Will Durant
From Philosopedia
Durant, Will(iam) (James) (5 November 1885 - 7 November 1981)
An eminent philosopher, Durant wrote The Story of Philosophy (1926) and over 50 other books].
His comprehensive Story of Civilization (1933—1975), written partly with his wife Ariel, has led some to refer to Durant as being a contemporary Renaissance humanist.
Invited to speak on “The Origins of Religion” at a New York assembly of the Francisco Ferrer Association, Durant told the group that sex is a sub-current in religion and “the phallus had in many places and forms been worshiped as a symbol of divine power.” The New Jersey bishop immediately excommunicated Durant and when the press reported the incident Durant’s mother collapsed in shock and his father ordered him to move out of their home.
Of religion, he (with Ariel) wrote the following:
- • Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative.
- • Is Christianity dying? Is the religion that gave morals, courage, and art to Western civilization suffering slow decay through the spread of knowledge, the widening of astronomic, geographical, and historical horizons, the realization of evil in history and the soul, the decline of faith in an afterlife and of trust in the benevolent guidance of the world? If this is so, it is the basic event of modern times, for the soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.
- • Sapere aude—“to dare to know”—became the motto of this éclairissement, or enlightenment, this Age of Reason triumphant and fulfilled. . . . Man could at last liberate himself from medieval dogmas and Oriental myths; he could shrug off that bewildering, terrifying theology, and stand up free, free to doubt, to inquire, to think, to gather knowledge and spread it, free to build a new religion around the altar of reason and the service of mankind.
Durant had been educated by the Jesuits in Saint Peter's Academy and, later Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 1911, after having taught and been librarian at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, he left the seminary, becoming a teacher who utilized the Ferrer Modern School's methods called "libertarian education." It was at the Modern School that he met and married a pupil, Ida Kaufmann, thirteen years his junior. They had one daughter, Ethel, and adoped a son, Louis. Durant's wife, whom he called Ariel, contributed mateerially to all the volumes of The Story of Civiliation but was given title page credit only with Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins."
Durant in the 1950s was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York, a religious humanist group led by a Unitarian.
