Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  Early modern descriptions of Hell drew their force from the often terrifying experience of darkness and the night in everyday life. How did shifts in attitudes toward darkness and the night relate to changing beliefs in Hell? I argue that the “dark foundations”51 of Hell in daily life and experience were shifting in the second half of the seventeenth century – with profound implications for Hell itself.

  Darkness and the night evoked many emotions in early modern Europe, but fear was assumed to be foremost. It was an easy leap from fear to Hell. The Scottish Presbyterian Elizabeth Nimmo (née Brodie, d. 1717) fused everyday darkness with Hell in an incident recounted in her journal or “spiritual narrative”:

  I was afraid I had sinned the sin unto death. One Sabbath night when my trouble was very great … I was immediately challenged, though the challenge seemed to come from the Devil: “O,” says the enemy, “you have now sinned the sin unto death.” I knew not how to go alone … and after I had lighted my candle, and had read half a side of a book in octavo, then the temptation came in sorely upon me that the room was full of devils to carry me to Hell. I thought I had no comfort but the burning candle, and out it went without any visible cause, whereupon I thought I should have dropt down to the pit.52

  Nimmo’s account of a solitary nocturnal encounter with diabolical temptation resembles both the confessions of accused witches and La Tour’s penitent Magdalene (Figure 3.5). Nocturnal Hell was still very real to Nimmo in rural Scotland in the late seventeenth century, but for some of her learned and urbane contemporaries, the night was now associated with the freedom to question the very existence of the Hell she so feared.53

  From Milton to Spinoza, seventeenth-century Europe produced both vivid evocations of Hell and the first truly resonant denials of its existence. Europeans challenged the orthodox doctrine of Hell in the seventeenth century as never before. Denunciations of eternal torment issued from both radical Christian and secular pens. Positions ranged from the annihilationist argument (represented, for example, by Thomas Hobbes) that the wicked would be destroyed (usually after some time in Hell) and only the saved would enjoy eternal life, to the universalist claim (first advanced by Origen) that eventually all souls would be saved.54

  But these denials of Hell present a strange paradox. After assessing the range of denials in his masterful study of The Decline of Hell, D.P. Walker examines the early modern understanding of the social function of the orthodox doctrine. Aside from a few millenarian Christians, all agreed that without the fear of Hell, society would collapse. As a deterrent to sin and crime, eternal damnation was too important to be questioned publicly. As Henry Dodwell put it in 1698: “in this age of licentiousness, there is hardly any doctrine … of more pernicious consequence than that … concerning the finiteness of hell torments.”55 Learned doubts about the duration or existence of Hell were too dangerous to be shared with the common people. The conflict between learned disbelief and the social function of eternal punishment led to a “double doctrine” of Hell in which those who denied its existence privately affirmed it publicly.

  Authors were quite clear about the double doctrine of Hell. The English Platonist and clergyman Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715) printed his universalist treatise De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium (Of the State of the Dead and of Those who are to Rise) privately and in Latin.56 Translated and published in English, Dutch, and French after his death, in its pages readers found this warning:

  whatever you decide, in your own mind, about these punishments being eternal or not, the received doctrine and words must be used for the people and when preaching to the populace, which is inclined to vice and can be deterred from evil only by the fear of punishment.

  Burnet’s attempt to limit access to his writings about Hell failed, despite his warning that “if anyone translates these things, which are addressed to the learned, into the vulgar tongue, I shall consider it done with ill will and evil intent.”57 Even Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, who denied post mortem rewards and punishments alike as contrary to disinterested virtue practiced for its own sake, admitted that “the principle of fear of future punishment, and the hope of future reward … is yet in many circumstances a great advantage, and support to virtue” for those too impulsive or weak to strive for virtue for its own sake.58 The issue also figured in debates between French Protestants and Catholics in the second half of the seventeenth century. When confronted with Pierre Jurieu’s publication of Origen’s denial of eternal torment, the French Protestant pastor Elie Saurin agreed with Bossuet, bishop of Meaux:

  The crime, or rather the imprudence, consists in M. Jurieu’s having informed the people of a thing which could only scandalize and could not in any way edify.59

  A range of seventeenth-century writers agreed that the denial of the orthodox doctrine of Hell should be presented in terms either intellectual or esoteric, so that “none of the Wicked shall understand, but the Wise shall understand.”60

  Rare were men like F.M. Van Helmont, who in 1684 denounced this secrecy, asking:

  Is it sufficient ground for preaching this Doctrine [of eternal damnation], to concede that it will terrify and affright people from sin? Does God need any Lie of man’s making, to deter people from sin? Or shall we lie for God?61

  In similar terms Pierre Bayle denounced the self-interest which led Arminian theologians like Jean Le Clerc and Issac Jaquelot to conceal their belief in universal salvation. If they revealed that they agreed with Origen and would “exclude no one from the bliss of paradise,” they would be driven from the Netherlands by the “Ministers of the Flemish and Walloon Churches … [because] the dogma of eternal torment seems too precious and too important to allow it to be attacked.”62 Bayle then rehearses the social defense of the orthodox Hell, which “restrains vice by the fear of eternal damnation”; denial of eternal punishment “opens the door to all crimes [and] encourages all criminals.”63 Of course, Bayle did not believe that the denial of divine punishment necessarily led to immorality and vice, but his challenges to the theological foundations of Hell were always concealed or indirect.

  Working with anonymous, posthumous, and unpublished works, Walker carefully exposes a variety of intellectuals who concealed or obscured their disbelief in orthodox Hell. In England personal ties connected Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), John Locke, and Isaac Newton in shared disbelief in orthodox Hell.64 On the Continent debates and denunciations shed light on the disbelief of Spinoza, Bayle, and many Arminian theologians. Walker argues that “probably many disbelieved in eternal punishment, but none of them published against it in his lifetime and under his own name.”65 In 1730 William Whiston quoted Samuel Clarke as having said that “few or no thinking men” affirmed the doctrine of eternal torment.66 Many followed Burnet’s advice and publicly affirmed the traditional doctrine while privately denying it.67 For the learned, this “double doctrine” of Hell – one for the enlightened, another for the common people – presented to the vulgar a simulated inferno designed to deter them from sin.68

  The “double doctrine” reveals the imprint of nocturnalization on the intellectuals’ loss of faith in Hell during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For men such as Spinoza, Burnet, or Newton, Hell, like darkness, had become a nonentity, with no existence of its own. But the double doctrine unearthed by Walker reveals that Hell, if not real, was still important for its social functions. Like darkness on the baroque perspective stage, Hell was created and dispelled to produce specific effects. When men who did not believe in Hell encouraged preaching and teaching about Hell as if it were real, they staged eternal damnation.

  Threats of eternal damnation functioned like stage effects, reliant on the manipulation of darkness in the night. The utility of darkness in baroque theater merged with the utility of the fear of Hell in the comments of the master theater designer Joseph Furttenbach. In a guide to theater techniques published in 1663, he described how “Lucifer would be brought on quickly from Hell and let down again ami
dst flames and smoke. Especially when the lights are dimmed for night, this gives quite a terrifying effect.”69 The double doctrine of useful lies about Hell simulated the realm of the prince of darkness for an audience of the ignorant and undisciplined, like a flash of fire from a staged Hell, to produce “a terrifying effect.”

  Hell had become a theatrical display, a simulation based on darkness and illusion. This was clear to someone like Burnet. Writing against the orthodox teaching on Hell (but in Latin), Burnet was especially angered by the orthodox claim that the elect will take pleasure in viewing the eternal torment of the damned. Burnet cast this whole scene – the saved looking down on the torments of the damned in Hell – as a “spectacle on the stage.” Driven to irony, he asks:

  Consider a little … what a theatre of providence this is: by far the greatest part of the human race burning in flames for ever and ever. Oh what a spectacle on the stage, worthy of an audience of God and angels! And then to delight the ear, while this unhappy crowd fills heaven and earth with wailing and howling, you have a truly divine harmony.

  Of course, the double doctrine itself was ironic, affirming Hell on one level while denying it on another. Hell had become a useful artifice or a necessary evil – much like the darkness of which it was made.

  8.4 Darkness and Enlightenment

  Nocturnalization promoted the expression of key concepts of the early Enlightenment. Many of these ideas could be traced back to the New Philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, or Spinoza. But the abstract, complex, and contradictory arguments of these authors could challenge just about everything in the traditional learned culture of their time. Why did issues such as ghosts, witches, and Hell emerge, among others, as key controversies?70 A specific aspect of Hell’s “dark foundations,” resting on an ancient bedrock of fear, looked a little less frightening to all who experienced nocturnalization – a significant minority of Europeans in 1700. A primordial feature of daily life was now pushed back, however slightly, by the new street lighting and by improved domestic lighting. In this new era of the history of the night, women accused of witchcraft evoked pity rather than Satan’s dark powers, and one could now “laugh at spirits.”71 The “esprits forts,” libertines, and skeptics who challenged the reality of ghosts, witches, Hell, and the Devil were at home in the night when these conversations flourished.

  Contemporaries understood the effects of nocturnalization on the religious and philosophical debates of the time. As Lewis Theobald, editor of the London journal the Censor complained in 1717:

  It is too frequent a provocation to a Man of my Gravity … to be obliged to sit up with a Mixture of Company, who, when the Watchman has gone his Round, and the Sparks are entering on their Third Bottle, will trouble the Board with Debates of Religion, and the Power of Faith.

  At this late hour serious topics arose: “How unfit a Time is it, when either Reason nods, or is bewildered, to launch out into Subjects of such a Nature; and play the Skeptics, when Notions must be so confused.” Theobald saw the clear effects of these conversations:

  I doubt not but this Custom of trifling with Immortality and Themes above the Sphere of common Reason, when the Powers of Wine have made the Tongue licentious, has been the Cause of many a Free-thinker among the alert and sanguine.72

  He did not, however, suggest reversing the nocturnalization of London’s cultured life: he goes on to explain that late hours per se are not the issue. Instead the late-night conversations on “themes above the sphere of common reason” have helped change the intellectual tone of the times, creating free-thinkers and “bigots” alike: the former are too emboldened, and the latter too frightened, by late-night “trifling with Immortality.”73 His French contemporary, the abbé Jean Terrasson (1670–1750), claimed that street lighting had led to the decline of letters: “Before this age … everyone returned home early for fear of being murdered on the street, which redounded in favor of one’s work. Now, one stays out at night and works no more.”74 Social banter was replacing solitary reflection in the learned night.

  The association of the night with free-thinking was widespread. The guide to Paris published in 1718 by the German Nemeitz advised young men to visit the city’s “infinite number of cafés” in the afternoon or evening.75 In particular, he noted that “the widow Lawrence in the rue Dauphine keeps a café, called the ‘café des beaux esprits’ where assemble certain persons who discuss all sorts of curious and spiritual matters.”76 A police report of August 1729 described such café conversations in a more alarmed tone:

  There are in Paris self-proclaimed wits who talk in cafés and elsewhere of religion as a chimera … and if order is not restored, the number of atheists or deists will increase, and many people will make a religion according to their own fashion, as in England.77

  Like the night print from the Secret Letters and the accounts of Morris and Thoresby examined above, these authors testify to effects of nocturnalization on the form and content of the debates of the early Enlightenment.

  The magnitude of this change is revealed by comparison with a 1629 sermon of John Donne (cited in chapter 3). Preaching “in the evening” at St. Paul’s in London, Donne called on the power of midnight, solitary and profound, to strip away the vanity of the day. Addressing an “atheist,” Donne asked him to look ahead “but a few hours, but six hours, but until midnight.” Donne assumed that at midnight his listener would be asleep, “dark and alone” in an ascetic or penitential night. Donne taunted: “Wake then; and then dark and alone, Hear God ask thee then, remember that I asked thee now, Is there a God? and if thou darest, say No.”78 By the end of the seventeenth century, nocturnalization had transformed the scene imagined by Donne. In London midnight was precisely the time when the society of gallants, free-thinkers, and “atheists” thrived. They confronted not God, but one another in drink and conversation. Worldly banter replaced sacred introspection as a key nocturnal activity, and the late hour was more likely to strengthen their free-thinking than to challenge it. For Donne and his listeners, it was “an occasional mercy” when “A man wakes at midnight full of unclean thoughts, and hears a passing bell.”79 But by the end of the century, the social din of the coffeehouse had drowned out the lonely sound of the passing bell.80

  The imprint of nocturnalization upon the discussions of ghosts, witchcraft, and Hell also appears in the framing concepts and rhetorical strategies of important works of the early Enlightenment. Here I examine early Enlightenment thought in terms of nocturnalization through two popular texts, 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). These works, which reached especially wide audiences, present the same tension between the two aspects of nocturnalization – the discourses and practices that dispelled or denied darkness and those that created, maintained, and manipulated it – seen in the discussions of witchcraft, ghosts, and Hell above. Fontenelle presents an intellectual seduction by night, lifting the veils of nature but counseling secrecy from “les esprits ordinaires.” To refute accounts of spirits, ghosts, and witches, Bekker emphasizes repeatedly that these encounters often take place “at night and in nightmares” when reason is obscured.81 Both authors created hierarchies of perception, understanding, and enlightenment that shifted the darkness of ignorance onto differences of region and race.

  8.4.1 Nature: Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

  Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) combined talents and connections in literature (he was the nephew of the brothers Corneille) with interests in astronomy, geometry, and physics. The Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds was his first major success when published in 1686. In 1691 he was elected to the Académie française and in 1697 appointed permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences – a testament to his skill as an elucidator of science. He published widely as a moralist, advocate of les modernes, Cartesian, and biographer of sc
ience. Voltaire and Diderot hailed him as a true pioneer of the Enlightenment.

  Fontenelle’s extraordinarily popular Conversations went through thirty-two editions during the author’s long lifetime; translations appeared in every major European language throughout the eighteenth century. In the year following its publication, the book was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, and in this year Fontenelle added a sixth chapter that reinforced the book’s enlightened-aristocratic tone.82 This work and his other writings of the 1680s – some clandestine, some popular – marked “the gateway to the French Enlightenment.”83 Like the larger intellectual movement of which it is emblematic, Conversations engages with darkness, the night, and nocturnalization on several levels.

  Consisting of six conversations at night between an unnamed marquise and a scientifically informed narrator, Fontenelle’s work teaches the fundamentals of a Copernican–Cartesian universe, infinite and dynamic. Fontenelle explained astronomy through his narrator’s intellectual seduction of the marquise, who is untutored in natural philosophy but possesses a keen intellect and ready curiosity. (Fontenelle’s narrator describes her as “a blond … the most beautiful woman I know.”) In his Preface Fontenelle explains that “the ideas of this book are less familiar to most women than those of The Princess of Cleves, but they’re no more obscure.” His narrator then leads the marquise from ignorance and disbelief to a clear understanding of the heliocentric solar system, the movement of the earth, geographic features on the moon, eclipses, the six known planets, and the possibility of life in other solar systems. Fontenelle’s conversations between the amiable narrator and his bright pupil reveal a clear parallel between the darkness deployed in the theater and the use of darkness in the presentation and transmission of natural philosophy in the Enlightenment. As in the theater and in court culture in general, the relationship between the creation of darkness and the illumination of darkness is central to the project, yet carefully hidden.