by Roy Porter
Witch personae thus flourished as comic grotesques at the very time when real ones were fast fading from the consciousness, if not the nightmares, of the educated. In due course witchiness would find further incarnations: while the Devil perhaps metamorphosed into the Negro, provocatively blending blackness with virility,94 the village hag would be superseded by the femme fatale and the vamp – although the shawl-clad crone, with her cottage, cat and cauldron, was to enjoy an afterlife in Romantic fairy tales, children's fiction and the movies.95
In such artistic migrations, the supernatural assumed a new symbolic reality, with the psychological truth of witch lore and the supernatural coming into the open, marking the late Enlightenment plunge into interiority. A century after John Locke had warned against exposing children to tales of ‘Sprights’, the Romantic Charles Lamb imaginatively savoured the ambivalences of being spooked by ghosts and goblins. Assuming the persona of a little girl who believed her aunt was a witch, ‘I shrunk back terrified and bewildered to my bed’, he wrote, ‘where I lay in broken sleeps and miserable fancies, till the morning’.96 Here Lamb psychologized and sexualized the witch figure in a manner perennially fascinating to late Enlightenment fantasists.
This refiguring of the supernatural from the transcendental to the psychological flags wider developments in poetics. The dark, devilish and disturbing elements then being laundered from religion by reason were returning, sanitized, in new artistic genres. In particular, the cult of the sublime aestheticized the supernatural. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke provided the classic psychological explanation of the allure of the ‘terrible’: the sublime was terror enjoyed in security. Dread of ghosts, demons, the unknown and the uncanny could now be enjoyed from the comfort and safety of one's theatre box or parlour sofa.97
The new aesthetics had implications which went far beyond admiration for mountains and spectres: it recuperated religion by psychologizing it.98 For some it could even reinvest the very notion of the holy, seemingly discredited by the withering Enlightenment critique of irrationalist mystification. Seminal in this respect were Robert Lowth's lectures on Hebrew poetry. Professor of poetry in Oxford, Lowth delivered (in Latin) lectures in which the sacred poetry of the Hebrews was praised as ‘the only specimens of the primeval and genuine poetry’.99 In treating the religious as artistic, he was part of a trend. In a discussion of the New Testament demons and miracles, Anthony Blackwall replaced rationalist fixation on the evidences of Christianity by a psychology of faith. The man in the Bible possessed with Legion, he suggested, was brilliantly dramatized:
Who is not shocked with horror and trembling at the first appearance of the raging Demoniac… Then with what religious awe, reverence and tenderness of devotion do we view the mild Saviour of the human race commanding the infernal Legion to quit their possession to the miserable sufferer!100
Here Scripture was theatricalized, its spiritual authority seen as depending on the suspension of disbelief.101 Turning to the raising of Lazarus, Blackwall likewise underscored the dramatic qualities of suspense and amazement, almost as though the truth of the biblical miracles was vested primarily in their appeal to lofty Shaftesburian sensibilities.102
Nor was he alone in casting the Bible as what Edgar Allan Poe would style a work of mystery and imagination. In James Usher's Clio or, Discourse on Taste (1769) enthusiasm was applauded for its power to excite terror, curiosity and pious exultation: ‘In the sublime we feel ourselves alarmed, our motions are suspended, and we remain for some time until the emotion wears off, wrapped in silence and inquisitive horror.’ Following Burke, Usher observed that the obscurity, irregularity and awe constituting the sublime were primarily associated with the ‘idea of invisible and immense power’ – in a word, God, who thus became a psychological entity. Moderns might deride such emotions as superstitious, but terror and awe were integral to human experience.103
The role of the sublime in psychologizing, aestheticizing, and thereby revalidating the supernatural stands out in the cult of the Gothic, a genre heralded by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) and continued in the novels of Mrs Radcliffe (with her rationalized ‘explained supernatural’), Matthew Lewis, author of Ambrosio, or the Monk, and, in a more complex fashion, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).104 Supernaturalizing the everyday, such works traded in stock elements: the mist-shrouded castle, the villain vowed to Satan, demons, phantoms, sorcerers and shrews, a flirtation with the weird, the uncanny and the bizarre – and, underpinning all, a Burkean obsession with terror and the infinite unknown. Elements like ghosts triggered new sexual frissons in a return of the repressed as the old demonological themes of possession, while incubi and succubi were internalized and eroticized by that quintessential late Enlightenment artist Henry Fuseli.105 Romanticism played a key part in the conversion of the supernatural from Scripture to studio, study, stage – and, later, screen: in the nineteenth century it would be writers and artists who would explore those issues of innocence and evil, the terrestrial and the eternal, which had so long been the prerogative of divines – before being overtaken, in their turn, by psychoanalysts, a tendency acknowledged in T. E. Hulme's adage that ‘Romanticism… is spilt religion’. For Romantics, artistic creativity redefined the holy: ‘Imagination’, held Blake, ‘is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever.’106
In such matters as spirit possession, madness, suicide and witchcraft, changing attitudes and practices attest a signal development: a waning of the hold over the élite enjoyed by the literal word of the Bible and its theocentric vision.107 Challenges to Scripturalism materialized in other fields as well, including interpretations of the history of mankind itself, to be examined below.
Enlightened thinkers sought to rationalize life in terms of a model of natural order which replaced an active God with an active man. The hubris of such arrogations of omniscience and omnipotence afforded golden opportunities to satirists bent upon deflating rationalist monsters: apostles of modernity, Swift never tired of showing, were possessed by the demons of reason.108 ‘The world is persuaded, not without some colour of reason,’ confessed Jeremy Bentham in the 1770s, with the cheery self-mockery of youth, ‘that all reformers and system-mongers are mad… I dreamt t'other night that I was a founder of a sect; of course, a personage of great sanctity and importance: it was called the sect of the Utilitarians.’109 Parodying himself as enthusiast rather tickled him: ‘There came out to me a good man named Ld. S.' – that is, Lord Shelburne – ‘and he said unto me, what shall I do to be saved? I yearn to save the nation. I said unto him – take up my book and follow me.’110
Despite this disconcerting tendency of reason to turn crazy, the Enlightenment brought a fundamental value shift, landmarked for instance by the repeal of the witchcraft statutes, the passing of Divine Right theories of government and the end of touching for the King's Evil.111 The magic also went out of medicine: viper flesh, pike jaw and unicorn horn vanished from the pharmacopoeia. The Medieval Christian endorsement of ‘wonder’, with its horror of ‘forbidden knowledge’, gave way to the enlightened underwriting and validation of ‘curiosity’ and scorn for ‘marvels’.112
The programmatic shift from Christian Providentialism to more secular, scientific world views must, however, be kept in perspective. After all, everyone still craved glimpses of the extraordinary. Daniel Defoe's Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) dramatized the traditional spirit world of pneumatology while also anticipating modern parapsychology.113 The London earthquakes of February 1750 provoked panic, with the hellfire preacher William Romaine and his episcopal counterpart Thomas Sherlock both urging their flocks to repent before the threat of divine punishment. ‘In after ages it will hardly be believed’, recorded Tobias Smollett,
that on the evening of the eighth day of April, the open fields, that skirt the metropolis, were filled with incredible numbers of people… who waited in the most f
earful suspense until morning, and the return of day disproved the truth of the dreadful prophecy.114
Spectacular episodes like the Cock Lane ghost affair in the 1760s, a metropolitan media hype, involving the alleged appearance of a ghost at a city of London lodging house, are reminders of the enduring power of supernaturalism, just as sensations like the Mary Toft affair – the Surrey woman who in 1726 convinced many people, including the Royal Surgeon and Anatomist, that she had given birth to rabbits – demonstrate popular credulity.115
Integral to a profound transformation of mentalities, secularization and naturalization also had their social dimension, demarcating the enlightened from the rest. The devaluing of marvels was no triumph of abstract rationality but a shift in the identity of intellectuals, for whom wonder and wonders became dismissed as vulgar, the very antithesis of what it meant to be in the stadium of light.116 In any case, such changes lay no less in rhetoric than in realities; nor must they simply be deemed as ‘progress’, for one man's rationality is another's credulity. ‘Superstition is said to be driven out of the World,’ commented Hester Thrale in 1790; ‘no such Thing, it is only driven out of Books and Talk’.117
10
MODERNIZING
We must consider how very little history there is: I mean real authentick history.
SAMUEL JOHNSON1
The Georgian century brought rapid and profound socio-economic transformation, opened, closed and punctuated by political revolutions. Small wonder that enlightened thinkers felt driven to address the dynamics of change, and to formulate theories which linked past, present and future, ultimately in terms of overarching visions of progress.2
History-writing itself was changing. Renaissance philologists had pioneered the recovery, editing and scholarly study of documents, while in the seventeenth century headway had been made in the use of inscriptions, coins and archaeological evidence. These traditions continued, but the preoccupations of such mere ‘antiquarians’ were challenged in the Enlightenment by a new breed of philosophic historians, erudite yet eager to create an intelligible, instructive and, not least, entertaining past, presented in polished prose. ‘The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds,’ wrote Hume: ‘as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.’3
Innovative features distinguished the outlooks of this new history. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614), William Howell's History of the World (1680–85), Cardinal Bossuet's synoptic Histoire universelle (1681) and other standard texts, were ‘God's eye’ narratives, beginning at the Creation and tracing the providential handing down of civilization by God to His chosen people. Between 1669 and 1678 Theophilus Gale published four parts of a massive work, The Court of the Gentiles, demonstrating that all arts and sciences arose from the Jewish people – from Adam, Moses (skilled historian and philosopher), Seth and Enoch (astronomy), Noah (navigation), Solomon (architecture) and Job (a great philosopher).4 Such Bible-centred readings were on the way out.
Indeed, historians like Hume and Gibbon now approached the rise of Christianity itself from a naturalistic standpoint, adopting a detached and often ironic stance. Hume's History of England (1754–62) was unremittingly hostile to the manifestations of religion: monks and ascetics were power-mad hypocrites; the Church conducted itself through deceit and superstition; the Crusades had been fired by fanaticism and greed; doctrinal bickerings were fatuous.5 Here lay the overture to Gibbon's lordly irony. Chapters 15 and 16 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire exposed Christianity's human, rather than Providential, sources, its growth being explained not by Providence but by secondary causes: the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians, inherited from the Jews; the doctrine of a future life; the miraculous powers claimed by the primitive Church; the austerity of Christian morals; and the organization of the ‘Christian republic’.6 Conjectural history, discussed below, replaced scriptural accounts of origins with sweeping narratives of social evolution.
Scorning dry-as-dust antiquarianism,7 enlightened historians targeted their works at wider audiences. Patriotic histories were popular, Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation (1679–1715) being but the foremost in a long line of Protestant-Whig histories celebrating the march of national freedom via the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution.8 Even the very superior Gibbon (‘an Englishman, a philosopher, and a Whig’) was not above a touch of chauvinism. ‘We contemplate the gradual progress of society from the lowest ebb of primitive barbarism, to the full tide of modern civilization,’ he swelled:
We contrast the naked Briton who might have mistaken the sphere of Archimedes for a rational creature, and the contemporary of Newton, in whose school Archimedes himself would have been a humble disciple. And we compare the boats of osier and hides that floated along our coasts with the formidable navies which visit and command the remotest shores of the ocean. Without indulging the fond prejudices of patriotic vanity, we may assume a conspicuous place among the inhabitants of the earth.9
Yet that cosmopolite also typically wrote sympathetically about Islam, and pondered how the history of Europe would seem to a future New Zealander.
Hume defined the historian's task as being ‘to remark the rise, progress, declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing empires: the virtues, which contributed to their greatness, and the vices which drew on their ruin’.10 Applied to English history, this meant putting the accent on socio-cultural phenomena: ‘The rise, progress, and decline of art and science,’ he reflected, ‘are curious objects of contemplation, and intimately connected with a narration of civil transactions.’11 Looking back to what he typically called ‘the dark ages’, he dismissed many of the chronicles as mere fable and, good philosophe as he was, contrasted the boringness of barbarians with those ‘convulsions of a civilized state’ which generally ‘compose the most instructive… part of its history’.12
In the light of the uniformitarian conviction that human nature was ever and everywhere the same, enlightened historians posited that the past was intelligible in terms of the hidden springs of action; and, motives being constant, that made it relevant to the present.13 Later ‘historicists’ would upbraid such thinking as anachronistic, since it failed to probe into the minds of the dead. That charge would not, however, have fazed enlightened historians, who prized their own ‘philosophical’ stance – history was philosophy teaching by example. And, as Bolingbroke's dictum makes clear,14 enlightened history was positively intended to be didactic, providing lessons for statesmen while also broadening outlooks: ‘history’, he claimed, ‘serves to purge the mind of those national partialities and prejudices, that we are apt to contract in our education’.15 The greatest of its morals was that human affairs – with few exceptions, notably Graeco-Roman Antiquity – had been a nightmare of crime and folly, from which humanity must awake and escape.16
Enlightened histories claimed to be replacing error with truth, but they were in reality trading new myths for old – their own mentalities were mythopoeic too. Yet, however blind to their own myth-making, the enlightened were energetic anatomists of myth, going beyond accounts of individual fables to shape grand anthropologies – or pathologies – of the myth-making imagination itself.
The museum of mythology – and that principally meant Graeco-Roman legends – was approached from various vantage points, which, for simplicity, might be called the Christian, the Deist, and the rationalist.17 According to Christian thinking, myth – that is, paganism – was intrinsically false, though heathen fables might be instructively read as corruptions of biblical truths. Samuel Shuckford's The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728), a typical instance, confidently assimilated all non-biblical traditions to Scripture by taking biblical chronology, characters and events as the gold standard. In his ‘euhemerist’ reading of myth as coded history, the ancient gods were actually Noah and his sons, disguised under other names and dressed up in the garb of paganism.18 For the foremost late-
century Christian mythographer Jacob Bryant, Noah had variously been styled Prometheus, Deucalion, Atlas, Theuth, Zuth, Xuthus, Inachus, Osiris, Helius, Zeus, Dios, Dionysos, Bacchus, Naus and Nous, in local myths derived from adulterated versions of true Judaeo-Christianity.19 The same Christian-privileging habit is conspicuous in William Warburton. His The Divine Legation of Moses (1737–41) defended Christian orthodoxy by paradoxically embracing the free-thinkers' claim that the doctrine of Heaven and Hell was a purely human device, contrived for political reasons. Such being the case, the Bishop deduced that Hebrew theocracy must have been divinely directed, since the Old Testament made no mention of future rewards and punishments.20
For its part, the Deist approach premised, as already seen, primitive monotheism. From that it followed that both pagan polytheism and Christian doctrines (with their quasi-polytheistic Trinity and saints) were degenerate versions of the primal cult of the Supreme Being. Exploring ‘The Origin of Idolatry and Reasons of Heathenism’ in his Letters to Serena (1704), John Toland thus contrasted foolish pagan fables with pure monotheism:
The most ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Romans, the first Patriarchs of the Hebrews… had no sacred Images or Statues, no peculiar Places or costly Fashions of Worship; the plain Easiness of their Religion being most agreeable to the Simplicity of the Divine Nature.21
Myth had become the chosen vehicle for imparting religious or moral doctrines, explained Toland, because fables were so beguiling. The trouble was that, in due course, the legends of the Greeks, Egyptians and Hebrews had provided monkish writers with models for the ‘art of lying’: ‘The bare, naked, or simple way of Instructing by Precept, being found jejune and nauseous, a mixture of Fable was therefore thought necessary to sweeten and allure the minds of men, naturally Superstitious and Credulous.’22 The gilding of religious doctrines with myth proved the teachings themselves mendacious, and priestcraft peddled parables to conceal its repellent and ridiculous doctrines. Fables were acceptable, however, to Toland if they were open inducements to virtue, Aesop for his part being an author who tended ‘to the discrediting of Vice [and] the encouraging of Vertue’.23