Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)
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The existing scholarship on the symbolic valences and associations of the night in the pre-modern West reveals an ambivalent legacy. All the religious traditions of early modern Europe – Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim – used the night to think about God and humankind, good and evil. Certainly some of the most complex and sustained discussion of darkness and the night in the West took place within the Christian tradition. The volume, complexity, and variety of writing about the night in the Christian tradition and the range of topics it understood through the night far surpass modern attempts to address the night in philosophical or literary terms. And the upheavals within early modern Christendom from the Reformations to the Enlightenment make the symbolic associations of the night in this period especially dynamic and significant.
For early modern Christians, darkness and the night had long served as powerful metaphors. From the tradition’s earliest writings, darkness and the night have borne strongly -– though not exclusively – negative associations. The letters of Paul repeatedly contrast light as righteous with darkness as evil, as in 2 Corinthians 6:14: “For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” and 1 Thessalonians 5:5: “You are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.”32 The night represents evil or separation from God. The light–night opposition is especially intense in the Johannine books: “Jesus answered and said unto him … this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil,” and “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 3:10–19; 9:5). The betrayal and arrest of Jesus at night and the mid-day darkness that marked the crucifixion reflect the same associations.
Do these early Christian writings present any counter-associations in their use of the night? In the frame of its powerful light–darkness / good–evil oppositions, the Gospel of John introduces “a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.” Later when he is praised for preparing the body of Jesus for burial, he is described as “Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night” (John 3:1–2; 7:50–51; 19:39). There has been little consensus among commentators on this obscure figure, on the one hand criticized for coming to Jesus only in secret, on the other hand praised as a true disciple.33 As we will see below in chapter 3, the religious persecutions of the confessional era gave Nicodemus – and the night – new valences. Further exceptions to identification of the night and its darkness with evil are also seen in the story of the Apostle Paul. As Wolfgang Speyer has observed, in pagan, Jewish, and Christian antiquity midnight and noon were liminal times, both associated with blessings and maledictions. Paul, first struck blind at midday (Acts 9:8; 22:6–11), is later freed from prison “at midnight” as he and Silas pray (Acts 16:25).34
Augustine repeated the dominant biblical motif, noting in book 13 of his Confessions that “we are now light … and children of the light and children of the day, not children of night and darkness.”35 When writing against the dualists of his age, however, Augustine affirmed the place of darkness in divine creation:
Yet even these privations of things are so ordered in the universe of nature … For by not illuminating certain places and times, God has also made the darkness as fittingly as the day.36
Even so, Augustine considers literal darkness only in terms of privation (“darkness is the absence of light in the same way in which silence is the absence of voice”), not as a material complement to light or as a source of positive imagery.37
The influence of Neoplatonism on Christian spirituality helped generate a set of ideas centered on “interiority”, “ascent”, complementary “light and darkness”, and “oneness with God” (as Denys Turner has described them) that first allowed darkness and the night to serve as paths to God.38 Most influential were the writings of Denys (or Dionysius) the Areopagite, a Syrian theologian of the late fifth century CE. Denys created a rich and complex mystical vocabulary of apophatic darkness which reoriented the light–darkness motif in the Christian tradition. As he proclaimed in The Mystical Theology: “I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light!”39
Denys placed darkness in his apophatic theology of that which cannot be expressed about God. Introducing his Mystical Theology, he explained that “the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into the darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”40 This association of darkness with apophatic and mystic theology laid the foundation for all later discussions of nocturnal spirituality in the tradition. “Darkness” served to evoke a theology of speechlessness, a “darkness which is beyond intellect,” later described by Nicholas of Cusa as a docta ignorantia. Denys evoked this darkness to open The Mystical Theology:
Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,
up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture,
where the mysteries of God’s Word
lie simple, absolute and unchangeable
in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.
Amid the deepest shadow
they pour out overwhelming light.41
Darkness, and by extension the night, could now help to express a Christian’s approach to an ineffable and utterly transcendent God. And Denys held almost apostolic authority in the West from the twelfth until the sixteenth century, when his identification with the biblical Areopagite of Acts 17:34 was decisively proven false.42
The mystic praise of the night and its darkness in late antiquity would find little echo in the Christianized Germanic culture of the early medieval period. Anglo-Saxon texts such as Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood” present a night of utter danger and evil, with no redeeming qualities. Fear, treachery, and violence fill the night in the earliest German and Scandinavian poetry as well. Clerical writers of this age understood the night in dismal terms: Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) explained that “Night represents injustice, infidelity, and all misfortune.”43 “The day is for the living, and the night is for the dead,” Thietmar of Merseburg (976–1018) asserted.44 Describing his journey from Reims to Chartres in March 991, the Benedictine Richer of Reims spoke of “the threat of the night” as the sun began to set. After a slow and dangerous bridge crossing he saw that “the night had fallen, covering the world with horrid darkness.”45 As scholars such as Chris Fitter have noted, early medieval texts never present the night as positive in a material or spiritual sense, focusing instead on themes of assault and danger.46
The place of communal prayer at night in the Rule of St. Benedict is well known.47 The Nocturnal Office offered the opportunity to encounter the Lord at night, but it was also understood as a form of communal defense against its dangers.48 Medieval writers in the Benedictine tradition found no opportunities to use the night as a metaphor for approaching the Divine. For example, the writings of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) abound with images of divine light, but he never uses any language of apophatic darkness or envisions the dark night as a path to God, in contrast with ancient and early modern theologies of darkness.
In recent years several scholars have sought to assess the night in the high and late Middle Ages. Writing in the context of studies of other aspects of medieval culture, including collections on the monstrous and on space and place in the Middle Ages, Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris have focused on “the metaphorical and literal uses of the night in medieval society,” while the Bulgarian medievalist Tzotcho Boiadjiev has examined the night in the practical texts of medieval sermons and exempla of the tenth through fifteenth centuries. Both of these studies describe a night of external threats, natural and sup
ernatural. Using a long series of sermons and exempla Boiadjiev shows how the night transformed ambivalent places such as the road, the bridge, or the churchyard, which in other contexts might serve as symbols of progress or strength, into sites of diabolical danger and violence. For Youngs and Harris, the clerical writers of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries constructed a “dark ‘other’” in their efforts to “fix what it meant to be in the light of God and part of the Christian community.”49 While they explore the wide range of negative associations with the night in the high and late Middle Ages, both of these studies go beyond the clichés of unrelenting nocturnal fear to examine the burgeoning illicit night life seen in cities beginning around the twelfth century.50
In the period from the sixth through fourteenth centuries, Christian writers in the West seldom drew on the few positive associations the night had acquired during the first five centuries of their tradition. The wide influence of Denys in the West issued from his writings on celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy; his use of darkness in paradoxes to describe the Divine, whose “transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge” found little resonance. By the fourteenth century, however, the growth of mystical theology had renewed the use of the night in the apophatic sense first expressed by Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. Apophatic images of darkness and the night can be seen in the works of Meister Eckhart (d. 1328), in the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing (unknown English author), in the writings of Denis the Carthusian (1402–71), and most systematically in the De docta ignorantia (1440) of Nicolas of Cusa (1401–64).51 With the Dionysian corpus established and reworked by Nicolas of Cusa and other fifteenth-century mystics, early modern Christians could cite venerable authorities when using the imagery of the night to inspire or exalt, creating a counterpoint to the more widespread and traditional association of darkness and the night with evil. How early modern Christians drew on the theologies of darkness in their tradition has been little studied, and is the focus of chapters 2 and 3 of this book.
1.2.1 About this book
The night is emerging as a focus of scholarship in early modern Europe, creating enormous opportunities to explore the period in relation to this ubiquitous aspect of culture and daily life. How best can scholars connect the night with the salient themes and issues of the early modern centuries? To bring the history of the night into dialogue with the history of the early modern day, so to speak, we can see the night as part of a broader form of analysis, rather than as a self-contained topic. In this study I use daily life as a category of historical analysis to understand the reciprocal relationship between night and society. I show how early modern men and women mapped the contrast between darkness and light – a fundamental distinction of daily life – onto early modern culture, and how this culture in turn helped structure the distinction between night and day.52 This approach also broadens and reorients the history of daily life itself by focusing on the imprint of everyday distinctions on complex bodies of thought and expression.53 By moving beyond considering daily life simply as an object of study, and using it instead as a category of analysis, we can illuminate aspects of culture and society far beyond the quotidian, such as Lutheran mysticism or changing beliefs about ghosts and spirits. This approach creates new and valuable perspectives by examining the reciprocal relationships between the night and witchcraft persecutions, confessional formation, absolutism and court culture, the civilizing process, social discipline, gender and the public sphere, and colonization, race, and the early Enlightenment.
In medieval Europe, spiritual and political authorities forced the individuals and groups they excluded into the night, “physically in their movements, and metaphorically by being linked to the evil abroad in the darkness.”54 This process intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as demonologists tied the crime of witchcraft to the nocturnal witches’ sabbath (a connection never made, for example, in the fifteenth-century Malleus maleficarum). But as I show in chapter 2, discourses of witchcraft in this period focused on the night in another, more interior way, as the time of diabolical temptation. In the narratives of witchcraft performed on stage or extracted though the courts, the act of succumbing to this shadowy temptation and joining the Devil’s nocturnal anti-society became the true crime of witchcraft. The power of this somber fiction is seen in the tens of thousands of executions for witchcraft in this age.
Early modern Europeans used the night to think profoundly about God and the Devil, underscoring the significance of the night to early modern culture. In chapter 3 I show how the formation of rival confessional churches led Christians to seek the Lord in the night, literally and figuratively: the widely persecuted Anabaptists provide the most concentrated example of a much broader experience. I also examine men like John of the Cross and Jacob Böhme, persecuted within their own churches, who brought forth an intense nocturnalization of mysticism and theology, epitomizing the wider nocturnalization of Christian piety and imagery across confessions. Like the diabolical associations of the early modern night, these mystics saw the divine night as a time of isolation in powerfully interior terms.
The visual and emotional power of imagining the night and its darkness as attributes of God quickly generated parallel political expressions. Sovereigns and courtiers mapped the contrast between darkness and light onto the political culture of the seventeenth century, representing power and authority through fireworks, illuminations, and lavish nocturnal festivities. In chapter 4 I show how darkness and the night were essential to baroque attempts to articulate and transcend confessional sources of authority. Nocturnal darkness intensified the light that represented God or king in spectacles of what Jürgen Habermas called “representative publicness.” At the same time, the active use of darkness by princes to bedazzle, conceal, and deceive expressed the fundamental political insights of the age. The use of the night to create and represent authority reveals fundamental connections between court culture, the baroque stage, and seventeenth-century political thought.
In chapters 4 and 5 I show how spectacular new uses of the night slowly began to reorder everyday routines at court and in cities as princes, courtiers, and respectable townspeople regularly extended the legitimate social part of the day long past sunset, and often past midnight. In the second half of the seventeenth century, parallel to the new uses of the night at court, the rulers of the leading cities of Northern Europe began to establish public street lighting. Most research on street lighting has focused on the gas and electric lighting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the first European street lighting – candles or oil-lamps in glass-paned lanterns – was an innovation of the seventeenth century, both reflecting and promoting new attitudes toward the night and urban space. Chapter 5 shows how the night and its illumination thus link the representational needs of baroque rulers with the practical expansion of urban public time and space.
Contemporaries recognized street lighting as a “modern” security innovation. A 1692 description of Paris remarked that “the most distant peoples should come and see … the invention of lighting Paris during the night with an infinity of lights,” explaining that the street lighting was something “the Greeks and the Romans had never considered for the policing of their republics.”55 In chapter 6 I argue that this policing was part of a distinctive colonization of the urban night. It met with immediate resistance from the urban night’s traditional inhabitants: young people – nobles, servants, apprentices, and students – as well as tavern visitors, prostitutes, and those of all estates who sought occasional anonymity. In the ensuing struggle to colonize the urban night authorities deployed estate, age, and gender to mark the shifting lines between prohibited and respectable night life. The colonization of the urban night created a “bourgeois public sphere” whose location in daily time, in the evening and at night, was at least as important as its physical sites in coffeehouses or clubs. I place the arguments of Jürgen Habermas and Joan Landes on gender and the pu
blic sphere in the new context of daily time and examine how meeting at night limited respectable women’s access to the emerging urban public.
The same legal-disciplinary policing underlay authorities’ engagement with the night in the countryside as in the city. As with the colonization of the urban night, youth, gender, and sexuality were the key issues. But as I show in chapter 7, the encounter of church and state with the rural night was shaped by different cultural and social forces and led to outcomes distinctly different from the colonization of the night in the cities of Northern Europe. Attempts to colonize the rural night focused on social discipline and were less tied to commerce and consumption than at court or in major cities. Like their cousins in towns and cities, young people in the countryside resisted incursions into a time that had traditionally been theirs. Because neither church nor state could intervene in rural daily life as effectively as they could in cities, villagers young (and old) successfully defended their traditional night life. By 1700 the difference between the successful colonization of the urban night and the failed colonization of the rural night appeared as a real shift in patterns of daily time seen, for example, in the transformation of the age-old pattern of segmented sleep described above. References to segmented sleep are absent from the diaries of elite men like Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and the duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) because their daily life was shaped by the rise of street lighting, better domestic lighting, and the spread of coffee and tea as alternatives to beer and wine. The nights of townspeople, compressed into a single sleep of seven or eight hours, began to diverge from the traditional pattern of segmented sleep reflected, for example, in rural diaries.