Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  In The World Bewitched Bekker also redefined the relationship between enlightened Europeans and “all the Pagans in the World … in Asia … in Africa … and at last in America” in far-reaching terms. Bekker considered the place of these “Modern Pagans” in the first book of The World Bewitched, described by an English reviewer as “being but a collection of the various Opinions of Men about this Matter.”107 The reviewer thought that this first book of The World Bewitched “has not been attended with great Difficulties.” Compared to the furor created by the Cartesian and exegetical arguments in books II and III, that was true, and few scholars today have examined the argument Bekker makes in the first book.

  Contemporaries did respond to his discussion of belief in the Devil by “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern,” however. These contemporaries, such as Benjamin Binet and John Beaumont, saw that, far from being a noncommittal survey of beliefs in demons, the Devil, ghosts, and witches in all times and places, this first section makes a bold and startling argument that redraws the dividing lines between knowledge and ignorance, shifting the “the frightful Darkness of Paganism” onto the beliefs of the other peoples of world, ancient and modern.108

  In the first book of The World Bewitched Bekker assembles evidence about pagan beliefs in the Devil, demons, ghosts, witches, and spirits. He argues that “the difference to be found amongst them is not material, and must be accounted as inconsiderable, comparatively to the conformity that is betwixt them all.” Bekker interprets the consistent pagan belief in evil spirits in light of his assertion, “certain and undoubted, that every Opinion that proceeds from Paganism as from its Original, cannot at the same time be founded upon the Holy Scripture.” Bekker implies here and argues later that pagan belief in spirits is “contrary to true Reason, and … Holy Scripture affords no proofs of it.”109 These pagan beliefs are thus entirely false, not merely distorted misperceptions of a Christian reality that includes ghosts, demons, and witches. The overall claim of The World Bewitched that spirits and demons can affect nothing material, and that the Devil’s reach does not extend to the physical world, is supported in book I by this evidence, leading Bekker to conclude, for example, that “It is … sufficiently proved, by all the quotations of this Book, that there are no Miracles, Oracles, purging Fires, Apparitions of Hobgoblins or Souls, Witchcraft by Letters and Characters, or choice of Days, either in Judaism or Popery; but they draw their Original from Paganism.”110 Rooted in paganism, these beliefs had no place in the further reformation of Christianity Bekker proposed.

  The place of the practices and beliefs of modern-day pagans in Bekker’s argument presented the strange reversal of the well-known proof of the existence of God “by universal consent.” The argument from “universal consent” functioned as a “moral proof” of the existence of God, quite familiar to Protestant and Catholic theologians alike.111 According to this proof all nations, ancient and modern, demonstrated some belief in a god or gods. However mistaken these pagan conceptions of the Divine might be, taken as a whole they showed an inescapable underlying truth. No reasonable person would conclude that all these peoples were mistaken; therefore, there must be a real God. Among the many proofs of the existence of God taught by early modern theologians, that from universal consent was a widely cited and seen as a meta-proof, a “consequence of the force of all proofs of God.”112 Theologians distinguished, of course, between the proper Christian understanding of God based on revelation, and the misconceived, anthropomorphic pagan gods. Nonetheless, “the abuse which one does to a truth does not destroy it,” as the Huguenot theologian Benjamin Binet explained, and pagan beliefs testified indirectly to the reality of the Christian God.113 This argument for the existence of God underscored, however tentatively, the fundamental unity of humankind. Belief in the Divine was universal and evident – the only partial exceptions were the European “atheists,” real or imagined, against whom seventeenth-century theologians sharpened their arguments.114 A flicker of the true God was visible even in the darkest pagan idolatry. Recognition of a common truth united all peoples, however distorted or idolatrous pagan understandings of God might be.

  Bekker divided this unity. In his view ancient and modern pagans joined most Christians in the common and false belief in the power of the Devil, spirits, and witches. Bekker opposed himself and an enlightened minority of his readers to the superstitious pagans and Christians of his age. He proposed “to the Reader and myself, the lesson of the Apostle in his first Epistle to Timothy. 4:7: ‘Reject prophane, and Old Wives Fables, and exercise thy self to Godliness.’” In the first book or section of The World Bewitched Bekker argued from universal error: the age-old and world-wide belief in spirits and the Devil was, according to his Cartesian understanding of spirits, impossible; according to his reading of the Bible it was unscriptural as well. Reason and Scripture showed pagans to be in utter darkness on this issue, and their ignorant belief in ghosts and spirits could only be cleared up from Cartesian and scriptural starting points. Bekker’s reliance on these two sources of authority, the New Philosophy and Scripture, led him to forthrightly deny any truth or value in the beliefs of the “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern” he surveyed. This denial distinguished him from the detached but respectful tone of eighteenth-century works which developed the concept of “comparative religion,” such as Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (1723–37).115

  Alongside the outraged responses to Bekker’s application of Descartes, Spinoza, and Cocceius to questions of the Devil, ghosts, and spirits, contemporaries noted his transformation of the well-known argument from universal consent into something quite ominous: after all, Bekker’s claim that belief in physically active ghosts and spirits was a universal error could be expanded by a skeptic or atheist to argue that the universal belief in a deity was just as erroneous. The most widely circulated clandestine manuscript of the early Enlightenment, the Traité des Trois Imposteurs, succinctly made just such a case:

  Those who ignore physical causes have a natural fear born of doubt. Where there exists a power which to them is dark or unseen, from thence comes a desire to pretend the existence of invisible Beings, that is to say their own phantoms which they invoke in adversity, whom they praise in prosperity, and of whom in the end they make Gods. And as the visions of men go to extremes, must we be astonished if there are created an innumerable quantity of Divinities?116

  The rationalist theologian Benjamin Binet responded to Bekker with a variation on the proof of the existence of God by universal consent, arguing that:

  all the peoples of the world are steeped in the opinion of demons. One can infer from this confession that what they know [of demons], however erroneous it might be, must be known to them through the [demons’] operations. And to put this truth in full light, please note the following: It is impossible that one and the same belief universally spread and constantly received may be entirely false in its content.

  Following the argument from universal consent, Binet explains “if demons have been universally and constantly accepted by all the peoples of the world, this knowledge must proceed from some solid cause.”117

  Evidence from other peoples was important to Bekker and to those who sought to refute the claims he made in book I of The World Bewitched. Binet accused Bekker of trying to “evade the entire supernatural order that our travelers tell us regarding the wizardry of the peoples and the operations of the devils who, they report, molest them.” Binet notes that Bekker “makes fun everywhere of the credulity of humankind.” Indeed, Bekker introduces his work by claiming that only with a proper (Cartesian) perspective can one understand “the inconsistency of the Properties of Bodies with those of Spirits … as I do here … as was necessary … to lay a firm foundation to this work, that is wholly grounded upon that Principle, at least as to those things that are the object of the Light of Reason.” This leads Binet to argue for the universality of human experience with the Devil, unconstrained by the claims of European enlighten
ment. He rebukes Bekker:

  Thus Sir, you mean to make us laugh by denying the operations of demons on the Brazilian peoples, for example, because they are not good enough theologians to rise to the knowledge of God and the mysteries that His word has revealed us, or because they ignore the true [i.e., Cartesian] doctrine of demons.

  Binet refuses to accept the division of the world proposed by Bekker (and in the same terms by Fontenelle) into the few (European) enlightened and the many ignorant on such fundamental issues.118 But in the course of the following century the divisions Europeans perceived between themselves and the other peoples of the world would be intensified by adding the opposition enlightened–superstitious to the existing dualities based on religion, race, and civilization.

  For a few learned Europeans and a wider circle of readers and fellow-travelers, a new relationship with the night put the prince of darkness and his attendant ghosts, spirits, demons, and witches into a new light. All these shadowy figures were linked in a wave of controversy that helped define the first generation of the Enlightenment. Representations of darkness and the night – literal and metaphorical – shaped key works of the early Enlightenment, such as Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds and Bekker’s The World Bewitched, revealing the imprint of nocturnalization on the new ways of understanding the book of Nature and the book of Scripture at the end of the seventeenth century. Living and working in the most nocturnalized sites on earth, authors like Fontenelle and Bekker depicted themselves as conquerors of darkness, but in their works we see the displacement of darkness characteristic of nocturnalization. They each created hierarchies of perception, understanding, and enlightenment that shifted the darkness of ignorance onto new differences of region and race. And by taking the victory of light over darkness as the very emblem of their heterogeneous movement, the authors of the European Enlightenment invoked both sides of nocturnalization, dispelling and creating darkness in discourses that contrasted the light of reason with the allegedly benighted peoples of the wider world, whose beliefs about ghosts, witches, and spirits were “proof of the obscurity, that is spread over their understanding.”119

  Chapter Nine Conclusion

  Nocturnalization was a revolution in early modern Europe. In the seventeenth century princes and urban oligarchs alike projected their glory onto the night with illuminations and fireworks displays, while purpose-built baroque theaters could be fully darkened, day or night, to enable the complex “special effects” and illusions of baroque opera or theater. These practices reveal a new willingness to deploy and manipulate darkness and the night. And as the eighteenth century began, Europeans in cities and at royal courts – and even a few in the countryside – encountered the night equipped with more domestic lighting, new street lighting, and new, sober beverages like coffee and tea. In cities, the abandonment of curfews and the rise of the club and the coffeehouse transformed late hours into a time of polite sociability and conversation. For those exposed to increased domestic lighting, sleep itself reflected this new relationship with the night. The traditional biphasic sleep pattern of a “first” and “second” sleep began to give way to a single compressed period of nightly slumber.1 These are all signs of the uneven but distinct march of nocturnalization.

  The sources of this nocturnalization were many. In the fractured Christendom of the confessional age, religious persecution and a disorientingly heterodox world led some to seek refuge, literal or allegorical, in the night. Nicodemus, the disciple “which at the first came to Jesus by night” became the byword for those who sought the Lord at night. The persecution which sporadically drove early modern Christians into the night marks the growth of both the scope and the ambitions of the early modern state, as state churches replaced or buttressed the authority of Rome. The expanding reach of these states, focused on moral and social discipline, included the policing of the urban night. Sweeping disciplinary ambitions were seldom realized, but the policing of the urban night rested on a long tradition and was one area of relatively successful oversight. Supported by this oversight, the elites of the court and city colonized the urban night, displaying their conspicuous consumption of time (and, materially, lighting) alongside their enjoyment of coffee, tea, fine porcelain, and other luxuries. The evening and night became the time of the emerging public sphere as the respectable public used the night which the authorities had helped colonize to gather and critique those same authorities, from the most mundane to the most exalted. The breadth of nocturnalization arose from its sources in state, public, and private initiative as a key site where projects of discipline and consumption overlapped.

  A 1702 article on street lighting in an anonymous Leipzig newsletter summarizes these sources of nocturnalization. Written from a burgher standpoint that criticizes both the extravagance of the court and the folly of the poor, this feigned letter from the Captured Letters, Exchanged between Curious Persons Regarding the Current … Political and Learned World addresses the use of the night to display status, as well as the nocturnalization of daily life at court and in cities.2 Its title is its program: “On the vanity and waste of illuminations / and in contrast regarding the useful and necessary employment of harbor lights and also the night lanterns set up here in Leipzig.”3 It concludes with a moralizing “madrigal” on the recent history of the night:

  The Epicurean makes

  The day into his night

  Vanity likes to turn things upside-down

  These folk let themselves be fooled

  into thinking that they can turn night into day

  through their illuminations.

  Whoever cannot afford so much

  that he can buy wax candles

  But despite that wants to ape the rich

  (also gladly feasting)

  He burns boldly little oil-lights or lamps.

  The folly has spread so far

  that even the poor must follow it

  Although some are already stuck in direst need.

  These are the fruits of such solemnities!

  This rubbish was invented by the papists

  and so the land was disgraced.

  It would be fine, if the money for it had to be paid

  by the priests and not the lay folk.4

  A far better use of artificial illumination, intoned this author, would be street lighting, which indeed was beginning in Leipzig as he wrote.

  These comments identify the use of the night for spectacle with the “papists.” Nocturnal spectacles and urban illuminations were used by rulers of all confessions, but the references to “papists” and “priests” by this Lutheran author remind us that religious conflict and baroque culture alike forced or led early modern Europeans into the night, and into new attitudes toward the night. The references to “illuminations” and “solemnities” also link lighting with court culture. Finally, we are told that conspicuous consumption and its imitation by social inferiors account for the spread of nocturnalization – a familiar comment in an age which satirized bourgeois gentlemen for striving to appear noble. Taken together, “commercial and urban vigor, a trend towards political absolutism, and an emphasis on orthodox, textual religions” formed a distinctly early modern compound.5

  The nocturnalization which reshaped daily life for a significant minority of seventeenth-century Europeans separated darkness from the night as never before in Western culture. Darkness was slowly transformed from a primordial presence to a more manageable aspect of life, acquiring in the process new associations within mysticism and popular devotion, political display, respectable sociability, and learned exchange. In each of these areas nocturnalization encompassed both the triumph over darkness and the deliberate evocation or manipulation of it. Symbolically and historically, this pairing reveals a supplemented process in which stated goals were always shadowed by their contradiction or inversion.

  Alone and isolated in a literal or figurative night, early modern women and men could encounter the Devil or God on an intensel
y personal level – be it through seduction or revelation. The early modern night opened up greater heights and lower depths for the Christian soul, as mystics and witches alike were made in the dark night of illumination or temptation. Georges de La Tour’s popular “penitent Magdalene” (Figure 3.5), isolated by candlelight, reappears in contemporary narratives of nocturnal diabolical temptation on stage or in witch trials. The promise of the night as a path to the Divine presented by John of the Cross, Johann Arndt, John Donne, or Claude Hopil was shadowed by the demonology of their churches, which shaped the interrogations of the thousands of accused witches who confessed to attending nocturnal sabbaths and to nocturnal pacts with the Devil sealed by sexual relations. By the early modern logic of contrariety, the night that could unite the soul with God could also unite the body with Satan.