Dark Brilliance by Paul Strathern

Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason: From Descartes to Peter the Great

by Paul Strathern

Pegasus Books 2025

Paul Strathern looks at the so-called Age of Reason in his latest book, Dark Brilliance, that somewhat nebulous period between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, and his central reminder is that although this Age of Reason began to strive for best of human potential and rational inquiry, it was born of the violence and squalor of a less-striving era. It's a useful point, made by every historian of the Age of Reason, and as Strathern goes on to mention, that squalor counterbalances sometimes awkwardly with the essence of the new Age so stirringly summarized by Descartes, that humanity will thrive “so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order for deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or too well hidden to be discovered.”

It's probably no coincidence that Descartes fills so many of these pages, since he not only summarized the Age of Reason in words (albeit painful words; that bit about “accepting as true what is not so” will hit 2025 readers like a physical blow), he also epitomized it in person, a rational mathematician and proto-scientist who spent most of his life torturing nonhuman animals in ways that still have the power to drain blood from the face of any feeling person. A genius caked in gore is about as fitting an avatar for the Age of Reason as Strathern could find.

Strathern is a practiced, very readable author, but it's difficult to see much else that's fitting in his herky-jerky survey of the Age of Reason. He includes transformative figures like Robert Hooke with his astonishing microscope, and he writes about these figures in vivid, involving prose. “Before his eyes a new world emerged,” we're told of Hooke looking at the micro-world. “Wherever he looked he saw something as it had never been seen before.”

But Strathern spends just as much time on figures that don't seem quintessential to the Age of Reason at all, or only minimally. Foremost of these would be the great poet John Milton, a traditionalist who would surely have been a great poet in any era. He's seems to be in this book mainly because Strathern finds him interesting, and to a point, who could object? Particularly since Strathern has the refreshing spirit to find he personally dislikes the poet. “Reading between the lines … it is clear that Milton was hardly a sympathetic character, preferring to voice his own opinion rather than court popularity,” he writes, grudgingly allowing that “during his travels, Milton seems to have reined in his high opinion of himself and his strict moral outlook...”

Sneering at Milton is always fun, but Strathern is considerably less interesting on other members of his central cast. It's strange and disappointing to find this author retailing bland or self-evident prose, and it happens too often in Dark Brilliance. When he's writing about Vermeer's painting of a young woman playing an instrument, for instance, he mentions that he disagrees with Gombrich's contention that Vermeer's paintings are really “still lives with human beings” and then rebuts it with, of all things, platitudes. “Are her eager eyes staring out beyond the glass of the window, or is this the absorbed expression of concentration on playing the music?” he asks. “This is a human question, not applicable to a still life. And the answer lies in our imagination.” Not only does this misserve Vermeer, it also misserves still life paintings.

The Age of Reason is so profuse and hyper-dramatic that a writer like Strathern can't fail to find lively subjects to match his writing style; the book isn't all “the answer lies in our imagination,” thankfully. Isaac Newton and Louis XIV do well, for instance, although in a book of just under 400 pages, nobody gets more than a fraction of the space they deserve, and broader subjects like the Little Ice Age or tulip-mania or even the sacred potato get a series of running mentions but almost no in-depth examination, and that raises some consistent questions about what the aim of a book like Dark Brilliance is, or who might benefit from reading it instead of finding, say, an old flea market copy of Will and Ariel Durant's The Age of Reason from nearly 70 years ago. Strathern's fans will expect a smooth reading experience, and they'll get that, at least.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News