The Faltering Trajectory

THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV by Will and Ariel Durant. 802 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

Louis branded the age with his name. He was, after all, the arbiter of its fashions, the patron of its arts, the instigator of its wars. He was the Sun King, and Le Brun painted him as a god on the vaults of Versailles.

But the age named after Louis (roughly 1648-1715) was perhaps more profoundly embodied in the frail frame of another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal. Pascal began as a youthful exponent of reason and science--most notably in his studies of atmospheric pressure and the calculus of probabilities--only to recoil in middle life from everything science and reason had apparently achieved. In his last testament, the famous Thoughts on Religion, he emerged as an eloquent defender of religious belief. Science, he declared, was mere presumption, and man could grope his way towards the truth only by renouncing the intellect and "placing his faith in feeling." And yet Pascal was torn. "I look on all sides," he wrote shortly before his death, "and everywhere I see nothing but uncertainty."

Other Breed. The age he lived in. Historian Will Durant suggests, suffered from the same obsessive doubt, and its great preoccupation was the confrontation of science and religion, rationalism and faith. In this book, Volume VIII of his massive The Story of Civilization, Durant explores that conflict, from the persecution of the Huguenots to the age's finest flowering in the minds of men like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibnitz.

As in his previous volumes, Durant scants parts of his story to speak at leisurely length of the poets, philosophers, and men of science he admires. He finds little space to discuss the great outward thrust that sent 17th century Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutchmen around the globe. And although he writes of the statesmen and military leaders who helped shape the age--Cromwell, Marlborough, Peter the Great, Frederick William of Brandenburg--his sympathies lie with that other breed of 17th century men who made "all the motions of matter seem to fall into an order of law and the immensity of the universe seem to obey the predictions of the human mind."

The Accommodation. Common folk still sought a king's touch as the cure for scrofula, still believed that the twitching of a hazel twig betrayed the nearness of criminals, still looked to omens and cabalistic signs as a guide to the future. The Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft for burning a peasant's beard with a magnifying glass, and witches would continue to stalk the lands of Europe for as long as King Louis lived (Durant reports that in Scotland the last one was sent to the stake in 1722). But at the same time, Hooke was developing the compound microscope, which transformed the study of the cell; Nicolaus Steno was studying the development of the earth's crust; Olaus Roemer was determining the velocity of light. And John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, was proposing a theory of representative government with such eloquence that Oswald Spengler was later to conclude that Locke was the architect of the Western Enlightenment.

Durant is at his best in his cogent, detailed discussion of that oddly reactionary heretic, Baruch Spinoza, who by conceiving of the universe as one elemental, infinite substance, indivisible from God, finally achieved what the age had not thought possible--an accommodation between science and religion.

Hopes & Fears. Among historians, Durant is the great anecdotist. Catherine, Queen to England's Charles II and a lady to her fingertips, finds the King disheveled in his chambers, notices a slipper beside the bed and graciously withdraws "lest the pretty little fool hiding behind the curtains should catch cold." Peter the Great, greeted by the King of France before the royal palace, graciously picks up his host and carries him up the steps like an infant.

In his "integral method," no minor poet or scientist is dismissed as irrelevant in presenting the age in "total perspective." Yet perspective is exactly what Durant lacks. Thus he can declare that "the greatest Italian painters were now in Naples, everything flourished--music, art, literature, politics, drama, hunger, murder, and always the gay, furious, melodious pursuit of feminine curves by agitated men." But he never seems aware that the "great" Neapolitan painters were at best secondary talents, and that the true center of painting had shifted elsewhere--to The Nether lands and France.

Durant specifically denies himself absolute judgments. His gently rationalistic view of history holds that "there is some truth in every passion, something to be loved in every foe." But with typical diffidence, Durant pronounces the age of Louis a hopeful one. "The mood of Europe was changing from supernaturalism to secularism, from theology to science, from hopes of heaven and fears of hell to plans for the enlargement of knowledge."

Durant and his wife Ariel, who has assisted with research on all the volumes, will continue to trace what Durant calls "the faltering trajectory of mankind" through Volumes IX and X --The Age of Voltaire in 1965, and Rousseau and Revolution in 1968. Provided, says Will Durant dryly, that "the Great Powers do not destroy our subject before it destroys us."

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