The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  He was by nature a tough customer. He dearly loved a good set-to, with plenty of fire and fury, and he revelled in the commotion, which, starting in the university, spread throughout the city. He was especially fond of practising those subtle ruses whereby an overweening, blustering adversary is baffled and befooled, or officious pomp deflated by a pointed sally or a shaft of satire. Nor was he unduly troubled by the scandalous reputation he bore, which caused people to nudge each other as they saw him in the street and whisper, “There goes Christian Thomasius, a fellow that stands in awe of nothing and nobody.”

  In 1680, he returned to Leipzig as a privat docent and gave full rein to his ideas. His teaching soon became widely known as something both novel and provocative. Metaphysics, he said, was simply beating the air; as for theology, let the theologians keep it to themselves. There were only two branches of knowledge that really mattered: logic and history; the former because it taught you to think clearly; the latter because it afforded you a number of useful examples, some to be imitated; some, not. Knowledge, he said, should have some tangible object in view, should lead to some immediate practical advantage; justice should be social justice. Of prejudice of every kind, of prejudice, the parent of every ill, he was the determined and relentless foe. Prejudices came of giving children and young people the most pitiable rubbish to swallow, and never encouraging them to reason things out for themselves. Another cause lay in the haphazard way people take in whatever they are told to believe. And he would wind up by repeating his favourite dicta: the light of Nature is one thing; the light of Revelation, another. Theology belongs to the Biblical world; philosophy to the world of Reason. Theology sees to man’s welfare in the next world, philosophy to his welfare in this one; and that is by far the more pressing.

  That sort of thing was more than the University authorities could stomach. Thomasius was poisoning the minds of the young; he was leading them straight to atheism. They attacked him; he hit back. Swathed in the ample folds of his academic gown, behatted with a monumental wig whose ringlets foamed in profusion about his shoulders, tall and massive, he stood his ground, firm as a rock. They pelted him with arguments, with pamphlets, with threats; they dragged him before the beaks and big-wigs, they ordered him to stop his lectures—they only added to his zest for the fray. Sometimes, he had positive flashes of genius, as on the day, still a red-letter one in the annals of German Universities, when he posted up the syllabus of his forthcoming course of lectures written, not in Latin, but in the vernacular. And what a subject he had chosen! As he wished to talk to his students as man to men; as it was his object to make them, not so much barristers, or judges, as thoughtful human beings, it was his purpose, he told them, to study the sort of human type which Baltasar Gracian presented to the world, the type, that is to say, of the hero. This led him to consider another type of humanity, the “honnête homme”, the “gentleman”, the “man of breeding”; and this brought him to “la civilisation française”, to those arts of social life of which France is par excellence the mistress, the exemplar. In his inaugural lecture he dealt with the question how far Germans ought to imitate the French. Well, they ought to study them, of course, and to acquaint themselves with their leading writers, with their famous books, the Logique of Port Royal, for example; they should familiarize themselves with their language and with all the delicate, psychological subtleties which it reflects. But they should not imitate them slavishly, with apelike fidelity, or play the common plagiarist. The French, he said, are ahead of us in Science, in Taste, in Manners. Instead of trotting along submissively behind them, let us get up-sides with them and not allow these highly superior gentlemen to put us on a par with a lot of Muscovy savages. We’ve got to show them what we Germans can do. Our future will be what we ourselves make it.

  In the thick of the fight, he would laugh aloud; for, says Gracian, it is an advantage, not a drawback to have a merry spirit, provided we keep our merriment within bounds. There’s no better seasoning than a pinch of humour. He spiced his rationalism with a very generous pinch indeed when, in 1688, he brought out a journal on the lines of what he thought a journal ought to be. Again there was a mighty fluttering in the dovecots of the doctrinaires. It turned out, this journal, not to be in Latin, like the Acta eruditorum of which Leipzig was so immensely proud, but in German. Thomasius thought the world of it. A journal at once flippant and serious, frivolous yet sober, a journal which talked about books, some grave, some gay, a journal inspired by the spirit of a man who was himself the very personification of Irony and Reason: Erasmus!

  The tension went on getting worse and worse till at last, in 1693, things reached breaking point, and Thomasius had to say goodbye to Leipzig. Those who refuse to go with the swim must expect things like that; they are all in the day’s work. So he betook himself to Berlin. He happened to arrive just when Frederick III of Brandenburg was in the middle of turning the Academy of Nobles at Halle into a University, and one which was destined to become a great centre of intellectual activity. There Christian Thomasius found himself in clover; he was in fact the life and soul of the whole place, its real creator, its inspiration. It was there that he began to busy himself with the Devil.

  And what energy he put into it, piling argument upon argument, some of them a re-hash of Bekker, some his own particular brew. Neither the evidence, nor the Scriptures if read aright, nor common sense, nor logic furnished any grounds for maintaining such a superstition: This sort of thing, for example—Satan presents himself to a man in animal or human shape; they strike a bargain; Satan gets the man’s soul; the man gets the power to put the evil eye on men and things. Sometimes Thomasius refines upon his theme, as thus: This absurd idea about the Devil is taken from books and pious books at that. That is where—in books—Catholics, from their childhood upward, have seen the Devil in the guise of some horrible monster; that is where Lutherans, from their childhood upward, have seen the Devil wearing a monk’s habit, complete with cloven heel and horns poking through his cowl. Sometimes, he waxes indignant: You would think, he says, that after Luther, after all the fables, Roman and papistical, had been exploded, the Reformers would have shed this absurd delusion. Not so; it still holds its ground in popular belief; indeed, it seems to be actually gaining ground among the Protestants, among Lutherans in particular. The shame of the thing!

  But it is not only the philosopher that speaks; the professor of law, the barrister who has had some experience in defending people charged with witchcraft in the criminal courts takes up the tale. In Saxony, there were laws, and quite recent ones, which laid down that anyone who should so far forget himself as a Christian, as to make a compact with the Devil, should, whether he had harmed anyone or not, be tied to the stake and burned until he was dead. Ah! by the ever-spreading light of the Cartesian philosophy, by the march of reason, let the German jurists and theologians cease to fall into an error that leads to crime! Nothing, perhaps, is more characteristic of Thomasius than this practical intervention of his; it is a sort of outward and visible sign of his zeal for justice and humanity.

  In 1709, he had the intense satisfaction of refusing a professorship of which, in repentant mood, the University of Leipzig made him the offer. At Halle he had come to stay, at Halle he passed the remaining years of his long life; at Halle, in 1728, he breathed his last, the glorious inaugurator of the German Aufklôrung, a hero in the great struggle for enlightenment.

  We do not have to delve very far into the depths of the human consciousness before encountering a seam of superstition; there are always plenty of outcrops. The Marquise de Brinvilliers and her female accomplice Voisin were not only poisoners; they were also held to be witches. In 1680, one of the most exalted personages in France, the maréchal de Luxembourg, was arrested and flung into prison on a charge of having made a pact with the Devil. The discussions about the Loudun women, said to be possessed, ancient history though it was, still went on; and plenty of other cases of the same kind. In 1692, the skill of a certain wiz
ard with his magic wand—his name was Jacques Aymar—had led to the arrest of the murderers. He became famous. Whenever he got near a thief, or a dicer, his hazel-twig would begin to turn and twitch violently. He threw himself into the spirit of the part; he swooned, he went off into trances, he was everywhere in demand, the sensation of the age! And he was not the only one. At Toulouse, in the Dauphiné, in Picardy, in Flanders, similar marvels were all the talk. Curés, monks, women, children could detect the hidden presence of water or of gold. We must not run away with the idea that this sort of thing was confined to France. Germany, too, came into the picture. The magic wand was used in reducing dislocations, healing wounds, staunching haemorrhages. Similar practices were rife in Bohemia, Sweden, Hungary, Italy and Spain. “Zahuris is the name given in Spain to certain men possessed of such extraordinarily penetrating vision that they can detect springs of water under the soil, as well as metals, hidden treasure and dead bodies. They have very red eyes.”[6] In Egypt, the hazel-twig is used to relieve animals swollen with excess of urine. In all these stories there were plenty of impostures, but as in some instances the twig did undoubtedly move of its own accord in the hands of people of unquestionable probity, its mysterious motions were inevitably ascribed to the Devil. And besides this kind of practitioners, there were wonder-workers of every conceivable description, adepts in black magic, fortune-tellers, interpreters of cards and I know not what.

  But all this time, opposing forces were at work; the forces of common sense. The number of books that were written about Jacques Aymar—for and against! In fact, it was the affair of the Gold Tooth over again. “Following up two short books that had already appeared on the subject, Vallement came out with a third, consisting of six hundred duodecimo pages, purporting to explain on ordinary mechanical principles why it was that the divining rod twisted about as it did. M.P. of the Oratory would have none of it and clearly demonstrated that the rod could not possibly move without the Devil’s having a hand in it. The upshot was that, after all these excellent books had been written, Jacques Aymar was discovered to be a swindling knave, and M. le Prince had him bundled out of the country. What from the philosopher’s point of view is particularly amusing about this story is that Vallement began his book by telling his readers that M. Van Dale’s story of the Gold Tooth had put him on his guard, and that before attempting any explanation of the marvel, he had taken particular care to establish its authenticity.” Dubos told this story with a chuckle in a letter he wrote Bayle on the 27th April, 1696. Brossette, who had seen, yes seen, the wonderful man with his own eyes, and had not quite recovered from the experience when he unburdened himself at some length about the matter in a letter to his friend Boileau, was inclined to think there was something in it all. The letter is dated Lyons, 25th September, 1706, and it reads as follows: “I saw a man here yesterday whose powers, or natural gifts if you prefer it so, are by no means easy to explain. I refer to the celebrated Jacques Aymar, or the Man with the Magic Wand, who, as a matter of fact, is a peasant belonging to Saint-Marcellin in Dauphiné some forty miles or so from Lyons. They get him to come here when there is anything particular they want to investigate or discover. He told me some really extraordinary things about this water-divining skill, how he can locate hidden springs, trace displaced landmarks, hidden coin, stolen goods and how he can expose murder and foul play. He described the violent pains and paroxysms that come upon him when he is on the scene of a crime or in the neighbourhood of its perpetrators. First of all, he gets an acute burning sensation about the heart, this is followed by nausea and the vomiting of blood and then he goes off into a dead faint. All this happens to him without his being in the least aware that there is anything for him to find out, and these manifestations seem to have more to do with his body as a whole than with his divining-rod. If you would like any further particulars, I can supply them.” No; Boileau doesn’t want any further particulars. He is not at all impressed by his friend’s account and his reply is distinctly gruff: “Auteuil, 30th September, 1706. My dear Sir, I really am bound to confess that it utterly passes my comprehension how a man like you could have been so foolish as to let yourself be taken in by a knave whose rascalities have been thoroughly exposed, and who wouldn’t find anyone in Paris, not even among the nursemaids and little children, to listen to his balderdash. In the days of Dagobert or Charles Martel, people might have been deceived by such mountebanks, but are we, in the enlightened age of Louis the Great, to give ear to such rubbish? And doesn’t it look as if our common sense had deserted us not long since, together with out victories and conquests?” Not at all; common sense was very much on the alert. “I am told that there used to be a number of people in Paris who made out that they were diviners and that they got a lot of money by that means. I am not in the least surprised. There are so many fools of all sorts and conditions in that vast city that it is no wonder the diviners do a brisk trade there.”[7]

  These were the ideas and protestations of a few independent thinkers; but, apart from them, there was a concerted movement on foot which, while aiming a blow at superstition, aimed an equally shrewd one at religion. There was never the slightest attempt to differentiate between the two; they were invariably treated as one.

  Comets are not portents of ill. Oracles are hoaxes, pure and simple. God never wrote His decrees on the entrails of animals; nor did He confide them to moonstruck madmen. If by sorcerers you mean knaves or lunatics, then sorcerers there are; otherwise, there are none. There are no such things as devils, nor is there the Devil. There is no ultimate authority from whose verdict there is no appeal. There are no traditions free from the taint of error or misrepresentation. There are no miracles, for Nature does not take its cue from man’s delirium.[8] Nothing is supernatural. No mystery is insoluble by human reason: “Would you like me to tell you, as one old friend to another, how it is you follow what the crowd hold in your ideas about things, instead of consulting the oracle of Reason? It is because you believe that there is something divinely inspired about it . . . because you imagine that the common consent of so many peoples down the ages, can only be the outcome of some manner of inspiration —vox populi, vox dei; it is because, being a theologian, you are accustomed to give up reasoning when you think you are in the presence of a ‘mystery’.”[9]

  [1]“Letter to M.L.A.D.C., Doctor of the Sorbonne. Wherein it is proved in the light of various arguments derived from Philosophy and Theology that comets are in no sense portents of disaster . . . ,” 1682. “Divers reflections recorded in writing for a Doctor of the Sorbonne in connexion with the comet which appeared in December, 1680 . . . ,” 1683; 3rd edition, 1699. “Additional matter appended to Divers reflections on the comets . . . ,” 1694. “Continuation of Divers reflections . . . ,” 1705.

  [2]Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses . . . à l’occasion de la comète, 1683, §83.

  [3]Ibid., § 68.

  [4]Mélange de remarques critiques, historiques philosophiques, théologiques sur deux dissertations de M. Toland, intitulées l’une, L’Homme sans superstition, et l’autre, Les Origines judaïques, par Élie Benoist, pasteur de l’Eglise wallonne de Delft, Delft, 1712.

  [5]Éloge de M. Marsigli.

  [6]Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Zahuris.

  [7]Richard Simon, Lettres, t. III, p. 51.

  [8]Tractatus theologico-politicus, Preface.

  [9]Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses . . . à l’occasion de la comète, § 8.

  III

  RICHARD SIMON AND BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

  IT WAS not to be expected that the Bible would escape the critical onslaught. The symbol, as it was, of Authority, it was only natural to submit it to the searching eye of criticism.

  When the critics could manage to make out that it was self-contradictory in this passage or in that, how they exulted! For example: We are told in the Book of Genesis that Adam was the first man, and Eve the first woman, and that they had two sons, Cain and Abel; that Cain killed Abel; that Cain said unto God, “My sin
is too great to be forgiven me . . . therefore whoso shall find me shall slay me”. Whoso shall find me; so there were men in the world already, before Adam. Isaac de la Peyrère had landed that fish a long time since, and the Pre-adamites were hand in glove with the “intellectuals”.

  Take the essay which, purporting to be a letter addressed to a London nobleman, was written in the year 1695 by an Oxford M.A. who did not reveal his name. This attack takes a different line. All the Eastern races, and the Hebrews are no exception, have a wonderful gift for inventing myths. Just as the history of the Persians, the Medes and the Assyrians is a farrago of imaginary tales, so too the Bible, so too the Talmud, are a mass of fables. The Arabs outshone the Hebrews with their metaphors, their similes, their gift for fiction, as witness their Alcoran, their many poets who, in the fulness of time, inspired the writers of Spain and Provence with their tales of Knights Errant, Giants, Dragons, Enchanted Castles and all the paraphernalia of Chivalry. Holy Writ, he concludes, “is altogether mysterious, allegorical, and enigmatical”. It betrays a kinship with those fables of the Orient which are no more than “romantick hypotheses”.[1]