Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  When darkness fell over the early modern countryside, the characteristic ambivalence of the night emerged. Fear waxed alongside pleasure, leisure merged with labor, and limitations created opportunities. An intense combination of discipline and distinction drove nocturnalization at courts and in cities. From a rural perspective, however, the illuminated courts and cities resembled another vitreous innovation of the seventeenth century, the greenhouse. The concentrated administrative energy and dynamic conspicuous consumption at courts and in large cities produced an exotic bloom of night life. This growth could not be sustained in the early modern countryside, where rural folk instead tended hardy, native nocturnal traditions. Attempts to colonize the rural night were fewer and less successful. At the end of the eighteenth century the spinning bees had endured, rural publicans and customers continued to ignore closing hours, and the night remained a time and place for youth, especially young men. The expansion of respectable night life at the expense of the nocturnal elements of traditional youth culture in cities created a new contrast between city and country nights.

  Chapter Eight Darkness and Enlightenment

  How did Europeans understand darkness and the night, real and symbolic, as the rhythms of daily time shifted? This chapter examines several key controversies of the early Enlightenment in the context of daily experiences and popular beliefs associated with the night and its shadows. The imprint of nocturnalization on these controversies reveals the unevenness of nocturnalization and of the universal claims made by the New Philosophy. Claims to dispel darkness, literal or figurative, lead us to darkness relocated or recreated elsewhere. The tension between the universalism of light and the selective use of the night refigures our understanding of the origins of the Enlightenment and the special place of its early or radical phase.

  The study of nocturnalization in the preceding chapters has revealed two contrasting but ultimately complementary responses to darkness and the night in the seventeenth century. Two sets of discourses and practices arose: one which sought to dispel darkness and transform the night, and another focused on creating and manipulating darkness, whether in devotion or spectacle. These two faces of nocturnalization left their imprint on the form and content of the early Enlightenment. In the first set of discourses and practices, the new street lighting was often described as vanquishing the darkness by transforming night into day: “The night will be lit up as bright as day, in every street,” as a 1667 report on the new street lighting of Paris exclaimed.1 This sense of triumph over darkness is reflected on an intellectual level by Spinoza, for example, who defined darkness as a nonentity in a 1663 treatise, arguing that “We imagine nonentities positively, as beings … we imagine as if they were beings all those modes which the mind uses for negating, such as blindness, extremity, or … darkness, etc.”2 In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke made clear that the association of the night with frightening supernatural beings was entirely contingent: “The ideas of goblins and sprites have really no more to do with darkness than light,” he explained. The problem was a false association created by young women:

  yet let but a foolish maid inculcate these often on the mind of a child, and raise them there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives, but darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other.3

  Darkness itself has no innate qualities for Locke. In similar terms the readers of London’s popular Athenian Mercury were told in an article on darkness published in the 1690s that darkness was “a mere Privation of light.”4

  In contrast to the proclaimed elimination of darkness, baroque piety and the perspective stage used darkness as a real presence to create visual and emotional effects, as did the fireworks and illuminations that crowned court celebrations and political displays. Nocturnalization thus describes a dual relationship to darkness, encompassing the discourses and practices that dispelled or denied darkness as well as those that created, maintained, and manipulated it. This chapter examines the influence of both sides of nocturnalization on European culture at the start of what Herder called “our enlightened century.”5 The seemingly straightforward connection between lighting and the Enlightenment becomes more complex and revealing when we examine both aspects of nocturnalization in the milieu, intellectual content, and controversies of the early Enlightenment.6 I do this by tracing the cultural and intellectual fates of ghosts, witches, and Hell – three intertwined aspects of medieval and early modern culture deeply associated with darkness and the night – in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.7 These manifestations of nocturnal fear, now separated from their basis in the darkness of everyday life, became weak links in the chain of traditional belief. But the discourses which challenged traditional ideas about ghosts, witches, and Hell all used or evoked darkness and the night to supplement their claims. In the same terms, I examine the imprint of nocturnalization on two key texts of the early Enlightenment: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) of 1686 and Balthasar Bekker’s De betoverde weereld (The World Bewitched, 1691–94). Both of these self-consciously “global” works redrew intellectual and cultural boundaries, creating new zones of insight and darkness.

  8.1 Ghosts

  In early modern Europe, ghosts made eschatology apparent to the senses. They revealed the meaning of death and the reality of the afterlife in physical reality: ghosts could be seen, heard, or felt. Their place in early modern European culture (learned and popular) was especially sharply debated across the period from the Reformation through the Enlightenment.

  The association of ghosts with the night was axiomatic. Across the Western cultural tradition, the night has long served as a fundamental symbol of death and the afterlife,8 and the experience of the night shaped descriptions of death, purgatory, Hell, and ghosts in popular and learned accounts alike. In 1643 a baker in the Bavarian town of Altomünster reported to his confessor that he had been visited by a ghost from Purgatory. The spirit asked the baker to fulfill a vow so that it could rest in peace. As David Lederer observed in his valuable 2002 article on ghosts in early modern Bavaria, the baker seems to have understood the apparition as a true purgatorial spirit in orthodox Catholic terms, but the Ecclesiastical Council in Freising did not agree. When the confessor reported the baker’s experience to the Ecclesiastical Council, the learned clerics of the Council responded with a list of ten problems with the account. Among them, “the baker claimed that the spirit appeared brightly lit and joyous during the day as well as at night. Ghosts from Purgatory, the Council reminded the father confessor, were spirits of the dark, tending to sadness and usually showing themselves around midnight.”9 The leading Protestant denunciation of ghosts from Purgatory, Ludwig Lavater’s 1570 treatise De Spectris, argued that any seeming ghost was in reality the Devil or a demon assuming the form of deceased person to deceive the living.10 As described above in chapter 2, Lavater agreed that such apparitions “do appear still in these days both day & night, but especially in the night … For he who is the author of these things, is called in the holy Scriptures the Prince of darkness, and therefore he shunneth the light of Gods word.”11 Lavater warned that “Spirits and other strange sights, be not the Souls of Men, but be either good or evil Angels,” or else some human trickery.12 In other words, Lavater and most sixteenth-century Protestants agreed that the Devil could visit the living in any guise, including that of a familiar deceased person; some persons might also fake an apparition of some kind, but the souls of the dead could not leave the afterlife and appear to the living: “neither the souls of the faithful, nor of infidels, do walk upon the earth after they are once parted from their bodies.” The meaning of ghosts and other nocturnal apparitions became the focus of fierce Protestant–Catholic debate in the second half of the sixteenth century with the publication of Pierre Le Loyer’s Catholic response
to Lavater, the 1586 IIII. livres des spectres, ou apparitions et visions d’espirits, anges et démons (Four Books on Specters or Apparitions and Visions of Spirits, Angels, and Demons). Despite the controversy surrounding the issue, Protestants and Catholics agreed that apparitions (whether ghosts from Purgatory or devils from Hell) were most likely to walk the earth at night.13

  The deep association of ghosts with the night across the confessional divisions of early modern culture linked the new ghost controversies that arose in the late seventeenth century with nocturnalization. The ideas and values of the early Enlightenment, whether inspired by Descartes, Hobbes, or by general skepticism, found ready expression in debates over ghosts and spirits. In comparison with discussions about the reality of witchcraft and the existence of Hell, the stakes were a bit lower when expressing skepticism about spirits or their abilities, and queries about the reality of ghosts and the abilities of spirits could be aired in a broader forum. At the same time, as we will see, skepticism about the “nature, power, administration, and operation” of spirits could serve as the thin end of the wedge of unbelief.14

  The rise of skeptical, Cartesian, and empiricist views challenged ghost beliefs in new ways, and the beliefs found new defenders in Protestant Europe. Two new positions on the reality of specters and ghosts, running parallel to the nocturnalization examined above, emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century. Skepticism about the existence or physical abilities of spirits might arise from even a superficial brush with Hobbes or Descartes; defenders of the spirit world associated this skepticism with libertines like the English “town-gallant,” who “Till Noon … lies a Bed to digest his over-nights Debaucht” – a night spent in brothels, playhouses, coffeehouses, and taverns. Denounced as a blasphemous skeptic in the 1675 pamphlet The Character of a town-gallant, the gallant’s “religion (for now and then he will be prattling of that too) is pretendedly Hobbian.” He actually understands nothing of the New Philosophy, our critic explains, but “the rattle of it at Coffee-houses has taught him to Laugh at Spirits, and maintain there are no Angels, but those in Petticoats. And therefore he defies Heaven … imagines Hell, only a Hot-house to Flux in for a Clap, and calls the Devil, the Parsons Bug-Bear.”15 Often associated with the worst of debauchery and unbelief, the denial of spirits by free-thinkers and “esprits forts” in taverns and coffeehouses led to broader and more sophisticated forms of unbelief. To counter this position, conservatives began to emphasize the reality of spirits as evidence of the reality of Heaven, Hell, and the entire “invisible world.” As we will see, the café at night was a key site for these debates over the implications of the New Philosophy for belief in ghosts and spirits across Northern Europe.

  In 1701 the clandestine Leipzig newsletter Geheime Briefe, So zwischen curieusen Personen über notable Sachen … gewechselt worden (Secret Letters, Exchanged among Curious Persons on Notable Issues) defended the existence of ghosts to a broader public, providing us with an extraordinary visual overview of the issues in the form of an illustration of a ghost appearing to three men at night (Figure 8.1).

  Figure 8.1 Facing-page illustration, Geheime Briefe, So zwischen curieusen Personen über notable Sachen … gewechselt worden (Freystadt [i.e. Leipzig], 1701), after p. 829.

  The unnamed author of the Secret Letters insisted that ghosts and spirits were real, and that the denial of their existence was pernicious: “The denial of ghosts is the subtle profession of atheism” (“Spectrorum negatio est subtilis Atheismi professio”) is the title of the illustration (Figure 8.2). The illustration offers a unique visualization of the ghost controversy. As the three men drink and smoke their pipes by candlelight, a libertine raises a toast, unaware of the headless apparition just seen by the companion on his left. The dark time of drink, sin, and atheism becomes a moment when the reality of spirits (and of God) is revealed: the libertine night becomes a mystic time. The corresponding text in the 1701 Secret Letters asks “What we should think of those Christians who do not believe in ghosts and the appearance of spirits and deny their physical actions?”16 The response denounces such Christians as a “disturbing and dangerous swarm,” and attacks the “ghost-busters” (“Gespenst-Stürmer”) who deny the appearance and effects of spirits. Such persons

  are not really subtle but in fact truly crude atheists, who must either deny the witness of the Holy Scripture, Old and New Testaments, or twist [Scripture] in an unreasonable and scurrilous way.17

  Figure 8.2 Detail: illustration title, Geheime Briefe, So zwischen curieusen Personen über notable Sachen … gewechselt worden (Freystadt [i.e. Leipzig], 1701), after p. 829.

  The author emphasizes the evidence in the Christian Scriptures:

  accounts of ghosts appear in the Old Testament (such as the appearance of the prophet Samuel and similar, etc.), not to speak of the New Testament … which must be mere fables to such a “ghost-buster” if he wants to deny the appearance of spirits.18

  The association of late-night conversation with the debate over ghosts and spirits extends beyond this image, appearing in several diaries of the period. Far from the intellectual centers of Leipzig or London, for example, the West Country physician Claver Morris of Wells in Somerset noted a similar exchange in his diary on September 6, 1709: “At the [weekly Tuesday night] Music-Meeting there happened to be Captain James Coward; And his asking how a Spirit could throw a Bed-Staff gave me an occasion to prove beyond his denying, & I hope to his satisfaction, that the World was not eternal and that there were future rewards & Punishments after Death.”19 The conversation recorded in Morris’s terse entry starts with Coward posing a question raised by Descartes and Spinoza: how could an immaterial spirit interact with the physical world? We do not know exactly what followed this question, but one way or another, the conversation led to Morris shoring up several pillars of Christian doctrine by asserting the last judgment and the reality of post mortem punishments, including Hell. As the Secret Letters article warned, there seemed to be a slippery slope from skepticism about ghosts to the outright denial of Christian verities.

  Only one “ghost-buster” was mentioned by name in the Secret Letters article: the Amsterdam Reformed minister Balthasar Bekker (1634–98), who had unleashed an enormous controversy with the publication of his De betoverde weereld (The World Bewitched, 1691–94).20 Across the four volumes of this work Bekker argued that “the apparitions of Evil Spirits are contrary to true Reason, and that the Holy Scripture affords no proofs of it.”21 Bekker’s work was immediately translated into German, French, and English and was read and discussed widely in the 1690s.22 Bekker was an orthodox Reformed minister, but the intellectual basis of The World Bewitched was an explosive combination of Cartesian pneumatology and Spinoza’s accomodationalist biblical exegesis. On Cartesian grounds he questioned whether “a Spirit, as a Spirit, and so much the more as it is a Spirit, can without Body act upon all sorts of Bodies, and upon other Spirits,” concluding that “the operations of such Spirits, as are not joined to a Body; either Angels or Devils” cannot “act upon other Bodies, either of Men, or other matter.”23 Denounced as a “Spinozist” and atheist for the claims in The World Bewitched, which we will examine below, Bekker was permanently suspended from his post in Amsterdam in 1692.24 The contrast between Bekker and his predecessor Lavater is especially revealing: these two Reformed pastors and theologians, separated by a century of concentrated intellectual ferment, held completely opposed views of the existence and effects of demons and spirits in this world.

  The denunciations of Bekker’s work in the Netherlands, England, and Germany were intense. His claim that neither reason nor Scripture could prove “that Men have any commerce with Spirits”25 deeply disturbed Protestant authors who saw in such spirits proof of all things spiritual, and in their denial the prelude to atheism. Some argued for guilt by association: in 1692 the Amsterdam Reformed minister Jacobus Koelman claimed that ideas in The World Bewitched “have a lot in common with atheists, Sadducees, Epicureans, Libertines,
and other Scripture despisers, and especially with Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, Adrian Koerbach, David Joris, and the like.”26

  Indeed, in the 1690s conservative English Protestants were responding to the same intellectual threats generated by “atheists, Sadducees, Epicureans, [and] Libertines” homegrown and imported. The number of ghost publications in Britain surged and the Athenian Mercury (an English periodical similar to the Secret Letters) began trading in ghost stories. But the English ghost controversy had its origins a generation earlier. As ghost-story collector John Aubrey (1626–97) explained:

  When I was a child … before the Civil Wars … the fashion was for old women and maids to tell fabulous stories nighttimes, of Sprites and walking of Ghosts, etc. … When the wars came, and with them Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition [inquiry], the phantoms vanished. Now children fear no such things, having heard not of them.27

  The Interregnum unleashed a torrent of heterodox ideas from Thomas Hobbes, the Ranters, other antinomians, and Christian mortalists like Richard Overton and John Milton – all in one way or another denied the existence of ghosts, spirits, demons, the afterlife, or the immortality of the soul. Responding to the “Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition” that had begun in the 1640s, the Cambridge theologian Henry More (1614–87) began promoting ghost belief in his 1653 An antidote against atheisme, or, An appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man. This was the first Protestant defense of the belief in ghosts and spirits: