The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Everybody knows about the story of the Gold Tooth, a diverting tale, well conceived and full of significance. Let us read it once more, for its lesson never grows stale, and as we read let us recall the sensation it made when it first came out. Fontenelle, while seemingly indulging in a little harmless amusement, touches in reality on three matters of profound human concern: Science, History, and Religion.

  In the year 1593, the report got about that, somewhere in Silesia, a child of seven had lost all its teeth, but that one of the missing.molars had been replaced by another, all of gold. In 1595, one, Horstius, Professor of Medicine at the University of Helmstad, wrote an account of this tooth, giving it as his opinion that it was partly natural, partly miraculous, declaring that God had bestowed it on the child in order to console the Christians for the sufferings they had undergone at the hands of the Turks. Truly, a strange sort of consolation! And of what possible concern could this tooth have been to the Christians, or the Turks? That same year, so that the Golden Tooth should not be lacking in historians, Rullandus wrote another account of it. Two years later, Ingolsteterus, another man of learning, wrote a work in which he contested Rullandus’ views on the Golden Tooth, whereupon Rullandus came out with an elaborate and erudite rejoinder. Yet another eminent person, named Libavius, collected and collated all the statements that had been put forward in regard to the tooth, to which he appended a theory of his own. These works were all very impressive; only one thing was lacking and that was any clear evidence that the tooth was a gold one at all. On its being handed to a goldsmith for examination, he discovered that a piece of gold leaf had with amazing dexterity been superimposed on the tooth. First came the books about it; afterwards, the expert examination by the goldsmith.

  That is what happens in all manner of cases. It is just human nature. What in my view brings home the extent of our ignorance is not so much the facts which really are facts, but which we cannot explain, as the explanations we produce of the facts which are not facts at all; which is as much as to say that while we have no principles that should lead us to the truth, we have plenty of others well calculated to lead us away from it.

  Learned men of science clearly demonstrated how it was that underground places were warm in winter and cool in summer; then other scientists still more learned, came along with the discovery that the whole thing was a mistake and that the original statement was entirely incorrect; underground places were not warm in winter and cool in summer.

  Historical questions are still more liable to this sort of error. We discuss and argue about what the historians have told us. But these historians—what manner of men were they? Had they not their own passionate predilections? Were they not credulous, or ill-informed, or inaccurate? Find me a single one who examined his subject, whatever it may have been, with a completely unprejudiced and attentive eye.

  All this is especially pertinent when your particular subject-matter happens to be concerned with religion. In such cases, according to the side you are on, it is no easy matter to avoid ascribing to a false religion virtues which it cannot claim, or to a true one, virtues which it does not need. However, we ought clearly to understand that, just as we can never add truth to what is true already, so we can never impart truth to what is intrinsically false.

  At first, he seems to be indulging in a little playful banter; but gradually, as he proceeds, his tone becomes graver and graver. Through all these airs and graces, the underlying idea, profound though it be, is clear enough and it obviously tallies with what Bayle had said in the matter of comets; the likeness is unmistakable. There is the same appeal to a wider audience than that of the professional philosophers and theologians, the same pitiless denunciation, first, of human frailty, the primary cause of all error, next of tradition, which blindly takes error to its bosom, fortifies it and renders it all but invincible. Some absurd idea or other crops up; the Ancients take it seriously and give it their imprimatur; then we, the later generations, accept it with our eyes shut, on the authority of the Ancients. The process never varies. Get half a dozen people to believe that the sun is not the source of daylight, and the thing is done. In time, whole nations will come to believe it. Like Bayle, Fontenelle is a fierce opponent of authority; the doctrine of universal consent he considers absurd as affording proof that such and such a proposition is true. Whether a fairy-tale is believed by a hundred people, or a hundred million, for a single year, or for generations, it still remains a fairy-tale. Like Bayle, too, he would not hear of miracles, and lastly, like Bayle, he declined to recognize any specific distinction between Pagan and Christian. Christian truths were not prefigured in Pagan rites; the Pagans bequeathed their errors to the Christians.

  A lover of the good things of this world, almost uncannily “wise”, he was too fondly addicted to his little comforts to risk calling down the wrath of the gods about his ears. Therefore he fought without making any great noise about it; but he fought all the same. He knew that at Bologna there was a scientific academy that went by the name of the Academy of Restless Souls. Restless! That was the word. The name was admirably suited to those “modern philosophers who, being independent of control by any authority, are seekers now and for ever”.[5] He is one of the Restless Ones. Like the rest of the band he feels that he has a mission to fulfil, and he feels that it is not going to be an easy one. To reject some new idea out of hand, or to concur with some old and commonly accepted one, does not require any exercise of the reason; but to abandon a long-standing opinion or belief, to take sides with the innovators, that is not so easy, that deserves some credit: “It takes some effort to strive against the stream, but none to drift along with it.” Believers are nothing in his estimation; unbelievers everything, as this dictum makes clear: “What people who believe in a thing have to say in its praise, is nothing to its credit; but what people who disbelieve in it may have to say to its detriment may serve to destroy it. The believers may know of no reason why they should not believe; non-believers can hardly be ignorant of the reasons for believing.”

  Of still more ancient date, still more deeply rooted in the popular mind, still more general was belief in witches; abominable creatures who hied them to their Sabbath, bestriding weird mounts, who held high festival with the Evil One. Dreadful tales were told of them. By their spells, they could stop a husband from fondling his spouse; they led well-conducted, virtuous young women astray by dropping a charm of some sort into their food or drink. They poisoned the beasts of the field, they made the fruits of the earth to wither, and man to languish and die, maimed women big with child, and wrought scores of other iniquities. Still more wicked are magicians; they hold familiar intercourse with the Spirit of Evil, whom, to such as are curious to behold him, they can present under whatsoever guise they please. They have a secret trick for winning at card-play and of enriching those to whom they reveal it. They can foretell the future. They can take the shape of any animal they please, and assume the most terrifying forms; they enter houses where they utter shouts and yells and appalling groans; they take on fiery shapes loftier than trees, dragging chains behind them with their feet and brandishing serpents in their hands. After a while, they fill people with such terror that there is nothing for it but to send for the clergy to come and exorcise them. . . .

  They were very numerous: they were found among the American savages; among the Laplanders. These Lapland wizards, having made a compact with the Devil, have power to stay a vessel in its course, and to change the aspect of the sky. They beat for a long time on a kind of magic drum, after which they go off into a trance and lie motionless, face to the ground, what time their soul leaves the body and ranges far and wide. In Lapland, you might almost say, you come across a sorcerer every step you take.

  However, there is no need to go all the way to Lapland for your sorcerers. For example, at Tedworth, in old England, there is a house from which a drum-beater had to be expelled by the occupier. However, by some unearthly means, the creature got in again, and began making a
horrible rumbling sound, intermingled with divers other diabolical noises. The truth of the story is established beyond all possible doubt. A clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Glanvil, went to the house and examined every nook and corner from cellar to attic; he heard noises, but he saw no one. People who refuse to accept such a clear proof of the Devil’s existence and power are impious, unbelieving Sadducees. The Sadducees are making some headway in England, paving the way for atheism by casting doubts on the existence of an Infinite Being; but all good folk, mindful of the sinister activities of the Tedworth ghost, will give them the trouncing they deserve.

  So we see how this question, no new one, but one that time after time recurred afresh, still had power to disturb men’s minds. Witchcraft, charms, spells and so on—what exactly were they? The spiteful deeds of infernal spirits, of ubiquitous demons who take pleasure in tormenting human beings and in luring them on to commit evil? Or do we mean the multifarious manifestations of the power of the Devil, of Satan who, leading Jesus Christ to the top of a high mountain and showing him all the Kingdoms of the Earth, and the glory thereof, essayed to tempt him? Or are they but evil dreams, mere illusions, figments of the mind, to which we mortals are always prone, cheating fantasies of an overheated imagination, imagination, mother of lies?

  And so, for yet a third time, there was nothing for it but to renew the contest, or, more properly, to intervene in a contest which seemed endless, but which, if it were humanly possible, should now at last be brought to a conclusion. And it was high time to intervene, and to intervene energetically, since it was now no longer a mere abstract question of truth or error that was at issue; it was a matter of flesh and blood, of accusers and accused, of courts of law, of judges and of victims. If some European countries were inclined to leniency in these matters, forbidding proceedings to be taken against a lot of poor unfortunate wretches suspected of having commerce with the Devil but in point of fact quite innocent of that or any other crime; if, in 1672, an edict of the King of France had forbidden the courts to take cognizance of bare, unsupported charges of sorcery, other countries went on pursuing alleged magicians, necromancers and demoniacs with the utmost rigour of the law, sending them to prison, the torture-chamber, the gallows or the stake.

  A Dutchman, then a German, Balthasar Bekker, and next Christian Thomasius, with more vigour than any of the others, are typical of the triumphant rationalism of the time. A queer figure of a man was this Balthasar Bekker. From a pair of broad white bands emerged a massive square jaw, a huge mouth, an enormous nose and two great staring eyes surmounted by a pair of bushy eyebrows. And the man himself was as queer as his appearance. Though a pastor, he was—he couldn’t help it—a disciple of Descartes from whom he acquired the art of clear and logical thinking. An incident that had happened to him earlier in his life had imbued him with an enduring contempt for the judgment of his fellows. It appears that, while carrying on his pastoral work in Frisia, he had compiled a catechism which was condemned by more than two hundred pastors in solemn synod assembled, not a single one of whom, according to him, was able to give any reason for the condemnation. On two subsequent occasions, the book was formally approved, although he had not made the smallest change in its doctrinal content. How, after a thing like that, could one help concluding that a sound Christian, and particularly a teacher, would do well to pay no attention to what others thought and said, but to rely, for his rule of faith, on himself alone? Henceforward, he would pursue one object in life, apart that is to say from the care of his flock, and that should be to denounce error and unmask shams wherever he found them. He was not going to follow in the footsteps of anyone, not even of the learned, who were always ready to play the sedulous ape to those who had made a name for themselves in the world, and were simply hide-bound with prejudice. He would do his best to make people wiser, though it was to be confessed that few betrayed any very enthusiastic desire to submit to the process. It is always so convenient to concur, in thought and action, with the general run of people; to repeat what you hear others repeating day after day; so easy to shout with the crowd; such an effort to think for yourself! Like Toland, he was intoxicated with reason, this Balthasar Bekker. But, at all events, he was valiant, sincere and full of energy. He was fired with that revolutionary ardour which is an indispensable part of the armoury of an intellectual crusader.

  Setting out to do battle with prejudices, he had no difficulty in finding them; there were plenty of them ready to his hand. He, too, began by exculpating the comets; but the subject that engrossed him beyond all others was the Devil. The Devil was his major obsession; the Devil puts in an appearance in all his sermons, and went on doing so till at last in a weighty volume which he brought out in 1691: De betooverte Wereld, the World Enchanted, he cast him out. It was his mission to disenchant the world.

  He starts off at a lively pace. Belief in the Devil and all his works, in his supposed agents and their evil deeds won’t bear examination in the light of day. We have only to trace the idea to its source, to note its development throughout the ages and in various countries, to recognize that it was of Pagan origin and that Christianity had been tainted with it. And although Protestants, since their rupture with the Pope, had to some extent shaken it off, it still exercised a baneful effect on them. Don’t tell me that it is founded on the Scriptures. On the Scriptures as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church, perhaps; but not on the Scriptures interpreted in the light of reason; that is to say, interpreted by him, Balthasar Bekker. For example, the Scriptures speak of angels; since, however, they tell us nothing of their nature, of their essence, we may assume that they are ordinary mortals entrusted by God with a special mission and therefore endowed by Him with extraordinary powers. The Scriptures make mention of evil spirits, but here again they simply mean men, but men depraved and given to sin. They describe the temptation of Adam, but here again there is not a word in the whole narrative to warrant the idea that the Devil can exert any direct influence on the soul or the body of man. They give an account of the temptation of Jesus Christ, but they say nothing to lead us to believe that the Devil was other than a wicked man. They tell us that Jesus Christ healed folk who were possessed of the Devil, but it was customary in those days to attribute serious diseases to devils, and indeed to apply the word to the diseases themselves. Christ was merely availing himself of the metaphorical mode of expression current in his day; consequently, when we speak of the healing of persons possessed of the devil, what we mean is, not the literal driving out of devils, but the healing of maladies only too real. In brief, “if we consider the Scriptures with a perfectly open and unbiased mind, we shall certainly not attribute to the Devil those powers and activities which their preconceived ideas led the commentators and translators to ascribe to him”. In our own day, we have had experience of magicians, enchanters or sorcerers, who have been very wicked people, spiritually and morally corrupt; but without having had any private or exclusive communication with the Devil.

  Balthasar Bekker’s opinions brought upon him the censure of his Church, but he died still clinging to them. He had made a point of having his book translated into French, himself keeping an eye on the rendering, lest it should be disfigured by any of those distortions and misrepresentations which seem to be the inevitable portion of the most successful works. The precaution was a wise one, for the book, in its French guise, had a very extensive circulation. It was also translated into English and German, and was read all over Europe.

  However, the country in which sorcerers were hunted down with the grimmest determination was, at that time, Germany. No great while since, the death had occurred of a celebrated jurist, one of those terrifying people who are quite sure that they are the repositories of all truth and all justice, and remorselessly condemn their brothers for their own good. Benedict Carpzow is said to have boasted that he had read the Bible right through from cover to cover fifty-three times and that he had received Holy Communion at least once a month while devoting his life to tig
htening up the regulations directed against, and increasing the penalties exacted from, the practitioners of the black art. He had convicted, or been the means of convicting, some thousands of them. However, it so happened that it was Germany that was destined to produce, a generation later, the man who, of all others, was most effective in opposing these barbarous cruelties. His name was Christian Thomasius and his mere emergence on the scene is sufficient to show how the times had changed.

  At Leipzig, where he was born in 1655, Christian Thomasius had been reared on sound principles, as befitted a respectable professor’s son. He had been taught to think on Aristotelian lines and to believe precisely what those austere guardians of orthodoxy, the pastors, taught him to believe. At the age of twenty, having completed his training, he went to Frankfort, there to become a teacher in his turn. He knew exactly what it behoved him to do in order to uphold authority, and to safeguard traditions which left no scope for independent thinking in matters intellectual, or for any sort of latitude in the conduct of everyday life.

  But it so happened that, in the year 1675, he made acquaintance with the works of Pufendorf who, by drawing a distinction between Natural Law and Divine Law, had completely laicized the character of juridical studies. For Thomasius, this was nothing short of a revelation. The doctrine of Natural Law, which he had opposed without having had any close acquaintance with it, was henceforth his Credo; he traced it back to its basic principles, and now behold the one-time Champion of Dogma transformed into a firebrand of revolution! No more passive acceptance of doctrines, no more blind following of the blind, for him! In future when I examine a doctrine I shall not enquire as to the position and reputation of its upholders, I shall simply ask what degree of evidence there is to support it. I shall study the arguments for and against, and in making my decision I shall be guided solely by the light of my own intelligence. Instead of behaving like the submissive vassal of an intellectual oligarchy, I shall model myself on one of those heroes of ancient times who took up arms against the tyrant they had served, so that liberty might triumph.