by Peter Watson
‘Man can know himself more profoundly and clearly than even Newton can grasp the laws of matter: consequently knowledge of history, being the story of human motives and their effects, can in principle be far more profoundly and minutely known than the external world, which is ultimately opaque.’ Of all the original thinkers in the world, and despite Jonathan Israel’s claims for Spinoza, the most underestimated figure is the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). His simple insight, that men can know only what they make, coming as it did at the high point of the scientific revolution, completely transformed man’s view of himself. In fact, it provided man with not one but two views of himself, mutually contradictory. Since these two views have never been reconciled (they are one of the main themes of the last part of this book), we may say that Vico is as responsible as anyone for the modern incoherence.62
Vico, a philosopher for whom history was more important than for anyone else of his time, tried hard to understand the mind of primitive man. Without such understanding, he thought, we can never understand ourselves. To do so he made highly original use of psychology, linguistics and poetry.63 His most famous book was Scienza Nuova, published in 1725. His aim here was to uncover a secular philosophy of history, the laws of which, he believed, would help design workable political institutions for the future. As John Bowle says, by modern standards Vico had a weak understanding of biology, and it would be more than a century before evolution by natural selection was conceived. This limited his vision, yet at the same time Vico brought a magnificent energy to his task. Although he believed, like many people at the time, that God rules the world by means of laws evident in human affairs, he agreed with Spinoza that these laws were ‘immanent’ not transcendent–that is to say, they were not available through revelation but emerged in human institutions and could be deduced.64 Unlike Hobbes and others he did not share the view that law stemmed from an overt rational contract; instead, he said it had been assembled from the instinctive realm of custom. ‘Fallen humanity, no longer apprehending truth directly, is yet linked with God by the promptings of instinct. Through the darkness, men and nations still perceive glimmerings of the divine purpose by a “common wisdom”, emergent in response to the challenge of the environment.’
Looking around him, and back through history, Vico uncovered three instincts, he said. These were the belief in Providence, the recognition of parenthood, and the instinct to bury the dead, instincts which found expression in the customs and rites of religion, marriage and sepulture.65 He accepted that man had fallen from grace, but he still believed he was the master of his own fate as he increasingly apprehended the evolution of civilised life. Civilisation was, to this extent, an expression of God’s purpose, though philosophic knowledge could supplement instinct. The great collective enterprises of mankind–jurisprudence, the sciences, the arts, religion itself–may be examined for what they reveal about the aims of ‘The Divine Architect’.66
The charm of Vico lies in the extent to which some of his ideas now seem so outmoded and absurd and yet in other aspects are so modern and still refreshing. For example, Vico maintained that after the Flood the human race was divided into men of normal size and idolatrous, bestial giants, ‘living in the diluvial marshes’ left by the receding waters. Humanity developed from these titans, though gradually we achieved the proportions we now have. Civilisation arose through a fear of thunder and lightning, which startled the giants out of their ‘brutish stupor’, for which they learned to feel nothing but shame. Thus shamed, they no longer cared to exercise their instincts in the open, and so carried off their mates into caves, where family life was founded. It was this first act of ‘violent authority’ which created the ‘natural docility’ of women and the ‘natural nobility’ of men. Vico was widely read in history and salted his views, for example, with scholarly references to the number of occasions where, in pagan mythology, thunder is made an attribute of Jove. In the same way, Old Testament giants are connected to Greek legends and the war of the Titans against the gods.67 This first phase of human history is dubbed, naturally enough, The Age of the Gods, its purpose being for the ancestors of man to learn discipline. They conceived the gods who came to personify the sea, sky, fire and the crops and they evolved the rudiments of religion, family life, speech and property. (Vico thought this last derived from the burial of the dead.) The Age of the Gods was followed by the Heroic Age and then the Human Age.
In the third part of the book, Vico turned his attention to the human race and attempted to reconstruct its history by reference to language, notably poetry and the mythology of early man. ‘Peoples who are in the depths of ignorance naturally interpret their surroundings by fables and allegories: the development of language naturally corresponds with the development of a society. During the Age of the Gods, when men were inventing speech, language was vague and poetical; the lapse of time was indicated by the number of harvests; the names of the gods symbolised the natural interests of food and agriculture. During the heroic age men communicated by symbols and heraldry.’68 In another section he argues that man’s social development derives from the three punishments inflicted on fallen humanity–the sense of shame, curiosity and the need to work. Each of the gods and heroes of mythology may be understood, he says, as manifestations of the effects of one or other of these punishments.
For us, today, Vico’s arguments are unconvincing–the details, anyway–and many of those details are self-evidently absurd. But underneath the absurdity was a surprising piece of modern sense–that man evolves, and not just biologically but in terms of language, custom, social organisation, law and literature. And under all of that lay a bigger time-bomb: that religion itself evolves. Thus Vico helped also the advent of doubt, which is the subject of the next chapter.
The date of The Prince, 1513, to 1725, the date of Scienza Nuova, overlapped heavily with the scientific revolution and it is certainly no coincidence that all of these political philosophers attempted to construct their theories based on at least the principles of the new sciences, and to construct systems which could be generalised from state to state. It may be, however, that it was too early to apply the new sciences to the affairs of men. The most enduring legacy has in fact been the distinction between those who, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, were pessimistic about human nature (occasioning authoritarian or conservative philosophies), and those like Locke and Spinoza, who were more optimistic (the liberal philosophies). Broadly speaking, this is still the main political division by which most of us live, though we now call them, respectively, right and left.
The idea of ‘community’ (and its legitimacy as a political authority) has been a theme running through this chapter. But there is one meaning of the word that we have yet to encounter fully but which the Cambridge historian Tim Blanning says also came into being at this time–i.e., the seventeenth, and then the eighteenth century. This ‘community’ is ‘the public’, which he calls ‘a new cultural space…Alongside the old culture, centred on the courts and the representation of monarchical authority, there emerged a “public sphere”, in which private individuals come together to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. By exchanging information, ideas, and criticism, these individuals created a cultural actor–the public–which has dominated European culture ever since. Many, if not most, of the cultural phenomena of the modern world derive from the “long eighteenth century”–the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the journalist, the critic, the public library, the concert, the art exhibition, the public museum, the national theatre, just to list a sample.’69
Blanning concentrates on three of these innovations: the novel, the newspapers and the concert. In the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century there was a ‘reading revolution’, he says, and he quotes scores of memoirs of the time to support this argument. In Britain, for example, the number of books published rose from about 400 per year in the early seventeenth century, to 6,000 a year by 1630, 21,000 in 1710 and fully 56,000 by the 1790s.70 He
notes that in the eighteenth century in Germany there was at this time a ‘significant move’ from using the words die Gelehrten (the learned) to die Gebildeten (the educated or cultivated). ‘Even for those who rejected revealed religion and scriptural authority, Bildung offered a means of secular salvation through culture.’71 Changing taste and the rise of the novel may also be seen from this table, taken from Blanning’s book:
Publishing in Germany: 1625–1800
Subject
1625
1800
Law
7.4%
3.5%
Medicine
7.5
4.9
History etc.
12.0
15.7
Theology
45.8
6.0
Philosophy
18.8
39.6
Belles lettres
5.4
27.3
Blanning says that the chief attraction of the novel was its realism, imagination masquerading as factual reportage, and though many were trivial and lachrymose, Samuel Richardson expressed a more serious aim, to investigate ‘the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement’.72 Another effect of the novel, and its concern with the here-and-now, was to push centre-stage family relationship and women, partly because most middle- and upper-class women enjoyed more leisure than their menfolk.
So far as newspapers and periodicals were concerned, it was during the last decades of the seventeenth century that the transition from sporadic to regular publication occurred in several parts of Europe–Antwerp, Frankfurt, Turin, as well as Paris and London. Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (‘News of the Republic of Letters’) first appeared in 1684. By the 1730s in London, however, there were six dailies and by the 1770s there were nine, with a combined circulation of 12,600,000. Even those who couldn’t read kept up; they gathered in one of London’s 551 coffee houses, 207 inns or 447 taverns, where the newspapers were read out loud. These figures were eclipsed by those in the Holy Roman Empire, where there were more than a thousand newspapers and periodicals by the time of the French Revolution.73
This picture is amended somewhat by Jonathan Israel’s discussion of ‘learned journals’ which also came into existence at this time. ‘Overwhelmingly orientated towards recent developments in the world of thought, scholarship and science, they did much to shift the focus of the cultivated public’s attention away from established authorities and the classics to what was new, innovative, or challenging, even when such innovation arose in distant lands and unfamiliar languages.’ Whereas previously it took people years to find out about books which had appeared in a language different to their own, now they knew about them ‘within a matter of weeks’.74 In addition to making people better informed, these journals generally displayed the new values of toleration and intellectual objectivity, says Israel, and often contributed to the fragmentation of the ‘deeply rooted notion, championed by kings, parliaments and Churches alike, that there existed a universally known, accepted and venerated consensus of truth. At the same time, the journals also attempted to marginalise the more radical aspects of the enlightenment, those parts promulgated by the Spinozists.’75
Though their use expanded enormously, books had existed in one form or another for centuries. In contrast, the public concert was a wholly new medium. Blanning says that the first public concert, in the modern sense (a clear distinction being made between audience and performers, an anonymous public admitted on payment of a fee), took place in London, at John Banister’s house, ‘over against’ the George Tavern, in Whyte Freyers, in 1672. This stimulated a demand not only for other concerts but also for sheet music as people achieved musical literacy. This, in turn, created a demand for a certain kind of music, of which Haydn and then Handel in particular were the beneficiaries–the symphony was especially popular with the new musical public. Concert halls proved to be a major attraction at the great market towns (Frankfurt, Hamburg, above all Leipzig), as an added bonus of travel.76
The new ideas in music still came from the cities where the courts remained (Salzburg, Mannheim, Berlin) but Blanning’s point is that the new public, the new public sphere, brought with it a much greater national feeling than had ever existed before. In fact, the new, self-conscious public and the cultural ideas it developed a taste for formed a powerful cocktail or mix, a new forum for the circulation of ideas which hadn’t existed before. This mix would not only determine what cultural ideas proved popular and enduring, but ensured that culture itself would become a virile and febrile aspect of nationalism. The powerful doctrine that nations should differ in their cultures, which was to prove energising and dangerous in equal measure, really stems from the emergence of the public sphere in the seventeenth century.
25
The ‘Atheist Scare’ and the Advent of Doubt
To Chapter 25 Notes and References
Copernicus died in 1543. According to tradition, he received the first printed copy of De revolutionibus, his famous book on the heavens, on his deathbed. It makes for a dramatic and moving story, but we should not make more of this episode than it deserves. In fact, the ‘revolution’ which De revolutionibus sparked took quite a while to come about. In the first place, the book is virtually unreadable except to erudite astronomers. Second, more important, reports of Copernicus’ research–including his new hypothesis, that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa–had been circulating in Europe, among scientists, since about 1515. For at least two decades Copernicus had been recognised as one of Europe’s leading astronomers and his book, which would set out the details of the new theory, was keenly awaited by colleagues.
When De revolutionibus did appear, most of these colleagues recognised immediately the book’s importance.1 Indeed, many astronomers referred to Copernicus as a ‘second Ptolemy’ and, by the second half of the sixteenth century, his book had become a standard reference for nearly all professionals in the field. At the same time, and incredible as it may seem to us, the central argument of De revolutionibus was ignored. ‘Authors who applauded Copernicus’ erudition, borrowed his diagrams, or quoted his determination of the distance from the earth to the moon, usually either ignored the earth’s motion or dismissed it as absurd.’2 An English elementary textbook on the heavens, published in 1594, more than half a century after Copernicus’ book appeared, took the earth’s stability for granted. This is even more surprising than it may seem in retrospect because, except for the church, Copernicus was pushing at a door that was more open than one might think.
By the end of the sixteenth century, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited.3 Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in their thousands, and hundreds of martyrs had been put to death, often in spectacularly cruel ways, for holding opinions that no one could prove, one way or the other. As was mentioned above, if so many people were convinced their divine inspirations were right, and yet they disagreed so drastically, surely this must mean that divine inspiration was often illusory. Ironically enough, the Bible itself was instrumental in provoking some of these events. For it was now that vernacular translations of the scriptures brought the book before a mass audience. From the 1520s on, the Bible passed beyond the realm of the scholar and the divine and, as Brian Moynahan has pointed out, the implications of what was not in it became as important as what was. In particular, what could now be seen clearly were the many church practices and privileges ‘that were found to be blessed by custom but not directly by God’.4 Menno Simons was just one twenty-eight-year-old, in Pingjum, Holland, who had his doubts–in his case about the bread and wine at mass being the flesh and blood of Christ. He attributed these doubts to the devil, trying to prise him from his faith. He had confessed this often, he said, when he finally got the idea ‘to examine the New Testament diligently…I had not gone very far when I discovered that we were deceived…’
5 He was in fact ‘quickly relieved’, he said, to find no evidence that the bread and wine were anything other than mere symbols of Christ’s passion. Relieved or not, it was still an overwhelming shock.
The access to the sacred book which the vernacular translations gave ordinary people was dangerous, and the church knew it. For example, it allowed the laity to discover for themselves the inconsistencies and contradictions in the text, inconsistencies and contradictions which had been kept from them. A young Englishman, in Chelmsford, Essex, was forbidden to read William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible (hundreds of copies of which were being smuggled into Britain) and ordered by his father to consult only the Latin edition, which the young man could not read. He rebelled, obtained a copy of the English translation and hid it under his bedstraw, reading it when he could. This soon led him to mock the reverence which his elders displayed to the cross, kneeling before it in church, raising their hands to it when it passed by in procession. He told his mother one night, when his father was asleep, that such practices were mere idolatry and against the wishes of God, who had said ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image, nor bow down to it, nor worship it.’6
