The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  And although the earth and air that are implicated in the garden plants, or the water about the fish in the pond, are themselves neither plant nor fish, they nevertheless contain them though generally in forms so minute as to be imperceptible by our senses.

  Therefore nothing in the whole universe is barren, or sterile or devoid of life; there is no chaos, no confusion, save to the outward view. . . .[4]

  There we have the affirmation of a sovereign harmony of such a nature, that drinking deep thereof, we find ourselves within the realms of perfect love.

  THE NEW SCIENCE

  Naples! the sun! what joy to be alive! Hark to the shouting and the tumult! See, in the narrow, winding streets, what swarms of people, the most mercurial people in the world! What vivacity! What zest! Where shall we find their like? And how keen they are to learn, to improve their minds! How animated they are! How eagerly they converse! Look at their assemblies, their salons, where men, carrying the burden of profound learning with graceful ease, discuss the various questions that engage the attention of philosophers and men of science, consider the various schools of thought and weigh the facts. At Naples, which receives, because it always keeps its ears open, the latest tidings of all that is being said and thought in Europe, at Naples, the old, original, tumultuous Naples, which stands forth as the very embodiment of force and vitality, there was born into the world on the 23rd June, 1668, a certain Giambattista Vico.

  Every sort of hindrance that fetters the spirit, he knew; yet he managed to evade them all. He might, for example, have been an infant prodigy—he escaped. He might have been one of those too docile disciples who meekly lap up everything their masters tell them; he escaped. He might have become a slave to his profession; he escaped. Finally, he might have become prosperous, one of the greatest perils a man of ideas can be threatened by. That, too, he escaped. He read Aristotle and all the Greeks, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Gassendi, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz without surrendering himself to any of them. He took four models as his guides. They were Plato, Tacitus, Bacon (who realized “that the sciences, both human and divine, had a lot further to go, and that such few discoveries as they had made still had need of correction”), and Grotius who “brought together under a single code of law the whole province of philosophy, and who based his theology on the history of facts, whether fabled or authentic, as recorded in three languages— Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the only learned languages of antiquity which have been handed down to us by the Christian religion”. However, the influence of these geniuses did not deter him from criticizing them very thoroughly. Solitary, majestic, melancholy, he determined to be himself; himself and none other.

  There are two sorts of intelligence, the intelligence which absorbs, and the intelligence which creates. Vico possessed them both. He would plan out a route for himself, and then incontinently abandon it, from sheer impulsiveness. He revelled in metaphor and imagery. He would tell himself that he would proceed in his analysis step by step, and then suddenly, off he would go, up into the skies, on the wings of some inward intuition! He will begin to demonstrate something in the most approved logical manner, and then, because he is in such a tearing hurry, he will forsake the line he has chosen, not because he sees some obstacle ahead of him, but simply because it is his nature so to do. He is persistent, and will tell you the same thing over and over again; he is impatient, he outstrips himself, and tells you his conclusion before he is done with his preliminaries. He hankers after the novel, the daring, the paradoxical. He loves disentangling a thread of truth from a skein of error, and then, holding it up for all to see, cries, “’Tis I did it, I, Giambattista Vico!” There is no suggestion of classical restraint about him; fiery, intense, to an almost insane degree, he is the very personification of the Soul Unsatisfied. He is never tired of proving things, of re-shaping his text, of clarifying his ideas, of impressing on his readers the marvellous nature of his discoveries. He was a tenacious customer, not easy to get on with; in fact, quite the reverse. Overbearing, irascible, he persuaded himself that he was endowed with superior intellectual gifts which his contemporaries failed to recognize, and their blindness gave him pain. Therefore, he redoubled his efforts to bring them to see things in his light. He battled with them; he battled with himself. What he felt he absolutely must do, sooner or later, was to initiate them into his great secret, the secret of the New Science.

  New, indeed, it was; in the first place by reason of the faculty it liked best to employ, the faculty that went by the name of the creative imagination. No doubt criticism has a part to play, and a useful part, but it is out of touch with the deeper significance of life, which is no mere abstract thing, but perpetual creation. Again, there was novelty in his method, which was precisely the one with which the people about him would have nothing to do; it was the historical method; only, in his view of it, history was to be read not merely in books, but also in the countless traces man had left behind him in his pilgrimage down the ages, in the poetry of the primitive peoples, in their languages, their laws, and their public institutions; in everything, in short, that had to do with their way of life. Then, again, his line of approach was new. Instead of peering into the distant future for the object of his quest, he turned his gaze backwards down the aisles of time, to the very origins of our kind. Finally, his philosophy was new in its essence. It was concerned with the idea of collective evolution, of being which creates itself and is at the same time conscious of itself, finding the guarantee of its certitude in the identification of subject and object: Science is the creation of humanity by humanity, and recorded by humanity. “In the midst of that night of darkness and shadow in which antiquity lies enwrapt, antiquity from which we are so far removed, we discern an everlasting light which never wanes, a truth which none can call in question. Therefore it is possible—it is also both profitable and necessary—to discover its principles by tracing the changes which our ideas have undergone.”

  Poor Vico! so forlorn and yet so great. No one could make out what he was talking about; they hardly took the trouble to listen. His ideas were too novel. They clashed too violently with what was generally received and approved of. The majority of people kept prosing on about the abstract, the rational, and blushed at the very thought of the past, which seemed to them something that enlightened and civilized people like themselves ought to be ashamed of. History, they took to be a lot of fairy tales, and poetry mere verbal jugglery. As for sentiment, the silly stuff, they would have none of it, and imagination, which was equally crazy, they sent to the right-about. But Vico, with the invincible obstinacy of genius, refused to treat humanity as though it were an anatomical specimen; he insisted on discerning in it the pulsation of the living thing. With jurisprudence and philology, and pictures, and symbols, and fables, to help him, gradually acquiring an intimate knowledge of the past, he plunged into the remotest depths of antiquity; to discover at once the history of our evolution and the ideal form of the human mind.

  The golden branch which he brought with him made no impression. This accounts for the cry which we can still hear in the Scienza Nuova[5], the cry of a wronged soul. Passion, with him, tries desperately hard to lend wings to sentences too heavily laden with thought to take the air with ease, and Vico, eager to prove all things at once, in constant apprehension lest he has insufficiently explained himself, always in a hurry, puffing and panting and floundering along, presents his public with his magnum opus, and his magnum opus falls completely flat. Three quarters of a century were to elapse before this admirable work at last began to fling a shaft of light athwart the European sky-line.

  [1]Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Book II, ch. 20.

  [2]Ibid., Book II, ch. 21. Pierre Coste’s translation.

  [3]Abrégé de la Vie des peintres, 1699.

  [4]Monadologie, §§ 67, 68, 69.

  [5]Principii di una Scienza Nuova intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Première édition 1725: Prima Scienza Nuova. Deuxième é
dition 1730: Seconda Scienza Nuova).

  VI

  SOULS OF FIRE

  THOSE towers that crown the landscape in the green countryside, and, in the cities, the cathedrals with the houses clustering round them, to which they seem to be pointing the way to Heaven; the golden glory of the tapers lighting up the tabernacles with their tremulous beams; the intoning of the priests, the chanting choirs, the Credo, the Magnificat, the sound of bells, the teeming censers, the countless churches, conventicles, synagogues, mosques, all the various places where people congregate to confess the mystery that enshrouds their birth, their life, their death, leaving it to God to reveal the secret to which their own unaided reason finds no key.

  The need for religion abides eternally in the human breast.

  Now, it was, that religious folk began to feel alarm at the activities of the freethinkers and atheists. Many were the Christian apologists who gave warning of the growing danger. Though there were some who did not hesitate to engage the terrorists on their own ground, others sought for different weapons to repel the foe. The wolves were ravening in ever-growing numbers round the fold; new methods must be found to keep them at bay. If the voice of the ungodly was loud in the land, let religion make answer with an ever swelling diapason, with an ever livelier faith. Against those who watch and pray, and slumber not, the enemy shall not prevail.

  “This sublime age, which may be called the age of the spirit, or, more than that, the age of perfect love . . .” Thus speaks Henri Bremond, reviewing the Christian life under the Ancien Régime; and he showed that the spread of Cartesianism in no way diminished, among religious folk, the keenness of their devotion to the fundamentals of the faith, or discouraged the practice of religious exercises and observances. Among the books of devotion quoted by him in support of his statement, one in particular, so noble is its simplicity, remains fixed in our recollection; it is called L’Horloge pour l’adoration perpetuelle du Saint Sacrement, and the date of it is 1674; “a Clock for the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.” This sacred timepiece gives warning of the hours of pressing danger. The faithful, when they hear it strike, may imagine they see the enemy hosts, with Satan at their head, launching an assault upon religion, in an attempt to compass its destruction. Every hour, as it strikes, calls up some vision of terror. Midnight: the Powers of Darkness, in the murky deeps of Night, which is their empire’s chief domain, come forth from their cavernous dens armed with the instruments of torture, and the fires which they take with them wherever they go, up and down the world, to gather their tools and agents about them. Five in the morning: the Sacred Elements cast to the dogs. But each offence is answered by a healing litany. The ticking of this solemn clock awakens “a new instinct”, “a latent ardour”, such as nothing availed to arouse in the tranquil days of peace.

  A life richer in sensibility; here, it may be, is the crucial point; here we may discern, albeit still faint and evanescent, the beginnings of an apologetic which it took a whole century to develop. Knowledge, certainly: no church is opposed to knowledge. And Reason, too, of course. No Church can afford to dispense with Reason. Nevertheless, disregarding the extremer forms of atheism, and taking account only of the effect observable in the general run of people, religion undoubtedly did lose the support of a certain section of the thoughtful public, the section that wanted to be independent of religion, to by-pass it, and to set up a humanistic ideal of their own. “No one can deny that this is a learned and enlightened age. Great progress has been made in all branches of Science and Art, whether by way of giving them sounder principles to work on, or supplying them with a firmer basis of proof and demonstration. What a number of discoveries have been made, what a number of experiments have seen the light, which have enabled us to penetrate beyond those limits in which, all through the dark ages, the mind of man was so narrowly confined. Nevertheless, it is greatly to be doubted whether the cause of religion has benefited by all this laudable quest for knowledge, whether, indeed, it has not lost, rather than gained, because of it.”[1]

  Well, but religion can recover the lost ground by calling in other spiritual values to its aid, values which its adversaries either deride or deny.

  The best proofs of the existence of God are, no doubt, the metaphysical ones; but metaphysics are “caviare to the general”. With the vast majority, the feelings are the main guides and, by availing himself of them, the Christian apologist can arrive at a proof not a whit less cogent. Do not the wonders of Nature reveal His existence, His power, His loving foresight? The argument may not be new, but it can take on fresh power if it is presented with appropriate emphasis, if logic is heightened with emotion. A state of admiration and wonderment is thus created, in which all is made clear, a lyrical state which carries all before it. Look at the woods: “In summertime, these branches shield us with their shade from the sun’s hot rays; in winter they feed the fire which enables us to maintain our bodily warmth. Nor is wood useful only as fuel; it is of a tractable consistency, though solid and durable, and can be fashioned by man into whatsoever shape he pleases, great architectural structures, and ships that sail the sea. Then, again, the fruit trees, with their branches bending low towards the ground—with what gracious condescension they seem to proffer their fruits to man!” And then of water: “If water were by a shade less dense, it would be something akin to air. The whole face of the earth would be parched and sterile; there would be no winged creatures; no animal of any kind would be able to swim; no fish could live; there would be no sea-borne merchandise. If water was a little more rarefied, it could not sustain those prodigious floating edifices we call ships; the lightest bodies would straightway sink to the bottom.” Look at the air, at fire, at the stars, at the dawn, which “for thousands upon thousands of years has never failed to usher in the day; punctually, to the very second, she comes, and at her appointed place”. And the animals. “The elephant, whose neck would be too heavy for its body were it as long as the camel’s, is furnished with a trunk.”[2]

  A little while, and we shall have Nieuwentijit, and the Abbé Pluche, proving to innumerable disciples how God’s existence may be inferred from the wonders of Nature; then will come Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; and, after him, Chateaubriand.

  Having arrived thus far on our journey, having reached the threshold of the retreat where the Man of Feeling proudly makes his final stand, we will next call up Gottfried Arnold from the shades. Behold him standing with his Histoire impartiale des églises et des hérésies in his hand! He claims impartiality for it because it is the work of a man who owes allegiance to no sect in particular, and because he has treated his subject as a historian, not as a theologian. Furthermore, he claims for it a general appeal, because, refusing to admit that there is one Church, and one only, it addresses itself to all who profess to believe in God and in Jesus Christ. What it really amounts to is a glorification of heresy.

  The truth is, he alleges, that people have made a great mistake about heretics, who, according to him, are a grossly misunderstood and maligned body of people. Heretics is the description applied by people in power to such as might stand in their way, or diminish their influence. They refer with ostentatious pride to their own orthodoxy. But orthodoxy is not religion, it is not faith. To swallow a lot of dogmas and formulas with your eyes shut; blindly to believe whatever the authorities tell you; to imagine that belief is a mere opus operatum—that is what orthodoxy amounts to. In short, it is nothing but a sort of barren rationalism that knows nothing of religious experiences, of spiritual awakenings, of being born anew.

  Heretics proper are not to be identified with those who, for sound motives, take the risk of wandering a little from the path of strict orthodoxy; they are much rather the sort of people who live like pagans, recking nothing of God, self-opinionated people, doctrinaires, intolerant bigots. . . . Thus, in the year 1699, spoke Gottfried Arnold, scholar, rebel and mystic: those who are commonly called heretics are your true Christians, sanctified by suffering, and glorifi
ed by love. Those who commonly go by the name of orthodox, whose hearts are dry and withered— those are your true heretics.

  And now, with Gottfried Arnold for our guide, let us make our way into the circle of the religious enthusiasts.

  The year 1709 witnessed the expulsion of the last few nuns who had stayed on at Port Royal. In 1710, the buildings were themselves demolished. Jansenism was to be suppressed; the sect which for so many years had been a thorn in the Church’s side, was to be exterminated at last; ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. But no; it was not to be. The Jansenists began to open up new ground, to make progress abroad. Little by little, they forged ahead. There were still a few hot-beds of Jansenism left in Louvain; and at Utrecht, where, in defiance of authority, a church opened its arms to the exiles, the outlaws; in a number of German towns; in Vienna, the very heart of the Imperial Court; in Piedmont, in Lombardy, in Liguria, in Tuscany, and even in Rome itself. And Jansenist propagandists were busy in Spain. In France, the quarrel broke out afresh, and as violently as ever, with the promulgation, in 1713, of the Bull Unigenitus. Quesnel, an Oratorian, brought out a book on the Morality of the Gospel in which a hundred and one passages were condemned by the Pope. It seemed as though a signal had gone up, as though someone had given the word. The commotion began all over again: objectors; defenders; trimmers—all fell to arguing again, and to argue they were to continue for many a day to come. Soon, now, the Convulsionnaires were to appear on the scene; processions, miracles wrought upon the graves of the chosen ones. This time, the disturbances reached the proportions of a public scandal. If Jansenism contained two elements, the one theological, the other moral, it was the latter that grew stronger at the expense of the former. Spiritual anxiety, hopes and fears about salvation, bitter memories of persecution, the belief that miracles of divine vengeance were at hand—things like these are not to be done away with by royal decree, or on orders from Rome. In the long run Jansenism came to be, not so much a doctrine as a spirit; a spirit harsh, forbidding, austere, sternly opposing the progressive dulcification of faith and morals.