Taking a fresh look at Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
The Durant series includes:
• Our Oriental Heritage, 1935
• The Life of Greece, 1939
• Caesar and Christ, 1944
• The Age of Faith, 1950
• The Renaissance, 1953
• The Reformation, 1957
• The Age of Reason Begins. 1961
• The Age of Louis XIV, 1963
• The Age of Voltaire. 1965
• Rousseau and Revolution. 1967
• The Age of Napoleon, 1975
As the title says, Will and Ariel Durant tell a story — one whopping story, from the beginnings of civilization up to the 19th century. This isn’t academic history. It’s entertainment for the millions. There’s no need to read it from beginning to end. If you try to, you’ll never finish. But you can read a chapter here and a chapter there, following the threads that weave in and out from volume to volume or following your current interests.
The Durants tell this story from a point of view. That’s natural with history, though academic-style histories often mask their bias. They don’t pretend to be objective. They call it as they see it, with strong and well-expressed opinions. For me, much of the charm and delight of the work comes from those opinions and that excellent writing style. Gibbon, too, was very subjective, with a delightful style, including judgments that sum up individuals, countries, and periods. But Gibbon only dealt with a small subset of the vast topic that Durants took on.
Sometimes the Durants characterize a long complex career with a few incisive sentences. For instance, “Charles V was the most impressive failure of his age, and even his virtues were sometimes unfortunate for mankind.” Reformation, p. 642. Also, about Christian II of Denmark, “Christian fled to Flanders with his queen, the Protestant sister of Charles V; he made his peace with the Church, hoping to get a kingdom for a Mass; he was captured in a futile attempt to regain his throne, and for twenty-seven years he lived in the dungeons of Sonderborg with no companion but a half-wit Norwegian dwarf. The paths of glory led him with leisurely ignominy to the grave (1559).” Reformation, p. 628. There’s much here to ignite the imagination of a novelist.
Sometimes the Durants succeed in capturing in just a few words the crux of a situation, for instance about Loyola, in his days as a soldier in Pamplona, “Four years he spent there, dreaming of glory and waking to routine.” Reformation, p. 906.
Elsewhere, they render cursory and eloquent judgment, for instance, about John Calvin Reformation p. 490, “…we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”
The books in this series were published over the course of 40 years, 1935–1975, and some of the 11 volumes are over 1000 pages long. But this massive work has found its way into the hands of many people over the years, mainly as a perennial new-member enticement for the Book-of-the-Month Club. That’s how I got the first volumes, back in 1959. For many middle-class, baby-boomer Americans, these books were and remain the standard historical reference work.
But reading the Durants today, I can’t help but recognize how much has changed, with the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the collapse of Communism. It’s only natural to tell a story from the perspective of today. Now today has changed, so the story feels dated. The Story of Civilization is still great entertainment and a handy reference work for checking dates and names, but the overall thrust of the narrative no longer resounds with authority.
For the Durants, the events of previous centuries were important as causes or harbingers of what in their day looked like the ultimate conflict facing mankind. They highlighted every minor event and character with any possible connection to the eventual conflict between Communism and Capitalism. While the narrative ended with Napoleon, the implication was that the story led inevitably to the Cold War issues and conflicts that prevailed when the Durants wrote.
But today, the Cold War is a distant era that we can only understand with research and effort. It’s difficult to reconstruct the perspective and set of assumptions that permeated much of Western thinking for a generation, but is now gone. Today, there is no ultimate conflict. Hence, we no longer see history in Hegelian terms, with events unfolding in a single direction. We can now appreciate history as story, as the story of humankind, and it can come alive again — in many different tellings of many different episodes. I wonder what interesting and obscure events and people will now be resurrected from the junkheap of history.
Today, we can look back on the 20th century as a play in three acts — WWI, WWII, and Cold War — rather than as the culmination of all history. Only when the Ice Age ended could anyone conceive that ice was not the ultimate state of nature, that there would be other trends and cycles — some short and some enormously long. During the Cold War, reading history was like reading a story when you already knew the outcome. Yes, you could appreciate the details and the performance, but it all led to what you already knew. That was history seen through the colored lenses of the major issues of that time.
What a relief it is to live now in a time when the major issues are unknown. Today, we have the opportunity to look at the past with fresh eyes, with new undefined and shifting filters. The past is alive — not yet killed by a new orthodoxy.
History changes over time. We always view the past teleologically, as if what came before is of significance mainly in so far as it led to the world becoming the way we see it today. As the present changes, the teleology changes. Hence the need for each generation to rewrite history.
