Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (42 page)

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 science. 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.

The text opens with a letter from the narrator to a “Monsieur L***” describing the narrator’s conversations with the marquise. “I’ll divide them for you by evenings,” the narrator explains, “because in fact we had these conversations only at night.”
⁸⁴
The nocturnal setting evokes the expansion of legitimate nocturnal activity in the period, as well as nightly pursuits ranging from astronomy and the theater to court life. The use of darkness – intellectual, metaphoric, and represented – to create the
Conversations
shows the text to be an intellectual expression of
both
aspects of nocturnalization. Like the nocturnal spectacles of the opera or the court, Fontenelle’s nocturnal
Conversations
depict the triumph of light over darkness on one level, while on other levels fostering, maintaining, and manipulating darkness. Indeed, in the first of these nightly conversations, the narrator uses an analogy with theater to persuade the marquise to accept a new epistemology based on darkness and obscurity. Before he can explain anything about the movement of the earth or the position of the sun, he must convince the marquise to leave her “common-sense” views behind. He does this by comparing the natural world to the theater:

I have always thought that nature is very much like an opera house. From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effect from a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden.
⁸⁵

Fontenelle summarizes the central insight that underwrites his text: “‘Whoever sees nature as it truly is simply sees the backstage area of the theater.’”
⁸⁶
His frame of reference is the baroque perspective stage, with its reliance on darkness and illusion.

With the help of Fontenelle’s narrator the young marquise comes to understand that there is more to nature than meets the eye. But the
analogy “nature–theater” also incorporated a hierarchy of perception. As a guide to the opera published in Hamburg in 1702 explained:

Nowadays all persons of distinction seek entertainment from the opera, but among the thousands found in the boxes and seats one would scarcely meet ten who understand what happens there and how to evaluate it. Indeed, a great many in the audience do not understand one bit of it. The most important things to note at an opera are … the sets, which no one can rightly assess unless he understands painting and perspective … Above all the machines [must be] considered, as they are the best thing about the opera, filling the spirits of all members of the audience with wonder.
⁸⁷

One had to learn how to see the opera, just as Fontenelle’s narrator teaches the marquise (and his many readers) how to see the natural world.

But this learning is not meant to be shared widely. When the marquise reports on the sixth evening that two “men of wit” ridiculed her knowledge of astronomy, the narrator advises her to do as he does and keep their insights secret from the ignorant: “Let us content ourselves with being a little select party who believe and not divulge our mysteries to the common people.”
⁸⁸
The artificial illusions of the theater, dependent on darkness, become in the
Conversations
a model for nature in a discussion that dispels intellectual darkness for the marquise while maintaining it for “the vulgar.”

The hierarchy of perception presented by Fontenelle was perhaps most fully expressed in the darkness of the baroque theater. The influential guide to the baroque stage, Nicola Sabbatini’s
Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri
(
Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines
) of 1638 makes this hierarchy explicit in practical terms:

the common or less cultivated persons are set on the tiers and at the sides, since the machines give a less perfect appearance in these places, and because such people do not observe them minutely. The persons of culture and taste should be seated on the floor of the hall, as near the middle as possible, in the second or third rows. They will have the greatest pleasure there, since … all parts of the scenery and the machines are displayed in their perfection.
⁸⁹

Sabbatini’s advice maps a political and cultural hierarchy onto the perception of the stage or the world. The “cultured” see beyond the surface when they view the sets and special effects of the opera or
theater. They appreciate what is concealed as well as what is visible. In the same terms, many scholars have noted Fontenelle’s oblique style, discretion, and use of irony. The author expected his proper audience of
raisonneurs
to be able to read between the lines. Those at the top of the hierarchy of perception would see the more radical scope of Fontenelle’s views.
⁹⁰
His clandestine philosophical writings of the 1680s reveal his anticlericalism and deep skepticism regarding all systems of metaphysical thought, including revealed Christianity.
⁹¹

The Amsterdam Reformed minister Balthasar Bekker (1634–98) unleashed an extraordinary controversy with the 1691–94 publication of his
De betoverde weereld
(
The World Bewitched
). Bekker, son of a Friesian village pastor, studied at the universities of Groningen and Franeker. He became a Cartesian but was also strongly influenced by the biblical philology of Cocceius. He earned a doctorate and served as pastor in Franeker before taking a position in Amsterdam in 1678.

When Bekker published the first two books of
The World Bewitched
in 1691, he was an experienced author with several catechisms and a work on comets to his credit. Nothing prepared him, however, for the extraordinary popularity or violent responses generated by
The World Bewitched
.
⁹²
Across the four books of
The World Bewitched
Bekker argued “upon the same foundation of Scripture and Reason” that “the Empire of the Devil is but a Chimera, and that he has neither such a Power, nor such an Administration as is ordinarily ascribed to him.”
⁹³
As Bekker’s work was translated into German, French, and English, dozens of refutations were published, as well as a few defenses of Bekker from authors more radical than he. Another edition published in England in 1700 as
The world turn’d upside down, or, A plain detection of errors, in the common or vulgar belief, relating to spirits, spectres or ghosts, daemons, witches, &c
. kept the controversy going, with an important response published by John Beaumont in
1705
(the book to which Ralph Thoresby turned for reassurance in 1712).

In
The World Bewitched
Bekker sought to make “an exact enquiry after whatever is falsely believed in the World, and the Erroneous
Opinions that are entertained without any other ground than that they are every day told and heard of.”
⁹⁴
Specifically, Bekker intended to deny the supposed effects of Satan and evil spirits in the world. He saw this work as a continuation of the Protestant Reformation, “a new and perhaps final phase in the perfection of Christianity.”
⁹⁵
As with the
Conversations
, Bekker’s
World Bewitched
engages with darkness, the night, and nocturnalization on several levels. Bekker proposes to illuminate “the frightful Darkness of Paganism” while creating darkness in new hierarchies of interpretation, perception, and revelation. His attitude toward the common people, his approach to Scripture, and his understanding of the night all reveal the imprint of nocturnalization, as does the place of “pagans” in this work.

Bekker’s challenge to belief in witchcraft, evil spirits, and the power of the Devil has been depicted as reflecting growing popular skepticism and disbelief in the Netherlands. But Bekker himself complained of the credulity of his congregants and the cases of supposed possession and bewitchment they brought to him. He made clear in
World Bewitched
that he was “rejecting the Opinion commonly received amongst the Vulgar, concerning the Craft and Power of the Devil.” In his survey of belief in witches and demons, past and present, he noted that “for as to the common People, either Papists, Jews, or Pagans, they know nothing for the most part, but a little by hear-say; so that there is no relying upon them.” Even among Protestants, “it is sure without mistake, that for the most part, what the most illiterate believe and practice, is contrary to the sense of Divines, and of all those that understand any thing in the Holy Scripture.” He sounds a resigned tone: “I will have nothing to do with them [the common people] upon this subject, having often tried my self how many follies our own People say and believe, upon this account.”
⁹⁶
Despite the popular response to
World Bewitched
, he sought an audience among the learned – as the four detailed volumes of his study suggest. He addressed “our Doctors and our Men of letters [among whom] … there are none so credulous as the Vulgar; however there is a very considerable difference to be seen in their Opinions, some believing almost every thing, and others almost nothing at all” about ghosts and witches.
⁹⁷
Even among the most free-thinking Christians in the
Netherlands, the Collegiants, belief in spirits and diabolic possession was widespread and vigorously defended.
⁹⁸

Bekker’s frustration with the credulity of the common people echoes in his sense that his own tradition has utterly misunderstood the biblical testimony regarding spirits and the Devil: “But to our great shame, most ... of us, as well as of other Sects, that pretend a Veneration for the Holy Writ, search not in it after its Sense, being satisfied with the vulgar Interpretations, and such as they have received from others.” To correct this misinterpretation, Bekker proposed, like Fontenelle, to look beyond the deceptive surface of his object of study to a deeper understanding of Scripture heretofore obscured from view. This is the work of books
II
and
III
of
World Bewitched
.

From the first, Bekker’s critics noted that he used an extreme accomodationist hermeneutic associated with Spinoza or Cocceius to radically reinterpret all scriptural references to angels, the Devil, and evil spirits.
⁹⁹
It was this approach to Scripture, rather than his Cartesian pneumatology, that most provoked Bekker’s fellow divines. As Le Clerc noted in the first French review of Bekker, “to answer Mr. Bekker solidly, they must … prove … that according to the rules of criticism, and the spirit of the Hebrew and Greek Languages, it is impossible to give the Scripture the sense which our author gives it.”
¹⁰⁰
A battalion of theologians proceeded to do just that. The intensity and extent of their responses made Bekker a target of attack decades after his death in 1698. A satire of 1730–31 imagined a conversation with his ghost, illustrated with a visual lampoon showing what was wrong with Bekker’s approach to demons and Scripture. In
Figure 8.4
Bekker is shown sieving or sifting demons out of the Christian Scriptures. Below the sieve are a series of terms used by Bekker to interpret away apparent references to evil spirits, possession, demons, etc. in the Bible: “frenzy,” “melancholy,” “lunacy,” “enthusiasm,” and “epilepsy” are among them. In this lampoon of Bekker, he is unaware that the real Devil and demons are hovering just above him. The caption reads “So Becker sorts out the devils by his art; / But the spirit of lies alone makes more doubt.” This remarkable representation of Bekker’s
approach to Scripture directly challenges the accomodationist hermeneutic of Spinoza and Cocceius, denying the esoteric knowledge hidden from the vulgar and the hierarchy of perception on which it was based.