Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (40 page)

In response to these new challenges, witchcraft took on new meanings in the law and learned discourse.
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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.
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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.”
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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!”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.”
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The famously dissolute free-thinker Matthew Tindal said the same in his
1697
tract on religious toleration, though with less straightforward conviction.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.

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”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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