a God insulted by heresy. Human sacrifice had been restored.
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Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory. We must try to understand such movements in terms of their time, but they seem to us now the most unforgivable of historic crimes. A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.
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A thousand factors and influences - ecclesiastical, intellectual, emotional, economic, political, moral - were coming together, after centuries of obstruction and suppression, in a whirlwind that would throw Europe into the greatest upheaval since the barbarian conquest of Rome. The weakening of the papacy by the Avignon exile and the Papal Schism; the breakdown of monastic discipline and clerical celibacy; the luxury of prelates, the corruption of the Curia, the worldly activities of the popes; the morals of Alexander VI, the wars of Julius II, the careless gaiety of Leo X; the relic-mongering and peddling of indulgences; the triumph of Islam over Christendom in the Crusades and the Turkish wars; the spreading acquaintance with non-Christian faiths; the influx of Arabic science and philosophy; the collapse of Scholasticism in the irrationalism of Scotus and the skepticism of Ockham; the failure of the conciliar movement to effect reform; the discovery of pagan antiquity and of America; the invention of printing; the extension of literacy and education; the translation and reading of the Bible; the newly realized contrast between the poverty and simplicity of the Apostles and the ceremonious opulence of the Church; the rising wealth and economic independence of Germany and England; the growth of a middle class resentful of ecclesiastical restrictions and claims; the protests against the flow of money to Rome; the secularization of law and government; the intensification of nationalism and the strengthening of monarchies; the nationalistic influence of vernacular languages and literatures; the fermenting legacies of the Waldenses, Wyclif, and Huss; the mystic demand for a less ritualistic, more personal and inward and direct religion: all these were now uniting in a torrent of forces that would crack the crust of medieval custom, loosen all standards and bonds, shatter Europe into nations and sects, sweep away more and more of the supports and comforts of traditional beliefs, and perhaps mark the beginning of the end for the dominance of Christianity in the mental life of European man.
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He [Luther] accepted magic and witchcraft as realities, and thought it a simple Christian duty to burn witches at the stake. Most of these ideas were shared by his contemporaries, Catholic or Protestant. The belief in the power and ubiquity of devils attained in the sixteenth century an intensity not recorded in any other age; and this preoccupation with Satan bedeviled much of Protestant theology.
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Erasmus confessed that a man's moral choice is fettered by a thousand circumstances over which he has had no control; yet man’s consciousness persists in affirming some measure of freedom, without which he would be a meaningless automaton. In any case, Erasmus concluded, let us admit our ignorance, our incapacity to reconcile moral freedom with divine prescience or omnipresent causality; let us postpone the solution to the Last Judgment; but meanwhile let us shun any hypothesis that makes man a puppet, and God a tyrant crueler than any in history.
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Those years were among the most momentous in history, and Luther had been their strident and dominant voice. His faults were many. He lacked appreciation of the historic role that the Church had played in civilizing northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind's hunger for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal justly with his Catholic or Protestant foes. He freed his followers from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible book; and it has been easier to change the popes than the book. He retained the most cruel and incredible dogmas of medieval religion, while allowing almost all its beauty to be stamped out in its legends and its art, and bequeathed to Germany a Christianity no truer than the old one, far less joyous and comforting, only more honest in its teaching and personnel. He became almost as intolerant as the Inquisition, but his words were harsher than his deeds. He was guilty of the most vituperative writing in the history of literature. He taught Germany the theological hatred that incarnadined its soil until a hundred years after his death.
And yet his faults were his success. He was a man of war because the situation seemed to demand war, because the problems he attacked had for centuries resisted all the methods of peace. His whole life was a battle against the sense of guilt, against the Devil, the Pope, the Emperor, Zwingli, even against the friends who would have compromised his revolt into a gentlemanly protest politely heard and carefully forgotten. What could a milder man have done against such handicaps and powers? No man of philosophic breadth, no scientific mind restricting belief to the evidence, no genial nature making generous allowances for the enemy, would have flung down so world-shaking a challenge, or would have marched so resolutely, as if in blinders, to his goal. If his predestinarian theology was as repugnant to reason and human kindness as any myth or miracle in the medieval faith, it was by this passionate irrationality that it moved the hearts of men. It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen.
It remains that with the blows of his rude fist he smashed the cake of custom, the shell of authority, that had blocked the movement of the European mind. If we judge greatness by influence - which is the least subjective test that we can use — we may rank Luther with Copernicus, Voltaire, and Darwin as the most powerful personalities in the modem world.
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he [Castellio] pointed out, men had debated free will, predestination, heaven and hell, Christ and the Trinity, and other difficult matters; no agreement had been reached; probably none would ever be reached. But none is necessary said Castellio; such disputes do not make men better; all that we need is to carry the spirit of Christ into our daily lives, to feed the poor, help the sick, and love even our enemies. It seemed to him ridiculous that all the new sects, as well as the old Church, should pretend to absolute truth and make their creeds obligatory on those over whom they had physical power; as a result a man would be orthodox in one city and become a heretic by entering another; he would have to change his religion, like his money, at each frontier. Can we imagine Christ ordering a man to be burned alive for advocating adult baptism? ... What a tragedy (he concluded) that those who had so lately freed themselves from the terrible Inquisition should so soon imitate its tyranny, should so soon force men back- into Cimmerian darkness after so promising a dawn!
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the theory of predestination fell into the backwaters of Protestant belief. ... the pride of divine election changed into the pride of work and accomplishment; men felt stronger and more secure; fear lessened, and the frightened cruelty that had generated Calvin’s God gave way to a more humane vision that compelled a reconception of deity. Decade by decade the churches that had taken their lead from Calvin discarded the harsher elements of his creed. Theologians dared to believe that all who died in infancy were saved, and one respected divine announced, without causing a commotion, that “the number of the finally lost...will be very inconsiderable." We are grateful to be so reassured, and we will agree that even error lives because it serves some vital need. But we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.
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That evening six Protestants were burned to death in Paris by a method judged fit to appease the Deity; they were suspended over a fire, and were repeatedly lowered into it and raised from it so that their agony might be prolonged.
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Heresy was rising again. In 1506 forty-five men were charged with heresy before the bishop of Lincoln; forty-three recanted, two were burned. In 1510 the bishop of London tried forty heretics, burned two; in 1521 he tried forty-five and burned five. The records list 343 such trials in fifteen years. Among the heresies were contentions that the consecrated Host remains merely bread; that priests have no more power than other men to consecrate or absolve; that the sacraments arc not necessary to salvation; that pilgrimages to holy shrines, and prayer for the dead, are worthless; that prayers should be addressed only to God; that man can be saved by faith alone, regardless of good works; that the faithful Christian is above all laws but that of Christ; that the Bible, not the Church, should be the sole rule of faith
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Soon a large part of the conquered terrain accepted the Moslem creed; so war solves theological problems before which reason stands in hesitant impotence.
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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. How many publishers, teachers, scholars, patrons, poets, romancers, and reckless rebels labored for half a century to produce the literature that here has been so narrowly confined, so many masterpieces unnamed, nations ignored, once immortal geniuses slighted with a line! It cannot he helped. 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 it, and carry it down through a thousand catastrophes as an heirloom of the race.
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