Word: durants
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Maxim us or Optimus? In pages as crowded but unhurried as a Bruegel canvas, Historian Durant shows the life and customs, major sins and minor pastimes of his period, stopping along the way to sketch in a thousand odd facts and arresting faces. The volume ranges over the whole of Europe (with major side trips to Persia, Russia and the New World), from 1300 to 1564 A.D. There is a bit of everything in the book-politics, war, art, architecture, philosophy, commerce, science-all by way of scene-setting for the great central struggle. Durant devotes a third...
Enter the Monk. Laughing satire soon gave way to bitter invective in the growing passion for reform. The unity of Christendom had been precarious for centuries before the Reformation. The marvel is, suggests Durant, that with its half-dozen-odd principal nations all out of step-in time, in psychology, in power, in learning-the Roman authority survived as long as it did. Italy was not only the home of the papacy, it was the source and cradle of European civilization itself-sophisticated, modern, even decadent, when England and Germany were still medieval, while France and Spain were somewhere midway...
Born to War. Much has been made of the dramatic spectacle of the bold monk lustily hammering his propositions to the church door and challenging all and sundry to debate them with him; but, as Durant points out, the truth is more ordinary. The door of Wittenberg's Castle Church was used by clerics as a notice board on which they pinned invitations to debates and news of what would now be called "coming attractions." When Luther posted his theses in 1517, he had no notion that the coming attraction would be history's fiercest spiritual drama...
Pope Leo X finally excommunicated Luther in 1521, but the monk was now too big a fish to be thrown out of the pond. Notes Durant wryly: "Luther proclaimed that no man could be saved unless he renounced the rule of the papacy. The monk had excommunicated the pope...
Consequences of Revolt. Luther inevitably dominates the stage, but Durant does well by the other great Reformation leaders-John Knox, the virtuoso of invective, and Calvin, the black icicle of theology for whose doctrine of predestination even-tempered Author Durant reserves one of his rare flashes of indignation ("We shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with [an] absurd and blasphemous conception...