I thought fit to fortify and strengthen the Faith of others as much as I could; being well assured that a contemptuous misbelief of such like Narrations concerning Spirits, and an endeavour of making them all ridiculous and incredible, is a dangerous Prelude to Atheisme it self, or else a more close and crafty Profession or Insinuation of it.28
For writers like More, the night took on a new value as the time of the appearance of ghosts and spirits. Among the defenders of established Christianity in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the spirits of the night held a new meaning. No longer seen as diabolical illusions or as bearers of messages of repentance, justice, or vengeance, now the specters were seen as proof of the immortality of the soul, and of the existence of God and the afterlife as well. As penitential spirits or diabolic apparitions, they drew their meaning from a larger system of belief; now, in an ominous reversal of signification, these apparitions had to serve as evidence of that larger invisible reality.
For many Protestant authors in Britain, the Netherlands, and the Empire, the threat of popery that once surrounded such apparitions was utterly overshadowed by the Christian mortalism of Milton or the “atheism” of Hobbes, Spinoza, or even Bekker. The utility of the ghost to preserve faith in God – and in divine mystery and majesty – became paramount. This utility was initially supported by hopes that the circulation of enough “well-attested” ghost stories would prove their reality within the empiricism on the rise at the end of the century.
In this debate, both positions reflected fundamental changes in everyday life for the learned and urbane. As noted earlier, nocturnalization encompassed two seemingly contradictory trends: on the one hand the conquest of the darkness and the night through vastly improved street and domestic lighting, and on the other the creation and manipulation of darkness at royal spectacles, on baroque perspective stages, and in absolutist political display in general. The ghost literature of the seventeenth century presents a similar contrast between dispellers and promoters of the shadowy spirit world. The “ghost-busters” (such as Spinoza and Bekker) claimed to shine the light of Cartesian analysis or rational Scriptural exegesis onto the shadowy existence of ghosts and reveal them to be, in the words of Spinoza “but dreams, which differ from God as totally, as that which is not differs from that which is.”29 Whether materialist, rationalist, or empiricist, the radical Enlightenment promised the elimination of the shadowy world of ghosts, demons, and spirits. The discourses which denied the existence of ghosts circulated in the most nocturnalized spaces of this period. Many issued from the cities of the Netherlands, which enjoyed the oldest and most effective street lighting in Europe. (See Map 5.2.) From this dense concentration of nocturnalized daily life, the ideas of the radical Enlightenment radiated through the night, from the genteel evening gatherings of Claver Morris in Somerset to the coffeehouses and taverns of London, Paris, and Leipzig.
In contrast, sovereigns who used darkness and the night to enhance their displays of light and power – such as Charles I, Louis XIV, Augustus the Strong of Saxony, or even Frederick William I of Prussia – mirror those anxious Protestants who assessed the dangers of “atheism” as much greater than those of popery and so emphasized the reports of ghosts and spirits in their own times as “sensible proof of spirits” and therefore of God. In a 1678 treatise on angels Benjamin Camfield referred to “the Supreme Spirit, and Father of Spirits”:
’tis to be observed, among our modern Atheists and Sadducees especially, that their antipathy and aversation, as to the notion and being of Spirits universally, hath carried them on (and naturally doth so) to the dethroning of God, the Supreme Spirit, and Father of Spirits.30
Terrified by the dethroning of kings and heavenly king alike, apologists for monarchy and revealed Christianity praised darkness as fundamental to divine and earthly majesty. Dryden’s “Astraea Redux” of 1660 presented the night as a time when the truth of monarchy was revealed (“Well might the Ancient Poets then confer / On Night the honour’d name of Counseller”), rehabilitating the Stuarts, “In such adversities to Scepters train’d,” by claiming that “We light alone in dark afflictions find.” Rachel Jevon’s poem in celebration of the restoration of Charles II pairs darkness and splendor by proclaiming Charles “More Splendid made by dark Afflictions Night; / Live ever Monarch in Coelestial Light.” The royal spectacles of Louis XIV, beginning with the Ballet de la Nuit of 1653, used darkness to enhance the brilliance of the Sun King.31 The parallel between the importance of darkness to baroque royal spectacle and the importance of ghosts and spirits to Christian faith was first made explicit by Henry More in his 1653 Antidote against atheisme. More chose to end his 160-page treatise with a ringing simile:
For assuredly that Saying was nothing [i.e., never] so true in Politicks, No Bishop, no King; as this is in Metaphysics, No Spirit, no God.32
Countless Protestant divines had denounced all apparitions as human or diabolical trickery, but More, Camfield, Koelman and other Protestants writing in response to the New Philosophy saw these specters as heaven-sent evidence of the Divine. By the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant supporters of monarchy and the divine monarch had embraced the night and its ghosts in terms that would have been unthinkable a half-century earlier.
8.2 Witches
The debate over ghosts and spirits shaded into the more weighty issue of witchcraft. This is no surprise: for early modern people the ghost and the witch were “not merely allied beliefs, but intrinsic parts of the same system.”33 The Devil might appear in the form of a ghost, or directly to a witch; witches might summon the spirits of the dead (as the witch of Endor did) – all were manifestations of the same metaphysical order, sharing deep associations with the night.
Though closely associated in popular and learned belief, the stakes were higher when witchcraft was at issue. Ghost belief could have serious theological and political implications, but there were no major legal issues tied to it. Witchcraft, in contrast, was a crime described and denounced in every body of Western law. Its ties to the political order were explicit. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Protestants and Catholics alike had created a stable context for witchcraft that demanded its persecution, despite the publications of skeptics from several confessions. This context framed witches as the Devil’s servants on earth, with their maleficia, gatherings, and rituals recognized as inverted reflections of the legitimate servants and proper worship of God. Imagined nocturnal gatherings were a key part of this inversion. In these terms Stuart Clark has elucidated the political logic behind the persecution of witches, which helps account for the violence of both the persecutions and the flare-ups of debate over it. In response to criticism of the execution of several witches in Scotland in 1697, minister Robert Wylie argued that “unless a man hath so far renounced humanity as well as religion as to deny invisible Spirits, and the being of witches,” the actions of the Scots authorities were irreproachable.34 The legal and practical context of witchcraft persecution, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in learned demonology, all emphasized the night as the time of diabolical temptation and the witches’ sabbath. The tie between witchcraft and the night intensified at the end the sixteenth century as the learned demonization of the night made its way into popular culture through witch trials and publications.
After 1650, the stable framework of learned demonology and legal persecution was shaken by new challenges that went beyond the humane skepticism of Montaigne, Scot, Wier, or Spee. On an intellectual level, these challenges arose from Cartesian or materialist thought; on a quotidian level, increasing use of the night for respectable sociability undercut its demonization. Spinoza provides some of the most striking expressions, arguing in his Korte Verhandeling (c. 1660) that “devils cannot possibly exist” and refuting arguments about the existence of spirits in series of letters in 1674.35 Such authors challenged the possibility of witchcraft on an abstract level, and they presented their arguments as light overcoming the darkness of superstiti
on.
In response to these new challenges, witchcraft took on new meanings in the law and learned discourse.36 More and more, stories about witches became assertions of the reality of witchcraft. As with ghosts and spirits, supporters of traditional, revealed Christianity saw witchcraft itself as evidence of the reality of their faith and their God. The nocturnal crimes and gatherings of witches were inverted testimony to the divine order preached by the established churches. To preface accounts of witchcraft and witch trials in New England and Sweden The Compleat Library, or, News for the Ingenious (December, 1692) explained the stakes:
As we are troubled in this Age by a great many Atheists, or pretenders to Atheism, so we are no less pestered with a multitude of Pretenders to Reason and Christianity both, which yet against both Reason and Scripture … do strangely Sadducise, and dogmatically, and confidently maintain, there are no witches.37
By publishing these accounts of sorcery, “being attested in the most Authentic manner that is possible,” the author hoped to “satisfy them [i.e., the skeptics] of the Reality of the Being of such wicked Creatures, and of the lamentable Effects of their horrid Confederacy with wicked Spirits.” Despite this author’s reference to “the lamentable Effects” of human alliance with evil spirits, these alliances served an important new purpose by generating accounts of witchcraft which could now be used in the name of established Christianity to support a system of beliefs that seemed (to traditional defenders at least) to be challenged on all sides. As a Scots author explained in a 1698 account of witchcraft, after “Seeing Devils take so much pains to contract for the Souls of Witches; the Saducee’s tho’ judicially blinded in their Reason, are hereby rendred inexcusable by very sense.”38
Conversations with free-thinkers confirmed the fear that denial of the reality of ghosts and witches was a slippery slope to graver errors. This was the conclusion of Ralph Thoresby, the nonconformist antiquary of Leeds, who noted in his diary on June 13, 1712 that he was “troubled.” Visiting London, he had spent that evening and the one before at a coffeehouse in the company of learned men like himself, including one Obadiah Oddy (a classicist), a “Mr. Gale,” and Edmond Halley, Savilian Professor at Oxford. Halley had a reputation as a free-thinker, but the trouble came from Oddy. Thoresby wrote that Oddy, who had been “very zealous in opposing even the best attested narratives of apparitions, witchcraft, etc.” on the previous evening, “now confessed he believed there was no Devil.” Thoresby responded in his diary: “the Lord enlighten him!”39 Could accounts of devils and witches counter this unbelief? In conversation with the free-thinker Oddy, Thoresby (and perhaps other interlocutors) presented “the best attested narratives of apparitions, witchcraft, etc.” as proof of the invisible world of God and spirits, but to no avail.
Apparently concerned by his nocturnal encounter with skepticism, Thoresby began the next day to read “Mr. Beaumont of Genii,” a reference to John Beaumont’s An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, and other magical practices … With a refutation of Dr. Bekker’s World bewitch’d; and other authors that have opposed the belief of them of 1705.40 Ten days later he noted that he had “Finished the perusal of Mr. Beaumont’s History of Genii, or spirits, presented to me, and recommended by the pious Bishop of Gloucester, from whom I had also an account of that very remarkable apparition mentioned in the postscript. His Lordship says this curious treatise has done much good in this skeptical age.”41
Beaumont’s treatise began with an engraving of divination by night (Figure 8.3, “Jews Going Out in the Moonshine to Know their Fortune” by Michael van der Gucht) which reinforced the traditional association of the night with the reality of magic and divination. Here Beaumont cited a Jewish tradition of nocturnal divination during Sukkoth after repeating accounts of contemporary “second-sighted persons” about whom he had been “credibly informed.”42 Thoresby would have found in Beaumont many accounts of spirits and witches, including detailed reports of the Essex witch trials of 1645. The treatise spoke in the empirical tone of the time with many well-attested narratives, including an account of the author’s own experience with spirits and a report from the bishop of Gloucester, with whom Thoresby had spoken personally about “that very remarkable apparition mentioned in the postscript.”
Figure 8.3 Illustration of “Jews going out in the Moonshine to know their Fortune” in John Beaumont, An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, and other magical practices … With a refutation of Dr. Bekker’s World bewitch’d; and other authors that have opposed the belief of them (London, 1705), frontispiece. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
Accounts like these were nothing new, but now they bore the additional function of affirming an entire system of belief in spirits, witches, the Devil, and God. Thoresby’s conversation with Oddy suggests that these nocturnal accounts would never persuade Cartesians or materialists, however. As Jean Le Clerc explained in the first French review of Bekker’s World Bewitched, several scholars were preparing to answer Bekker, but “one would wish that in order to refute him, they would not adopt all the stories that have been made and are made every day regarding Sorcerers & Magicians … They will not persuade our Esprits forts by this path.”43 Instead, Le Clerc argued that “to answer Mr. Becker solidly, they must … prove that the nature of a spirit is such, that it necessarily has a certain power over bodies, though limited; or that, at least, God has established, with regard to pure spirits and their relation to the body, a law much like that of the human spirit’s relationship to the body with which it is united.”44 This was a tall order.
As in the debate over ghosts and spirits, supporters and deniers of witchcraft reflected fundamental changes in everyday life. The intellectual conquest of the night defined darkness and witchcraft alike as nonentities, and no amount of empirical evidence could change this definition. Supporters of traditional Christianity turned to the terrors of the night for “proofs” of their understanding of God and the invisible world, but the landscape of darkness was beginning to shift beneath them.
8.3 Hell
In early modern Christian doctrine, Hell was suspended in a thick network of concepts and connotations. The immortality of the soul, divine judgment, post mortem punishment, the resurrection of the body, revealed doctrine, and a morally static afterlife – all these concepts were woven together in the traditional teaching on Hell. And all these concepts and connotations were questioned as never before in the seventeenth century – first by radical Christians, then by the radical Enlightenment. A challenge to any one of the concepts could have seismic effects on the entire concept of Hell, and the stakes were high. Unlike the belief in ghosts or witches, the doctrine of Hell was preached quite deliberately to deter sin, stir consciences, and maintain the social order. In a 1686 letter the devotional author Matthew Henry presented the accepted view that “Heaven and Hell are great things indeed, and should be much upon our hearts, and improved by us as a spur of constraint to put us upon duty, and a bridle of restraint to keep us from sin.”45 The famously dissolute free-thinker Matthew Tindal said the same in his 1697 tract on religious toleration, though with less straightforward conviction.46 He placed atheists and deists outside the bounds of toleration because they denied “the Existence of a God, or that he concerns himself with Humane Affairs; it being the belief of these things that preserveth them in Peace and Quiet, and more effectually obliges them to be true to their Promises and Oaths, and to perform all their Covenants and Contracts.”47 Denying the efficacy of ghosts, spirits, and witches was already dangerous – witness the career of Balthasar Bekker – but denying openly the existence of divine post mortem punishment in Hell went beyond the limits of even radical Enlightenment discourse. Confounding Hell’s dark existence meant unleashing on an already troubled world all the crime, excess, lust, and deceit kept in check by fear of eternal punishment. Was Hell a nocturnal illusion
that even the most enlightened had to maintain?
We are accustomed to think of the challenges to Hell in the seventeenth century as theological and intellectual, originating in extraconfessional Christianity and in the radical Enlightenment. But traditional Christian Hell as understood and preached by the established churches of early modern Europe was built from the raw materials of daily life, not merely from Christian doctrine and Scripture. When Christians described Hell, they spoke to all five senses, creating a bricolage of experiences. Early modern authors, following a long tradition, distinguished between the poena damni (internal suffering) and the poena sensi (external sensual suffering) that would be experienced in Hell.48 Some of the most significant challenges to Hell in this period arose from the same realms of experience used to make traditional Hell real.
The constitution of Hell through the senses and through lived experience has already been discussed by scholars of early modern culture and belief. Carlos Eire has argued that early modern Christians might “relate experiences in this world to what they had seen and heard about the infernal regions, thereby receiving a foretaste of what might await the five senses after death.”49 As Eire has suggested, the moans and wails of criminals punished in the town square, the smell of the burnt flesh of a heretic, the pain of passing a kidney stone (or of giving birth), the bitterness of an herbal remedy – all could be part of the experience of Hell.50 Eire and other scholars have suggested that early modern people imagined Hell in terms of extreme experiences of torture, pain, and suffering. Using daily life as a category of analysis broadens this approach by considering Hell in terms of mundane early modern experience rather than focusing on the extreme experiences.
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