Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.