Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  Power, wisdom, and perfection are, of course, attributes that were formerly assigned to God, and playing fast and loose with definitions in this way did not fool churchmen who were on the lookout for attempts to circumvent their worldview and their authority. In 1708 a German theologian created a guide to enable his colleagues to thwart the kind of thinking that “calls God Nature,” which he characterized as “the most systematically philosophical form of atheism.”

  Most radical Enlightenment figures—Collins, Radicati, Van den Enden, and others—don’t have the same star power as moderate Enlightenment players. But not all have sunk into obscurity. Jonathan Israel makes a case that the main force behind the radical wing, its intellectual godfather (and one of the most influential philosophers in history), was Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza used many of Descartes’ categories and applied them more ruthlessly—to religion, among other things. Like Descartes, he “proved” that God exists, but he also “proved” that God cannot have human properties and does not perform miracles or otherwise intervene in human affairs. The Bible contains much wisdom, Spinoza wrote, but shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to tales of seas parting or water being turned into wine. He ridiculed popular belief in supernatural beings, reacting to a debate about whether spirits can be female or male by saying, “Those who have seen naked spirits should not have cast their eyes on the genital parts.”

  The three-way debate among the radical and moderate secularists and the theologians ranged over nearly every conceivable issue, but it was centered on the notion of God. The charge of atheism was seemingly constantly in the air in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and not because its targets professed not to believe in God but because they defined God in ways that did not require a church as mediator. A conception of God that did not rest on scripture was considered a danger to church and state. Far from seeing himself as an atheist, Spinoza believed that God must exist, for he defined God as infinite substance and reasoned that “a substance consisting of infinite attributes . . . necessarily exists.” In his view God was synonymous with nature, meaning not merely the natural world but the totality of all things. He went so far as to upend the medieval notion of substances by defining God as the one and only substance existing in the universe: everything else was some subpart of God.

  Spinoza insisted that there is such a thing as religious truth, but he also insisted that religious institutions were largely concerned with protecting their own position. At times Spinoza’s thinking about superstition and the manipulation of it sounds not only modern but ultramodern; streamline the language of his Theologico-Political Treatise and it could appear in a twenty-first-century antireligion best seller: “The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt. . . . Anything which excites their astonishment [people] believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as made as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.” Religious institutions, Spinoza held, in a passage that has set many people in the centuries since nodding in agreement, prey on this collection of insecurities: “Immense pains have therefore been taken to . . . [invest] religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people.”

  Spinoza’s form of pantheism was reviled by Christians and Jews of his time and later (he was expelled from his Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-three), but it has fit well in the modern era. Einstein, when challenged to state his own religious beliefs, famously aligned himself with Spinoza, saying, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

  Genuine atheism—a belief that there is no deity involved in the universe or its creation, that we are alone—would, of course, be a major outcome of the modern turn that occurred in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it would be wrong to imagine that the Enlightenment was antireligion. Its mainstream thinkers, as well as many if not most of the radicals, were antichurch, not antifaith. Their problem with religion was that it kept individual humans from exercising their own minds and applying their innate reason to understanding the world and their place in it. This criticism applied not only to Catholicism but also to Protestant theology. It’s true that Protestantism was a movement on behalf of the individual. It came into being in large part because its leaders felt that individual Christians needed to have their own relationship with God, unmediated by the church. Luther reviled the Catholic Church for making people slaves to the clergy. But at the same time he wrote On the Enslaved Will, which argued that individuals must prostrate their intellect and will to the God of scripture. As the marquis de Condorcet, a leader of the French Enlightenment, said of such Reformation figures as Luther, “The spirit that animated the reformers did not lead to true freedom of thought. Each religion allowed, in the country where it dominated, certain opinions only.” The Protestant churches were no more willing to accept the God-equals-nature argument than was the Vatican.

  The Enlightenment figures wanted people to be utterly free to use their minds, to apply the light of reason. This included applying reason to faith: evaluating and valuing the underlying substance of life—the universe, God, nature—with clear eyes, and without necessarily employing the tools of organized faith. You might say, in fact, that the whole thrust of the Enlightenment was not an attempt to diminish God at all but, on the contrary, an insistence on expanding God, broadening the scope of the word to include all that the new forms of learning encompassed. The enemies, in this view, were two: authority—any power or organization that dictated how and what to believe—and fuzzy thinking.

  All of this went directly back to Descartes, whose turn to philosophy began when, after his studies, he found himself “saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was.” “Clear and distinct ideas” would be the goal—of Descartes, and of the thinkers of the next century. Thus Spinoza lashing out at superstition. In the 1740s, Denis Diderot, the force behind the famous Encyclopédie and one of the intellectual fathers of the French Revolution, put the zeal for clarity in the form of a maxim: “Superstition is more harmful than atheism.”

  HISTORICAL PERIODS DON’T USUALLY name themselves. People walking around circa 1300 did not greet each other with “It’s a lovely morning here in the Late Middle Ages.” The Enlightenment—whose leaders were nothing if not self-conscious—was an exception. Aufklärung, les lumières, ilustración, illuminismo, verlichting: across Europe, in whatever language, there was an awareness on the part of individuals of somehow having different minds from earlier generations, and everywhere they expressed the idea with the metaphor of light invading what had been darkness. One of the clearest expressions of it came from the tiny, introverted German philosopher Immanuel Kant, part of whose grand project was to identify the “transcendental” foundation of religion—to ground faith not in a church or a holy book but in the human mind, the world, and the relationship between the two. Kant was a mousy, homebody sort who never strayed farther than one hundred miles from his Prussian hometown, and his writings are as dense as any philosopher’s, but he could on occasion rise to the soaring plane of the propagandist. “Enlightenment,” he declared when asked to define the force that he and his contemporaries were caught up in, “is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another person. . . . ‘Dare to know’ (sapere aude)! Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

  The “motto” was put into practice politically in two dramatic and very different ways in the eighteenth
century. In the 1770s, there came a metaphorical lull in the frenzy of invention and scientific activity as everyone paused to witness the birth of a whole new arena of modernity. Across the ocean, the inhabitants of the former British colonies in North America decided to throw off their mother country and give a real-world test to the ideas about representative government that had been nurtured over the century in the theories of men like John Locke. Americans are used to thinking of their country’s revolution as the climax toward which the century of European intellectual ferment was building. As the great American scholar Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1977, “The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment, the New World—certainly the Anglo-American part of it—realized and fulfilled it.” Europeans see it differently. To them, the American Revolution was a sideshow, while the French Revolution, in all its gore and glory and tragedy, its titanic upending of church and state, was the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment and of the long process of transformation that began with Descartes’ cogito.

  Of course, both revolutions are intimately conjoined to the century of transformation that preceded them. The American leaders—Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the rest—swam in the same current of ideas the Europeans did. They were steeped in the political philosophy of Locke, who argued that societies are held together by a “social contract” between rulers and the ruled and that if power is abused the people have a right to revolt. Jefferson wrote that his political philosophy derived from Newton, Bacon, and Locke, especially the idea of bringing scientific questioning and observation into the political realm—the cogito, you might say, taking a seat in government. But there was another side to the American revolt. Henry May’s 1976 study, The Enlightenment in America, argues that religion was so much a part of the American fabric that the issue in America was not “the Enlightenment and religion” but “the Enlightenment as religion.” In the 1730s and 1740s, an evangelical fervor gripped the American colonies; the first so-called Great Awakening gave a spiritual cast to the political drama that would follow. At the same time, many in the American elite were deists, who essentially turned Newton’s science into religion. Jefferson made deism part of the nation’s fabric with the Declaration of Independence’s appeal to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” No churches were burned at Bunker Hill or Yorktown. The American Revolution, seen in this light, was the full expression of the moderate wing of the Enlightenment, which stressed order, harmony, and a balance of faith and reason.

  But the other Enlightenment, the radical version, would have its own, very different political expression. In 1789, when the people of Paris took to the streets intent on winning a constitution from their king, the scientists and inventors, the cogitators and pamphleteers of Europe paused again and took note, for here was an effort to extend the political ideals of their Enlightenment to one of the old, established nations. Completely unlike what happened in America, the French Revolution was a systematic breakdown of the old order and its representatives, not only the monarchy but the Catholic Church. What had begun in the minds of a small number of intellectuals—antipathy toward both the king and the church for shackling people in cages, for controlling their lives, their minds, their purses—spread to every level of society, with the ferocity and face-to-face, breath-to-breath stench of an unprecedented collision of forces.

  If modernity ultimately required a complete break from existing structures—of human thought, belief, society, everything—then what happened in France in the 1780s and 1790s had terrible necessity. It would also demonstrate something that had not been understood by Descartes when he reoriented his worldview around reason but that would become depressingly familiar in the coming centuries. As an organizing principle or a battle cry, reason doesn’t necessarily lead to peace and order but can just as well spawn inhuman violence on an epic scale.

  It was in the midst of this world-historic lesson that Descartes’ bones once again returned to the realm of the living.

  HE HAD A FACE THAT COULD BEST be described as angelic. If that word suggests purity, it also hints at things like otherworldliness and ghostliness, and all of these qualities applied to the strange, impassioned, vigorous, meticulous, and ethereal man named Alexandre Lenoir. He was born in Paris in 1761, nearly a century after the remains of René Descartes were buried in the French capital. In a portrait painted when he was thirty-five, Lenoir looks creepily like a teenager. His skin shines alabaster, the lips are mauve and womanish and curled into a slight, freakish smile, the eyes into which the viewer’s are drawn are round and black like portals onto the dark. On his head is a foppish broadrimmed black hat; a gold scarf is knotted around his neck.

  He was a lover of art. He studied painting. He married a painter. He was also, seemingly from birth, obsessively fascinated by death, images of death, effigies, and human remains. He came of age in an ideal time in which to exercise such a preoccupation; the French Revolution gave his curious life its context. In 1763, when Lenoir was an infant, King Louis XV levied a series of new taxes. In the past such a move might have caused only raucous grumbling, but over the previous decade half of what would be thirty-two volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopédie had appeared. Diderot and his coauthors had tried to collect in it all the new knowledge that was proliferating in Europe, and it proffered not an objective stance but frank beliefs about, for example, the connection between a commitment to reason and the moral necessity of obtaining the consent of the governed. Over the years the volumes, and their underlying logic, had worked their way into the mental fabric of the country. The parlements of France banded together to voice opposition to the taxes. Some of the parlements (which were not legislative bodies but rather regional judicial councils) arrested the king’s governors; graffiti appeared on government buildings demanding the king’s head. As the matter escalated, the parlements declared for the first time that together they represented the will of the people and that taxes could not be assessed without their consent. The king reacted with a suddenness dramatically out of keeping with decorum. He rode directly from his palace in Versailles to Paris (pausing at the Pont Neuf when he came upon a religious procession, before which he dismounted and knelt in the mud as it passed), strode into the Palais de Justice, and unleashed what has gone down in French history as the séance de la flagellation—the whipping session, one might say. It was a violent rebuff of the idea of elements of government uniting in opposition to the head of state, and about as decisive an assertion of kingly power as is possible to imagine: “In my person only does the sovereign power rest. . . . From me alone do my courts derive their existence and authority. . . . To me alone belongs legislative power. . . . By my authority alone do the officers of my courts proceed.”

  Thus began the struggle that would lead to the fall of Europe’s most autocratic monarchy. In 1770, the king dissolved the parlements, but in a sense the damage had been done. Pamphleteers had broadcast the reasoning of the parlements; it resonated with the people and continued to do so through the following years. In 1788, a restored Parlement of Paris warned a new King Louis (the XVI) that they would not stand for royal despotism; now the parlements were using phrases like rights of man and confirmed by reason. The following year, representatives of the Third Estate (going back to the Middle Ages society was divided into a First Estate, comprised of the clergy, a Second, the nobility, and a Third, commoners) took the new language further, declaring that they were not an estate at all—not a third-rate advisory council to those in power—but “the people.” In fact, they were a National Assembly. The king locked them out of the meeting hall. They gathered instead at a nearby tennis court and took an oath to remain united until the king agreed to a constitution. Soldiers marched into Paris. In one stroke, the National Assembly “abolished feudalism,” then issued a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

  Alexandre Lenoir grew to maturity during the tumult leading up to the Revolution, and the waifish artist was part of the fervor. And yet his interests soon p
arted in one crucial way from the objectives of the revolutionaries. His mentors included the artist Gabriel François Doyen, who made a name for himself with florid large-scale religious paintings in the manner of the Italian Renaissance, and the polymath Charles-François Dupuis, who besides being one of the inventors of the telegraph wrote a wildly successful book called The Origin of All Religious Worship, in which he argued that Christianity was merely an updating of ancient cults of sun worship. Bathing in the lush influences of Doyen and Dupuis, as well as Freemasonry (which itself sprang from the minds of freethinkers as a ritualized theologizing of nature), and steeped in his own exotic personal mysteries, Lenoir developed a private universalist belief system that centered on reason, history, religious art, and architecture.

  To his horror, as the Revolution escalated mobs of his fellow revolutionaries took literally the calls from their leaders to tear down the structures of the old regime. Crowds attacked churches and palaces. Buildings were looted, paintings and sculptures destroyed; monks’ cloisters became stalls for horses. One by one, many of the country’s most ancient religious structures—the Abbey of Cluny, the church of St.-Denis, burial site of the French monarchy—were ransacked. Once-precious relics, including the bones of formerly revered kings, were paraded through the streets. The body of Louis XIV himself, still in a state of semi-preservation, was unearthed and hacked with knives, to cheers. It was madness, but with a method. The developing ideology of the Revolution emphasized the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, with their roots firmly embedded in seventeenth-century “new philosophy.” This ideology rejected all symbols of the past that put “mysticism” over reason, that “did not bear the stamp of utility,” and that were “contrary to good morals.” The government not only egged on crowds but carried out an official “dechristianization” program that resulted in the destruction or desacration of religious buildings in virtually every town in France, from village churches to Notre-Dame de Paris, where the sculptures of biblical figures on the façade were defaced.