The Age of Reason Begins, by Will & Ariel Durant

Just a few pages remain before I close out The Age of Reason Begins, Volume VIII in the 11 volume Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant.

I still remember the first time I stumbled across the series while perusing my favorite used bookstore (McKays) in Knoxville, TN.  I can't believe it was more than 10 years ago that I first read Volume I, Our Oriental Heritage, and began to fall deeply in love with history.  My plan to use the series as my outline for world history itself is proving to be a good plan, if a long one.  I've read my way through thousands of years, and am now within 375 years of my own.

The Age of Reason focuses on a difficult era for the historian, the wildly complex fallout from the religious reformation across Europe, roughly 1558-1648.  The period marks a major shift from the age of faith to the age of reason and the age of nations.

Martin Luther had called out the problems and audacity of the Catholic Church.  But the revolution he began created unprecedented divide and decline of the Christian faith, and caused unprecedented death in countless wars.

By the end of the Thirty Years War, which resulted in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, revenge and land-grab had replaced the original purpose of the relentless devastation.  Religious intolerance, from all participants, nearly killed religion itself.

The era is alive with great figures, of course.  The first Queen Elizabeth, William of Orange, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Rembrandt and Galileo to name a few.

Perhaps my favorite was Henry IV of France, the first monarch to promote the idea of a nation that actually tolerated multiple religions and creeds.  Although it failed to take hold right away, the idea was Henry's.  Without Henry, would religious tolerance have ever become a reality?

It was a sign of the times that many Christians of Hungary escaped to the Ottoman Turks to their east because they were more accepting of Christianity than their own Christian rulers.

Sir Francis Bacon also caught my fancy.  A macro thinker in science, for the first time called Greek thinking into question, and signaled the beginning of modern scientific thinking.  The scientific revolution and the industrial revolution begin with Bacon.

The complexity of this period is daunting, as tiny republics, dukedoms and fiefs, transitioned, reformed and transitioned again and again into a never-ending mix of political and religious cross-currents.  The Hapsburgs and Holy Roman Emperors, both of the Austrian and Spanish branches, clashed with England, France, Sweden, the Ottoman Turks and a panoply of German principalities.

Politically, the result was something approaching Europe as we know it today, but devastated by war, sick of religion, and turning towards science and industry.

I've got one more book on the same era to absorb, a history of the Hapsburgs, before I move towards the rise of French supremacy and the 18th century.

My new-found love of Charles Dickens will undoubtedly slow my progress in history.  More to come on that.