THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS (732 pp.) —Will and Ariel Durant—Simon & Schuster ($10).
In 1619, Johann Kepler published his remarkable studies on the orbital speed of planets. Two generations later, they were to lead Newton to the theory of gravitation, and in Kepler's own time they so impressed James I of England that he tried to hire the great German astronomer as an adviser to his court. Back home in Linz that same year, Kepler's mother was thrown into prison as a witch.
The paradox that has fascinated all historians—of reason beside unreason, of rationalism beside blind faith—was never more sharply apparent than in the century (1558-1648) from Elizabeth to Richelieu and from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king's touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster—although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans on the ground that they had prolonged the cold weather long past the change of seasons. And yet the voice that defined the age and spoke one of its most famous lines belongs to a rationalist: "I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends,'' wrote Francis Bacon to Lord William Cecil, "for I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
Historian Durant's province is scarcely less vast, as readers of his massive, generally excellent Story of Civilization know. The seventh volume in that story is also one of the best. It introduces the period that Durant regards as his own. What was planned as Durant's final volume is now to become part of a trilogy—with The Age of Louis XIV (1963) and The Age of Voltaire (1965) still ahead.
Pardon for All. Although the Age of Reason thus becomes the most scrupulously scrutinized period of Durant's entire enterprise, this volume contains some curious errors of emphasis: the great migration of peasants and adventurers, jailbirds and divines from the England of James I to the New World is dismissed in a paragraph; the years during which Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov and the first of the Romanov dynasty were transforming Muscovite Russia into an imperial power get only six pages.
But in chronicling the great events that convulsed the century—the religious wars, the confrontation of Christianity and rationalist philosophy, the growing defiance of the authority of kings—Durant is painstaking, persuasive and tolerant. Even academic critics no longer dismiss him as a mere popularizer, and he shows once again that, better than any other historian living, he understands how to dis till the flavor of an age from its arts and manners. Like one of his favorite figures, Montaigne, he can "speak to paper as I do to the first person I meet." Indeed, he is often at his most eloquent when speaking of Montaigne himself, whose lifelong preoccupation with his health (notably kidney stones) leads Durant to a typical, one-sentence appraisal: "He sought the philosopher's stone and found it lodged in his bladder."