The text opens with a letter from the narrator to a “Monsieur L***” describing the narrator’s conversations with the marquise. “I’ll divide them for you by evenings,” the narrator explains, “because in fact we had these conversations only at night.”84 The nocturnal setting evokes the expansion of legitimate nocturnal activity in the period, as well as nightly pursuits ranging from astronomy and the theater to court life. The use of darkness – intellectual, metaphoric, and represented – to create the Conversations shows the text to be an intellectual expression of both aspects of nocturnalization. Like the nocturnal spectacles of the opera or the court, Fontenelle’s nocturnal Conversations depict the triumph of light over darkness on one level, while on other levels fostering, maintaining, and manipulating darkness. Indeed, in the first of these nightly conversations, the narrator uses an analogy with theater to persuade the marquise to accept a new epistemology based on darkness and obscurity. Before he can explain anything about the movement of the earth or the position of the sun, he must convince the marquise to leave her “common-sense” views behind. He does this by comparing the natural world to the theater:
I have always thought that nature is very much like an opera house. From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effect from a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden.85
Fontenelle summarizes the central insight that underwrites his text: “‘Whoever sees nature as it truly is simply sees the backstage area of the theater.’”86 His frame of reference is the baroque perspective stage, with its reliance on darkness and illusion.
With the help of Fontenelle’s narrator the young marquise comes to understand that there is more to nature than meets the eye. But the analogy “nature–theater” also incorporated a hierarchy of perception. As a guide to the opera published in Hamburg in 1702 explained:
Nowadays all persons of distinction seek entertainment from the opera, but among the thousands found in the boxes and seats one would scarcely meet ten who understand what happens there and how to evaluate it. Indeed, a great many in the audience do not understand one bit of it. The most important things to note at an opera are … the sets, which no one can rightly assess unless he understands painting and perspective … Above all the machines [must be] considered, as they are the best thing about the opera, filling the spirits of all members of the audience with wonder.87
One had to learn how to see the opera, just as Fontenelle’s narrator teaches the marquise (and his many readers) how to see the natural world.
But this learning is not meant to be shared widely. When the marquise reports on the sixth evening that two “men of wit” ridiculed her knowledge of astronomy, the narrator advises her to do as he does and keep their insights secret from the ignorant: “Let us content ourselves with being a little select party who believe and not divulge our mysteries to the common people.”88 The artificial illusions of the theater, dependent on darkness, become in the Conversations a model for nature in a discussion that dispels intellectual darkness for the marquise while maintaining it for “the vulgar.”
The hierarchy of perception presented by Fontenelle was perhaps most fully expressed in the darkness of the baroque theater. The influential guide to the baroque stage, Nicola Sabbatini’s Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri (Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines) of 1638 makes this hierarchy explicit in practical terms:
the common or less cultivated persons are set on the tiers and at the sides, since the machines give a less perfect appearance in these places, and because such people do not observe them minutely. The persons of culture and taste should be seated on the floor of the hall, as near the middle as possible, in the second or third rows. They will have the greatest pleasure there, since … all parts of the scenery and the machines are displayed in their perfection.89
Sabbatini’s advice maps a political and cultural hierarchy onto the perception of the stage or the world. The “cultured” see beyond the surface when they view the sets and special effects of the opera or theater. They appreciate what is concealed as well as what is visible. In the same terms, many scholars have noted Fontenelle’s oblique style, discretion, and use of irony. The author expected his proper audience of raisonneurs to be able to read between the lines. Those at the top of the hierarchy of perception would see the more radical scope of Fontenelle’s views.90 His clandestine philosophical writings of the 1680s reveal his anticlericalism and deep skepticism regarding all systems of metaphysical thought, including revealed Christianity.91
8.4.2 Scripture: Bekker’s The World Bewitched
The Amsterdam Reformed minister Balthasar Bekker (1634–98) unleashed an extraordinary controversy with the 1691–94 publication of his De betoverde weereld (The World Bewitched). Bekker, son of a Friesian village pastor, studied at the universities of Groningen and Franeker. He became a Cartesian but was also strongly influenced by the biblical philology of Cocceius. He earned a doctorate and served as pastor in Franeker before taking a position in Amsterdam in 1678.
When Bekker published the first two books of The World Bewitched in 1691, he was an experienced author with several catechisms and a work on comets to his credit. Nothing prepared him, however, for the extraordinary popularity or violent responses generated by The World Bewitched.92 Across the four books of The World Bewitched Bekker argued “upon the same foundation of Scripture and Reason” that “the Empire of the Devil is but a Chimera, and that he has neither such a Power, nor such an Administration as is ordinarily ascribed to him.”93 As Bekker’s work was translated into German, French, and English, dozens of refutations were published, as well as a few defenses of Bekker from authors more radical than he. Another edition published in England in 1700 as The world turn’d upside down, or, A plain detection of errors, in the common or vulgar belief, relating to spirits, spectres or ghosts, daemons, witches, &c. kept the controversy going, with an important response published by John Beaumont in 1705 (the book to which Ralph Thoresby turned for reassurance in 1712).
In The World Bewitched Bekker sought to make “an exact enquiry after whatever is falsely believed in the World, and the Erroneous Opinions that are entertained without any other ground than that they are every day told and heard of.”94 Specifically, Bekker intended to deny the supposed effects of Satan and evil spirits in the world. He saw this work as a continuation of the Protestant Reformation, “a new and perhaps final phase in the perfection of Christianity.”95 As with the Conversations, Bekker’s World Bewitched engages with darkness, the night, and nocturnalization on several levels. Bekker proposes to illuminate “the frightful Darkness of Paganism” while creating darkness in new hierarchies of interpretation, perception, and revelation. His attitude toward the common people, his approach to Scripture, and his understanding of the night all reveal the imprint of nocturnalization, as does the place of “pagans” in this work.
Bekker’s challenge to belief in witchcraft, evil spirits, and the power of the Devil has been depicted as reflecting growing popular skepticism and disbelief in the Netherlands. But Bekker himself complained of the credulity of his congregants and the cases of supposed possession and bewitchment they brought to him. He made clear in World Bewitched that he was “rejecting the Opinion commonly received amongst the Vulgar, concerning the Craft and Power of the Devil.” In his survey of belief in witches and demons, past and present, he noted that “for as to the common People, either Papists, Jews, or Pagans, they know nothing for the most part, but a little by hear-say; so that there is no relying upon them.” Even among Protestants, “i
t is sure without mistake, that for the most part, what the most illiterate believe and practice, is contrary to the sense of Divines, and of all those that understand any thing in the Holy Scripture.” He sounds a resigned tone: “I will have nothing to do with them [the common people] upon this subject, having often tried my self how many follies our own People say and believe, upon this account.”96 Despite the popular response to World Bewitched, he sought an audience among the learned – as the four detailed volumes of his study suggest. He addressed “our Doctors and our Men of letters [among whom] … there are none so credulous as the Vulgar; however there is a very considerable difference to be seen in their Opinions, some believing almost every thing, and others almost nothing at all” about ghosts and witches.97 Even among the most free-thinking Christians in the Netherlands, the Collegiants, belief in spirits and diabolic possession was widespread and vigorously defended.98
Bekker’s frustration with the credulity of the common people echoes in his sense that his own tradition has utterly misunderstood the biblical testimony regarding spirits and the Devil: “But to our great shame, most ... of us, as well as of other Sects, that pretend a Veneration for the Holy Writ, search not in it after its Sense, being satisfied with the vulgar Interpretations, and such as they have received from others.” To correct this misinterpretation, Bekker proposed, like Fontenelle, to look beyond the deceptive surface of his object of study to a deeper understanding of Scripture heretofore obscured from view. This is the work of books II and III of World Bewitched.
From the first, Bekker’s critics noted that he used an extreme accomodationist hermeneutic associated with Spinoza or Cocceius to radically reinterpret all scriptural references to angels, the Devil, and evil spirits.99 It was this approach to Scripture, rather than his Cartesian pneumatology, that most provoked Bekker’s fellow divines. As Le Clerc noted in the first French review of Bekker, “to answer Mr. Bekker solidly, they must … prove … that according to the rules of criticism, and the spirit of the Hebrew and Greek Languages, it is impossible to give the Scripture the sense which our author gives it.”100 A battalion of theologians proceeded to do just that. The intensity and extent of their responses made Bekker a target of attack decades after his death in 1698. A satire of 1730–31 imagined a conversation with his ghost, illustrated with a visual lampoon showing what was wrong with Bekker’s approach to demons and Scripture. In Figure 8.4 Bekker is shown sieving or sifting demons out of the Christian Scriptures. Below the sieve are a series of terms used by Bekker to interpret away apparent references to evil spirits, possession, demons, etc. in the Bible: “frenzy,” “melancholy,” “lunacy,” “enthusiasm,” and “epilepsy” are among them. In this lampoon of Bekker, he is unaware that the real Devil and demons are hovering just above him. The caption reads “So Becker sorts out the devils by his art; / But the spirit of lies alone makes more doubt.” This remarkable representation of Bekker’s approach to Scripture directly challenges the accomodationist hermeneutic of Spinoza and Cocceius, denying the esoteric knowledge hidden from the vulgar and the hierarchy of perception on which it was based.
Figure 8.4 Balthasar Bekker sieving devils, from Curieuse Gespräche im Reiche derer Todten. Zweyte Unterredung oder Gespräche im Reiche derer Todten (Leipzig and Braunschweig: s.n., 1731), frontispiece to part 2. Wellcome Library, London.
More broadly, Bekker’s insistence on natural or physical explanations for all supposed encounters with spirits, angels, and devils led him to emphasize the power of the night and sleep to cloud the mind. Dark times and places became the antipode to the Cartesian rationality he took as his method. The accounts of Jacob wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32; Hosea 12) “occurred, as in every case before and after, in a divine night-vision,” Bekker explained.101 Likewise “the Devil … does not have the freedom to haunt the world or appear to people, except in sleep or in a dream.” In books II–IV of The World Bewitched he explains dozens of biblical, historical, and contemporary encounters with angels, devils, or spirits as nocturnal dreams, visions, or misperceptions. Examining an account from the early church, Bekker asks “At what time” did the Devil appear to Theodoretus? “At night. He was perhaps sleeping or dreaming.” One must consider the time of day when examining any account of a ghost or demon, Bekker insists.
In his refutation of dozens of ghost stories in book IV, Bekker articulates the role of the night in his analysis:
For example, when the will-o’-the-wisp sometimes pops and crackles and gives off a strange and unpleasant noise, like the whimpering or sighing of a person, it seems to some, because man’s fearfulness is greater at night than by day and hinders him from using his judgment and reason properly (so that the true cause is not recognized) that all these … are the antics of Satan.
Bekker follows this observation with a series of accounts concerning ghosts and specters, emphasizing that each occurred “in the evening, while lying in bed,” “in the evening hours,” “in the evening twilight,” or “at night in front of the bed.”102 Signaling a key theme in the later Enlightenment understanding of the night, Bekker demonstrates in example after example that the dreams and fears of the night check the use of reason. Night became the shadowy supplement to the light of reason, always dispelled but ever-present.
8.5 Darkness and race in the early Enlightenment
Fontenelle and Bekker shared a mission to reorient their world by placing the familiar in a startling new contexts. The secularizing, disenchanting force of their works redrew lines of intellectual and cultural division between men and women, between Europeans and the wider world, and between the enlightened and the superstitious. Questions of human difference by gender, region, and culture play a key role in The Conversations and in The World Bewitched. Fontenelle and Bekker figure very differently in the early Enlightenment, but in their projects of education and enlightenment they both propose new zones of ignorance and new boundaries between light and darkness. Both rely on a hierarchy of perception to break down old barriers and create new divisions.
References to region and race set the stage for the last lesson in Fontenelle’s explication of astronomy. At the end of the final evening, the marquise asks “‘haven’t I always heard that the Chinese were very great astronomers?’” The narrator agrees as to their reputation, but corrects the marquise. He explains:
In truth, I am more and more persuaded there is a certain Genius which has hitherto been confined within our Europe, or which at least has extended very little beyond it.103
Here the fundamental distinction between the raisonneurs and the vulgar is generalized across the earth. Among the Europeans some few would be enlightened; among other peoples, likely none. The Europeans stand in the same relationship to other peoples as the raisonneurs to the vulgar, at the summit of a hierarchy of perception and understanding. This European claim on enlightenment is underscored throughout the Conversations by reference to the astrological and cosmological “fallacies” of other peoples, for example in the discussion of the fear caused by eclipses or comets. Indeed, Fontenelle describes the earth itself demarcated by “complexions.” Looking down from the height of understanding, Fontenelle explained:
I sometimes imagine that I’m suspended in the air, motionless while the Earth turns under me for twenty-four hours, and that I see passing under my gaze all the different faces: white, black, tawny, and olive complexions. At first there are hats, then turbans; wooly heads, then shaved heads.
The text brings the “certain Genius” of the Europeans together with the visible contrast between “societies.” Trying to imagine what inhabitants of other worlds would look like, Fontenelle’s narrator generalizes about human variety, observing that “‘All faces in general are made on the same model, but those of two large societies – European, if you like, and African – seem to have been made on two specific models’.”104 Visible difference and intellectual superiority coincide in the construction of race.
In Fontenelle’s most popular work the intel
lectual darkness of “the vulgar” serves as a backdrop to the glittering intellects of the marquise and the narrator, who agree not to even address the irrational masses. On a larger scale, the absurd beliefs, barbaric practices, and scientific ignorance of the “Africans and Tartars,” “Iroquois,” and Chinese which decorate the Conversations reveal the new hierarchies of race and region built into this fundamental Enlightenment text.
The relationship between gender and race in the Conversations is mirrored in the contemporary Code noir regulating slavery in France’s American colonies, also published in 1687.105 The gender inclusion of the Conversations, in which the beautiful blond marquise becomes the intellectual superior of the waggish noblemen who fail to understand the solar system, is consolidated as the marquise takes her place in the European superiority asserted by Fontenelle. The inclusion of enlightened women takes place in a new hierarchy which is based on European knowledge of the natural world and marked by race. The authors of the Code noir sought to consolidate difference through gender in similar terms by decreeing that slave status followed the maternal line. Articles 8–13 of the code asserted that all persons born in the French Caribbean colonies “will follow the condition of their mother.” The maternal transmission of status in the Code noir contrasted sharply with French practice and noble ideology, which relentlessly emphasized the male line of descent.106 In the colonies, however, concubinage with female slaves was an overriding factor. The Code noir punished such “free men who will have one or several children from their concubinage with their slaves,” fining them heavily. “Beyond the fine, they [would] be deprived of the slave and the children, and … she and they be confiscated for the profit of the [royal] hospital, without ever being manumitted.” Creating race as a category of division shifted the transmission of civil status from men to women in the Code noir. In practice, racial separation in the French Caribbean hardened in the following years, making the Code noir appear relatively liberal in its tolerance for mixed-race marriages, for example. The Conversations and the Code noir use gender in similar ways to draw new boundaries between learning and ignorance, or between freedom and slavery, in order to consolidate the category “European” or “French,” defined in opposition to extra-European ignorance, superstition, dark skin, and servility.
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