Age of Flame

THE REFORMATION (1,025 pp.)--Will Durant--Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

When Bishop Latimer was about to burn at the stake for his Protestant loyalties (during the reign of Catholic "Bloody Mary" Tudor), he not only spoke one of history's most famous lines but defined an age: "We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as shall never be put out." The Reformation was an age of flame, lit both by candles and by faggots, by holiness and horror. Materialist-minded historians have no trouble tracing economic pressures and class struggles in the Reformation, yet it remains above all a conflict of faith, fought at a time when that weak substitute term "ideology" had not yet been coined--the greatest and (in the words of Roman Catholic Historian Philip Hughes) the world's "first purely theological battle."

This impressive book, sixth and next to last installment in Will Durant's massive Story of Civilization, retraces that battle in half a million highly readable words. Painstaking, broadminded and fluent, The Reformation is a triumph for 71-year-old Author Durant, who combines an encyclopedist's passion for detail with a philosopher's ability to generalize and a good storyteller's sense of anecdote.

Maxim us or Optimus? In pages as crowded but unhurried as a Bruegel canvas, Historian Durant shows the life and customs, major sins and minor pastimes of his period, stopping along the way to sketch in a thousand odd facts and arresting faces. The volume ranges over the whole of Europe (with major side trips to Persia, Russia and the New World), from 1300 to 1564 A.D. There is a bit of everything in the book--politics, war, art, architecture, philosophy, commerce, science--all by way of scene-setting for the great central struggle. Durant devotes a third of the book to the forces and the men leading up to the Reformation proper--the grimly erudite Oxonian, Wyclif; the austere advance runner of Protestantism. John Huss; the peripatetic humanist. Desiderius Erasmus, who could "scarce forbear" to pray to "St. Socrates" and expressed in satire what many of his contemporaries mutely felt about the late-Renaissance church. Author Durant delightedly quotes from an Erasmus dialogue written on the death in 1513 of Julius II, one of the worldlier Popes, who is presented as seeking admission to heaven from St. Peter.

Julius: Enough of this. I am Julius the Ligurian, P.M. . . .

Peter: P.M.! What is that? Pestis maxima?

Julius: Pontifex Maximus, you rascal.

Peter: If you are three times Maximus . . . you can't get in here unless you are Optimus also.

Enter the Monk. Laughing satire soon gave way to bitter invective in the growing passion for reform. The unity of Christendom had been precarious for centuries before the Reformation. The marvel is, suggests Durant, that with its half-dozen-odd principal nations all out of step--in time, in psychology, in power, in learning--the Roman authority survived as long as it did. Italy was not only the home of the papacy, it was the source and cradle of European civilization itself--sophisticated, modern, even decadent, when England and Germany were still medieval, while France and Spain were somewhere midway between the two stages. "Renounce your desire to see Rome, my friend; what you seek there is not to be found any longer," wrote the aristocratic German theologian Ulrich von Hutten: "You may live from plunder, commit murder and sacrilege . . . but if you do but bring money to Rome, you are a most respectable person. Virtue and heavenly blessings are sold here; you may even buy the privilege of sinning in future."

Yet when he arrived in Rome in 1510 on a minor mission for his order, the young Augustinian monk of Wittenberg, Martin Luther by name, fell on his knees and cried: "Hail to thee, O Holy Rome!" Luther "went through all the devotions of a pilgrim . . . and earned so many indulgences that he almost wished his parents were dead, so that he might deliver them from purgatory."

Luther's slow rebellion during the next decade is a puzzling, fascinating story to theologian and psychiatrist alike. Tentatively, the earnest, orthodox-minded monk began to stray from the fold--and with every step he took, a new, hidden facet appeared in his character until he became the very opposite of his former self.

Born to War. Much has been made of the dramatic spectacle of the bold monk lustily hammering his propositions to the church door and challenging all and sundry to debate them with him; but, as Durant points out, the truth is more ordinary. The door of Wittenberg's Castle Church was used by clerics as a notice board on which they pinned invitations to debates and news of what would now be called "coming attractions." When Luther posted his theses in 1517, he had no notion that the coming attraction would be history's fiercest spiritual drama.

The storm broke, instantly, violently, as if with one light touch theologians had gone up in spontaneous combustion. The mildly questioning monk turned into a national hero. Rough German humor entered his manner: "If I break wind in Wittenberg," he said, "they smell it in Rome." Soon he boomed his great battle cries: "I have been born to war, and fight with factions and devils. [I] am the rough forester to break a path and make things ready."

Pope Leo X finally excommunicated Luther in 1521, but the monk was now too big a fish to be thrown out of the pond. Notes Durant wryly: "Luther proclaimed that no man could be saved unless he renounced the rule of the papacy. The monk had excommunicated the pope."

Consequences of Revolt. Luther inevitably dominates the stage, but Durant does well by the other great Reformation leaders--John Knox, the virtuoso of invective, and Calvin, the black icicle of theology for whose doctrine of predestination even-tempered Author Durant reserves one of his rare flashes of indignation ("We shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with [an] absurd and blasphemous conception of God").

Patiently, precisely, Durant portrays the manifold consequences of Luther's revolt. Every man might now be his own theologian; every state (if it had the power) might withhold its allegiance to Rome. The tortures and burnings of heretics on both sides became part of each nation's struggle to maintain its chosen order. Britain's Henry VIII, for example, quarreled with Papists as well as Protestants when he deemed them a menace to his royal law and order, was apt to burn both on the same day. Luther condemned radical sectarians--Zwinglians, Anabaptists, peasant-reformers--with righteous enthusiasm. Too-temperate Catholics fell victims to their own Inquisition.

Before he concludes, Author Durant pays tribute to the Catholic Church's own movement to reform itself. Says Durant in a passage typical of his style and temper: "The Counter Reformation succeeded in its principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war. But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind . . . All in all, it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products of the Protestant Reformation."

Lesson of Tolerance. Author William James Durant (who was raised a Roman Catholic, now describes himself as a humanist) is a tolerant man who enjoys riding above the battle. With gently malicious humor, he quotes Catholic historians when he has something anti-Catholic to say, Protestant historians when he is anti-Protestant. To Durant, the men who tried to heal the wounds of Christendom, rather than the zealots on either side, are the "good" men of the day; but he believes that "our sympathy can go to all the combatants." Concludes Durant: "A religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme."

This note, however true in itself, rings somewhat strange at the end of a turbulent story of an era in which religious "competition" meant fire and death. The need for tolerance is thus the major moral Durant draws from the Reformation--which would never have happened had not "intolerant" men been willing to die (or kill) for their beliefs. Yet this somewhat anticlimactic touch of gentle rationalism does not diminish the excellence of Author Durant's work, and in a way perhaps foreshadows the subject of his next volume, The Age of Reason, to be published in five years--if, as Durant puts it, "the Reaper will stay his hand."

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