Will Durant - The Story of Civilization Volume VI: The Reformation

TO LOUIS, MOLLIE, AND ERIC

T HE prospective reader deserves a friendly notice that The Reformation is not quite an honest title for this book. An accurate title would be: 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. Why so meandering a thematic frontier? Because Volume IV (The Age of Faith) in this Story of Civilization brought European history only to 1300, and Volume V (The Renaissance) confined itself to Italy, 1304-1576, deferring the Italian echoes of the Reformation. So this Volume VI must begin at 1300; and the reader will be amused to find that Luther arrives on the scene only after a third of the tale has been told. But let us privately agree that the Reformation really began with John Wyclif and Louis of Bavaria in the fourteenth century, progressed with John Huss in the fifteenth, and culminated explosively in the sixteenth with the reckless monk of Wittenberg. Those whose present interest is only in the religious revolution may omit Chapters III-VI and IX-X without irreparable loss.

The Reformation, then, is the central, but not the only, subject of this book. We begin by considering religion in general, its functions in the soul and the group, and the conditions and problems of the Roman Catholic Church in the two centuries before Luther. We shall watch England in 1376-82, Germany in 1320-47, and Bohemia in 1402-85, rehearsing the ideas and conflicts of the Lutheran Reformation; and as we proceed we shall note how social revolution, with communistic aspirations, marched hand in hand with the religious revolt. We shall weakly echo Gibbons chapter on the fall of Constantinople, and shall perceive how the advance of the Turks to the gates of Vienna made it possible for one man to defy at once an emperor and a pope. We shall consider sympathetically the efforts of Erasmus for the peaceful self-reform of the Church. We shall study Germany on the eve of Luther, and may thereby come to understand how inevitable he was when he came. In we shall make an experiment in empathyshall attempt to view the Reformation from the standpoint of the imperiled Church; and we shall be forced to admire the calm audacity with which she weathered the encompassing storm. In a brief epilogue we shall try to see the Renaissance and the Reformation, Catholicism and the Enlightenment, in the large perspective of modern history and thought.

It is a fascinating but difficult subject, for almost every word that one may write about it can be disputed or give offense. I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a mans 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 under the tolerant auspices of sterling Protestants like Jonathan C. Day, William Adams Brown, Henry Sloane Coffin, and Edmund Chaffee; and that many of my most faithful auditors in that Presbyterian church were Jews whose thirst for education and understanding gave me a new insight into their people. 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.

I thank Dr. Arthur Upham Pope, founder of the Asia Institute, for correcting some of the errors in the chapters on Islam; Dr. Gerson Cohen, of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, for checking the pages on the Jews; my friend Harry Kaufman of Los Angeles for reviewing the section on music; and, pleno cum corde, my wife for her unremitting aid and illuminating comments at every stage in our co-operative labor on this book.

If the Reaper will stay his hand, there will be a concluding Volume VII, The Age of Reason, which should appear some five years hence, and should carry the story of civilization to Napoleon. There we shall make our bow and retire, deeply grateful to all who have borne the weight of these tomes on their hands, and have forgiven numberless errors in our attempt to unravel the present into its constituent past. For the present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for our understanding.

W ILL D URANT

Los Angeles, May 12,1957

1. Dates of birth and death are usually omitted from the text, but will be found in the Index.

2. The religious standpoint of authors quoted or referred to in the text is indicated in the Bibliography by the letters C, J, P, or R, for Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, or rationalist.

3. Passages intended for resolute students rather than for the general reader are indicated by reduced type.

4. To make this volume an independent unit some passages from The Renaissanee , on the history of the Church before the Reformation, have been summarized in the opening chapter.

5. The location of works of art, when not indicated in the text, will usually be found in the Index under the artists name. The name of a city will, in such allocations, be used to indicate its leading gallery, as follows:

AmsterdamRijksmuseum

AugsburgGemldegalerie

BarcelonaMuseum of Catalan Art

BaselOffentliche Kunstsammlung

BergamoAccademia Carrara

BerlinKaiser-Friedrich Museum

BremenKunsthalle

BrusselsMuseum

BudapestMuseum of Fine Arts

ChicagoArt Institute

CincinnatiArt Museum

ClevelandMuseum of Art

ColmarMuseum Unterlinden

CologneWallraf Richarts Museum

CopenhagenStatens Museum for Kunst

DetroitInstitute of Art

FrankfurtStdelsches Kunstinstitut

GenevaMuse dArt et dHistoire

The HagueMauritshuis

LeningradHermitage

LisbonNational Museum

LondonNational Gallery

MadridPrado

MilanBrera

MinneapolisInstitute of Arts

MunichHaus der Kunst

NaplesMuseo Nazionale

New YorkMetropolitan Museum of Art

NurembergGermanisches National Museum

PhiladelphiaJohnson Collection

PragueState Gallery

San DiegoFine Arts Gallery

StockholmNational Museum

ToledoMuseum of Art

ViennaKunsthistorisches Museum

WashingtonNational Gallery

WorcesterArt Museum

The galleries of Florence will be distinguished by their names, Uffizi or Pitti, as will the Borghese and Galleria Nazionale in Rome.

6. This volume will reckon the crown, the livre, the florin, and the ducat of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at $25.00 in the money of the United States in 1954; the franc and the shilling at $5.00; the cu at $15.00; the mark at $66.67; the pound sterling at $100.00. These equivalents are loose guesswork, and repeated debasements of the currencies make them still more hazardous. We note that in 1390 a student could be boarded at Oxford for two shillings a week;