What Will Durant Actually Said—and Why It Matters

When Benjamin Netanyahu recently quoted the historian Will Durant in a public address, the response was swift and largely furious. Critics accused him of equating Jesus Christ with Genghis Khan—of drawing a moral equivalence between a figure of peace and one of history’s most notorious conquerors. The outrage was loud, confident, and almost entirely based on a misreading.

Durant said no such thing. And understanding what he did say reveals something uncomfortable—not just about the critics, but about how poorly modern audiences grasp the relationship between virtue and survival.

The quote in question comes from The Lessons of History, the slim 1968 masterwork Durant wrote with his wife Ariel, distilling a lifetime of historical study into its starkest conclusions. The passage reads: “Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”

This is not a moral comparison. Durant is not saying Christ and Khan are ethically equivalent. He is making a descriptive claim about the physical world: that nature and history are morally indifferent. The universe does not protect the righteous simply because they are righteous. It does not guarantee that the gentle outlast the brutal, that the civilized outlast the barbaric, or that the good outlast the ruthless. The contrast between Christ and Khan is chosen precisely because it is so stark—to drive home the point that even the most profound moral distance between two figures offers no guarantee of physical survival.

To read this as a slur against Christ is to miss the argument entirely. If anything, Durant is issuing a warning on behalf of everything Christ represents.

The irony is that this idea is not remotely alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew prophets wrestled with exactly this problem—not occasionally, but repeatedly, across centuries, with a raw honesty that modern readers often underestimate.

Jeremiah, standing amid the ruins of his world, asked directly: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” (Jeremiah 12:1). Job observed that “the tents of robbers are at peace, and those who provoke God are secure” (Job 12:6), and pressed the point further: “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” listing in forensic detail how the violent and the godless thrive, raise families, and die in comfort, having never been made to account (Job 21:7–15). Habakkuk, surveying a world in which Babylon devoured nations, could not reconcile what he saw with what he believed: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil,” he told God, “yet you remain silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves” (Habakkuk 1:13). Malachi echoes the same grievance from the mouths of the disillusioned: “Surely the evildoers prosper; even when they put God to the test, they escape” (Malachi 3:15).

The Psalms return to this wound again and again. “Do not fret because of those who are evil,” the Psalmist urges in Psalm 37—twice, in verses 1 and 7—the repetition itself a tell, an acknowledgment that the temptation to despair is persistent and reasonable. Psalm 92:7 concedes openly that the wicked “spring up like grass,” flourishing visibly and abundantly. And in perhaps the most psychologically brutal of these passages, the author of Psalm 73 confesses that his faith nearly broke entirely: “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked”—watching them grow “fat and sleek,” free from the burdens that crushed better people, until he could barely see the point of virtue at all (Psalm 73:3–12).

These are not the complaints of skeptics or cynics. They are the anguished observations of believers who refused to pretend that temporal justice was automatic or guaranteed—who looked at the world as it actually was, rather than as they wished it to be. What Durant articulates in secular, historical language, the prophets expressed in theological terms millennia earlier: that in the world as it actually operates, goodness does not come with a built-in defense mechanism. The lamb does not survive because the universe favors lambs. It survives, when it survives, because someone has taken on the responsibility of protecting it.

This is where Edmund Burke’s famous formulation becomes essential. If the universe has no inherent prejudice in favor of the righteous, then that preference must be created and maintained by human agency. Goodness is not a physical law. It does not enforce itself. Peace is not a natural condition—it is a constructed one, and its construction requires people willing to defend it.

Durant makes this concrete. He asks what would have become of Europe’s classical and Christian heritage had Charles Martel’s Frankish infantry not held at Tours in 732. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the very moral frameworks through which we now debate these questions—all of it was contingent, at that moment, on soldiers who were not debating philosophy. The culture was the passenger. The military was the vehicle. More recently, we have seen what happens when the vehicle fails: the Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited by the Taliban. The antiquities of Mosul, systematically erased by ISIS. No argument of cultural or spiritual value slowed them. Only force, eventually, did.

The backlash to Netanyahu’s quotation is, in its own way, a perfect illustration of Durant’s point. We live so safely downstream of centuries of successful defense that we have begun to mistake the achievement for the atmosphere. We assume that the freedom to read, to worship, to criticize, to write op-eds denouncing world leaders—that all of this simply is, rather than that it was built and is maintained at considerable cost. The statues to the generals have long since been erected; we are free to argue about whether they deserve them precisely because the battles were won.

This produces a particular kind of moral confusion: the belief that force is inherently corrupting, that the person who raises the sword is as culpable as the person who made it necessary. It is an understandable confusion, even a sympathetic one. But it is a confusion that a Genghis Khan—or any of his modern successors—is under no obligation to share.

Durant was not endorsing brutality. He was issuing a warning about what happens to beautiful, gentle, philosophically sophisticated civilizations when they forget that their survival is not guaranteed by their virtue alone. The universe, he observed, has no prejudice in their favor.

History, however, has a very clear record of what happens when they act as though it does.

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Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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