The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  As for the history of Greece, that need not detain us long. It was even more untrustworthy than the Roman. Were people to believe that the Athenians, albeit the most cultivated of men, had no authentic records until quite late on in their history, and that that is why their source and remote origin were completely hidden from them? All their dates and periods are a hopeless tangle. They are very hazy even about the correct dates of their national festivals. Aristophanes brings the gods on to his stage grumbling that the moon gives them no really accurate notion as to when these auspicious events are due to take place. The result is that the gods arrive too late for these public feasts and have to go back with empty stomachs to heaven. Who’s going to put any faith in the Greek chroniclers after that?

  What is clear is that not only we have not got at the truth in regard to ancient history, but that we have no means of doing so. How did the ancients measure things? What was their system of notation? Those are the kind of things you have got to know before you can speak with any certainty about the practical side of their life. If you don’t know them, you can never be absolutely sure about anything, you are merely talking in the air. Points like that are brought up for discussion at the meetings of learned societies such as the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Admittedly, there is no lack of the raw material of knowledge; what is lacking is any idea of how to handle it methodically. Men search here and enquire there, but without ever getting any definite response. We hunger for knowledge, and depart unsatisfied. And so we arrive at this melancholy conclusion, that the only really wise man is the man who knows that he knows nothing.

  Well then, let us put profane history aside and let us concentrate on the one history that really matters, the history dictated by God. Here all is plain sailing; from the creation of the world to the coming of Christ there is an interval of 4,000 years, or, to be quite precise, 4,004. By the year 129 the population of the earth had considerably increased, and so had evil-doing. In the year 1656, came the Flood; in 1757, men set to work to build the Tower of Babel. The vocation of Abraham dates from 2083. The written law was entrusted to Moses 430 years after the vocation of Abraham, 856 years after the Deluge and the same year that the Hebrew people were delivered out of Egypt. Thanks to these firmly established landmarks, Bossuet, composing his noble Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, beholds a succession of epochs which automatically fall into their appointed places in the great scheme of things. Beneath harmonious and majestic porticoes winds the triumphal road which leads to the Messiah. So delightful was it to fare along that road that minds innocent and quiet furnished their whole lives with memories of its milestones, recalling not only the year, but the month, nay, the exact day, on which occurred this or that memorable event recorded by Holy Writ. The faithful opened their books of devotion: on the 18th February in the year 2305 before the birth of Our Lord, Noah sent forth a dove from the Ark. On the 10th March, Jesus received tidings of the sickness of Lazarus; on the 21st March, Jesus cursed the fig-tree; on the 20th August, in the annus mundi 930, died Adam, the first man.[7]

  And then, over against these innocent beliefs, this tranquil peace of mind, loomed up the figure of Chronology. At first sight, it seemed no more than a mild discipline, a salutary exercise designed to train the memory of school-children and to prevent them from getting mixed up about the sequence of events; a dry, rigid sort of thing; a gaunt framework, all bones and ligaments. However, in proportion as the suspicion of confusion in the records of humanity gained ground, so also did the status and reputation of chronology. It was recognized as an indispensable branch of knowledge; in short as a science. It became known as the doctrine of times and epochs. Just as the art of navigation furnishes pilots with rules for sailing the sea without wandering from their course, however long the voyage, so are we indebted to chronology for the skill to find our way with certainty over the vast and shadowy realms of the past. A great undertaking in very truth, that pilgrimage down the long vista of generations dead and gone, peoples and nations that had long since had their day. If chronology was not quite accurately aware of the nature and scope of her laws, this did not hinder her from applying them. She appraised the genuineness of a document, not in the light of the authority behind it, but simply as a matter of pure arithmetic. Chronology pays little heed to the language in which the document is written—French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew or whatever it may be, she is indifferent to its origin or its character. Her nature enables her to flit with ease from the profane to the sacred, for she is, and professes to be, no more than an abstract mathematical device. One thing she knows, however, and knows full well, and that is that it would never do for her to make a mistake in addition.

  In some dim recess, at the far end of their libraries, poring over their books, cogitating, comparing, and collating, specialists, investigators, experts, auditing the account-books of History, pursue their thankless and seemingly innocuous task. If they like it, and they say they love it, then by all means let them get on with it. Pin-pointing a date here, and another one there, totting up the tale of years, how they squabble among themselves! When ordinary folk heard the din of their wrangles, they just laughed. A lot of dryasdusts at their futile games again, they said. But when these learned gentlemen finish their task, or rather their instalment of it (for they began it long ago, as far back as the Renaissance, and finish it they never will), they will have sown more seeds of unrest in quiet minds, and done more to undermine faith in history, than all your open scoffers and anti-religious fanatics ever succeeded in doing. Not that they are all unbelievers; they are not, and some of them go over their sums again and again in the hope of protecting the old beliefs against the encroachments of these new chronologists. The result was that a confused and bitter struggle went on between them. Leibniz joined in the fray; and so did Newton. The currently-received figures seemed pretty easy to add up: Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: and the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years; and he begat sons and daughters. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos. And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters. . . . The grand total of all these successive generations shows four thousand years as separating the creation of the world from the birth of Christ. But it looked as if there were some links missing, as if the chain were not complete, for that total is certainly not big enough. Quite possibly, however, the Hebrews had their own special way of counting. But, if with a view to solving their problems, the chronologists adopt the comparative method and seek for dates and figures in the records of the races bordering on the Jews, what abysmal discrepancies they will encounter! It is confusion worse confounded. More and more difficulties come crowding in upon them, till they find themselves at last in a deeper than Cimmerian darkness.

  Two races, to come at once to the essentials of the problem, looked like bursting the old framework into fragments when they claimed that they had existed, not for four thousand years—a very pale glory, that—but for tens, nay, for hundreds of thousands. Those Egyptians, reputed so wise, so just, who in other matters had been awarded so many marks of esteem, seemed to go completely crazy when it came to the question of dates. Taking a measureless and invincible pride in the glory and antiquity of their race, they traced their origin back to a past so remote, to an abysm of time so unfathomable, that it seemed to merge them with eternity. However, it was no easy matter to refute them. They were accomplished mathematicians, and their records were clear and unequivocal. In the third century before Christ, “the illustrious Manethon, priest or sacrificer of the city of Heliopolis”, had, in obedience to the command of Ptolemy Philadelphus, recorded in writing the history of Egypt. In this chronicle, he enumerated a series of royal dynasties which began before the date traditionally assigned to the Deluge and, uninterrupted by that event,
continued long after it. A record more ancient still, written long before the times of the Ptolemies, had it that kings had reigned in Egypt for a space of 36,525 years, even to the time of Mectanebes, the last of them all, who was driven from the throne by Ochus, king of the Persians, nineteen years before the reign of Alexander the Great.[8]

  Then again there were the Chinese, learned astronomers, men of sagacity and judgment, abundantly furnished with calendars and almanacs. They claimed, and wanted people to believe, that they had existed from a time so remote as to have been anterior to the date when God created light. Was there ever such barefaced impudence! Compared with the Emperors of China, Adam was but a creature of yesterday. “Yam-Guam-Siem has it that, from the beginning of the world down to the reign of the Emperor Tienski, who came to the throne in the year 1620, there is represented a period of not less than nineteen million, three hundred and sixty-nine thousand and ninety-six years.”[9] A formidable problem, there, for the serious-minded folk of those days; a problem which learned men throughout Europe set out to solve, bit by bit, inch by painful inch. In 1672, an Englishman, a student of chronology, John Marsham by name, thought he had found the key to the riddle. Yes, it was true that the Egyptians had had thirty royal dynasties which, if taken end to end, one after another, would exceed the age of the world. But that was the crux of the matter—they must not be put end to end, for there were dynasties that were not consecutive but collateral, and these dynasties had held sway in their respective parts of the country at one and the same time. . . . In 1687, Père Paul Pezron, a monk of the rigid Cistercian rule, put forward a different explanation: four thousand years, he freely agreed, were inadequate to accommodate the ancient Egyptians. Four thousand years, however, is the period given in the Hebrew version of the Bible. But now take the Septuagint reading; there you will get roughly five thousand five hundred years. With those fifteen extra centuries, those dynasties can be housed comfortably enough. That was a victory for Père Pezron, but his triumph was short-lived. It was not merely that even these additional years were not enough to satisfy the arithmeticians, but it was considered a very rash proceeding to go picking and choosing between the different versions of the Scriptures just to suit the convenience of the Egyptians and the Chinese, and Père Pezron was given to understand that he was slipping from chronology and landing himself in impiety. There was an exchange—not at all a courteous one—of treatises and dissertations. From Italy, Fr. Astorini gave currency to a conjecture which Père Tournemine took up again in 1703. In the ordinary way, when some date is mentioned, say, for example, 1600, and then, when it is desired to refer to some subsequent year within the same century, it is customary, not to repeat the entire number, but to say 610, for instance, when the date you really mean is 1610. Who knows but that the Jews did likewise? Perhaps, not realising this, and taking their figures exactly as they stand, we have understated the total by several thousands of years. That was all very well, but how in the world was one to prove that this mode of notation, which was peculiar to the Italians, had also been in operation among the Hebrews? The whole thing was merely substituting one uncertainty for another.

  This difficulty gave rise to another, no less tormenting. Listen yet again to the words of Bossuet: “Thus God, having delivered his people out of the hands of the Egyptians, that he might bring them into the land where he intended them to serve him, made known to them, before establishing them therein, the laws by which they were to order their lives. He wrote, with his own hand, on two tables which he gave to Moses, on Mount Sinai, the foundations of this law, that is to say, the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments, which contain the first principles of man’s duty towards God and towards his fellow-men. To Moses he also gave other precepts.” But some there were who considered that, if the Egyptians were a people of such ancient origin and such profound wisdom, and if the Hebrews dwelt for many years under the domination of the Egyptians, it was logical, indeed necessary, to conclude that the superior civilization would have left its mark on the inferior, and that therefore the Egyptians must have moulded the Hebrews, rather than the other way about. Such was the thesis advanced in the first place by John Marsham, and, later on, in a more strictly scientific form, by John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Both of them ascribed to the Egyptians, whom they greatly admired, a decisive influence in the matter of laws, precepts, religious rites—circumcision, baptism, temples, the priesthood, sacrifices, ceremonies—all these came from the Egyptians. When, in order that he might save his people who had fallen victims to the serpents, Moses set up a brazen serpent which healed all those who gazed upon it, it was no miracle that he wrought; he was but repeating an ancient Egyptian incantation. But if that were so, the chosen people would have been, in their essential beliefs, subservient to a pagan race. No longer could it be held that God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai; Moses would have merely copied the Egyptians, his lords and masters.

  The worthy, the painstaking, Huet, Bishop of Avranches, who, the story went, crammed his house so full of books that one day the place came toppling down about his ears, and who was for ever reading, reading, had a praiseworthy object in view. It was nothing less than to restore Moses to his rightful place, namely, the first place. He set out to show that the whole of Pagan theology derived from the acts, or the writings, of Moses; that the gods of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Persians, as well as those of the Thracians, the Germans, the Gauls, the Bretons and the Romans, all proceeded from Moses. Such was the theme of his Demonstratio evangelica, 1672; and again of his Quaestiones alnetanae de concordia rationis et fidei, 1690. What, however, he failed to perceive was that his argument was double-edged, that it cut both ways, that it could be turned no less effectively against himself. If there were all those resemblances between the Mosaic beliefs and those of Pagan antiquity, was it Moses who inspired the others, or did those other more ancient races hand on their traditions to Moses? Poor Huet! His very success was his undoing, landing the unhappy man in the ranks of the unbelievers. “My father”, Louis Racine mildly observed, “did not at all approve of this learned man making use of profane learning to buttress up religion”. Antoine Arnauld was less delicate but more direct in what he said: “It would be difficult to imagine a book more fundamentally irreligious; or one better fitted to persuade the budding free-thinker that, although one ought to have a religion, it did not greatly matter which, seeing there was good in all of them, and that even Paganism could stand comparison with Christianity”.

  That was where the best intentions in the world might bring one. Well; it was a case of one difficulty after another, of doubt piled on doubt. It was a crucial phase in that unending battle which goes on from generation to generation, only its aspect varying according to the fashion of the day, the battle, that is to say, of Science versus Religion. Listen to the Abbé Renaudot, who, in the year 1702, was giving his views on John Marsham’s book at a meeting of the Académie des Inscriptions: his words are vibrant alike with admiration and distress: “In its own particular line, this book is perfect; perfect in respect of the orderliness, the method, the precision, the conciseness and the profound scholarship which distinguish it throughout. At the same time, it is difficult not to animadvert on an author, who, either because he has a special leaning towards Egypt, and its antiquities, or for some other reason best known to himself, has so attenuated everything that lends dignity to the Scriptures and their ancient origin, that he has provided the free-thinker with more food for scepticism than the majority of the declared opponents of religion ever did”.

  People hesitated; they did not know what to think. Of course one might bolt and bar oneself up within the fortress and hurl back the arguments of the chronologists, telling them that these Chaldaeans, these Babylonians, with their demands for myriads of years to satisfy their claims to racial antiquity, were nothing more or less than a pack of liars; that St. Augustine had said the last word in the matter when he spoke as follows: If the profane authors tell us thi
ngs contrary to what is set down in the Bible, we should regard them as untrue.

  But when they ventured out into the open, ill-equipped as they were to defend themselves against weapons which religious apologetics had so far done nothing to neutralize, the combatants were involved in some very perilous adventures indeed. Figures, as vertiginous as they were vague, lingered on in people’s minds: 23,000 years; 49,000 years; 100,000 years; 170,000 years; should one follow the example of Father Antonio Foresti who selected his dates because they were convenient rather than because they were correct? Between the two extremes, one claiming that it was 6,984 years and the other that it was 3,740, since the world began, he counted no less than seventy intermediate opinions. Impossible to accept or verify them all. However, he had to make up his mind, and he made it up in the light of practical considerations quite unconnected with science. Foresti picked his authors on the same lines. These authors, no matter how many you take, all tell different stories. Who’s right and who’s wrong? If you choose one, you are bound to give the lie to the others. Still, one of them had to be chosen; unless one took a leaf out of the book of the cautious Perizonius who, addressing his students at Leyden, had repudiated the encroachments of Pyrrhonism. Nine years after his inaugural lecture, he said what he thought about this chronological controversy. He said it with his customary terseness and with sound, if somewhat chastened, common sense. Demolishing the arguments of one’s predecessors was a comparatively simple matter. The constructive part of the business was not so easy. The Egyptians themselves had nothing really certain to offer. The most one could do was to establish a few time-relationships in the history of the various ancient peoples, without attempting to pin them down to any definite date. In this way, Perizonius hoped to salvage something at least from the great shipwreck. What was happening now to those ideas which at one time had seemed so stable and so sure? To those tenets at once so simple and so imposing? Where now were those calm and confident affirmations, those ever-fixed marks, those ever constant dates? What was one to believe? How could we discern the hand of Providence in what was now a welter of confusion? How were we to assess the value of this or that fact in the field of knowledge, when the facts themselves looked like slipping through our fingers? The new arrivals bade fair to sap the foundations of History, of Providence and of Authority alike. The outlook at last became agonising in the extreme. What! The more one searched, the less one found? Was that the measure of the thing? The past became more and more shrouded in mist, and all attempts to dispel it did but render it the more opaque. Time the all-devourer, Time which tends to envelop all things in endless oblivion, has all but hidden from man the date of his creation, the knowledge of how long he has dwelt upon the earth. So true is this that, in spite of all the efforts that have been made in our day to discover the number of years that intervene between the creation of the world and the coming of the Messiah, not only have we failed to reach the truth; we have wandered yet farther from it.[10]