802 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0207942273
The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writers, historians and philosophers Will and Ariel Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 8: The Age of Louis XIV was originally published in 1963, and covers the era of Louis XIV (well, yeah) of France in Europe and the Near East. To pin an entire era on only one person is, perhaps, not the best way to write history, but seeing as France was the behemoth of Europe at this time – culturally, economically, militarily – it would be hard not to place le Roi Soleil at the center of this particular solar system and build a narrative around his life and achievements. Of course, The Age of Louis XIV is broader in reach than just its Gallic inhabitants and their gloriously bewigged and leggy monarch, beginning as it does with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which brought the Thirty Years’ War mercifully to an end) and detailing the history of Europe during a period of nearly seventy years, give or take. The intellectual history of this period is covered very well; in particular, we find easily understood overviews of the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche and his attempts to bridge the gap between St. Augustine and Descartes (yeah, right) and Baruch Spinoza as he…well, read this:
We may conclude that in Spinoza substance means the essential reality underlying all things. This reality is perceived by us in two forms: as extension or matter, and as thought or mind. These two are “attributes” of substance; not as qualities residing in it, but as the same reality perceived externally by our senses as matter, and internally by our consciousness as thought. Spinoza is a complete monist: these two aspects of reality – matter and thought – are not distinct and separate entities, they are two sides, the outside and the inside, of one reality; so are body and mind, so is physiological action and the corresponding mental state.
We also encounter John Milton singing blindly about heaven and hell, Blaise Pascal inventing projective geometry (look it up), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz postulating monads in the best of all possible worlds (I know; me neither), Thomas Hobbes painting his nasty and brutish portrait of the state of nature, John Locke telling us how comes the mind to be furnished with ideas and George Berkeley explaining that the world is just a perception in the mind of God (in spite of the evidence of Samuel Johnson’s stubbed toe). And we must not – cannot – forget Isaac Newton as he measures light and calculates gravity:
When [Newton] passed a small ray of sunlight through a transparent prism he found that the apparently monochrome light divided into all these colors of the rainbow; that each component color emerged from the prism at its own specific angle or degree of refraction; and that the colors arranged themselves in a row of bands, forming a continuous spectrum, with red at the one end and violet at the other. Later investigators showed that various substances, when made luminous by burning, give different spectra; by comparing these spectra with the one made by a given star, it became possible to analyze in some degree the star’s chemical constituents. Still more delicate observations of a star’s spectrum indicated its approximate motion toward or from earth; and from these calculations the distance of the star was theoretically deduced. Newton’s revelation of the composition of light, and its refraction in the spectrum, has therefore had almost cosmic consequences in astronomy.
This whole epoch is one of my favorite of all times, with the fading of the Medieval Age at last done with and the birth of the modern just around the corner, and with all of this intellectual firepower just lying about. But it is France that is the star of this tale as it emerges as Europe’s cultural leader. While the bloody wars of religion are not exactly over, religion is still quite relevant to the European mind but, happily, its desperately violent attempts to hold onto power continue to ruin its credibility among the peoples of the continent. The Durants as authors are generally kind to religion, seeing it as an essential part of the fabric that holds societies together, but here the philosophy of the hour is concerned not with theology, but of humanity, for as the power of the church declines, those of the state rise, and no autocrat epitomizes this more than the Sun King, who built Versailles as a monument to the State and himself, and whose example was an inspiration to every other king in the continent, for good and for ill. Our modern world is the heir to this development, for the secular state has without question won over the Church in terms of secular power – and this, too, is for good and for ill, for as God has been replaced by Man in the hearts and minds of some, Man finds that worshipping himself has unleashed more Hells on Earth than any Pope of prelate could ever have imagined.
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