The Age of Reason Begins

Summary

The Age of Reason Begins is the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization and the first to name Ariel Durant beside her husband on the title page. Published in 1961, it is subtitled A History of European Civilization in the Period of Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Rembrandt, Galileo, and Descartes: 1558-1648, and it spans the ninety years between Elizabeth I's accession and the Peace of Westphalia. The Durants treat this period as the time when Europe, exhausted by religious war, began to look to reason, mathematics and experiment for the certainty that confessional strife had failed to provide. The volume opens with a long portrait of Elizabethan England: the queen and her ministers, the Puritans and recusant Catholics, the struggle with Spain and the Armada, Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox, and a broad account of the drama and poetry that culminates in Shakespeare, to whom the authors devote extended chapters. The narrative continues through the early Stuarts, the King James Bible, Bacon's career and philosophy, the quarrels between James I, Charles I and Parliament, and the coming of civil war. Further books survey France from the Wars of Religion through Henry IV, the Edict of Nantes and Richelieu, with Montaigne as the skeptical voice of a weary age; Spain at the height of its literature and painting, with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, El Greco and Velázquez; Italy after the Council of Trent; the revolt of the Netherlands and the Dutch flowering that produced Rembrandt; the German lands ravaged by the Thirty Years' War; and Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and the Ottoman world. The closing books turn to what the Durants regard as the deepest change of the period: the work of Tycho, Kepler, Galileo and Harvey, the trial of Galileo, the witch persecutions that ran alongside the new science, and the philosophies of Bacon and Descartes that proposed new methods for knowledge. As in the other late volumes, the authors combine political narrative with chapters on manners, morals, music, art and religion, and they write with an evident preference for tolerance and inquiry over persecution and dogma. Christian readers will find the confessional history told with sympathy for individual believers and impatience with coercion by any church, and they should weigh the book's tidy contrast between faith and reason against the many scientists of the age, Kepler foremost among them, who saw no such opposition. Used beside Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Galileo and Descartes, it supplies the political and cultural setting that the primary texts assume.

Plot or Argument

• Elizabethan England and the age of Shakespeare

  The volume begins with Elizabeth's settlement of religion, her court and ministers, the Catholic and Puritan challenges, the war with Spain, and the literary explosion of the 1580s and 1590s, ending in long chapters on Shakespeare's life, plays and mind.

• Stuart England, Bacon and the road to civil war

  James I and the Authorized Version, the court of Charles I, Bacon's rise and fall, and the conflict between crown and Parliament over money, religion and law carry England toward the 1640s.

• France from the Wars of Religion to Richelieu

  The Durants narrate the religious civil wars, the conversion and toleration policy of Henry IV, his assassination, and Richelieu's construction of royal power, with Montaigne's Essays as the period's moral commentary.

• Spain, Italy and the Low Countries

  The Spanish golden age of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, El Greco and Velázquez is set beside Spain's political decline, Counter-Reformation Italy, and the Dutch Republic's commerce, toleration and painting.

• Central and eastern Europe in the Thirty Years' War

  The German lands, the Habsburgs, Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, Poland, Russia's Time of Troubles and the Ottoman Empire are surveyed up to the settlement of 1648.

• The new science and the new philosophy

  The closing books treat Tycho, Kepler, Galileo and Harvey, Galileo's condemnation, the witch trials, and Bacon's and Descartes's proposals for a method of certain knowledge, which the authors present as the opening of the Age of Reason.

Characters

• Will and Ariel Durant, authors and narrators

  Husband and wife historians whose shared voice favors toleration, science and the arts, and who are credited jointly for the first time in this volume.

• Elizabeth I, queen of England (1558-1603)

  Ruler whose cautious religious settlement and long contest with Spain open the volume.

• Mary, Queen of Scots, Catholic queen of Scotland

  Elizabeth's cousin and rival, whose execution in 1587 the Durants narrate as a crisis of conscience and policy.

• William Shakespeare, dramatist and poet

  Given chapters of his own as the summit of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.

• Francis Bacon, lawyer, statesman and philosopher

  Lord Chancellor disgraced for taking gifts, and the herald of an inductive science of nature.

• Michel de Montaigne, essayist

  French skeptic who answered religious fanaticism with self-examination and moderation.

• Henry IV of France, king (1589-1610)

  Protestant leader who became Catholic to gain Paris and granted toleration in the Edict of Nantes.

• Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII

  Builder of royal absolutism who allied Catholic France with Protestant powers against the Habsburgs.

• Galileo Galilei, mathematician and astronomer

  Advocate of Copernican astronomy whose trial in 1633 the Durants treat as a turning point in the relations of science and the Church.

• René Descartes, philosopher and mathematician

  Founder of a philosophy built on methodical doubt, with whom the volume ends its account of the new reason.

Lessons

• Why weary Europe turned to method

  The Durants argue that a century of religious war made many educated Europeans look for a kind of certainty that did not depend on confessional authority, and that Bacon and Descartes offered methods to supply it. Students should assess both the causal claim and its assumption that faith and reason were rival sources of certainty.

  • What events in France and Germany do the Durants use to explain the appeal of skepticism and of new methods of knowing?
  • Did Bacon and Descartes reject religious faith, or try to place it on a different footing? Use their own words where possible.
  • Was Montaigne's moderation a cure for fanaticism, or only an escape from it?

• Shakespeare in his political world

  Because the volume sets Shakespeare inside a narrative of succession crises, conspiracy, censorship and Puritan hostility to the theater, students can read the history plays and tragedies as works written under a queen without an heir and then a new Scottish king. The Durants' biographical speculations should be distinguished from the documented record.

  • Which events of the 1590s and early 1600s do the Durants connect with particular plays, and are the connections convincing?
  • How does knowing about the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot change a reading of Richard II or Macbeth?
  • Where do the Durants admit that the facts of Shakespeare's life are uncertain?

• The trial of Galileo reconsidered

  The Durants tell Galileo's conflict with the Roman authorities as a clash between free inquiry and ecclesiastical control. Students should set this account beside Galileo's own Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which argues from Augustine that Scripture and nature cannot conflict, and beside the political and personal circumstances of 1633.

  • What reasons do the Durants give for the Church's condemnation of Galileo?
  • How does Galileo himself describe the relation between the Bible and astronomy?
  • Is 'science against religion' the best description of the case, or would 'scientists and churchmen disagreeing about authority and evidence' be more accurate?

• Witch fears in an age of science

  The same decades that produced Kepler and Harvey produced the largest wave of witch trials in European history, in Protestant and Catholic lands alike. The Durants include both, and students can ask what this coincidence reveals about fear, law, war and the uneven spread of new ideas.

  • Where and when do the Durants locate the worst witch persecutions, and what causes do they suggest?
  • Which voices of the period, clerical or lay, protested against the trials?
  • What does the coexistence of the new science and the witch trials suggest about how ideas change a society?

Context

The Age of Reason Begins appeared in 1961, at the height of the Cold War and of American confidence in science, four years after Sputnik. Its theme, the passage from wars of religion to a culture of scientific method and political toleration, matched a mid-century liberal reading of European history in which the seventeenth century marked the start of modernity. The Durants wrote as secular humanists who admired religious individuals while distrusting churches armed with state power, and that outlook shapes their selection and judgments.

Composition

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1961 as Volume VII of The Story of Civilization, following The Reformation (1957). It is the first volume whose title page names Ariel Durant as co-author; Will Durant had acknowledged her collaboration in earlier prefaces. The volume continues directly into The Age of Louis XIV (1963). It was reissued as a Simon & Schuster ebook in 2011.

Reception

The book was widely read and kept the series on bestseller lists, and its chapters on Shakespeare and on the scientific revolution became popular introductions. Academic historians have generally regarded the series as a readable synthesis of older scholarship; on topics such as the Galileo affair and the witch trials, later research has added nuance to the conflict-centered account the Durants give.

Comparisons

• Essays

  The Durants make Montaigne the presiding skeptic of the French wars of religion; the Essays show a more varied writer, devout in practice and playful in doubt, than any summary can capture.

• Novum Organum

  Bacon's call to clear away the idols of the mind and build knowledge by induction is the program the Durants credit with opening the age; reading the aphorisms tests how original and how practical that program was.

• Discourse on Method

  Descartes's short autobiography of doubt and method is the natural endpoint of the volume, and students can compare his own account of why he resolved to doubt with the Durants' explanation from the religious wars.

• Galileo: The Starry Messenger, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and Two New Sciences (First Day)

  Galileo's letters and dialogues let students hear the scientist argue his case about Scripture and astronomy in his own voice, correcting or confirming the Durants' version of the trial.

• On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis)

  Harvey's 1628 treatise on the circulation is the medical landmark of the period the Durants survey, and its dedication and experiments show how the new method worked in a physician's hands.

• Don Quixote

  The Durants treat Cervantes as the voice of a Spain whose chivalric and imperial dreams were fading; the novel itself shows how comedy and pathos could carry that judgment.

• The Age of Louis XIV

  The next volume continues the story from 1648, through Hobbes, Spinoza, Newton and the French classical age, completing the transition this volume begins.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The subtitle's six names. Notice that four of the six are writers or thinkers and only one a painter, and ask what that tells you about how the Durants define the age.
• Elizabeth's religious settlement. Follow how the queen treated Catholics and Puritans and what the Durants think her caution achieved.
• The chapters on Shakespeare. Separate what is documented about his life from the authors' speculation about his opinions and moods.
• The Thirty Years' War. Track how a conflict that began in religious terms became a struggle among dynasties, and where the Durants place Richelieu in that change.
• The new science. Watch for the words the Durants use for the Church in the Galileo chapters and compare them with Galileo's own descriptions of his faith.

Key terms and names

Elizabethan Settlement

The religious compromise of 1559 that established a Protestant Church of England with a prayer book and episcopal government acceptable to as many subjects as possible.

Edict of Nantes

Henry IV's 1598 decree granting French Protestants limited freedom of worship and security towns.

Thirty Years' War

The series of wars from 1618 to 1648, centered in Germany, that began over religion and ended in the Peace of Westphalia.

Heliocentrism

The Copernican view, defended by Kepler and Galileo, that the earth and planets revolve around the sun.

Induction

Reasoning from many observed particulars toward general laws, the method Bacon urged for natural philosophy.

Methodical doubt

Descartes's practice of doubting everything that can be doubted in order to find a certain first truth.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Which years does the volume cover, and what events mark its beginning and end?
2. Comprehension What did Henry IV do to end the French Wars of Religion, and what happened to him?
3. Comprehension What did Galileo observe with the telescope, and what was the outcome of his trial in 1633?
4. Interpretation Why do the Durants call this period the beginning of the Age of Reason rather than the end of the Reformation, and is the label fair to the Christians who did most of its science?
5. Interpretation How do the Durants present Richelieu's decision to support Protestant powers against Catholic Spain and Austria, and what does it reveal about the changing aims of the war?
6. Interpretation In the Durants' account, what did the Dutch Republic gain from religious toleration, and what did Spain lose by its policies?
7. Big Question After decades of war fought in the name of true religion, many Europeans concluded that certainty must come from method rather than from revelation. Was that conclusion wise, or did it mistake the abuse of faith for faith itself?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 19:1-6 (Scripture)

  The psalm's claim that the heavens declare God's glory was the confidence of Kepler and many astronomers of the period, and it offers a counterweight to the volume's contrast between faith and the new astronomy.

• Romans 12:17-21 (Scripture)

  Paul's command not to avenge oneself but to overcome evil with good stands in judgment over the massacres and reprisals the Durants record in France and Germany, by Christians of every confession.

• Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) (Great Conversation)

  Galileo cites Augustine to argue that Scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, and that God's two books cannot contradict each other; it shows that the debate the Durants narrate was also an argument among believers.

• Translators' preface to the King James Version (1611) (Great Conversation)

  The preface defends translating Scripture into the common tongue for ordinary readers; it fits the Durants' account of James I's reign and shows the period's religious energy flowing into scholarship rather than war.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Between 1558 and 1648 religious division produced persecution and war across Europe; the cost of that conflict, together with new discoveries in astronomy, anatomy and mathematics and the skeptical temper of writers such as Montaigne, led educated Europeans to seek knowledge through observation, experiment and rational method; Bacon and Descartes gave that search its philosophy; therefore this period marks the beginning of an age in which reason, rather than ecclesiastical authority, became the chief court of appeal in European intellectual life.

Rhetorical device: catalogue of names. The subtitle lists Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Rembrandt, Galileo and Descartes, defining an age by its creators rather than its kings, and the book repeatedly pauses its political narrative to give such figures chapters of their own.

Debate: Resolved: The Durants are right that the wars of religion, more than the scientific discoveries themselves, turned Europe toward the Age of Reason.

Writing Prompts

Essay: The Durants present the trial of Galileo as a defining clash between authority and inquiry. Using their account and Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, argue whether the conflict was chiefly about science, about Scripture, or about who had the right to interpret both.

Comparison with Discourse on Method: Descartes explains in Part One of the Discourse why he resolved to doubt what he had been taught. Compare his reasons with the Durants' explanation of why the age turned to method, and argue which account better explains Descartes's choice.

Medical Lens

The volume's section on science includes the medicine of the period: Harvey's demonstration of the circulation of the blood, anatomical teaching at Padua, and the persistence of Galenic practice. Plague recurs in the background of English and European cities, and the Thirty Years' War is described as a catastrophe of famine, disease and depopulation as much as of battle. Melancholy, a fashionable and serious subject in this period, appears in the literary chapters through Burton and the Elizabethan stage, and the witch persecutions raise questions about how contemporaries understood delusion, confession under torture and mental disturbance. Any reading of accused witches or historical figures as mentally ill is interpretive and should be presented as a reading. Medical claims in the volume reflect 1950s secondary scholarship and should be checked before citation.

• Closing books on science, section on medicine and Harvey

  The discovery of the circulation of the blood, anatomy at Padua, and the state of medical practice in the early seventeenth century.

  Physicians Doctors Anatomy Dissection
• Chapters on the Thirty Years' War in Germany

  Devastation of the German lands by armies, famine and epidemic disease, with heavy loss of population.

  Plague Epidemic WAR Wounds Starvation Nutrition
• Chapters on the witch persecutions

  Trials, confessions and executions for witchcraft, with contemporary critics who questioned the accusations and the use of torture.

  Madness Psychosis
• Chapters on English literature under James I

  The literature of melancholy, including Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the melancholic heroes of the Jacobean stage.

  Melancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation in 1610 between Kepler and a Lutheran pastor who fears that the new astronomy contradicts Scripture, with Kepler arguing from his own faith.

• Essay

  The Durants date the beginning of the Age of Reason to the period 1558-1648. Argue for or against that dating by choosing one event or book from the volume that you think marks the real turning point.

• Classroom

  Build a map of Europe in 1618 and mark where Shakespeare, Cervantes, Galileo, Kepler, Rembrandt and Descartes were working, then add the battle sites of the Thirty Years' War and discuss what the map reveals.

• Fiction

  Write the letter of a German village schoolmaster in 1636 describing what twenty years of war have done to his parish, using the Durants' account of the war's effects.

Further Reading

• Discourse on Method, René Descartes

• Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo Galilei

• The Thirty Years War, C. V. Wedgwood

• The Origins of Modern Science, Herbert Butterfield

• Queen Elizabeth I, J. E. Neale

• The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton